SLUGgin' Time ... and the Winning's Easy

Apologies for re-using a facebook quip as this post's title, but it just came so naturally* ... anyways, the winning actually did not come easy at all, as with the newfound RSVP rules and plenty of time to set lineups beforehand, I managed to craft a sort of speed/athleticism/hucking (Garret/Griesy,Dheintime, now back in town) v. hands/smarts/work-it-up (Joe/J-Ro/Dixon) matchup that could not really have been more balanced. The latter crew, including your narrator, took the free pizza, winning 13-14, 13-11, 3-2 in one of the best SLUG-fests in recent memory. Hot (90 to 104 degrees F over the course of the morning), humid (~40%**), and windless was the day, and the 14 on 14 matchup featured few turns and a whole lot of solid play. Good times on the pitch.

* - As many folks with a late nineties pop rock upbringing and a limited handle on classic vocal jazz, the first time I actually heard this song was in this form:

When really, one should probably hear this one:

Or this one:

first.

** - "Humid" is relative.

But wait, I'm sure you're asking, wasn't Mr. Jones knock knock knockin' (let-me-hear-you-LOUD!) on purgatory's door like, two days ago? True that, but I've felt semi-decent the last two, did a little ellipticalling / very, very moderate weight-lifting the other day without incident, so I feel like I might be turning the corner. So I played a limited amount today, did my best to stick to O points, and generally hung back relative to my normal game. The effects of not having run / being run down for the past two weeks still lingered; on one of the first points of the day, BP put up a huck for me, and Paul - with whom I'm normally at least even in terms of speed - blew right by me. Ugh. I got my sea legs back after a little while and managed to contribute with some cuts and scores and such, including one semi-big layout snag of a hammer, though it was overall a quite odd day - despite primarily playing handler and hanging back, I can't remember putting up a single huck, and I really only broke the mark for big gains a handful of times. Otherwise it was just possession play and a few endzone cuts, letting some of our other dudes* step in and take the bigger chances. Probably not the ideal contribution for me to make, but it worked out, and I only had a single turn on the day - a breakmark throw intended for Ebay that got mysteriously poach-D'ed by Ken, who, um, let's just say had his man, my teammate, been properly positioned, would not have been anywhere near there. I have to take the blame, as it's my job to see Ken, but you generally don't expect the guy who's supposed to be five yards behind you to be five yards in front of you in the break lane with his defender. I'm just sayin'. None of this mattered as we got the disc back and scored - huzzah - but I'll own my gaffe, I suppose.

* - It's tough for people to figure out, I think, where they stand in the pecking order of licensed-to-thrill risk-taking rights. Garret, for example, our gunslinger who played his college days at Carleton, knows that he has full blessing to take crazy shots (within reason), as the cumulative effect of the open game and huck scores outweigh the occasional turn. And there's that key word, "occasional." We had a player-to-remain-nameless who should be just taking care of the disc conservatively make seven decidedly unoccasional turns in the first game and a half, and when you're losing games at cap by one and there are generally few turns overall, that kills. "Know thyself," FSNAD, is the lesson** here, methinks.

** - Speaking of lessons - I felt like a crappy captain today as I got frustrated with the above behavior and let the guy know it, only it clearly did nothing to help - he kept doing it - and probably pissed him off. I continue to struggle with the encourage / correct / scold aspect of things, as I don't always get who will respond best to what and what's actually called for in different situations. I especially struggle because I know e.g. back in high school football, I didn't respond well to "scolding." It didn't really help, as I already had a good grasp of what I had done wrong, so the yelling after the fact educated me zero and made me feel terrible 4,000. With Sprawl, I should do a better job of remembering those teenage feelings, lest I be (gasp) a hypocrite (not to mention it sorta requires me to be perfect with my decisions if I'm always coming down on people for every little bad one, and yeah, I'm not going to claim to be 100% with my decisions (see school comma med)). And I did make an effort today, thinly disguised as it probably was, to give people more positive feedback and not just snap at mistakes.

All of that said - one, when the same mistake happens over and over (a repeated violation of our "same-thirds" rule was one of the culprits this morning), it's not clear to me that the person knows that or how he erred. So some sort of big, emotionally impacting yelling is an attempt to grab their attention, not just an act of venting. And two, I consistently read things like this regarding on-field/court leadership:

Throughout his career, [he] has never shown much leadership. Because of his tumultuous upbringing in [city] ... his whole role in life is to appease and not make waves ... Even in high school at [school] in [city], as great as he was, he was never the leader, never the player who got in your face and told you to pick it up or get off the court. That title went to a diminutive little player named [teammate], who was tough and resilient and fearless. I don’t think it has been that much different in the pros. [He] is not the kind of player to furiously demand a new coach or general manager ... He does not get in the face of a teammate who is playing below his level, and even if he does it carries little emotional weight. In short, he does not have that assassin mentality that defined [legend] and defines [future HOFer] and translates into true greatness.

That's culled and redacted from this rather scathing article by Buzz Bissinger at Vanity Fair, and if you can't tell, it's about Glen Frey's new best friend LeBron James. The point of quoting it is this: the line between utterly pretentious "I don't make mistakes so why do you?" asshole and leader who refuses to accept less than full effort form his teammates is a fine one, and I don't know if I ever toe it correctly. It's additionally difficult to know whether it's a line worth towing - it's pretty clear that the "legend" referenced at the end, based on his HOF acceptance speech, anyways, was and is an insufferable jerk. That may be worth it for NBA rings, but we're not exactly in that stratosphere with Phoenix club Ultimate. Regardless, this kind of fire/intensity that constantly teeters on the brink of ass-hole-ay is downright glorified in sports, largely assumed to be effective, and, as noted above, necessary for "true greatness." And I'm trying to do nothing if not be great - what, would I want to be "lesser?" There's an art to this, sure, one that I fail to master often, but hopefully it's something that's overall positive I bring to Sprawl.

Still, good to have Dheintime back in town to balance it out...

So yeah, I survived, played reasonably well, and actually have felt no ill effects since. Not from the sickness, anyways - one of the things my doc recommended to absolutely prevent any anemia-related energy problems was not to take NSAIDs. So I didn't engage in my habitual Ultimate-associated "Vitamin I*" pill-popping, and wow, the knee-swelling, um, swelled accordingly. Between that and a bruise on my hip from the aforementioned hammer-grab-layout, I've been hobbling even more than usual today. Good to know that two weeks off doesn't help the joints very much...

* - Ulty slang for ibuprofen. It's fair to say that Ultimate players generally abuse ibuprofen, and I'd be curious to see if we were all running around with more ulcers than the standard population because of it. I try to keep it to a minimum and only use it to combat inflammation, not to mask pain, but given my proclivity for inflammation, that's added up to quite a few bottles over the years. I've never had any overt Vitamin-I associated GI troubles or anything, though the doc's probably right and cutting back won't hurt. Still, cold turkey has got me not running very well, so I'll have to come up with a better solution for the upcoming weeks...

But yeah, great, great SLUG, good to be back on the field with the peeps after a little time off. After the sweat-fest, we hit up Venezia's per usual and caught part of the 3rd place game in the World Cup. Pizza and loud cheers for shots/goals and debates over whether intentional handballs constitute cheating. Good laid back lunch end to a great morning, and on the personal level, good to know that I'm still operating on something of a reasonable athletic level despite the recent viral unpleasantness. I was definitely not 100% - you could I was feeling - no, don't bother - but hopefully things are on the up and up. We shall, as always, see.

OH, and - how about the first redesign of The Ballad in what, four years? I have to retract that Beck said my blog was ugly - apparently, I asked her if she thought it was ugly, and she replied, "well, it's not what I would do." So correction: she merely strongly *implied* that it was ugly. But the real push came when Ulty friend and graphic designer Lisa heckled the blog's look. We can't have experts disapproving, so I changed the scheme entirely. Hope you dig.

E.K. Powe Library Makeover

This is the first of a seven part series about the home of the Clarion Content, Durham, NC. To read old Durham posts click here and scroll down. To see photos of Durham houses click here and scroll down.

E.K. Powe, the elementary school nearest our offices, has some good news! It was one of only thirty-two schools nationwide to be awarded a complete library makeover by Target and The Heart of America Foundation. The school's library will be redesigned with eco-friendly building materials.

The remodel includes 2000 new books for the school's library collection, computers, new carpeting, and age-appropriate furniture to encourage curling up with a good book. Plus each student gets an additional seven books of their very own.

Hooray for, E.K. Powe. And thanks to the Watts-Hillandale neighborhood association newsletter, Parade for the heads up.



This photo is from the era when E.K. Powe was West Durham High School.



This is E.K. Powe elementary today.

Ugly Blog: Errata

Beck and I went through a few iterations to get the layout / design of her new blog, Cooking For Elaine, just right. Somewhere in there it became clear that The Ballad is "ugly." Comment then withdrawn, modified to "it's not what I would do." Eventually translated to "there's too much block text," then further translated to "your paragraphs are too long." Ah, I see where this is going.

In the interest of placating Beck, here's a little experiment. I have several blog posts in the works, all of which are undeveloped ideas that deserve big treatments that, really, it just seems I don't actually have the time to write. So in the interest of appealing to Beck's low-text, short paragraph aesthetic sensibilities*, here are several full posts that will never be, condensed to max-of-five-sentence paragraph form.

* - And this from a person who doesn't tweet!

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The Authenticity of The BS Report

I listen to Bill Simmons's podcasts regularly. In them, he interviews sports personalities, talks shop with various other ESPN personalities, phones his buddies to discuss the latest games, etc., all with a casual tone that gives off the impression that, aside from the occasionally bleeped swear word - this is an ESPN-ABC-Disney production, after all - the listener is experiencing what it would be like to just hang out with Bill. Given the usual gloss / subterfuge / simulacra that pervades most modern media*, the podcast feels like a last refuge, or maybe really a tech-enabled return, to authenticity: the real personality, the unfettered dialogue between these honest to earth, real people, who just happen to live high-profile lives. But then you realize they're recordings, undoubtedly edited and censored, and Simmons himself is giving near-constant indications that he is watching what he is saying due to the powers that be. So even the ostensible casual conversation requires the holding of tongues with quiet reservation, and even while e.g. listening to Seth Myers detail the behind the scenes of SNL skit-writing, the crushing clench of the postmodern spin forces me to wonder, per usual: what's crafted, and what's just crafted by casual tone so as to appear uncrafted?

* - Lame, vague term, I know. Hey, five sentences. It wasn't my idea.

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Jazz, Not Classical

Sprawl players, Hashem help them, cannot remember or successfully run plays to save their lives, yet they want and want plays with specific instructions for precisely what to do in this or that situation. It's borderline absurd, given that there's been no real indication that the plays would be followed even if people knew them, but the bigger problem is that the assumption that there is an exact thing-to-do in every given situation is fundamentally flawed. The expression we've come up for when players keep asking "what do I do when X" type questions is "Jazz Not Classical" - we've got a framework, and yes, sometimes there are definite cuts to make / notes to play, but a lot of it is creative improvisation from within the framework, following certain principles but having the freedom to adjust on the fly, in the moment. Cool metaphor, but it also uncovers a larger problem: we've got some players who don't, um, know their scales just yet. This is time number 42,376 in a teaching context where I've re-realized that my experience set does not match others, and we've got to make sure that a whole ton of fundamentals and background are in place before we can jam.

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Phish and the World Cup

When you listen to Phish jams, Trey is almost always way out front, wailing* o'er the top with incendiary melody lines on his Languedoc guitar, and it's very, very easy to fixate so much on that sound that the remainder of the band sounds like vamping. In soccer... someone has the ball. A way to experience both in a different, perhaps more enlightening light, is to do everything it takes to fixate on the whole instead - in the jam, you can aid yourself by making a concerted** effort to listen to bass and piano and the experience of the whole will just click; on the pitch, try paying attention to the shapes the defenses and offenses make rather than watching the players as individual entities. In short, feel the ball and the guitar more than observing them directly, and both art forms will breathe in a new way. I am becoming increasingly convinced that mainstream popular American sports and music taste are fixated on the former approach, locking in on the lead, and as this vantage gets its kicks from searing notes and goals, it doesn't seem very likely that low-scoring soccer or jam/jazz will overtake football or Taylor Swift anytime soon.

* - "Wailing," not "whaling," for you Mr. Miner readers out there.

** - "Concerted." I kill me.

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The Existential Bench-Press

My favorite memory of high school football, or rather my memory of the best feeling I had during my four years playing high school football, is one that occurred repeatedly - the five minute walk to my car away from the locker room at 6:30 after practice each day. That little five minute window put the maximum amount of time between me and the next time I would have to be back at the locker room, hunkering down, putting on pads and inexplicably putting myself through the nastiness of another day of physically and psychologically torturous CHS football. I bring it up because sometimes at the gym, after that last rep on the bench, or after the forty-fifth (or sixtieth or thirtieth, depending on the day) minute on the elliptical, I catch a brief whiff of that same feeling - I've put maximum time between myself and the next grueling workout. This is a weird thought to have, in particular, leading up to those last few bench presses; hard to keep moving that maximum weight for the day when your orientation is completely towards not doing it any more. All of this points to the necessity of constant renewed goal-setting lest your routine become Sisyphean, but it also points to the following section - if every action is oriented towards other goals, be they Ultimate or pleasure or health or whatever, wherein lies the "real" value?

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Zeal & Anosmia

Whence the drive to do things? Zeal for particular pursuits, like the locus of love or the origin of creative ideas, seems to be one of those mysterious rooted-in-nothing things that nonetheless explains everything. I have been kicking around the idea of a very, very loose framework of a novel entitled Anosmia in which a character goes into surgery to get his sense of smell repaired with the intention of enhancing his worldly experience only to inadvertently destroy whatever the fount of zeal is. This is clearly Smelltardian kinds of autobiographical, as I both can't smell and sometimes (like more people than will admit, I suspect) my zeal drops out - I look at the expanse and just don't have an inkling, an inherent "calling" or whathaveyou, of what to pursue. I kinda feel like the Anosmic lead has limited options in the achieve enlightenment, give up entirely or press-through-in-a-constant-state-of-frustration trichotomy, and I'm definitely leaning toward the latter. In the meantime, fear not, I dig Ultimate, music, and school and philosophy and all kinds of things - I suppose *I* can still smell a bit*, though that probably doesn't make for very interesting reading.

* - Beck would agree - ZING ME!

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The Wire Has a Fat Detective, You May Have Noticed

The Wire is, by all reports, the height of television quality, and it is for many reasons excellent - tight story lines ("too tight?" asks Beck), stellar performances, and an avoidance of expository dialog that evokes an attitude of respect for the brainspace of the viewing audience. Still, it's rife with preposterous elements - the constant eating / porn-mag reading of the fat detective, the overt greying of the stressed-out mayoral candidate's hair, the exaggerated "Omar lives by a CODE!" emphasis, the McNultian "I've cleaned up my act!" smirks - that force me to ask WHY DO THAT? I recognize my tendency to nitpick, I suppose the things that sore-thumb here are more indicative of the relative health of the rest of this excellent show, and we admittedly are only partway through season 4, so maybe the best is yet to come. But for all The Wire's composition and refined, near-Shakespearean air, there are still these cringe-worthy moments that jar the experience. So much is smartly left unsaid, why say these obvious things?

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Frustration, Aggravation Is Getting to You

I fight on a daily basis not to have my selfhood defined by frustration; I lose often. Beck called me on one of my WHY DO THAT? rants the other day regarding the healthcare provided on campus - the details are unimportant, but I was irked that they were basing so much of their thinking on a test with obviously confounding variables - and she's right, I get aggravated at these little mistakes and it dictates the remainder of the experience for me. So I can watch that and try to acc-entuate the positive. But what do you do about e.g. the intractable problem of trying to teach undergrads that are missing their second grade skills? I am meta-frustrated at how I am supposed to deal with pursuing a career that seems to involve a lot of farce on its educational side; that is all.

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The Data-Driven Life / The Reframing Capacity of Obsession

In the midst of all my calorie-counting, food diary-keeping adventures, Jenny pointed me in the direction of this article about, as it's called, "The Data-Driven Life." This little sub-post is really just a link, as it's an interesting little article. But I'm struck by the article's blase dismissal of the shift in framing that occurs when one alters one lifestyle so as to accommodate all that number-crunching. True, the effectiveness of all that data tracking is remarkable, but that tracking alters the way you experience the world, and it's unclear to me how you even begin to weigh that as a benefit v. cost - seems like you would need to, not to use the idea twice in two paragraphs, develop tracking for the tracking. I just know that I spend some non-zero amount of time each day looking at nutrition labels, and more important than the time lost is the way it has reframed my everyday experience - I don't know how to begin to evaluate whether the "health" I've gained is worth the unquantifiable alteration in my subjective experience of food and meals.

* - You could raise a similar point about blogging a life vis a vis living it. You *could.*

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Flags of Our Fathers

Requires a pic:

We have an Arizona flag hanging off the newly mounted flagpole on the front of our house. Now, some of you know what this is about: CBS Southwest is just carrying on the vexillological traditions of one iPJ, no further meaning intended, other than perhaps a generalized appreciation for our now home-state. But if you're not one of those in the know - more specifically, if you're a Phoenician passerby - you may be tempted to see this as some kind of ardent support of Arizona. And, you know, its laws. Outside of onomatopoeia, acontextual words are pretty meaningless; what about flags?

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Phew. There you go. Hope you found that interesting and/or more aesthetically pleasing. Now it's time to reorient myself to another value backing a goal worth pursuing. Until next time...

Sending Our Love Down the (Not) Well

I am seated in the living room with iodined cotton fuzz on both arms, placating the dogs with rawhide chewies and not-really-all-that-eagerly awaiting LeBron's 6 PM announcement. Oh, and I'm celebrating, sort of, the ten year anniversary of the first summer I got certifiably Phish-hooked and followed their tour online on a day-by-day basis. I'm not going to full-on album review the show, but just so you get a proper environmental image, here's the setlist of a show from ten years ago today, a show that was conveniently enough immortalized - more than all of their shows have been immortalized - as Live Phish 05:

Saturday, 07/08/2000 Alpine Valley Music Theatre, East Troy, WI

Set 1: Punch You In the Eye > NICU, My Soul, Poor Heart, Wolfman's Brother, First Tube, Llama, Guyute, Run Like an Antelope

Set 2: Heavy Things, Piper -> Rock and Roll, Tweezer -> Walk Away, Twist, The Horse > Silent in the Morning, Possum

Encore: Suzy Greenberg > Tweezer Reprise

We're in the midst of the instrumental composition "First Tube" right now. This show was a weird selection for the series - there's nothing that really screamed "of your 1000+ shows, you should definitely make this one one of the first six you release officially!" - but they did, and despite the controversy at the time (dooooood, 1994!!!??!?), it's a good representative of a standard show from that summer of 2000. So it's effectively taking me back to happy times with Beck and Zil and driving to Toronto and Ohio to catch Les Boys - ah, memories. I'll give an in-depth take on the whole release at some point, probably in 2047 at the rate I've been reviewing albums recently, but for now, trust that it's a breezy pleasant soundscape on an otherwise 112 degree day.

(Interruption - it's 6:11, and I still don't know where LeBron's headed. Tres betrayal - they said it would be announced within the first 10 minutes! When will I learn?)

Back to the fuzz... as mentioned, I've been feeling intermittently energy-less lately. Well, "intermittently" became "constantly" a little over a week ago - just have been having bouts of a gasless tank at random moments in the day, with my peaks being in, I don't know, the 70% range. Not good - hard to do much of anything for more that ten minutes at a time, and on occasion I get that weird, going to fall over feeling. I'm not dizzy, not feeling faint, don't even really feel week, just feel like I'm dragging badly.

(Miami, btw. Yawn. I suppose this flagrant dis to Cleveland isn't all that yawn, but otherwise, this has been an encapsulation of everything annoying re: ESPN-esque supercoverage).

I'll cut to the chase - docs are pretty convinced I've got mono or valley fever or something of that ilk, so it's something that's more tremendously annoying than it is serious. So no reason for concern - all the appropriate values continue to be normal (after three rounds of bloodwork now), physical exam is normal, yada x 3. The recommended remedy is rest, don't take NSAIDS, and don't push myself to exhaustion in Ultimate or workouts. That last part has not been a problem lately, as this continued bout of low energy was actually somewhat well timed. With the holiday weekend, all things Ulty were canceled last weekend, which has given me a solid twelve days between events. And I've skipped three workouts in a row, too - I'll pay for that later, ugh - but mayhaps all the rest will do my fatigue some good and will have the added bonus of knee relief. This is me being positive about the situation.

Refocusing - I saw the doc for followup today, and he wanted to do a blood culture to rule out anything really strange. And blood cultures require 1, an iodine-sterilized draw, and a lot of blood. So NATCH I got Susie Rookie Phlebotomist. And despite my gigantic, ropey veins, she stuck and stuck and stuck me and hummed her favorite Neil Young tune off Harvest as she bruised the Bathsheba out of my arm. In her defense, the iodine makes skin incredibly sticky, and if the container gets stuck on the skin, the needle is that much harder to navigate. Anyways, she eventually called in Kathy Has-Done-This-Before Phlebotomist, who used another vein on the left arm, and they collaborated to draw a tube from my right arm for a blood culture as well. They put cotton and gauze over all three holes before I got up - purple gauze, so I looked like a mummified Suns player* or something - and when I tried to take it off at home, the cotton stuck all over the iodine. So here he sits, fuzzy was he, and my arms still hurt from the needle swishing. Boohoo, I know.

* - Here's to refraining from making the obvious Steve Nash and lots of bandages joke, which surely would have reminded everyone that I am from San Antonio, home of NBA Champions.

Anyways, just thought I'd give a little health update since I had casually mentioned that I'd been sickly lately. I've been pretty frustrated with this, btw, as the symptoms are all pretty vague and cause me to reflect on how energetic I'm feeling 20,000 times per day. I constantly have to convince myself that I'm not faking, and this is not just some elaborate psychosomatic ploy to get away from workouts. Speaking of, it also feels like the work I've done at the gym is being swallowed up by lethargy, and there's nothing I can really do about it. I want to get my exercise in, but I'm pretty tapped out by just walking the dogs in the morning and doing a little cooking. I've tried to do some pushups just to see if there's any chance I have something for a given day, and around #5 I get predictably woozy. So it seems that all that can be done now is to take 'er easy and try to get some work done from the prone / seated position. Walking from my car to the office has been quite a drag, so I'm going to do stuff from home if at all possible. I do have some Sprawl stuff coming up, so I'll do my best to play a limited amount and not push it too much... which, as you can probably guess, will be quite difficult for me.

Ugh. I suppose there are worse things in the world, but having your vital force sucked out kinda, um, yeah, you get it. So apologies if things have a dragging tone of late, and if I'm at all unkind, trust that it's only my body / not my mind / that is confusing things. Here's to rest and rallying; wish me luck, and hope this spell doesn't cause me to fall even farther behind in my work. It was supposed to be the summer of George, etc.

Music, lately

These three songs [see videos below] have burbled up from the murk of the cultural morass to make an impression on the Clarion Content's Music Editor.

Owl City does, "Fireflies"




Paramore's lead singer, Hayley Williams, with B.O.B., does "Airplanes"




Katy Perry does, "California Gurls" with a man who needs no introduction, Snoop Dogg...

***Ooops, they won't let us embed it, but you can watch the video here.

Root, Root-Root For Something...

Great Tuesday - Beck wasn't working, I got a minor reprieve from work as the first summer session ended, and we took big advantage of the shared day off. The lackluster Cubbies were in town to play the lacklusterer Diamondbacks, so I spent a portion of my morning hunting down tickets for the evening game. The Diamondbacks box office proper sells their tickets to Chase Field at INSANE prices - I really couldn't find a decent seat for under 35 dollars, with the definition of decent being "not in the second deck or bleachers" - so I scoured craigslist and the like in search of a better deal. After much hand-wringing and internal speculation as to the actual rules of craigslist etiquette, I scored! I tracked down a broker clearly trying to cut losses and selling some shwank 60 dollar season ticket seats for a relatively scant 25 bucks per. The seats were about 2/3 of the way between 3rd base / home and 24 rows back, not bad at all. This was freaking GREAT, as the original discouraging seat prices had almost resigned me to skipping a Cubs game. Que? Instead, Beck and I disrupted our nightly behavior of post-work grilling and Wire-watching for an evening taking in an ol' ballgame.

Before that, though, the business at hand - I sent out 40-ish e-mails yesterday (and a few lingering ones this morning) of personalized feedback for the Sprawl tryouts. This takes much longer than you might think. I tried to walk the fine line of letting people know the rationale behind our decisions, relaying the things we'd like to see them work on, and avoiding the general abject off-pissing of those cut with condescending thoughts of how they can maybe next time meet our approval. (The plural first person here, incidentally, is not royal but represents Dheintime and me - again, he has been out of town the last three weeks, so a lot of this has fallen on me, but we have maintained close contact w/r/t decision-making and such, and hopefully everything has gone smoothly). And I, you know, tried to write something authentic, meaningful and helpful, as opposed to a "hey, great job, better luck next time." Anyhoo, this ate up a fair bit of the afternoon, but hopefully was well worth it - if nothing else, people have gotten direct feedback, and no one can claim that we have not been forthcoming with our decision process.

Side note - I also found out yesterday that one of our new recruits, Andy, can't play with Sprawl. This is classic agony and ecstasy type stuff, as two weeks ago it came out that he wanted to play with Sprawl, and we were elated; a star had just fallen in our laps. Por supuesto, as is often the case with hippie Ultimate players, it turns out he's *actually* looking for jobs all over the U.S., contiguous and otherwise, and didn't really feel like he could commit. Things come up, sure, but this was more than a tad annoying, and more than that disappointing; I had been looking forward to playing with the homey. It also further complicated our team status, as we've now had two guys drop and another who can't attend one of the few tournaments to which we will travel. So I also spent part of the day scrambling and consulting with other veteran players as to which alternates should fill in and why. Hopefully we've got everything figured out, but to repeat a sentiment, no doubt that this aspect of things is the least appetizing part of being a Sprawl captain.

Getting back to the drill - I otherwise had one plan for the day, which was to watch the Uruguay - Netherlands World Cup semi-final. GREAT match, and yes, I, too, am caught up in the tetra-annual fever. Or something. The Netherlands won 3-2, if you're out of the loop, and there was all kinds of drama with potential off-sides calls missed, etc. (I've got more to write - not a lot - about the WC, but that is probably best for a different post). Karmically speaking, an intentional handball did NOT lead to a World Cup Finals berth*, so all is okay with the universe.

* - I don't link to the guy enough, especially since I ripped off his asterisk in-text footnote trick some time ago: Joe Posnanski has a post about the intentional handball that nails it quite well. The only thing I would add is that Joe P. doesn't really discuss the "it feels wrong" aspect of the story, which seems like the most interesting aspect of it. I'm trying not to give away too much here; read the story and send me an e-mail if you're interested in chatting about it. And bookmark Joe's blog while you're there; he is undoubtedly one of the best sportswriters out there (Nyet said, echoing a sentiment that has been echoed some gerbillion times).

I enjoyed a delicious barbecue pulled chicken / Mexican casserole for lunch while watching futbol on the laptop, and Beck backed up that spot-hitting meal with an early dinner featuring tuna steaks, yams, and the spinach cakes I made the other day. She rushed to finish it and got it done just in time; we ate at 5:30 and got out of the house by 5:55 to head down for a 6:40 start. Living in central Sunny Azz has its privileges: after a quick drive, parking and walking a block to the stadium, we were in our posh seats at 6:25 and ready to watch two former world champions square off. Here was the view from our seats:

Speaking of that view, and speaking of that 6:40 start, you'll notice the bevy of empty seats there. This was not some accident of our location:

That is a seriously empty ballpark, particularly for a WGN-fan-based Cubs game. I don't know how much of this is explained by the 6:40 start time, nor do I have a clue why the DBacks start the games at that time - it definitely seems to prevent the commuters from getting to their seats by the first pitch, as the park did fill up more by the 3rd inning. I assume it has something to do with television rights or dodging the start times of the other West Coast games. Regardless of the explanation, it doesn't explain Tuesday evening's paltry showing. The stadium-broadcast and official box-score attendance, which can generally be assumed to be hyperbole if not an outright lie, was only 20,067. For a Cubs game! What the hey-hey?

Problem one: the aforementioned ridiculous seat prices. They're idiotic; you can't charge that much for 1/162nd of the season, folks. Problem two: "the economy," or what have you. Scapegoat explanation, but in combo with problem one, I am sure it's having an effect. Problem three: the Diamondbacks are GOD AWFUL this year. They're 32-52 and 17 games out of first place in a tight division, so their season is effectively already over. They just fired their coach and replaced him with the fist-pumpin' Kirk Gibson, but all the limping theatrics are not going to help a team with the 30th best (AKA 1st worst) runs allowed rate that can't be overcome by a free-swinging-and-missing offense that sits at #16 in runs scored. The bullpen is silly bad with a 6.90 ERA, and the starters aren't exactly smoking either (4.70). It's worse because they've got a slew of young talent that just keeps not turning the corner, so Phoenix is left with a poorly performing team that strikes out a ton. There are some homers to go along with those big whiffs, sure, but it's effectively a terrible season of people who are *just* short. People are disinterested / disheartened - it's tough backing the 'backs these days.

But STILL - the Cubbies are in town! Which brings me to problem four: the Cubs are terrible in a whole different way. They aren't overmatched, they have the talent... they just can't play baseball this year. They've got a stacked, expensive lineup... that is 26th in the league in runs scored! Up and down the roster, well-compensated, historically good performers are having bad years. Case in point - rock solid reliable 3rd baseman Aramis Ramirez is batting .184/.247/.327, which is just unbearable to watch; for a star of his caliber to have those numbers at this point in the season is cripplingly embarrassing. The Cubs pitching / defense has been mediocre, too, at around 18th in the league in runs allowed, so it's unsurprising that they are 37-47 and 10.5 games back. In short, a huge letdown of a Cubs team was visiting a god-forsaken DBack team, and neither club's fans bothered coming out.

So Chase Field was dead. From the first pitch,

an utter lack of joy peppered the closed-roof room. It didn't help that both pitchers cruised through the first three innings in 38 minutes - Silva gave up a run to the DBacks, but the game started off largely offense-free, forcing everyone to draw their entertainment from the usual sequence of t-shirt cannons and hot dog races. Somewhere around the 4th inning, as the limited crowd trickled in to completion, things picked up a little, and toward the end, the game got downright exciting - tying runs at the plate late, the whole nine. I'll skip a recap; the Cubs won 6-4 (actually, they just completed the series sweep as I write this on Wednesday night) by fending off a late rally and getting some runs by severely unexpected spots. Some points of note:

Kosuke Fukudome went 1-5 with a solo HR and 3 Ks. The HR was his 2nd in as many days, not something you should bet on too often with KF, but the strikeouts stood out to me more. He had 36 Ks in about 244 PAs before the game, and is generally a slap hitter who doesn't miss terribly often. Sometimes the patterns clump, I guess. The other thing that a performance like this compels me to do is imagine what you would think of a player who did this routinely - someone who batted .200 with a .200 OBP and an .800 SLG, who struck out constantly but was good for a homerun per game. That's a skewed 1.000 OPS, the type of stat that would command top dollars... anyways, that would be a strange player, but ever since those years (e.g., 1989) when McGwire would bat .230 with 30+ HRs, I've thought about what it would be like to have someone actually just churn out those kinds of days. With sabermetric type thinking, natch, we realize that those guys are more valuable than you think in some ways and less in others... I digress.

The aforementioned slumping A-Ram hit 2 HRs! They were near carbon copy shots to the LF power alley and definitely made the difference for the win. If you couldn't tell above, I feel for the guy - he just looks lost and depressed at moments - so seeing him play baseball competently was a treat.

Woah, wait... backing up a paragraph... speaking of guys who hit .200 and only hit homeruns, Mark Reynolds! Seeing the guy who smoked his own single season strikeout record in person was fun. Wacky to look up at a guy's stats before the all-star break and see 113 in the Ks column. At the end of the game, he came up against the Cubs masterful strikeout artist - we're talking a ludicrous 17 Ks per 9 innings pitched here - Carlos Marmol. I turned to Beck and surmised that given this irresistible force and incredibly moveable object combo, we were extraordinarily likely to see a strikeout. Both parties did not disappoint.

Speaking of the K machine, Marmol pitched 1 and 2/3 innings and struck out five. He almost added a sixth by coming close to striking out four in the ninth, a rare feat that would have been fun to see in person, but one that was disrupted by a nicked pop out by Snyder instead of the K. Ah, well. This afforded me the opp to explain the dropped third strike rule to Beck, so that was nice. She as infield-fly rule knowledge away from marriage material.

That's really all I've got for gameplay; you can check out the boxscore for the nitty gritty. It was a great game in many ways, though; somewhere along the way I heard that the best baseball games are 5-4 wins by the home team - a good combination of hitting, pitching and defense is likely in those games - so a 6-4 Cubs win worked just fine. Plus it was over in a quick 2:43, so a nice pace taboot.

Oh, I should not fail to mention the "Racing Gracies" or the "D-Backs Legends Race." Somebody decided that the best way to honor DBacks greats was to engage their likenesses in a theater of the grotesque. It's a standard issue wannabe Sausage race, but with the hideous bonus of... well, this:

Yeah, I know. But let's go closer for even more un-ease:

That's the gigantic-headed semblance of Matt Williams, Randy Johnson, and Luis Gonzalez (I missed Gracey, who was well out in front by this point). The tacky here is just sublime. I really can't fathom who signed off on this - it seems to wedge the DBacks into a particular rut to knowingly do something this goofy as a tribute to their cherished players that lord knows the e.g. Yankees would never deign to do. It's not the induced nightmares that are bad so much as the induced humiliation.

Anyhoo... the early game end gave us time to book it to MoJo just before closing to enjoy their Tuesday half-off deal. Fantastic call by the Beck, and a solid cap on a fun evening. Tonight (Wednesday), instead of heading downtown again, I just watched the hapless Cubs beat up on the DBacks again from the comfort of my living room. It's the way of baseball-viewing that I think I just need to admit I prefer - still, it was good to get out of the casa Tuesday for an evening and sit outside inside an AC'ed stadium for a few hours watching my favorite team suffer through a small part of yet another insufferable season. Thanks per usual to Beck for putting up with me at a baseball game, and here's hoping both these franchises turn it around soon ... lest next year the crowd feature only 10,000 fans, half of whom are youthful, cheerleading DBacks employees who annoy more than enrich.

(Yeah, I don't like D-girls, Baxter, or the rattle noises. I don't think I'm alone...).

The Days Are Just Packed

Crazy WD, after a 5:30 AM, 90+ degree, 1.55 mile walk, decided to speed around the yard and hurt herself this AM. The remainder of her day has looked thusly - don't worry, she's fine; a quick exam, some Rimadyl and quality sofa time did the trick. Ah, be careful Dubsy; you look it, but you're not actually two anymore...