Articles from May 2010

May 31, 2010

I was certainly more raised on baseball than I was on hip hop.  I was whiffing at balls on a tee for my preschool squad and Baltimore choppin’ in the batting cages before Biggie and Pac ever started beefin’.  I knew California Love and was vaguely familiar with some other more popular rap of the day, but didn’t really get into hip hop until my older brother Griff played me Dr. Dre’s seminal Chronic 2001.  It was labeled parental advisory and I’m not sure how he even acquired it but knowing what a vile opinion our parents held of rap music we didn’t dare bump that shit in the house.  The only place we could safely blast such depraved filth was in Griff’s Ford Exploder and I’ll be damned if we weren’t bumpin’ the Doc just about every day on the way to school my 8^th grade year, two years after I had actually stopped playing baseball.

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Dee meeting Brandon Webb

May 27, 2010

I’m not going to lie, I have a love/hate relationship with fantasy baseball. When my manfriend, Daniel “Dee” Clark, or “Barfy” as many of you know him (just ask if you want to know the latest adventure of Captain Barfy—it involves a boat party and some misery on my part), first asked me to play fantasy baseball I was ecstatic. I had stood back as the boys scoured Ron Shandler’s Baseball Forecaster, which they exchanged every Christmas, wondering how a game could be so in-depth and intricate. I remember reading through some statistics in Shandler’s book and asking “Who in the hell is Chone (which I pronounced like it looks, with the sound “ch-“ as in Chad) Figgins”. While laughter erupted, my knowledge was a mockery of the sport. I knew it was time to start studying baseball. I started by pronouncing Chone like “Shawn” to help me sound less like a dumbass.

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May 26, 2010

Of all the projectiles used in today’s four most popular professional sports, no air-borne apparatus is more deadly more than the baseball.  The worst damage a football or basketball will usually ever do is jam a finger or break a nose (sorry, Stuart Scott).  A hokey puck is comparable to a baseball in density and velocity, but players wear full-face helmets the entire game and goalie is the single position dedicated to sacrificing himself in the line of fire.  Only in baseball is a primary element of the game defending your opponent’s best attempts at using a large club to bludgeon a cork filled piece of leather into oblivion. I’ll leave the exact physics to the Grinnell guys or whatever other link you wanna put up for that), but the simple fact is that the right swing connecting with the right pitch can produce a devastating amount of force, something any player, coach, or fan can attest to.  In fact, the book Death at the Ballpark documents over 850 unique ways people have died either playing or watching America’s pastime.  There are close calls every game, with line drives and foul balls zipping this way and that.  Usually, people get out of the way.  Sometimes, they don’t.

On March 11, 2010, Marin Catholic High School pitcher Gunnar Sandberg was struck in the head by a line drive during a scrimmage.  The 16 year old was placed in a medically-induced coma and had part of his skull removed during one of many surgeries.  But just two months later Gunnar is well on his way to recovery, and with a protective helmet currently covering his recuperating cranium, he has thrown out opening pitches for both the Giants and A’s in the past two weeks.  He is also looking forward to returning to his high school team next season.  That’s tough, kid.

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May 25, 2010

A friend of the Sombrero has had quite a month of May (and parts of April).  He accepted a job with a large scouting agency to analyze prospect statistics for a summer, he earned his masters degree from a very high-ranking economics program, and he is currently in a long interview process with a certain desert-located big league team named after a snake.  If I seem like I am being a little cryptic, it is because our friend, who will be referred to as Eat-a for the remainder of this post, has not been given the job quite yet.  Eat-a has been kind enough to include me a little in the process and has enlightened me as to what is expected from realistic applicants for jobs in the big leagues.  I personally found some of it surprising, but the majority of his process has been largely what I would have expected given how coveted these jobs surely are.

Eat-a played ball in college with most of the Sombrero writers and appeared on numerous All-MWC teams as a Pioneer.  He captained the team as a senior, and threw professionally in Australia after his graduation.  Essentially, Eat-a had a very successful career in the game and we all greatly benefitted from being his teammate.

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May 24, 2010

I was talking to Dee the other day about something that I find to be one of the coolest parts of the game of baseball and its inherently individualistic nature, walk-up intro music.  There is no other team sport in which every player on the field gets so many exclusive moments.  A Hall of Fame NFL lineman could go his entire career without ever hearing his name over the stadium loudspeakers, yet even bottom rung Major Leaguers get three to four chances on average to strut out into the spotlight.  Even high school varsity teams throw on players’ own personal pump-up tunes on their way to the plate.  I didn’t play baseball long enough to get to walk out in front of a cheering stadium to a song of my choosing; the closest I have to compare is whatever I put on my IPod before a big ski run, but I totally understand the motivation of music and think it has a particularly interesting place in the game people come here to read about.

In my research on the topic I came across an article published Sunday in the Sacramento Bee that beat me to it, pretty much summing up everything I wanted to say about the topic along with a lot of big league insight that I would not be able to provide.  It’s really worth checking out, and big ups to back to back Cy Younger Timmy “Dirty Hippy” Lincecum on selecting The Doors’ Break on Through.  You are now firmly cemented as my favorite active player (more on that later). Another interesting bit I came across actually talked to the music people behind the scenes for all 30 MLB teams and got the skinny on all of them.  So I’m going to save myself a lot of time on this one and get straight to what I wanted to do with this piece in the first place.  I know all the guys that write on here have at some point walked out to their own intro music, along with most of the people who are reading here on a regular basis, and I’d love to hear what you guys’ thoughts are on it.  What did you walk out to and why?  If you’ve never had the pleasure of walking up to the plate to cheering fans and your own musical motivation, think for a minute that you’re in the on-deck circle of your favorite stadium and your team needs a big hit.  What’s it gonna be?  I want to hear from you on this one, Golden Sombrero Nation.

Responses:

Dee: the three walk-up songs i remember using were shook ones, gun ballad by the pharaohs (paz’s verse), and the whoa instrumental from bad boy. i really thought all of those beats were just heavy and brought me to the competitive and focused state of mind i needed to be in. i have heard some of the guys i go to dental school with, who also happened to play in college, say a lot of shit about players who use hip-hop as their walk-up jam like that we are all fake thugs and wankstas. it’s not like a could not have found a great punk rock piece that i would have loved. the problem is that even 3-chord punk songs demand more than the 5 or 6 seconds it takes to walk from the circle to the box. all of those hip-hop tracks i mentioned used samples that were only around 4 seconds and then looped. i really feel like battle rap is the way to go with walk-up songs.

Mark Wilcox: At Grynul, I walked out to a beat mixed by Griff and Hodges a few summers ago when we were drinking beer and watching Chris dominate his guitar. Apart from it being a pretty dark and intimidating beat, I liked it for the memory it conjured. Having a cold one with friends will forever be a favorite pastime; I could relax and think about how cool it was that I was there when that little piece of intellectual property was created. Plus I knew no one else in the world walked out to that shit. Confidence and comfort were the reasons I chose my walk out music.