The new M’s caps
You may have been saying to yourself “I’d love to go out wearing my Mariners cap, but it’s just not embarrassing enough to wear the logo of one the worst, most ineptly-run franchises in baseball, where the worst hitter in the game gets to DH and bat fourth every game. What if there were something uglier? Something that ties the team into a gaudy commercialize patriotism. Like… the baseball equivalent of a Lee Greenwood song.”
I know I have. If so, our wish has been answered!
Did you just throw up? A little, maybe? Because I can show it to you again.
Plus, it’s not just a craven attempt to exploit fans into buying a new cap for $35. Oh no:
A portion of proceeds from all caps sales will go to the Welcome Back Veterans fund
You might wonder what portion that is, exactly.
Newspaper Tour Guide: And each paper contains a certain percentage of recycled paper.
Lisa: What percentage is that?
Newspaper Tour Guide: Zero. Zero is a percent, isn’t it?
Sorry, wrong quote.
It played out with Uni Watch like so:
MLB PR czar Rich Levin glared at me like I’d just hocked a loogie in his cappuccino or something. “The answer is that that hasn’t been determined yet,†he growled. “But this is a charity initiative — it isn’t about generating revenue.â€
“I’m not suggesting otherwise,†I responded. “But there’s a certain level of cynicism out there among some fans, so I was giving you a chance to clarify…â€
“We reject that,†he snapped. “We reject the cynicism.â€
Uni Watch on the caps
Uni Watch at the press conference
I don’t have a lot to add to that Uni Watch post: these kind of things really annoy me.
But what’s absolutely amazing about this is the raw, unmitigated cynicism of MLB, that they’d launch patriotic themed hats ostensibly to benefit a worthy veterans charity and be totally unprepared to tell anyone what the participation is. I’ve got a pretty dim view of humanity and this shocked me. How could you do this? How do you go lower than this? Are the caps ugly because the program’s ugly? Is this branding a warning by someone on the inside, trying to keep us from falling prey to this program?
I hope. Anyway, I’d humbly suggest if you’re interested in supporting the cause, just go to welcomebackveterans.org and donate directly. They’ll get almost 100% of the proceeds from that action.
Game 87, Tigers at Mariners
Galarraga v Dickey.
I have to admit that when I first saw this matchup on the probable pitcher listing I wondered for just an instant if Andres Galarraga had made yet another comeback, this time as a pitcher. The Big Cat would only be 47, after all.
And remember, you can keep America rolling!
Game 86, Tigers at Mariners
Rogers vs. The Interview, who remains strangely untraded. 1:10 our time.
Game 85, Tigers at Mariners
Verlander v Silva, 7:10.
Surprisingly, Cairo is not rewarded with additional playing time.
Vidro bats 4th despite being one the worst hitters in baseball. Anyone who can offer a cogent and reasonable explanation of why will receive one of my PNG beers.
KIRO may have won next M’s radio contract
Thanks to Henry for the link to blatherWatch:
You can take it to the bank: KIRO has won back the Mariners’ play-by-play broadcast contract they lost to KOMO in 2002.
And they picked it up for less than half the $10 million that KOMO paid.
When KOMO paid tons for the last radio contract as part of a set of larger moves, the team was coming off a long run of success. Their reward was largely to be mired in horribleness. The M’s still do draw listeners, though, and if/when their fortunes improve, KIRO may have done well buying (relatively) low.
For the M’s, though, it’s another disturbing indication that their failure on the field is undermining the team financially. Ticket sales keep declining, they just got creamed on the radio negotiations, and at the very least we should assume that they’re not able to crank up advertising rates every year like they once could.
So get to winning again, team.
Bloomquist and Bloomquist Light
Cairo’s game made me think about something. Sure, the last time Bloomquist had an extra-base hit was July 15th, 2007. But when was the last time he had more than one in a game?
I believe that it was July 6th, 2005, when he had three doubles in Kansas City. Before that, August 22nd, 2004 in Detroit. Then July 12th, 2003, against the Devil Rays (double, triple). And then September 22nd, 2002, when he had two doubles at home against the Angels. I scanned the gamelogs, so I might be missing one (or more).
I think that’s it. 514 career games, 4 of them had more than on extra-base hit, only one of which had three. So 52 games with any kind of extra-base hit.
Game 84, Blue Jays at Mariners
7:10, in a thunderstorm if this keeps up. That’d be kind of cool.
Dustin McGowan v Jarrod “The Bus” Washburn
And the Sonics are out
Seattle settled, team leaving.
We haven’t said much at all about this, in large part because on non-Mariner or baseball issues, we pretty much stay quiet, and we didn’t have anything insightful to add. But this totally, totally sucks, and there’s so much blame to go around that it’s hard to know where to start. Well, no, actually, you start with Howard Schultz, but you get my point. No one in Seattle, including the other teams, wins here.
And you people in Oklahoma City — I would hope you would be appalled enough by this to not participate in this shameful debacle, but I don’t have a lot of faith in that.
Ichiro’s devious Papua New Guinea beer update update
“Usually I enjoy Japanese beer, but given the situation, if I was objectively watching the game, I wouldn’t care if it was Japanese beer, American beer or beer from Papua New Guinea.†— Ichiro
In our quest to honor Ichiro’s wishes and consume American, Japanese, and Papua New Guinean beers as the team finishes out this season, we were briefly stymied by the total lack of Papua New Guinean beers in Washington. Or, it appeared, anywhere we could get to.
But we rallied! And came up with some ideas. Some others claimed they could get Washington State Liquor Kombinat stores to special order the beer, but I haven’t heard from anyone that did it, so I’m betting that turned out to not be true.
I ordered from this place, and was skeptical of their claimed quick delivery time. This turned out to be prescient as it took them quite a while to respond at all to my order.
My order number was in the single digits, and it wasn’t nine. I would bet that they were all sitting around peacefully, minding their own business, when suddenly the cute little website they’d thrown up started to spit out shipping manifests for Ichiro loyalists, and they had to run over to the store to buy some beer to ship people.
But it’s coming, or so they claim in their latest email. And I remember that I wrote this:
Ichiro can’t come out and call for the fans to rise up and oust this inept franchise, to somehow make a change from the people who represent ownership on down. He may even have no idea how it could happen. He doesn’t know how a huge, angry, resentful fan base might pull this off.
But Ichiro has faith in us, in our ability to unite together to acquire crazy obscure beers where there are no local sources to be found, and from that, to go on and affect the larger, even more difficult changes we all know must happen here.
And in each of these victories, cracking open a bottle of potentially delicious beer or watching the franchise build a winning team around our favorite players, will be all the sweeter for having seemed impossible from where we stand now.
That was May 26th, and look what’s happened since then. Ichiro knows what he’s doing.
The day in unsourced rumor mongering
Hey, how about a totally unsourced rumor from CBS Sportsline’s Scott Miller?
One fascinating rumor making the industry rounds has an investment group led by Microsoft executive and current Mariners minority owner Chris Larson and former Seattle GM Pat Gillick taking control of the Mariners sometime in the near future, with Gillick running the baseball operation and naming the new GM.
As the story goes, Hiroshi Yamauchi, retired head of the game company Nintendo, is looking to get out of the baseball business and is intent on selling his controlling share of the Mariners. Larson, it is said, wants to become the controlling owner.
I want Chris Larson to be the new controlling owner too. Miller does not offer quotes or denials of any kind from anyone vaguely involved, including unsourced confirmations or denials, which… well, you should be pretty skeptical.
But… Gillick? What? Gillick’s name came up in the GM rumors a while back, but — well, if something like this was afoot, I have to think the local Times and PI guys would have been able to scare something up. They’ll probably be left holding Miller’s bag, so to speak, trying to get confirmation or denials themselves now that this is all circulating.
But then, Miller’s arguing it’d be smart to move Ichiro so there’s that too.