Princes and Thieves
The gods have raineth actual work upon me, so until next Wednesday we’re only hitting doubles. We were taught to aim for the monstah as a kid anyway. It’s the smaht play.
FIRST BASE: ONE NATION, INDIVISIBLE The country took a day off (or in my case, four) over the weekend to celebrate getting back to work. Only in America! Gotta love it. And those who participate in our national pastime were at it over the weekend, fighting largely for Wild Card spots. All the divisions are more or less wrapped up except, perhaps, the NL West, where the Rockies have closed to within 3.5 games of the Dodgers. That’s a dramatic reversal of fortune from June 1st, when the Dodgers held the largest division lead in baseball (eight game), and the Rockies were in last place, 10 games below .500. The Rox lead the Giants by 2 for the Wild Card, and the Red Sox are up 2.5 on the Rangers after getting manhandled by the Pale Hose.
But that’s not the big baseball story from this weekend. Prince Fielder hit a walk-off home run on Sunday and orchestrated perhaps the greatest organized celebration of all-time, much to the consternation of the Giants, who fell at the Prince’s mighty blow. To paint a visual picture, Fielder hits the homer and stars running around the bases, untucking his comically oversized shirt after he rounds first base. At this point, he also starts pointing to his teammates spilling out onto the field. Nothing major; who knows what this means? Anyhow, as he approaches home, he leaps and lands on home plate with a thud and his whole team — everyone — falls backward as if a bomb went off. It was fantastic, original, and sure to be fined and banned. So enjoy the crap out of it.
SECOND BASE: MAD WORLD The fourth episode of Mad Men aired Sunday night, and if you don’t watch the show or aren’t interested, you can skip ahead to tomorrow’s post. I have a notoriously bad history of judging shows within seasons, especially in the first few episodes. So I’m going to withhold my judgment of certain plot elements, and the way certain things are handled. The one thing I’m concerned about that I will talk about is the wink-nudge peeks at the future that occur in, I believe, increasing frequency. The first season was about Don Draper and basically only Don Draper; outside events were cleverly inserted into the “text” of the show. The second season added a little more and expanded Peggy and Betty’s characters, but increasingly, in the third season, the world is the main character — hardly 10 minutes goes by when you’re not clued in to some event that will happen in the future. That shit I can learn about on Wikipedia; I want to know more about these characters, and not the half-by-rote way in which they smoke marijuana for the first time or learn about the conflict in Vietnam.
Alright, see you tomorrow.
