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The other day, one of my friends (and former editor) Blake Hurtik (better known as the creator, director, CEO, and commander-in-chief of The Hurtik Locker) showed me a Sporcle quiz he had created called “Can you name the MLB 2010 Team Slogans?”
Before you do anything, take the quiz now, and see how many you can answer: http://www.sporcle.com/games/bhurtik/MLBteamslogans
I was pretty proud of my 16/24, but considering that these are slogans representing MLB franchises, shouldn’t any reasonably invested baseball fan be able to identify most of these? That’s when I realized the unintentional comedy behind many of these slogans, and how ridiculous they actually seem upon further review.
So here, I’d now like to propose how these ridiculous slogans would translate in other situations and what I’d make the team’s slogan if I was the club’s PR manager. In no particular order, here are some of my 2010 MLB favorites:
Blue Jays pitcher Adam Lind makes a routine catch in front of another packed crowd at Rogers Centre.
1. The Toronto Blue Jays “You Belong at the Game” Currently dead last in the MLB in overall attendance at home/away games, this slogan feels more like a request, or even desperate plea.
Parallel Slogan: The Suffolk Jr. High School Girls Wrestling Meet “You Belong at the Game”
What it should be: “You Really Really Belong at the Game, Like Seriously, We’re about to Pull a Fucking Expos Here If More People Don’t Start To Show the Hell Up.”
2. The Pittsburgh Pirates: “Pride. Passion. Pirates.” Pride? In having one of the top five draft picks every season? Passion? In helping hundreds of National League hitters boost their slugging percentages when they roll into PNC? How can anyone in Pittsburgh actually say this with a straight face after seventeen consecutive losing seasons?
Parallel Slogan: “Pride. Passion. Cuba Gooding Jr.”
What it should be: “Shame. Ambivalence. Pirates.”
3. The Oakland A’s “Green Collar Baseball” Apparently Oakland doesn’t fit into “blue-collar” or “white-collar” demographics. We’ll see if San Jose has the same feeling in two years. (All 174 Oakland fans just cursed me for bringing that up.)
Parallel Slogan: The Denver Broncos “Putrid Fluorescent-Throw-Up-Orange Collar Football”
What it should be: “Gangrene-Infested Collar Baseball”
4. The Atlanta Braves “The Excitement of Turner Field!” Nothing gets me more excited than enduring the 110-degree heat index during the blistering Atlanta summer at Turner Field! And did you see Yunel Escobar draw those 4 walks yesterday? Absolutely exhilarating! To the Brave’s PR department, I wouldn’t recommend using Turner Field as one of your main selling points.
Parallel Slogan: Isiah Thomas Basketball Camp “The Excitement of Henderson Elementary Gymnasium!”
What it should be: “The Excitement of Being Rushed to the Hospital from Turner Field with Heat Stroke”
5. The New York Mets “We Believe in Comebacks” You certainly do! They let the Phillies come back from a 7-game deficit with 17 games left to take the NL East in 2007 and then followed that up in 2008 by allowing them to come back from a 3.5 game deficit with 10 games to play. It doesn’t matter if it isn’t the Mets who are necessarily making the comebacks!
Parallel Slogan: The Detroit Lions “We Believe in 50-point Fantasy RB Scoring Weeks”
What it should be: “We Believe in Building Up Hope for 150 games and then Utterly Crushing it with a Sledgehammer”
Seriously, he just has magic inside now! Since when is that a banned substance?
6. The Giants “It’s Magic Inside” This probably isn’t the best slogan to throw around for a sport that’s still reeling from the whole steroids debacle. I hope this slogan was in place when Bonds played for the team. The unintentional comedy scale would have been off the charts. It can still apply to current reliever – and former Mitchell Report starter – Guillermo Mota, though.
Parallel Slogan: Jim Jones’s Kool-Aid: “It’s Magic Inside”
What it should (have been) be: “It’s Methyltestosterone HGH and Primobolan Enanthate Inside”
7. The Chicago White Sox “It’s Black and White” In a city that’s infamously segregated with the southside Sox being Chicago’s “black” team and the northside Cubs being the “white” team, way to further divide the city between race!
Parallel Slogan: 1930s Water Fountains “It’s Black and White”
What it should be: “It’s kind of black, but mostly just pasty white guys.”
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First there was Grover Cleveland. (And yes, damn straight I’m opening this column with a Grover Cleveland reference.) Then there was the German Military of the early to mid 20th Century. Later there was Ali, followed by Jordan. O.J. led the charge on the criminal front while David Chase took up the torch in the world of television. And today we have Rourke, Downey Jr., and Stallone.
Today, Grover and I stand as one.
What do all of these venerated icons have in common? They all stood at the peak of their games, the height of their powers only to walk away from it all, take some time off, and then return to their former glory with a vengeance.
Today there stands a new name among these icons: Pagels.
Where was I all these weeks? Hostage in Nicaragua? Withering away on my death bed? Relocating under the witness protection program? Nah, mostly lying on my couch watching SportsCenter.
I’m not going to make any excuses for my two-month absence (other than my 18 hours of classes, final exams, transferring to new school, and getting a summer job of course.) But I’m trying to regain my former glory of biweekly columns.
The problem is that I set a precedent too high for myself. All of my posts were over 3,000 words. Every time I thought of cranking out another mega-column, I succumbed to watching another episode of Mad Men. I felt like Brett Favre weighing the pros of going through an entire NFL training camp, regular season, and playoff schedule again. I just couldn’t do it.
But then I remembered how Favre beat the system.
Instead of showing up to grueling team workouts in May, flying out to sweltering hot summer training camp, and grunting through the meaningless exhibition games, why not just stay at home in Mississippi and play pickup games of football in Wrangler jeans along with a bizarre cult of 21 other Wrangler-clad woodsmen? Why not just roll into camp a few weeks before the season opener and take the starting job?
That got me thinking, why should I have to crank out Tolstoyian length columns every week? Why can’t I shoot baskets all day in my backyard with my vintage KG Timberwolves ball, watch the Rangers game, and then crap out a shortened post for my web site?
Last night’s debauchery against Tigers pitcher Armando Galarraga was just the event that prompted me to come out of my hibernation and write on something I’ve been so adamant about with friends recently.
Galarraga just missed being the third pitcher to throw a perfect game in four weeks.
The way we umpire sports is inherently flawed. While millions of other jobs across the globe are being lost to machines, refs and umpires continue on working out-of-date jobs every day of the week. There’s a reason we don’t have elevator operators or gas station attendants any more. Their jobs have become automated, and society as a whole is better for it.
What if murder courts were only allowed to view the security camera footage one time in each trial? What if the jury had to make an immediate ruling to sentence the defendant to death or let him walk free within seconds of viewing the video? There’s a reason they take the time to review things and consult others. So they can make the right decision!
Now I’m not suggesting we banish all umpires to Elba and have Skynet run the games, but there has to be a better way of running things. Do you know how chaotic it is in the middle of the field during an NFL game? Imagine trying to see if the center snapped the ball before the play clock ran out, if the offensive tackle didn’t false start, if the defense was situated in a legal formation, if the quarterback stayed in the pocket, and if the cornerback interfered with the receiver past the five yard non-interference zone….all while trying to avoid being manhandled by 22 200lb+ behemoths.
There’s a reason they have a booth in football, but why are only 1% of the calls made from the person who has the best view of the field?
I’m tired of sitting on my couch watching sports where a blown call is instantaneously replayed on the screen. But I’m also tired of watching referees huddle over near a small closed-circuit television screen watching the replay for over five minutes. The last thing we need is to make these games longer.
We live in the 21st century! The fans should not have the ability to know the call long before the refs, but it simply seems this is how sports are run these days. As Obama’s newly appointed Secretary of Sport, I’ve come up with two very basic ways to fix this issue.
The Robotic Refs Plan
- Have machines make 80% of the calls by placing chips in the balls and players’ cleats, and planting readers on the bases, sidelines, and goalposts. This would make rudimentary ball/strike, goal/no goal calls (unlike Sex Panther cologne) 100% accurate 100% of the time.
- Keep two refs on the field to make all the bizarre rulings that are too complicated for machines to judge.
- There also need to be refs on field simply to maintain order. There’s much more to being a ref than just making calls. They have to manage the game, give the ball to the right people at the right times, tell players where to go in certain situations, and break up fights. (Actually scratch that last one. Fights should never be broken up.)
The Instantaneous Walkie-Talkie (NOT FIVE MINUTE PHONE CONVERSATION) Booth Plan
- Keep all of the normal umpires/referees on the field/court/ice. As far as making call is concerned, yes a robot would be far more accurate, but as I said before there’s much more to being a ref than simply making calls.
- Have someone in the booth watching the game on TV with a walkie-talkie connected directly to the umpires on the field. If the umpires blow a call, the man in the booth can immediately radio down within seconds that the player was out of bounds or safe at first, etc.
This should no longer take two commercial breaks to figure out.
I don’t understand why no sport has installed this already. Why have the umpires walk behind some concealed curtain to spend an eternity determining a call when we can have someone in the booth just radio down any corrections within seconds?
It’s a shame that Galarraga had to have his perfect game ruined by a single, late bad call, but it’s more of a shame that first base umpire Jim Joyce has to work in such a flawed system and forever be known as “the guy who blew that pitcher’s perfect game.” Like Buckner’s blunder and Norwood’s “wide right,” Joyce – who has put in over two decades of reliable MLB service – always be associated with one play on one night in Detroit no matter what he does for the rest of his life.
For the baseball purists who say the way things are run should never change, I have one question for you: how many umpires can you actually name other than Don Denkinger and now Jim Joyce? We only notice umpires who blow major calls, just as we only notice waiters who drop plates or pilots who crash airplanes. Are you seriously telling me that fixing a mistake would ruin the game?
Was the runner out by a step last night? Yeah, but it’s not his fault that baseball has installed such a ridiculous system of making calls. Detroit fans shouldn’t be calling for Joyce’s head, but rather commissioner Bud Selig’s.
But Selig isn’t the only person who has failed recently. This column has yet again reached page four on my computer…
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