Jason Stark reports on how those Detroit Tiger pitchers are doing during their fielding drills this spring after their horribly beautiful E-1 medley they played for the world last October.
Tony LaRussa Is A Rabbit
When you finally win a World Series in a city starving for one after a mere 11 years of being the manager you tend to loosen up. For instance, I heard a story that Tony was signing autographs while stopping in a Starbucks in downtown St. Louis. I thought that was pretty cool considering his usual frosty or aloof behavior, but this…this is a whole different level of loosening up.
I seriously doubt that Tony would have agreed to be the rabbit in the play “The Mad Hatter” after the humiliation that was the 2004 World Series. What I do know is that these pictures will make themselves to the wall of the Cardinals clubhouse for at least the duration of spring training.
via Deadspin
One more picture of Tony LaRussa hop, hop, hopping through the off-season after the jump!
The End of the 2006 Playoff Beard
Guess what? We actually have some Hell Yeah Bitch! .com produced video for you today. First change your pants and then check out the video below. The video retells the beautiful story of the shaving of the 2006 playoff beard that worked perfectly…subtitle: The Greatest Shave Ever.
Get the Flash Player to see this player.
Today I am kind of clean shaven and I have to say, I’m experiencing a little post-beard depression. I miss it. Maybe, next season, I should do a Season Beard. Nah, I’d rather have a girlfriend. I’ll have to just wait for October 2007.
Let me apologize for having to use youTube, but when I was trying to get this converted into flash last night it was problem after problem (thanks for nothing FFMpegX) so this morning I had to fall back on the old faithful youTube. Once I find a solid method of flv creation at home, I move this back to a in-house solution. Update: Fixed. Not the way I would have preferred, but fixed all the same. Its still on youTube though, and I’ll leave the link up.
Download the Clinching Playoff Games
I’m really not trying to turn this into a Cardinals site…maybe not as hard as I should be…but I figured anyone in St. Louis might want to know this little nugget of information: You can download, for free, a copy of the clinching games from each round of the playoffs by going to this site and entering in your MLB.com login information (you can make an account there too). Thats all. Download the games you want and watch them until February when pitchers and catchers report. I’m downloading game 5 of the World Series and game 7 of the NLCS right now, and I’ll report back with quality and length, but the wording implies whole games so I hope thats true. Each game in MPEG4 clocked in at around 800 MB so keep that in mind you Amish people with dial up, but if thats not you, go there right now.
Are you going yet?
The Cardinals Are Baseball’s 2006 World Champs
I still can’t believe that it happened…especially in this year with the problems we had. Amazing. To tell you the truth, it really hasn’t hit me yet. I’ll probably be sitting in a meeting on Tuesday and I just stand up and freak out when I finally happens. We ran downtown last night after it happened and the greatest night of my life continued. (I hope the pictures I took with my phone turn out. If so, I’ll have them posted later.) Yes, last night was the greatest night of my life. I can only hope that the day I get married and the day my future children are born can both at least come close to the night the Cardinals won the World Series. Some day I’ll be in the hospital and the doctor will pass me my newly born child and I’ll look into his eyes and say “Hmmm…pretty close. This is almost as cool as that night when the Cardinals won the World Series. You guys remember that? Now that was a night! Am I right?”
Awesome.
Update:
Thanks for the kind congratulatory words for both the city and the team from DaringFireball. Sorry about your Yankees John.
One More Game…Here’s a Pumpkin.
I present the Yadi-o’ lantern. Why? I’m not sure, but its cool.
I swear I’m going to pee myself if the Cardinals win the series. Amazing.
Via: Viva El Birdos
I Don’t Know, Just Line Up a Bunch of Country Artists
I love baseball and I love the St. Louis Cardinals…and as improbable as this sounds after three, eight game losing streaks, I’m excited to say the Cardinals are in the World Series. I do have a problem with the World Series though. No, I’m not going to beat a back-from-the-dead pitcher about his dirty hand, I’m talking about something more important: the city of St. Louis’ national image. The nation at large already thinks we are a bunch of hicks and Major Leage Baseball and the Cardinals themselves seem to be more that happy to simply back that claim up by launching the following lineup for the musical preformances at the three World Series games being held in our fair city:
Game 3 National Anthem: Trace Adkins
Game 3 God Bless America: Jo Dee Messina
Game 4 National Anthem: Billy Ray Cyrus
Game 4 God Bless America: Sugarland
With the execption of Billy Ray Cyrus (Who can forget “Achy Breaky Heart”?) I have no idea who these people are. I’ve been told they are country artists though, and that pisses me off. Although I understand that it can be hard to believe but I’ve lived in St. Louis all my life and I have never listened to country music. Here’s another interesting fact, we have musical talent from the St. Louis area that are not country acts. I know! I couldn’t believe it myself! What are the odds? It makes me want to vomit when I think of the meeting where Major League Baseball was planning out the musical acts:
Guy #1: Who do we want to sing at the St. Louis games?
Guy #2: Does it really matter? Just toss a couple of country artists in there and make them scream “America” a few times…that ought to get that hoosier crowd out there going.
Guy #1: Nice…nice. Good plan buddy. Now what do you say to getting back to our hotel and beating up those Japanese hookers we got earlier and tied up.
Guy #2: Oh yeah!
Besides the fact that those two guys are kinda weird with their beating up hooker fetish, thats probably how it went down. Not all people in St. Louis are inbred hicks…we do however all approve to beating up Japanese hookers. Get your facts straight.
Yadi Does It!
I guess I won’t be shaving the playoff beard tonight! Yadier “I batted just above the mendoza line all season” Molina hits a homerun in the top of the ninth to pave the way for a knee-buckling curve ball strikeout thrown by his battery-mate Adam Wainwright (and a fellow Brother of the Beard) to one Carlos Beltran for a trip to the World Series. This is the second trip to the World Series in the last three years for St. Louis and their 17th National League pennant all time.
A commenter on Dave Winer’s blog, a Mets fan, said this game wasn’t good. I replied and I’ll just quote my previous comment to save time:
…I think this was one of the better games in the playoffs. It was tight all game, two good starting pitching jobs (I still can’t believe thats the same Oliver Perez), and amazing catch, a clutch homerun, and a bases loaded bottom of the ninth 2 out strike out Is there another great baseball moment that didn’t happen in this game? It was a fantastic game, regardless of the outcome or who you were rooting for. Great season for the Mets and a surprising continuation for the Cardinals.
It was a great series by the Mets, and they had a great season and a great game 7, but something got into these Cardinals. I don’t know if it was being called an “underdog” for the first time in years, but these Cardinals came together in all sorts of ways including Yadi finding his bat, Rolen actually getting a key hit or two, and Jeff Weaver and his Great Dane hoped in their van and solved “The Mystery of the Left-Handed Hitters”. Zoinks! Have yourselves a Scooby Snack or two Cardinals, you’ve earned it…but keep going, this post-season that no one saw coming isn’t over yet. Detroit will be really tough, but the Cards have been picked to lose the last two series too so who knows.
Gratuitous Kate Beckinsale and Friends Photo #34
Well This Weekend Didn’t Go As Planned
Crap. I went on a mini-vacation from Thursday until now. I didn’t mention it because I assumed I would have no issues with internet connectivity as well as have a little time to be able to post a few things to the site. Neither happened. If I was a big guy that crushes beer cans on my head and wears a constant supply of polo shirts I would have just picked myself off the ground and said “My bad!” as I pounded my chest and continued with a “That one’s on me. On me!”
As a peace offering I now give you three Carmen Electra pictures
Per my agreement with the Devil in which he got my soul and I got the last piece of pie last Thanksgiving…there are two more pictures of Carmen after the jump.
Oh and one more thing: Go Cards! …and all hail our new power-hitter So “The Guch” Taguchi.
ESPN ZOOM: The New Busch Stadium
Sadly I couldn’t get tickets, but I’m sure there is a sea of red clad, happy people flooding around downtown St. Louis right now. The festivities for the first home opener for “Busch Stadium III” are set to kick off any minute, with the game starting roughly an hour after that. I’ll get down there a little latter in the season to see the new park from the inside, but until then I have to settle for pictures. However, viewing pictures of the new park on the web was a surprisingly pleasant experience today when I found the new (?) feature on EPSN.com called EPSN ZOOM. Its an auto-resizing flash application that shows each picture in a gallery in beautiful full window size with a simple navigation on the top and a little information / caption box that can be drug around the window or hidden at will. Its is truly one of the best and cleanest flash implemetations I have seen thus far. I know its simple, but to me, this is really what flash should be used for: A simple, clean interface for a single aspect of a site. ESPN has really done some nice work reworking the entire face of the online face of their brand and ZOOM is one of the nicer and more surprising features they have added.
…Oh yeah, I love the look of the new Busch stadium as well. It should be a good day today…and maybe, just maybe I’ll get in a better mood after last night’s this past weekend’s stupid loss to sweep by the Cubs.
View the new Busch Stadium in the ESPN ZOOM gallery