What we do have to talk about today is the 21st birthday of one of our own, Kyler. Kyler will likely kill me for including this picture, but so be it. If he wants to get mad about me posting a picture of him playing with a little girl (who is almost his birthday buddy), then he can play a nice game called "Suck It." I am not sure what Kyler is doing tonight, though I am sure that it will involve going out to some restaurant where he can legally order an adult beverage for the first time and then likely to one or more of the downtown Winona establishments where he will drink a pallet of Old Spice. I am a little disappointed that I cannot go out somewhere with him tonight, though I have to be a reasonable facsimilie of an adult and help take care of two kids and be mostly functional at work tomorrow. I can no longer do any of those things if I drink more than like 2 beers (and I havent drank more than 2 beers at a time since before my wife got pregnant with our second kid, which for those of you scoring at home was approximately last September), so I would be a pretty crappy 21st birthday companion. One weekend day this summer though, we will do it up and I'll make sure that all of you in Winona know about it. We can have a mini partay, though someone may need to lend me a floor to sleep on.
I dont really have much baseball to talk about today.
-Clayton Kershaw told the Rockies, "No tacos for you" in his 107 pitch no hitter that should have been a perfect game if Hanley Ramirez hadnt thrown a ball away on a slow roller. I dont know how many of you, if any, played sports above high school or may have had something in high school like what we had in college. But most teams above high school (and I am 95.6% confident about this) have some sort of Kangaroo Court to make guys financially pay for terrible or moronic things that they do or for breaking team rules. My college baseball team had a "No hats while eating" rule whenever we were on the road and stopped at a restaurant (any kind, from McDonalds to some fancy sit down), for example, and the cost for forgetting to take your hat off was $0.50 per occurance. If you made a stupid decision on the bases or threw to the wrong base while missing the cuttoff, or had a particularly ugly slide or dive for a ball, someone nominated the moment and put a fine to it, and the finee could either accept or challenge the fine and that challenge went to the group. Then either the finer had to pay the fine or the fine was doubled, depending on the decision of the group. You get the point. The money all went to some big end of the year party for "party favors." Anyways...someone on the Dodgers better be taking Hanley to task for that error or Hanley better be taking Clayton out for some spectacular meal to make up for it.
-Kris Bryant was promoted to AAA, which promted a giddy Uncle Jimmy to text me almost immediately and then refuse my request to trade for him. The only thing that makes me worried that Uncle Jimmy wont name his soon to be born son Warren Giancarlo is that he might name him Kristopher Javier.
-I saw a new favorite Tony Gwynn stat: Tony Gwynn could have gone 0 for his next 1,182 and still finished his career as a .300 hitter. To put that in context, he would have had to go nearly 2 full seasons of playing 140 games each season, to not end his career as a .300 hitter. I am having visions of Bernie Mac coming back to play for the Brewers in "Mr. 3000." Sidenote on that movie, Bernie actually semi pulled off being a believable Brewer. And I am not sure there is a better baseball nickname than T-Rex Pennebaker. I dunno who came up with it, but hells yes. The only movie name that comes close is Ebby Calvin 'Nuc" LaLoosh. Anyways, now I am just rambling. Happy birthday to Kyler. All the rest of you, feel free to share your 21st birthday story in the comments.
I can only imagine the range of items covered by "party favors" - guessing both human, liquid, etc...yikes.
ReplyDeleteMy 21st was pretty tame. I was one of, if not, the last of my group of friends to turn 21. The standard 21st celebration in Iowa City (at least back around Y2K time) was going to One Eyed Jake's where the birthday boy/girl/tranny/etc. would get 21 pitchers of some fizzy yellow beer for $21 - yes, that's $1 per pitcher for you people who suck at math (looking your way, Commish). On top of that, our group would always have the birthday person continually sign his name on a sheet of paper and put the time to keep track of how shitty he got over the course of the night. Obviously, shots also were downed, and right now I kinda wish I had saved this sheet of paper to show Warren Giancarlo/Kristopher Javier come August 1st, but I digress.
When we all looked back at the pics (once they were printed from our Kodak FunSaver disposable cameras - God, I'm old) there was one of me with 2 of my buddies where one of them had made a bow-tie out of a $1 bill and put in on me. Don't remember it happening at the time, but I think I may still have that glossy-eyed photo somewhere in my room at my parents' house. Ah, memories...
PS - Commish, you owe me royalties for using "Pallet of Old Spice". That shit is trademarked, unlike the Redskins.
I cant believe that I missed this last week. I was only a lowly 20 when Uncle Jimmy terrorized Iowa City with a dollar bow tie, so I could not attend that shit show. Though we did make up for it that one night where we went to Northwestern-IA football game, then went out and ended up in a sub shop (I dont remember the name) where I stole an entire box of the bags of chips you got with your meal deal and then walked around Iowa City handing out bags of chips to random people. Ahh memories.
ReplyDeleteMy 21st was even lamer than Uncle Jimmy's. It was a Saturday and we were playing a doubleheader at Concordia-St. Paul on Saturday and Sunday. My parents drove up to the cities and my aunt (godmother) came down from Anoka and we went to some restaurant (probably a Chotchkie's) and had dinner... If you know my family, then you know that there was no drinking involved with this outing. Then I went back to the hotel and hung out with some of the baseball guys (probably did something exciting like watch SportsCenter) and went to sleep to play the next day. And by play, I mean sit on the bench, cuz that was the season I think I ended with 20 total at bats or something terrible in my first year on the Varsity team.