Baseball: Those Saint Louis Cardinals

Montreal has some new spring training baseball games coming in March of next year. I like these games, I go to 'em ... to be honest I like the pre-game ceremonies better than the exhibition baseball (where 3rd stringers tend to enter the lineup at the 4th inning mark).  A lot of old favorites have cruised on in over the last few years from 70s/80s Expos stars, to 90s Expos stars, and other key figures to take part in the opening ceremonies.

I don't have that many ideas left to write about anymore, but writing is a fun exercise and a cool mental tool to exercise. There's certain times of the year, probably because they are topics I've done annually, where I get a sort of writin' bug. I wrote about the previous MTL Exhibition games over the last 4 or 5 years and it's becoming a yearly routine for me. I really liked the format of the Cincinnati Reds article I did where I focused on the Reds and my memories of 80s/90s baseball surrounding them. I tried to mix it up and go a different route with the Pittsburgh one last year ... and do modern "memories" of now-a-times stuff ... but who am I kidding? I'm a Nostalgia Man, I love the past pretty well.

I'm gonna go back to the Cincinnati-one format for this where I think it had the right mix of Comedy, Baseball History, and Montreal Baseball Return Promotion (45% Comedy, 30% Baseball History, 25% MTL Baseball Return Being-Down-Withness).

In the meat of that one, I talked about the Best Red, and My Favorite Red. So, let's do that but for those Old St. Louis Cardinals this time who are venturing to baseball-less Montreal to play some friendly old baseball games in March (these are like Monday and Tuesday I think not Friday and Saturday like the previous four times).


Cardinals!

I know the Cards got into some murky water last season or two ago with something about attaining some informations in a "by hook or by crook" format ... but that's not the Cards I know and like ... my main thoughts of that team that come to mind when I think of them are from the "Whitey Ball" era (no that's not a bad term for white people playing baseball, it's based off the stratagems of one Whitey Herzog ... who was the main tactician for the Cards for many years).

Note the Napoleaning of the hand.

Baseball now a days thinks the fans want homers or strikeouts ... and they are kind of altering the game (for what they think is better) to achieve more HR and K ... but I loved Whitey Ball, baby.

I remember in Earl Weaver's book, the man who basically was the key influence on wanting walks and home runs ... he said the reason he set up his lineup for the "3 run homer" was because he coached in Baltimore and hitting homeruns out of Memorial Stadium was particularly easy (the corners of the fences for example stood at 309 feet out which is ludicrous). Weaver says in his book that if he coached in Kaufman in Kansas City (corners there were 330 feet out) he'd load his lineup with speedsters instead of power hitters.

Basically, how you design your stratagems is dependent on the battlefield in baseball. What was Whitey Herzog dealing with at Busch in the 80s? He had 330 corners like at Kaufman (I guess Missouri likes far out corners) so he designed a strategic deployment based on vicious unrelenting speed and thus Whitey Ball was born.

Let's do a leaderboard of stolen bases for the 1985 Cards (this is ONE TEAM mind you, not the entire league leader board):

1985 Cards Stolen Base Leaders:

Vince Coleman 110
Willie McGee 56
Andy Van Slyke 34
Ozzie Smith 31
Tom Herr 31
Lonnie Smith 12

In 2017 that's not even the combined NL/AL leaderboard let alone the leaders of a single team! Whitey Ballers weren't just running .... they were RUNNING THEIR DICKS LOOSE!

When the Cards won the Trophy in '82 you know who had the most homers on the team? One George Hendrick and you know how many he had? A whole 19 of them. They didn't even have one 20 homerun hitter when they went all the way in 1982.

Look at ol' Whitey in that photo ... with his hand all Napoleoned in his pocket like that. There's only one sort of very specific person who comports themselves in that fashion ... only Dynamic Strategists comport themselves as such. When you see a dude nonchalantly looking about the place with a single hand in the pocket and one hand flappin' loose ... he may seem to be nonchalant as shit but that person has a myriad of scenarios being calculated and re-calculated in his mind. Yes, a person who comports themselves like that are always Dynamic Strategists.


The Best Cardinal

Lots of choice here with a team that was founded in 1900 ... you've got quite a lot of names to chose from but I still think the choice isn't that hard. From glossing over historical stats only briefly it's not hard to settle on this name as the Greatest Cardinal of Talent-Wise of All Entire Time....

Bob Gibson. 

He was 251- 174 for the Cards in his career with a 2.91 ERA and 3117 strikeouts. That's some amazing numbers for a pitcher. His best year is almost unreal ... in 1968 he was 22 and 9 with a 1.12 ERA over 304 innings pitched!! That's the closest thing to total Absolute Ultimate Dominance that there is for a pitcher.

A starting pitcher of today would not even fathom pitching 300+ innings let alone while maintaining a 1.12 ERA throughout. People think Nolan Ryan was the pitcher who came the closest to Absolute Total Ultimate Dominance on the mound but Nolan never put up anything like that in his career. Nolan did get under 2 in ERA one year but in the strike shortened 1981 season where he had a 1.69 over 149 innings pitched.

1.12 over 304 by Bob Gibson .... is just .... Dolemite-esque in Nature. It's As Bad as Can (be). He was basically a Human Tornado in 1968.

I never saw him pitch other than in archived videos but I don't need any live-scoutage under my wings of analysis to proclaim Bob Gibson as the greatest Card talent-wise ever  ... I mean great googly moo this man was a House of Utter Pitching Fire, truth be told.

Runner Up for this Award: Stan "The Man" Musial


My Favorite Cardinal of all time

Now, this section is where I let my personal bias seep into the mix and I gently toss my analytical abilities out the old window, and relate to the reading audience who my favorite Cardinal was. As an 80s kid and 90s teen ... the 1980s and 1990s are my area of most nostalgia for baseball so the player will be from that 20 year period no doubt. 1900-1980 and 2000-2017 are not my area of nostalgic expertise.

The criteria to be awarded the championship of this section of the article isn't the same as the Talent portion where deep analytic thinking helped derive Bob Gibson for that honor ... this section is more "Did I like that dude's name a lot?" .... "Did the dude do a helluva lotta sick back flips before taking his position in the field?" .... "were his baseball card photos funny and/or cool looking?"

I had a shortlist but I narrowed the shorty down to two finalists. Al Hrabosky and Ozzie Smith.

The Mad Hungarian is a slight notch or two on the chronoscale ahead of my time ... but I'm not doing a Cardinals article without getting a quote of his in here. I mean, here, check out this one ... wait it needs set up. The Cards management asked Hrabosky to shave his iconic facial hair and after doing so his performance dropped off substantially and he claimed it was due to his now lack of facial hair and explained the need to have it to compliment his "psyche":

lookin' guuud.

"To be perfectly honest with ya, I feel that, I maybe have average physical ability, but when I get my psyche and my self-hypnosis goin', then I can compete with anybody and anything..."

-The "Mad Hungarian" Alan Thomas Hrabosky








The man's whole modus operandi was being wickedly wickedly pumped. Now, I'm gonna just go out and say it .... That is COOL. I would really like to know the procedure he used to self hypnotize himself into the Zone. For some reason I have a feeling it might have involved listening to the Doobie Brothers whilst drinking semi-warm Schaefer beer ... but that's just speculation on my part at this juncture.

  
Nextly, the Wizard of OZ! Ozzie Smith .... complete with GIFS OF HIM DOIN' FLIPS EVERYWHERE!!!!!

Wut the .... OH MY GOOOODNESS!

What is gonna ... OH WOW!

SLOOOO MOOOO SHUUUUNNNNN!

Ozzie don't, don't you're gonna get .... HE DID A BACK FLIP!!!

Sorry Al Hrabosky but you lose. Ozzie Smith is one of the mainest mainest mainest men of the 80s/90s. I, over the years, have equated happiness to doing back flips and Ozzie Smith would take the field by doing back flips. It's almost too much. It's .... the greatest thing.

So the award for my Most Favorite Cardinal of all time goes to ... Ozz....


......A CHALLENGER APPEARS!

OH NO!

Oh no, Willie ... no. No, I can't. I can't. I wrote a pretty long article about Willie McGee back in the day like five or six years ago. It was one of the first articles that got a lotta hits on my blog. It was a pseudo art review of photos of Willie McGee that went on for, I dunno, like 2000 words. It had a complete fictitious backstory, copy-pasted french poems, and everything else. I'm sorry, Willie, I can't include you in this one because I've done like thousands of words on the Subject of Willie McGee already. 

I can use the remainder of this space to work in a Dane Iorg joke or something .... Who am I kidding? Let's get Willie in this article.

People might have thought back in 2012 that I was making fun of Willie McGee in that "The Highest of High Culture: The Appraisal of Photographs of Willie McGee" piece. I wasn't. As a kid in the 1980s, photos of Willie McGee when found in various packs of baseball cards genuinely confused and intrigued me. I'd open a pack and flip through the cards and I'd be like ... "Oh a rookie card, cool", "YEAH! AN EXPO! YES!" ... and then ..... "????" .... total bewilderment and confusion.

I wasn't making fun of Willie's appearance in that 2012 piece, I honestly think Willie McGee baseball cards are art. They are. I would look at them and really wonder things like "What the heck is this dude thinking about to be making a face like this whilst getting his baseball card photo taken?" ... I mean if you made me choose what is the greatest baseball card of all time I'd say with perfect aplomb and genuine honesty that the 1986 Topps Willie McGee is the greatest baseball card of all time.

Players wanted to look cool, tough, professional, or snapped doing an interesting action/play in these cards ... but not Willie McGee. He wanted to take these photos with the most confounding facial expressions possible ... and they are just that ... confounding. I still think to this day that what Willie McGee is thinking about in his 1986 Topps trading card is ..... "Gee whiz .... that's a funny lookin' dog over there."

Ozzie Smith, I apologize, you're the greatest .... but the award for my Most Favoritist Cardinal of All Time goes to...

Willie Mcgee.

Conclusion

I like this article, it's pretty good.

Robots

In the last blog thing I wrote, I talked pretty highly of our steel-girded friends known as robots. I was saying that robots are gonna take over politicians jobs and it'll be really cool in like the 3000s .... but people shouldn't take that statement out of context.

The crux of the pudding of the last article was like to cheer people up because the political scene is getting all wonky lately. I re-read it just now and it's pretty dark at some parts for a cheer-up article ... like the kool-aid stuff and whatnot ... but the end was like a humorous sort of pick-me-up along the lines of "Don't worry gang ... robots will be our presidents soon ... so chin up y'all!"

A Robot

I don't want people to think I'm some sort of dirty robot-lover though. I actually in all personal-honesty don't even really like those cold-steel synthetic sons-of-whores and of bitches. I mean, those robots are stealing everyone's jobs with their cold uncaring robotic hands!

I guess I don't really hate robots though, I just wanted to clarify the last article where it probably came across (assuming anyone actually read it) as if I was looking forward to the collapse of humanity and the rise of the Ungodly Era of Murderous Machina ... which I'm not. I don't ever want humans to die ... I love humans.

I don't even hate all sorts of robots either just the dumb ones. Okie-doke, let's define some types of robots now.


Term Define
 
1. Automaton: These are fake humans that are just like puppets ... they can't like do stuff or think about stuff but they are made to look like real-ass humans. Sometimes they can achieve Uncanny Valley where they look so real that when real people look at them they get really freaked out.

The only time in my life I ever felt the effects of "uncanny valley" wasn't for a robot though, the only time I ever felt this was over a cat. I was delivering something, like a couch or something, to a house and they had this cat on the couch .... and I was looking at it and something was up with it .... I kept looking at it and then slightly approached it but it didn't budge or make eye movements .... then the customer told me it's a stuffed animal .... and I was like "it is?" .... and they said it was from a company that makes life-like replicas of people's departed pets and boy-oh-boy was it life-like ... like really life-like.

As my mind was transported in that moment to the Valley of the UnCanny ... I really thought to myself ... "Gee whiz, that cat is TOO life-like!"

So yeah, automatons are just like gimmick puppets ... they can't hurt nobody so who really cares about them?

Yes, Worker 8 was a faithless killing machine ... but he was also my friend.

2. Machines: Machines aren't really robots they are just serieses of mechanical components that can execute procedures. They can't think, feel, love, hate, or be alive ... they are just cold lifeless drones. The Russian word for "Work" is something like "Robota" .... to work is to robot and to robot is to work. I'm not Russian though ... and I don't think robots are work-machines ... to me robots are the fun friends from movies and video games who not only can execute procedures in an orderly fashion .... but who can also become your Best Friend. Those are only in the fictions though ... real life machines have no rhyme or reason and are just faithless steel giants.

Machines are super dangerous because they can be programmed by humans to execute a variety of pre-conceived functions ...  and as we all know ... humans can think up some really really fucked up shit for machines to do .... from killing to very badly killing to very very very badly killing like everything.

Oh no, not MORE ANDROIDS!?!?!

3. Androids: These are just fiction these ones. They are synthetic humans. Like say someone somehow thought up a way to re-create a human from scratch out of common shit on earth (i.e. not frankensteining other humans together or altering an existing human) ... as of right now we can make skin-like polymers and shit in real life, bone like shit, hair like shit and other shit .... but there's one thing that science hasn't even come close to creating from scratch yet and that's the human-ass BRAIN. The brain is so intricate and took layers and strata of millennia to achieve. Those millions upon million of years of evolution can't be re-created from scratch by anyone at this juncture. Even a chicken's brain is more intricate than any synthetic brain out there.

Are Androids dangerous? No, you silly goose, they don't even exist and won't for a few thousands of years so who cares about them?

(Frequently Asked Question: Is Frankenstein an android because he's a synthetic human? No, Frankenstein/Frankenstein's Monster is a MONSTER cobbled together from various parts of other humans ... he's like a Hybrid Human ... but more specifically Frankenstein is a big scary Monster and not a robot.)



4. Humanoid Robots: These are cool ones from fiction who look like tin cans or barrels but under those shabby tin cans they call bodies lies the caring and beautiful heart of a genuine human being. The Tin Man from Wizard of Oz is like the proto-type for this character trope ... the Tin Man literally didn't have a heart but by the end he learned that a heart doesn't come from some store or some shopping mall .... it was inside of him this whole entire time.

I love some of these robots, I cannot tell a lie, I really do. Pee Wee Herman had that Konky 5000, I have great respect for the Konkster, he brought joy and screaming to the Playhouse each and every Saturday. One time, Konky broke down and couldn't print out Today's Secret Word and Pee Wee had to call Jimmy Smits (before he was famous) to come fix Konky 5000 .... I was so happy that Saturday morn when Konky re-booted up as his old self thanks to Jimmy Smits's timely repairsmanship.

I like that swell-hearted Johnny Number Five as well from "Short Circuit" and "Short Circuit II" .... but my favorite humanoid robot is the main man himself .....

.... Robo.

Robo.... respect, brother. You're more than just a tin can, you're the best.

5. Cyborgs: Cyborgs are cool. They are regular-ass humans like me and you but with upgrades and decals and stuff. Unlike Androids these things exist. Like, do you have a grandpa with a pace-maker? Your grandpa is a fricken CYBORG. His heart is beating thanks to a machine implanted into his chest .... that's literally cool. 

Who says the legless can't have a foot race?

You ever watch those Para-Lympics where like dudes and chicks are cruising around the racing tracks with like bouncing-blades for legs? Man that's cool looking. In a sense, those paralympians are Cyborgs if you think about it. They had their legs replaced with the miracle of science's equivalent to legs. Those guys are amazing.

 Anyways, man I love Cyborgs .... they are so cool. One of my favorites is RoboCop. My heart gets filled with so much emotion and joy whenever I think of RoboCop. People think RoboCop was a Humanoid Robot or an Android but no .... RC was a Cyborg. 

RoboCop

I don't recall chronologically every piece of the RoboCop continuum but if memory serves me right, RoboCop was a Man until the dad (Red Foreman) from The 70s Show repeatedly shot him with a shotgun until he almost died .... but RoboCop didn't die .... he just got really badly shooted.

So what they did was, they put RoboCop's brain into the chassis of an elite crime fighting humanoid machine built for protecting and serving Detroit society. So, yes RoboCop was mostly Machine ... BUT .... the one component science can't create is the complex-as-shit human-ass BRAIN .... so RoboCop was still a Man. He was a Man with severe upgrades and decals made to his body but he still had his brain ... so RoboCop is 100% a Cyborg.

If you need proof that RoboCop is still a Man, look no further than the scene in RoboCop 2 (or is it 3?) where a gang of drug addicts and some 12 year old kid beat RoboCop with clubs and then jack-hammer him apart with a jack hammer. The remains of RoboCop are refurbished back at the precinct following the defeat .... and they install a new thinking program into RoboCop to make him a newer more better RoboCop 2.0 .... a RoboCop that is polite and nice and follows protocol to a tee .... and the audience is led to believe that the Man inside RoboCop was no more. Or was it?

RoboCop briefly regains control of his dying human side and walks to an electric transformer near the police precinct, tears it open, grabs the insides of the transformer with his bare robotic cop hands, lets a gajillion megawatts of power surge through his robotic veins .... and BAM .... RoboCop breaks free from his shackles of programming and regains control of his halcyon Human-Self and re-begins his mission to capture the elusive drug-dealing bandit known as Kain.

What a powerful film that RoboCop 2 (or maybe 3) was. Powerful film. I heard the RoboCop statue that will grace Detroit is coming along nicely. Building a monument to RoboCop .... outstanding. That's the smartest thing someone in Detroit has done since the Tigers drafted Jack Morris in 1976.

Ow! Ora Mantane! SUUUUU-PER! OW!

The Cyborgs portion is going on long but there's one more Cyborg I like pretty well and that's Franky from One Piece. He's a shipwright/leader-of-a-street-gang/rock-n-roll-singer/pirate who rules. His Japanese voice actor is soooo good (I can't in good faith say the English voice actor captures the uniqueness of the JPN voice actor in the english dub) ... the JPN voice actor inserts a lot of James Brown "Ows!" into the shtick that just fits so well. Most of what the Japanese voice actor says as Franky is English but like busted-up James-Browned-Up Engrish. Like, I would describe Mr. Kazuki Yao's voice as Franky along the lines of if the Godfather of Soul Mr. James Brown flew to Japan and drank all of the sake wine and then learned some Japanese to impress some Japanese chicks but only a bit of the language .... and it winds up sounding like this:

OOOOW! RITE REFF RITE REFF RITE REFF! PSYCHO!!!

I don't think I'll ever write on the subject of Japan and James Brown in the same breadth ever again so let's jam this in here while we'll charting down this obtuse course:

 YA! OW! SCREAM ABOUT THOSE NOOODLES JAMES!!! Good GOD! OW!

Anyways, in the English version of One Piece, The ENG voice actor plays the role as some drunkard ruffian. It's not even comparable to the original ... not even close. Comparing Franky's JPN voice to Franky's ENG voice is like comparing Sushi to ANUS.

We're charting way off course here in the section but, look, guys look, Franky is not some common thug drunkard bozo ... ok? Franky's voice is what you'd get if the Hardest Working Man in Show Business took a bath in a boiling roiling HOT TUB of MISO Noodle SOUP and soaked in there for a good solid week. How in the name of everything did the ENG voice actor come up with something not-even-remotely in the same ballpark as that awesomery? Who knows.

Let's get back to Cyborgory for a bit .... Franky's a Cyborg that's why he's in this section. He got hit by a train but then painstakingly rebuilt himself from shit lying around the crash scene... which is so badass. Looks-wise he's very reminiscent of Teddy from Mother (for the NES) who is another character I've always found very fascinating as well. 

If your character is like if Teddy from Mother 1 got hit by a train and self-rebuilt himself like MacGyver into Inspector Gadget and is voiced by a guy talking like a heavily sake-soaked James Brown ... you are speaking my language Japan ... you are speakin' my language, baby. Ow!

Man, both RoboCop and Franky fill my heart with a powerful zest for life. Yet, if I had a choice to become a Cyborg and you asked me to choose between being RoboCop or Franky ... I'd choose Franky. Why? Because he still has his dick.

Yes, it is demonstrably proven in One Piece that Franky's genitals are still his human-born dick-and-balls. There's a scene where his street gang steals his speedo and are playing monkey-in-the-middle to keep it from him when the sexy lady Nico Robin takes the opportunity to grab and clutch onto Franky's nards ... of to which Franky cries in terror and his two Square-Afro Groupies/Girlfriends cry along with him. He's got his full on dick .... it's not like a Robot Dick.

If I was to become a Cyborg .... there's only two human pieces I need in tact. My Brain, and my Weiner (oh and my balls of course). Franky is the ideal cyborg as his whole body is SUPER souped-up but he retains the humanity of his brain and his balls and his dick.

Where Am I Going With This?

I don't really know, but you know, sometimes though, like .... I think technology is moving too fast. I know this blog always promotes science, technology, etc .... but there's another side to every coin.

One hundred years ago do you think people were trying to figure out all the different kinds of real and theoretical robots of planet earth? Do you think people were signing petitions to ban killer robots 100 years ago?

(See: Elon Musk and 116 Experts Call for Ban on Killer Robots via The Guardian) 

Tech experts want to pre-emptively enforce a ban on killer robots hedged on fears that Robo Cops and Metal Gears of the future will go haywire and put the raw death on all our stinky asses? Well Son of Santo Domingo 'aint that some shit?

It's not just robots though ... all of technology is growing at a pace that I don't think humans really have the time to learn, grasp, and come to an understanding of. Is technology evolving at a pace that is outpacing us?

I wrote early on in this blog about the show The Prisoner starring the great Patrick McGoohan. That article explored the theme of Individual vs. Society which was the main focus of the Prisoner but another theme of the show was that technology was out-pacing humans. The end credits showed a wheel become a bicycle and then a bicycle becoming a flying bicycle .... in the old days people thought that was fast pace tech .... The Wheel to Flying Bike. Man, imagine if McGoohan was still alive .... he'd be freakin' out loose! And maybe we all should be?

No one had a name in the Prisoner .... they were all numbers. Number 6 tried and tried and tried to win his humanity back whilst on the Prison Island and in the end many still question if he did. Maybe he should have grasped onto an open electric transformer to win his humanity back .... it worked for RoboCop at least.

Conclusion

I don't know, I see the best of both sides of the coin I think. I still want to be an individual human with a cool zillion-years-of-wicked-evolutionary Brain ... and my weiner too.

But ...

I wouldn't mind having some Cyborg components. Like, shitting for example. That's so stupid and disgusting. Can't like we invent something where the shit tubes in the body output the shit to like a bio-plastic replaceable orb and you can open a component in like your buttock, remove the shit-filled orb, throw it in the toilet bio-degradable orb-and-all ... wouldn't that be so much better than actually shitting? Like I drink coffee often man .... I HATE SHITTING SO MUCH IT'S SO GROSS. Like, the first Cyborg component I'd be looking at if I was a MacGyver type person would be an alternate bowel expulsion method ... I mean .... the current method is honest-to-betsy and heavens-to-murgatroyd DISGUSTING AS HELL.

Spinal cords too ... we need more better cords, baby.

Okay let's Summarize: I want to be an individual person not a cold robotic number - but I want to move my bowels with a bio-orb implant component system and I want a more better souped-up spine cord.

That's what I'm all about.