MVN - Most Valuable Network

the long dark pitching change of the soul

They’ve just started running (or perhaps they’ve been running, but I only just noticed ‘em because I’ve been watching endless amounts of football this weekend) ads for Tigers seasons tickets, and I don’t know about you cats, but they’re painful for me to watch. Painful in the sense that it’s a stark reminder of what I am NOT seeing right now. Mainly, baseball.

It’s one thing to see photos and to think about the season, which I do all the time. It’s another thing entirely to see video clips from the season, ENTICING you into believing that baseball is here, you can almost taste it. It’s cruel and it’s evilly smart marketing, because there’s nothing I want more right now than to buy season tickets, this despite the fact that I am not actually in Michigan for most of the summer and, even if I was, things like internships/jobs would make season tickets highly impracticable (not to mention the price). But I WANTS.

It’s about that time of winter where you’re feeling desperate. Football’s still going on, but you know it’s going to be over soon, and then what? THEN WHAT?? Then you have what Douglas Adams would call “the long dark teatime of the soul,” the time when you have to watch basketball and hockey and the Winter X-Games and tennis (seriously, tennis is great; they play it in bizarre time zones, so it’s often on live in the wee hours and is thus perfect for insomniatic college students) even though all you REALLY want to see is baseball.

I call it “the long dark pitching change of the soul,” because Adams was British and I am a coffee-guzzlin’ Amurkin, and when it comes to quiet interstitial time I can much more relate to a pitching change than to some genial hour for the consumption of boiled leaves.

[Did Tom Brady just throw an interception? Did that just happen? WHAT WHAT WHAT ARGH. I hate the Chargers and I hate San Diego and I hate the completely retarded new umpire outfits and grrrrraarrrrggghhh NOT ALLOWED TO BE INTERCEPTING TOM BRADY.]

Brief relevant story. Last spring, the very first game I went to was a Michigan baseball game. This one, actually, if you want to see the photos from it. Ray Fisher is a pretty small baseball park, so as I approached it through the parking lot, I could hear what was going on inside. I was there early, so the Wolverines were still taking BP. And, this being college ball, that meant that as I walked up I could hear a low murmur of chatter and the sharp, clear pinging of aluminum bats.

Ping. Ping. It’s not a noise that seems natural, when you’re used to a wooden crack, but it’s still quite unmistakeably a baseball noise.

Outside the park, I had to stop and sit down for a minute because I thought I was going to start crying.

It was quite literally one of the most beautiful things I’d ever heard, that joyful sound of bat on ball after a long, LONG winter.

Even ALUMINUM bats. That’s how much I miss baseball. It’s a sort of constant ache, the kind of thing you live with so consistently that you almost forget it’s there, and until I heard that pinging…. well, it was like a warm wind to melt the winter away, to put it floridly, and it hit me all at once. Baseball. BASEBALL.

So these stupid bloody season’s ticket ads, that’s what they’re doing. They’re making it impossible for me to ignore the ache. I’m all “yay footballz woo,” then I see one of these things and I NEED BASEBALL. Then football comes back on and THE PATRIOTS ARE STILL LOSING WHAT THE SNARGLE and it’s not enough to make up for the decided lack of baseball.

SIGH.

This is all fairly pathetic, I realize, but I think some of you lot probably know what I’m talking about.

2006 in amusingly amateur photo review

The 2006 season was of course unforgettable for many reasons, and here at Roar of the Tigers it was even more remarkable because I got out to a grand total of 7 games. I know that doesn’t sound like very many, but bear in mind that I spend most of the baseball season living back east in Massachusetts. And through several strokes of ridiculous good fortune, some of those games ended up being “special”… the home opener, all three games at Fenway, and Game 2 of the World Series. I am a lucky blogger, yo.

If you’ve ever been to a game with me (and some of you Tigers bloggers have had that unfortunate experience), you know that I am usually somewhat uncommunicative because I either have my face buried in a scorecard, or the back end of my camera. Even if I’m sitting up in the hinterlands and haven’t a chance of getting anything approaching a decent shot.

So I think I’ll do a review of the games I went to in 2006 with some of my favorite shots from the season. Really this will only serve to make me miss baseball even more right now and to cause me to quietly curse the great temporal distance between now and the start of Spring Training, but I DO IT FOR YOU, CHERISHED READERS, ALWAYS FOR YOU.

(Disclaimer: All photos by me. I do not have a DSLR camera so, y’know, it’s not made for shootin’ sporting events or low light or anything that, uh, characterizes most baseball games. All shots taken from wherever I happened to have seats in the ballpark, which varied from “Wow amazing but behind this bloody net” to “So far up I can see Canada from here”. Expect photo quality to vary accordingly. I’m shooting with a Sony DSC-H1, if anyone cares, which I suspect none of you do. However! Onwards!)

2006 in amusingly amateur photo review

I think you have to come back here to comment (I couldn’t put this many photos in a regular MVN post, see), but I assume most of you can manage the ‘back’ button on your browsers. I have nothing but the highest of expectations for Roar of the Tigers readers!

the glory of Tigers past

Roar of the Tigers went a-field-trippin’ yesterday, as you can probably tell from these shots, to the National Baseball Hall of Fame. Dork that I am, I have a ton of photos of Red Sox things, Tigers things, and Sandy Koufax things. But I especially wanted to talk about these two particular items.

The shiny blue deal up top is the 1984 World Series ring. It’s a pretty simple design: just a little diamond representation of the infield set in blue….something, enamel I guess. Compared to some of the later rings it’s downright sedate (especially the ‘03 Marlins ring, which is about the size of my entire fist). Mostly it’s notable because it’s the last one we’ve got, of course. When we win our next one, I hope the designers go this route instead of in the garish use-as-many-rocks-as-is-humanly-or-inhumanly-possible direction. Take note for next season, greater Detroit-area jewelers.

What I really want to mention is this cover for a program from the 1945 World Series, because it is the height of awesome. I am now going to geek out as only an artist (pause for laughter to subside… amend previous statement to “art student”) can, so feel free to zone and just gaze upon the pretty. If you want to see it larger, clickee.

First off, ILLUSTRATION. YES. YESSSSSSSSSSS. Baseball programs these days, 99% of the time, have either a photo or a stark logo that’s been vectored all to bloody heck and back on the cover. There is nothing wrong with photography and there is nothing wrong with a sharp logo, but this puppy is ILLUSTRATED and this makes me HAPPY. I love the style. That scratchy pen work is calmed down, visually, by the fact that there are only three colors on the whole thing, and really? If you’re going for punchy contrast, you would be hard-pressed to do better than black, white, and safety-cone orange.

Second. The fonts. There are three different fonts on this cover, and while I think it ends up being a little unnecessary (surely the stadium name could’ve been written in the same font as “World Series”, yes?), I do like them all. They are not ‘timeless’ fonts, but they set this little publication in a very definite era, and if you’re designing a World Series program, where the year very much matters, I think that’s a good thing. There is a lot of variation; they vary in letter spacing, height, line weight, overall letter shape, and so on. But since they’re all sans-serif fonts, it’s still not as messy as it could have been.

The heavy block letters used inside the baseball are necessary to visually hold the letters together along the curve they’ve been set on. More slender typefaces often look kind of cruddy on curved lines, because at some point the individual letters either have to give up their hopes of cohesiveness, or they have to deform themselves like mad to get wide enough to still hang together. NOBODY BUT ME CARES ABOUT THIS so I’m gonna stop now and save you all the trouble of reading it, if you’re still reading. Hi Dad!

Third, the damn thing was only 25¢. I yearn for such times. Nowadays the only way to get a 25¢ program would be to buy a pen that costs a quarter and draw one up yourself.

Fourth, the artist who drew this paid such good attention to what (s)he was doing that (s)he drew an ACTUAL ADULT TIGER facing off against what is clearly an ACTUAL BABY BEAR. Seriously! Look at how small that bear is! He’s TINY! Looks a little underfed too. Whereas that tiger is enormous, bristling, stalking, roaring. Was there any doubt about who was gonna win this World Series? I think not.

(By that same token, you might expect a tiger to tear a cardinal to pieces, and thus would be confused about this past season. Let your mind rest easy, for it is simply explained. TONY THE RUSSA HAD THE BIRD FLU. He totally infected all the ferocious tigers and so it is that the small, feathery menaces won. Biochemical warfare. FOR SHAME, St. Louis, FOR SHAME.)

Fifth: Briggs Stadium! Hee. How’s THAT for a timewarp?

There were some other very stylish program covers as well, but I especially wanted to call attention to this one, because I thought it was especially elegant and, well…. awesome.

In completely unrelated news, tropical cyclone Bondo cracks me right the heck up.

Back to Bondo

Trade rumors can BITE MY TIGER-STRIPED TAIL END.

Jeremy Bonderman is ours, all ourrrrrrrssssssssssss, our preeeeccccciiioooouuuussssss. So saith the Associated Press: $38 million over 4 years. He would’ve been up for grabs after the 2008 season if this deal hadn’t been made, but now we have him locked and loaded ’til 2010, ensuring a Bonderman/Inge Axis of Awesome until at least that date.

Bonderman will be 28 in 2010. This boggles my mind, in a good way.

In the 4 seasons he’s been in the majors, his ERA has dropped every year, from 5.56 in his rookie year (when he was, mind you, still unable to legally purchase alcohol, and when the entire team sucked worse than lampreys) to 4.08 this past season. He’s only just turned 24 and, since I think we can count ‘03 as a year a normal team would’ve left him in the minors, is still coming into his own.

His mechanics, from what I have seen, are fairly clean… not to get nutty here or anything, but I’ve most often heard/seen his pitching motion compared to that of Roger Clemens, and while the Rocket is clearly a freak of nature, when it comes to the repeatability of his motion, that bodes well. He’s had some injuries but nothing like an oblique strain or anything that’ll make your soul explode in tears when it comes to pitchers. Was his only major injury so far that incident where he got bopped on the hand/wrist/arm by a comebacker and never quite shook it off? That’s not bad at all.

I like this signing very much, as probably everyone and their grandkitten could have predicted. It’s a great price, especially when you take into account Bondo’s age, talent level, potential talent level, and the retardedly inflated baseball meat market this offseason. It’s a good length; we get Bondo in our clawed clutches for a solid amount of time, and if he’s an amazing All Star pitcher by the time he’s 28, he’ll deserve a big payoff from either us or someone else, which this allows him to get. And if he stinks, well, four years isn’t going to make or break the team. Everyone wins.

Here’s to another four seasons of Jeremy Bonderman being better than you!