July 27, 2012
Link-O-Rama
• I'm pretty convinced that it will rank somewhere between incredibly embarrassing and utterly humiliating, but at Paul Allen's urging and in the name of good radio "Girls Gone Gleeman" is a dating game-style show that's going to happen on KFAN live from the state fair next month. I'll pass along full details later, but in the meantime you can listen to us brainstorming on the air yesterday (mixed in with a bunch of Twins talk during an hour-long segment).
• Based on this St. Paul Pioneer Press headline for Ben Goessling's article, the Twins now have the same problem that's plagued bloggers.
• Join the club, Demi.
• Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David more or less shooting the shit for a day is basically perfect.
• Delmon Young has a gorgeous new mustache, which more than makes up for his .700 OPS.
• Zubaz, white limousines, pitching machines, and Minnesota fashion icons of the 1980s.
• I've given up trying to explain Jason Marquis since the Twins released him.
• Behold, the most Carlos Gomez thing in the history of Carlos Gomez things.
And of course the at-bat ends the only way the at-bat could possibly end.
• I give Michael Phelps credit for not being afraid to further his stoner reputation.
• Kevin Love apparently stays awake on flights to document his Olympic teammates sleeping.
• I'm thinking about trying to put $100,000 together just to hang out with Hakeem Olajuwon.
• Gordon Ramsay making $38 million per year may seem like a lot, but that breaks down to less than 50 dollars per television show.
• On a related note, as a loyal Twitter follower seeing Chelsea Peretti make a brief cameo as an unhappy diner on Hell's Kitchen cracked me up.
• Cal Ripken Jr.'s mother was abducted at gunpoint and Orioles manager Buck Showalter shared a similarly scary story about his mother.
• Warning: Don't use the bathroom around Michael Morse.
• Pirates prospect Starling Marte debuted last night and homered on the first pitch he saw.
• I like to watch Ted Berg make sandwiches.
• As a kid I often wrote stuff on my mom's old typewriter for absolutely no reason other than it seemed fun, but as an adult I'm not quite pretentious enough to install this on my laptop.
• Here's a Google Chat transcript of what happened when my mom asked me why Twitter wasn't working yesterday afternoon:
I waited another half-hour to fess up, and only because Twitter finally started working again.
• Interesting news in the online sportswriting world, as former Fanhouse founding editor and Yahoo! director of blogs Jamie Mottram has a new job with USA Today Sports Media Group.
• An original baseball blogger, Jon Weisman, celebrated 10 years of Dodger Thoughts.
• Now that Alex Rodriguez is old and injured, what are his chances of breaking Barry Bonds' all-time homer record? I'm glad you asked.
• It turns out the mask makes everyone as scary as Bane.
• Movie recommendation: The Prestige, which is the film Christopher Nolan directed in between Batman Begins and The Dark Knight. It somehow flew under my radar until now, but has a few of the usual Nolan favorites in an interesting story and is well worth a $1.99 rental on Amazon.
• Speaking of the usual Nolan favorites, this made me laugh.
• Thanks to Barnabas Piper for naming Gleeman and The Geek as one of his favorite podcasts.
• According to this completely scientific poll, AG.com is the second-best "sports blog" and I'm the ninth-best "sports talk radio personality."
• Every day hundreds of people arrive at AG.com via search engine queries and most of them are Googling stuff like "Gleeman" or "Twins blog." I'm also amused by the weird and seemingly random searches that lead people here, so here are some of my favorites from this week:
- "Chuck Knoblauch fat"
- "Dick Bremer hates Kevin Slowey"
- "B.J. Hermsen salary"
- "Rene Tosoni salary"
- "Dana Wessel hair"
- "Kate Bilo age"
- "Evan Longoria dating Kate Upton"
- "Why does Matt Capps suck so badly"
- "Is eating a pound of carrots really zero points"
- "How many children does Brett Myers have"
- "Sasha Gray blog"
- "Patrick Reusse diet"
- "Jay-Z is not left-handed"
- "Kathy Kepler ballet"
- "Is a .199 batting average good"
- "Jenna Fischer covered post-it notes"
And then there were like 500 variations of "how to lose 150 pounds."
• Finally, in honor of Paul Allen describing me to potential dating game applicants as having "a George Michael beard" this week's AG.com-approved music video is "Faith":
This week's blog content is sponsored by Ballplayer: Pelotero, a controversial new documentary about baseball prospects in the Dominican Republic starring Miguel Sano as a 16-year-old.
Interesting piece on ARod. Of course, Bonds should have hit at least 800 HR for his career, if he weren’t blackballed by the league in a tremendously hypocritical act of likely collusion at the end of his career. Jason Giambi was celebrated as a steroid-user (even put up for an All Star fan vote in NYC) while Bonds wasn’t given a job when he offered to play for the league minimum.
You can make an argument that Bonds’ steroid use actually was a great service to baseball…a serious testing regime wouldn’t ever have been instated without Bonds. It would have been a much longer, murkier drug purgatory than we have now.
Comment by AM. — July 27, 2012 @ 7:12 am
lol I’m sure I’m responsible for most of the “gleeman” google hits, but without it I wouldn’t have learned such valuable tidbits as.. A gleeman is an entertainer, often traveling between towns, villages, inns and taverns
Comment by Pat M — July 27, 2012 @ 8:01 am
About Marquis, let’s face it, not only is Gardy a waste of space in the clubhouse, so is Rick Anderson. The Twins pitching staff has been a joke for years now, and its unbelievable that they haven’t found a new pitching coach.
Comment by William — July 27, 2012 @ 9:13 am
Aaron, I’m curious – how did you run across Barnabas Piper’s blog?
Comment by FMelius — July 27, 2012 @ 10:50 am
If you were a general manager, would you sign a 43 year old malcontent and known cheater who had just been indicted on multiple felony counts? I wouldn’t want Bonds on my team no matter what his numbers were. I can’t prove there wasn’t collusion, but I have no trouble believing that every single team passed on Bonds individually.
Giambi wasn’t celebrated for his steroid use, which like A-rod’s, had a huge negative effect on his popularity. While both of those guys came back from it, unlike Bonds, neither one is a convicted felon.
Comment by Pedro Munoz — July 27, 2012 @ 11:10 am
You mean the 43-year-old who hit 276/480/565 as a 42-year-old? Yes, I would have given him a contact. At the time it was reported that teams feared the blowback from fans, but it was pretty clear that they feared the blowback from the Commissioner’s office more. Bonds would have been a distraction and he would have brought negative press, but he could have helped a team or two. His retirement may not have been collusion in a technical sense, but it was driven by the Commissioner’s office and a weak sports media that refuses to push back on popular narratives, choosing instead to serve as an echo chamber.
Anyway, I finally went to a Twins game last night and was treated to a three-hit shutout by Diamond and an 11-run performance from the offense. Was not expecting that, very cool.
Comment by Ted — July 28, 2012 @ 8:33 am
Assuming weak sports media and all that, what should the narrative have been for Bonds? Should there have been a different reaction to the felony indictments? Were people wrong to think Bonds was a PED user?
Comment by Pedro Munoz — July 28, 2012 @ 6:20 pm