Gotta Bribe Them

Suddenly the hottest team in baseball is the Washington Nationals! They have an 8-game winning streak and coupled with the Marlins 9 game losing streak, they have found themselves tied for third place with the Mets.
How, exactly, they have done this is a mystery. They are hitting .236 as a team and exactly as much as Jayson Werth, the Nats 18-million dollar star, is hitting.

It won’t last but its nice to see.

At this time of year if a baseball team is 10 games out of first place, it’s pretty much over for them. Not to say that it is impossible to climb out of that hole; it’s been done before. But with the trading deadline approaching soon, these teams are approached to make deals with teams near the top which are looking to solidify their rosters for the stretch run. This would include the Orioles, Cubs and Astros right now with the Nats, Mets and Padres in that range also each 9.5 games back.

If the season were to end today there would be a 3-way tie for the NL Wild Card with the Braves, Cardinals and Diamondbacks. It would be interesting to see the season end like that, although I believe there is a tie-breaker before a playoff game to eliminate one of the teams.
I had been initially opposed to breaking up the NL and AL into three divisions each and the creation of the wild card team for the playoffs. But it does keep interest high towards the end of the regular season and we have certainly seen a great deal of critical last-day-of-the-season games. I have heard talk of further expansion and re-alignment but no details of such. The AL has 14 teams and the NL 16. It would make sense, I suppose to add two to the AL and breakdown the leagues into 4 divisions each. The winners of each division would simply be the playoff entrants.

The countdown to Derek Jeter’s 3000^th hit is on hold as he is currently sitting on the DL. Jeter is now just 6 hits shy of the milestone.

Overall this season has been a little boring for me. There isn’t anyone on pace to do anything spectacular. With pitchers this will never happen again until they are allowed to pitch more than 5 innings at a time.
With hitters, no one, other than Jeter, is really doing anything earth shattering. The next huge milestone to watch is with Alex Rodriguez as he approaches Ken Griffey and Willie Mays on the all-time HR list. With 626 he needs 4 more to tie Griffey with Mays’ mark of 660 next to reach.
Rodriguez is still just 35. Barry Bonds retired with 762 homeruns. A-Rod would have to play 6 more years and average 25 a year to reach that mark, which seems reasonable.
Jim Thome needs 7 more dingers to reach 600 now. While I would never have thought that Thome was a hall-of-fame caliber player I would imagine that the 600 HR mark would put him in there. He, as far as I know, was never accused of being a roid boy so, given that; I’d have to give him a vote, if I had one. He is also now 2^nd overall in career strikeouts to Reggie Jackson trailing him by about 180. But since he does have more HR’s than Jackson and Jackson is in the HOF, I think the case can definitely be made for Thome now.

I had one of those early morning graduations party shows the Friday into Saturday in Glassboro, NJ. It was a 4am start and it was a return performance from last year.
The school for which I did this show in NJ really goes all out for their graduation party.
First the party is a couple of weeks after graduation and they had over 400 kids attend. This one is held at a neighboring college’s recreation center. It was started over 15 years ago when two local teachers responded to the deaths of a couple of teenagers in their region involved in accidents on graduation party nights.
So how does a school get over 400 kids to show up at an all-night alcohol-free party two weeks after graduation? Well, every kid who attends gets a $25 WaWa gift card, so they literally bribe the kids. But, at the college, there is food and drinks all night, a DJ, billiards, ping-pong, inflatable attractions; use of the swimming pool, and then my show closes out the event at the college. All of the kids are then bussed back to the high school for a continental breakfast where prizes are then drawn. Prizes include some computers and TV’s; a $1500 cash award and the grand prize was a new car…well, a used car, but a car nonetheless.

Overall this event costs over 50 thousand dollars. The money is raised over the course of the year and while I am not sure if the district contributes anything or not, I believe that simply most of it is raised by the parents and teachers who run the show every year.
They started planning next year’s event while this year’s event still hadn’t taken place yet.
People who no longer have children in the school help put on this party every year and that includes the former chairman of the party for the past 7 years who, while no longer the chairman, still is involved with it.
I’ve been to over 100 of these things now and this one is clearly the best one that I have seen. Keeping in mind that one would think that most of these kids would be at the beach or someplace similar, its truly a testimony to what they have built that so many of these kids attend this party every year.

Hmmm…..no talk of politics or bleach blonde hair. That’s good so now I’m

Done.