Bribe the Audience

Two tough battles are raging the MLB Championship series.
The Tigers held off elimination last night with the aide of their third base last night. Not their third baseman, but their home field third base bag as a routine double play ball bounced off of the bag fair and into the leftfield corner to help save the game.
The bag itself was removed after the game and is now in the possession of Tiger manager Jim Leyland who said he would place the bag in his personal memorabilia collection. Should the Tigers win it will be worth a little more than if they lose the series, of course.

The Rangers Nelson Cruz has smacked five homeruns in this series already, which tied a record for one post-season series. He has hit 2 extra-inning homeruns which is a record and became the first player in post-season history to end a game with a grand-slam homerun.

I refuse to say “walk-off” homerun, because it’s a stupid saying and I am tired of hearing announcers shout out “WALK-OFF!” when their guy strokes a game-winning hit.

Some of these announcers are really bad but I won’t name names because I am feeling kind today…sort of. I hate the way they count pitches, call game-winning hits, and overly praise players with stupid adjectives like “gutsy” when they are playing a game that last 3 hours, for the most part.

The Cardinals and the Brewers are now tied at two games each. This should not come as a real surprise since they split the 18 regular-season games that they played. The perfect way for this to play out is for the series to go seven games.

I would imagine that MLB and the network that airs the World Series would like to see a Cardinals-Tigers WS matchup. They played against each other in 2006, which the Cardinals won, and famously in 1967. St. Louis is the best baseball town in America and Detroit is such a hell hole that the city could really use a boost of morale for its citizens.

But the Brewers Ryan Braun and Prince Fielder are prime-time players. Braun seems to thrive in the limelight and I am sure that he will pick up a lot of new fans and enemies in the Fall Classic, should they bounce past St. Louis.

The Rangers pound the ball though and in a season which didn’t showcase a great deal of power numbers, they have three guys who hit 30 homeruns each and two others with 24 and 29. Since they are the defending champions of the AL, they do have some players which casual baseball fans would know like Josh Hamilton, Michael Young and Adrian Beltre, for example. The return appearance would also solidify their standing as an AL powerhouse which bodes well for the AL since the Red Sox and Yankees could use some competition in that regard.

For whatever reason there are more people reading this blog than I actually imagined. It has left me with a bit of a dilemma. I teeter back and forth with what I want to do with this stupid thing here. In one respect it’s a journal for me but I do also have the desire to write about more intense things that are on my mind. These things include politics but they also include a venting process where I would like to speak more freely about things that aggravate me and I would like to swear a lot while doing so.

I am writing this around 5pm. I have been thinking about this since 8am. I think that what I am going to do is start another blog with a fake name and rant there rather than risk alienating people that I don’t wish to alienate.

So I will stick to basic cultural things here like baseball, TV shows, and anything that I might find interesting to pass along while on the road performing. I’ll toss in some personal things that, for some reason, generate more feedback than anything else (like when the girl friend left the house and when my dog passed 2 weeks ago) but leave the bitching about some otherwise polarizing subjects to my ghost name, which I naturally will not reveal here.

A show at West Chester University went rather well last night. It was my first time in there and there was a crowd of over 100. There is no telling how many people will ever show up at these things and it is sometimes a risky proposition taking a show like this without a decent estimate of crowd size. This is particularly risky doing a show for a place like for the first time. Let’s face it; I’m no household name so I don’t get any draw because of that. I have to hope that the hosts give out cookies and ice cream and make a free show out of it to get a room full of college kids on a Thursday night.

But more often than not my concerns are unwarranted. Ugh…I’m not even going to jinx myself by expanding on that any further. It went well and I’ll probably get asked to come back there again in the future; that is what is most important.

I am concerned about the future months coming though. Last year I had my December shows booked by August. It’s now October 14^th and I have one show booked for December. It’s getting hard to make ends meet and I just got some local real estate information that was disturbing for me also with the depreciation in home prices here. My house was my out in case of emergency. It still is, of course, but now it’s less of an out for me.

That is one thing makes me need to go write another blog…RIGHT NOW BEFORE I EXPLODE!

Done.