I'll Have the 'Le Texan': Notes from the Road and a Weekend Series
For fuck sakes, if you're not passing anybody, or if it's going to take you four or five minutes to get your shitbox past the guy you're thinking of passing, get out of the fucking passing lane. Those vehicles lining up behind you have not decided that you are our fucking fearless leader who has hit upon the ideal traveling speed for all of us. WE CAN'T GET AROUND YOU, YOU FUCKING MORON!
OK? Thanks.
Friday
Since somewhere along the line this apparently became my LiveJournal, I guess everybody knows I was up in Montreal for the weekend. Good times.
- Once you get out past Kingston, it's damn near impossible to get a proper radio signal for the Jays game. At least, it was for us. This is, of course, a travesty. Especially since I was getting broadcasts clear as a bell of the Phillies and Mets, the Buffalo Bisons and someone, a forlorn Montreal-area station clinging to the Washington Nationals, and about three stations carrying the Yankees. Fuck off!
- If I was in Kingston or Peterborough or any of these places where the local station has dropped the Jays, or if I had a cottage up that way and could no longer tune in Jays games on a Saturday afternoon while I scraped shit off the bottom of my boat, or whatever the fuck it is cottagers do, I would be writing twelve letters a day to the local station and newspaper, because this is just bullshit.
- I did literally manage to tune in the game for about four batters, starting when it was 4-3 Jays with Accardo on the hill before the signal abruptly faded at 5-4 Tigers with Accardo exiting for Downs after an inexplicable Johnny Mac error. Fuck me! I wasn't able to get the signal back after that, but I knew exactly how it would go down from there anyway.
- Montreal was a sea of shaved heads, Tap Out and Affliction shirts, dudes too ripped to be able to put their arms down at their sides, and cargo shorts. Ugh. Isn't it supposed to be all pretty French girls who are just the right amount of slutty? Was I wrong in remembering it that way?
- Crescent Street was the epicentre (of course) and I grabbed the first chance to get the hell out of that part of town after a quick $7 pint of Blue. It worked out pretty well: we got shitfaced long into the night and my friend was able to sexually harass all the girls he wanted without being threated by some meat head.
Saturday
- Saturday morning didn't happen too easy, but a Boreal Rousse among scattered, hung over piles of shit really helped. This part's a little fuzzy, but I know we went for breakfast and the Danimal ordered "the 'le Texan' " from one of Montreal's 17,000 stunningly gorgeous waitresses.
- Attempts at wiffle ball came up empty, so I headed to some other hotel, grabbed some Molson Dry from a dep. and ended up in the shower, not realizing that the Jays were on while the Beej was shakily closing out game two.
- Wandered around outside the Bell Centre a bit before most of my group went inside for the fights. Parkes is sort of right... nobody was acting quite as dumb as they looked.
- Watched the Habs lose a crazy one at a local hole away from sausage-town and kept downing pitcher after pitcher. Then we wandered to another bar and sat on the cold patio for the fights.
- Hugged a bunch of random French dudes after GSP kicked the shit out of Serra, which I guess in a weird way was almost kind of what I came up there looking for. A moment of national pride and French-English solidarity on the back of a solid ass kicking. There's no shame in it. Well, there probably is, but who gives a fuck?
- I'm friends with the singer of a French punk band from the 80s, Le Vent du Mont Scharr, who don't seem to be known at all among Anglos, and who were playing a show that night, and who fucking killed. I'm sorry but this was 50 times better than hitting a strip club filled with 400 other dudes and eight strippers way off in the distance. (That's really how the ballet scene this weekend was described to me, FYI.)
The Weekend's Beverages of Choice: Boreal Blonde, Boreal Rousse, Molson Dry, Molson Ex, Wild Turkey
Sunday
- You can't run a GFI off another GFI!
- If you're not comfortable with the thought of how the highway overpass above you might come crashing down on your head at any second, I don't recommend taking the A-20 out of Montreal with an engineer who knows his shit about concrete. "You see those under there? They put those up because they're expecting the thing to come down at some point. I wouldn't park under there." That's some fucked up shit.
- Missed a bunch of the game because we were busy listening to the Raptors embarrass themselves and the concept of team defence in Orlando. What the hell has happened to them?
- Was lucky that I wasn't drinking anything when we tuned back into the Jays and I heard Ashby say that Eckstein had hit a three-run home run, because I'm positive that with the double-take I did, I would have spit it all over the car.
- At one point I thought I heard either Jerry or Alan say that someone was in the lineup because Frank Thomas had been released. Nah... he said "was being rested" or something. Couldn't have been released...
Monday
- Now that was ugly. What the hell is it with the Jays and these unknown shitballers? There is some sort of fatal flaw with this offence that nobody has been able to quite put their finger on in the last two years. And fuck if it isn't too much to ask Adam Lind to be the guy to remedy it. Adam Lind and Scott Rolen, on the other hand... let's hope.
- Griffin was all over the place today: throwing in an extra mail bag, taking a nice dump on Ricciardi for the Thomas and Burnett signings, and showing up on Prime Time. For the most part, he actually wasn't horrible, but this laughable Reed Johnson bullshit absolutely needs to stop. Look at the splits on Reed this year. He's killing the RHP we said he couldn't touch, and he historically has never touched, and for some reason has been brutal-- way worse than Stewart-- against the LHP he would have primarily been used for here. So, there really is still no argument to be made that he should be here, but what's crazier is, his splits right now are completely backwards.
- So, um... what does anybody think that means? That Reed Johnson has magically transformed into a completely different hitter? Hmmm... or maybe it's that a mere three weeks of data can get pretty completely fucking skewed.
- Griffin also says he's heard that maybe $100 MM is a magic, untouchable number for the Jays payroll. Where did you hear this, Rich, in your head? The Johnson move had very little to do with money-- it was almost entirely about crushing a player's feelings and treating him like a number.
- Speaking of splits, the Jays should maybe consider never pitching Shaun Marcum during the day: 6.02 ERA, 1.50 WHIP in his career under blue skies, 3.31 ERA, 1.22 WHIP under the lights.
- Bob McCown, you seriously need to stop talking about baseball. You're still the best and everything, but seriously... Stop. I'm serious. You don't have a fucking clue what you're talking about. Seriously. Stop. Thanks. Stop. No. Please stop. Thanks. Stop. Seriously. Stop.
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12 rational and reasonable comments:
So does anyone in the kingston area know which stations I should start harassing to get jays games?
Just put a monster antenna up . . . one of those nice television ones. I'm sure they can be had on the cheap. With one of those monsters you should be able to get a station from the centre of the canadian universe.
What? No? You aren't going to put one of those on your car? Oh, okay.
Wow the new logo is amazing.
I'd definitely buy a shirt with that logo on it. But make the shirt nice, not a gross colour or the logo too big or small.
im thinking if the logo would be best on the left breast pocket side....or bigger in the middle?
I agree, that new logo is fuckin' sweet. Way better than the bird lapping up a spilled bottle of pee (although that was pretty good too).
2 things,
Molson Ex is the shit.
Bob McCown is the worst. He's totally out of touch with reality.
We get that McCown stirs up shit because it is supposedly entertaining and what not, but dude is rapidly going down the Jim Rome path of burrying a team when they are down, then hopping on the bandwagon when they turn it around.
It is actually kinda boring to hear at this point.
And Deacon really sucks as a cohost now.
Hey, let's not talk ill of the turkey-jay, ok? That's got cache up the yin-yang.
Firejoemorgan weighed in on some hack's article on Thomas today.
Agree with him or not, McCown nurses radio gold out of those mics constantly. I don't need to listen to someone I always agree with, as long as there is topical, interesting discussion that doesn't just rehash platitudes and cliches that any old idiot could say. They always get below the surface of the topic, especially when Brunt is with him. To me, that's by far the most important thing. Listen to some of the other shows on the Fan. They can all have good discussions at times, and are generally pretty good to my mind, but they don't even come close to the depth of what McCown's doing-- apart from some of the topic-specific shows, like JaysTalk, the Soccer Show, Hockey Central, etc. But in most of those cases they're not as off the cuff (JaysTalk obviously is, and is gold), and you really need to like the topic to keep listening. As far as the more free-form shows go, McCown kills everybody at the station, in the city, probably in the country (though I can't claim to have listened to enough Canadian sports talk radio to know that for sure).
That said, I think he kind of betrays that on the Jays by not really having the other side to his own arguments very well-represented. Yeah, Blair's good and Elliott is alright, but Griffin and McCown get agreeing on the same kind of BS, and it's fine if they have that opinion, they just need another voice, I think. I'd love to hear more Wilner on there, and whatever happened to Keith Law? Vorpies. That's basically what I want. Vorpies. Not people who are going to agree that letting go of Reed Johnson was a cost saving move and a terrible mistake. Because a quick look at the stats says that's bogus. And yesterday it was being tossed around like it was obvious and incontrovertible.
JM, that article on FJM is by Gerry Fraley of the Sporting News. He's the one who, in a season preview, wrote that the Jays were hoping Eckstein would shore up their weak infield defence.
Haven't read the FJM piece yet, but obviously, the man has his head way up his ass. How do these hacks keep getting work? And you should have read the bullshit piece on this weekend's UFC card that I read on AOL Fanhouse! Jesus Christ, where do they find these people?
If you live out in Eastern Ontario and want to listen to the games, I suggest getting XM, if you don't mind paying a few bucks a month.
Bob McCown doesn't know Montreal played last night
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