Fire Brand of the American League

This is a pretty cool Red Sox blog that I came across on espn.com just now, and it's a nice place to catch up with all of the latest Red Sox news.

Desktop backgrounds: MLB

So I just got a really cool idea while trying to find a good Tampa Bay Rays desktop background (I'm looking for one in the light blue)...I came across a sweet old-school Brewers background and a nice Indians one, so I decided to find the best desktop background for each MLB team. If you use any of these, then mission accomplished.

Here is a really good website to go to for logos - since these are easily accessible for you, I'll try and find logos that aren't on this website.

American League
Baltimore Orioles

Boston Red Sox

Chicago White Sox

Cleveland Indians

Detroit Tigers

Kansas City Royals

Los Angeles Angels

Minnesota Twins

New York Yankees

Oakland Athletics

Seattle Mariners

Tampa Bay Rays

Texas Rangers

Toronto Blue Jays

National League

Arizona Diamondbacks

Atlanta Braves

Chicago Cubs

Cincinnati Reds

Colorado Rockies

 

Florida Marlins

Houston Astros

Los Angeles Dodgers

Milwaukee Brewers

New York Mets

Philadelphia Phillies

Pittsburgh Pirates

San Diego Padres

San Fransisco Giants

Saint Louis Cardinals

Washington Nationals

Our generation's Bill Buckner

I remember one night (between 2004 and 2007) when my dad and I were on our way home from something or other, and I was telling him how the Red Sox winning the World Series in 2004 didn't give me the same "Now I Can Die in Peace" feeling as it did for people who were around for 1986, 1975, and even 1967. I had never experienced the agonizing defeat of a Red Sox World Series loss...but years later, I know what the next worst thing could have been. Aaron Boone. I can't even explain it any more than that. I don't even want to. It's weird, because we won the World Series the next year, and in 2007, but I just can't watch that pitch. It's painful.

When it's just a game

I'm pretty sure this is the third time I'm going into a post sans title, and I'm also pretty sure it's the third time I've made that clear before I started my post. Anyway, this one will be about the MLB All-Star Game - not exclusively last night's game, but the concept of the event, too. Last night's game was won by the National League, holding the American League to one run for the second straight year. The NL won 5-1 behind solid pitching from their bullpen, as well as a key 3-run blast by Prince Fielder to answer the first run of the game, put up by the AL in the top of the 4th. With the victory, the National League pennant winner will have home-field advantage in the 2011 World Series.

The reason this is so is because the All-Star Game "counts" now. Until 2002, when the All-Star Game ended in a 7-7 tie, it was merely an exhibition, something for everyone to enjoy. But after the tie, Major League Baseball and the players agreed to award home-field advantage in the World Series to the representative of the league who won the All-Star Game. Frankly, I think this idea sucks. Home-field advantage should go to the team who deserves it the most - the one with the best record in the regular season. The NHL, NBA, and NFL all do it, and it works. (Actually, I quasi-scratch that. The NFL's championship is played at a neutral site, so home-field is only good through conference playoff play.) Luckily, there has been one instance where the World Series team with the worse record had home-field advantage - the Red Sox in 2004, who had 7 fewer wins than the Cardinals. So maybe it's not as bad as I thought, after some quick research. With no World Series making it to a seventh game since the rule change, the decision to make the All-Star Game count hasn't really made a significant difference in determining a World Series champion. But even if having the game count hasn't left a noticeable impact, it shouldn't count. I couldn't find a YouTube video of the intro, but at the end of the clips, there were All-Stars saying that this game was about the fans. And they're absolutely right. It's not about playoff implications, and it shouldn't be that way. Let the All-Star Game be fun in the way it's supposed to be fun.

(Editor's Note: I made it through the entire post, and I'm still without a title. Time to make something up on the spot.)

Excerpts from "This I Believe," Part 2

So this is the same deal as the first post I did while I read This I Believe. Here, I'll just continue to post quotes as I go along and talk about them.

(Allison, Jay, and Dan Gediman. This I Believe: The Personal Philosophies of Remarkable Men and Women. New York: This I Believe, 2006. Print.)

- "If I were to discover that there is no afterlife, my motive for moral living would not be destroyed. I have enough of the philosopher in me to love righteousness for its own sake."
This is a great quote I think, and a great way to live one's life. I believe something similar to this quote - what the truth is in terms of a deity, god, or afterlife, shouldn't affect how we live our conscious lives on Earth. Yeah, I understand people hold beliefs where what they do on Earth affects what their outcome is in the afterlife, but those people are putting time and energy doing things that may not even benefit them. Of course, no one's sure if those people reap the rewards of their work on Earth, because we can't tap into the afterlife. We just have to go off of what we know in life, and in living.

- "I believe freedom begins with naming things. Humanity is preserved by it."
This quote is kind of similar to one in my first This I Believe post, where it talks about acknowledging something that may have happened to you, and giving it a name. When you give something a name, you give meaning, life, and implications to it. That name exists to you in that moment and holds a certain relevance for you. When something is troubling you, don't keep it inside. Give it a name, so you can begin to tackle it and overcome it.

That's it for right now...I'm about a third of the way through the book, so there will definitely be more to come.

Metablogging

One of my favorite roots in the English language is meta-, which means something along the lines of self-referential. So metanarrative is a story about a story, for example (as in, stories that start "Once upon a time..."). So metablogging would be a blog post about blog posts! Today I went through all 80-something blog posts, just to see what I've said in months past, as well as checking for color-coordination (there's something about the new layout where yellow on white in my "10..." posts doesn't look good), typos (Vicki told me she found a sentence in a post where I used a different word than I intended to, but couldn't find it when she looked again (that's actually the reason I went through all my posts - I wanted to find it so she could sleep peacefully (turns out the mistake was in my first post from the Stonehill library, where I mistook "note" for "know"))), and making sure YouTube videos work. It was actually fun to go through old posts and see what things made me laugh at certain times, as well as go back to old dates and remember what I was thinking at the time I posted something. Now that my blog is squeaky clean, I love it even more than I did before!

8 things that ruled in both my early childhood and my early adulthood

Let's face it, there will always be a kid inside of each of us. Some of us have that inner child in them more than others, and I bet that I'm one of those people - which I'm totally fine with - I love having fun and being silly and acting like a clown because it makes me happy and it makes others happy. Can't argue with that logic. With that in mind, here are eight things that were awesome back in the day, and are still awesome today.

1. It's one of the most joyous things in the world to get a Mack truck to pull its horn. I came to this revelation during Stonehill Orientation, when I was outside welcoming cars into a parking lot off of the main road. There were at least a dozen trucks to pass by, and I was out there clad in purple jumping up and down feigning a pulling motion to communicate with them to do the same. It was honestly so great when they actually did it, and I always gave them a thumbs up and a huge smile.

2. This is more of a truth than something that's awesome, but it happens every time without fail, so I figured I'd include it. If you're sitting down, you're going to start picking the grass. It's a fact of life.

3. Speaking of things that are inevitably going to happen, if there are hors d'oeuvres out, and included are crackers and cheese, there will be cracker-and-cheese sandwiches. And they will all be delicious. Double-stacks and triple-stacks encouraged.

4. Razor scooters still continue not only to be a great means of transportation, but they're also exceedingly cool! I loved having one during my freshman year of college, and despite the fact that I'll have a car on campus for the fall semester, everyone at Stonehill will see me ridin' dirty.

5. Every time a song comes on that was used in a video game years before, I'll always point it out. A couple prime examples are The Anthem by Good Charlotte (Madden 2003) and Joker and the Thief by Wolfmother (MLB The Show 07). And it's always true that someone else knows exactly where the song came from too.

6. It's one of the greatest feelings in the world when you have a stuffy nose and you position yourself on your side so your nose is magically cleared. (Editor's Note: This just happened to me and was the inspiration for this thing that ruled - I'm not doing all 8 of these at once, since I could only think of 3 or 4 at the time I started the post.) And you try so hard not to move at all from that exact spot, since one millimeter the wrong way will ruin everything. You definitely savor every second you can like that, because soon, you're just gonna go back to having a stuffy nose again.

7. Every summer, I always look forward to listening to the Red Sox on the radio when they make a West Coast trip to Los Angeles, Oakland, or Seattle. Maybe even Texas and some of those Central/Mountain Time Zone games. It's just a great feeling to fall asleep with just a sheet and the windows open and the fan running, and the faint sound of the radio in the background.

8. Pokemon may be simultaneously the greatest childhood game ever, and the biggest destruction-by-expansion game ever. Think bad sequels (Shrek). But we're not here to talk badly about anything - we're glorifying things for what they were. Not only was Pokemon obviously awesome during my first years in double-digit age, it was awesome during my last years of teenagerhood. The end of my senior year of high school was filled with bringing my purple Game Boy to school and playing it whenever I had a free period (thank you, two studies), as well as parts of my summer. The Yellow version was my game of choice, obviously - who wouldn't love having Pikachu follow them around? I also kept Pokemon alive during my first semester at Stonehill, where I played Silver on a DS Emulator on my laptop. That is, until I couldn't beat the Elite Four anymore. Then I kinda just quit.

You could come right home

Two things that I think one could pensively chuckle about to themselves:

It's funny how you say you're holding off on doing something because you don't want to be forced into it and make it artificial, but sooner than you think, you have the necessary inspiration you need.

It's also interesting to read the lyrics to a song and think that none of them directly apply to you or have any meaning to you, except for that one stanza. There's always that one stanza that sticks out from every other word and you can't get those lines out of your head.

Hello, Twitter (kind of)

Little did I think that after spending a year living with Joe Falzone, that he would still have an impact on my life. A couple days ago I met up with him and his brother at their house in the Cape, and he told me that I should get a Twitter. After I scoffed at him for already having a social media outlet for my thoughts (see: this blog), he told me that I would have a lot of fun doing it. Unfortunately for everyone on Twitter, I'll just be posting my mindless and meaningless thoughts on my blog still - between Facebook and the blog, I'm sure the Internet world has seen enough of me as it is. Alas, every Twitter-esque post I create will be in a tab on the blog, similar to the AL East standings that (essentially) no one looks at. So when you read the Twitter posts, think of something like Yogi Berra. Mindless and awesome.

The life

I'm currently on my laptop in the backyard of our Cape house, nomming on some English muffins and orange juice, with perfect weather, clear skies, and the inevitable potential of an awesome day. I don't really have a ton of things to say about it right now, but this is the life.