Men Without Hats

There's a lot to love about baseball. The greenest grass on the planet. The joy of sitting outside on a (increasingly) hot summer night eating peanuts and cracker jack, not caring if you ever get back. Growing up, I always wanted to be a baseball player (well, after the firefighter/astronaut phase and before the lawyer phase, so really there about a five-year window where I harbored dreams of being a professional baseball player before giving up on that dream when I realized my baseball talents were not really talents).

I don't get paid to
wear this...yet.

There were a multitude of reasons why I wanted to play in the Major Leagues. Sure, there was fame, fortune, and the opportunity to have a baseball card made of me. But you also get to wear a hat to work. And not a hard hat, which is not possibly cool and, to my knowledge, has never been featured in a rap video, but a baseball hat. A genuine, authentic baseball hat like the kind you can buy at any decent sporting goods store. Only I wouldn't have to buy it, they'd give it to me as part of my uniform. (I could do without the baseball pants, they always seemed unnecessarily hot for a game played outside in the summer.)

While I may not have become a professional baseball player (yet!), I have adopted the idea of wearing a hat all the time. Part of it is the fact that my eyes are sensitive to the light, part of it is showing random support a team that I'm not actually a member of and part of it is laziness on my part because wearing a hat means I don't have to comb my hair in the morning. And being that the job market in Wilmington is less than good, I've been wearing a hat fairly often.

I didn't realize just how often it was until I went to take our dog for her nightly walk without wearing one. It was overcast night and rather than my usual 20 minute walk, this was hopefully going to be a quick 10 minute trip. So I get the dog on  her leash and head out the door when the little guy said, "no, daddy no hat." (For those who don't speak toddler, that means, "Daddy doesn't have a hat on." Toddler speak isn't that difficult, so if you didn't understand that, it's likely you're just hoping I'll post a picture of an attractive woman at some point.) When I got back from walking the dog, the little guy, again, said "daddy no hat."

Just because I wear a hat (or visor) to the beach, pool, library, for a walk along the river, to the grocery store, to take him to preschool, to the park, or just around the house doesn't mean I always wear a hat of some kind. I do, occasionally, shower, and even at times do so without some sort of hat.

Perspectives

I can't, for the life of me, figure out what's going on in the picture below.

Those ladies were at the beach for at least an hour and a half (I left before they did, for all I know, they could still be out there.) They made the effort to drive to the beach, find parking, carry their chairs to the sand and the faced the sand dunes.

I don't understand people.

Soccer, Nancy Grace and the Dominican Republic baseball

In case you haven't noticed, and judging by the ratings you haven't, the United States Women's national team have managed to win a few games and are threatening to climb to the top of women's soccer. I mention this because on one of the growing number of social networking sites someone mentioned that an American was cheering for Brazil. For some reason, people seemed to care which nation's women's soccer team this person was hoping would win.

It's not like this person was cheering for al Queda or for Nancy Grace (that's not a false equivalency, they're both equally heinous and should be wiped from the face of the earth). No, apparently which athletes you chose to support from the comfort of your own home or sports bar ... Ok so no reputable sports bar had a quarterfinal Women's World Cup game on but the point remains, matters to people. Look, they're just athletes playing a game. Random chance of where you were born doesn't have to dictate who you're obligated to cheer for.

In fact, I've twice found myself cheering for national teams other than the U.S. over the years.both times were in the World Baseball Classic, the sport's version of the World Cup.

I've been a baseball fan for pretty much as long as I can remember. I begged my dad when I was seven to be able to stay up to watch a World Series game on a Saturday night. He relented, not knowing the game would end up being the classic Bill Buckner game. granted, I was seven and didn't understand all that was going on, but I knew it was baseball and I wanted to watch. Add in the countless hours playing fantasy baseball and the hundreds of games I've watched and I had a pretty good idea of the players I liked and the ones I didn't. So when the World Baseball Classic rolled around, I didn't feel that I HAD to cheer for the U.S. simply because we happened to share the same nationality. I don't think Minnesotans feel the need the support Michele "I'm Driving Ozzy Osbourne's Crazy Train" Bachman simply because they share a state any more than I feel the need to cheer for some contestant on The Bachelor because she's from my state.

So I did the thinkable. I cheered for the Dominican Republic in both 2006 and 2009. Granted, neither time did they win, but they had the players I lied to watch the most. And this may come as a shock to some, but if you're using the outcomes of international sporting events to determine the amount of pride you have in your country, it might be time to reevaluate your definition of what it means to be a citizen.

At the end of the day, it's just sports. Cheer for who you want. It's not like it' something really important, like
American Idol. If you don't support the contestant nearest to where you live, you're a traitor to all that is good and just and holy in this world.

Tears of a Clown

Song 23: Don’t Cry

Artist: Guns ‘N Roses

Friday Night Fun

It doesn’t happen all that often, but there are times when I make The Wife cry. Usually it’s a result of some screw up on my part that also coincides with a stressful time at work or during our weekly ‘fingernails across the chalkboard’ session aimed at desensitizing us to sounds emanating from the depths of Hell. So far, it just annoys the crap out of us and has yet to make that sound any more palatable.

But every now and again, I can make her cry and it be a good thing. On those rare occasions when things aren’t stressful at work and I find a particularly humorous thread to pull, I can bring The Wife to tears from laughter. Often, in the middle of her laughing fits, I get told “don’t put that on facebook,” which, of course, means I make it a point to threaten to do it. Ultimately, I would acquiesce to her wishes and not post it on facebook. That’s what Twitter is for.

But every now and then, I would find my wife chuckling at something that’s really not funny at all. For a while, I didn’t think much of it. We all have different senses of humor and her’s simply included a part that found unfunny things funny. But after she told me something was amusing this weekend that was not, in anyway, comical, I started thinking, “if she finds that funny, and it’s not funny in the slightest, does that mean I’m not funny either?”

I then realized the conundrum goes both ways. When I was stuck watching Dancing With The Stars one season, I made the comment that I thought one of the red-headed dancers was kind of hot. Apparently she was not, at least compared to the other dancers on the show. (Which, to be fair, is like saying a Victoria’s Secret model isn’t as hot as the others.) She’d said that she couldn’t believe I found her attractive (I used the word “hot”) because finding a professional dancer with a body (note: this section deleted due to fear that my wife might actually read this and not find the humor in it that I might have. Let’s just say it went on for a while.) really hot is just crazy, right?

Beyonce: Wife Approved

So now I make sure there’s a broad agreement among the world that a woman is, indeed, hot before saying such to The Wife. (Acceptable women so far include Beyonce and Anne Hathaway among others.) However, each time my wife chuckles at a lame pun or cracks a smile at a joke that I wouldn’t make if it were just me and my dog (who has a pretty good sense of humor, for a dog), I cry just a little inside. It makes me question my worth, not just as a comedian (note: I’m not actually a comedian), but as a person (note: not really). On the plus side, my wife finds George Clooney hot, so maybe she thinks I look like him.

Next Song: Leaving

Artist: Hootie and the Blowfish

My brush with the edge of fame

I haven’t exactly filled my Twitter followings with the likes of influential thinkers or vapid Hollywood stars who want me to know their thoughts on the nature and meaning of existence of what they had for lunch (that applies to both groups.) In fact, I would venture to say that the “famous” people I follow would not consider themselves celebrities. A more accurate description would be “sports analysts for various media outlets whose celebrity status exists entirely within the sports community.”

One of those I do follow is Jonah Keri. You might recognize that name and think to yourself, “I thought Luke just said he didn’t follow any real celebrities, why is he following the “Get Him to the Greek” guy?” And I’d say “no, not Jonah Hill, Jonah Keri” and you’d be all like “I don’t know who that is. I hope this blog gets funny soon or I’m going to watch Get Him to the Greek out of spite.” (Note: You might want to go ahead and pull it up on Netflix and save yourself some time.)

 I first became aware of Keri though his editing of the book Baseball Between The Numbers which is essentially an idiot’s guide to advanced statistical analysis. It’s one of the five books I would take with me if I were to be stranded on a desert island mostly because there’s so much in there I don’t understand. I’d eventually forgotten about Keri until he started a podcast and had as one of his first guests Rob Neyer, (another of the aforementioned sports analysts from twitter). As a Neyer fan, I figured it’d be worth the listen, which it was - so much so, in fact, that I started following Keri on twitter and reading more and more of his work.

If you don't like this book,
I'll do nothing.

It was also around this time that he was pimping his new book, The Extra 2% which tells the story of how the Tampa Bay Rays managed to go from being an historically bad team to winning the toughest division in baseball twice in a three-year span. (I got the book for Father’s Day and finished it four days later. If you’re at all interested in baseball or the business practices the Rays used to go from worst to first, I highly recommend it. It comes with my unconditional no-money-back guarantee. If you don’t like it, I won’t refund your money.) Did I mention it has spent time on the New York Times best seller list?

As luck would have it, Keri is an avid Twitterer, regularly responding to his followers (including me, much to the chagrin of my wife, who doesn’t get Twitter), engaging in various topics of conversation, offering fantasy advice (which I’ve been the beneficiary of a time or two). He doesn’t take himself seriously (always a plus), is self-deprecating and fills in admirably on ESPN’s Fantasy Focus podcasts from time to time.

All that brings us to last week. Keri sent out a tweet looking to crowdsource a few ideas about the most underrated college football stadiums and tailgating atmosphere. He’s got more than 11,000 followers, so you and I can both imagine that he got a number of suggestions, so when I suggested Georgia Southern’s Paulson Stadium as underrated for both stadium and atmosphere, I figured it’d go into the digital wastebasket of tweets Keri received. So last weekend, I’m at my in-laws and decide I should check my direct messages (they don’t show up in my regular feed, and unless you look for them, you’d never know you had them.) As it turns out, I didn’t know I had one and the one I did have was from Keri, himself, who was intrigued by Paulson Stadium and the atmosphere around football games and wanted more information than could be sent via a 140 character tweet. A best-selling author wanted me to email him. Sure, it was for God knows what and may never amount to anything, but I still think it’s kind of cool. 

The Prettiest Little Stadium
in America

So I rattled off a 500-word email doing the best I could to explain what makes Paulson Stadium and Georgia Southern tailgating a special and unique experience. I know I couldn't fully capture what it's like to spend an autumn Saturday at the "Prettiest Little Stadium in America," but hope I was able to give a reasonable representation of what it's like.

It also didn’t hurt that it almost, kind of, maybe convinced my wife that there might just be something to this whole Twitter thing.