Dead Religions

Troy Tulowitzki appears to still be playing the jilted lover, still complaining about get traded to a winning team last season from the abysmal Colorado Rockies. He even leveled a shot at the Rockies’ spring training facility at Salt River, calling it a country club that allowed players to get comfortable, and he would rather be in Dunedin. You know what makes a player comfortable, Troy? Extended trips to the DL. But you go ahead and pretend that playing in the hood at Dunedin will help you keep it real.

Tulowitzki is also under the false impression that he won’t be traded again during this contract. He will be one of the first guys Mark Shapiro moves when Shapiro begins his five year rebuilding plan (if healthy), which should commence before the Indy 500. Enforcer Eric “Jim Beam in the Dugout” Wedge should start giving Tulowitzki the stink eye any day. Wedge better be careful though – too harsh of a glare might put Tulowitzki back on the DL.

So this is the season I attempt to delve into the Occult of College Baseball, which is a rather weird sect of the Religion of Baseball. I usually avoid college ball for two reasons: aluminum bats and the scarcity of beer sales. However, there is a distinct lack of Canadians in college ball, so it can’t be all bad.

Here are some major differences the Occult contains:

Parents of the players abound. In this regard, there is a Little League feel in the stands. Overprotective Mama Bears who would be DEAD MEAT in the California League will snarl and even pounce if their cub is insulted. Dads are often the worst Mama Bears, plus many dads still coach their sons from the stands. Hey disphit, your kid would probably be a lot more relaxed if you weren’t shouting instructions from your seat. Do you pull up a chair in his dorm room and bark instructions about how to satisfy his girlfriend?

The umps are ridden more in college ball than in other level of ball – from the dugouts to the fans, displeasure rains. Opposing fans will even shout at each other about how their teams got screwed.

The player do a lot of rah rah camaraderie nonsense, stuff you will never see in the professional ball. Some of this is because there isn’t the transiency you see in the minors – guys are with their team for all for years of college.

The defense is much more raw, especially corner outfielders.

No lead is safe thanks to weak bullpens, poor defense and aluminum bats.

I wonder if Mark Shapiro is still bitter that he wasn’t nominated for Best Supporting Actor in Moneyball. The dude practically launched Jonas Hill’s career in that movie, and now his portrayal of John Hart is forgotten.

To all these goobers clamoring about going to Canada if Trump is elected: hey, you dumb bastards, an America with Trump at the helm is still infinitely better than Canada. Quit being such worry warts. In the long run, civil wars promote prosperity, especially if there is a catchy slogan involved: The Reconstruction 2: This Time, Let’s Do It Right!

Twitter makes this species dumber, but probably speeds up Selective Darwinism, so  everything washes in the end.

The Indians set fire to a big pile of money today when they officially signed Juan Uribe. They could have given that money to some local kids’ charities and received more production than what they will receive from THE FAT FOSSIL.

Boo hoo hoo. Gerrit Cole is upset because he didn’t get more money from the Pittsburgh Pirates even though he is not arb eligible and was awarded an eight million dollar signing bonus. Life is tough, youngster. Go back to school and earn a degree in contract law.

Abraham Almonte has been suspended for eighty days for banned substances. Poor Abe.

Bernie Kosar will be at the Ford Auto Show this Wednesday at the IX Center in Cleveland because Cleveland never forgets a hero, especially when he was the third best QB is his division when he played.

The Cavs have lost two in a row, and are 6-4 over their last ten games, so the head coach should be fired any day.

It will be 90 degrees in Goodyear, Arizona this week. HYDRATE OR DIE!

Toronto Blue Jays’ General Manager Ross Atkins abruptly left a press conference in tears this afternoon after being asked by Richard T. Enispay about the signing of Rafael Soriano to a minor league contract. Atkins started the press conference in a bubbly mood, gushing about how the signing was a textbook example of Mark Shapiro’s Poo Poo Strategy in which if one throws enough feces against the wall, one might get enough of it to stick on the wall to have an outfield platoon David Dellucci and Jason Michaels. Enispay asked Atkins why anyone would want shit to stick to the wall anyway, and Atkins began what appeared to be some sort of mental breakdown.

“Stop being so negative!” stammered Atkins. “Do you know how hard it is to work for my boss? He demands do be called ‘Supreme Emperor’, even in casual conversations. When he get it through his head that he has identified the perfect reclamation project, he obsesses with that player for years. The other day I walked in a dark bathroom and heard him in the stall muttering something about how Alex Escobar could still be the chosen one if only Alex would return his calls. I tried to back out there before he heard me, but no such luck. He started screaming at me to sign Rafael, sign Rafael! All I could think is what Rafael is this asshole talking about? Betancourt? Perez? Certainly not Furcal because Furcal never played for the Indians.

Then he started babbling something about Dominican League peripherals be damned, a 2.84 ERA is a 2.84 ERA, and it didn’t matter if he had given up more hits than innings pitched, and what do declining strikeout rates matter in the Dominican League because all those fuckers do is hack, and the Blue Jays need a Rafael because Rafael is the patron saints of travelers, physicians, and match makers, and everyone would be getting lucky in Dunedin this year with no feat of venereal diseases if Rafael was in camp. He then started singing “Leaving on Jet Plane” from the top – ‘My bags are packed, I am ready to go, and something about a goddamn taxi blowing its horn’, and I am wondering if whatever he puts on the ferret face of his to loosen up the tightness of that bad facelift is seeping into his brain.”

At this point Enispay tried to console Atkins, placing hand on his shoulder, which caused Atkins to screech, “Don’t touch me! He will know! He always knows!” The rest of the media looked on in stunned silence as Atkins ran out of the room sobbing.

In another stunning blow to Canadian baseball heritage, Vladimir Guerrero announced today from the Angels’ Spring Training facility that he would like to go into the Baseball Hall of Fame as an Angel, not an Expo because Montreal no longer has a team. Putting aside that perhaps Guerrero should not count his chickens before they hatch as he is certainly not a lock for the Hall, that will be the first Angels’ cap in the Hall.

“If you are going to develop an addiction, make sure it is something that isn’t boring” – Bongwater

I must say, I do enjoy the new Starbucks Smoked Butterscotch Latte. I know old time readers are thinking, “It is really is true. Bads85’s soul is dead. Years ago, Bads used to hurl burning backpacks through the front windows of Starbucks (metaphorically, of course, because Bads85 would never commit acts of terrorism in the post 9/11 world). Now the sellout is drinking fu-fu coffee drinks on Saturday morning. He’s become THAT GUY instead of That Guy. Let’s erect of shrine on Zzyzx Road to the memory of the old Bads.”

Yes, the old Bads has been gone for a while, but this spring, he is coming back. I still am That Guy. It is a shame there aren’t more of us. Remember, I was the dude that carried a Total Baseball Encyclopedia to games in a backpack for years to settle arguments. Note I said “settle”, not win. Winning an argument isn’t important. THE TRUTH is — no matter how small. Mulder and Scully taught us that.

Of course I also used that Encyclopedia to end fights by knocking people upside the head. If any of this bothers you, get the fuck out of the truck. As the boys from The Hold Steady say, “Sometime actresses get slapped.”

We have miles to go before we sleep, and we’ve spent too long drinking from the poisoned well of stagnancy. The boats might be beating against the current ceaselessly into the past, but we are headed overland, into the unknown. We’ve lost a lot of companions along the way, and more will fade into darkness as we head forward. At the end of the road, we only need six to be our pall bearers. The moral high ground is over there, just beyond the village of complacency – the road to adventure is right in front of us. You can grab your backpack walking stick and strike a path over that hill, but I am taking the SUV. It has the beer cooler.

After the Toronto Raptors defeated the Cleveland Cavaliers last night, a large group of not so rowdy fans purposely walked to Mayor John Tory’s house to politely petition that legislation should be passed naming the 2016 Raptors the greatest team of all time. Mayor Tory exclaimed, “I have not seen this sort of excitement since Loverboy released “The Kid is Hot Tonight”. Some of the people on my lawn were so excited they forgot to say ‘Please!'” Meanwhile, as Cleveland burned, Mayor Frank G. Jackson, the epitome of frumpy sexiness, worked dutifully on his NFL mock draft.

While the Raptors have become the darlings of about 2% of the Toronto population, they have not garnished much love outside the city. They are only drawing 88.3% capacity on the road, 29th in the NBA. More Americans would rather see the the Grizzlies, a heartwarming story of life after the Canadian shackles.

Cleveland Indians attendance in 2001, the year Mark Shapiro became the GM of the team: 3.2 million; 39,694 per game.

Cleveland Indians attendance in 2015, the year Mark Shapiro left the team: 1.4 million million; 17,806 per game.

Cleveland Indians attendance in 1986, when there was talk of the Indians moving to New Orleans because of poor attendance: 1.4 million.

Look at all those fans Shapiro made go poof! I wonder how many bunnies he has in his closet.

Richard T. Enispay, the greatest investigative sports reporter in the history of civilization, has left the friendly confines of retirement behind his country club walls to break a bombshell that only he can deliver. The man who uncovered that John Wayne enjoyed drinking Slippery Nipples with Art Modell while dressed in women’s lingerie is reporting that Mark Shapiro is planning on moving the Toronto Blue Jays to Jackson, Mississippi.

“I had discussed the move in great detail with my employers even before the 2016 NBA All Star Weekend,” said a furtive Shapiro as his beady eyes darted around the S&M bar where Enispay cornered him. “However, Rogers Communications realized that the Blue Jays could never compete with the memories of that weekend, and that Drake would probably never sing a song about the splendor of our baseball facility because it is a dump.”

When Enispay asked him why the hell he would want to move the team to Jackson, Shapiro mumbled something about Jackson being named after the greatest hero of the War of 1812, and that the jilted Canadians should never be allowed to forget that. When told that Andrew Jackson spent most of the war fucking up the Red Sticks, not the Canadians, Shapiro spat, “Well, I can’t move the team to a town called Zebulon Pike because those fuckers murdered that strikingly handsome man in his prime at York when they blew up the magazine in cowardly fashion!”

Shapiro refused to acknowledge that Pike was immediately remembered at the War of 1812, but faded from American consciousness after the Civil War. “Had Pike’s life not been cut short by those murdering Canadians, York doesn’t get sacked and maybe this city would have developed some culture beyond real estate speculation,” hissed Shapiro. “Cause and effect! Those Canadian bastards have forgotten all about Fort Mims also. It is very easy to be politically correct if you forget that history is linear!”

Shapiro did shed some light on why Rogers Communications would be willing to move their baseball team to the Deep South. “I convinced them that a decent stadium could never be built in Canada – that wasn’t hard. I just had to show them the Women’s World Cup monstrosities and those goofy looking CFL stadia, and the big brass said, ‘Fuck, you sure are correct.’ These guys just wanted something that could hold some natural grass. I told them we could build a new stadium one brick at a time in Mississippi, and each brick would contain the soul of one Canadian. They were all for that.”

Hey, remember when Toronto Blue Jays’ fans were cuddly puppies that endeared themselves to America because everyone wanted to just to play fetch with their new, adorable friends? Of course you don’t because that never happened. Ever. Blue Jays’ fans were those entitled jerks that flocked to Cleveland Municipal and Tiger Stadiums during that brief time when their team was good. Enduring those boobs at the ballpark for those two years was tough, mostly because of their flatulence and their loud wives. Fortunately, that was long enough ago that most of those folk are dead, felled by hardened arteries and prison rape enactments gone wrong.

Now that Blue Jays actually made the playoffs in 2015, the obnoxious Canadian briefly surfaced, but thankfully Mark Shapiro is on the job now, so Canadian baseball should receive a death blow like the 1994 work stoppage. With only one minor league team left that play in the teeny tiny, dilapidated Scotiabank Field at Nat Bailey Stadium (that is the real name of the stadium) in Vancouver, perhaps baseball could be gone for good in Canada by the year 2022. Canadians probably won’t even miss it because they will still be basking in the glow of the greatest NBA All Star Weekend.

But today let’s not dwell on the Blue Jays; let us look at the Toronto Raptors and their six first round playoff exits. They only made the playoffs one other time, which resulted in a semi-final departure. Couple all that with 716-932 franchise record, and one can easily see the fine NBA tradition in Toronto that was the foundation to the greatest All Star Weekend in the modern era. The Raptors are the Cleveland Cavilers without LeBron, and everyone knows Cleveland sure knows how to party!

However, this all just a prelude to today’s main topic: the dismal state of the Canadian teams in NHL and Bads 85’s excellent solution to that. Three of the four NHL divisions have Canadian teams sitting in last place right now. The only division that doesn’t is the division that doesn’t have a Canadian team because Canada just isn’t that populous due to short life expectancies due to poor diet. Arizona, a franchise on life support in the desert valley, is better than almost all the Canadian teams. The best Canadian team is that juggernaut the Ottawa Senators, who have surged to a 29-26-3 record.

The NHL really doesn’t need to be straddled with these albatrosses, so they should just cut loose the Canadian teams and expand further south into Mexico. The Peso will soon be worth more than the Looney anyway as Canada’s oil economy craters. I am sure some fucking hockey purist will point to the strong attendance in Montreal, Calgary, and Toronto as evidence as the NHL should remain in Canada, but those aren’t real revenues because Canadians pay with worthless tender. However, I am a reasonable guy who doesn’t want to completely shit on everyone’s fun and tradition, so I am willing to offer this compromise: after a Mexican expansion draft, relegate six Canadian NHL teams to a developmental league. Allow the best Canadian team to stay in the NHL for the small price of a nuclear carrier task force. The team with the best record in the developmental league supplants the Canadian NHL team, which won’t be any good, and no one in America will know where the team is from anyway.