There are many different things to write about in the World of Baseballs, or, in bigger terms, the World of Sports. There’s the fact that the boring mega-payroll
Dodgers just ousted the fun, also mega-payroll Phillies from the playoffs. (Ben has you covered.) Personally, I think the entire playoff structure is wack, and it should be eight teams, three best-of-7 series, no more, no less. But hey, that’s just, like, my opinion.There’s been a slew of Stadium Shenanigans, like this hoo-boy piece of turd
that the Chicago Ursines NFL team is currently foisting on taxpayers (thanks John for bringing it to my attention). As always, Neil deMause has you covered on those. I’ve been informed by Mr. deMause that his term “vaportecture,” for fancy stadium renderings that bear no relation to any conceivable future reality, is just a few independent uses shy of being eligible for the Oxford English Dictionary. So, how about it, those of you with blogs elsewhere? Wanna use the word “vaportecture” and get it possibly added to the dictionary? Here’s a lovely example that deMause gave us last year, of a proposed HonkyHose stadium:
How pretty! But, if you zoom in:
Oops, that’s not how you spell Chicago!
But I don’t want to write about such things right now, and if you think my writing’s only tolerable as it is, TRUST ME — it’s worse when I’m slogging through it. (Hence basically every game recap in basically every September in years that the Twins are out of it, which since I’ve been around, has been most years.)
So… how about a Movie Night?
There’s a different site that does this — I won’t link to it, it’s a political site, and I don’t expect others here to share my political views. (Except… maybe less money for stadiums, maybe?) But the movies on that site’s Movie Night aren’t necessarily political. Sometimes they are, but it’s most fun when they’re not. Like Jaws, for instance. Everybody had a good time just enjoying their favorite music cues, and pointing out when the robot shark looks good/when it totally looks like a cheesy robot shark, etc. (Also what was the stupidest bit in the original novel.)
Here’s how that works!
It’s a set date at a set time. And everyone cues up the movie at exactly that time, from whatever source they’re using. (Like library DVDs, streaming services, or Internet Archive, etc.) Then people make comments/jokes about the movie. Like “that was cool” or “that is dumb,” or sharing trivia stuff they know about the movie or the actors or the subject, etc.
So… kinda like gamethreads. But for movies.
We could do that here. I’m sure we could all think of many baseball movies, some good, some kinda lousy.
For example, The Jackie Robinson Story is easily available on YouTube, because it’s in the public domain. (A lot of movies for Black audiences ended up in the public domain, since the studios really didn’t give a rip about renewing the copyright… although, my favorite instance of public domain is still the 1963 Hepburn/Grant Charade, which was public domain the day it came out, because some dolt forgot to put the “©” symbol in the credits.)
Just a quick look tells me there are Internet Archive copies of the 1942 The Pride of the Yankees (Gary Cooper as Lou Gehrig) and the 1951 Angels in the Outfield (Paul Douglas as a cranky manager who gets nicer via divine intervention… no, it’s not the weather guy Paul Douglas). There’s also the free streamers like Tubi that might have some interesting stuff on them (with commercials, but that’s no different from a gamethread).
And once we start talking about library DVDs, the list expands to basically every baseball movie/sports movie ever made, although we’d need to plan those out a bit more in advance (so people can request them from the library, etc.) And I don’t want to plan out a bunch of Movie Nights in advance if it’s going to be just me typing a bunch of comments by myself. The ideal would be to have at least five people show up.
So… thoughts? Opinions? (And heck, I’m not opposed to doing other inoffensive movies, too, like Charade or The Hitch-Hiker or something free on YouTube like that… I just think baseball movies would be more fun.) With something on YouTube or Internet Archive or the free streamers, people wouldn’t even have to go to the Great Enormous Strain of picking up a library DVD. I mentioned three baseball free ones above; I’m sure there’s more.
And if nobody’s interested, no harm, no foul! It’s not an idea my heart’s set upon. I just enjoy Movie Night at the other site, and I thought we could try it, if anybody likes. I mean, we could also all watch a pretty sunset together, or mascot porn, but I think baseball movies would be better,
(Oh, and OK, you want to know what the stupidest thing in the original novel Jaws was? The Richard Dreyfuss character has an affair with the wife of the Roy Scheider character, and then Scheider hates Dreyfuss, and it’s really a terrible book overall besides about two pages of Shark Facts right at the beginning. Sometimes, it’s best when movies DON’T stick to the book!)
