Royals Report Card, 2008

On opening day of the season, April 2, i laid out some predictions/ requirements for my beloved Royals, in hopes that this season would bring some changes to the way things have been for the last, oh, 20 years in Kansas City. While some of them were admittedly bold, none of these feats had been accomplished in 5 years of Royals baseball- Progress would be inevitable this year, not only for the fact that it was nearly impossible to do any worse than we've done for the last five seasons, but for the fact that we hired a new manager, renovated Kauffman Stadium, and i personally rode 600 miles on a vintage tandem bicycle across rural Kansas for 2 weeks just to support them.


So. Compared with my predictions from 7 months ago, lets take a look at the report card, and whether or not it's going on the fridge.

1. Finish the season within 5 games of .500

Record: 75-87 Okay, so we finished 12 games under .500. Last year we finished 24 games under. The year before that we finished 39 under. By previous standards, this season was a godsend. Still, 12 under. Grade: C+

2. Finish at least 3rd in the AL Central

Finished: 4th. For the first time in five seasons, we finished out of last place. We finished ahead of the Detroit Tigers, by one game. If you'd told me last season that we'd finish ahead of the Tigers in 08, i'd have gone out and gotten a tattoo of bigbird on my esophagus, because that should have meant we were going to the world series. Still, looks good on paper. Grade: B-

3. Somebody on team must hit 25+ homers

Home Runs: Jose Guillen hit 20 homers, Alex Gordon squeaked 16. No long ball. No run support. Grade: C

4. Two players must hit 20+ homers

Obviously one did. Alex probably would have if he hadn't injured himself doing something like this:


5. Alex Gordon, rookie sensation, must hit 20 homers or 70+ rbi's

Alex was groovy, but not a rookie sensation. He hit 16 and batted in 59. Would have done it had he not gotten hurt. No excuses. Grade: B-

6. At least one player must hit 100+ rbi's

Jose Guillen, in his infinite bitchiness, did knock in 97 rbi's. Couldn't he have just banged out 3 more in that last game? Jeez. Still, last year's rbi leader on the Royals only hit 60. So again, in comparison, we're mammoth right now. Grade: A-

7. Three players must finish season hitting .300 or higher

Mike Aviles: .325
David Dejesus: .307
Mark Grudzielanek: .299

Aviles and Dejesus. Unstoppable. Constant hitting. Gamers. And ol' Grud. Grade: A-

8. Two pitchers must earn 15+ wins

Gil Meche: 14-11
Zack Greinke: 13-10

I can't believe this didn't happen, because Zack Greinke is better than Optimus Prime plus Kurt Russell in the 90's. Zack Greinke is to the Royals pitching rotation what beer is to Tony Stewart. He'll win 18 games next season. You'll all owe me money. Grade: B+


9. Two players must be elected to 2008 All Star Team

Only Joakim Soria made it to the team, and he actually pitched! Granted, the game had to go 13 innings for that to happen, but shut your mouth. Grade: B-

10. Jose Guillen must hit 20+ home runs, use no steroids

Jose hit 20 homers. I assume he didn't juice, but he did threaten fans, throw fitty tantrums, and act like a hemorrhoid a few times. If he didn't club 97 rbi's, i might even speak ill of him. Grade: A-

11. Joey Gathright must steal 25+ bases, harm no old ladies

Gathright:21 stolen bases. Joey is so freaking fast, he's already in the 2009 season. Nobody else is, but he's there and just waiting for next March. If he hadn't gotten hurt this year he'd have doubled it, and i don't care what happens to old ladies anymore. Greatest player on earth.

12. Team must post winning record at Kauffman Stadium

Didn't happen. Put the crown back on the screen. Things will change. Grade: C

13. Manager Trey Hillman must be ejected from at least 2 games

Trey was ejected from at least two games, and god bless him. I hope Buddy Bell took copious notes on the spit in the umpire's cornea. We all know you have to get mad before you get better Grade: A

14. Two starting pitchers must finish season with ERA under 3.50

Zack "Christ" Grienke: 3.47 ERA
Gil Meche: 3.98

It's good enough to have two pitchers under 4, but we really need to see this number go down. Brian Bannister pitched like an idiot this year. The fact of the matter is, we could have drafted Tim Lincecum instead of Luke Hochevar. We could be drinking Aquafina instead of camel urine. Grade: B

15. Closer Joakim Soria must earn 30+ saves

Joakim Soria belongs on the fridge. In notching 42 saves for us with an era of 1.60, that guy deserves a key to the city. He deserves a key to America. And a Cy Young. And an unlimited shopping spree at the Sharper Image. Grade: A+

16. Two pitchers must strike out 150+ batters

Zack Greinke: 183
Gil Meche: 183

I should do 183 pushups right now for these guys. Two seasons ago, our top two pitchers struck out 76 and 72 batters. Excuse me? Can you say 200 in '09? Grade: A+

17. Royals must slaughter San Francisco Giants on June 21st.


On the day i first arrived at Kauffman Stadium after riding 600 miles on a tandem bicycle for two weeks, (see here) i watched the Royals fall behind 10-3 to Tim Lincecum and the woeful Giants. And i felt blue. However, the Royals managed the second greatest comeback in franchise history that afternoon, eventually winning 11-10 thanks to Joey Gathright. It was the single greatest game i've ever witnessed in person. Also, they were in the old Monarchs jerseys. Also, i was delirious. Grade: A+

As you can see, this was a hell of a season for my boys, and further proof that next season they'll be ruining lives all over the American League Central. These kids are going to be in the playoff picture before you can say Saberhagen, and i can't give them anything lower than a B- this year for their landmark progress and finishing out of the cellar for the first time in five years. I might even make it a solid B. You could still show your grandma that. Go Royals, and we'll see you in Surprise, 2009.

Followup Pt. II

It is the middle of the night, and GRB-080319B is gone. There are no lights, but for the ornaments of our particular galaxy, an assortment and curry of leftover peices. In the grand scheme of things, it has just left us, and we are left to drive home from the airport alone. And yet, we will never be so close again as we are in this moment, as it will be another light year away by the time we’ve dragged ourselves to and from our summer sheets. It is over Calcutta when we are in the supermarket, It is rounding the rings of Neptune when we are sweating on the bus. I don’t recognize anybody here. GRB-080319B is blasting forth, cutting through the nothingness like music from another room.

GRB-080319B appeared in the constellation Boötes, known as “bear watcher” for its proximity to both Ursa Major and Minor. Depictions of its figure vary from a sickle-handed hunter to a seated man, clutching a pipe. More pressing, however, is the void that occupies the constellation Boötes, one of the largest in the universe devoid of galaxies. What must it mean to travel hundreds of millions of light years without a single roadside attraction? GRB-080319B knows a darkness like a car inside a snowed-in tunnel. Granted, 7 billion years will bestow patience. There is a hum to such quiet, an abandoned interstate, lonely in the shadow of a brand new freeway in the distance. 250,000 light years of darkness. I heard an ambulance today and almost fell in love.


I heard a bucket drop from the roof of my building and thought of GRB-080319B. The satellite Swift recorded its first sighting at 2:12 in the morning, when our world was primarily indoors. Scientists measure the size of such gamma rays in terms of their redshift, a method of determining galactic distance through an object’s observable brightness. GRB-080319B is said to have been 250 million times more luminous than any previously recorded explosions to date and to have been visible from Earth for roughly 40 seconds, yet no one has reported witnessing it. A bucket fell from my roof at around 3:03 this morning, and I am currently believed to be the sole recipient of its clamoring.

GRB-080319B is gone, like a circus from a rural town. Everyone is changed, having seen themselves reflected in it, but living in their living rooms the same. These occasions, these spans of sometimes only 40 seconds are where we do our living, our windows open briefly and shut for such events. We stick our heads out like dogs in the wind, and the ride is over, we are at the vet. We are waiting for our families while they are on vacation. They say we know no sense of time, that waiting isn’t waiting if we do not call it that. We know it is. Waiting is waiting for dogs and trains and people, for bears and bikes and wheels waiting to turn, ready for pavement, pavement ready for friction, friction ready for fall. Waiting is 7 billion years through the darkness, just to flicker off without so much as a how do you do.

NOW That's What I Call Funeral!

I'm doing this for a number of reasons, the most pressing being my ol' buddy ol' pal Cameron Turner posting his ideal "funeral mix" on his website the other day- Take a gander at that HERE, and accept mine with the same small print, meaning, if you're a kid from high school and we never really spoke but you found this and thought you'd better intervene before i threw my boombox in the bathtub Benicio-Del-Toro style, feel free to read guiltlessly on. If i had any thoughts of prematurely skipping out on this life, i think you'd see a lot more Elliot Smith (and Korn?) on this list. Now, back to what's happened here.

What's really happened here is Cameron Turner has invoked a dangerous chain reaction, likely intentionally seeded, to fuel the insatiable John-Cusack loving english-major minds out there to further entertain thoughts of their own premature demise, a thought even quicker to be replaced with: how will everyone on earth manage to cope with the loss of me once i'm gone? To put it simpler, this is equivalent to asking Kid Rock if he'd like a Coors. The perfect mixtape is an artform in itself on par with ice sculpture, only carrying the burden of importance each one of us is individually bestowed with to feel as though the greatest songs on earth were written precisely for us, just us, just me, i.e. not you. So what could be more relevant than the songs you'd choose to subject your friends and loved ones to when you're already up there playing cards with Bing Crosby and Henry Kissinger?


Well, a lot of things. Like, top ten "There's Only An Hour Left On Earth, What Do We Listen To" tapes and "Top Ten Greatest Lesser-Known Last Tracks of Albums" tapes and obviously the list goes on. So without further ado and more small print, my current preferences for funeral mix, all of which you have my permission to play as they load my body into the specially designed humpback whale-carcass pod to be tied by a five hundred foot rope to the back of the next departing space shuttle mission.

Also note, lest you think me an ignoramus, that i'm crediting the artist and record whose version i select, not who i'm guessing wrote each tune or suggesting each tune is up for grabs by any old artist. Take for example my selection of a song featured on the "Toy Story 2" Soundtrack by Randy Newman. If you were to play the Sarah McLachlan version of this song at my funeral right off the soundtrack, my body would explode in a maelstrom of incendiary hellfire. To properly honor me, you would play the instrumental version, featured on Randy's Songbook Volume 1. Also, i'd like to hope that my inclusion of a song from Toy Story raises the bar of pretentiousness tenfold to this entire discussion.

1. Shenandoah, Keith Jarrett, from The Melody At Night, With You
2. That Lucky Old Sun, Ray Charles, from Modern Sounds in Country & Western Music
3. The Man In Me, Bob Dylan, from New Morning
4. Row, Jon Brion, from the Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind Soundtrack
5. Fair Play, Van Morrison, from Veedon Fleece
6. Yawny At The Apocalypse, Andrew Bird, from Armchair Apocrypha
7. God Only Knows, The Beach Boys, from Pet Sounds
8. When She Loved Me, Randy Newman, The Randy Newman Songbook Volume 1
9. The Predatory Wasp Of The Palisades, Sufjan Stevens, from Illinois
10. Don't Think Twice, It's Alright, Bob Dylan, from The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan
11. Golden Slumbers, The Beatles, from Abbey Road

Followup Pt. 1

I did twenty pushups in the dark and thought about GRB-080319B. Over the course of history, people have been capable of thinking few things whilst doing pushups, therein revealing one of pushups’ truest qualities. One of the most popular thoughts must be the age-old riddle: am I really pushing myself up, or am I pushing the earth back down? But now that I’ve learned about GRB-080319B, I wonder more about what it’s like to walk into a kitchen after one’s pushups in the dark to find a hairy tarantula right there on the wall. Where in the world might I live to do that? Sri Lanka? Would I fear the tarantula, once it had the possibility to exist in my kitchen, in my hemisphere? Or would I simply find a giant pot and try to catch the hairy thing and turn it loose on the other giant insects outside? Would it threaten small birds? Could I sell it to someone online?

I watched a video of Tom Jones dancing in 1969 and thought about GRB-080319B. So much happened over the course of the 7 billion years it took the light of GRB-080319B to get here, all of it contained in that blooming pomegranate of light. Tom Jones was in that pomegranate, acting all wild and kissing the girls, their moms were sort of upset but still dancing, perhaps experiencing an adult version of jealousy, a thing so convoluted it takes on names we haven’t yet come up with. My knowledge being limited of the borders of the universe, I suppose it’s possible that we’re just one of the first stops for old GRB-080319B, just a roadside attraction on the way to the big pony show. 7 billion years later down the road, someone else might catch an eyeful, and, squinting hard enough with the right prescription glasses, might see old Tom Jones, disintegrating into particles at the speed of light, jumping aboard for the next destination, flailing his legs around like a wild animal, lost in the ether of time.



I shaved thinking about GRB-080319B and I don’t know who I’m going to vote for anymore, and I wished for a bigger beard for the end of the world. It never comes in like I want it to, and I’d like to know I had it good and scruffy for when things started to get heavy. A beard might be a sign of strength in a time of great crisis and confusion. A sign of confidence, of magnetism and natural understanding that hair was no stranger to my cheek, and I might prove a real leader of the human race in our final hours. Because something must be coming, spiraling at us from any number of billions of years away, fated like a cataclysmic baseball off the universal swinging bat, thinking: bleacher seats.

Arthur C. Clarke posted his final message to Earth via Youtube on March 19 from his house in Sri Lanka. He was 90. I listened to three minutes before my computer stopped working and I felt lonely so bit my fingernails and thought about the end of the world. Arthur was so old in his video that he had a hard time talking, but I found another later in which he chats online with Leonardo DiCaprio to raise funds for wild gorillas, and that made me more positive. If Arthur believed it was worth taking time to raise money in order to preserve gorillas, I might find it worth time to continue my daily activities, like going to work and flossing. Sometimes when I get to thinking about GRB-080319B too much it doesn’t make sense to keep doing things the same way over and over again. They say the explosion took place some 3 billion years before our earth and sun were formed, and just got here now. I haven’t been sleeping very well. Arthur died three minutes before GRB-080319B appeared, and they want to name it after him.

They say that GRB-080319B was the “birth scream” of a universe, marking the beginning or end of a black hole, an occurrence never before seen by the naked eye. I too am visible to the naked eye, and was born as such, with a birth scream all my own. My mother had a scream too, and my father most certainly would have had he been watching. However, my birth scream happened in a small white room in Cedars-Sinai in 1984. When I looked up the hospital today it didn’t look familiar, it had a star of David on the front, and I’m not Jewish. However, I am currently involved with stars. If GRB-080319B were to return to its birth site, 7 billion years away, it might not recognize anything either. A small white room may be a large black space on the other side of the universe. There might not be a concept of white walls out there. There might not be a Cedars-Sinai.


In the report of GRB-080319B’s discovery, it was said that a satellite called Swift was drifting through the night sky “serendipitously” when it came upon the gamma ray. There are only so many times in the life of a word that it will be used so well as serendipitously was then. Because it could have been floating unexpectedly, but it hadn’t been. It could have been simply unassuming, focused on another task, but it hadn’t been. It had been drifting. And it had been drifting serendipitously. When a gamma ray travels 7 billion years to reach what might have been the first of naked eyes, one might assume it’s forced to travel so. For what good is rushing about, when the borders of space themselves have never been so broad and inconspicuous? Because what is any activity over a span of billions of years, of ice ages and cataclysmic failures and successes, life and death and life and death and life again, of biking through the suburbs on a sunny afternoon? One can only hope it is the same.

GRB-080319B

Though i'm less sure than Sonseed about what specific god to attribute my recent successes, i've scored a job as a bartender at a Mexican Bistro. Here, i'll pour expensive margaritas for tourists, chop mango for sangria, and get drunk and paid simultaneously, all the while navigating a back kitchen deeper than the bowels of hell and populated by an army of mexican chefs who will undoubtedly rail the Sonseed out of me in a language i'll never understand. Don't get me wrong. It's going to be magnificent.

Also, i've been trying to wrap my mind around this concept ever since i heard Fox News refer to it as the "Birth Scream of the Universe"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GRB_080319B

While a part of me wants to do the obvious and properly lambaste the daylights out of Fox News, let's talk about outer space. Perhaps astronauts have already accepted the fact that something could have happened 7 billion years ago that took that long to get here, just to make a pomegranate shaped foof in our sky for three seconds, but therein lies the missed opportunity. GRB-080319B!? Honestly? That's a longer name than Americans will read in the year 2008, and nothing we're going to remember well enough to tell our drunk friends at happy hour, let alone think about in our prayers not to be crushed by a meteor every night. NASA should know better.

If we as Americans were HALF as focused on our space program as we were 40 years ago, we'd at least have hired somebody whose job it was to come up with better names than that for the deaths and births of 7 billion year old galaxies that traveled 7 billion years just to foof in our sky. And this is exactly what's going to stop me from being a bartender, and i fail to understand why anybody else is struggling to get their day to day chores done after reading something like this. I know that one of these days, in the upcoming months, somebody is going to say something like "not enough salt on my glass" or "mas mantequilla, guero" and i'm going to think about GRB-080319B and just quit, and start smoking PCP and selling small american flags to senior citizens at bowling alleys.


What does that even mean? 7 billion years ago a galaxy 7 billion light years away blew up and it just got here now? And its right below an article about a guy who accidentally hit a bear riding his bicycle? Here is a clip from the next story down:

"Jim Litz said he was traveling about 25 mph monday morning when he came upon a rise and spotted a black bear about 10 feet in front of him. He didn't have time to stop and t-boned the bruin."

Jim Litz t-boning a bruin? Are you fucking kidding me? I've got half a mind to tattoo GRB-080319B on one cheek of my butt and "Jim Litz Sucks" on the other cheek, just to prove a fleeting point and make my future wife really upset. But maybe i'll meet a cool NASA wife that way. I'm feeling a little upset and confused about all this. I was just trying to get some information before i went to sleep, in case a giant fire rock crushed my planet in my sleep. I'd die smart. Smarter than Jim Litz. I hate that guy.

Strange Times

Now I am quietly waiting for
the catastrophe of my personality
to seem beautiful again,
and interesting, and modern.

The country is grey and
brown and white in trees,
snows and skies of laughter
always diminishing, less funny
not just darker, not just grey.

It may be the coldest day of
the year, what does he think of
that? I mean, what do I? And if I do,
perhaps I am myself again.

-Frank O'Hara


Perhaps too radical of a juxtaposition between things i do and don't like. Sorry Frank. Better just to keep quiet. Do as the walrus says:

The Beautiful

While it may be in part to a strange guilt that's come over me for posting a picture of scarily large-breasted digital prostitutes on the website i sent out to countless relatives to find my tandem tale, i think it's easier to attribute my posting of this to an uncanny sense of national pride that's come over me in the last few weeks. With the star-studded Olympics leading directly into the DNC, where hundreds of thousands of believing liberals descended like fruit flies into my old sweetheart Denver, you can't write it off as nothing. While i'll withhold my political tirades for another, far less romantic evening, i think it's safe to recognize our nation at a great crossroads, and to reassess our individual roles as to what we consider our responsibilities to be toward our country as a whole. Our tradition as a nation of individuals hinges upon our ability to, every so often, come to agree upon what we aim to represent together on a global scale, and what we're allowed to expect of our cities and neighborhoods. That said, to the bastards who stole my roommate's car, i've got a 34" George Brett bamboo/maple composite bat that hasn't gotten nearly enough hits this season. You can bet your onion i'm not going to miss you.