Dear Diary fourteen October 2002

I’m told that Foul Tips might allegedly be explaining this AS WE SPEAK, but the fact of the matter: The Angels are incredibly good at baseball. Bad on everybody for not noticing and doing something to prevent the Angels from being good or at least destroying the city of Anaheim, preferably using some kind of lethal slime monster, prior to this writing.

Also worth noting as regards the Anaheim Angels: The amounts of karmic good will accumulated by the Angels by destroying the Yankees should have lasted them until approximately 9000 years in the future. Somehow they managed to spend of all in the last week and change, despite the fact that monkeys jumping up and down are AWESOME.

Some notes on my personal relationship to baseball:

My mom’s favorite baseball player: Jim Thome

Baseball player of whose pants my dad once turned into a pair of shorts: John Wesley “Boog” Powell.

I have a lot to say about baseball, since all I have been doing for the past nine days is watching baseball, and also talking about how awesome it is with likeminded people, which is to say people who would agree with me when I say baseball is awesome.

I’m finding that my fourth year of college is substantially harder than the first three. This is some shit.

WHY THE ANGELS ARE ACTUALLY OK:

1. The idea of the Rally Monkey is dumb, and that right there is an argumentative Thermopylae from which I cannot be removed. However, the fact that any time they show the Rally Monkey the words “RALLY MONKEY” in all caps flash above the monkey’s head is GREAT.

2. Mike Scioscia is somewhat chubby.

3. Tim Salmon looks like what I would draw if you asked me to draw of picture of someone named “Tim Salmon,” if I did not know who Tim Salmon was. Reference Figures A and B. I call this theorem “The Tim Salmon Corollary.”

4. Chone Figgins has the best name in baseball that is not Josh Bard.

5. Adam Kennedy hit three home runs in a game as the ninth hitter in Anaheim’s lineup. That fact alone indicates that the DH is a good idea, despite the fact that the DH is clearly a bad idea. On a vaguely related note, Adam Kennedy qua the designated hitter rule saves all of us from having to see Ben Weber handle a bat, which would be some shit, to say the least.

5a. Ben Weber is a robot.

6. Troy Glaus is nine feet tall, and his name is Troy Glaus. See the Tim Salmon Corollary.

7. I had a dream about Rudy Tomjanovitch at some point last weekend. The last sports-related dream I had was that Donald Fehr ran for President of the United States and no one could stop him. I’ll just say that the dream about Rudy Tomjanovitch was much more pleasant, and I can only assume the Angels had something to do with defeating Fehr’s plan to control my dreams and then kill me.

8. David Eckstein, as pointed out by ESPN.com, does actually look like Bart Simpson. Also, he gets beaned a lot. A learned colleague suspects that the Ecksteinian propinquity for HBPs is because the Eckstein in question actually stands on top of home plate when he bats. One suspects the propinquity originates with the fact that David Eckstein, prior to his career as a vertically-challenged middle infielder, was actually the inspiration for Patrick Dempsey’s Randy Bodek in the 1989 film Loverboy. Or that maybe David Eckstein crowds the plate and as a result gets beaned a lot.

9. Bengie Molina and his brother Jose Molina. And the fact that neither of them, being brothers, are related to fellow scrub catcher Izzy Molina. That, much more than the eventuality of Ben Weber holding a bat, is some shit.

10. Benji != Bengie.

11. Schoeneweis means “beautiful-point” in German.

12. John Lackey is actually a lackey.

13. If the Angels were a band, they would be the reunited version of New Edition.

14. If the Angels were a movie, they would be Forever Young starring Mel Gibson.

15. If the Angels were an author, they would the guy who wrote Hatchet.

WHY THE GIANTS ARE MORE OK THAN THE ANGELS:

1. Benito Santiago. There can only be one.

a. Benito Santiago paid his friend $1.1 million because his insurance company wouldn’t pay for the friend’s six-month stay after an auto accident.

b. Benito Santiago has been playing major league baseball since your author was five years old.

c. The likelihood of Benito Santiago ascending to heaven, on a scale of one to Benito Santiago ascending to heaven, is about a 92.

d. Benito Santiago used to wear number oh-nine. Not nine. Oh-nine.

e. Quoth Benito: “I don’t hit women. I was married for nine years and I had ladies before in the past. I always treated them like ladies. And I treated this woman like a lady. That’s my style.”

f. Benito Santiago was born in 1865, the year the American Civil War ended.