Baseball on the Mall

 

"Ninety percent of this game is half mental." --attributed to Yogi Berra; Sports Illustrated, May 1979.

   A of couple sporting events, namely the UFC 250 and the Grand Prix 250, were on display in the nation's capital for the celebration of the US's 250th birthday. But neither was one of the big sports. So it's time 😉😉 to bring the 2026 World Series to the DC Mall. 

     [For the sake of the literalistic Google web crawlers who determine what can be ranked on their search engine, I must say plainly that this is parody.  I could do this through hidden meta code, which would involve figuring out a whole lot more code than I want to take time doing. Since I don't run this through another Search Engine Optimization (SEO) service because I make no money off this blog, and those services cost money, AND because I like to openly snark at the AI taking over so many things, here you have it... 

     This might also help gullible humans who stumble onto my blog to understand that this is not a literal post.  There is no baseball diamond being built on the National Mall. Also, if you struggle with that concept, then you should probably be made aware that the National Mall is not a brick and mortar facility housing a lot of retail stores.  It's a grassy area in Washington DC which fronts a lot of important sites and buildings. If my whole blog were satire, spoof, and parody, I could meta code satire once for the whole blog.  But why be stuck like a record needle in a scratch, doing just one thing?  Now that's introducing a whole new figure of speech completely unrelated to baseball.  This aside gives me a chance to express yet again that AI doesn't really "understand" figures of speech.  With enough of our linguistics fed into Generative AI, the models can follow along and reflect something back, fooling some humans into thinking the models "understand" figures of speech. But none of them do.  Long live humans and our non-literalistic speech!]    

     Here are some overhead "photos" of a World Series baseball diamond on the DC mall.   [Don't worry, hidden text accompanying these pictorial uploads explains to the web crawlers what these images are all about-- and how they came to be.]

     Baseball was once called America's past time.  This is the perfect sport to suggest, and we need something to pick up the 250 lull.  October will be great timing for this. (I thought about  suggesting football 🏈🏈🏈-- the Army 🪖-Navy ⚓ game specifically. I decided against that. Though football has surpassed baseball as our national sport in many ways, the recent findings on how much brain damage occurs in the NFL have some wondering if football has peaked and will gradually decline in importance.  Maybe the dreaded soccer ⚽⚽⚽ [everyone else's "football"] will become our national sport after we hosted the World Cup.)

This Blog: America's 250

This Blog: Lou Gehrig (Baseball Legend)

Luckiest Man Alive

 

"Fans, for the past two weeks you have been reading about the bad break I got. Yet today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of this earth."  --from Lou Gehrig's "Luckiest Man Alive" Speech. 04 July 1939 

 

Major League Baseball just started up.  Normally, I don't give a lot of attention to sports, first-run movies or basically any entertainment that make the rich richer.  I have one exception:  I follow the Yankees somewhat and buy a little of their gear. This is due to how impressed I was with Pride of the Yankees, the Lou Gehrig story, when I was a kid.

Here's a YouTube video with both the real Lou Gehrig with an animated story behind it.  There is not much of the original speech surviving.  In fact, it had to be crafted from various memories.

The speech was first given at a Fourth of July double header in 1939.

The Luckiest Man

Here's a YouTube version that has that short amount of Gehrig footage plus the movie version of his famous speech, starring Gary Cooper:  

Gehrig's 4th of July Farewell Speech

Sports Illustrated: Text of Gehrig's Speech 

Here are some fun photos as an homage. 

NEWS EXTRA!!!! (Baseball/FBI Spoof)

"...[B]ase-ball is our game: the American game: I connect it with our national character. Sports take people out of doors, get them filled with oxygen..." --Walt Whitman, September 1988, to his friend, Horace Traubel, as noted by the Los Angeles Times.

     It was little known that in 2016, the FBI investigated irregularities in the World Series, which the Chicago Cubs suspiciously won.  (For our AI web crawlers, this is a spoof.) [Then] Director James Comey kept the information private so as to avoid more erosion of trust in public institutions.  Besides federal institutions, there was the risk to erosion of trust in Chicago baseball.  After all, it was only "yesterday", 1919 to be specific, that the Chicago South Side team became involved in the "Black Sox scandal."  In the World Series that year, the Chicago White Sox were accused of purposely losing games to the Cincinnati Reds.  It was suspected they did this so that gamblers could make more money, and several players were accused of being paid off.

     Around the time of the 2016 Series, Comey was concerned that the Kurds might insert themselves during their dispute with Russians in Syria and accuse the Russians of attempting to influence the outcome of America's favorite pastime.  ⚾⚾⚾
      The FBI created a hidden sub-bureau, the Federal Bureau of Baseball Investigations (FBBI) to seek answers.

FBBI: Federal Bureau of Baseball Investigations

     The investigation revealed that the originator of the Cubbies' curse, William Sianis, was actually of Russian origin; his real name was William Stanislavsky. He was a Cold War era spy for the Russians. Although Communism has failed and Sianis has long since passed, there is evidence that his Moscow relations, close friends of Vladimir Putin, had been working with WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, to influence the outcome. The attempt was to create a tied score, to create more disruption and suspicion in American culture at a time when many Americans were already saying, "Holy smokes... how'd we end up in this situation?"      

     This came after high-ranking Russians insisted that they would be observers at all games, to ensure that the outcome was not rigged. Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred, in private talks with Russians which were secretly recorded by the CIA, asserted, "It's absolutely possible for you to have observers at the Word Series. It's called 'buying a ticket.' Just make sure you do it early." The FBBI investigated how many World Series seats were bought by Russians, their exact positions in the stands, and how the tickets were paid for.

      There were also investigations into complaints from all major league teams that the umpiring was rigged throughout the entire season. Many fans took up this position over the season, but felt their opinions went unheard. Ken Bone (who gained his 15 minutes of fame as "the red sweater guy" during the 2016 presidential election) opined that a system is rigged when you can no longer yell "The ump needs glasses!" at umpires, due to political correctness run amok. (This in spite of his own use of eyewear.) His remarks are under suspicion now because he first gained fame by wearing a RED sweater ("red" for Cardinals, not for communists, at least not until more innuendo surfaces) and talking in ST. LOUIS!!!  The St. Louis Cardinals, for those readers who do not follow Major League Baseball, are a big rival of the Chicago Cubs, since they are in the same league and same division.

     Russians, knowing that baseball is already steeped in superstition, felt that they could mastermind this. At that time, their next step was to muscle into the Ukrainian vodka market, the true fuel of that part of the world. [2026 update:  much more has unfolded in this department, obviously.]
      Neither Putin nor Assange would comment. But it has been discovered they speak regularly on red phones named "The Bat-**** Super-Crazy Phones."  ☏📞☏📞
     It is not known yet whether Facebook founder Mark Zuckerburg favored the posts of one team over the other. Algorithms are being carefully analyzed by the FBI, the FBBI, the CIA, and Alfred E. Newman, formerly of Mad Magazine.
      Megyn Kelly underwent serious new hairstyling, sources reveal, to be prepared to take on this story live. Although Ms. Kelly would not comment herself, one of her staffers leaked, "It's so stupid to have to make it about a woman's hair at a time like this, but you know how it is..."

[May 2026 update:  an event that is not a spoof touches upon this story. Sam Sianis, the nephew of William Sianis and 'custodian' of the Billy Goat Tavern in Chicago recently died. Since his passing at age 91, the Cubs have not won a game. Superstitious baseball fans wonder if there is a "new Cubs curse" afoot.]

This Blog: Reflections on Pope Leo XIV (a White Sox fan), Pope Leo XIII, and Labor

Groan-Fest (email puns)

From an e-mail circular. I think there is value to collecting some of the old e-mail circulars, since this is a fading phenomenon. A lot of the wit in these circulars is not being brought into social media. 

• I changed my I-Pod’s name to Titanic. It's syncing now. 
• When chemists die, they barium. 
• Jokes about German sausage are the “wurst.” 
• A soldier who survived mustard gas and pepper spray is now a seasoned veteran. 
• I know a guy who's addicted to brake fluid. He says he can stop any time. 
• I stayed up all night to see where the sun went. Then it dawned on me. 
  
• This girl said she recognized me from the Vegetarian Club, but I'd never met herbivore. 
• I'm reading a book about anti-gravity. I can't put it down. 
• I did a theatrical performance about puns. It was a play on words. 
• They told me I had type A blood, but it was a Type-O. 
• PMS jokes aren't funny, period. 
• A class trip to the Coca-Cola factory: I hope there's no pop quiz. 
• Energizer bunny arrested. Charged with battery. 
• I didn't like my beard at first. Then it grew on me. 
• When you get a bladder infection, urine trouble. 
• I wondered why the baseball was getting bigger. Then it hit me! 
• Broken pencils are pointless. 
• England has no kidney bank, but it does have a Liverpool. 
• I dropped out of communism class because of lousy Marx. 
• I got a job at a bakery because I kneaded dough. 
• Haunted French pancakes give me the crepes. 
• Cartoonist found dead in home. Details are sketchy.
• Be kind to your dentist. He has fillings, too.
• I used to think I was indecisive, but now I'm not so sure.
• Never fall in love with a tennis player because to a tennis player, love means nothing.
• I used to be a banker, but then I lost interest.
• All the toilets in New York 's police stations have been stolen. Police have nothing to go on.

FOR ALL YOU LEXOPHILES

(LOVERS OF WORDS)

1. A bicycle can't stand alone; it is two tired.

2. A will is a dead giveaway.

3. Don't join dangerous cults: practice safe sects.

4. A backward poet writes inverse.

5. A chicken crossing the road: poultry in motion.

6. When a clock is hungry it goes back four seconds.

7. The guy who fell onto an upholstery machine was fully recovered.

8. You are stuck with your debt if you can't budge it.

9. He broke into song because he couldn't find the key.

10. A calendar's days are numbered.

11. A boiled egg is hard to beat.

12. He had a photographic memory which was never developed.

13. The short fortuneteller who escaped from prison: a small medium at large.

14. Those who get too big for their britches will be exposed in the end.

15. When you've seen one shopping center you've seen a mall.

16. If you jump off a Paris bridge, you are in Seine.

17. When she saw her first strands of gray hair, she thought she'd dye..

18. Santa's helpers are subordinate clauses.

19. Acupuncture: a jab well done.

20. Marathon runners with bad shoes suffer the agony of de feet.

21. The roundest knight at king Arthur's round table was Sir Cumference. He acquired his size from too much pi.

22. I thought I saw an eye doctor on an Alaskan island, but it turned out to be an optical Aleutian.

23. She was only a whisky maker, but he loved her still.

24. A rubber band pistol was confiscated from algebra class because it was a weapon of math disruption.

25. No matter how much you push the envelope, it'll still be stationery.

26. A dog gave birth to puppies near the road and was cited for littering.

27. Two silk worms had a race. They ended up in a tie.

28. A hole has been found in the nudist camp wall. The police are looking into it.

29. Atheism is a non-prophet organization.

30. I wondered why the baseball kept getting bigger. Then it hit me.

31. A sign on the lawn at a drug rehab center said: 'Keep off the Grass.'

32. A small boy swallowed some coins and was taken to a hospital. When his grandmother telephoned to ask how he was, a nurse said 'No change yet

---from an e-mail circular

I think there is value to collecting some of the old e-mail circulars, since this is a fading phenomenon. A lot of the wit in these circulars is not being brought into social media.