Happy Memorial Day everyone. Today all Major League Baseball players across this great country of ours will honor the veterans who have sacrificed to preserve our freedoms by wearing special caps with MLB logos filled with the glorious stars and stripes. Well, sadly, only almost all.  For twenty unlucky American players, one unlucky Puerto Rican player, two unlucky Venezuelan players and two unlucky Domican players, they’ll be forced to wear this offensive monstrosity:

Disgusting, right?  It just makes you want to puke up some Memorial Day barbecue, doesn’t it?  Well, I’ve set star 7IS designer Kevin Lager to correcting this indignity, and hopefully MLB will get this right in time for July 4th.  Because wouldn’t this 7IS alternative be a helluva lot better:

Our troops and veterans deserve no less.

U! S! A! U! S! A!

There’s a woman’s hockey team out there that has a powerful lesson for the woeful Chicago Cubs this season, and I’m not overreacting.

The lone skater in white is a player for the North Vancouver Hot Shots, a woman’s hockey team who “competed” this past weekend in Las Vegas at the Canadian Hockey Enterprises Gambler’s Cup Hockey Tournament.

I use the term “competed” loosely.

Faced with a 2-1 deficit late in the Championship game versus the heroic, virtuous and stunningly beautiful Hockey Honeys of Calgary, the Hot Shots of North Vancouver quit. Literally. They skated off the ice with two minutes to go, awarding the Hockey Honeys the title by default.

As the saying goes, “when the going gets tough, quit.”

The North Vancouver Hot Shots knew they didn’t have a chance to overcome a deficit as steep at 2-1. They knew they lacked the strength, the fortitude, and the sports(wo)manship to see the game to its end. They knew they were outclassed, outmatched, outskilled, and outworked all game long, and they’d had enough.

And thanks to the righteous path taken by the North Vancouver Hot Shots women’s hockey team, we have a lesson for the Chicago Cubs men’s baseball team.

Quit.

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It turns out that every single MLB nickname is offensive. Stick with me here…

In name, the Fighting Sioux are no more, which opens the door to other sports teams changing their nicknames due in-part to political correctness. The problem with Major League Baseball is that every single team nickname is wildly offensive.

Baltimore Orioles - Sounds like Oreos, and obesity is killing the G-8 nations.

Boston Red Sox - Grammatically and democratically offensive, which is a double whammy.

New York Yankees – This name is far too sexual for America.

Tampa Bay Rays – Named after Rachael Ray, who offends anyone who has taste or dignity (or both).

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On June 17, 2009, three nefarious Canadians committed the foulest of crimes in Cincinnati’s home of the Reds: The Great American Ballpark. Their crime? Buying Beer… as Canadians! This is part four of their story.

Canadian Kevin, pictured below (he’s the cute one), although a fan of The Clash, is known to greatly prefer Joe Strummer’s later work with The Mescaleros – specifically Global A Go-Go, which he claims is one of the greatest albums of all-time. Kevin bats left-handed, and hits for contact because he has very little power – even by beer-league standards.

 
Kevin was the third of the Canadian Three that 7th Inning Stache was able to contact and interview for his side of the story regarding the international incident that was created when he and his friends had the audacity to buy beer, as Canadians, in Cincinnati’s Great American Ballpark.

7th Inning Stache: Thanks Kevin for being brave enough to share your ordeal with us.

Kevin: Thank you for being brave enough to publish it. When we got back to Canada, we contacted a few of our favourite (and *cough* more popular *cough*) baseball blogs with our tale-of-woe, and it was just too hot for anyone else to touch.

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My love of baseball is strong enough that I can endure – and even enjoy – books. This off-season I ploughed through delights like As They See ‘Em and You Gotta Have Wa, and I’m not going to lie to you, it barely felt like I was actually reading. Even my current casual reader, a book on Cubs history cleverly titled The Cubs, hasn’t once reminded me of being forced to read The Chrysalids in Mr. Randall’s monotonous Grade 10 English class.

I picked up a copy of The Baseball Codes today, and though I’d love to have a review up while the book is new and (presumably) topical, I simply don’t read that fast. I think I type faster than I read, and I type with my index fingers only.

Timing is everything, however, when it comes to baseball blogging (I hear Chalk loves that word), so I’m not going to let something as trivial as having actually read the book stand in the way of a solid review. Hell, I bought the damn book, what else do you want?

Let’s start this review off with a bang. Jesus H. Christ on a crutch, check out this cover:

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On June 17, 2009, three nefarious Canadians committed the foulest of crimes in Cincinnati’s home of the Reds: The Great American Ballpark. Their crime? Buying Beer… as Canadians! This is part three of their story.

Canadian Gerald, pictured above (he’s the one wearing shorts, some sort of Reds merchandise, and holding an illegal beer), is a baseball encyclopedia. Ask him who played center field for the Texas Rangers in 1985. While most people would answer, “who cares?”, Gerald will tell you it was Oddibe McDowell, who was also the first Ranger to hit for the cycle… and he also sported a slick pencil ‘stache.

Gerald was the second of the Canadian Three that 7th Inning Stache was able to contact and interview for his side of the story regarding the international incident that was created when he and his friends had the audacity to buy beer, as Canadians, in Cincinnati’s Great American Ballpark.

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Milton Bradley didn’t like Chicago and now all the Cublogosphere is up in arms.

If Canada’s epic victory over Team USA in last Sunday’s Olympic Gold Medal game taught us anything, it taught us that every now and then Canada needs to step in and tell America who knows better, who is better, and who will always being looking up to their impressive neighbour to the north.

It really is too bad your country doesn’t care about hockey, because if you did, you’d already have perspective on this overblown Milton Bradley saga and you’d have moved on by now.

Though the circumstances differ, the story is the same. While Bradley blamed Chicago for his poor performance as a Cub in 2009 which lead to his trade to Seattle in the off-season, Chris Pronger blamed Edmonton for a dissatisfied socialite wife while he was an Oiler in 2006 which lead to his trade to the (no-longer Mighty) Ducks in the off-season. The subtle differences are moot, because in both cases, both players became Public Enemy #1 in their respective former cities.

What happened to Edmonton after 2006?

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The Big Hurt Frank Thomas is retiring today.  He will be remembered as a pretty good slugger on some bad White Sox teams, then as an injured bitching and moaning old veteran on the White Sox World Series team who plopped around to random places after.

Most of all though, I will remember him as being BANNED FROM CANADIAN TELEVISION.

In his short Toronto tenure, he made this short Blue Jays spot which Canadian television censors forced to be edited down before being shown on Canadian television.  They were reacting I’m sure to shrill Canadian cries of “Violence, eh!” and “Child Abuse, eh!” and “Big Scary Black Man, eh!”

The video has been removed from youTube by the selfish (or censor-happy) bastards at MLB, but I found another version for you to enjoy and be REALLY, REALLY SHOCKED by: