Dear reader(s),
Recently I found this article on the Yahoo Sports. I read it assuming it would be good for a laugh or two since clearly there are exactly ZERO "best things about being a Mariners fan" this season. What made me so furious was that the whole top ten list was so serious, humorless and 100% lacking in originality or entertainment value. Naturally I had to write up a rebuttal. Hopefully slightly more fun to read. Welcome to hell:
Top Ten Ways To Immediately Improve the Seattle Mariners Baseball Team
**note**
if you are expecting this to be a remotely tasteful top ten list or
anything that should qualify to be read by anyone, you are guaranteed to
be disappointed. Not only that but you will wish you had never read
this. In fact, you may never dare to log into facebook ever again..
Congratulations. You just checked into the mental illness hotel. Enjoy
your stay. **end note**
10. I'll start slow admittedly. Trade Ichiro. I know how that sounds but listen to the logic:
Then we can once again call the right field bleachers "The Bone Yard". Area 51 bothers me. Always did. I had a conversation with a person a few years ago that had sat in the right field bleachers. I said "oh cool you sat in the boneyard!"
the person just stared at me clueless. No recollection of the great Jay Buhner. Not many people would even know how to react today to that kind of unbridled thunder in the batting order. I say more Jay Buhner. Be it on the tv broadcast or selling himself like a prostitute as spokesperson on car commercials or hardware store ads. I can't knock him. He is the bone. More Buhner. More Bone Yard. Unfortunately this means no more Ichiro. Sor-ry.
9. Start selling tickets by the inning. Baseball
equivalent to the hourly rate hotel. My guess is on average three
innings worth is just about enough for any given ticket holder to get
the idea that what they are watching is a joke. Just about the time
they realize they can't take anymore, "oh hey good I only paid for 3
innings anyway!"
8. STOP the peanut ban day at the Safeco Field. I am being
serious. One day at the F'ing BALLPARK my only job was to shake down
fans for peanuts like they were sneaking contraband into a prison. I do
not wish to get long-winded on this one. I will say this in closing.
If you are allergic to ballpark food, maybe you should not come to the
ballpark. Sorry for the simple logic there. No, I don't care what your
rich asshole parents have to say. Let us eat our goddamned peanuts in
peace. This would never fly in the Bronx.
7. Stop picking on Ken Griffey Jr. If anything pick on the guy
that put the LazyBoy chair in the clubhouse in the first place. If I
was a washed up future Hall of Famer that was not in the lineup that day
I'd go ahead and take a nap too. Just my opinion.
6. Fire General Manager Jack Zduriencik. I'm surprised I don't
hear this more often from others. I have a feeling some of you might
agree with me. This guy couldn't build a little league team. How dare
he not trade Chone Figgins? I would have traded Figgins for a box of
rocks and eaten his salary just to not put Mariners fans through another
season of him embarassing the team. No excuses. Milton Bradley?!
Eric Byrnes?! An army of young "hitters" that cannot hit? You get the
idea. Pathetic.
5. Find an owner that cares enough to actually come to a game.
The M's play in Japan and the guy still can't get out of the house?
This is sad.
4. Stop dredging up the retired corpses of
players from the glorious 2001 team that didn't even make the world
series. Enough marketing meetings that go something like this:
"Hey how about another 2001 team member throwing out the first pitch...or singing the national anthem?"
"Good idea. I hear Paul Abbott will do just about anything for a free plane ticket and a $20 McDonalds gift card"
"Fantastic! Book him!"
3. Stop broadcasting games on the
radio. Without the late, great Dave Niehaus it is just depressing. I
listened to a few innings the other day. Ken Wilson? Really?
zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
2. Fire Eric Wedge and hire any random drunken ex New York Yankee as Manager. It worked well with Lou Piniella. Too bad Billy Martin is dead. Lets throw out some names. Maybe Donnie Baseball wants out of LA. As long as he is hammered in the post game press conference I don't care who he is.
1. More steroids in the clubhouse. If there is one thing I have
learned from sports related steroid scandals of the past it is that
chemists are always creating new designer steroids that piss tests
cannot yet detect. That is how they get away with taking them. The
players that get caught taking steroids are the ones that screw up and
take the wrong ones that the league is actually testing for. Health
concerns? I don't care. If you play for the Mariners steroids are now
mandatory. Whatever it takes to start lighting up the scoreboard more
than once every two weeks. Trust me fans will return, hope will return,
entertainment will return. Who really cares if athletes take drugs?
We're not talking about surgeons or school bus drivers here. They are
entertainers. Let them entertain us. Baseball was so much better
before drug testing. Just get me back to the 70's please.
*** For the record I self-editted 90% of the hate from this Top Ten. You just never know who is reading and the last thing I need is to end up on a Homeland Security watch list. As if I am not on one already for all the times I have cried for race war and jihad on the internet. Just being on the safe side. Believe me I was proofreading and even I was surprised at the level of white-hot full-on five-star hatred I was spewing. Nobody needs that. I would have been apologizing for the rest of my short life. I think I still improved on the original horrible top ten list that inspired the above.***
