The Jays are by no means a cellar dweller in the American League, but they're not anywhere near contention due to both the Red Sox and Yankees returning to form in the same year. Hello 1996-2013! Since the Jays are well out of the playoff race and have a plethora of veterans on their roster, we've gotten back to what was once the most exciting part of being a Jays fan during the dark ages: The Non-Waiver Trade Deadline. Three players have already been shipped off, with Toronto sports fans chiming in that the trades were terrible, like clockwork, and there are several more to go still. When you are looking forward to the future of the team, rather than the present, as the Jays are now, this time is the most exciting because it represents an influx of hope with new young players and a way to ignore the truly forgettable baseball being played by *checks notes* Justin Smoak and Jaime Garcia?!. Most will not work out, but some might!
For many years as fan, this was mostly what I had to look forward to. It was always that if we could send off either Troy Glaus or Bengie Molina or even sadly Scott Rolen to get someone to pair with Lunchbox, Arencibia, and Mr. Intensity, we'd be sure to be in the playoffs in no time. We're back to that now and just like watching them start to lose again last year, it sucks, but is also a little sweet and comfortable.
People romanticize being a die-hard fan of a losing team a lot, but that's mostly done when that team eventually starts winning. You can easily smile while looking back on the harder times because you can now see what it all led to. It's easy to forget that it's mostly just bad baseball played by middling players while you wait for trades and the future.
I still wouldn't have it any other way though.
In other news: Music!
I came across Buddy's new album Harlan and Alondra by way of an excellent article on The Ringer. They describe it as "a sweltering piece of R&B that beads on the skin and paints a necessarily unfinished picture of Buddy and the city he’s from." That works! The whole album is great and is for sure my favourite rap album of the year so far. I think that I could get real deep into more stuff with this vibe.
Also getting pumped regularly is Marshall Crenshaw's self-titled first album. Duff suggested it to me because he knows that I will blare any and all power-pop and also that I love 80's-style production. Those two things combine flawlessly here and as soon as the bassline on "There She Goes Again" took off, I knew I would be super into this for the rest of the summer. Big hooks and perfectly corny longing lyrics that I flip for every time.
We now move on to the third section of the blog post: Books!
I'm currently reading The Great American Novel™️ for the first time, as I had designated it my "challenge" book of the year. It also wound up being a primary influence on the current show of the gallery, so I'm really going all-in on our summer programming. Given the book's high standing, length, and the fact that it was written in 1851, I thought it would be a tough read, but I've found it really easy going so far. The story is one of those that you immediately recognize as archetypal as soon as you start it and there are multiple long stretches of explaining that whales are fish because The Bible says so. It's also surprisingly anti-racist.
Initially, I was fretting about needing to write a post, but having no inspiration to write anything. I then rationalized that I could just start with baseball, music, and books and see where we got from there. Those three things make up a pretty big part of my identity, so why not ruminate on those? Way better than working through two or three "I have nothing to write about" paragraphs before getting to the point, right?
No comments:
Post a Comment