I Look Like I’m Having a Stroke, I’m Missing Cake But, At Least The Sounds are in First!

It’s been a great start to the season. Seriously. It feels like 2005 all over again. In 2005 the Brewers put together a AAA roster that included potential superstars Prince Fielder and Rickie Weeks and they were as good as advertised. Home runs, stolen bases, incredible athleticism, the whole package. After one month you just looked down on the field and you could see a potential championship. It didn’t hurt that at this time in ’05, Corey Hart was on the verge of being sent back to AA he had such a horrible start and beginning in May hit the switch and started hitting line drives everywhere.

In 2007 the same feeling is starting to overtake me. The Sounds have won six in a row as of this blog and are firing on all cylinders, except hitting with men in scoring position but you can’t have it all. Where would you put it? The pitching staff is tops in the league and the bullpen is shortening the game by three innings almost every time out. The two top prospects the Brewers put in Nashville are playing like top prospects. Opposing pitchers are finding out fast that pitching Ryan Braun down and away does not work all that well, he just hits homers the opposite way. Iowa found out tonight that trying to jam Braun will result in Braun getting a free guitar for bouncing one off the scoreboard. Pitch him away? Nope. Pitch him in? Ouch. I’ve been in baseball for 16 years and the only place left is down the middle……….Let me know how that works out.

Yovanni Gallardo had a rough first start. He was a little nervous and was leaving some pitches up and in AAA those get hit…hard. He shooed the butterflies away before his second start and struck out 12 New Orleans Zephyrs in six innings. It helped that New Orleans hitters somehow got the idea that major league baseball expanded the strike zone. Previously it had been from the knees to just below the letters, but the Mets AAA club was operating under the impression that the strike zone was being called from just below Grants Tomb to the moon. I really did think that Gallardo would throw a fastball and Lastings Milledge would hit himself in the head. Milledge is the big prospect for the Mets but from what we saw, he is to outfield defense what blenders are to brain surgery. In his first game he managed to strike out on a pitch over his head, butcher a fly ball and get picked off of first. The only way he could have hurt the Zephyr’s worse would have been to run over pitching prospect Phillip Humber in the dugout and then take the mound and give up JD Closser’s game deciding homer. That would have been the …. I don’t know…quadfecta or whatever word means screwing up each and every aspect of the game.

Back to Gallardo. He’s real good. Good velocity, good control, unflappable, keeps the ball low and knows what he is doing. Fun to watch. He even fields his position well. He’s put in two very solid efforts and while it is great to see Gallardo and Braun excel at AAA, it also means we will probably lose them all that sooner to the big leagues.

The Tennessean did a very nice feature on me in Mid April. In my ten years with the Sounds I had never had one written about me and it was a lot of fun. Finally a forum for my communist views! I tried to explain to the reporter, the very patient Bryan Mullen, that Leprechauns really were living in my attic, but he cut that out of the article. He asked me about my background which turns out to be one of lying (that’s how I got into the biz) vice (I bartended in the off-season for the last five years) and addiction (I am a huge Jane’s Addiction fan) I didn’t get a chance to wax poetic about my love of baseball and of Nashville, the closest I came was “Boston Baked and Fried has awesome Buffalo Grouper Tenders!” Not exactly Vin Scully is it?

Then came the bad part. The picture. There is a very good reason I am on the radio. I can’t smile for the camera. I always look like I’m having a stroke and the longer I have to smile the more I look like I ran face first into a patio door. They tried everything to get me to look normal to no avail. I looked like I needed sleep while at the same time having my face screw up like I swallowed a lemon. Luckily the article was fun and I didn’t come off as the curmudgeonly lunatic I really am and even my mom liked it (Though she did say the picture was horrible. Whose fault is that? Huh Mom?)

We are going through a craptastic part of the schedule. Gone for eight days, home for four, gone for eight, home for four……Wait! What the hell?!. Greer Stadium may not be as nice At&T Bricktown Ballpark but at least I get to sleep in my own bed! I had to leave my dog a picture of me so he’d remember that I own the place. The worst part is that some music festival I have never heard of is taking place May 11^th and 12^th at Riverfront Park and I will be in Colorado Springs (lucky me). One of my favorite bands, Cake, is playing. They are an incredibly inventive talented group who somehow turned Gloria Gaynor’s 70’s disco anthem “I Will Survive” into a very cool song. I will hate to miss them but Colorado Springs awaits! (Kill me now……please).

Here are two more bands you should go see. They play country mostly, though one plays a lot of covers and not enough of their amazing originals and the other plays on the road so much I never get to see her unless I’m in North Dakota or Jackson Hole, WY and lets face it, who is? In any case they are both incredible, beautiful and don’t run the other way when they see me.

The first is Magnolia, you can catch them in various Nashville locales, the other is Marci Mitchell and you should catch her when she is in town because she doesn’t get to play here much though she promises that will change.

Opening Day is Here! (TAPS WATCH) What Took You So Long?

In 1955 Detroit Tigers Hall of Fame broadcaster Ernie Harwell wrote an essay/poem for “The Sporting News” on Opening Day. Harwell was only a teenager in Atlanta, GA when he convinced “The Sporting News” that he was a much older much wiser man and deserved to cover the Atlanta Crackers for the number sports paper in the country. Harwell later became the voice of the Crackers and made the move to the big leagues with the Dodgers. He became a state icon in Michigan after he moved to Detroit with his famous catchphrases such as “He stood there like the house by the side of the road and watched it go by.” when a batter took strike three, or when a foul ball was hit into the stands at Tiger Stadium exclaiming, “That was caught by a fan from_______” and inserting the name of a nearby town or city.

The essay/poem he wrote became so popular that “Sporting News” ran it every Opening Day for years, right inside the front cover. As we get ready to start the 2007 season and a chance for a thrird straight division title I can’t think of any way to express what baseball means to me and thousands of other fans than to reprint this poem, titled “A Game for all America” by Ernie Harwell. It doesn’t hurt that this poem, considered a baseball masterpiece makes mention of Sulphur Dell.

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A Game For All America

By Ernie Harwell

Baseball is President Eisenhower tossing out the first ball of the season; and a pudgy schoolboy playing catch with his dad on a Mississippi farm. Its the big league pitchers who sin in night clubs. And the Hollywood singer who pitches to the Giants in spring training.

A tall, thin old man waving a scorecard from his dugout -- that's baseball. So is the big, fat guy with a bulbous nose running out one of his 714 home runs with mincing steps.

It's America, this baseball. A re-issued newsreel of boyhood dreams. Dreams lost somewhere between boy and man. It's the Bronx cheer and the Baltimore farewell. The left-field screen in Boston, the right-field dump at Nashville's Sulphur Dell, the open stands in San Francisco, the dusty, wind-swept diamond at Albuquerque. And a rock home plate and a chicken wire backstop -- anywhere.

There's a man in Mobile who remembers a triple he saw Honus Wagner hit in Pittsburgh 46 years ago. That's baseball. So is the scout reporting that a 16-year-old sandlot pitcher in Cheyenne is the new "Walter Johnson."

It's a wizened little man shouting insults from the safety of his bleacher seat. And a big, smiling first baseman playfully tousling the hair of a youngster outside the players' gate.

Baseball is a spirited race of man against man, reflex against reflex. A game of inches. Every skill is measured. Every heroic, every failing is seen and cheered -- or booed. And then becomes a statistic.

In baseball, democracy shines its clearest. Here the only race that matters is the race to the bag. The creed is the rule book. Color is something to distinguish one team's uniform from another.

Baseball is Sir Alexander Fleming, discoverer of penicillin, asking his Brooklyn hosts to explain Dodger signals. It's player Moe Berg speaking seven languages and working crossword puzzles in Sanskrit. It's a scramble in the box seats for a foul -- and a $125 suit ruined. A man barking into a hot microphone about a cool beer, that's baseball. So is the sportswriter telling a .383 hitter how to stride, and a 20-victory pitcher trying to write his impressions of the World Series.

Baseball is a ballet without music. Drama without words. A carnival without kewpie dolls.

A housewife in California couldn't tell you the color of her husband's eyes, but she knows that Yogi Berra is hitting .337, has brown eyes and used to love to eat bananas with mustard. That's baseball. So is the bright sanctity of Cooperstown's Hall of Fame. And the former big leaguer, who is playing out the string in a Class B loop.

Baseball is continuity. Pitch to pitch. Inning to inning. Game to game. Series to series. Season to season.

It's rain, rain, rain splattering on a puddled tarpaulin as thousands sit in damp disappointment. And the click of typewriters and telegraph keys in the press box -- like so many awakened crickets. Baseball is a cocky batboy. The old-timer whose batting average increases every time he tells it. A lady celebrating a home team rally by mauling her husband with a rolled-up scorecard.

Baseball is the cool, clear eyes of Rogers Hornsby, the flashing spikes of Ty Cobb, an overaged pixie named Rabbit Maranville, and Jackie Robinson testifying before a Congressional hearing.

Baseball? It's just a game -- as simple as a ball and a bat. Yet, as complex as the American spirit it symbolizes. It's a sport, business -- and sometimes even religion.

Baseball is Tradition in flannel knickerbockers. And Chagrin in being picked off base. It is Dignity in the blue serge of an umpire running the game by rule of thumb. It is Humor, holding its sides when an errant puppy eludes two groundskeepers and the fastest outfielder. And Pathos, dragging itself off the field after being knocked from the box.

Nicknames are baseball. Names like Zeke and Pie and Kiki and Home Run and Cracker and Dizzy and Dazzy.

Baseball is a sweaty, steaming dressing room where hopes and feelings are as naked as the men themselves. It's a dugout with spike-scarred flooring. And shadows across an empty ballpark. It's the endless list of names in box scores, abbreviated almost beyond recognition.

The holdout is baseball, too. He wants 55 grand or he won't turn a muscle. But, it's also the youngster who hitch-hikes from South Dakota to Florida just for a tryout.

Arguments, Casey at the Bat, old cigarette cards, photographs, Take Me Out to the Ball Game -- all of them are baseball.

Baseball is a rookie -- his experience no bigger than the lump in his throat -- trying to begin fulfillment of a dream. It's a veteran, too -- a tired old man of 35, hoping his aching muscles can drag him through another sweltering August and September.

For nine innings, baseball is the story of David and Goliath, of Samson, Cinderella, Paul Bunyan, Homer's Iliad and the Count of Monte Cristo.

Willie Mays making a brilliant World Series catch. And then going home to Harlem to play stick-ball in the street with his teen-age pals -- that's baseball.

And so is the husky voice of a doomed Lou Gehrig saying, "I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of this earth."

Baseball is cigar smoke, hot-roasted peanuts, The Sporting News, winter trades, "Down in Front," and the "Seventh-Inning Stretch." Sore arms, broken bats, a no-hitter, and the strains of the Star-Spangled Banner.

Baseball is a highly paid Brooklyn catcher telling the nation's business leaders: "You have to be a man to be a big leaguer, but you have to have a lot of little boy in you, too."

This is a game for America, this baseball!

Its still the best poem I ever read.

One of the greatest things about living in Nashville is the music. It reminds me a lot of a minor league stadium in the familiar way it is a part of the city. Whether you run into Mark Knopfler on the street or see Neil Young jump on stage at The Mercy Lounge it’s a cozy music community without all the pretension of an L.A. or New York. Traveling to other cities you realize how lucky you are to have so many musical choices each and every night. I should have done this a long time ago, but Brian Anderson of the Brewers beat me to it in his blog at milwaukeebrewers.com. It’s a great idea and I hope to steer some of you towards some bands and singers who not only make music I like, but are also friends of mine that I have made in my ten years in Nashville as a broadcaster and bartender.

Kim Collins and her husband Scott have been friends of mine for more than four years and its hard to meet two nicer people in this city, or two more talented muscicians.

Scott and his brother front a band that has gone far too long without releasing a new album and that is the only bone I have to pick with him. They are: Pale Blue Dot

Kim Collins not only contributes to Pale Blue Dot but she and Scott have formed their own duo called The Smoking Flowers. I’ll probably link them someday soon, but this time I am going to link Kim’s new band which evolved from her old band, a Nashville favorite called Kim’s Fable. The new band is called Walls of White and they just held their new self titled debut album CD release party at The Basement on April 4^th .

Check them out.

Oh! And PLAY BALL!

P.S. Don't forget to email any questions you may have to chuck@nashvillesounds.com