MITCH BEATEN: DEALERS COME BACK AGAINST BEERS, ALLAY FEARS OF WINLESS YEAR, ENJOY JORDAN'S TEARS

RECAP: Saturday brought a showcase of genial futility to Potrero Hill Rec Center, as the addled 0-4 Oakland Beers met the rattled 0-4 Mission Street Dealers in a battle to see who would be saddled with the title of "2014 Daly City Brians." Our squad was somewhat anemic, as Mark, Crizzle and Toes were off getting drunk somewhere scenic, although I won't be too hard on those bros, lest this blog entry devolve into polemic. Jimmy McConnell, New Romantic crooner with talent to burn, took the mound against his former team and Jameson Kern, a punky guy who throws wobbly pitches that just sort of die. Throughout the first five it was a seesaw affair, the lead changing hands while lice frolicked in my hair, the Dealers scoring once and the Beers scoring twice while the lice laid eggs that looked like small grains of rice. The Beers took a lead of siete to seis, and I daydreamed of punching Stonehouse in the face, though my resentment did prove to be quite premature, when the Beers tacked on seven-it was hard to endure. 14 to 6 the Mission boys trailed, and it looked like the Dealers would once again fail, when our hitters decided to put up a fight, in a rousing display that made my pants tight. Spoon doubled, Mick singled, I got hit in the shoulder; John singled, Abe walked, we all got older. Jimmy got a hit, and Rob strode to the plate; a single soon followed for the man called "F8." Spoon got on again and I came up with 'em loaded: I lined out to center and my liver exploded. The inning was over but the Dealers had life; Jesse pitched well, did you know he's my wife? In the bottom of the 8th, we made another ruckus; their closer came in, ready to fuckus. Bases loaded, down three, Mitch Eaton and me; I respectfully filled my jockstrap with pee. I swung with great effort and sent the ball soaring; four feet down the line, because baseball is boring. The dribbler worked out, and after Mickey FC'd, Eric Rosen came up like Judas of Galilee. He went down 1-2 and then smashed one dead center: into Chad's glove the ball seemed to enter. But then it popped out, and the bases were cleared; big hits against Eaton are shocking and weird. Into the 9th, the drama still thick: runners on the corners, a batter with no dick. Kristina lined her first pitch to the gap; J.P. dove and caught it then took a quick nap. Charlie came up as Oakland's last hope; he fouled out to first and the Dealers were stoked. Victory at last, for the blue and the gold: mighty and brave, alcoholic and old.

JORG HAIDER DRIVE OF THE GAME: This blast was described in the verses above, and it could only be Rosen, from New York with love. Swings like DiMaggio, heart strong and true; what can I say, I love that big jew.

GREGOR BLANCO PLAY OF THE GAME: John P. Segura, plucky and spry; playing center field, don't ask me why. Melendez's liner made us all hold our breath; John hustled over, high on crystal meth. He dove and he caught it and he leapt to his feet; the runner on third beat a hasty retreat. I salute our captain with this purple ode: did you know he lost his virginity to Depeche Mode?

MARK MOSS OF THE GAME: For this award, the criteria's vague; it began as a joke and now it's a plague. Jesse and Mickey can share it this day: they hit and they fielded and Mark was away.

QUOTE OF THE GAME: that tortured noise Will Cornyn made when I showed him my belly; he acted disgusted but I think he's just jelly

SPOON: FIVE FREAKIN HITS just cum on my tits


ANTHEM OF THE GAME: 

STATS 

CLEANERS 9, DEALERS 7: DEALERS JUMP OUT TO EARLY LEAD, REMEMBER THAT THEY'RE THE DEALERS

"Your guys' kid is going to have a blog dedicated to Flogging Molly."

-Elias Perez, bizarrely insinuating a romance between

me and Cameron from the Cleaners

The legendary English actor Charles Laughton, star of early talkies such as The Private Life of Henry VIII, Mutiny on the Bounty, and The Barretts of Wimpole Street, liked to eat shit.

"Bowers brought over a young man to Laughton’s house, and Laughton proceeded to carefully wash crisp lettuce leaves and tomatoes and place them on two slices of bread while the young man was told to strip completely and perch up on a counter top. He put the sandwich on a plate and grabbed a pot. He told the young man to follow him, and they were gone for 15 minutes. When they came back, Bowers could see that the lettuce and tomatoes had been smeared with a light brown substance. Bowers writes, “It looked like gravy or peanut butter or some sort of sandwich spread."

Unlike Laughton, the 0-3 Dealers took the field against the scat-brown Richmond Cleaners looking to break this habit. The consensus that's built up around the Cleaners in the past few years is that they're alcoholic Irish construction workers who are short on talent but periodically recruit ex-MLB prospects to pitch for them, possibly for money. To their credit, we haven't seen many of those guys this year, possibly because the Cleaners ran out of money. Taking the mound against Jesse was Steve Kerwin, an OG PCHLer and Good Guy who has never been known to tuck his t-shirt into his baseball pants. Jesse, who wears tight black jeans on the mound as some kind of encoded sexual signal to somebody (me) easily dispatched the Cleaners with three weak ground balls in the top of the first. In the bottom half we jumped on Kerwin for three runs, coming by way of a Spoon walk, a Chris "topher" Adams double, a single by your reliable wordsmith Sam Bull (for that self-description, Crizzle just artfully implied that i have a vagina), and then a fucking RBI TRIPLE by Jesse, which made me tired. Jesse dispatched the Cleaners in the second with another effortless inning, and then S.K. was replaced by Hank Seaman, a man whose name pretty much does my job of making fun of him. Jimmy led off with a single, John walked, Rob Spector flied out to center as he's been stubbornly doing since the dawn of time, Abe walked, Moss singled, and then Spoon, Mickey and I walked with the bases loaded for a total of four runs. Hank was yanked for Cleaners manager Shawn "Boof" Wyman, who struck out Jesse in a creepy portent of things to come.

A WORD ON THIS FUCKING GUY

There's been a lot of noise about jocks and ringers and PEDs since this league started, but this asshole somehow transformed himself from an unremarkable pitcher with poor control into Steve Carlton, and I feel justified in calling him out. Piss in the cup, Boof.

u still can't hit tho

After going up 7-0, we became relaxed and magnanimous, swinging at bad pitches so as to speed up the Cleaners' inevitable defeat and get them home in time for the tail end of the Warriors game. What can I say: we're not very bright. Seven runs turned out to be the limit for us, as Boof was lights out for the next six innings. The Cleaners scored four runs in the fifth thanks mostly to some heartbreaking defensive near-successes, then another three in the seventh to tie it up. I rarely delve into the details of the opposing teams' offensive success, because it always looks cheap and lucky to me, so all I'll say is this: I really hate that little scrunchy Rickey Henderson guy on the Cleaners who crowds the plate in the hope that he'll be hit by a baseball.

In the bottom of the eighth, Crizzle led off and quickly went down 0-2 with his patented "'Zatoichi the Blind Swordsman" technique of swinging really hard with his eyes closed, but then Boof plunked him. I came up and duplicated Crizzle's at-bat, wildly swinging and missing twice and then taking a breaking ball to the knee which I'll admit I did not try very hard to avoid. Jesse was next, and he roped a solid single to the right-center gap, only it was different than most singles in that the center fielder caught it on the fly and doubled Crizzle off second. (No finger-pointing here, I was also a mile off first base and could conceivably have been "tripled" off.)

In the top of the 9th, the Cleaners, well, they scored twice, in excruciating fashion, aided by some defensive confusion involving potential double plays that weren't and some sketchy calls. I really hate talking about this stuff. I still felt hopeful about a comeback until I realized the Cleaners have fucking Danny as their closer, a guy who actually wears the "washed-out MLB prospect" jacket WITHOUT hyperbole. We are, let's face it, on an insufficient plane of time and space and perception to hit a guy like Danny, even though John managed to get on base by catching a pitch with his leg. We lost. 

Way to clean up yer crap, "Cleaners" where are

the Chinese when you need em

The Cleaners brought this in case anyone needed

to terminate a pregnancy mid-game

(joke credit: H. Lando)

JESUS H. CHRIST PLAY OF THE CENTURY: Abraham "El Patriarca" Nunez. Based loaded, one out, one-run game, fly ball smashed to the right-center gap. He's not gonna get there. No fucking way he gets there. The ball is about to drop and he's still five miles away. Then he dives into the air, fully extended-like Superman, or my dick right now-and somehow bends the fabric of space, Warp Drive-style, and catches the ball. Best Dealer play I've ever seen. I wish somebody could have captured it for the ages. Oh wait, I totally fucking did.

Honorable mentions: Mickey's demented backhanded absorption of a screaming shorthopper hit deep in the hole at short, and Eric Rosen somehow spearing that line drive from Danny that was hit so hard I didn't even see it. 

HARLEY-DAVIDSON DRIVE OF THE GAME: jesse's triple it was good his hair is nice i'm over him tbh

PURPLE HEART OF THE GAME: This suppurating infected wound on my thigh, the result of a play at the plate and inadvertent spiking from some dirty Cleaner. If this thing gets amputated Louie Rappoport is really gonna have the last laugh

CRIZZLE PUFF RAGE OF THE GAME: When we picked off a Cleaner at second via the classic "center fielder creeps up quietly" move (we had this in Little League-it was code-named "Mizuno"-it never worked) but the guy was called safe. Crizzle has more passion than the rest of the team combined. Sometimes I fall asleep listening to a looped mp3 I made of Crizzle screaming

PLAYER OF THE GAME: I haven't been doing this because you're all such amazing snowflakes that it hurts me to rank you in any way. 

MARK MOSS OF THE GAME: Mark Moss

STATS

(please lmk if I fucked these up, I trust y'all)



MISSION STREET DEALERS: PROVIDING CUTE, INSPIRATIONAL WALKOFF WINS FOR OTHER TEAMS SINCE 2011. DCB 11, MSD 10 (10)

It's been a while since I blogged at ya'll, my productivity predictably diminished by depression, alcoholism and sexual dysfunction. I'm basically late-stage Eugene O'Neill if he didn't get haircuts and had a Nintendo Gamecube. So consider yourselves lucky that Saturday's game provided us with so much florid suffering that I couldn't NOT write about it. I didn't even write about the 29er game, and that one involved an actual, literal ambulance. 


After losing our first two games to various skateboarders and nerds, we went to Crocker Amazon (Crocker? Really? I heard the Brians tried  to get Rolph but decided it was "too classy") looking for our first  victory since the invention of fire. Our opponents were the Daly 
City Brians, a team whose most marked improvement since last year was in the field of "dressing less horribly." I got to the field shortly before the scheduled first pitch and was the only Dealer there, in contrast to the roughly 300 Brians playing catch and doing jumping jacks and piercing each others' ears. Eric, Mickey and Abraham trickled in, and the four of us decided we could take 'em. Abe would pitch, I would catch, Mickey would be a rover, and Eric would handle our money. 

The main reason that anti-Semitic joke was terrible is that

none of us have money, least of all Eric.

Eventually enough guys showed up that the prospect of playing baseball evolved from "farce" to "black comedy," and the game was on. Abraham, a vicious woodland creature named for the biblical figure who invented the sneer, took the bump and pitched damn well for a guy who was also named after our gayest president.

Abraham, shown here trying to sell a diseased

sex donkey to a pretty youth.

We got out to an early 2-1 lead, which is rare for us. Our vibe is usually more "failed comeback" than "scoring in the first inning." The Brians managed to score some runs, which I won't get into in detail because when I talk about the Brians I get so bored I have to slam my balls in a drawer just to feel something. Abraham and Jimmy pitched really well. The runs they gave up felt like bullshit. We started scoring for real around the fourth inning, erasing a five or six-run deficit with quality at-bats from the likes of Abraham, Mickey, Jesse, Spoon, me, a couple of elderly Chinese can collectors, pretty much everyone. Team effort. We traded blows evenly into the bottom of the ninth inning, when some guy presumably named Brian made it to third base with one out. Jimmy saved the game by masterfully inducing a pair of popouts, and we headed into extra innings, brimming with confidence from our history of losing every extra-inning game we've ever played.

Mark Moss led off the top of the tenth with a screamer down the third base line, scampering into second like a hungover bunny. (Do bunnies get fucked up? Fermented carrots?) Spoon advanced him to third with a perfectly placed grounder to the right side (I was the only one screaming praise at him for this, because I like the little things and am a thoroughly awkward person) and then Mickey smoked a clean base hit to center, which he didn't have to do (a fly ball or slow grounder would have worked) but was nice of him. We went into the bottom of the tenth looking to slam the door on those bluish-gray bags of carbon for our first win of the season, and after their first batter flied out to the sexy hairdo playing center field, things were looking good. But then some bad things happened. The Brians loaded the bases in their typical raggedy horseshit style, and the next batter hit a deep fly to center that got over Jesse's head. The winning run was scored by Elias Perez, a man whose speed is measured in geologic eras.

Please don't kick my ass if you're reading this EJ, despite

my size I am incredibly weak and a noted coward

Jesse ran off the field, jumped on his Harley and drove it straight off the Golden Gate Bridge, landing safely in a newly-installed suicide-prevention net because of course he'd fuck that up too.

Pete Kozma Play of the Game: I'm going to give this space to Mark Moss because he's always great and I don't want to acknowledge that the defensive play of the game was Kyle Smeallie's game-saving (for the Brians) catch of Eric Rosen's super-clutch shoulda-been base hit in the later innings. Kyle looks like Wolverine. I'd post a pic of Hugh Jackman but that just looks like a compliment

Drazen Petrovic Drive of the Game: Eric Rosen's super-clutch shoulda-been base hit in the seventh that got caught by fucking Wolverine

Honorable Mention: Spoon's mammoth blast over the right-fielders head in the I think seventh? Dude was on ABSINTHE at the time. He's like Pete Rose mixed with Arthur Rimbaud and left out in the Nevada desert for a few years. Also, of course, Moss and Mickey's hits in the tenth inning etc.

Roscoe Arbuckle Sad Fatty Moment of the Game: Me failing to take second base on an overthrow because i was too tired and distracted from having to run ninety feet. With Jesse's base hit coming afterwards, it could have won the game for us. Which brings us to the 

River Phoenix Sad Prettyboy Moment of the Game: Jesse getting picked off. 

Raoul Wallenberg Self-Endangering Act of Bravery of the Game: The great hobbled bear, Andrew Gomez, drawing a walk and playing an inning at first base against the advice of every medical professional in his employ (the quacks AND the real ones)  

Mark Moss of the Game: Mark Moss

Rob Spector Sighting: confirmed

Was This All Crizzle's Fault? yes, probably would have won if he was there

STATS COMING TOMORROW

SOMEBODY CHECK ON JESSE

I'M WORRIED