Adam B is more music than sports
-- he's an editor at the music
website mxdwn.com and a
DJ with Y-Rock on XPN
-- but he's a regular reader
and commenter at The700Level. He sends us these thoughts:
It's entirely plausible that the stratee-gery in Charlie
Manuel's
managing of the National League squad for Tuesday night's All-Star Game didn't pique every Phillies fan's curiosity. So
what's a fan (or a sports blog) supposed to do on the slowest sports day of the year when there's not enough
compelling game action? Look for the weird and the unconventional, of
course.
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First, the weird: It's not out of the realm of possibility that
a
reader or three has seen early Banksy-style
Phillies "P" graffiti around town before, but I noticed something a few
months back that made me really sit up and take notice.
I was finally
able
to take a picture of it and am showing it off here. The tagger (or
taggers)
managed to put a Phillies "P" on the base of just about every old sodium
streetlight along Roosevelt Boulevard between Bridge and F Streets... in
both directions... along the local and express lanes. If you
add
up all of that distance, that's more than five-and-a-half miles of
reproduction without the express written consent of the Phillies or
Major
League Baseball. That's some effort to show public support for/deface
public
property in the name of a sports team, requiring copious time and
serious
brass balls. Can we rename this stretch of the Boulevard the WFC
Expressway?
Second, the unconventional: ESPN.com's Music section (sigh)
introduces readers to a downloadable new song from Broadside
Ballads, the forthcoming second album from the band The Baseball
Project. It's a folksy little ditty called "Phenom" about, yeah, that
News
phenom: Washington Nationals rookie signing/callup/Messiah Stephen
Strasburg. It's written and sung from Strasburg's perspective so he's
never
mentioned by name. Who does get mentioned? There's obscure Texas Rangers
pitcher David Clyde, who was in Strasburg's shoes back in the 1970s and
whom
the narrator considers a cautionary example of a potential star who
flamed
out quickly. Then there's none other than Gramps himself, Phillies
pitcher
Jamie Moyer, whose presence on the mound at age 47 the narrator
considers
"so damn right." Damn right. And if maybe this all sounds a little
hokey,
don't get it twisted: The Baseball Project is actually something of an
oldhead indie-rock supergroup whose members include Steve Wynn (The
Dream
Syndicate), Scott McCaughey (Young Fresh Fellows), and Peter Buck
(R.E.M.).
Photos by Adam B. for The700Level.com