One Reason I Wish Wasco High Had Broadcasters

I have always associated Wasco High teams with the San Francisco Giants, partly for the obvious reason that they share colors, but the colors seem to express a deeper commonality of character. This is silly, I know. The Giants are just a collection of baseball players who happened to be drafted or paid most by the team that happens to be based in San Francisco. Players circulate too fast for any team to develop much of a character. As Jerry Seinfeld famously quipped, in professional sports we are "rooting for laundry." So it may be unfair to associate the Giants with the deep and enduring deformations of soul that seem to afflict Tiger teams. On the other hand, at least there is a mitigating explanation in Wasco's case, given their tragic shortage of adults. Fair or not, when I see someone in orange and black, I expect them to sneer.

Which brings me to broadcasters. Major League Baseball, in its benevolence, has allowed me to access home and away feeds of all games. I can even stop, rewind, switch feeds, switch games, whatever. Sure, I have to pay, but what is money compared to this? When I purchased the service, I didn't see the point of watching anything but the feed that Vin Scully was on. Mostly that is still true, but in the just completed Dodger-Giant series, I often enjoyed switching over to hear the Giant take on certain events. Yesterday, for example, even the sad ending of the game could not taint the peculiar pleasure of hearing the Giant announcers mutter "unbelievable" at a call they disagreed with, or "thanks to the UMPIRES" after Lincecum left in the limbo of a tied 9th. It was just so gloriously pathetic. It made me wish that there was some way to selectively sample Wasco whining in the same way. "C'MON! That's a FOUL!" At the very least, someone over there should start a blog.

I'm gonna give it to you straight...

“We don’t look good passing the ball, we don’t look good running it, we don’t look good doing anything.” Arvin Head Football Coach Edgar "No Sugar" Mares

Headline of the Day

"Love Buttonwillow Raceway? Live there for FREE!"

Dan Tudor in the Washington Post

Dan Tudor, former Shafter High quarterback, Hometown Sports host, and current Shafter resident received a nice write-up in the Washington Post about his business helping colleges better sell themselves to recruits. He seems to be doing very well.

Minor quibble: For some reason, the Post failed to mention that the "farming town of 15,000 near Bakersfield, Calif" is Shafter! Way to alienate a rapidly growing market, Post.

This is just one more sign of the once august paper's decline. James Fallows noticed upon returning from a three year stay in China - "The NYT, for all its travails, is a recognizable version of the publication I'd previously known. Personality, depth, world-view, tone. The poor Washington Post is not."

This may be a teachable moment. Perhaps on one of my purgatorial hall passes, Mark Viera, Dan Tudor, and I can have a beer and talk about Viera's infelicitous wording. I am open to that.

UPDATE: Thanks to a reader, I've learned that Tudor has been the offensive coordinator of the Shafter varsity football team in recent years and is now the Frosh-Soph Head Coach. Viera makes a big deal of Tudor not being a coach (he even refers to him as "Non-Coach" in the headline), adding a sin of commission to the noted sin of omission. Offensive indeed. If there is one thing we in Shafter will not tolerate, it is the erosion of journalistic standards.

Shafter Football Preview

Easing back into posting... Zach Ewing has a preview of Shafter's football team up on his blog. Here is the conclusion:

"(Ansolabehere) believes — and there’s no reason to doubt him here — that Shafter’s talent level is far below the Wascos and Tafts and Tehachapis of the world. Now he’s giving the Generals some schemes that could allow them to use that talent more efficiently. And while we won’t likely see a huge turnaround in year one, there’s reason to hope for Shafter fans that a few years down the line, they’ll be more in line with what the Generals have been in the past — always competitive, occasionally rising to the top."

Shafter will be running the Wing T this year with a pretty similar defensive scheme. I've read nothing but good things about Ansolabehere as a coach, but this figures to be a tough year. We seem to be at the low in the of our talent cycle while the rest of the league is not.