Take Me Out to the Ballgame

The national pastime enters its second week with a full slate of Major League Baseball games across the country. Optimism for my defending champion Boston Red Sox as well as my fantasy baseball team, the Bad News Blairs, is running rampant. Hopefully this optimism will still be running rampant at the All-Star break, or at least Memorial Day. Living in Chicago, I should also note that this is the 100th (!) anniversary of the last world championship for the Chicago Cubs, the beloved north siders. Can you imagine saying "Wait until next year" for 100 years? I thought 86 years was rough but damn. However, the beauty of baseball is that hope springs eternal at the start of every season. It's the summer romance that eventually breaks your heart, leaves you for the winter, buys a cute new outfit and shows up again in the spring.

In recognition of the opening of baseball version 2008, I wanted to pass along this funny article Presidents, Pierogies and Other Strange Things That Race at Ballparks sent to me by my friend Aeron in North Carolina. It is a history of some of the mascot racing traditions in major and minor league ballparks across the country. As a midwesterner who has made it to Milwaukee for a Brewers game or two, I am very familiar with the famous Klement's Racing Sausages. They got some notoriety 5 years ago when Pittsburgh Pirate Randall Simon smacked the Italian Sausage (aka college student Mandy Block) with his baseball bat, knocked her and another racer to the ground and received a citation for disorderly conduct. Needless to say, ESPN showed that clip a lot.

It is somewhat ironic in this technological age that a number of the mascot races - including the sausages and the racing presidents at Washington Nationals games - evolved from graphics on a scoreboard to actual flesh and blood "people" and not the other way around. In this world of Nintendo Wii, Blackberry, podcasts and virtual reality computer games like "Second Life," it is nice to know that we haven't completely given up on the human element when it comes to our sports-related entertainment. Don't know about you, but if I am going to watch four sausages race down the 3rd base line at a ballgame I demand authenticity.