First Base Coach To Tom Hanks . . . "There Is An Academy Award At Second Base!!!!"

In the ongoing list of things the internet does really well — song lyrics, footage of early punk rock shows, probably also porn — the "open thread" has emerged as also being kind of brilliant. Not the lazy Oh-it's-Friday-and-I'll-let-people-comment-about-nothing-in-particular kind of open thread but rather the It's-the-baseball-playoffs-and-let's-replicate-the-experience-of-watching-a-game-together kind of open thread. See, for example, this open thread from last night's Phillies-Giants NLCS Game 5 on the Philadelphia sports fan site The Fightins.

Jen likes to check in on the Philadelphia sites every once in a while — The Fightins and The 700 Level are two in particular. I always say that I miss exactly two things about my hometown — my family and the sports teams. One is obvious — you should miss your family! — and two, the idea of rooting for New York sports franchises is about as unappealing as it gets. We have many close friends who root for New York teams — though I don't personally know any Nets fans — and those teams just don't need any more support (the Diamondbacks, on the other hand, could use several hundred thousand more supporters — abandoning that poor franchise now would be basically finishing what Hitler started).

Although my family does have some Philadelphia roots, my current support for them is more directly related to Jen — if I went to the boardwalk shops at the shore I might be in the market for a "Philly By Injection" novelty T-shirt. Which is to say, we watched Game 5 last night. Just as we watched Games 1 through 4. And Games 1 through 3 of the NLDS. And countless regular season games on MLB Extra Innings. And Game 3 last year — and etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc. But this game was the "must-win" game — the Phillies down to the Giants three games to one.

Jen, like many Philadelphia sports fans, has a streak of negativism that seems to have been present at birth. The way I understand it, the "Phold" of 1964 permanently altered her parents' DNA and the defective gene was activated in 1993 and subsequently exacerbated by things like the 10,000 loss mark that the team reached in 2007.

Suffice it to say, the level of anxiety before Game 5 was high. The game started out badly, then got better, and then got tense until there was finally relief — the Phillies won — woo-hoo — and now they'll have to do it all over again on Saturday. Usually games — for me at least — are a blur of ups and downs and cursing at Ryan Howard when he golfs at curve balls in the dirt and pumping fists and holding heads and whatever other emotions happen, and it's hard to recall everything. Which is why the open thread is so genius — the entire game comes back to you when you read it again. Newspapers have gotten into the act by having their reporters "live blog" games, but it's not nearly as great as the open thread. And as you'd expect from a town that "booed Santa," the Fightins open thread sort of reads like cross between a Greek chorus and 4chan. Reading it after the fact is really entertaining.

The game basically starts with "SHANE, DONT SWING AT BULLSHIT PITCHES!" (comment 67) and ends with "FUCK YEAH FIGHTINS!!! BRING THIS SHIT HOME!" (comment 751). Between it runs the gamut: the handle "Darren Daulton's can of Oompa Loompa spray tan" sarcastically writes "great start" (comment 91); JT asks (comment 136) when Pat Burrell turned into overly aggro-Washington National Nyjer Morgan after Burrell argues a strike call and seems to yell "What the fuck are you looking at motherfucker?" at Roy Halladay; the Phillies' three-run third inning elicits cheers — "Phinally! Phuck yeah! Phuck you Giants!" (comment 226). It goes on from there. Mixed in the action are trolls with handles like "Giants Fan With Broom at Game 5" and "PhilsSuckMooseBalls" — they're the useful foils for the thread.

This being a game against San Francisco, and the nature of semi-anonymous comments from Philadelphia sports dudes being what it is, a certain degree of homophobia eventually emerges, but it's really precipitated by the aforementioned PhilsSuckMooseBalls troll, who gloats (comment 309) — I think in response to allegations that Tim McCarver gushes too much about Giants players like Tim Lincecum — that he "blow[s] [himself] on a daily basis! And take it from Tim McCarver's shrunken chode in the ass every Thursday at 2pm!" PhilsSuckMooseBalls adds (comment 325), "HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA YA SUCK COCK!"

It has never been clear to me why fellatio should be maligned in this way. I kind of want to blame David Milch but it's not all his fault, and besides, the mere misogynistic/homophobic etymology of "suck" should be disturbing to us, as should the mainstream acceptance of the term. That said, Jenkintowner's comment (375) after slow Giants left fielder Pat Burrell somehow eked out a double in the bottom half of the fourth inning is hilarious: "First base coach to Pat…'There is free cock at second base!!!!'" It kind of devolves from there until Chase Utley makes a spectacular catch to end the seventh — "HOLY SHIT UTLEY MATRIXED THAT MOTHERFUCKER" (comment 725) — and Philaflava pronounces that "The man crush on Utley is officially back" (comment 732).

Anyway, pretty great stuff . . . and like I mentioned, the open thread is the closest thing there is to understanding the back-and-forth, up-and-down intensity of playoff baseball — without actually watching playoff baseball, that is.

So after the game is over Jen is reading this stuff out loud and guffawing at parts — the handles in particular are funny, so it reads like "'Jamie Moyer, drenched in Champagne, having the time of his life' says (October 21, 2010 at 10:25 pm) . . ." or "'The Elevator Tower at the Vet that withstood the Vet Implosion for ten or so seconds and then proceeded to fall over' says (October 21, 2010 at 9:47 pm . . ." — and then she sees a link on one of the sites to this dopey by-the-numbers "takedown" of Philadelphia culture. This sets Jen off.

As the guy who posted the link notes, the piece brings up the usual Philadelphia sports fan tropes — Santa Claus, et al. — and that it's another in a long line of lazy stabs at a city that doesn't deserve all of the abuse it gets. (By the way, the Santa Claus story has been exaggerated over the years as this USA Today piece from 2003 shows.) Yes, Philly fans returned to rare form this year with the Taser and vomit episodes — but it's important to note that these two yahoos came in from the suburbs. Jen says she wants to write a letter to the editor.

Troll comment 40 on the open thread wrote, "You know what a 'perfect 10' is in Philly? A girl who has more teeth than she has kids." I think Philadelphia is an easy target because it's got a white Irish-Italian working class that no one worries they will offend — shit left over from the previous centuries when the Irish were a different "race" and all Italians were in the mob. Today, the "Philly" has become an almost-epithet adjective along the lines of "ghetto" or "rough," not to mention easy fodder for San Jose Mercury-News columnists.

I also blame Jonathan Demme for the nation's perceptions of Philadelphia — after all, he was responsible for clumsily using a struggling post-1970s milieu of urban decay as the setting for a story of a man dying of AIDS. You might not have realized that the real-life subject — or semi-subject, as it were — actually had no connection at all with Philadelphia. The pre-Rendell city just served as a convenient stand-in for the notion of "the end of the line." Has Detroit even been treated this shabbily in art? (And don't even get me started on Bruce Springsteen's "Streets of Philadelphia" song and video — takes the "subtlety" of Demme's dim view of Philadelphia and clobbers you over the head with the symbol like a sock full of nickels in the 700 Level of the Vet.)

If the Phillies don't win the next two games — and it's possible they won't (some of Jen's negativism has rubbed off on me over the years) — then that's OK I guess — it obviously has to be OK — but it still sucks, to use the word of the day. There's something really deflating about ending a baseball season with one game — deflating in a way that, say, Diamondbacks fans didn't experience this year when their team's season ended like in May or something. Especially in this part of the country. Especially this time of year when the inexorable slide into winter is going on and whatever trees are around are just getting barer and barer with each windy snap and each day just gets colder and darker and crappier and then finally you're stomping slush out of the treads of your ugly snow footwear.

And it only makes it worse when Cole Hamels totally loses control of the game — and basically the series — in the fifth inning and then the drive back to New York is damp and overcast and days later Michael Bloomberg will steal a third term over the objections of nearly no one in power it seems and it all kind of makes you feel crummy (thus, this) . . . until the Phillies trade for Roy Halladay in December and the crazy roller coaster thingy starts up again.

When it's going well, this time of year just consumes you, and when it's going badly, it also consumes you. Bring on Game 6.

"This Blog's Final Post"

There's something sad about a blog post titled "This Blog's Final Post", which is what just happened with The New York Times' Idea of the Day blog. You can see on the comments that many of its regular readers will miss it — they're saying stuff like "tragedy" or "I miss it already" or even the simple "thanks to everyone who worked on this enlightening enterprise." I had the Idea of the Day on my own reader and it was one of the easier blogs to manage — one post a day, and generally you got the gist without even having to click through. I guess that's not a great model for a blog's success, but at least it wasn't a "mark all as read" type of feed.

Blogs are different from bands in that bands can put out a last album and let it go off into the sunset. The band Big Black, for example, knew it was going to break up after its last album. In the liner notes they wrote that "breaking up is an idea that has occurred to far too few groups, sometimes to the wrong ones." In interviews during their final tour they said that they wanted to break up before they started to suck.

The worst kind of blog death is a slow death, with a final post that isn't really a send off or a final post of any sort but rather something that stays stuck in time kind of waiting for another post to happen. Maybe you go to the site every once in a while to see if they didn't just change their feed address or something, but it was just abandoned.

It's worse when the blogger dies — there are examples I've heard about and here's one that comes to mind but fortunately blogging is still pretty new, so it doesn't seem to happen all that often. (And what happens when you die? Someone pulls your domain out from under you.) The idea of suddenly expiring without a "final post" haunts me — it would be horrifying to have your last thoughts on earth be something snarky about how the mayor wants to ban salt. (Here's Guskind's last post, by the way — a picture of a pleather sofa . . . with a typo in there — insult to injury.)

Idea of the Day's Tom Kuntz avoids this worst-case scenario by signing off succinctly: "The blog's end is a result of limited resources in a medium where any number of worthy projects are possible, and where new priorities continually emerge." Fair enough, understandable — I've been a part of more than one blog that kind of peters out for similar reasons — but the way blogs kind of sit there in perpetuity just waiting to be updated is depressing — not depressing in, say, the way Srebrenica was depressing but more in the way C.J. Wilson not blogging is depressing; put plainly, C.J. Wilson is the kind of baseball player that is best seen and heard (and I'm sad that his MySpace page is now set to "private").

Yes, C.J. Tweets, but I've never liked/been skeptical about Twitter. One, it's important to control your own content. Two, why only 140 characters? Lame.

On Why C.J. Wilson Is Great

One, C.J. Wilson is the living embodiment of Mark Harris' Henry Wiggen character — the book-writing pitcher in Harris' baseball novels. I should add that Wilson is much more articulate — and way more straight edge. Two, like Wiggen the character, Wilson is also a great player — and how many awesome pitchers also studied screenwriting?

But let's go back to the straight edge part — in the era of Roger Clemens and Mark McGwire, a Major League Baseball player proclaiming a straight edge lifestyle carries a significance that goes way beyond the typical don't drink-don't smoke-don't fuck connotation. That is cool. No, it's great. And — in my best haughty adult-something voice — it's also important — not so much for the kids (though that's important, too) but for anyone who watches baseball.

Wikipedia C.J. — he's interesting. And if the Rangers make it past the Yankees, you'll be one up on Joe Buck.

Oh, And By The Way, Here's An Abbreviated Appreciation Of MLB Extra Innings That I Meant To Write But Didn't

I came across C.J. Wilson this year while watching the Texas Rangers' feed on MLB Extra Innings. If I had had it together, I would have also written an appreciation of MLB Extra Innings — watching the local feeds is a lot of fun for all the local commercials. You might not have realized, for example, that the Rockies' Troy Tulowitzki was growing a mullet this year for charity. If you had the Rockies' local feed, you'd know this — over and over and over, in fact. This local color made midweek Royals-Mariners day games that much more exciting. If you're a fan of baseball and have the time and inclination to sit through more Brewers-Pirates matchups than you could ever dream of, I highly recommend the service.