let the humbling begin

Last Thursday the opening pitch of  the major league baseball season was thrown

out by generals and admirals representing the five branches of the U.S. military.

A flag requiring about 100 handlers and covering most of the outfield at the Wash-

ington Nationals’ park was part of the ceremonies.

That apparently wasn’t enough patriotism for the website Fox Nation, which won-

dered if Obama was “chickening out” of the presidential tradition, and posted his

poor reviews from last year when he threw it high and outside.  Had O shown up,

Fox likely would have called for his impeachment as a slacker.

I blogged that day that baseball is the most humbling of all the major sports.  A

team and its fans get 162 chances for the joy of victory or the sting of defeat. So far

no team has been a perfect 162-0, nor the perfectly dreadful reverse.  But my Giants

have been humbled 3 out of the first 4 times.

The weird thing is, they had great pitching in the opening series with the Dodgers,

except for reliever Dan Runzler, who got but one out and gave up 4 earned runs.

Oddly, had he not gotten that out, his ERA would be 0.00 instead of 15.43.

The perennial question mark Barry Zito actually pitched a solid game, gaining a

quality start.  But dreadful fielding doomed the Boys from the Bay.  Errors caused

the loss of their first two games, despite stellar starting pitching from Tim Lince-

cum and Jonathan Sanchez.

I can only hope that the Giants that whupped the Dodgers 10-0 on Saturday is the

real team.  Oh, well.  At the very least they can’t be mathematically eliminated from

contention until July.

Add to this feeble start the fact that UConn beat Buter last night for the NCAA bas-

ketball championship, an honor I had reason to believe Kansas would win.  But the

Huskies beat the team that beat the team that eliminated KU –upstart VCU — so

there’s precious little vindication there.

I’ve got a good feeling about the Canucks, though.

 

In other news of the humble, I found out during one of my many digressions while

researching the Whizbang Chicken Plucker that the Hormel website claims that the

first singing commercial was for SPAM.  It was on the radio by 1940.  Wikipedia begs

to differ.  It claims that the honor goes to a Wheaties commercial aired Christmas

Eve, 1926, in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area.

After the ad ran, 30,000 of the next 56,000 cases of Wheaties sold were bought in

the Twin Cities.  General Mills was about to stop making the cereal until this suc-

cess.  Can you imagine how that would have affected Bruce Jenner’s career?

But wait.  Answers.com, a part of WikiAnswers, asserts that Sadie Theone Lindgren

whisper-sang a jingle for Bubble-Up on the Harry Von Zell show earlier in the 20’s.

Jimmy Durante was a guest.  I hate to see the WikiKingdom contradict itself like

this.  Is something distracting Julian Assange?