Drunken Brewers/Twinkie Preview

In about 2 1/2 hours, I'm embarking on my most ambitious tailgating venture ever as I take off to Milwaukee to watch the Brewers take their second straight from the Twinks. It is my most ambitious ever because we are bringing a table. Otherwise it is the same as any other. Regardless, myself, Mrs. Juice, Sports Bottle, the soon to be Mrs. Sports Bottle, Richard and friends are going to get fucked up and enjoy the ridiculous weather. I put the over/under on number of innings I remember at 6.5. I put the over/under on inning Richard passes out at 7.5. Fun will be had by all.

One quick side note: U.S. is playing Mexico in some fake soccer tournament tonight. While I am aware of it, I would never make plans around watching it, or probably even think to watch it when it was on. I guess I'm in the minority though because according to ESPN.com, of like 129,000 voters, 39% are the most excited about this match vs. 4 other sporting events (MLB, NASCAR, CWS, Wimbledon). While that isn't exactly a murderers row, I'm SHOCKED that a relatively meaningless soccer match won.

I Hate Watching Dave Bush Pitch...

..And I am lucky enough to get to "see" him tomorrow. I took the liberty of putting "see" in quotes, because I'm hoping to be seeing double by the time the first pitch is thrown. If my performance last year at this event (and I do believe this is turning into an annual event) is any indication, things are going to get sloppy. Sports Bottle is hosting the event, which coincides with his girlfriends' birthday. I just hope that her family and friends are as accepting of me as she is. I assume she wouldn't have allowed Sports Bottle to invite me if she wasn't. Especially since every time I've met her I've been pretty super drunk.

I don't want to make any promises, but I certainly am not going to rule out lobbing a few f-bombs at nearby six year olds. My modest goal is to make it to the end of the game without blacking out, and being functional enough to go to a bar afterwards. Last year? Not so much.

I will make one prediction. I don't think the birthday girl makes it back to the car after the game without vomiting. I'm throwing it out there. That is a pretty long window if we get there at 3 and don't leave until 9 or 10. There is a pretty decent chance that someone will bring a random bottle of shitty booze to do shots off of, or there will be a beer bong or shotgun or something that can make someone puke even if they aren't shitfaced. Remember Sports Bottle, it is her birthday. Be nice. And good luck with that.

So back to Bush. For some reason, he pitches in 75% of the games I go to. And his wind up makes me physically ill. That stupid pause drives me crazy. And he generally gets smashed all over the yard, except for the time I saw him pitch 8 innings of shutout ball. I predict drunken boos from Miller Park.

Beatdowns, Hidden Messages and Fake Waterparks

WISCONSIN 78, INDIANA 46

Jesus. I need to start out with that embarrassment of the artist formerly known as IU in Bloomington last night. Indiana is really, really awful. I am SHOCKED that they have won any Big Ten games. They seem far worse to me than Penn St or Iowa. Not only are they not very talented, but they can't shoot, and consistently dribble off of their feet. I will give them credit for not quitting, they are at least a little scrappy, even when down by like 100.

Back in the not so distant past, a win at Indiana did not seem possible. There was a time where Bucky had lost like 40 in a row there or something. Bucky is pretty good this year, but still. That game was almost unfair. I heard on SportsCenter (who is always right) that it was the worst loss at home in NINETY SIX YEARS!!! When you do something to someone worse than it has been done to them in 96 years, you really kicked the shit out of them.

Two other things about last night: 1) The camera followed Tom Crean a little extra long after he got ejected last night, and you could see him shoulder check the locker room door into a wall. And screaming obscenities to himself in the tunnel. He was PISSED. Had it stayed about 10 more seconds, you may have seen him destroy the locker room through the crack in the door. It was pretty great. I still dislike Tom Crean. 2) I think Bo Ryan does too. I feel like he put a little extra hot sauce on this beat down. Is it a carry over from the days of shady backroom recruiting deals made by Crean to steal players from UW while he was at Marquette? Hard to say, but when you leave your starters in until 1:28 left in a 31 point game, I think it is pretty safe to say that Bo was trying to prove a point. That point? Don't fuck with a dude that literally looks like a Badger.

FAKE WATERPARKS

I'm being forced to go to a fake water park with my nieces and nephew (3 and 2 years old I think), and my in-laws. I say it is a fake waterpark because it is in Wisconsin, and it is the middle of winter. I'm envisioning one waterslide in a hotel. It is in a hotel, so I'm halfway there. I really like my in-laws as a general rule, but I dislike hanging out in disease infested hotel waterparks. Especially after working my ass off (surfing the Internets) all week. At least I can stuff my face with snack food and get drunk. Anyone know any good bars in Waupaca? Maybe I will get blacked out and drown some stranger's kid. That would be a tragedy.

BREWERS-CUBS

I got in on a "second chance" to buy Brewers-Cubs tickets yesterday. I got an email at like 8 a.m. that I could log on at 10. I didn't exclude anyone, but I was only allowed to buy 4 tickets, and I couldn't get more than two together. My brother and I are going in September, when the Brewers will be 10 games out of a playoff spot (assuming Soup makes the rotation because of his contract over about six other pitchers that are clearly better than him). I'm calling it the second annual Brother Trip to Miller Park Where One Brother Purchases Nosebleed Tickets In a Section With 98% FIBS and Sips Beer While Watching the Other Brother Try Not To Get Into a Fight for Three Plus Hours. Last year there were approximately 35 ejections in our section. We also saw a chick fight on the way out, and the lights went out at Miller Park.

It is a 6:10 first pitch, which gives FIBS plenty of time to get up at their usual 2 p.m., put in hair gel, pop their collars over the top of their $80 Cubs T-shirts, put on their $400 Yves St Laurent aviators, hop into the BMW SUV's that their parents bought them for high school graduation,
get to the stadium by 5, have two cosmos, and be belligerent fighting guy by 6.

I couldn't have said it any better...

Even though we are on the verge of getting swept out of the first play off series we've been in for over the last 26 years, CC can still give me a spot of brightness in my day, even if it was unintended humor. If the guy doesn't pitch for us ever again, I give him my kudos for doing everything in his power just to get us to this point, here's hoping to him getting a shot at redemption come Game 5!

Sports Illustrated's Stadium Rankings

Recently Sports Illustrated released a fan voting based ranking of all major league ballparks.





Now I'm not going to complain too much about the rankings because they put Miller Park at second, but I found that to be a little ridiculous. I could see Miller being in the top ten, but second seems to be a bit much.

The first category is affordability which was given to the Kansas City Royals. This seems plausible, the Royals have been terrible for quite some time and their stadium is over 30 years old, so they probably have to give those tickets away. Surprise surprise the Red Sox and Yankees were ranked last for affordability, I guess dropping 300 million a year on salaries requires you to generate higher revenue from your ticket sales.

The next category is food, the Brewers were ranked first because everyone loves brats! It seems a lot of comments about the food also revolved around the stadium's "secret special sauce". If a sauce has the words secret or special in it, I tend to be wary. For some reason the Yankees and Mets are in last place, which might be impossible seeing as how they are in New York.

Team quality places the Tigers as number one. I guess that's a tough vote to call, there's actually been a decent amount of parity in the MLB for the last few years.

Tradition's top four teams are the Red Sox, the Yankees, the Cubs and the Dodgers. That seems about right, all of those teams have been around for over a century.

Atmosphere can be a tough call. The rankings have the Mariners ranked first and the Marlins last. I think what it really boils down to with atmosphere is when the team's stadium was built. Case in point, they put the Twins down at 29th. I've been to a few games at the big inflatable toilet, it's really not that bad. I think the fans have made it out to be worse than it is because of the dome's age and the fact that they have a new stadium waiting for them in two years.

The Cardinals of St Louis have been voted the fans with the highest "IQ". I've seen people from Missoura, I'm not that impressed with their intelligence. How do you even quantify this? The fans here really seem to know what they're talking about when they are sitting in the stands? What if you're just really unlucky and always get stuck next to the same drunken asshole that can barely even form words, let alone coherent thoughts? If you've been to a weekend game you know there's a very realistic chance of this happening. The picture I used in the collage is of apparently "famous" fans of the Cardinals...

Once again the Cards get the nod for hospitality. What I found fishy about this ranking is that the Royals were number two. I don't know what goes on down in Missoura during baseball games, but apparently its the greatest experience for a visiting fan in the history of the known world.

The Brewers are first for promotions. I credit this 1000% to the sausage races. After Randall Simon gave the sausage runners national media stardom, they haven't had time to look back. Everyone loves it, and the fact that they are sausages just speaks volumes about what we rank as important in the state of Wisconsin. The Red Sox rank dead last in promotions, I'm assuming the used Manny Ramirez batting helmet give away night didn't go over as well as the execs had planned.

Traffic? The White Sox got some love for this, but I really have no opinion about traffic for these games. I'm assuming the shittier your team is, the less fans go there and the better the traffic is around your stadium. While the White Sox aren't that shitty, they are definitely the Eli Manning to the Cubs Peyton in Chicago.

Finally we have the category of neighborhood, which surprisingly enough the Padres won! Gee, I wonder who would complain about an area that's always 75 degrees and has beautiful beaches all along the city. I'm sure the Marlins are dead last because either A)Their fans just checked poor for all the answers in the survey because they hate the way the Marlins are run or B) Hurricanes are not conducive to happy tailgating.

The accuracy of this fan poll is probably directly related to the demographic base of the people who actually bothered to fill it out, so I would take it with a grain of salt. However for the next year, Brewers fans can say that Miller Park is the second best stadium in all of baseball!