I have no idea how, but it seems I’ve ended up on MLB.com’s mailing list. Back around March or April, they sent me a pack of 10 baseball cards for seemingly no reason. Now I’ve received their 2008 Holiday Catalog. I’m not sure why they have a catalog in the first place, since it covers pretty much everything they have online, but there you go. At any rate, I decided to peruse, even though I have no intention of buying anything in the catalog. However, upon opening up the catalog to the first page, I was greeted with this unpleasant and rather confusing site. Check out the top left corner:

Now, I could give you several reasons why I didn’t appreciate them using this particular sample T-shirt from a personal standpoint, but this doesn’t even make sense from a business standpoint. If you’re going to illustrate your player T-shirts by using an example, WHY would you use someone who was only with the team for two months, had a rather rough time of it, and almost assuredly will not be with that team next year? It’d make much more sense to use a Derek Jeter T-shirt (or, even better, change that 12 to a 13 and call it A-Rod). And, in fact, nearly all other examples of products in the remainder of this catalog do just that (You can see the close-up of the Joba Chamberlain jersey near the bottom of the photo). They have samples of David Ortiz, Ichiro, Derek Lee, and the like. All of these make sense, as they are mainstays of their respective teams and are unlikely to be going anywhere anytime soon. At any rate, let’s go through some of the other noteworthy items in the catalog (please keep in mind that these are not necessarily items that I would like to own). I’m not gonna break out the digital camera like I did for the first one, though. I’ll just show you the online pictures, first of the particular item displayed in the catalog, then the equivalent Tigers item, if available.

For the record, this is one of those T-shirts I would not want. I have never heard of the Detroit Tigers as “Hitsville.” My dad hypothesized that it is in reference to the Motown music history, but still…

Surprisingly, I’d actually be willing to wear this one, but I possess neither the figure nor the guts to pull it off.

I’ve seen commercials for Fatheads before, and I just don’t get it. I just find the concept of having a life-sized decal of David Ortiz (or anyone else, for that matter) on my wall to be unbelievably creepy. By the way, there is seemingly no Fatheads of Tigers players at the current time, but I know for a fact there used to be (some of you may remember my post objecting to the animated web ad for it).

This one is similar in concept to the Fathead, but is admittedly less creepy. Still, I would think having a giant mural of Yankee Stadium (or Comerica Park or any other ballpark for that matter) above the head of your bed would be rather distracting as you’re trying to sleep. By the way, I keep looking at the Comerica Park mural, trying to figure out who is batting in the picture, but the picture is just too low-res.

I already have a Tigers freezable pilsner that Rachel got me for Christmas last year (and it’s a nice, large one at that), but I’d be interested in purchasing a travel mug to go along with it. Unfortunately, there is no Tigers travel mug, even though almost every team is available. Upon further inspection, I discovered that there are no mugs for the Red Sox, Pirates, Reds, or Braves as well, and there is a common feature among these five teams: Each gave up a player at the trading deadline who was high-profile enough that you would probably put him on a cup.

These are Christmas ornaments depicting three team members celebrating a win/home run/something like that. Here’s my question: Who the hell are these people? The people are different for each team’s ornament, so obviously they’re meant to depict actual team members, but they’re so poorly done that I can’t figure out who they’re supposed to be.

Not surprisingly, the Yankees and Red Sox are disproportionately represented in the action figure department.  What I find kind of amusing is that they chose to portray Mariano Rivera not pitching, but running out of the bullpen. It even comes complete with bullpen gate (There’s also a Johnny Damon figurine of him making a curtain call on the dugout steps). Meanwhile, is it just me, or is the Justin Verlander figurine (which, by the way, is the lone Tigers representative) significantly beefier than the real thing?

I think I’ve saved the worst for last. In this charming little item, you can have your name and favorite number placed on the back of a random guy’s jersey in a picture while the stars of your favorite team congratulate you on the big home run (or whatever). You have the option of getting a framed photo, a mousepad, or a coffee mug (I chose to demo the mousepad just cuz it was the easiest one to see). There must be a thousand different avenues of creepiness in this product. The first thing that comes to my mind is that it looks like fan fiction gone out of control. By the way, there is a Tigers equivalent, and it merits at least a nomination for Worst Photoshop Job Ever:

Yikes. Where do you even begin with this one? The most obvious error is Polanco’s head. I know he’s got kind of a big head in real life, but this is ridiculous. The brightness and color balance also do not match the rest of the body (or the rest of the picture, for that matter). To add insult to injury, that’s not even Polanco’s body (And though I can’t tell you for sure whose body that is, judging by how veiny the arms are and by the fact that Polanco’s head is superimposed onto someone else’s body in the first place, I’ve got a pretty good guess). In addition to the utterly mutated Polanco, we have Guillen (who has light and color balance that actually matches the background but is completely the wrong height in proportion to everyone else in the picture), and some unidentified person to the left of “Your Name.” Seriously, who is that? Am I supposed to know who that is? Is it someone who used to be on the team years ago? If that’s the case, why doesn’t he have someone else’s head Photoshopped onto HIS body)? Is it someone I DO know, but the picture is so crappy I can’t identify him? Perhaps it’s just an overexcited bat boy. I really don’t want to know.

Well, those of you who watched The Amazing Race Sunday night could probably guess that I was a bit disappointed. Not by who was eliminated (It was stupid for Terence and Sarah to try to do a food task if one of them was a vegetarian since most food tasks feature some sort of gross animal part. Besides, Terence was extremely annoying and it was kinda satisfying that all the blame could be laid on him for the elimination. Sarah was kinda cool in that she seems to be able to speak every language on the planet), but by the fact that the powdered dye used in last week’s episode was apparently of the extremely washable variety and Tina’s hair is back to being blonde without a trace of green in it (although a couple of the players still looked slightly pink, but that could also have been sunburn, I suppose). The finishes this season are getting kinda boring, cuz the winner of each leg has always been one of two teams: Ken & Tina or Nick & Starr (a brother/sister team that has a tendency to sound more like a couple than like siblings, which makes an otherwise okay team sound a little bit creepy). And now that we’re down to four teams, the suspense is kinda going down the drain. Along with Ken & Tina and Nick & Starr, the remaining teams are Toni & Dallas (a mother/son team that I’ve kinda taken to rooting for after my favorite team was eliminated; they’ve done a lot better than I expected, but they get surprisingly little screen time) and Dan & Andrew (a couple of frat boys who have somehow managed to stick around THIS long; seriously, they pretty much suck, and yet somehow they’ve gotten lucky time after time and manage to come in second-to-last). Next week’s episode is virtually guaranteed to be a non-elimination leg, since it took them forever to have the first one. Interestingly enough, there hasn’t really been a bickering couple this season, which is actually a refreshing change of pace, especially since the producers must be livid with this development. Ken & Tina bicker a little bit, but not THAT much, and Terence had a tendency to whine a lot, but that’s about it. Aja & Ty (“Long Distance Couple”) had one argument but got along otherwise, and the other couples didn’t last long enough for any definite characteristics to emerge. The other thing this season doesn’t have is a gay person (or, at least, they haven’t been explicit about it). I think that’s the first time that’s happened, which is kinda disappointing, cuz the gay contestants usually (but not always) rank among my favorites (by the way, a gay couple has won before, so there’s not a lot in terms of breaking new ground, although it took them ten seasons before they got a lesbian on the show). At any rate, this’ll probably go down as the season where no one could read the clue properly.

Yeah, I promised I’d get the site layout changed back to my Phantom theme, and I still haven’t done it. I’ll get to it eventually. In the meantime, here’s some randomness:

I have been keeping up with The Amazing Race (the only time I didn’t was the one night where I was trying to watch both it and either the World Series or Game 7 of the ALCS and I kinda ended up heavy on the game). The team that got eliminated on Sunday was one of the teams involved in that personal vendetta issue I was complaining about earlier, so at least that’s over with (and I’m kinda surprised this team lasted THAT long cuz they had a tendency to not read the clues properly all through the race). Anyways, one of the more amusing moments on last Sunday’s episode was the Roadblock. For those of you who don’t watch The Amazing Race, a Roadblock is where one member of the team performs a task by themselves. The task can be anything from eating something gross to washing an elephant, but it’s usually something culturally related to the country they’re in (although they’ve had bungee-jumping Roadblocks a number of times). In theory, they’re supposed to choose who will take the Roadblock based on a short clue printed on the outside of the information pamphlet before they’re allowed to find out what the task actually is. This doesn’t always work. For example, if you’re at a restaurant when you get the Roadblock, you can pretty much rest assured that eating something will be part of the task. Also, there are many instances where arriving teams can see what the task will be before they even get the clue. At any rate, this particular Roadblock (by the way, the teams were in India) involved running through a crowd of people (who were spraying water and throwing some sort of powdered dye at both the contestants and each other) to get to a bunch of raised platforms where they had to find a particular tag that had the next clue inside (the one team who eventually got eliminated made this a lot harder than it needed to be). The funny part about this Roadblock is that if the non-Roadblocking team member (who usually does nothing more than cheer on/berate their partner) stood too long in one place, the hyperactive crowd would start throwing dye at them as well. There’s one team that consists of a separated couple, Ken and Tina (Ken’s a former NFL linebacker, by the way), who don’t bicker as much as you’d think they would (or as much as the producers probably want them to). Ken took the Roadblock for their team in this particular episode, but Tina made the mistake of standing in one place for too long, and the crowd went after her. This would be a good time to point out that Tina has long, VERY light blonde hair, so when someone chucked a large handful of green dye at her, her hair turned bright, glowing, radioactive green. She yelled at the person who threw the dye at her, but to her credit, she didn’t complain after that. What I’m amazed at is how evenly the dye got into her hair. It wasn’t splotchy at all. In fact, it looked like a wig. And when they checked into the Pit Stop at the end of the episode (which had to be several hours later), her hair was just as green as it had been when the dye first got into it. Now, Ken and Tina aren’t exactly my favorite team (actually, my favorite team got eliminated in the third episode, and there are fewer and fewer teams that I actually like this season), but after this episode, I kinda want them to stick around awhile cuz I wanna see just how long it takes for the green to get out of Tina’s hair.

There is someone (I don’t know who) who lives a few blocks away from me who owns a motorcycle. I know this because I can hear it. The thing is, this person never seems to go anywhere on the motorcycle. From what I can tell, they just sit on it and repeatedly rev the engine for hours at a time. And they do this at, like, one in the morning. It’s getting really annoying.