Idiots Write About Sports

I’m not a big fan of manufactured theatrics at the ballpark, but I do enjoy it when a closer is brought into a ballgame in his home park, the entrance music starts blarring and the crowd goes bananas. One of the true joys of going to Dodger games when I lived down south was Eric Gagne’s entrance to the strains of “Welcome to the Jungle.” (This was back in the days when Gagne could pitch, obviously.) Trevor Hoffmann’s “Hell’s Bells” act is also worth witnessing in person, should you ever find yourself down San Diego Way.

Well, the A’s happened to be in San Diego last week and got to see Hoffmann’s entrance up close and personal on Tuesday. Count Huston Street among the impressed.

“It’s awesome. It’s what it’s all about,” Street said Wednesday. “More than anything, it’s positive energy. The other team sees it, the other team feels it. It works. It’s almost like it’s its own momentum swing. It’s like listening to the Jaws music — you know something’s about to happen. It’s one of the things that makes baseball special.”

Street is in his second year as a big-league closer and enters games in Oakland with far less drama and fanfare. The Coliseum folks sometimes play an entrance song for him (“Hate Me Now” by Nas), but as Street said, “There have been two or three times when they don’t play it at all. They play commercials instead.”

So I’m at the Coliseum today, and Street is brought in during the ninth — a couple batters too late as we’ll discuss in a later post. And how does the Coliseum A/V staff respond to Street’s not-so-subtle printed suggestion that maybe they try to fire up the crowd a little more when he enters the ballgame?

By playing not one, but two commercials. The first was for On-Star and the other was for some kind of automobile of some sort — I wasn’t paying attention, but boy, was I fired up! Well done as always, Coliseum A/V people. You really know how to get the crowd standing up and cheering and engaging in commerce. Top drawer stuff.

(I may have said this a million time before, but why would anyone want to sponsor the mid-inning pitching changes? Those usually happen just before or just after something awful has happened to the home team — why do you want your company name associated with that? When you think about unpleasant, stomach-churning incidents, think OnStar!)

"One of the true joys of going to Dodger games when I lived down south was Eric Gagne’s entrance to the strains of “Welcome to the Jungle.” (This was back in the days when Gagne could pitch, obviously.)"

The irony of the situation was that Gagne rarely entered a "jungle" of a game -- all the games I remember him coming in to "save" during his famous streak were already "safe." Which, of course, is the best way to keep such a streak alive.

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