Mike Scioscia's tragic illness

These Jackholes Are Taking Your Dodgers Away From You

See that guy, over to the right? That’s something called “Stevie B”. Hey, Stevie – nice notch in your hair, there. You look like the black Kenny Powers, only somehow stupider-looking. And did you steal that red leather jacket directly from the set of “Thriller”, or did you just decide it was so cool that you had to have one yourself?

Look, I don’t care that your biggest hit, “Because I Love You”, somehow made #55 on the Billboard Hot 100 All-Time Hot Songs, because I couldn’t make it more than 12 seconds into the video without having my eyes start to bleed. (By the way, Billboard, you’re putting this piece of crap higher than the varied excellence of “I Love Rock n’ Roll”, “Aquarius/Let the Sun Shine In”, and that tour de force, “Whoomp! There It Is!”? For shame.)

Let’s put Stevie B aside for a second and move on to 1980s Latin Freestyle trio TKA. (Bear with me here, I swear that this will become relevant and that we haven’t sold out to become Boyz II Men’s Tragic Illness). Yep, that’s those fine looking young gentlemen to the right – the ones that appear to have applied the graphics to their CD cover with Microsoft Paint. TKA had approximately 10 minutes of popularity in 1991 and broke up shortly after, but that didn’t stop them from reuniting in 2001 to unleash Forever, described by allmusic.com as… well, it didn’t even rate a review. On ALLMUSIC DOT COM. This is a site that was able to force out a few words about the soundtrack to the third installment of the Mighty Ducks movies, yet they couldn’t be bothered to say anything about TKA’s big comeback. In fact, this group was of such little importance that AllMusic only bothers to list their leader, “K7″, as a member of the group. This is important when you realize that in the travesty I’m about to describe, it’s not the band “TKA”, and it’s not the musician “K7″… it’s the other two guys from TKA. The Florida Sun-Sentinel has further details:

It’s freestyle flashback featuring Stevie B with special guests Angel and Aby formerly of TKA at Florida Marlins’ Super Saturday this weekend.

Angel and Aby formerly of TKA rose to fame in 1991 with hits such as “Louder Than Love.”

The first pitch in the game against the Los Angeles Dodgers is set for 6:10 p.m. at Land Shark Stadium, 2267 NW 199 St., Miami Gardens. The first 15,000 fans will receive Marlins pom pom.

First: “Land Shark Stadium”. Haaaaaa.

Second: Yes, I thought that last line said “Marlins porn porn” at first.

But the most important part of that sentence is the 6:10pm (3:10pm PST) start. You see, Saturday afternoons have been FOX’s exclusive territory for years – there’s a national blackout between the hours of 1pm and 4pm western, and that’s why the teams that don’t have the 1pm FOX game scheduled either play at 10am PST, or the regular 4pm PST. If any team wanted to be stupid enough to start a game in the blackout period, they’d be unable to broadcast the game until the blackout ended - even in either team’s home market. Knowing this, no team would do something that idiotic.

Ladies and gentlemen, your Florida Marlins.

That’s right, thanks to the Marlins wanting to fit in a “concert” of washed-up never-was’s, they’ve pushed up the start time an hour to 6:10pm eastern, under the theory that if the post-game concert had to wait until 10pm, it’d be too late for those who - for some reason – actually wanted to see this crap. So thanks to this, it means that we’re all going to be missing the first two or three innings of the game – just so this ridiculous concert can go forward. With this being Eric Milton’s first start, that might be just long enough for us to not even get to see him at all!

You can blame FOX if you like, and I agree that I hate that they’ve been given such power. But the fact is, this isn’t a new rule, and it’s not a surprise to anyone – this is entirely the fault of the Marlins. This isn’t the first time this season this has happened, either, as the same issue came up against the Mets in April due to a concert by rapper Flo Rida. As you can imagine, their fans weren’t that pleased either…

UmpBump:

So you know what that means, kids? I can’t watch the game until 7pm, when SNY (the Mets channel here in NYC) begins broadcasting. I can’t even go on the internet to watch it because it’s the same fricken’ situation down in Miami. I just. can’t. watch. the. game.

Hulk get mad.

I can only hope that instead of Ron, Keith and Gary, the SNY team decides to have Ralph Kiner open up the telecast. I’d love to hear Ralph try to explain this %#$!-show on-air (Welcome to Mets baseball. This is uh… I’m uh… Well, we open up the telecast in the fourth inning here in uh… There’s a musician named Flo Rida who’ll be playing tonight… And as a result, here we are in the second inning, with Darryl Strawberry coming to bat).

It might be the only thing that could make this okay.

Kranepool Society:

Due to a rap concert after the game Saturday, the Marlins decided for some reason to start that nights game at 6PM instead of 7PM why? Beats the shit out of me as I’m sure the Gang Bangers that want to hear Flo-Rida rap out “LOW” (luv them Apple Bottom Jeans girlfriend) don’t mind staying up a little later on a Saturday night so if I’m going rip anyone a new asshole over this it’s has to be the Florida Marlins  and that little stooge David Samson.

I won’t let the Skill Sets off easy either as they should be using their muscle in getting the Used Car Salesman to force the Fish into changing the time of the game.

I’d kill FOX but that’s a lost cause as any company that thinks having Doofus Joe Buck and Tim Mc Fullofshit as it’s lead team is beyond help.

Yeah, that sounds about right. So enjoy that, Dodger fans, and mark my words that something amazing is going to happen in the early innings of this game that we’re going to miss. Like a triple play, or a Juan Pierre grand slam, or a zombie apocalypse. I’m not sure which of the last two seem less likely. Seriously, though; it’s one thing to miss a few innings of Eric Milton, but it was just about this time last year when Clayton Kershaw made his debut. Can you imagine the uproar if we’d been deprived of seeing that?

(Have a good weekend, kids. I’m blowing out of the big city and headed to… a slightly smaller big city. But the good news is, I’m turning over the reins to our very own long lost Latin Freestyle King, VIN! Treat him right.)