Ok, whoever it was in the Orioles' front office that made this decision gets an A+. While the team itself might stink, those home and home-alternate caps with the white front panel are delightfully old-school and hearken back to a day when the team didn't suck. I caught a good bit of an Orioles game this past weekend, and I couldn't stop staring at the caps and beaming. Fan fucking tastic. Now they have one of the best parks AND some of the best uniforms in baseball. All that's missing is the dudes who play in them.
Speaking of old-school uniforms that made me inexplicably happy...
There's Jose Bautista sporting the new Blue Jays duds, doing away with the ultramodern uniforms of the past decade or so. I didn't hate the ones they had, but when your team wins two World Series with a classic and distinctive look, why mess with it? The maple leaf addition doesn't hurt anything, and now they look like a baseball team again. I think these might be my new favorite uni's in baseball. They reflect the franchise's identity, just like the Orioles' new ones, which is why I hope they stay awhile. Nice work Blue Jays people.
My old favorite uni's are no more, which will send me to eBay one day this summer to clean up on vintage Luis Castillo and Livan Hernandez gear. It'll go nicely with the T.O. Eagles jersey I bought for a song in 2005. Anyway, maybe I'm the only person on earth who thinks black and teal is a proper uniform combination, but I loved loved loved the old Marlins getups. What they replaced them with has been the subject of some derision, and while I wish they hadn't changed a thing, these really aren't as bad as they seemed at first glance:
They're just black and orange. The powder blue and yellow don't factor in as much as I thought they would at first, which would have turned them into some technicolor barfbag. It's something I can get used to, and I'll never stop rooting for the Marlins, because of what happened in 2003. Still, if they wanted to take part in 150 or so throwback uni nights a year, I would be cool with that.
As long as I'm talking Marlins, I want to put in my two cents on the Ozzie Guillen situation. As a White Sox fan who came to love baseball in the late '80's and early '90's, Ozzie-- along with Robin, the Big Hurt, Ray Durham, Bobby Thigpen, and Blackjack-- is among my all time favorite baseball people. When he would speak off the cuff to the media during his time as manager of The Good Guys, I would gaze adoringly at the screen and think that if one day I should ever become the manager of a baseball team, I would approach it the exact same way as Ozzie: brutally honest, but never all that seriously. He reflected a lot of my values as both a manager and as a human being: consider yourself fortunate that you play a child's game for millions of dollars, don't forget to have fun, and play your ass off. So, as a sports bigamist (terminology courtesy of Bill Simmons), if Ozzie had to leave the South Side, I was happy it was for my second team.
Now I want them to fire him.
I think in a lot of ways, sensitivity has gone too far. People who think, then type, ask "Could anyone possibly be offended?" instead of "Is anyone offended?" and that annoys me. It leads to ridiculous non-apologies ("I'm sorry if anyone was offended by...") which quite literally means "I don't regret what I did. I just regret the way you reacted to it." But in Ozzie's case, I have to side with the easily-offended, culturally-sensitive crowd. For those who don't know, Ozzie spoke of his love and respect for Fidel Castro recently, in an interview with Time magazine. Ozzie manages a baseball team in Miami, Florida, a city with the largest population of Cuban expatriates (OK, let's call them what they are-- refugees) of anywhere in the USA. These people do not like Fidel Castro very much. Ozzie knows all of this, since he's been a coach with the Marlins before, and I am led to believe he considers Miami home. So... Why would this come out of his mouth? To me, there are only three possibilities.
1) Thoughtlessness. Ozzie knows that people expect him to say outrageous things, and he forgot he no longer works in Chicago, a city that will basically let you get away with anything. He now works in Miami, a city with a large population of Cubans and Dominicans, among others, who might just hold him accountable.
2) Martyrdom. Ozzie knows that if the media focuses on him, they'll leave his players alone. This strategy worked to perfection in 2005. Seriously, name a player from the 2005 White Sox. If you're not a Sox fan, it's a toughie.
3) Egomania. Ozzie knows that the media focuses on inflammatory statements, and decided to provide one because he had just watched ESPN for an hour and nobody mentioned his name on-air.
I think it's a combination of 2 and 3. Ozzie's not an idiot; I mean, he managed a team to a World Series title when they were far from the best team in baseball. The man's brain works and I will not dispute that. But if he's going to keep ripping the Cubans and others who live in Miami, it might suck for a team that needs to draw people to their new stadium. That's why, if I'm anyone in the Marlins' front office, I push to fire Ozzie with cause. I mean, if saying "I love Fidel Castro" isn't cause for firing someone who works in Miami, then I don't live in a world of reason.
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