Slang Editorial :: Never Underestimate The Value Of A Holla'

Thursday, April 16, 2009
No Turning Back To The Future

So the 2009 baseball season is in full swing and once again it appears that no one is willing to pay Barry Bonds to play for them. I guess at this point there's no more putting off the fact that the man's career is over and it's time for him to retire. Barry, you are by all accounts a giant dick and the worst kind of cheater--the guy who cheats not to get ahead but when he's already winning--but it was fun while it lasted.

I wonder if, given the option to turn back time, Barry would choose in a second-chance past not to take steroids. Knowing how things turned out, could he have just been satisfied being the biggest dick and best player in the league (rather than best ever)? These are are the kinds of questions, because can't turn back time.

But, on a related topic, what happens when you turn time forward? One glorious footnote to the 2009 season is that this year is the ten year anniversary of MLB's ill-fated decision to set aside a chunk of games during summer '99 to run as "Turn Ahead The Clock Games". What did this mean?

Dear god, a whole lot of this:

The idea was that teams would wear futuristic uniforms, "imagining the game as it might play out in 2027." Umm. Yeah.

Wow. Truly. Fucking. Awful.

What in god's name was MLB they thinking? Well, this is what you get in post-strike pre-roidawareness baseball. Though fans had just started coming back to the game after the "storybook" 1998 season of McGwire and Sosa saving the game (ha!), the league was still tremendously concerned about fan attitudes and attendance and was trying to do whatever possible to get people excited about baseball and coming to games again.

Ergo, Turn Ahead The Clock. Unfortunately, these kinds of situations often beget terrible, desperate ideas. These poor Mariners look like Arena League Baseball players heckling with the crowd before getting prepped for the mandatory "5th Inning Jousting Competition". And still, Turn-Ahead Seattle was only average-bad, as demonstrated by the images that follow:

That poor Pirates pitcher is so blinded by the hilarious ugliness of his uniform that he can't even bear to open his eyes! Ha.

Anyway, for whatever reason, Turn Ahead The Clock 1999 is also funny to me because I have literally no memory of any of this happening. It's possible that the memories were just some dumb and forgetful that I have simply written them out of my head... but then again, it's equally likely that in Summer 1999 I spent a little bit too much time looking like this:

NOTE: NOT ACTUALLY ME

Labels: bad ideas, baseball, curiosities, fucktactics, lolgore

posted by Nihilist Loves Hate, Hates Everything at 4/16/2009 03:33:00 PM 0 comments

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