Was That A Boring First Round?

Was the first round of the MLB playoffs boring? With one game avoiding a four series sweep across the board, hard to argue otherwise. Frankly, I don’t care much about Arizona v. Colorado in the NL championships either. But The Sox and Cleveland starting Friday night could be amazing. Both teams are making runs happen but in very different ways. It certainly could be the most bunt friendly series in decades and a game with Wakefield pitching against Byrd with neither getting the ball above 90 mph would be wonderful if both were at their best.

But pause a moment for the Yankees who exited yesterday. There was an outpouring of tears after the game on 880 AM with Suzyn Waldman choking up, John saying he loved her, Damon (pittuie!) using the past tense in relation to the team and Joe Torre walking into an era where he can write a bigger cheque as any team’s manager or any station’s broadcaster. They out performed themselves in 2007 so should feel good about themselves as they now go off to play for other teams. Who shall they buy for next year?

Baltimore Pit Beef For Christmas


Highlight of the last bit of 2007 (and have you realized that we are 3/4s though the first decade of the 21st century?) is going to be a trip to Baltimore. I got invited last Christmas to write a chapter of a book called Beer and Philosophy and now we are invited to the book launch.

Being a 20 watt bulb in the brightly lit world that is beer writing has a few perks and none is so perkier [Ed.: wow, did that came out wrong!] than the genial clan of more senior writers who will answer important questions like the one I posed to Lew Bryson about where to find the best BBQ in Baltimore:

The thing you want in Bawlmer is pit beef, a sinfully delish pile of rare, juicy beef piled high on a roll. There are several of these joints out on Pulaski Highway (like in this catty review: I liked Chaps, so there, nyah. I understand Big Al’s is closed now…sigh. More at this Chowhound link which also makes reference to the Double T local chain of diners (WELL worth your time for breakfast, my friend) and while some of them are not in the most savory of locations, the beef is nothing but. Pit beef is kinda like spiedies in that for some odd reason it’s never really traveled, but is definitely worshipful in situ.

Fabulous. Having already, in 2007, checked the wonderful western NY sandwich called a “weck” off my list of local US foods, the prospect of pit beef adds another layer of glowing orange to my vision of the next Yule. I found a great article from 2000 in the New York Times that further elaborates the concept:

Pit beef is Baltimore’s version of barbecue: beef grilled crusty on the outside, rare and juicy inside and heaped high on a sandwich. Several things make it distinctive in the realm of American barbecue. For starters, pit beef is grilled, not smoked, so it lacks the heavy hickory or mesquite flavor characteristic of Texas- or Kansas City-style barbecue. It is also ideally served rare, which would be unthinkable for a Texas-style brisket. Baltimore pit bosses use top round, not brisket, and to make this flavorful but tough cut of beef tender, they shave it paper-thin on a meat slicer.

Then there’s the bread: the proper way to serve pit beef is on a kaiser roll or, more distinctively, on rye bread. The caraway seeds in the rye reflect the Eastern European ancestry of many Baltimoreans in this part of town and add an aromatic, earthy flavor to the beef. Finally, there is the sauce. No ketchup, brown sugar and liquid smoke, as you would find in Kansas City. No Texas-style chili hellfire or piquant vinegar sauces in the style of North Carolina. The proper condiment for Baltimore pit beef is horseradish sauce — as much as you can bear without crying. And speaking of crying, you need slices of crisp, pungent white onion to make the sandwich complete.

This is all so excellent. One of my gripes as a Canadian is that there are few actual local foods. We can speak of Quebec cuisine (whether lowly comforting poutine or the selection of game that you do not get in English speaking Canada) and we can think of the seafood of Atlantic Canada but these are entire ranges of food based on local resources. A phenomenon at far too high a level. No, what I love about traveling in the US is that local thing on a bun that is made only in that neighbourhood or those couple of counties: Rochester’s garbage plate or the various regional BBQs of the Carolina, the pinnacle of one of which Lew encountered this week. Where is our Fat Boy fish sandwich with a wild blueberry frappe? Our humble hot or our bap and square? Where is our Chocolate Boston – which I have learned is made even more over the top at Purity Dairy by placing an entire sundae on top of a milk shake?

Session 8: Food and Beer With Lucy Saunders

Most excellent! I forgot it was session day today and the topic is food and beer as picked by the poetical industrial complex behind Beer Haiku Daily. As it happens, a few weeks ago…or more likely months…beer cook extraordinaire Lucy Saunders was kind enough to forward a review copy of her handy book Grilling with Beer – with, I just noticed, a very nice inscription. And, as it turns out, I took today off to make an extra long weekend and as it turns out it is the last stinking hot day of the year here at the east end of Lake Ontario. So it is time to BBQ and we are ‘cueing and brewing with Lucy.

Updates throughout the day as I review my options, pick my victims and start the fire.

 

 

 

 

Later: OK. Things can take surprising turns as I seem to have wanted to deal with (by which I mean “eat”) the entire ark with a shoulder and center roasts of pork, beef and pork rib and lamb sausages – and corn…and bunch of peppers, too. My theory of BBQ is that if you are going to spark the dang thing up you may as well cook from match to the final orange glow. Going through Lucy’s book, I decided to do a dry rub and a beer mop for the most of it and cook everything on a slow smoke.

So I got out a bottle of Black Irish Plain Porter, chopped up some cilantro, red pepper and green onion for the mop. For the rub, I put together kosher salt, paprika, cayenne, ginger, cumin, fennel seed and a few other things. An hour and a half on the dry rub and then on to the grill with a steady supply of dampened smoking wood added as I went along.

In the end we were left with an insane amount of meat…unless you believe that is something of an oxymoron. As I mopped, I had a Southern Tier IPA as well as a Great Lakes 666 Devil’s Pale Ale, a new LCBO listing here in Easlakia. Both were solid BBQ brews for the last hot day of the year.

So was I cliche going with the BBQ? Should I have made beer ice cream or a lager and partridge tarte? Not a chance. Beer is the partner to the flaming pit and is where the sweet notes and smoky tones play out best. And that porter mop added a layer chocolate espresso over the bite of the pepper adding even more depth. Even though I didn’t follow a particular recipe, Grilling with Beer is a source of great inspiration if you are into this sort of thing and a book I will return to again and again for great ideas for cooking with beer outdoors.

An Evening Of Convergence

While the top story in my last 24 hours has to be Beckett finishing his
complete game by setting aside the Angels like a librarian shelving a book
[Ed.: Yes! My own sports analogy!] in time for the Bionic Woman’s second
episode to start, it was really the realization that BW2 [Ed.: Yes! My own TV
acronym!] is the game Counterstrike meeting Blade Runner. At the end of the
show, the guy who got booted off Gray’s Anatomy is leading a bunch of
crouched guys with newbie CS guns down a dark alley towards a fabulously unguarded lit den
of baddies when I thought “flashbang” and, lo and behold, t’was so as bang did flash and baddies
did give up.

El Predicto: MLB Playoffs 2007 Contest

It is a grand thing when your fantasies and solid factual reality coincide so that your predictions for the playoffs can be as good as mine are:

American League

1) Angels vs. Red Sox (Sox in 7)
2) Yankees (yeecht!!!) vs. Indians (Cleveland in six)
3) Red Sox vs. Indians (Red Sox in 6)

National League

1) Rockies vs. Phillies (Phillies in 6)
2) Cubs vs. D-Backs (Cubs in 6)
3) Phillies vs. Cubs (Cubs in 6)

World Series
Red Sox vs. Cubs. Sox in 7.

Update: error noted and fixed in coments.

Ry has submitted here but can change before the deadline.

Prize? A real 1970s baseball card. Not my 1971 Hank Aaron or anything. But a real one. Maybe I have a double Billy Martin or something. Scoring? Simple: most games won by teams predicted to win series, divided by deviation from actual multiplied by extra factoring for style. What could be easier?

Put in your best guess before Thursday at 9 pm. That is right. You actually get to see some games before the deadline closes. How fair is that?

My Kind Of Conservative

I likely won’t vote for the man and the characteristics that are pointed out in this Toronto Star article may be exactly the sort of thing that loses him votes on certain sectors of the right but this is the sort of thing that I used to not be surprised to read in an article about a conservative leader in the good old pre-neo-con days:

“I’m just telling you when I see those things, that’s the way I react. How can we possibly live with ourselves when we have that kind of thing going on in a wealthy society like this?” When asked about what he would do to help eliminate poverty in the province, Tory, a former chair of the United Way of Greater Toronto, said: “I want to put forward a plan to reduce poverty overall … but I want to be certain that I can meet the objectives that I set,” he said.

Tory said his party has committed to a $1 billion, 10-year plan to repair social housing across Ontario to improve living conditions for low-income families. He referred to his plan to revitalize neighbourhoods, to his commitment to eliminate the health-care levy that discriminates against the poor and his program to help skilled immigrants.

While it is true that even our rural overlords in Ottawa have come to understand that Canada is a socialist country that works, that resource wealth when shared egalitarianly leaves plenty for the profit incentive, it is good to see that effectively the issue of poverty is a non-issue, though the responses may differ.

Late. Waaaaay Too Late.

Why don’tcha talk about what you talked about yesterday? The Padres and Rockies went late, you know. Not that I stayed up but you have to stay in there until at least extra innings start. You know. Hoffman sucks. Padres lose. Glavin sucks. Mets lose. Hoffman and Glavin will be in the Hall of Fame. Go figure. Guess I am passing on Hockey Night In Canada until at least 2014. Good photo at the beer blog. Go read the articles. Yah, do that. Loads in there.

I Get To Vote Next Week – What To Do?

This year’s provincial election confirms again that Ontarianada continues to define the nation but still is shy of itself. The issues here are the issues of the land but no one is really talking about them. The laws created here will be copied, the wealth will support schools and hospitals nationwide – with nary a peep of reluctance or, reciprocally, gratitude.

There is a new idea that has barely registered with an acronym that I honestly do not know the meaning of – though I will in about 14 seconds when I go read what brother #1 wrote over the weekend about MMP or “Mixed Member Proportional” voting. He points out some valid concerns but I will likely vote for it as the present concerns are too obvious. Anything to get a new voice or two into the public mindset and, hey, minority legislative assemblies work. In fact if there was a referendum allowing us to cap the seats of the biggest party at a majority or minority of the seats, I know which way I would be voting.

All of which leads me to the fact that I have not apparently written anything on this blog or the beer blog about the PPPP or Polska Partia Przyjaciół Piwathe Polish beer drinkers party of the early 90s that won seats in that country’s legislative assembly in the early elections after the fall of Communism. Sort of their Rhino party or the revived Neorhinos. I had to figure out why the kids in my class kept saying “pa-pa-pa-pa!” – not to mention why they always quoted Scandinavian heavy metal. I am sure I wrote about the PPPP. You know, it’s probably a vestigial memory of the world pre-blog when I actually emailed people I knew before the internet.

But whatever it was, now I say “MMP for the PPPP.”

Wooooooooooooooot!!!!

I missed the champagne spraying. We were out, invited to eat dinner in a hotel restaurant – the sort of thing I rarely do. But we have a grand time and when we got home the Sox were winning and Papelbon put it to bed – and the Yanks were up 9-6 against Baltimore. So I didn’t pay any more attention. But then…the Yankees…decided to suck:

The Orioles, who are finishing their 10th consecutive losing season, battered Mussina for 6 runs and 11 hits in five innings. They still stood to lose because of Rodriguez, who reached 1,500 R.B.I. and 1,500 runs scored in the same game. But Rivera, who had allowed only one earned run over 15 1/3 innings in his last 15 games, allowed a leadoff single to Nick Markakis and hit Kevin Millar with one out in the ninth.

After Melvin Mora flied to right, Ramón Hernández singled to load the bases for Payton. In Game 2 of the 2000 World Series, when he played for the Mets, Payton sliced a ninth-inning homer against Rivera over the right-field fence at Yankee Stadium. This time, he lashed a triple to the wall in right center, clearing the bases to tie the score. “I just went out to get some work; it wasn’t good at all,” Rivera said. “I missed a lot of pitches. But I’m fine. You have to move forward.”

Fabulous. Thank you for sucking, New York. Thank you.

The Asterisk Ball

I like the Baseball Hall of Fame. It’s where it should be, in a small town that has a claim (however tenuous now) to being a place where baseball started. Though no one really believes Abner Doubleday invented the game in the 1840s in Cooperstown, NY, the fact that the myth survived is in itself part of the structure of the idea of baseball – it is a game that inordinately attracts belief.

That is why I love the asterisk ball, the ball that Barry Bonds hit out of the park to beat the home run record of Hank Aaron. It is going to Cooperstown and it is going to have a asterisk, that symbol of a questionable stat, stamped on it.

The baseball from Barry Bonds’s much-debated 756th home run will soon land in the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum. When it gets there, it will be branded with an asterisk. Marc Ecko, the fashion designer who bought the ball for $752,467, asked the fans to decide how he should treat the memento. After more than 10 million online votes, 47 percent of voters wanted the ball to be adorned with an asterisk, 34 percent said it should not be changed and 19 percent wanted it to be shot into space. The first two options included the addendum that the ball would be donated to the Hall of Fame.

Why do I like this? It expresses the moment of the home run, the lunacy of the price of memorabilia, the scandal surrounding steroids as well as the humble fragile nature of the ball itself. It also captures the internet era and the dislocation of authority – neither Bonds or the Hall of Fame are controlling the moment.