featuring…
♫ The Baseball Project, Vol. 1: Frozen Ropes & Dying Quails
🍺 Brew Dog Curve Ball West Coast IPA / Cold Beer Pale Ale
Words & photos: Vincent Abbate
To paraphrase sixties rock’n’roll icons The Animals: It’s my blog and I’ll write what I want. It’s my mind and I’ll think what I want.
Today, on Opening Day, my favorite day of the year – better than Christmas, Thanksgiving and the Fourth of July rolled into one – I am thinking and writing about baseball.
Depending on who you ask, baseball is either an excruciatingly slow and boring athletic competition that’s well past its sell-by date as America’s favorite pastime or the most beautiful, artistic, compelling and enjoyable sport on earth. I’m in the latter camp, so if you’re a hater, you may want to jump off here.
I’m a sucker for anything baseball. Books, movies, ESPN docs about baseball heroes and history. Boxes of the baseball cards, programs, newspapers and other memorabilia I collected as a kid still reside at my mom’s home. And to this day, I can’t break the habit of following my favorite team, the Yankees (just lost a few more of you) on a day-in, day-out basis. I live in Germany. It often results in me staying up for games that start at 1:00 a.m. when I should be sleeping. I was born into a Yankee family in New York. It is simply in my blood.
So let’s throw a baseball-themed Listening Party, shall we?
Musically we’ve got tracks from Frozen Ropes & Dying Quails, originally released in 2008 on Yep Roc Records. It’s the first volume of songs by The Baseball Project, a sort of baseball nerd supergroup that has been chronicling the sport to music for a good 15 years now.
I’ve also got a couple of canned beers lined up for us courtesy of BrewDog: Curve Ball West Coast IPA and Cold Beer Pale Ale. In the spirit of Hall of Fame slugger Ernie Banks … let’s play two today!
Just don’t throw the empties on the field.
