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BRING ‘EM ON
Australia’s national baseball team is currently competing in the World Baseball Classic, against powerful opposition. Second baseman Trent Durrington isn’t spooked:
Are the Australians intimidated by the prospect of playing Venezuela and the Dominican Republic?
“We’re Australians,” Durrington said. “We’re not intimidated. By anybody.”
(Via reader willcatfish)
“We’re Australians,” Durrington said. “We’re not intimidated. By anybody.”
Didn’t help him too much when he was with the Brewers, who mostly used him as a pinchrunner last year since he couldn’t hit worth a lick. The only reason he saw slightly more action in ‘04 was because the rest of the team was even worse then.
Not that my opinion matters too much…he’s got a PCL championship ring, and I don’t.
“We don’t know the meaning of ‘intimidated.’ In fact, there are whole pages of words we don’t know the meaning of. That’s why we write for Fairfax!”
Posted by richard mcenroe on 2006 03 06 at 10:14 PM • permalinkAustralia has a baseball team?
The real kind? Who knew? ;-p
Posted by Barbara Skolaut on 2006 03 06 at 10:40 PM • permalink“We’re Australians,” Durrington said. “We’re not intimidated. By anybody.”
Margo in a thong.
Posted by richard mcenroe on 2006 03 06 at 10:53 PM • permalinkmcenroe, thanks a heap for that mental image. YOU BASTARD!!!!
Posted by The_Real_JeffS on 2006 03 06 at 11:12 PM • permalink#12 - And the same from me too. I was EATING, Goddamnit!
Posted by SwinishCapitalist on 2006 03 07 at 12:58 AM • permalinkHey us aussies punch way above our wait in international sport… we finished 4th in the olympics ahead of countries with two or three times our population…. so no, we aren’t often intimidated…. just look at all the world championships etc we have won over the last decade…. (and PS these are world championships where other countires are invited to particpate.. ;o) )
we obviously can’t be good in every sport, our isolated locale means we often struggle for good competition with other competitive countries, and the winter sports will probably never be our strong point, but we can hold our heads high most of the time, we aren’t often disgraced….
What the hell? Did anyone outside the US understand the gibberish in that link?
2.61 ERA?
Triple A?
shut-out innings? third innings double?Sounds like an Irish aircraft gunner in a drinking session.
Like the time I wrote a note for some Yanks, using nothing but Aussie Rules cliches. It’s another language, man.
The question will be how many Cubans decide not to play for El Commandante anymore once they reach Puerto Rico? Any guesses how many more decide that San Diego might be even a nicer place to ask for political asylum?
Posted by Pat Patterson on 2006 03 07 at 03:07 AM • permalinkPat P,
From what I have read, the Cuban government has done a couple of things:
(1) Brought a team to the WBC that is fairly young.
(2) Placed the relatives of said young players under arrest.
The message to the young Cuban players is clear. Defect and your mom and dad suffer, alot.
Nice people, unkie Fidel and his fascist.
Posted by David Crawford on 2006 03 07 at 05:57 AM • permalinkMcenroe. We are not intimidated by the thought of Margo in a thong, merely nauseated. REALLY nauseated.
BTW, thongs here refers to what you call flip-flops, I think.
But I get the drift. What attracts you to the thought of a near-naked Margo…
<brief pause>
excuse me, back now, that dinner tasted pretty crook coming up.
Yup, nauseated. But not intimidated. I’ll even give her a head start and take the scope off the rifle.
MarkL
CanberraO/T—Gerard Henderson in the SMH on Howard-haters:
...in intelligentsia land you can get through an entire day without hearing anything but criticism of the Howard Government. Here’s how such a day in the life of a Howard-hater might work…
Arise and read the editorial and letters and opinion pages of The Age, Australia’s most politically imbalanced broadsheet… Admire the cartoons of Michael Leunig, who has drawn Howard as a masked, kneecapping IRA terrorist. Look forward to next Saturday’s Herald in the hope that, again, Alan Ramsey will describe the PM as a “duplicitous toad” and refer to him as “Little Johnny”... Dream of Gough Whitlam, Howard Dean, George Galloway. Wake up - read The Age.
Posted by walterplinge on 2006 03 07 at 06:33 AM • permalink#21 bekkah (is that as in REbekkah?)
Ummm.. can you say that again? Didn’t quite follow you. Of course having the image of Magrok in a thong burnt into consciousness doesn’t help. Are you like that, REbekkah?
Posted by Stop Continental Drift! on 2006 03 07 at 07:18 AM • permalinkBye-bye, bekkah. For that trenchant and penetrating—oops, I mean totally pointless and off-topic—insult, you have been banned.
Posted by Andrea Harris, Administrator on 2006 03 07 at 09:26 AM • permalinkWonder if rebore or bekkah or whatever -was in the Insite audience,which this week was stacked about 50 to 2 against Strayans of any ethnic origin who are not Muslims.
There were some Modo sassy type girlies wading into to us - (er the REST OF THE WORLD TEAM).
Which is their lawful right of course
.....in AUSTRALIA.Australians don’t call soccer ... um… soccer, do they? I thought they called it football. Which confuses those of us who think football is a game played by beefy giants in body armor.
What? Australian baseball? Australians don’t…
(Normally I wouldn’t weigh in on a sports thread, but I can’t let myself be confused with nasty little bekkah, spit be upon it).
MarkL — Okay, you go over and tuck in the fiver…
Posted by richard mcenroe on 2006 03 07 at 11:45 AM • permalinkWhat the hell? Did anyone outside the US understand the gibberish in that link?
2.61 ERA?
Triple A?
shut-out innings? third innings double?Here’s some Baseball 101 for Tom W.
ERA - earned run average. The average amount of runs (points) a pitcher gives up in a nine-inning span (a standard baseball game).
Triple A - AAA is the rank of a minor baseball league A is the lowest, AA is the middle, AAA is the highest you can go before going into the major leagues.
Shut-out innings - innings pitched without giving up any runs (a pitcher’s statistic)
Third-inning double - batter hits ball into field and runs to first, then to second base, without being tagged out.
I, for one, am glad that Australia is sending a baseball team. Along with the Netherlands and South Africa, Australia is one of the only teams not from the far east or the Americas.
Good luck to the Aussies!
TV (Harry)
Posted by Inspector Callahan on 2006 03 07 at 02:11 PM • permalinkWhatever happened to Luke Prokopec? He had a couple of decent seasons with the LA Dodgers in 2000 and 2001, and at times looked very good, then was traded to Toronto where he had a shoulder injury. He appears to have been with Cincinnati as late as 2004… Even if he were out of American baseball, I figured he’d be on the Australian team.
Posted by Spiny Norman on 2006 03 07 at 04:30 PM • permalink#29 RebeccaH, #30 crash
Yes, Aussies call soccer .... soccer. BUT the FFA (Football Association of Australia) has recently decided to call the game here “football”. Possibly their only wrong move recently.
Soccer in Australia has had a pathetic history. For the last 20 years or so the administration and also the playing of the game has been in a permanent state of undeclared civil war. It operated along ethnic lines - Croat, Greek, Italian etc etc. and in spite of being “the world game”, got no-where in the general public’s eye. Soccer was the 4th code of football here, behind Aussie Rules, Rugby League and Rugby Union.
Absolutely bloody hopeless.
We produced lots of great soccer players, who immediately went to England to earn the big bucks and to escape the stupidity of the set-up here. Then, English clubs would never release the Aussie players to play in internationals, so Australia was a joke internationally in soccer.
Last year, the whole Admin & club structure was nuked; the Old guard was sacked and the old ethnic clubs were dissolved. They got in one of the best sports administrators to head it; a local billionaire put money behind the new structure, and they re-formed the National League from scratch (new city based teams).
Sorry for the long post, but Australia’s bad performance in soccer internationally has long been a joke and an embarrassment - here’s hoping the new set-up will see us ‘do a Korea’ in the World Cup, perhaps next time.
Posted by Stop Continental Drift! on 2006 03 07 at 05:51 PM • permalinkAnd if the North Americans would let anyone else play in their “World Series” we’d wup their asses in that too.
We’re good at cricket.
Posted by Stop Continental Drift! on 2006 03 07 at 05:54 PM • permalinkYou can learn alot about a country through it’s most beloved national sports.
Which brings me to my Grand Unified Theory of Leftist European Sport Suckage (G.U.T.L.E.S.S.) wherein I shoehorn entire multicultures into anything I see fit.
“Nations of the Almighty Pigskin beware! For the decline and fall of a given nation state is directly proportional to any rise in the popularity of Soccer.”
- Monkeyfan (about ten minutes ago)
In a nutshell:
Soccer - Sucks.
American (i.e. Real) Football - Kicks ass.
Australian Football - “Rules” is it’s middle name - currently lying broken in the field.
Cricket - Incomprehensible in its refined imperial nuance.
Baseball - Cricket with cash.<deeper geopolitical analysis alert>
Soccer (AKA ‘fake football’) is ok fun to deride whilst drinking cold beer, but from what I’ve been able to gather, the game has become little more than a simulacrum of patchwork balls; a postmodern European substitute for war. So far so good. It’s certainly less damaging than real war when everyone plays by an agreed upon sissy rulebook.
Unfortunately most of the bearded bastards of the world are more likely to respect an American [nuclear] football a bit more. I wish it were otherwise, I wish the ‘nuanced’ swollen ankle hissyfit school of diplomacy actually worked…Really I do.
It just doesn’t.
Fortunately there are alternatives to pussydom. Leave it to the Americans to bulk-up, armor-up, and kick ass on the field of (katching!) honor…And of course leave it to the Aussies to man-up their bastard child of two footballs with their own unique set of rules.
“Aahmah! We don’t nee no bloody aamah!”
<sound of femur shattering>Anyway, it’s an Aussie world, we just happen to live somewhere north of it.
#37 - just a reminder, the “World Series” was named after a New York Newspaper; it really has nothing to do with any international competition. A lot of people get that one wrong.
Posted by MentalFloss on 2006 03 08 at 01:12 AM • permalink#42 ‘Floss
I didn’t know that (d’oh); interesting. I gather the newspaper ‘World Series’ doesn’t exist now?
Money making scheme #421. So who owns the name “World Series” and does it HAVE to be used to describe the baseball series?
Now, remember this is MY idea, so no-one copy it. Ahem. You line up a sponsor for the event, throw even more wads of cash at it, so its truely obscene, and you re-name the series the (say) “Coca Cola Baseball Series” or something similar. And I will take a measly 2% for the concept (c).
[/irony]
Here, the domestic cricket competition was known for about 100 years as the “Sheffield Shield”, I think after Lord Sheffield who originally presented the trophy (I may be wrong, but the principle is correct). A year or so ago, the ‘powers that be’ in a stroke of marketing genius re-named the event the ‘Pura Cup’ after a (would you believe) dairy company brand, who was sponsoring it. Say “The Coca Cola Baseball Series” out loud instead of the “World Series” and you’ll get an idea how the “Pura Cup” sounds to us!
[/gagging]
Posted by Stop Continental Drift! on 2006 03 08 at 02:59 AM • permalinkThe ethnic soccer was established with long hours and unappreciated sweat and tears however.For the love of the game.
Mucho free labour and toil which began the long,slow process of bringing the game into the public eye in Oz.
Parents began enrolling kids in the little leagues of soccer and it became popular as it relied slightly less on brawn and more on skills.Games were certainly multiracial with the little kids,a great mixture of Koori, British (Irish,Scots,North country, Welsh),Italian,Greek,Polish,Nigerian,Canadian,Vietnamese,Zimbabwean,SouthAfrican,Chilean,French,Belgian,Maori,Pakeha,Indian,Pakistani,Fijian,Malaysian,Indonesian and Australian(Kooris and Skippys) born parents. All urging the teams and each others kids on. Terrific combination of accents.
The players though,were all Strine speakers.the “World Series” was named after a New York Newspaper; it really has nothing to do with any international competition
Ahem, plastic turkey alert! That’s an urban legend, congrats for perpetuating it. Snopes seems to be down right now, but their debunking can normally be found here: Link
Or as the theme song to the Team America sequel goes:
Aw-stray-lee-ah!
Fuck me!Posted by richard mcenroe on 2006 03 08 at 11:02 AM • permalinkIt looks like we might be crushed like a bug running into a windscreen, but at least never intimidated…
Posted by Margos Maid on 2006 03 08 at 06:13 PM • permalinkRight you are Geoff - or like an ant crushed on the
footpathsidewalkPosted by Margos Maid on 2006 03 08 at 08:01 PM • permalink
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Hey, if an Aussie can win a gold medal at speed-skating then anything is possible.