Introducing Radio Baseball

[AmericanErrorist]

No hockey? Maybe never any hockey again, what with angry fans telling players and owners to get the puck outta here. Football season's just one flush away from the Super Bowl? Baseball is months away but a pro team in Toronto is, what, years away? Don't worry boys and girls, it's time to play Babe Burrill's "Hit'n'Run Radio Baseball!" (copyright pending, trademark pending, patent-pending, charges pending).

That's a lot pending but not a bit of spending for this fun, totally free time-waster you can crank up while spinning tires for hours in a snowbank or getting wasted with friends while spooning for warmth back behind the wine store as you try to capture the subtle nuances of, say, The Vomit Pigs Unplugged.

What You'll Need To Play: You will need: Your butt and a radio. Optional equipment helpful in setting game mood include a crowd of live friends, a boom box cranked up to 11; earphones if you're playing solo.

Rookie Camp: Okay, my little swingers, huddle round. There are no teams in Rookie Mode. ALL OF YOU are grumpy umpires ganging up to play "Everyone Against The Radio!" The hits are pitched by the radio. ALL you umpires decide whether each radio song is a) a homerun or b) a strikeout.

How You Score: It's easy. You start at the bottom of the radio dial, add up the runs until you've hit three strikeouts, then change the channel. Each station comes with its list of penalty songs — this is all quite subjective, you see — tunes that are cliché, too obvious for the station in question.

In our test run, we tune to the bottom of the dial at 92.5 JACK-FM. JACK delivers its first song. A new song — they don't tell us what — but by mid-song the umpires offer a cheerful thumbs up: It's WAAAY OUTTA HERE! Leadoff homerun for JACK! We await the next offering. JACK winds up and pitches a sinker — Billy Idol's "Eyes Without a Face"— the ump gang immediately boos. Yer outta here! JACK tries a changeup — it's a real '80s techno bomb from Depeche Mode! Strikeout! That's two gone, with only one homer. It looks grim. But JACK suddenly goes on an ump-pleasing roll, pitches six straight homers before foolishly trying a changeup pitch from a stiff that whiffs! Tom Cochrane = out No. 3.

That's it for the first station: One inning, three outs, but not before JACK whacks seven homers.



The Stairway to The Mighty Q: We climb to the top of the dial, leaving one last but potentially lethal opponent for JACK: Classic rock monster Q107. Q is looming for umpires, so c'mon get zoomin' for potential entombing for jiving JACK dooming, making rooming for a sweep of a brooming. The feeling is that high. Time to knock JACK off.

But like all stations, there are set penalties to avoid; And so what are Q's predetermined penalties?

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An immediate strikeout if a Led Zeppelin song — no matter how good — happens to be playing the moment the station is tuned in.

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A double strikeout if Q is playing "Stairway to Heaven" at any time during the game broadcast period.

And so, with fingers crossed for Q fans among the umps — and with the most passionate wearing lucky Q-Tips in their ears and nostrils, Q107 is solemnly punched in and ... Can it be true? The room of umps exchange looks of awe. For on tune-in, the song playing is "Stairway to Heaven!"

Immediately some umps heatedly argue the interpretation of the ruling, saying it should only be a two-out penalty. But the majority of by-the-book umps, who by now have come to love their power more than their power rock, saw that their ruling carried. To wit: Q107 is docked one strikeout for playing a Led Zep song on tune-in and two more outs because it's "Stairway." This means, unbelievably, the Mighty Q is out before it even gets an at-bat.
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