Bronson Arroyo, of course, is best known as a rock and roll legend who sings about take-and-bake beef hoagies. But did you also know that he’s a baseball player? Well, he is! He was teammates with David Ortiz and Manny Ramirez when they failed the famous drug tests back in 2003, and when the news broke, he admitted that he himself used performance-enhancing drugs prior to 2004. Sources can’t confirm this, but it’s likely that he stuck out his tongue and mimed a nonspecific guitar riff immediately after doing so.

He’s not done “riffing” (that is an obscure and hilarious guitar reference). In an interview with USA Today, Arroyo volunteers that he still takes unapproved supplements

“I have a lot of guys in (the locker room) who think I’m out of (my) mind because I’m taking a lot of things not on the (MLB-approved) list,” Arroyo says. “I take 10 to 12 different things a day, and on the days I pitch, there’s four more things. There’s a caffeine drink I take from a company that (former teammate) Curt Schilling introduced me to in ‘05. I take some Korean ginseng and a few other proteins out there that are not certified. But I haven’t failed any tests, so I figured I’m good.”

With this quote, Arroyo hasn’t quite become the active player’s answer to Jose Canseco, but he’s just about the only guy on a major league roster to talk this way. It’s almost as though he doesn’t give a–

“People can think what they want of me,” he says. “I don’t give a f—-.”

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Wrigley Field is an objectively sterile tourist attraction, as are all baseball venues. It’s possible to glean sentiment from it, sure. My first visit to Wrigley is one I’ll never forget. I was struck by the intimate, residential nature of the surrounding area, and the brick and ivy I’d seen on baseball cards and television since as long as I can remember. Then again, I also remember unwrapping the Nintendo I got for my eighth birthday and the time I finally beat the labyrinthine 8-4 stage, sending Bowser into the fire and rescuing Princess Toadstool. They’re shared experiences, and they can be significant experiences, but they’re only perceived as exclusive experiences by those with a weak understanding of what they’re experiencing.

I was at Cincinnati’s Great American Ball Park on Monday night. The Cubs beat the Reds, 4-2. The announced attendance was exactly 22,222 spectators, the majority of whom were wearing Cubs shirts. Great American, by simple nature of the seat color, is a red stadium, but the populated areas of the stadium were unmistakably blue.

Coming into the game, the Reds had lost 13 of their previous 14 games. They haven’t been to the playoffs since 1995, but even that hasn’t been a big deal until recently, when they cast off Adam Dunn, Ken Griffey Jr. and Josh Hamilton. Despite the presence of franchise players such as Aaron Harang and Joey Votto, the team has no casual identity. Whenever I go to a Louisville Bats game, the Reds’ Triple-A affiliate, I have the same feeling. The atmosphere is great and the game is fun to watch, but when I go, I find myself appreciating the game of baseball, at a very base level, rather than being occupied with the fate of a particular team or player.

When Lou Piniella finally took the ball out of Randy Wells’ hand, the crowd gave him a standing ovation. When Aaron Harang, the definition of a workhorse and the closest thing to a familiar face on the Reds, left the game, the fans behaved like suits in a lobby waiting for an interview.

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I have been to the Great American Ballpark once. It was in 2005 sometime in early May, and I was very impressed with the stadium.

What I wasn’t so impressed with was the burger I ordered. It seemed like it had been sitting in a drawer for a week. Now, this was but one visit to the stadium and one item I ordered. Certainly, I shouldn’t be judging the stadium’s food quality in totality from one burger. But, this is what we do food-wise: If you go to a restaurant and aren’t impressed off the bat with its offerings, what’s your motivation for going again? First impressions count for a lot in the food industry. Counts for pretty much everything, really.

A baseball stadium is not a restaurant, though. When you are drunk, and you want something at a ballpark, you are going to pretty much buy whatever is there. This explains why I keep eating the hot dogs in Wrigley’s bleachers.  And this year at the Great American Ballpark, the Reds have decided to serve up a dollar menu to combat these trying economic times. A dollar for a hot dog? Sweet. Same goes for peanuts, popcorn, ice cream and candy. It’s nice they are selling the same items, but for cheaper.

Except, that’s not the case.

The items are smaller than the standard that sell for $3.50 or so. For example, the hot dog is “one size smaller” than the standard dog, Dierig said. It’s one-tenth of a pound, vs. the standard size that’s one-sixth of a pound and sells for $4.50 at the stadium.

This sort of reminds me of the time I bought a new car and they rolled out a moped from the dealer instead.

Via TBL.

MPS blog wasn’t around for the beginning of last season, so it missed a sacred spring tradition: making fun of the dumb stuff that comes out of Dusty Baker’s mouth. Fortunately, Dusty’s a reliable annual tradition — like my pledge to exercise more — and in 2009, he refuses to disappoint:

“We have a whole wall full of guys who at one time were good players expected to be star-calibre players,” said Baker. “You look at Jonny Gomes - he was almost rookie of the year. There is Jacque Jones, a star at USC and a big-time player at Minnesota just a couple of years ago. Look at Darnell McDonald - a first round draft pick (Baltimore, 1997). Then there is Laynce Nix - he was a high-round draft pick (Rangers, fourth round, 2000).

“At any give time or day, they could play like they were touted,” said Baker. “It is just a matter of if they can put it all together for an extended period of time. I keep looking for a guy like (Ryan) Ludwick - a No. 1 draft pick and highly touted and it took him a while, four or five organizations, then ‘bam,’ he got it. And it’s possible. Because if it is in there, it’s in there. They just have to get it out.”

That is mind-blowing stuff. Think about this. Dusty Baker is saying that if you were at one point good at baseball, but that your skills have since atrophied, you can still reclaim that talent in full. That talent is still “in you.” It doesn’t go away; it hibernates.

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The other day I was helping Tom Cruise count cards at a Las Vegas casino, and I got to thinking. The final bits of the Mets’ Shea Stadium were demolished yesterday. There are several reasons for building a new stadium — publicity, the possibility of hosting All-Star festivities, a spike in property value — but the most lucrative element is certainly improved ticket revenue. A new stadium tends to pay for itself over the long run, but given that we’re in the start/middle/whatever of a recession, it seems that the immediate impact on attendance is especially important.

Major League Baseball has built plenty of stadiums over the past twenty years, so I put together a few graphs to find out whether a trend can be spotted. First up: the White Sox’s new Comiskey Park, opened in 1991.

The bars represent the team’s attendance in a given year, and the red dot above them represents the stadium’s capacity. The green line divides the chart in two: the three years before the move to the new stadium, and the three years after.

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So, we know the Kerry Wood saga is over in Chicago. Jim Hendry, a very close friend of Wood’s, realized it would be better for Wood — after having quite a comeback year — to move on, find more money in a long-term deal and be able to buy an even bigger ranch for himself back in Texas someday. The Cubs made the best player personal move for themselves with others waiting in the wing (or via trade) for the closer’s role, even if was at the expense of a guy that had always come back to the organization, always tried his best even when it looked like his career might have been done and gone. Both parties ended it amicably. It’s a nice story about loyalty and friendship, really.

Oh, but remember that Dusty Baker guy that was here for that magical year in 2003 when Wood and Mark Prior were on top of the world? Yeah, he might have a little interest in old Woodie.

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This beautiful baby just dropped last weekend at Unheard Of in Cincinnati and will be debuting tomorrow at Rogue Status out Californey way. No word if Rose is actually profiting off these tees, but one would think if he got word of them, there would need to be a deal struck. (Via Hypebeast.)