#167 - mlb.

so, i've been watching what some people might describe as "an unhealthy amount of baseball" recently. i really don't know how it got this bad this quick, but for the past week or so, i've been getting home from work, flipping on the tv & settling in for hours upon hours of our national pastime. i've watched a few full games here & there, but most of the time i've been tuning in to mlb tonight live on the mlb network, where they bounce from one game to the next, only showing key/exciting moments. it's perfect for people like me with short attention spans. during my viewing, i've learned a few things about baseball in 2010:

a-rod will never hit his 600th home run - only six players in the history of baseball have hit 600 home runs, so ever since the yankees' alex rodriguez hit his 599th home run back on july 22nd, mlb network has been broadcasting every single one of his at bats. that means that you could be watching the ninth inning of a tie ball game & they break into the action so you can watch a-rod pop up to the catcher or ground out to short. maybe it's because he's a yankee or maybe it's because he makes around $27 million a year or maybe it's because he's a whiny pretty boy of a baseball player, but i could care less about a-rod's pursuit of 600, especially now that it's in its twelfth day.

i just keep getting older, they stay the same age - growing up, i used to collect baseball cards & while i was a nerd about baseball statistics, i loved looking at the back of the cards to see where the players were from & what their birthdays were. at some point along the way, the veteran players went from being my dad's age to being my age. at the moment, the youngest player in the major leagues is the chicago cubs' starlin castro, who was born in friggin 1990. dude can't even legally drink! meanwhile, people my age struggle to hit their 600th home run & a lot of the time, they just give up & retire because they're told old to compete with the whippersnappers.

instant replays of injuries rule - sure there have always been injuries in sports, but over the last ten days i've seen highlights from 135 games, many of which i saw multiple times. of course, this included injuries. i've seen the mets' jason bay's head jiggle around like a bobblehead as he crashed into the outfield wall. i've seen the phillies' ryan howard twist his ankle as he stepped on second base. the best one was last night, when the red sox' ryan kalish slid & crashed into indians' catcher carlos santana at home plate, bending santana's leg in a wholly unnatural direction. sure none of those injuries were of joe-theismann proportions, but there's something about athletes getting injured that i can't stop watching.

there are still two months to go before the playoffs start up, so there's a good chance i'll burn out on baseball before long if i keep watching it at this pace, but i doubt it. with all the spectacular injuries, whippersnappers & fruitless pursuits sure to come my way as we approach the world series, there's a lot to look forward to. too bad my red sox suck so bad this year that they won't be there come the end of it all.

snack: snickers ice cream bar
drink: stewart's black cherry wishniak soda

one night last week, when i was deep into a four-hour block of baseball viewing, i made a late-night trip to the corner store to grab a snack & a drink. it was as hot & humid as the underside of a brown bear's crotch that evening, so i went for a lil cool down from a snickers ice cream bar for my snack. i'm all about supporting snickers these days, as they've recently put betty white & abe vigoda in their tv ads & they're donating 3.5 million meals to those in need as part of their "bar hunger" campaign. regardless, even though i've eaten a hefty amount of snickers bars in my time & the ice cream bar version has been on the market for twenty years, i can't remember ever sampling one. it may just be that i've destroyed all my brain cells & can't remember having one, but even if that's the case, when i tried the ice cream bar last week, it was a whole new experience for me.

HOLY CRAP the snickers ice cream bar is LIKE CRACK. it's basically the same thing as the candy bar, but the chocolate shell is thinner & instead of having a layer of peanut nougat, it's got a layer of ice cream that's made with both peanut butter & cocoa. the resulting mix of peanuts, caramel, chocolate & soft, flavorful ice cream is quite yummilicious. it's way better than the candy bar version. the only drawback to it is the fact that it melts pretty quickly, but that was fine with me because it's so packed with flavor that i needed to take a break halfway through eating it anyhow. in the end, that was a positive, as i fell asleep before going back for the other half, meaning that i got to enjoy its awesomeness again the next day. healthy? definitely no. satisfying? definitely so.

i ended up getting a bottle of stewart's black cherry wishniak soda along with my ice cream bar. i've been avoiding stewart's for a while now in favor of non-HFCS sodas, but all of the corner stores open late night in my hood ran out of sugar-based sodas weeks ago & haven't replenished them for some reason. i was desperate for soda & getting a stewart's seemed better than getting a coca-cola, so with no other available options to fulfill my craving, i sucked it up & got the black cherry wishniak flavor. if you're like me, you're wondering what the heckaroony that "wishniak" thing is all about. after consulting the google, i figured out that the polish word for cherry is "wiśnia." as for the "ak" part, this internet recipe for cherry wishniak has three ingredients--cherries, sugar & brandy or vodka. so yeah, i guess that means wishniak is cherry liqueur.

there definitely isn't any liqueur in this soda, but it's cool though. if it wasn't for the HFCS, i'd get this stuff all the time. there's something heavenly tasty about black cherry sodas. here's what it is: orange & grape sodas both have an overly sweet flavor that doesn't taste anything like of either of those fruits. black cherry sodas aren't too sweet & actually sort of taste like black cherries. i'm not sure how often i'll end up getting the stewart's version, as both boylan's & virgils have awesome, non-HFCS versions of the black cherry soda, but if you don't give a crap about your HFCS consumption, you can't go wrong with the stewart's black cherry wishniak.