Ok we need to talk about the new 2024 MLB uniforms.

You're ... probably gonna get sick.

Let me start this baseball uniform noggin by telling you a little story. Let's go back to the mid 1800s right around the time the great American pastime was starting to get going. A time well before food regulations were established on a federal level. While some of the first baseball games were being played, babies started dying. It was an epidemic but no one knew why. Thousands and thousands were taking their last breath all over the newly formed cities all over the country. If that city had a baseball team you can almost guarantee babies and people were getting sick and dying from consuming store-bought milk. See, one of the many horrible things food producers did back then to cut corners was water down the cow's milk they bottled and sold. And since no one was looking, and they were so greedy they just used the crusty unfiltered pond water from their farm. But they had created another problem. It was too thin from the water so they then would add chalk or plaster to whiten it up. Oops, they added too much water so now there was no more cream in that fresh milk so they added something they had around the farm already. You guessed it, calf brains. You know, to give it that creamy milk texture. Ah darn, now that rotten, pond water, brain infested milk keeps going bad in the store. While pasteurization was a thing, they didn't bother and they did the next best thing to ensure a fresh tasty product would last.... they added formaldehyde. YUM! Which was the main culprit in all those 400,000 dead babies every year. What's this have to do with baseball uniforms you ask?

For the same reasons the commercial dairies were putting chalk and formaldehyde in the milk in the 1800s the MLB and Nike teamed up with the company known more for replica merchandise to produce an all new high tech uniform. Greed.

As soon as I saw that the backs of the new jerseys were all going to have the same font for the names and the numbers all had to fit in the same designated size I knew. I knew it was the MLB wanting to be able to mass produce shitty cheap jerseys to save on costs. It all has to fit into a t-shirt press template so they can crank them out. Now I'm seeing that patches and lettering isn't embroidered or stitched anymore. I saw literal fucking iron-on patches for the team logo. The jerseys are thinner and being touted as some new hi-tech cool material. That's bullshit. I bet it's some garbage cloth that they used to use on the K-Mart jerseys. And then they go and use this same paper-thin material on the pants. The first photos of the teams at Spring Training are coming out with the new uniforms and you can see their shirts tucked in under them. Their underwear and in some cases their balls. My team, the Giants just released a promo with Casey Schmidt with his balls showing. It's fucking embarrassing.

third pic from left you can see the nike logo from his boxer shorts. 

Not only are the players worried about the peek-a-boo pants but they say there's no more custom tailoring. The MLB is the big time for these guys which should come with perks. One of which is custom tailored uniforms. You know so they can play at top-level performance. Apparently the MLB is turning down players who want their pants to fit them properly. So, now you've got cheap assembly line jerseys, cheap logo patches, and shitty material but now they have to get their uniforms off the rack like a pleb. Every change I see just screams "cheaper to manufacture" to me. Team logos are iron-ons.  Trash.  And you have to make due with M, L, XL, XXL like a fucking store. These are fucking retail uniforms. Now I'm also seeing that they're not even consistent from jersey to jersey. Oh and the white isn't white any more, it's like a yellowish cream color. White must be too expensive. Welcome to "The Big Show" Rookie.

L: Old Gilbert jersey on the left, new Kirby on the right. Differences are subtle but all the little differences are a clear sign they're saving a ton of money on the manufacturing.  R:  shows two teammates with completely different cuffs on their jerseys. 

But it gets worse. If you're a fan and wan't a fan version, of which many say these on-field player worn jerseys feel like, you now have to pay up to $100 more than the old ones. And if you actually want a real MLB player quality (quality LOL) jersey they're around $400. An iron-on, assembly line piece of shit jersey for $400.

After all the new stupid rules last year the MLB, in trying to appeal to the luddite morons of the country are ruining the last sacred pastime we have left. Let baseball be uncool. Leave it alone. Money ruins everything. Some of this is probably me exaggerating and wrong but I don't care. I have a disclaimer in the sidebar.

What If...? – We Did Slip Into a New Timeline and This Was The Better Option

The Watcher from Marvel's 'What If...?'

I often joke and wonder if we slipped into an alternate timeline around the time Trump got elected because everything has just felt wrong ever since then.  Trump has gone on to become a messiah for the stupid and angry.  It’s polluted the entire Republican party.   But like, the Cubs finally won the World Series.  That’s not supposed to happen.  Hadn’t happened in over 100 years.  But in this timeline it does.  There’s other things I remember hearing about and I'm sure there's tons of write-ups on why people think this to the point that it’s kind of been a running joke to shitty things that seem to keep happening.  “well, in the Trumpverse it happens”    My sci-fi brain started wondering what would have caused the universe to shift in the first place. 

A lot of people like to say that it was David Bowie dying or the crazy theory about a weasel and the Hadron Collider that caused the ripple in the fabric of reality.  While funny and interesting I don't think that's it.   I got to thinking, did someone go back in time and change something that led us to this shitty future?  Was it the Butterfly Effect or something more deliberate and sinister? or what if...?   

But then I thought, holy shit maybe this is the better future.  Perhaps in the original timeline, Bernie Sanders or Hilary Clinton became president and caused something that spun us into disaster.  Right wing backlash could have spawned a civil war or a great depression and disrupted the entire world economy launching us into global unrest or a nuclear world war.  Maybe there was immediately an assassination and replaced by someone way worse.   How bad did it have to be that the reality we are in now was the better option? All of the bullshit we've gone through because of Trump.  I picture some scientists and historians in the future running calculations on advanced quantum AI computers in a bunker deep underground searching for the best option.  After evaluating all the results finally seeing this version of reality and going “fuck, Trump has to win” 

12 Monkeys(1995)

Maybe we needed to come to a breaking point in order to reset somehow.  As if it’s a ‘gotta get worse before it gets better’ kind of situation.   Similar to the movie 12 Monkeys could there have been one guy that’s sent back in time and has to convince some important people pulling the strings that Trump has to win for the sake of humanity.   Poor fucker.  “Trust me, I’m from the future”  Since he keeps failing, obviously, and getting sent back to try again.  Every time trying different points in time trying different ways to convince people.   Finally going back to the late 1970’s to help influence the modern republican party.  Get Reagan elected and over decades create an electorate of right wing conservatives, racists, evangelicals and every day idiots who are radicalized by talk radio and Fox news that ultimately gets Trump elected…. (barfing in my mouth a little as I type this) to save the future of humanity.  Saving it by creating the worst outcome that we could feasibly come back from. An outcome that doesn't end in near extinction of the human race.   So yea, it sucks but I guess it could be worse and maybe it was. Time travel was somehow invented and this is the fix. 
   
Sorry for all the doom and gloom on a stormy Tuesday morning. Sometimes I just think of shit like this.  

Old Photo Friday (haircut book edition)

I used to get my haircut at this place that was close to my old house that looked like boobs.  Yes, I said boobs.  The building was two single story geodesic domes connected in the middle.  They're right on a main road in town and everyone calls them the boobs.  Apparently it used to be a video store.  Dang remember video stores?  I'm not talking about Blockbuster or Hollywood but real old fashioned family run mom & pop video stores.  I remember going to Muir Video and getting scary movies to watch at friend's houses on the weekend.  Well, it's a hair salon now run by this kooky old Korean lady.  She's gotten a bit too kooky lately and raised her prices so I just cut my own hair now.   While I would wait for a chair or wait for Meg to have her hair done I would sit and thumb through magazines or whatever.  Then one day I found these hilarious hair cut photo books.  I started to imagine who these people were so I started making up names and little captions.   It was a hit on facebook so many years later I'm sharing them with you here. 

Originally I figured "teenagers adolescents" was enough but I think he needs a name.  Let's call him Zach. He loves Fortnite, drank a beer last year at a his cousins' bar mitzvah and he thinks his new haircut is SICK!