Brian Urlacher, marketing genius

August 6th, 2007 | Posted by PostmanE

Interesting interview in Peter King’s seemingly caffeine-free (hey, the season hasn’t started yet; PK better not be on the white pony already) MMQB column today: apparently, Brian Urlacher knows how to generate positive brand identity.

You know the awesome Vitamin Water commercial with David Ortiz? Yep: Urlacher’s idea:

Me: Tell me about the badminton commercial you made with David Ortiz. What was that like?

Urlacher: “He’s a great guy. Great guy. The one problem was, I couldn’t understand half the stuff he was saying. It took us about eight hours one day in the spring. We did it down where he has spring training [in Fort Myers, Fla.] with the Red Sox. The interesting thing about how the commercial came about was, I told vitaminwater we play badminton in the locker room sometimes, and it’s a cool company. They designed a commercial with me and David playing.”

That’s right, folks: not only are we currently faced with the revelation that members of the Chicago Bears play special teams in the locker room (somewhere, George Halas is spinning), but that Brian Urlacher took that abnormality and, with the help of Vitamin Water, turned it into a high-concept television spot.

Now, if only he would take up some ground level promotional gigs …

Things come apart

August 29th, 2006 | Posted by PostmanE

I can still kind of remember when the Red Sox seemed completely, totally in control of their own situation. Happy, actually, to have such a solid group in a solid place in the solid American League. Contentment, it felt, was abounding.

Now, well - not so much.

With Ortiz struggling against heart palpitations, the Sox were dealt another blow today, as Manny Ramirez and Wily Mo Pena (man, I wish my name was Wily Mo), were taken to the hospital themselves, struck with “gray-area” injuries, or so says Theo.

Now, I have no room to talk here - the Cubs are long gone, and tonight’s loss pretty much sealed the deal that I will not be paying attention any more this season - but the Sox are a walking caricature of dissapointing. That five-game sweep from the Yankees, well, there’s your turning point. But if the Red Sox can’t stop the bleeding sometime soon, that sweep will be simply another point in the bulleted list of this season’s long, slow decline.

Um, so anyone thinking David Ortiz is about to get railroaded?

August 7th, 2006 | Posted by PostmanR

To preface: I am not accusing David Ortiz of any HGH/steroidal malarkey. I actually think he’s a (gasp!) clean player, one of those “good for the game” type individuals and an overall jolly man, you could say. (That is unless you’re a Yankees fan. Then he’s a goddamned cocky cheater.)

But as Big Papi blasted his 40th home run of the season yesterday and now stands at 109 RBIs 110 games into the season, (Roger Maris and Mickey Mantle are the only others players to achieve those marks 110 games or less into the season and that was in 1961) people are going to start questioning his freak stats, no? And again, it’s not because they have any solid proof, but because (to be horribly cliché) it’s the age we live in. You know, the one where the last two great sluggers of our era, Barry Bonds and to an extremely lesser extent Albert Pujols, became entangled in some HGH/steroid controversy.

Oh, look! This guy from the Portsmouth Herald seems to share the same general sentiment as me.

Hey, I had to find someone who talked about this (if only for an instant) to back my point a little bit, OK? You aren’t going to believe some crazy talk from a blogger are you?

Exactly.

Ryan Howard wins Home Run Derby 2006; I get older with very little to show for it

July 11th, 2006 | Posted by PostmanE

Did you feel the excitement? Did you absorb the rush? Were you able to gather yourself after the storm blew you from your bearings and replaced your previous baseball-watching consciousness with something altogether more enlightened?

Did you - um - hear that Ryan Howard won?

Yes, the Home Run did not fail to dissapoint, and in that, I mean the Home Run dissapointed once again. Perhaps dissapointment is the wrong word. I mean, you know what you’re going to get going in - a bunch of slightly interesting, but mostly boring, bat-to-ball connections with no real tangible impact on anything at all. That expectation doesn’t really make up for the lack of excitement, though; you almost wish someone would put on some sort of crazy ‘obviously this guy’s roiding performance’, just for old times sake. Instead, um, Ryan Howard wins.

The best part of the night, for me, was not the actual flight of the many home runs leaving the park. Instead, it was the pre-Derby speculation that David Ortiz and Ryan Howard were in jeopardy of losing their ability to hit baseballs because particpating in the Derby drastically altered Bobby Abreu’s approach to the game. Seriously, Karl Ravech and the two dwarfs had a serious discussion about this, and the dwarfs were in agreement - Ortiz and Howard are doomed. Abreu is, after all, hitting like 20 points less than what he was before last year’s Derby, which means almost nothing. Or it means that he’s in a pretty long slump that he will one day come out of, or it means that he had a really really good first half last year and has since mailed it in/struggled to regain form.

Whatever the reason, it can not be the Home Run Derby. But we’ll see, I guess, when Ortiz and Howard start whiffing incessantly. Call it the Derby curse. Oh wait, Jayson Stark actually did that. Yikes.

One more quick highlight: There was an anti-steroid commercial at the end of the show last night. No, really. Suprisingly, Jose Canseco was not the pitch man. Dissapointing. Another Home Run Derby, indeed.