What are you watching?

I just discovered this on youtube!

I've read about it, but never seen it. Anna May Wong!

Holiday TV programming in Germany can be a disaster for my tastes. One of the smaller private channels had a title that caught my eye: "Hotel Transylvania 3". Well, after perhaps 5 to 10 minutes I had that film pegged as the point where this franchise fell off a cliff. But I do have HT 2 and the original on DVD. So I watched them, in that reverse order. Made me smile, chuckle, and occasionally laugh, which probably nothing on TV would have managed. 😄

Miguel said:

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A classic.

I've watched the first two episodes, and don't consider them trash. Maybe they're a bit crudely done, but certainly more interesting to me than a lot of the Rankin/Bass stuff that I avoided back in the 60's and 70's.

I can't stop watching this great baseball from Javier Baez.

Starbrow said:

I can't stop watching this great baseball from Javier Baez.

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I'm from Pittsburgh and I wish we had a major league team.

Erestor Arcamen said:

I'm from Pittsburgh and I wish we had a major league team.

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There's the Pirates, for whom legends Roberto Clemente and Willie Stargell played (the two that whose playing time I was able to witness in my time in the US). Have the done that badly in recent years?

Olorgando said:

There's the Pirates, for whom legends Roberto Clemente and Willie Stargell played (the two that whose playing time I was able to witness in my time in the US). Have the done that badly in recent years?

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Oh yeah, they had some legendary players in the past. Clemente is one of my favorite players ever, along with Doc Ellis, who threw a no hitter while on LSD. But since the current owner Bob Nutting took over, the team has been awful. They went 19 losing seasons in a row (1993-2012), then had a few decent seasons. Eventually they won a wild card game in 2013 but then lost to the Cardinals in the divisional round, promptly traded a bunch of those guys away. After that they made it to the wild card and blew it two years in a row and have been mediocre ever since.

Those few winning seasons were just luck and the front office has a tendency to trade away most good players and go into "rebuilding" every year so they're not at all worth watching. The clip that Starbrow shared, while definitely extreme, isn't at all surprising for this team. Tickets are dirt cheap but I haven't been to a game in at least 4 years because I refuse to support them while ownership only wants to fill seats not win and invest in the team. There are a lot of others in Pittsburgh that feel the same and refuse to support them, there are also a lot of sheep who do support them and feed into the awful ownership. So yeah, while the Pirates were once legendary, they're now pretty much Sauron post ROTK. Gnawing on themselves and no chance of doing decent again for s really really long time.

I understand that the team is a business and the owner wants to make money. But at some point, the real fans take notice that they're not even trying to win championships anymore. This front office treats it more as just some entertainment for fans to come, pay money and watch and it doesn't matter how good or bad the season goes as long as the books are green. Any player that seems to do decent eventually gets traded for cash and/or mediocre/elderly players who won't cost them as much and might play decent for a season or two.

My wife grew up near Philadelphia and hates the Phillies but is a huge Mets fan and I definitely follow them way more than the Succos.

Just another example. Adam Frazier is one of their decent players this year and they're trying to trade him too...
"Pittsburgh Pirates: Proposing Adam Frazier to the New York Mets" https://rumbunter.com/2021/05/26/pittsburgh-pirates-adam-frazier-trade-proposal/amp/

Erestor Arcamen said:

My wife grew up near Philadelphia and hates the Phillies but is a huge Mets fan and I definitely follow them way more than the Succos.

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Awks! OK basically what I figured.
But you mentioned the Mets. I was 13 and in 9th grade (which was junior high school there - don't ask, I don't know!) in the year of the Miracle Mets.
They were an expansion team in 1962 (both leagues expanding from 8 to 10 teams), to "replace" those traitors NY Giants and Brooklyn Dodgers, which relocated to California. And the Mets had been the doormat of the National League practically up to 1968. 1969 was also the first year that there were two divisions in both leagues, after the expansion to 12 teams each that year. The Mets passed the Chicago Cubs (who had been in the lead for a long time) at some late point, and ended up winning 100 games in the season, best in the NL. They faced the Atlanta Braves, starring some guy named Henry Aaron, in the divisional playoffs, and Bad Henry hit a home run in every game. The Mets swept the series 3-0 nonetheless. Then they faced the ominous Baltimore Orioles in the "World" Series, AL champs with 109 wins under their belt. And four starting pitchers with at least 20 wins (the Mets only had this guy Tom Seaver ...). And a much stronger hitting lineup. The Mets top pitcher Seaver lost the first game, but in the next four, which the Mets swept, had the Orioles staggering from the field each time due to a combination of bloopers by themselves, and utterly unlikely heroics by Mets players. Second baseman Al Weis hits a home run??? Slow-footed right fielder Ron Swoboda makes a catch that would have made the legendary Willie Mays proud??? Stuff like that.

1969 must be the year Baltimore learned to hate New York (City). In January of that year, the AFL New York Jets (!), led by quarterback Joe Namath, beat the favorite NFL Baltimore Colts in the American football Super Bowl. And in basketball, the NY Knicks swept the Baltimore Bullets in the first round of playoffs; losing to the Boston Celtics in the semis, or Eastern Division finals. That's contrary to my imperfect memory, but I never was a great basketball fan anyway. The solution is that the Knicks, in the following season (1969-70), again beat the Bullets in early playoff play, and defeated the LA Lakers in the finals despite Willis Reed, their center and team leader, being hobbled by injury.

I hear you EA. It had been a long 108 years between World Series wins for the Cubs, including the infamous '69 team that Olorgando mentioned.

Starbrow said:

I hear you EA. It had been a long 108 years between World Series wins for the Cubs, including the infamous '69 team that Olorgando mentioned.

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Don't be too hard on that '69 Cub team. What chance did they have against a miracle juggernaut that scoffed at three Henry Aaron home runs in three games in the first-time NL playoffs, then lulled the highly favored Baltimore Orioles into complacency by "allowing" their star pitcher Tom Seaver to lose the first game - then running roughshod over the Orioles in the next four games.

Is this the "Watching" thread, or the "Sports Talk" thread now?

Well, here's a sport you can not only watch, but participate in -- if you dare:

I've started watching Invincible on Prime. Two episodes in and I'm not really seeing what the hype is all about and feel the remaining six episodes are going to be kind of a slog to get through.