Ace in the hole

So a couple weeks ago I went to see the Jays face off against the Angels. Prominently displayed on the ticket was the line “ACE PLUSH TOY GIVEAWAY”. Now I’m a bit too old for collecting stuffed animals, but like everyone else, I’m a free stuff whore. I haven’t had season tickets for the Jays in ten years, but I do remember all my favourite giveaways. There was Coca-Cola hat day, Mr. Sub bag day, Shopper’s Drug Mart calendar day and also team autographed ball day (As an aside, I was doing some spring cleaning the other day and found an autograph ball that I actually used to play with, yeah I had that many). My buddy Devo was a little late so I had to wait outside the gate. It was maybe 15 minutes past start time when we went in when they were out of the stuffed blue jays. I couldn’t believe it. There were maybe 25,000 people watching the game and they were already out.

It’s not so much the toy I care about (although we ended up ‘finding’ one which Devo graciously donated to me cause he thought I was pretty broken up about it), as much as the principle. I can remember being horribly late to Jays games back in the day and always getting whatever they were giving away (except one autographed ball day which my dad and I got there at something like the 4th or 5th inning). I mean the Jays were like literally twice as popular back then and they always had ample supply (at least the first 20,000, which I’m sure we were amongst on Ace giveaway day).

The only greater injustice I can think of is that Playboy with Jessica Alba on the cover and nothing inside. You go into it expecting one thing and coming up totally empty handed. Why is it okay to tempt us poor/greedy people like this? I suppose in some places it’s done on a far greater scale. I can think of New York where they keep pretending they’ll field competitive pro sports teams (Sure, the Yankees are now, but remember the early 90’s?). The Knicks are especially great, remember when they traded Sprewell a couple years back and deemed Keith freakin’ Van Horn the saviour of the franchise? I’m thinking they either hired that Iraqi Minister of Information guy from the Iraq invasion or resurrected Joseph Goebels to do the press conference for that one. That’s quite possibly worse than the absence of topless Alba.

Anyway, in the end the Jays won, I got my Ace, and I don’t have to cheer for the Knicks, so I suppose it turned out alright. The only damper was watching our closer B.J. Ryan getting his first earned run of the season. He came in the top of the eighth and I turned to Devo and gave him the ol’ “what the hell?” He could only reply “hell if I know”. Apparently Gibbons thought he was due for an extra inning that game.

It’s Devo’s birthday today (technically yesterday) so wish him a good one.

Like A.J. Burnett, I’m out.