Rating the Tigers Entrance Music

I was fortunate enough to attend this afternoon's Tigers game against the Blue Jays with my friends Matt and Bill. I would give a more detailed account of the game but I don't remember much because it was freezing. Freezing is actually an understatement. Today's game made the Ice Planet of Hoth look like a sunny summer resort planet, only instead of AT-AT's lumbering around it was Frank Thomas and Troy Glaus and instead of snow and sleet blowing around and stinging your face it was mostly hot dog wrappers and used syringe needles. I was about five seconds away from climbing over the railing and cutting open Gene Lamont's stomach to sleep........for warmth of course, (shifting eyes). Anyways here is what I remember regarding today's game:

Blast of cold wind to the face, Granderson grand slam, standing and cheering, shivering, big lead, talking to Matt and Bill, fake peeing in heated restroom, Grilli sucks.......Rodney too, blowing into hands, go ahead run reaches base, I hate Todd Jones, game over, Tigers win, let's get the hell out of here because I can't feel my hands and face.

The other part of the game that stands out and one of my favorite and most underrated aspects of attending a baseball game in general, is listening to the entrance music chosen by the Tigers before their at-bats. So today I took a mental note of each batters song with the idea of rating them on a scale of 1-5. In the effort of full disclosure, and to have my own taste in music justifiedly ridiculed, I would go with one of the following three songs for my personal entrance music.

1: Wu-Tang Clan Ain't Nuthing Ta F' Wit (namely the "causing more family feuds than Richard Dawson" part, possibly the greatest line of verse ever written, causing Keats, Byron and Shelley to rise from their graves all exclaim, "shit why didn't I think of that" before having "flaming flying guillotines" simultaneously "chop off their heads."

2: Ace of Spades, by Motorhead: This song is pretty cheesy but no one can deny it's face melting awesomeness, it's just too badass. I feel the only way I could do this song justice would be to have barb wire wrapped around my bat with rusty nails sticking out of it, kind of like Robert Redford's bat in "The Natural."

3: Jump, by Van Halen: This song sucks but the first five seconds of it always gets me pumped up for some reason. This song single handily convinced me to skip school one day in 11th grade. I turned on my car right when the song started and it motivated me to seize the day instead of listening to some boring anatomy lecture, so naturally I went inside and fell asleep until after 2. Oh well, there was always tomorrow.

Enough "Empire Strikes Back" analogies and personal lists though and onto the ratings.

1: Curtis Granderson: "Nuthin' But A G' Thang", Dr. Dre: Personally I think Granderson has an excellent taste in music. Nearly every game I've been to he has selected either classic old-school rap such as Dr. Dre or early Nas or newer hip-hop like Outkast and N.E.R.D. This is the type of rap music that I listen to and browbeat my friend T.J. with, while mocking his mainstream rap like The Youngbloodz, Young Joc, Young Jeezy, or any of the other 500 rappers who use the word young in their name. It's also the type of music I blare in the privacy of my own car while driving down the expressway and immediately turn down when I get off my exit and drive around the city. I don't do this because I'm embarrassed to like rap music but rather because if anyone ever saw me, the whitest guy anyone will ever meet both metaphorically and in actuality, it would cause the whole rap industry to lose its credibility and come crashing in on itself, and I just can't live with that kind of guilt.
Rating: 5 stars

2: Placido: Unidentified Latino Music: I'm not familiar with the artists that any of the Latino players use or anything about that genre of music, so I'm not going to pass judgment on any of the songs. They could be coming up to the Hispanic equivalent of the Beatles, or the Latino version UNK, (see below) and I wouldn't know.
Rating: N/A

3: Sheffield: "This is Why I'm Hot", Mims: This is currently the most popular rap song on the airwaves and can be heard somewhere on XM radio 24 hours a day, along with "The Sweet Escape" and "Glamorous". This song is nothing but 4 minutes of some guy named Mims, which might be the worst name in rap history, boasting about how he's "hotter" than other rappers. This may be the most arrogant, self-centered entrance music since Gabe Kapler used to come to the plate to "Whatta Man", but I'm not going to be the one to tell Sheffield that, because as my friend Bill said at the game today, "Sheffield looks like a crazy version of Ray Lewis." Yikes.
Rating: 2 stars

4: Magglio: More Unidentified Latino Music: See Polanco.
Rating: N/A

5: Guillen: "U Don't Know Me", T.I.: I like T.I. as evidenced by the fact that "Rubber Band Man" was my ringtone for nearly two years after it had ceased to be semi-popular or relevant. My only problem with this entrance music is the fact that Guillen has been using it for the past two seasons. I find it hard to believe that there hasn't been a song released in two years that Guillen has listened to and thought, "Hey I kind of like this, maybe I could use it for my entrance music this season." If anything I think Guillen's refusal to change his music confirms my hypothesis that Carlos is really shiftless and annoyed at the prospect of having to do anything but lie around and watch soap operas or The Simpsons on DVD, very similar to my own outlook on life. If I were in his position I would probably think something along these lines. "Shit I've been meaning to burn a CD with new batting entrance music for like 8 months now, I should get around to doing that. O.k. where are my CD's........found them, alright now I've got to get on iTunes and download a song, and then put the CD in and then.........oh fuck this I'm just gonna hook up the Atari and play some Space Invaders...." Then I would take a nap while hooking the system up. That's how lazy I am, it's either laziness or severe, overbearing depression and anxiety. Oh well six one way, half a dozen the other, I guess.
Rating: 3 stars

6: Pudge: "Latino Heat", Eddie Guerrero: I like the direction Pudge went with his song selection borrowing it from the "sport" that made entrance music popular. I'm talking about the PGA Tour of course, where Craig Stadler helped make "Don't You Want Me" by the Human League a smash hit on the heels of his 1982 Masters win. O.k. that last sentence may be the stupidest thing I've ever wrote. I'm really talking about the WWF (I refuse to acknowledge the World Wildlife Fund as the real WWF, no matter how adorable their panda logo is). The WWF played a pretty large role in my childhood until I realized how phony and stupid it was at the tender age of 22, (no I stopped watching shortly after the introduction of IRS, which was the lamest idea for a wrestler EVER) and I used to watch Monday Night Raw and Wrestlemania with my friends and play the games on Nintendo and Sega, so I'm pretty familiar with the theme songs for every wrestler pre-1994. I think more baseball players should use wrestling music from this era and I would recommend the following three songs as certifiably kick-ass. 1: Also sprach Zarathustra by Richard Strauss and used by Ric Flair (WOOOOOO!!!). 2: "Sexy Boy" by Shawn Michaels, and 3: "Real American", Hulk Hogan.
Rating: 3.5 stars

7: Sean Casey: "Evenflow", Pearl Jam: Evenflow may have been my favorite song in 1992 and possibly the first rock song I actually embraced as my own anthem of an angst ridden nine-year old. I know you're thinking that listening to Pearl Jam made me the coolest nine-year old around but I wasn't, it was a fluke, and six months later I believed "Runaway Train" was the greatest song ever created ( I think I just heard you yell out "lame" from your home computer right now and it's completely justified). Anyways I trashed Guillen for using a song that was two years old, so I have to bury Casey for using a song that is now 15 years old. However in Casey's defense he's probably clueless and thinks that the grunge era is still prominent. I can see him after the game listening to Alice in Chains, while dressing in a red and black flannel wearing Doc Martens and trying to invite Brandon Inge over to his house to watch "Reality Bites".
Rating: 3.5 stars

8: Monroe: "Walk It Out", UNK: I hate this song and I'm disappointed in Monroe for choosing it. This is the type of song that my old roommate Mike's girlfriend Keri (got all that) would love and that's a bad thing. A very, very bad thing. Keri is the stereotypical 21 year old college girl who enjoys three things. 1: inane babbling about every minor things thats occurred in her life over the past 24 hours, including but not limited too, what time she got up in the morning, who called her, what she ate at Fazoli's, blah, blah, blah. 2: Tending to her two Yorkies that yip at everything and shit everywhere. 3: Clubbing. This is the kind of song Keri and her friends would get all excited about and rush the dance floor for, so they could have gangly douchebags dance on them and try, in vain, to pick them up, (i've been there). Anything that encourages the above scenario and features a grating chorus gets a low rating in my book. Oh yeah, and where is Mike in this whole scenario, getting high at his house and playing Guitar Hero for 4 hours straight, he's my idol........seriously he is.
Rating: 1 star

9: Inge: Some Metallica Song or Metallica knock off band that Sounds Like All the Other Metallica Songs, or maybe it's Korn, who knows: Metallica and their genre of music might be my least favorite type. I would rather listen to calypso or polka or someone puking until they died than listen to a Metallica song. In my hometown of Clio, James Hetfield, Dale Earnhardt, and Jesus are the three most idolized figures and in that order. 98% of Clio couldn't name 5 U.S. President's but they could tell you the exact day that Cliff Burton died. Since I was the only person in my high school not to own a Metallica shirt I was singled out as a "fag", well because of that and the fact that I was paralyzed by fear to talk to any girl, which resulted in many Goldeneye Saturday nights, and this was in a school where the girls were so easy they converted a classroom into a daycare.....but I digress. Anyways I'm sure Inge isn't some judgmental, conservative, redneck. If anything I'm under the impression that he's quite the opposite. However this list isn't a rating regarding the players character but rather the songs and the repressed, bitter memories of high school they bring out,errr, something like that.
Rating: 0 stars.