The Slanch Report

With the All Star game tomorrow, there have been a ton of various MLB sponsored events around town. To take part in the festivities (since my press pass to the All-Star Game itself must have gotten lost in the mail), I headed over to the Fan Fest at the Javitz center on Sunday.

This was my first time ever at an event like this, so I wasn’t sure what to fully expect. When we arrived at the convention center, the simple act of buying tickets became a clusterfuck, as it took us a couple minutes to find the place where they even sell the tickets. Fortunately, while waiting in line a friendly scalper came by and sold us tickets at less than face value. Hey, thanks!

Tickets in hand, we could see the entrance to the event only a few feet away. Instead of conveniently walking through and getting into the fest, we instead had to walk back outside, go down some stairs, through a long snaking path, up an escalator, around a corner into another snaking line and then finally we came back to where we had bought our tickets and were eventually allowed entry.

Upon entering, we checked out the various items up for auction: some cool jerseys, balls, bats and other cool memorabilia for those of you with healthier checking balances than I. There were multiple a cappella groups performing around the area, which was totally fortunate since a cappella totally sucks. There was however a dope set-up of all the various hats of the minor leagues, arranged by team, which was very neat to see and there were some excellent hats.

We wandered around and saw all the trophies of baseball. Did you even know that the NL base-stealing champion wins the Lou Brock award? I didn’t. Apparently the AL guy gets nothing. Strange. The trophies were somewhat interesting, for example, I’d much rather, based on aesthetics, win the Home Run Derby trophy or the World Series MVP than the regular season MVP which is just a boring plaque.

Hilariously, they had some giant-size posters of players hanging from the ceiling. The ones that I noticed were from such current All Stars like Barry Zito, and my personal favorite, Kaz Sasaki. He’s only been out of the league since 2003, so I can see why they’d be anxious to market him…

Continue reading ‘MLB All Star Fanfest, A Moderately Fun Time!’