Kabooms.
If you thought four hours a day, twelve hundred minutes a week was enough, think again. He's the last remnants of the old Republic, a soul fashion of fairness. He treats crackheads in the ghetto gutter the same as the rich pill poppers in the penthouse.
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The Clearinghouse of Hot takes break free for something special. The Fifth Hour with Ben Maller starts.
Right now in the air ywhere and a Happy Saturday? Idiot is National Ask a Stupid Question Day? And it is the Fifth Hour with Me Ben Maller and Danny G Radio as we were back at it on a college football kind of a Saturday. Hello, Danny G Radio.
Where do babies come from?
I cannot answer that question. I cannot Why are we here?
Why is the sky blue? Yeah?
What is it the very top of the world? Why can't we go there?
Danny?
What is going on?
My mom told me that when I was a toddler, I would ask her questions like that and she is like, stop asking me. Shit, I don't know the answer to.
Did we actually go to the moon?
Danny? Maybe?
Is the earth flat? Is it round? Is it hollow? I need to know Danny, I need to know the answers to these questions. On this podcast, we will have straight A's stormwatch a Gangsters Paradise, much other random random observations from the last few days, as we are known to do on this podcast, but I thought we'd start with this. Back on Thursday, Danny, they played the final game ever in Oakland. There will never be another baseball
team likely in Oakland again. The Athletics played and there was some vandalism, but it wasn't nearly like what we thought was going to be. It was rather rather controlled. Of course, the Oakland Police had like one hundred and fifty officers or something like that out there. They had six hundred security guards. I mean, it was over the top, but I watched some of it. I was busy. I couldn't watch the whole game, but I watched some of it.
And I'm not an A's fan. I talked about it on the Overnight Show a little bit, but it just bums me out when these teams relocate and it just seems so unnecessary to me. I don't run the business side of these things, but it just seems like they really effed it up. And I had some stories some I wanted to share here about my experience with the A's. I was a radio stringer way back way back in the day, many many years ago, when I was starting
out in radio, one of my first jobs. And so back in those days before the Internet, in the Stone Age, they would use a reporter to call in and you have updates on the game and to get audio after the game. So I did that for several years before I became a talk show host full time, and in that time I covered the Dodgers and the Angels and all the teams in LA and I got a phone
call from some executive for the Oakland Athletics. It's probably the late nineties, I forget exactly what year, but he's like, Hey, we're looking for somebody in Anaheim to do this thing. We were a sponsor and we want a live update from the Big A when the A's are on the West Coast. So I was like, yeah, I mean I'll do it. It's a paying gig. Of course I'll do it. And so I did that for a couple of years. It was called the Coca Cola like Road Report or
something like that. It was like PEPSI was the sponsor and It was a long time ago, but I got a check every month from the Oakland Athletics and it was it was you know when you get those checks, Danny, you don't want to actually spend the money because it's so cool to have the actual paper check. Well, it wasn't a lot.
Of money, it wasn't hard to save it.
Then well, they don't even have checks like this anymore. It was it was just a check that had the Oakland A's logo on it and it said from the Oakland Baseball Club or whatever. And so I like, well, man, I'm on the A's payroll. I mean, this is all eighty nine cents. Yeah, I'm getting like, you know, fifty bucks a game or something like that. But whatever it was, and I don't even think it was that much. So I did it and then became kind of friendly with
some of the guys worked on the broadcast. And so then when the A's would come to Anaheim, I would hang out in the A's broadcast booth. They would they would welcome me in, and it was really just a wonderful experience as a radio nerd to see how the broadcasts were done. And I had heard as a kid and I thought I was gonna be Ben Scully, but I would listen to far away broadcasts of different different teams, and I would get the Giants out of the Bay Area.
Every once in a while, I could scan the AM dial and find a grainy, faraway feed of the Athletics, but it wasn't normally from Oakland. It was like a station in Fresno or something would come in where I live. So I heard Bill King. I had heard him a lot on NFL films from his work with the Raiders, but he was a by play guy for the Athletics, and I met him and hung out with him off and on when I was at those games. And Ken Korak.
Yeah there was also Ray Fosse. Yeah.
Ray was doing TV at that time, so I was in the radio booth. But it was It was great, and I have one of my favorite stories, just absolutely crazy. It was an August game in Anaheim, very hot. The A's were not a playoff team, the Angels were not a playoff team, so I'm The way it worked is the broadcasters sat in the front row and I sat in the second row, and I had the stats and the scores out of town scoreboard before before the internet again, So I was updating the scoreboard for the guy who
dubbed it. So I'm sitting there and it's like the I know, it was the third inning. They were switching broadcast role, so it was like the end of the third inning, and then ken Korak was going to take over. So Bill King gets up and he walks up a couple of stairs behind me, and there's a lot of room there and and ken Korak jokingly said, well, Bill's going to get down to his underwear now, and I thought, well, that's funny, you know, that's that's pretty funny. And hand
to God Bill King. And he was an old man at that, I mean, he didn't live much longer than that. I don't know when he passed away, but you know, it was the ninety So he took off his pants. I think he had shorts on. Actually, whatever he wanted, he took it off. And he walked back down to sit next to Ken and he was in his tidy whities, and it was it was wild. Wow, he really did it. That's that's nuts. But a very nice man lived on a boat, I think in in northern California somewhere, so
that's my experience. But and I went to a few as games, not many. And now you were I think, Nanny, you were there much more than I was. I mean, you were you spent time in the Bay right when you were growing up.
My mom went from Massachusetts to San Jose with her family, as I've talked about before, met my dad in high school there in San Jose, and then came down here together in Thousand Oaks, California. And then they bought a house in Simi Valley before moving to Woodland Hills, so they would go to Dodger games. But then they found out something about southern California. Ben, even back then you could sell your house and make a lot of money from it. Absolutely, my mom was telling my dad, I
want to go back up to the Bay. Ben, I'm not kidding you. My mom and dad moved back and forth from the Bay to LA I can't even count on two hands. Got to go to my first Dodger game listening to Vince Scully when I was in kindergarten, really into baseball. When I was twelve, me and my older brother would convince our older friend Dion Hawes. Probably you two when you were kid, you had like that
one older friend who had a car. Yeah, we would convince Dion to drive us to Oakland for A's baseball because even though we were Dodger fans and that's what we really knew as youngsters, that was the closest team. We hated the San Francisco Giants, obviously being Dodgers fans, but the Oakland A's were okay with us because, you know, in our region we had the modesto as we got to see Mark McGuire and Jose Canseco come through. I have an old picture where I I'm posing with a
young Jose Conseco joja By. It was so fun to see these guys blossom into major league players in Oakland. So we would we would beg Dion, please take us to an Oakland game, and once in a while he'd be like, all right, you guys, pay for gas and I'll take you.
Yeah, wasn't that expensive back then.
Not at all. And Dion was one of those cool kids where he was just a few years older than us. He had a nice pickup truck and he had a booming system in it. Whenever he would pull up to our house, he'd be bumping some Eric b and rock him.
Come on, Pippin, get your tims on.
My older brother and I we were in kind of a weird position being Dodgers fans. But you know, baseball is very regional, and especially back then, as you know, Ben, we couldn't unless we were surfing the am doll like you late at night with an antenna trying to pick up games and other cities. You weren't getting coverage of other Major League Baseball teams the way you were your local team.
Yeah, it was like a stone age. Like I told younger people, I'm like, well, I to see, like the Toronto Blue Jays. I had to watch this week in baseball and maybe they would show a highlight of the Toronto Blue Jays.
Maybe you know it.
It was on sat like Saturday morning, it would be this week in baseball.
That's exactly true. If you tried to explain that to a kid right now, they wouldn't understand at all. So it was a strange thing. It was like, Eh, we're not exactly A's fans, but by family, we're kind of related to the A's. And we get to the Oakland Coliseum in nineteen eighty seven, one of the first A's games that we attended very late in the year, and in fact, it was Reggie Jackson's final home game playing in Oakland.
Oh wow, that's cool.
It was very cool now think about it. Reggie Jackson was literally on his last leg, but he was one of those guys where, even though he was an old player at the time, whenever he would come up to the plate, it was very special because man, he could hit a home run, still has power to hit it out. That's exactly what happened on this night. My older brother,
i think, wanted to make this game count. We didn't get to go to very many baseball games in general, and so he looked around, elbows me and he starts a Reggie chant in our section. Okay, And it starts out, you know, just him, It's just my brother doing it, and he won't shut up. He's one of those annoying kids in the stands who's trying to get everybody else in the stands to follow him.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know.
The little annoying kids where you're like, shut up.
Yeah.
And my older brother finally gets our section into it, and our section now is chanting Reggie. Then the section next to us picks up on it and they go and it was kind of like the wave because the next thing you know, the entire stadium is chanting Reggie's name and Ben that at bat, Reggie knocks one out.
Unbelievable. Reggie was bigger than life and all at the end of his career. At that time, he was like one of the biggest stars in baseball. And now have you seen those photos of like Reggie Jackson next to the modern slugger, he looks like a backup infielder. But when we were younger, I mean, he's amazing. Oh yeah, Reggie Jackson.
Yeah, And I mean at this point of his life, he was like a balding, kind of had a little bit of a bare belly. Yeah, he looked like a former player already, even though he was still in a major league uniform.
But Ricky Henderson said about the A's leaving Oakland, he was asked if he was sad about it, and he said, this is such a classic quote by Ricky Henderson. He says, I have too much money to be sad about the A's leaving leaving Oakland. Isn't that not on brand? You're an ass hat?
I'm sure other people saw what Jeff Passen wrote the other day saying the Oakland A's were killed by greed. Don't allow the people responsible for this to spin it any other way. John Fisher did not have to move the team. Major League Baseball and it's owners did not need to be complicit in it. This was a choice, a wrong one. History will sneer.
Well, what is He's going to make a lot of money going to Vegas eventually, But I yeah, I agree with the premise. The A's did not have to leave. From what I read, Baseball was going to cut off essentially all the welfare they were getting, right, That's why they left. They had to announce they were leaving because they weren't going to get the money from revenue sharing, and so that's why they did this when they did it. But yeah, why would Vegas is a great town. I
love Vegas. I go to Vegas a lot, But Oakland, in the Bay Area, there's more people that live there. It's a bigger media market by far than Las Vegas. So from that standpoint in terms of television and all those things, it is a downgrade. We'll see how it plays out, But yeah, I agree, it didn't have to.
Happen, so didn't have to happen. The only one thing I will say, and we've talked about this on our podcast before, it is pretty pathetic how they have let the city there in the flats of Oakland rot. And we've seen over the past couple of weeks people mention on their way to Oakland to go to one final game how they were disgusted by what it looks like surrounding the stadium there.
Well, I had a call from Lance, the bus driver this week. Lance called up. His car was stolen from San Francisco, he lives there. He tracked it to a neighborhood in Oakland. So calls the cops. He says, I know where my car is, and since it was parked in a garage, they said, well, there's nothing we can do. He said, well, I know where it is. I know exactly where the car is. And they wouldn't help him
at all. And so Lance thinks they're going to use his car in one of those neighborhood takeovers, you know where they take over the intersection and they ride their carton circles and burnouts and all that.
And so, I mean, besides them losing their their sports teams there.
In and out Burger right, they've.
Lost, Oh, they've lost restaurants and businesses to crime. It's kind of like the wild Wild West.
It's it's it's pretty bad now. The gangster's Paradise. I'll make this quick. But last weekend, Danny a fortieth birthday party for a friend of the wife. And when it's a friend of the wife, it's a friend of you. So I was dragged to Dave and Busters.
Have you you've.
Been to David Busters right over the years.
Yeah, Oh yeah. We take the kids there sometimes for their birthday celebrations. Yeah.
So they were having a big birthday party and they wanted to go to one in a different part of LA, but it was all booked up. So they said, all right, let's let's go out to Ontario, in the Inland Empire in southern California, the Ontario Mills Mall. I think it's fall, so we we it's pretty far from what we are. We drove out there and a little rough, Danny, a little rough. It was, you know, it was a gangster's
paradise kind of set up. There were a lot of shady looking people playing the games, and hey, the Eastern Own. As long as they don't bother me whatever, I don't care. So they had reserved a table, but we actually when we got there, the table wasn't ready because there was a party. They told us one of the people in our party that the table that we were supposed to get the party had been there for seven hours at the table at a daven Busters seven hours.
What do you do there for seven hours?
I don't know. I have no idea. So we finally got a table and we had a group. There were probably about twelve of us all together, and we're eating, we're enjoying. You know, the food was really not very good, but we ate and pretended to like it and all that stuff. It's terrible. So whatever I was invited, I said, right,
I'll go. And so then our waitress or a waiter comes over and there was another party right across from us, and she's she's in a bad mood, the waitress, and I said, oh, what's going on?
Shocker?
Apparently the group, and this was a group probably twelve to fifteen people, grandma, mom, dads, kids, little kids. They had eaten for about two hours and then left without paying their bill. They just took off and they didn't. They didn't pay their bill. We're not paying and they didn't eve say any in these percent like they were going to play games, and then they left. What are you doing? And this was a this had to be a ton of money, right. They were drinking alcohol, they had everything.
So I got a bunch of losers.
I know, it's like wild and you were allowed to do that in California. I think they don't really care, but yeah, it was. It was interesting that I had a good time playing the games. I didn't play too many, but but I mentioned yesterday on the podcast that I was watching the storm in the South through Florida and Carolina's and Georgia and then on the way up. And you've also been on storm Watch, right, Danny, this actually affected you more than me.
Yeah, it's weird. I've never followed a hurricane or tracked one before where it affected me because of where we live, obviously, but in this case, we were set on the CNR show to broadcast live from the graduate at Hotels and Burn, Alabama, and it was supposed to be the pregame to the pregame to the game day the day before their big game was going to be you know, a lot of b Auburn fans, a lot of OU fans there in attendance, as well as you know, people in the region who
listened to the Coveno and Rich show. There had been a lot of fans of the show that had RSVP'd, and the hotel was really excited to have the broadcast there. And then we start looking at the travel plans and we were scheduled to fly into Atlanta. We would have been landing in Atlanta right as the eye of the hurricane was over Georgia. We were tracking that to see
if it was going to change. We get to Wednesday and Rich is pacing the halls of FSR, telling me in Coveno if we should fly into the eye of the storm. And I'm like, it's all right, dude, will be all right, and he's like, yeah, but even if we wouldn't we land, we're going to be driving in it because once we got to Atlanta, we were going to get a rental car drive for ninety minutes to get to Auburn in Alabama.
Of course, I only ninety minutes out of Atlanta. I thought it was further.
Yeah, yeah, no, not a long drive from Atlanta, but it would have been an interesting drive through a hurricane. Finally, what happens is Dan Beyer live on our show does breaking news the Braves and Mets were canceled. Uh oh, we better talk to our boss Scott. So we do a group chat and we tell Scott, hey, you know us, we're all in, but the games are being canceled. Now. Not sure how many of our listeners are going to be able to attend this live broadcast. Yeah, yeah, that
was one thing. We were all focused on our travel, obviously trying to fly into that area. But then when we really stopped and thought about it, we were like, wait a second, if Georgia is declaring state of emergency and we're trying to fly in, aren't the other people trying to fly out or drive out? At that point, our boss got a hold of the client and talked to the people in charge to the Graduate hotels, and they decided we better call this a.
Couple of other Auburn games that you can go to. But yeah, that's you know, because the powers out from when I was reading the Powers out all over you certain parts of the South, So, yeah, who's going to leave their house? Let me go to I want to leave my I don't have power here, but I'm gonna take off.
Come on, man, we got FEMA passes. Well you were got.
Yeah that's true, you were gotting the street cred.
Yeah, that's what I was thinking. Like I still, I was down. I was like one of the ones pushing forward still like No, what we could do is we could fly into Dallas and then from Dallas straight into Birmingham and rolled up like in the Ghostbuster Mobile.
That'd be awesome.
Yeah, the hotel win would have been boarded up, but we're still walking in with our comrades and our live broadcast equipment.
Yes, we're here to save the day with a live radio remote right here. Yes, that's awesome. I drove in a tropical storm when I was back in Vermont, when I was in Boston a couple months ago, and that wasn't a hurricane, and that was pretty wild. The road was flooding a little bit, it was dark, there were
no lights. I can only imagine what a hurricane would be like with the power out on those old country roads in the South where there's just nothing for miles and miles and miles, And I mean that would be like a horror film, wouldn't it, Danny, wouldn't you think?
Oh for sure, And we're hoping and praying that everybody in that part of the country stays safe. At the time we're taping this. I'm not sure what's going to happen with the football games, but baseball was canceled.
Major League Baseball. If they'd been pro active, they could have had the Braves play on Monday and yep, earlier on Wednesday, and then they would have gotten the games in. But they didn't do that. So now they're gonna play a doubleheader on Monday most I guess that's going to happen now, And whoever wins the playoff spot, it doesn't really matter, Danny, because their pitching staff is going to be shredded from having to play all those games.
But they oh yeah, trust me. Rich Davis, who's a big Mets fan, he had a take on the air saying that this was actually an advantage for the Mets because of how it affected the Braves pitching staff.
That's one way to look at it.
That's hopeful thinking by a Mets fan.
Yeah, wishful thinking by a Mets which is usually the opposite. Usually the Mets fans were porked. You know, we were done, we can't win and all that. All right, I have some other stuff. I think I'll save it for tomorrow the mailbag if I remember, and.
Now, and I'm glad we got to reminisce a little bit about the Oakland A's because it is an emotional thing for sports fans. You know. I saw one of their broadcasters tearing up. You probably saw that video too. Yeah, the post game guys and bit was in tears and their dude next to them was choked up as he was saying goodbye. And it's really weird. It's like a piece of our childhood going to the wayside.
Yeah, we're getting older. We've seen a lot of teams relocate. Like I was saying about the other day, the Montreal Expose gone, Seattle SuperSonics, Hartford Whalers and Hockey, all those teams are gone. We've seen teams move multiple times. The Raiders have moved from Oakland to La back to Oakland to Vegas. The Chargers have moved. Oklahoma City was born from the Sonics. I mean, there's been a lot of
name changes and relocations. The Charlotte Hornets became the Pelicans, and Washington Bullets are no more, the Redskins, the Guardians all that. But anyway, so college football for your your you're home, so you'll be watching later today, Danny.
Yes, yeah, exactly a lot of college football today.
I'll be watching as well. In baseball, most everything I care about is decide, although we don't know the matchups yet, and whether the Dodgers will end up with the number one seed or the Phillies will have the number one seed, all that kind of stuff. And then next week the baseball playoffs. And we have a wonderful rest of your Saturday, and we've got the mail bag tomorrow. We'll talk to you next time later.
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