So let me paint the picture for you….  

It’s the day after the child’s prom.  In either a moment of wisdom or stupidity, I had allowed child and friends to have their post party at my house, which sent us to a hotel. So, we went to the SAM Remix party that night and had a great time with friends.  Then, we stopped by the house and brought the kids pizza late night just to make sure the world wasn’t collapsing. 

So now it’s noonish on Saturday when Garrett and I head down to Safeco Field to catch the Mariners vs Rays game.  And I admit, I feel a little like an old guy who went to one party, stopped by a prom party and then spent a night in a hotel.

So Garrett and I are walking thru the north lot, and we can hear Lenny Kravitz’ sound check.  We ask ourselves why we aren’t going to this concert.  What stopped us from buying tickets? And hearts full of regret, we sullenly walk past Qwest.

Except…..  suddenly…..  we notice…..  

There’s a line outside the Qwest field box office.  We investigate.  We ask a few questions.  We do a few mental calculations.  And a few short minutes later, we are holding U2 concert tickets.  AND we’re walking to Safeco for a Mariners game on a 72 dgeree day.  You go draw up a better day than that.

Anyway, here are some pics from the 300+ level.  Great show.  Fun pics.

I was going to put some notes together on the passing of Detroit Tigers Broadcasting legend Ernie Harwell.  However, before I had a chance, the North Sound division of AndyBoyer.com but together this list which I’ll forward here:

• Was born two years before the radio was invented.
• Was a bat boy for the Atlanta Crackers (really) at age five.  He never had to buy a ticket for a baseball game since then.
• Broadcast games for the Atlanta Crackers but was traded to the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1948 for catcher Cliff Dapper becasue Branch Rickey liked Ernie and Brooklyn needed a third guy to substitute for Red Barber who was sick with an ulcer.
• Broadcasters were fired often because as the teams’ radio sponsors — mainly beer companies like Strohs, Gunther, Goebel — won contracts, the new sponsor often thought the broadcaster identified too much with the old sponsor.
• Vin Scully replaced Ernie Harwell for the Dodgers
• In Harwell’s first broadcast for the Tigers in 1960, there was not room for him or his color guy in the Cleveland press box so they had to do the broadcast from a table set up in the upper deck.  It was 35 degrees and windy.  The 15 inning game lasted almost five hours.
• Rick Rizzs did the unthinkable by spending a year as Ernie’s “replacement” in 1992.  Bo Schembechler made this decision and resigned a year later.  Ernie was broadcasting for Detroit again in 1993.
• In 2002 the Cleveland Indians named their visiting radio booth for Harwell
• When he retired, he had twice outdone Cal Ripken’s consecutive games streak.  He missed two games in his career.  One for his brother’s funeral and the other for his Hall of Fame induction.
• It’s Harwell’s call of the 1963 World Series you hear in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”
• He and his wife Lulu were married for 68 years

Photo borrowed from http://rodgerdodgerowl.wordpress.com/2009/09/15/ernie-harwell/

The Stanwood bureau of AndyBoyer.com once again shows it is worth every dime we are pouring into it.  Garrett and his team bring us “Bend it Like Bennett” a blog written by a fake Clay Bennett. Funny stuff.  And as Garrett reports:

This cannot be written by an OKC resident.  It has to be a disgruntled Seattle fan.  However, the comments indicate that the people reading it believe it is an OKC fan.  
 
http://benditlikebennett.blogspot.com/

This comes to us from the Stanwood division of Andy Boyer.com. 

This is what happens when your marketing team doesn’t check things out with the legal team. Or maybe they couldn’t reach the lawyers, since the whole legal team was in court trying to make sure the Seattle based Marketing team would be out of a job in a few weeks….

One of my favorite things to watch is when businesses choose to ignore a technology or shift in human behavior, and honestly believe that if they ignore it well enough, it will simply go away.

We saw this in the music industry, where executives refused to believe that anyone would rather listen to thousands of songs on a device the size of a credit card rather than using a clunky cd player and devoting an entire wall for storing that same music. 

The newspapers were no better, refusing to consider that carrying a dirty glob of paper with old news was less appealing than simply logging on to a computer and getting the freshest info. 

This makes a story Garrett found even more humorous.  The Chicago Sun Times has some sports columnists who occasionally draw the ire of their readers.  Jay Mariotti is one such columnist.  Apparently, people were responding to his articles in a negative way, so the Sun Times made the decision to stop allowing readers to comment on his columns.  You can almost hear the conversation, "Well if we turn off the technology that allows readers to write negative things about Jay, then no one can write anything negative, and we won’t have to worry about it anymore. Problem solved!"

Except of course, that it’s 2008 and the world doesn’t work like that anymore.  Maybe in 1970 that was a good idea.  But nature abhors a vacuum, so if people want to write negative things about Jay Mariotti, and the Sun Times won’t let it happen on their site, the people will find a new home for their vents.

And they have, thanks to crosstown rival, the Chicago Tribune, who have geniusly embraced Social Media by developing a forum where readers can post comments about Jay Mariotti. And for that matter, other Sun Times writers. 

And guess what, two giant ads on the page.

So, you have one paper pretending that taking away the voice of the people would be helpful.   And you have a other that is profiting on the idea of letting people have their say.  By foolishly thinking you can control the voice of the people, you lose all control of the situation, because now you can’t even moderate out the particularly distasteful ones.  And your competitor gets the ad money. 

Lesson to be learned here: No one has 100% approval rating.  The only way to have any control of the situation is to let the people speak on your turf.