It’s not just a monkey; it’s a Rally Monkey

By Daren Many

ANAHEIM, Calif. — I’m going to start every blog with a thank-you to the people who have helped us in each city. In Los Angeles it was Bryan Mansell.

Bryan is a friend of Troy’s that he has known since kindergarten. Bryan is also a sound engineer in L.A. who bought us dinner, let us sleep at his pad for two nights, and figured out our wireless microphone system because we’re idiots. Thanks, Bryan.

Also, you should know that Bryan has the biggest house cat I have ever seen. It looks like it ate another cat of equal or larger size. If it were out roaming around in Africa you would look at his cat from inside a Land Rover with a guide carrying a high-powered rifle. I didn’t actually get a picture of the cat but I found a picture of one that was pretty similar, if not a little smaller.

On every long road trip like the one we’re attempting you run into problems. We have had more than our fair share of equipment problems. Not a day goes by that we don’t hear some of the following:

1.)  Wow! Maybe we should just film this thing with an Etch a Sketch. It would be a lot easier than the piece of crap we’re using now.

2.)  Hi! I’m a Mac and I’m a PC. Well guess what, you’re both pieces of garbage. Hand me another beer out of the cooler because I can’t handle this anymore.

3.)  PC load letter? What the @#%! does that mean?

4.)  Hey a-hole. Way to charge the battery last night. The five seconds of video I captured of the Rally Monkey should really spice up our documentary.

These things happen every single day. This actually is good and it means we care about what we’re doing on this trip. It’s not so good when you drink in the parking lot for an hour and a half and miss the first five innings of a game. That’s what happened in Anaheim and it’s a sign that things aren’t running all that smoothly. I don’t want to overreact, but there are some things getting in the way.

One is the amount of sleep we’ve been getting. When you’re driving to a day game at 10 in the morning in a major city and mistake it for a completely different city you might need a couple more hours of rest. 

Two is the amount of beer. Drinking beer is part of the game and when you get three buddies together it’s going to happen. But in all honesty, and I’m not going to be holding too much back in this blog, we are drinking too much.

We haven’t bought any food for our cooler because it would take up the much needed space for beer. We’re drinking around a case a day. This does not help our productivity.

Three is women. Now, this is a touchy subject and I might get yelled at after I publish this blog, but oh well. I’m single. When you’re single your phone rings slightly more than your grandparents’ cell phone. You know that phone. The one your grandpa has for emergencies.

Nolan’s and Troy’s phones need their own cell networks to handle the traffic. The amount of time these guys spend on the phone with their girlfriends adds up to numbers not yet acknowledged by the scientific community.

Listen, it’s fine. I’ve been in their situations. But even though they may disagree with me it’s affecting what we’re trying to get done. For example, most nights we spend some time trying to diagnose computer/video problems. It’s almost guaranteed that when we’re about five seconds from fixing a problem this happens:

1.)  Phone rings

2.)  Troy/Nolan picks up phone to talk to girlfriend

3.)  All productivity goes out the window, I grab another beer to prepare for the journey that will be the conversation between lovers, and I eventually go to bed so I can wake up the next morning to Nolan texting his girl.

I will leave you with a few small notes about the games we saw. The five innings we saw at Angel Stadium were fun and the park is pretty nice. We had a lot of fans telling us that the Rally Monkey actually helps the team. I guess it’s supposed to be good luck.

Well, the Angels won in the bottom of the ninth so what do I know? I asked a guy outside the stadium if he thought that the monkey might just run away if they took it off its leash. He didn’t think that was funny. These fans are serious about their monkey. I’ll leave it at that.

You will hear a lot about Dodger Stadium from the other guys so I won’t say much. Our experience there was less than desirable. Aside from that I felt some of the nostalgia, and anytime you can hang out in a ballpark it’s a good day.

We’re off to San Diego next, which I’m extremely excited about. It’s one of my favorite cities, I’ve been to the park before and it’s awesome, and of course I get to see the Mets play. I’ll be putting on the Seaver jersey for the first time this trip and I’m looking forward to it.

Mets: 3.5 games back

(There’s more on this and our other adventures at BaseCrawl.com.)