Mask appeal: Angels wrestling night a breath of fresh air

Menagerie When I heard about the Angels attempting to get into the Guinness Book of World Records for most assembled people wearing Mexican-style wrestling masks earlier this month, I was unsurprisingly mystified. After all, such a night combines quite a few things I’m into: Masks, wrestling and wackjob baseball promotional nights.

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Putting the future on hold with Bryce Harper

Weird grip, no?

I watched Bryce Harper go through the motions last Friday night, his attention to detail and serious countenance connoting a longtime veteran of the sport.

I listened as the 18-year-old Harper, sporting a ridiculous mustache, crafted a respectful and droll media presence, relaying with an underlying trace of irony to a group of reporters that he was “trying to get better every day” — repeating that four times in the course of a minute.

A little later, I was down in the tunnel talking baseball with Hagerstown hitting coach Marlon Anderson when I heard a bit of commotion coming from the visitors’ clubhouse. I looked over as a shirtless and smirking Bryce Harper emerged from the clubhouse, pointed at a teammate and hollered, “Better be careful, or that bag’s gonna be gone when you get back.”

This was the Bryce Harper I’d been waiting to see all night.

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Rearview Mirror: Mayo puts on clinic on how to exit gracefully

 Beast

“So wait, you’ve never seen what O.J. Mayo did in his final high school game?” my friend Tom Boorstein from SNY.tv asked me recently.

I can’t remember how Mayo came up in our conversation, which usually revolves around Tom’s inexplicable fascination with baseball umpires, but I told him I couldn’t recall having any memory of his final high school game.

“You have to see this,” Tom said while loading up the video.

True to billing, Mayo had figured out the single most ridiculous way to make a grand exit, leading me to compare it to some of the greatest curtain-closing moments in sports.

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