How ZZ Top, rooting for the Yankees, and taking off your shoes started clanging around in my head

I was thinking of giving up on this Substack thing, but one of the nicest people I have ever met saw my post on Facebook ( I don’t just say that because she subscribed, she once texted my wife to tell her she had been driving past our house and thinking about us) and started subscribing to this, so I am going to start another post. The ZZ Top reference applies here. I was watching a documentary (That Little Ol’ Band From Texas is the title) about them on Netflix (highly recommended) and the story was told about one of their early gigs to which a single person showed up. For years, the man would show up to their shows and they would remember his being their only fan at one of their shows. There are many great stories told in this documentary. One of them is that lead singer Billy Gibbons was in a band that opened for Jimi Hendrix on his final American tour and Hendrix was very complimentary of Gibbons’ playing.

In a sense I am rooting for the Yankees tonight. I would like to see Aaron Judge tie the all-time American League home run record. He currently has 60. They are playing the Red Sox (my team) tonight at Yankee Stadium. Many subplots float around this game tonight.

Roger Maris currently has the record of 61 set in 1961. He hit his final home run of the season against the Red Sox that year. Babe Ruth, who was famously sold by the Red Sox to the Yankees, had the previous record of 60. Maris’ record is quite the outlier in his career. Though he was coming off an MVP season in 1960 in which he hit 39 home runs, Maris was under immense pressure to replicate his 1960 exploits when he only had 3 homers in April, then he exploded, reaching the 61 mark.

For Aaron Judge, this season is not an outlier in terms of home runs. He had 52 in his rookie season of 2017, then a major league record until Pete Alonso of the Mets hit 53 as a rookie in 2019. I am in the Judge camp in terms of the MVP race with Shohei Ohtani, the incredible two-way star. Judge, also the largest center fielder in major league history at six feet seven inches tall, also leads the majors in slugging percentage, on base percentage and runs by wide margins. He leads the American League in walks, as well.

Judge’s season could be a Triple Crown one as he already, has a huge lead in both home runs and runs batted in. A recent incredible streak in which he has hit .500 over the last 15 games, catapulted him into the lead in the American League batting race. He is currently at .3170 and Xander Bogaerts of the Red Sox holds a .3166 average.

The taking off of the shoes will be the final topic of this comeback post. The first part of this is that I compare the taking off of the shoes to women taking off their bra at the end of the day. Once I have taken the shoes off, I don’t want to go anywhere else for the rest of the day. I saw the taking off the bra topic on Twitter. One woman posted that a friend had called her and said she needed a ride home, she’d had too much drink. The woman said I’ve taken off my bra, get a cab home.

The second part of the taking off the shoes topic is the ridiculous complaint by former President Donald Trump regarding the search of his “home” the huge resort Mar-a-lago resort. Aside from the recent “I can classify documents just by thinking about it” argument, Trump was upset that the agents who had searched his bedroom had not taken off their shoes first. Federal agents, searching a place for sensitive national security material, he thinks should have taken their shoes off. The joke writes itself basically.

Thank you to my one current follower and anyone else who reads this post. I welcome your comments and I will be back next week to tie together a few more random topics that are rattling around in my brain.