Tuesday, June 17, 2003

Cheese-steak eating surrender monkeys

Fans of the Philadelphia Phillies baseball team have a whole new line of material to pursue in their legendary pillorings of ineffective on-field performances. It was announced today that the new ballpark for the team, to open next year, will be called Citizens Bank Park, with the sale of the naming rights to that regional banking group. Within the realm of corporate named arenas, there's nothing especially bad about that choice. It should be noted however that the bank is in fact a subsidiary of the Royal Bank of Scotland. We suppose it makes sense not to have the name of the overseas corporate parent grace the local ballpark, but it's not like RBS is a French company or something. And we can easily see the disgruntled fans adapting their narratives to be consistent with the Scottish sponsor. There are lots of Groundskeeper Willies out there, just dying for a chance to try out some material, like in our suggested title above. In fact, there's such a mother lode of material from the Scottish connection, we wonder if the Phillies should reconsider and put RBS's name on the park. The ESPN Sportscenter guys would have to do a special Phillies show each night just to get through all the possible references.

No comments: