Bring on baseball, and with it the perfect summer soundtrack

Baseball season is almost here again, and even for someone who still cheers rabidly for the perpetually suffering (and almost all deserved, unfortunately) Baltimore Orioles, it's the best reason all year of every single year to celebrate.

And what could make the 2010 baseball season even better than it's sure to be? How about a month-by-month soundtrack updating the state of the season from some of alt-rock's (or whatever the hell you want to call it) best singer/songwriters.

In 2007, appropriately enough at a communal stadium urinal, fuzz guitar man extraordinaire Steve Wynn (if I had to pick just one, probably my favorite rocker around) and Young Fresh Fellows/Minus 5 vet Scott McCaughey met, and from that soon was born, thankfully, the Baseball Project.

So, what in the world is that? Well, it's just two really talented dudes, along with longtime Wynn drummer Linda Pitmon, getting together to write and perform really fun, totally fuzzed out odes to the world's greatest sport (with all apologies to the runner-up, soccer.) In July of 2008 they put out their first album, "Vol. 1: Frozen Ropes and Dying Qualls," which I just bought this morning (after the head's up from mi hermano, who luckily has an actual good team, the Twinnies, to cheer for along with the O's.) It's just full of all kinds of fun songs about baseball, including odes to Curt Flood,Satchel Paige, Sandy Koufax and others, including a great Spanish ditty about Fernando, and even tracks called "Ted F***ing Williams" and "The Yankee Flipper."

If you've never heard of Steve Wynn, I really probably can't do justice to how great he is in writing, so why not listen to a bit of the Baseball Project yourself? The group has just released the first of its monthly ditties for this season, appropriately enough titled "All Future and No Past." In the perfect spirit of eternal hope that greets each new season, it's a tribute to the league's most long-suffering teams, so the Pirates, Royals and, of course, Orioles all get prominent play. I'm not sure they're right that "The Orioles' recent woes are deceiving," but it's a new season, and that means that for one day at least, the Orioles will be in first place in the American League East by sheer force of alphabetical order.

Click the widget below to listen to "All Future and No Past," and keep a look out on ESPN's The Life for the tracks to come once a month throughout this season (and yes, I can almost guarantee I'll post them all here, too.) Enjoy, have a great rest of the weekend, and unless you somehow cheer for the Red Sox or Yankees, keep hope alive!

When's the last time you saw a great baseball movie?

Well, I actually saw "For Love of the Game" just the other day on DVD, and as sappy it is that one still just gets me every time, but I'm talking about a new-to-theaters, bona fide baseball movie.

I couldn't remember one for several years now, but "Half Nelson" creators Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden have one (very long) in the works that sounds just about perfect.

First premiering at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival, their flick "Sugar" follows the fictional saga of Miguel "Sugar" Santos, a Dominican pitcher who comes up through a baseball academy in San Pedro de Macoris and gets a shot to test his talents in America. Though there have been occasional movies about minor league baseball ("Bull Durham" the most famous, of course), this is the first one I can think of that addresses the Dominican pipeline.

This is apparently going to finally get some kind of American release in April, but I'll probably have to catch it on DVD. Enjoy the trailer.



When it comes to sports movies, the only ones I like more than baseball flicks are ones about soccer. Heck, I even like the corny "Goal" series, which so far has followed Mexican immigrant Santiago Munez to Newcastle United and then to Real Madrid and - in the chapter I haven't seen yet - eventually to the 2006 World Cup.

There are much better soccer movies than those, of course, and the one I found a trailer for at the froggy film site Cinempire.com looks like a real winner.

Starring Michael Sheen (and therefore by law, apparently, written by Peter Morgan, from a novel I now have to read by David Peace), "The Damned United" tells the story of very successful English football manager Brian Clough at his most unsuccessful point. Hired to coach Leeds United in 1974, Clough only managed to last 44 days, in which he managed to win only one out of six games and alienate just about everyone associated with the club.

This one is listed as coming out in March in the UK, and hopefully it will sometime after that play wide enough to even reach my little corner of the world. Anyways, here's the very enjoyable trailer. Have a great rest of the weekend.