Baseball DIY

Occasionally, I play the role of wannabe-rocker in my band, Prairie Rehab. We’ve played a baby’s handful of shows and hope to play more in the future (which is to say, if you’re in the St. Louis area and want to rock in a controlled manner, send me an e-mail). One thing I was thinking about yesterday after drumming a little in my basement is that newspapers don’t interview the band after they play a show. They interview them before, maybe for some fluffy feature in the Sunday edition, but there’s no post-show press conference or locker room debriefing like there is after a baseball game.

This is clearly a wrong that must be brought to rights.

I, for one, would love to do one.

“Eric, how did you feel about tonight’s show?”

“Well, you know, we didn’t get a lot of the breaks tonight. John brought the wrong harmonica for ‘Dream Girl,’ so that kind of threw him off. The monitors were in and out all night. A lot of things were just outside our control. But, you know, we’re mentally tough, and we played it out to the end. This band’s got a lot of heart.”

“Is it fair to say that you didn’t have your best performance tonight?”

“Yeah, I think, yeah, you could say that. I’ve kind of been trying to find my groove the last few shows. We’ve been on the road for awhile now, and I think it’s hitting us all in different ways.”

“What do you plan to do to bust out of this slump?”

"’Slump’? Who said anything about a slump? We’re not sucking, we’re just, just not playing straight-A shows the last few nights. "Slump" is an overstatement. We just need to go back out tomorrow and play like we know we’re capable of playing. It’ll work itself out in the end. We just gotta keep plugging away.”

On second thought, I think we can do with as little of that kind of “news” as possible. The older I get and the more I think about it, I think pretty much anything in the sports section outside of box scores and injury reports is just useless ephemera that no one needs to waste their time writing or reading.