Of middle-aged angst, mullets, hair metal and baseball

A blog about hair metal and baseball opens with one of the finest songs of the alternative rock era. Is this irony? Can we get a ruling, Alanis?

Happy Opening Day and welcome to Mark Gubicza’s Mullet, the first-ever (that I know of) blog paying homage to the two greatest things to ever come from the sandlots of America: Baseball and hair metal.

Why baseball and hair metal, you may ask? Because there are too goddamn many baseball blogs written by middle-aged men and I had to be different. Also, because I am qualified to write about only three things in this world: Baseball, hair metal and Hofstra University basketball, and I already cornered the market on the latter.

And actually, it might only be two things I can write about: I was once asked by a general manager if I knew what the fuck player development meant. I did in fact know what the fuck player development meant, and he sure didn’t seem to question my intelligence when I spent years blowing smoke up his ass about what a great job he was doing at it. But I digress.

My back story goes a little something like this: Baseball and hair metal were my constant companions during my teenage years, filling the void that would normally be filled by, you know, girls, and stuff. During the glorious summer of 1988, baseball and hair metal converged when Poison and Dokken blasted out of the boom box as I refused to get a haircut and tried to play an entire season’s worth of Major League Baseball games on my Nintendo. Mark Gubicza went 14-0 for the Royals. He had a mullet. Imagine how well Orel Hershiser could have done if he'd grown out his hair that summer.

I used to cover Major League Baseball, where I wrote about player development and a lot of other things. Now I don’t, and this blog is one way to deal with the crippling depression generated by no longer spending my days and nights at the ballpark. I wrote two books, one of which I’ll brag about to anyone who is listening. The other is to my resume what Everybody’s Crazy is to Michael Bolton’s. Oh it’s true. The man who introduced classic R&B soul to white suburban boys used to open for Ozzy Osbourne.

Oh my God, that was awful. If you’re still here after that, I promise you, nothing the rest of time will be that bad. But see? As awful as it was, you learned something new. That will be my goal here this year: To inform you with lots of baseball talk (topics new and old) and lots of hair metal videos and references (old and, umm, older), all woven together as tightly as the hairpiece perched atop Bret Michaels’ head. It will all make sense. Like gum and nuts. Tune in, tune out and turn it up, man.