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=== And Now a Word From Our Sponsors, Dept. ===

Last weekend, the Klat team hooked up with a posse of supachill New York web moguls.  Straight out of The Social Network, man - these guys got places to be and people to meet.  They were packing 16-megapixel Windows Phone cams, their million-hits-a-month website, a down-to-earth attitude and they axed us if we felt like introducing them to the ballpark.  Well, I guess so.  We can move back our Blake Beavan writeup by another day or two.

The Roosevelts dot com is a sort of Esquire meets GQ meets Sports Illustrated meets the 21st century, it's way visual and graphical, it's got seriously awesome people running it, and it's one of my new fave sites.  They axed for a Safeco Art Theory piece, which see later in the week.  Included will be discussions of the five most seminal works of art at Safeco.  Needed were a supplementary five artworks discussed on SSI, so ... please don your spectacles and 12" cigarette holders.  Time for some culture, you mooks.

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=== Children's Hospital Wishing Well ===

The Kid's Clubhouse area, in the outfield, serves as sort of a micro-Disneyland theme park for kids.  The Wishing Well statue and fountain anchor the mood of the area.

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As we see it, good art captures an interesting 1.0 seconds of time, but great art captures a thought-provoking 0.1 seconds of time.  The artist here manages to grab that split-second in which a young boy "muscles" up (!), happily grinning, sure that he's going to launch a tape-measure shot.  

SSI can even sign off on the artist's body language here, as the boy's skinny little arms reach back for a little something extra as he sits back on his right leg.  He's obviously going for the fences.  Hey, he's just a kid.  He doesn't know what choking up means or doesn't mean.  

The fountain springs to life when a real Mariner hits a home run ... there's an intersection here between MLB baseball, the naive hopefulness of childhood, and the way that baseball reinforces that childlike optimism in all of us. 

Baseball, on a daily basis, delivers that flicker of hope and freedom.  The art here resonates because the Mariners are so great about their Make-A-Wish foundation, a truly noble program that restores the element of hope to the lives of critically ill children.

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=== "Safe" ===

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In the Holland America Suites area lives the 9' tall umpire.  He's put together of cardboard and glue, as if born in a grade school classroom, and he throws every fiber of his being into getting the call right.  Check the tension of his legs in the crouch as he strains for the ideal viewing angle.  Check the barely-lidded eyes and he strains for perfect focus.  Check the restrained decisiveness in the degree of outreach of his hands.  His chest protector is forgotten in the force of his concentration on the action.

A hundred years ago, when umpires missed a play, they would turn to Christy Mathewson on the mound and ask him whether a runner was safe or out.  Christy believed that it was better to have honor and lose, than it was to cheat and win.  He believed this so absolutely that everybody around him absorbed his intentions.

We don't know whether America has lost any of its sense of honor over the last fifty years.  We do know, however, what we want our children to learn about honor, and we know that they can (best?) learn it from sports.

The Umpire is at floor level if you're walking down the hall on the 6th level, but if you're in the open-roofed 5th level lounge, he looms dominatingly above you like a Great Judge In the Sky.

For Ichiro, honor resides (partially) in the sincerity of his pre-game preparation.  For Eric Wedge, honor resides (partially) in giving his players fair notice of what is expected of them.  For Felix Hernandez, honor resides (partially) in a fair fight between pitcher and batter.  "When The One Great Scorer comes to mark against your name, He writes not that you won or lost.  But how you played the game." - Grantland Rice.

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Comin' up at SSI, The Mitt and The Batter's Fence ... if you want to see more articles like this, click down the left sidebar or follow the Next Post links below the article.

Cheers,

Jeff