Last year's Preakness Day Infield featured the mass-market debut of Port-a-Racin', the artful attempt to sprint over the top of a row of porta-potties while dodging flying debris cheerfully volunteered by the surrounding masses. A year later, the game had changed: now, the sprinting was banished to history's dustbin, as the flying debris itself took center stage.

Near as anyone could tell, today's game of beer-can volleyball broke out when someone flung a brew from on top of an outhouse. That, the surrounding masses realized, looked like jolly good fun. And soon the sky filled with silver-and-foam, the silver signifying surprisingly heavy vessels of lite beer, the foam showing that this lite beer anxiously wished to come out and join the party.

Six, seven, eight cans were volleyed back and forth simultaneously, some being consumed after their fleshy landings, others taking flight again. Some infielders shielded their heads with Styrofoam coolers. Others joined forces, hoisting a giant blue tarp to ward off the incoming fermentable attack.

One man proudly showed off what he claimed was a beer-can related broken finger. Another yanked a can out of mid-air, consumed its contents and chomped the defeated can between his jaws. A young woman face's snapped back after impact; she shook her head and managed a timid laugh.

(Courtesy Brotman Winter Fried)

You want a priceless reaction from an owner upon being asked to respond to a chicken/eagle/freak mascot and some Giant Racing President Heads passing out brochures and carrying confrontational signs just blocks from the stadium where his team plays? How about this one, from the Baltimore Sun:

Years ago, a Washington team promoting itself in downtown Baltimore might have seemed like an enemy incursion. But Angelos, when apprised of the event yesterday, said: "It doesn't strike me in any particular way. They're welcome to do that. It's a free country," Angelos said. "It [Baltimore and Washington] is one huge megalopolis, you know? It's about time we realize it."

"It's a free country!" Brills! Upon being told that Giant Racing Thomas was carrying a sign that read "Old Bay Stinks," Mr. Angelos no doubt replied "Sticks and Stones may break my bones but names about my distinctive regional spice combinations will never hurt me." I mean, either go funny ("Politicians will say anything," Angelos pointed out) or go angry ("Get those kids off my lawn!" Angelos said), but the quiet, "doesn't strike me in any particular way" passive aggression is fairly lame.

Other signs: Teddy ("I'll race the Orioles bird and beat him!"), Abe ("Honestly, the Nats will sweep Baltimore, hun!") If you want the earnest, what-it-all-means version, go to Nats320, which says "The past is history and it's time to enjoy the fun possibilities between Our Washington Nationals and The Baltimore Orioles--like these kids yesterday afternoon at The Inner Harbor in Baltimore." Me, I'm waiting for the Teddy-Oriole Bird bloodbath.

(Courtesy Brotman Winter Fried)

(By John McDonnell - TWP)

Summer in D.C. Sports. So boring. Nothing happening. Wizards gone. Redskins mostly gone. Russian superstars gone. Ukrainian soundbite machines gone. Soccer team struggling. Baseball team struggling. Tiger's months away. Nothing to blog about.

What we need a real crazy burst of nonsense to look forward to. Something that would bring together, at a minimum, the most bloggable athletes from the Wizards and Skins. Say, Clinton Portis, Santana Moss and Fred Smoot, to start. Then maybe throw in, hmmm, Caron Butler and DeShawn Stevenson.

As long as we're dreaming here, let's extend invites to two of the most insane athletes in America, just to up the chances of random acts of mohawk-cutting, bicep-flexing and porn-filming. Say, Terrell Owens and Chad Johnson. And maybe some old-school sound-bite insanity. Gary Payton, for example. And then some random headline rousers, like Willis McGahee and Jerry Porter and Kenyon Martin, for the heck of it. And to cap it all off, why not invite Braylon Edwards, the Official Athlete Spokesperson Concerning Sports Blogs?

Location? UDC, I guess; close to my house, easy access to Schlotzsky's and totally random.

So in this dream, we're talking about an early June charity basketball game at UDC featuring Clinton Portis, Fred Smoot, Caron Butler, DeShawn Stevenson, Chad Johnson, Terrell Owens, Gary Payton, Braylon Edwards, and all the rest, with the promise of celebrity halftime entertainment even better than the game itself. Yeah, that'd probably be good for a few days of blog copy. If only, right?

Wait, what's that?

My only regret about today's scheduled Inner Harbor Invasion by Screech, the Giant Racing Presidents and the Nat Pack--in which the invaders promised to hand out Nats promotional material to unsuspecting Baltimoreans--was the scheduled time of 11:30-12:30. I figure the chances of Giant Abe being beheaded by a giant racing alcohol-fueled belligerant Baltimore fan--or treating him like this Red Sox fan, anyhow--would have been much greater at, say, 5:30. Or 4:30. Or, frankly, 3:30. Or even 2:30. Maybe 1:30.

Regardless, 11:30 was probably plenty late enough for Giant Abe to be pelted in his Giant Head with Giant Rotten Tomatoes flying out of some Giant Upper Story Office in the Warehouse. Giant Abe certainly might have lived in infamy had he managed to dance in playful jeering circles around Giant Peter Angelos this afternoon. Anxiously awaiting the photos....

Marc Fisher sees this as a franchise-v.-franchise expedition:

Yay to the Washington Nationals for finally taking a return shot against the Baltimore Orioles. While the O's continue to do everything they can think of to diss the newcomer franchise, the Nats have played it polite and friendly up until now. But with the two teams playing in Baltimore this weekend, the Nats have sent the racing presidents, their Screech mascot and the Nat Pack (those overly friendly, annoyingly cute human mascots who roam the stadium making everyone feel a bit cheesy) to wander Baltimore's Inner Harbor distributing Nats promotional wares. Nice move--happening even as we type.

Oh, and to recap: Our NBA team's feud involves Jay-Z and Soulja Boy; our MLB team's feuds involve softball-style cheers and giant plush presidential likenesses.

As part of Tony's farewell tour, Norman Chad discussed the TK brand on Dan Levy's extremely compelling On the DL podcast yesterday. And Norman did the same thing I did, sucking up to the glorious legacy of Kornheiser, except he did so in opposite land. He prefaced all of this by saying that he no longer goes on PTI, "which is not my decision, it's their decision, and it's been one that bothered me." And, to be fair, he also said that he has always loved Tony, but that they're having some weird stalemate full of disingenuity. This was the winning line, though:

To paraphrase Tony Soprano in 'The Sopranos' about his mother, Tony is dead to me. There's nothing I can do about it. Somehow, something happened somewhere with Tony and I, and I just don't know what to do about it any more.

(By Toni L. Sandys - TWP)

I had a brief conversation with a veteran baseball writer yesterday, in which we both agreed on the following: that veteran baseball writers would not approve of softball-style dugout cheers emanating from Major League dugouts, that non-veteran sports bloggers would approve of such cheers in the strongest terms possible, and that many Major League veterans would side with the former rather than the latter. In other words, that there probably wasn't universal support in the Nats dugout for the Elijah-Dukes led cheering brigade the other night.

Right. So Paul Lo Duca called into WFAN today, and Surfing the Mets (via MetsBlog) shared his predictable thoughts on the softball girls:

Quick notes gathered while looking for a lost wallet in a car with a dead battery....

First off, for those who weren't here at the time, or who were here and can't get enough, or who grew up in Western New York as Bills fans and still remember Super Bowl XXVI as one of life's great tragedis, here's the link to an old but still workable Bandwagon homepage. Lots of Bandwagon columns to read. Different time. But my D.C.-based friends who were adolescents in those days speak of the Bandwagon series as the most important brush with sports journalism of their lives.

Second off, I spoke at a P.G. County elementary school's career day today, giving some sort of spiel about blogs and newspapers and strange Wizards haircuts to 5th graders, and then to kindergarteners, and then to 2nd graders. I asked all of them whether they knew what newspapers were, and I swear, two of them in two different classes said "that's what old people read." A third young boy also said "my father reads the newspaper on the toilet." All in all, it's been a bright day of hope and optimism for my industry. (See also: David Broder.)

As for some Internet reaction to Tony taking the buyout....

Dan Shanoff: I grew up on Tony Kornheiser. I grew up on the Washington Post sports section as a whole -- and from the mid-80s to the mid-90s it was, by far, the best sports section in the country, and if you look at the alumni list, you'd agree with me. But when I was a kid and young adult, TK was my favorite. I knew I wanted to be in journalism -- sports, hopefully -- and TK seemed to have the best job in the world.

On Frozen Blog: At OFB, we won't be joining in the lovefest for TK the remainder of this week. Kornheiser didn't merely consistently give hockey the back of his hand while working here, he actively undermined its presence with his sneering disregard for the game, the local team, and its supporters. For him, there was only one storyline on hockey, one now outdated by decades: the '80s playoff failures by Bryan Murray's Caps.

Stet Sports Blog: It's sad, really. Tony Kornheiser in so many ways made Washington sports. Nobody captured the malaise of the fan base, the essence of under achievement, and the irony of it all like he did. Mix in his seamless transition to television banter with his awkwardness on Monday Night Football, and add in a dash of love/hate for blogs, and you've got the epitome of sports media celebrity.

Deadspin: We appreciate Kornheiser's sadness about all this, and can't imagine how it must feel. Though, to be fair, we suspect his buyout package, along with the ESPN and radio money, should make for quite a comfortable golden parachute; the column seemed to be getting in the way of everything else anyway. We should hope that everyone else being bought out at newspapers across the country, the arts critics, the beat reporters, so on, so forth, will be so fortunate.

With Leather: Wow. What a profound loss. Readers will surely miss the two paragraphs he'd toss off for page 2 of the sports section every few days. Or the humorously annotated NCAA bracket every March. I worked for the paper for three years and I never once so much as glimpsed the guy at the office. But he was a presence, boy howdy. Now that damn Paul Farhi can write vapid pieces in the Style section without any fear of reprisal.

The Big Lead: We grew up reading the Post - we'd pick it up from the driveway at 6 a.m. every morning and devour the sports section and breakfast at the same time. More than the sports section, we enjoyed Kornheiser's Sunday styles columns, where he'd rant about his kids, culture, the Redskins, and basically anything that struck his fancy. We have more than a handful of them tucked away in a manilla folder in our desk. To us, he'll have no peer when it comes to sports humor.

Awful Announcing: The Washington Post's Sports Section in the 90s was unbeatable, and it's sad to see it disintegrate author by author. Some are still there but it just isn't the same.

Finally, let me present what I believe might have been the first Kornheiser column I read upon moving to D.C. Appropriately, the headline read "Speechless." It's a Style column from August 2, 1998. And yeah, this is self-absorbed as heck, but it's my blog, and I'm on vacation, and I started this stupid entry by writing about my lost wallet and dead car battery. If this isn't properly paying homage to Tony, go read his stupid blog. If there are any particular favorites anyone would like me to exhume from the archives, give a holler. Anyhow, it's after the jump.

Dang. From his radio show a few minutes ago:

"All I ever wanted to be was a newspaper writer," he said, which is likely not something that anyone under the age of 30 will ever say again. "This other stuff is great, but I don't care about it," he continued. "In my mind that's what it says on the headstone, it says 'newspaper guy.' "

But he also said he signed the papers to take the Post's buyout last night, after working here for, I believe, 29 years. He said he still might contract with The Post to do his Talking Points videos and his Page 2 excerpts, and he said some people in the leadership asked him to stay but didn't really insist, and even though he'll keep doing PTI and the radio show and MNF, he said he feared he'd never have the moral high ground again.

He has seven days to reconsider, but he said "I'll have somebody kidnap me and tie me down so I don't change my mind." And, as any longtime listeners would expect, he was plenty wistful when discussing what happened yesterday.

"There was not enough wine in the world, there wasn't, not last night," he said. "I'm watching 'Idol,' and I'm thinking about all these things, and I don't know who I'm supposed to talk to about this....It just feels odd. It feels odd and it feels bad. It doesn't feel sad, there's no sadness to it, it just feels wrong."

He also said "the Web site is sort of the future on some level," which I guess might be accurate, on some level, maybe. Then again, newsprint might make a dramatic comeback.

And no, I'm not happy. I've said this before, in several contexts, but when I moved from Newark, Del. to D.C. in 1998 as a miserable non-profit researcher who had never lived in a major media market, suddenly I was reading Kornheiser, Wilbon, Boswell, Jenkins and all the rest every day, and I was amazed. It was impossible for me to get my non-profit research done, because I spent all morning reading The Post sports section, before the Web was sort of the future. It absolutely made me want to leave non-profit research and become some manner of sportswriter, although first I decided to sell cheese for a while. But this paper's Sports section in the late '90s, and presumably for years and years before that, was something pretty special that actually made you anxious to open that stupid plastic bag in the morning.

Either way, will try to dig up some "Best Of" over the next few days, if the Web site poobahs don't beat me to it, since they're the future and all.

Ripped from the comments. I'll take 12, please. Go here to buy.

Actually, I'm grateful to the Mostly Full Nelson (who has since been demoted). Last night, I had no problem at all watching Cavs-Celtics in its entirety, merely to root against LeBron James and to hope against hope that maybe he'd be fouled with moderate force, causing his mother to attempt to beat back the Celtics with her fists as her son's team went down to ignominous defeat. Fifty percent of my hope came true, although probably not the 50 percent I would have guessed.

Anyhow, the Largely Full If Demoted Nelson has given me all the reason I need to watch a mid-May baseball game between two middling teams, and for that, I do earnestly thank him. And also the New York Post, for writing this:

Nelson Figueroa should consider pitching underhanded to the Nationals, if there is a next time for him. Here it is, girls, go ahead and hit it.

If Mike Wise were involved in this series, he'd absolutely be on the big screen being booed by the masses before the Nats leave the city.

Taking a break from vacation to post this glorious news: I was just granted full access to the Post's photo library for bloggy purposes. This might not mean much to you, but trust me, the sensation is something like putting an entire package of Orbit Bubble Mint into your maw at once and biting down, hard. Pure sweetness. To herald this new day, and make sure it actually works, two bits of celebratory photo glory from The Post's Preston Keres are included here.

Discussion question: Orbit Bubble Mint or Orbit Citrus Mint????