Shallow | Center

Piffle or Not Piffle?

BACK IN the early '90s, Saturday Night Live ran a skit, "George F. Will's Sports Machine," mocking his and others' near-pornographic rhapsodizing about baseball. Pressed by Jon Lovitz's Tommy Lasorda on whether he ever plays ball, Dana Carvey's Will responds, for example, "If, by play, you mean drink deep the aura of the game ... " (The transcript and some photos, including one depicting Corbin Bernsen's spot-on Mike Schmidt, are here.)

It's easy to catch a game in the Cape Cod Summer League, as I did last week, and find yourself digging up SAT words in an effort to do justice to the throwback era the league seems to represent. Most of the players are college kids, and they are not paid. They are put up by residents of the Cape. The PA announcer reads sponsors' messages between innings, and you can catch a player or two carrying a helmet with raffle tickets being sold by the intern he's accompanying through the crowd. The game I saw -- Yarmouth-Dennis hosting Cotuit -- was played at a  high school. Granted, it was the nicest high school field I had ever seen, but it was still a high school. And when one of the Y-D Red Sox went yard, all of his teammates were waiting at home plate to high-five him.

Bean There, Done That

RANDOM OBSERVATIONS and scenes from a long weekend in the metro Boston area:

• The breathless coverage of Tom Brady's testimony in the Charlie Weis medical-malpractice trial seemed hard to top. Until it came out that Brady's former girlfriend, the actress Bridget Moynahan, is expecting his love child. Brady is a god in Boston, and his upcoming paternity cranked the celebrity/media engine into overdrive immediately -- not just on television but in the usually more measured print media, where the story was plastered on the Globe's front page, above the fold.
• How is it that I could drive 300 miles away from Philadelphia, turn on the radio, find a hockey game, and still hear the Flyers give up a goal?

Maine Course

Food, Beer, Coffee, and Atmosphere -- Is There Anything Portland Doesn't Have?

PORTLAND, MAINE, WAS NEVER on my must-visit list, but after last weekend, I'm tempted to begin researching housing prices. The missus and I stashed the youngest member of the Shallow Center household with the in-laws and zipped up 95 for an overnight in Portland's Old Port district. Modest red brick buildings and cobblestone streets lend an intimate, stately air to the area; the countless charming bistros, brewpubs, coffeehouses, and upscale shops offer a funky, fun, contemporary vibe. Everything is walkable, and the people are low-key, laid-back, and ridiculously friendly. About the only detriments we found in the city Saturday were the weather, a confirmation of Dave Barry's "cold, but damp" crack, and the replacement of the quaint, progressive afternoon and evening crowds with throngs of college kids who swarmed Fore Street at closing time and woke us despite closed windows on our third-floor hotel room.