June 22, 2007

Clean clothes and a little 'Housewives'

FRANK MICKADEIT
Register columnist

OMAHA, NEB. – Yesterday was laundry day. Kirk dropped me off at Laundromat in Carter Lake, a small dust moth of a town north of Omaha that because of a quirk of hydrology is part of Iowa even though it is on the west side of the Missouri River. It was described to me by a local as a place "run by the redneck mafia," and I was warned that if I tried to horn in on the asphalt business there, I'd likely wind up in a batch of tar and gravel myself, part of some road-improvement project on State Route 347.

Trying to imagine what an asphalt salesman might look like and then look as little like that as possible, I cautiously got out of Kirk's SUV, took my bag of clothes up to the Laundromat, and tried the door. It rattled in its jamb. It was locked, even though I could see a woman on the other side doing her clothes. I tapped on the glass and she came over and unlocked the door and opened it without explanation – a sickly thin blonde about 35 wearing a clavicle-revealing tube top, off-brand jeans and a prominent but indecipherable tattoo on her right hand between her thumb and forefinger. I had her pegged for a tweaker and quite possibly a redneck mafia bride.

I did my laundry in silence, carefully separating my colors from my whites, realizing I was living on the very edge here. About 15 minutes later, a pickup pulled up and some old geeze came in. They had a clipped and tense conversation right out of a Hemingway short story. I soon gathered he was her father, and the downright mean, scornful way she spoke to him had me thinking he was not the local redneck mafia don – although maybe she was. She loaded up her laundry, about five baskets of it, in the back of the uncovered pickup and as the big raindrops of a late-afternoon Midwest thunderstorm started plopping on the asphalt, they drove away without so much as a goodbye. Close one.

The main thing was, I got to finally wash my Fear the Snout shirt, which I immediately put back on to head over to the ballpark for the evening game, in which North Carolina beat Rice, 7-4. The Tar Heels now play Oregon State in the best-of-three College World Series finals starting Saturday.

Well, I'm taking some flak for bagging on the Omaha zoo, which has even its O.C. defenders, including appellate Justice William Bedsworth, who has apparently toured the roadside attraction. His wife, Kelly McCourt, e-mailed me to say that it beats the Santa Ana Zoo. Yeah, but so does Bayou Pierre's Alligator Farm in Natchitoches, La. (Meanwhile, Beds himself, a former collegiate catcher, is so ragingly jealous of me being here he can't bring himself to e-mail me more than snippets of gibberish.)

I will say this – the Omaha zoo does have an anteater, a fact ferreted out by colleague Randy Youngman. In the second inning of Monday's game, Fullerton's Matt Wallach hit a big homer to deep right. A little wind shift, and it would have cracked the glass dome of the zoo's "rainforest" just beyond the bleachers. More's the pity.

Even in Omaha, I can't escape the "Housewives." My impression of Shane Keough's baseball talent, which I largely divined from his own father's on-camera evaluation, was that he wasn't much of a pro prospect. Not true, according to the editor of Baseball America, John Manuel, who I had dinner with the other night. Over whisky filets at The Drover steakhouse, he told me that scouts think he's got speed, power, footwork and instincts – a natural for centerfield, where they moved him from shortstop. Some compare him to Steve Finley.

I e-mailed this to Jeana Keough. She reports that Shane has just played his first two pro games for the Vancouver Canadians, an Oakland A's farm club, and collected his first pro hit. … What in God's name has happened to me? All this Midwestern down-to-earthness has me actually being nice to a Housewife?

Chatter around the press box is about the ban on blogging from the CWS. Providing play-by-play on the Internet got the Louisville newspaper in trouble during the regionals and resulted in a stern warning to all media. Blogs dilute the value of the immediacy the broadcast media pay for. This has created a great deal of protest from other media. I was almost willing to start a blog just out of defiance. … Ran into Steve Garvey in the press box the other day as he was exiting the ESPN booth. Not many people can wear that shade of green. The Garv ain't one of them. Probably had people adjusting their sets all over the country. Ah. That feels better.