When you grow up in Boston, you are predestined to be a Red Sox fan. For the first 27 years of my life, it was a miserable experience – the Red Sox lost every big game in every imaginable way. The tide has turned the last four baseball seasons. Their two World Series victories since then paved the way for them being an international success. To capitalize on that success, Major League Baseball had the brilliant idea to have the Red Sox open the season in Japan against the Oakland Athletics.
That’s why my alarm clock went off at 3AM this morning. When I moved to within 15 miles of Oakland, I expected their home games to start at a reasonable time. Fred the Baker doesn’t get up this early. If this post has some grammatical errors, you know why.
During the game, I noticed a new Miller High Life (MHL) commercial in their “Take Back the High Life” campaign. If you haven’t seen these commercials they are brilliant. A hefty, boisterous delivery man goes into various restaurants, clubs, and high-end grocery stores to make sure they are compliant with MHL’s ideals – namely reasonable prices. If they are not compliant, he reaches into the fridge and takes the beer out – revoking their license to sell it. In the process he delivers great one-liners about over-priced luxuries in today’s world. Here are a few:
- Referring to Super Bowl commercials, “Two very expensive ads for water… Water don’t need to be fancy. If I want flavored water, I’ll suck a lollipop.”
- Referring to a club… “Home of the $20 cover charge… there’s no cover charge for the High Life”
- “$11.50 for a hamburger, you all must be crazy.”
In this morning’s commercial the delivery guy visits a luxury box (“Section la te da”) and asks what inning the game is in. Of course the suits don’t know. He notices a big play going on and realizes that the glass is nearly sound-proof. He leaves with the MHL saying, “I need to smell me a hot dog.”
I think he’d make a great spokesman for personal finance in general. Here are some of the commercials, you be the judge:
I love those commercials — they really hit home with the target audience for Miller. “Section la te da” … hilarious.
“there’s no cover charge for the high life.”
Those commercials are brilliant. I love the one where he goes on a rant about the super bowl commercials.
A commercial about commercials. Awesome.
They just played here…and I missed that too. However, I am kind of glad I did as I read that 115,000 people attended the Dodgers/Sox matchup for charity. Traffic is bad enough on a Tuesday at 3am here – I cannot imagine 115,000 people trying to get downtown at once.
Ahhh…the ol’ getting up at 3am because opening day is in Japan bit. I remember doing this back in 2001 (?) when the Cubs did the same thing. But I was in college and had the time. They got spanked and my sleep got all messed up, but it was well worth it. Finally baseball is here!