When the Los Angeles Angels baseball team is losing, they’ve got a strange and funny way of rallying the team.
A rally, in this case, means when the fans and players on the losing team get themselves all fired up so they can try even harder to win the game.
For some baseball teams, fans use “rally towels” to try to help them rally. A rally towel is a white towel that fans bring out when their team is losing; they twirl the towels over their heads. The team sees all the white towels and realizes that the fans are behind them and want them to win.
For other baseball teams, fans wear “rally caps.” A rally cap is simply a baseball cap worn inside-out and backwards. It’s the fans’ way of saying, “Let’s go, team! We can win it!”
But the Los Angeles Angels may have the strangest way of rallying the team. They have a rally monkey.
A video of a monkey comes on when the Angels are losing. It jumps up and down, wearing a tiny team uniform. Sometimes it holds a sign that says “Rally Time!” The fans go crazy for the rally monkey.
The Los Angeles Dodgers baseball team was talking about the Angels’ rally monkey recently. Both the Angels and the Dodgers are based in California. They often play games against each other; they are rivals.
During training camp, when they were preparing for the baseball season, one of the players on the Dodgers, Matt Kemp, admitted he was kind of scared of the rally monkey, according to the sports website theScore.com.
But the Dodgers’ manager Don Mattingly said he finds the monkey pretty funny.
theScore website quoted Kemp as saying, “You’re out there in the outfield and the monkey just pops up on the screen, that’s kind of scary.” (But he’s not really scared of the rally monkey, which is, after all, just a video.)
Here is a short (54-second) video of the rally monkey in action.
CURRICULUM CONNECTIONS
By Jonathan Tilly
Writing/Discussion Prompt
Have you ever gone to a sporting event and cheered, hollered, or screamed loudly to root on your team? Do you think having a crowd make a lot of noise really helps a team play better or, in the end, is it really just a bunch of noise?
Reading Prompt: Analysing Texts
Today’s article explains a lot of quirky sports traditions that you may or may not already know about. Reread these traditions and their explanations. Now invent your own and explain how it works.
Primary
Identify specific elements of texts and explain how they contribute to the
meaning of the texts (OME, Reading: 1.7).
Junior
Analyse texts and explain how various elements in them contribute to meaning (OME, Reading: 1.7).
Grammar Feature: Prepositions
A preposition is a word that tells where something is (location), where something is going to (direction), when something happens (time), and to show a relationship between people, places, or things (relationship). For each example below, fill in the blank to tell what the underlined preposition is telling about.
“During training camp, when they were preparing for the baseball season, one of the players on the Dodgers, Matt Kemp, admitted he was kind of scared of the rally monkey, according to the sports website theScore.com.” ________________________________
“It jumps up and down, wearing a tiny team uniform.” ___________________
“You’re out there in the outfield and the monkey just pops up on the screen, that’s kind of scary.” ______________________
“They often play games against each other; they are rivals.”
___________________
