Any way you slice it, there's a best type of pizza

I love pizza. Pepperoni. Olives. Mushrooms. Combination. Canadian bacon and pineapple. All sorts of pizzas.

But there is a definite hierarchy of pizzas (not the toppings, the source of the pizza)–six distinct levels of pizza, and the gap between each of them is substantial.

They're all good – let's face it, they're pizza (the No. 1 food for me since . . . my first pizza)! But the difference between the best type and second-best is substantial, as is the gap between each layer as you descend toward the bottom of the pizza pyramid.

Six types of pizza. Six major gaps between them. I'm sure you agree with me since it's so obvious, but here are the six official tiers of pizza, beginnings with the best:

1. Pizza parlor pizza. There are possible exceptions (Mrs. Brad and I recently had some awful sourdough pizza from a pizza parlor), but pizza parlor pizza is better than any other kind by a large margin. I don't know what it is – and I worked at a pizza parlor for five years in college (which is a tribute to my longevity on the job and how long it took me to complete college), but pizza parlor pizza is No. 1 by a huge margin.

2. Take-and-bake pizza. Not as good as pizza cooked at a parlor (by the way, why do we call it a pizza parlor? That sounds almost British), but it's much better than any other type. This is pizza you take from a place that specializes in pizza, not the kind you get at a warehouse grocery store. However, there is a caveat: Take-and-bake is the second-best pizza on the day it's cooked but drops to third on Day 2. It doesn't age particularly well.

3. Homemade pizza. I don't mean pizza for which you make dough and hand-spin your own crust. I guess that's a different category, but I've never had seriously homemade pizza. When I say homemade pizza, I mean the kind that has a premade crust (from Boboli or a competitor) where you add sauce, cheese and toppings and then cook. Far from the pizza parlor variety, this is still pretty darned good. And it moves to the No. 2 spot when eaten as leftovers. Homemade pizza holds up well for Day 2.

4. Cafeteria pizza. I have this rated fourth because of the possibility that it might be good. Think of school pizza or summer camp pizza. Any mass-produced pizza is likely greasy, unhealthy and possibly pretty decent. And it's usually fairly cheap, which helps differentiate it from the rest of the bottom pizzas.

5. Frozen pizza. There has been a concerted effort by the marketing departments of frozen pizza manufacturers to equate it to pizza parlor pizza. They're similar: Both are round, have toppings and are called "pizza." Not much else is the same. I'll eat it, but if I'm buying a frozen dinner, there are many options ahead of it (including virtually any frozen Mexican food). And Day 2? Awful.

6. Pizza rolls. Mrs. Brad and I agreed on all rankings except this. She had this ranked above frozen pizza, which is incorrect. Pizza rolls have too much sauce in them and they burn your mouth. Given a choice, I'd cook a frozen pizza. But by far, I'd take a pizza parlor pizza.

Brad Stanhope worked for five years during the 1980s at Red Baron Pizza in Eureka. Reach him at bradstanhope@outlook.com.

 

Dramatic changes to baseball rules should thrill, not horrify, traditionalists

When major league baseball announced a series of rules changes that will be implemented this year, traditionalists were outraged.

How could they change the game? A pitch clock for the pitcher and hitter? Bigger bases? Only two throws to first base by a pitcher to hold a runner? No infield shifts? Outrageous!

Four major changes, four major reactions, all wrong.

Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. A grand slam of wrong reactions, because the changes in baseball this spring are long overdue.

Over the past few decades, the game has gotten . . . boring. Oh, sure, there's still strategy. It's still a six-month season in which the best teams win (at least in the regular season). But games have gotten much longer with much less action. Analytics revealed that the most effective hitters go for home runs and walks and that strikeouts don't matter. The most effective pitchers strike out the most hitters.

The result? Fewer hits. More standing around. Meanwhile, batters and pitchers slowed way, way down. Games in 2022 took an average of three hours, three minutes to complete. In 1980, games took two hours, 33 minutes on average. Over 40-plus years, baseball added 30 minutes to the game – while having fewer hits and less action spread over the period.

Finally – after watching the NFL change its rules constantly to create more offense and allow more scoring and more excitement and watching the NBA and the NHL change rules to permit more freedom of movement and more scoring and more excitement, baseball finally, finally, finally moved.

I don't expect the traditionalists to agree with the changes because of that. Most baseball traditionalists probably don't like that other sports change their rules to make it more exciting.

But . . . shouldn't traditionalists to agree with the changes because this brings the game back to what it was for more than 100 years? What's more traditional than pitchers working quickly, infielders playing their assigned positions and baserunners having a chance to steal? Baseball this year will look a lot more like 1940 and 1960 and 1980 and 2000 than the 2022 version of the sport.

There will undoubtedly be some chaos early this season (the first real game is March 30) when pitchers take too much time or a team gets penalized for trying to sneak a shift or a pitcher throws to first base too many times. But by midseason, players and managers will adjust. The games will have more action and will move along faster. The traditionalists will go back to complaining about replay reviews and the designated hitter and starting pitchers not going deep into games.

But baseball will finally start being like baseball again. This is the equivalent of finding a way to watch your favorite TV show without commercials.

This is as if baseball invented streaming in an effort to return to its roots.

Reach Brad Stanhope at bradstanhope@outlook.com.

Unofficial start of spring means winter of discontent nearly over

Today marks the unofficial start of spring.

It's the start of daylight saving time, when nature begins to heal itself by allowing us to have sunlight in the evening. If you see your shadow after 5:30 p.m., it means that there are fewer than six weeks of winter left. (It's possible I've mixed up winter-focused "holidays." It's also possible that whether or not a groundhog sees a shadow on Feb. 2, there are always six weeks of winter left because Feb. 2 is 6½ weeks before the first day of spring. So yeah, there's always six weeks of winter left on Feb. 2.)

Today's shift to daylight saving time seems more dramatic than normal because we've had the most wintery winter in memory. In Solano County and the rest of Northern California (heck, the rest of California and the rest of the West Coast , this has been a winter to remember. Or forget. It's been day after day after day of either cold or rainy weather. Or both. Snow on Mount Vaca and Twin Sisters? Flooding? We've had both.

Recent winters have been different. Virtually every year in the past decade or two, we've had at least a week or two (maybe even a month) of spring-like weather in January or February. We've had days when there was no need for a jacket when you went outside in mid-winter. We've been able to wear shorts in February.

This year? I don't think I've gone in shirtsleeves (the old-timey way of saying without a jacket) since before Halloween. Most mornings, I've either had to dodge raindrops while going to my car for work or scrape ice off the windshield. By the way, the cold, wintery weather is compounded when you have an old car that allows rainwater in. The result? An overworked defroster and a few mornings with ice on the inside of my back window. But I digress, because it ends today.

Today starts daylight saving time. Today spring is here.

Pay no attention to the weather forecast. Sure, we might get rain. It might still be cold. It might be snowing in Tahoe and flooding along the Russian River, as far as I know. We might keep getting variations of the "Pineapple Express" storms from Hawaii (the best weather-related name, for what it's worth).

But it's springtime. Before long, we'll have warm, sunny (windy) days. We'll open our windows to let in fresh air. We'll have to turn on the air conditioner.

The effects of the winter of our discontent will continue, whether good (reservoirs full, good snowpack) or bad (more ticks, lawns growing too fast). But the start of daylight saving time means that we're unofficially starting spring.

Now if someone can inform the weather, it would be good. If the rainy, cold and/or generally miserable conditions continue, we might all go mad.

I'm not sure I can continue to scrape ice off my inside back window and use a towel to dry the inside of my windshield much longer. Fortunately, I won't.

Daylight saving time is here!

Reach Brad Stanhope at bradstanhope@outlook.com.

Coke freestyle machines show who creates the real thing

As teenagers, we thought we were being creative. Low-level outlaws.

Same thing today. Give a teenager (or younger) a glass and a Coke freestyle machine – the touch-screen machines that some restaurants have where you can create your personal soda, either by going deep into their flavor archives or by combining flavors – and watch them "break the rules."

They'll combine a Monster drink and Coke and Minute Maid and Dr. Pepper and Fanta. They'll make their own drink. It's crazy.

Back in the day, it was the same – albeit without the Freestyle machine. When we'd go to the rare restaurant where they let you fill your own soda, you'd go crazy. Mix Sprite and Coke and Dad's Root Beer. Add some fruit punch to it. It was crazy, too. (Admission: I lived in the 1980s and didn't try cocaine. So this is my version of crazy.)

We would call them "kamikazes" or "suicides," two insensitive phrases. But it was bold! It was brazen! We weren't playing by their stupid rules!

Turns out, we were. At the minimum, we were setting the stage to do field studies for them.

Coca-Cola, which has more than 50,000 such machines, according to an article on Food Dive's website, combs through data from those machines every day to determine what flavors people want.

They're using us to do their scientific research! We're lab rats for Coke!

Since launching the freestyle machines, Coke has added four new flavors based on the data: Sprite Cherry, Coke with Cherry Vanilla, Coke with Orange Vanilla and (coming this spring!) Sprite with Lymonade.

On one hand, that's pretty cool. A company giving customers the freedom to select what they want (within the 32-drink flavor profile offered by Coke) and listening to them.

On the other hand, it makes the creative use of those machines seem much less, well, freestyle-y, right? If I'm being really creative with something and the result is that one of the world's largest corporations can make another product to make more money, am I really "freestyling?" Or am I an unpaid intern, doing market research?

Back when I was in college, I'd often play basketball with my friends at a church gym. We'd play for hours and then, apropos for the era, we'd go to the local Denny's. Some people would eat breakfasts (it was often late at night), others would have a soda. As a diabetic, I was limited in my soda choices, but there were two things I liked to drink: Diet soda (Tab was the only available choice at Denny's then) and milk. 

So I'd order one of each and an extra glass. Then I would combine Tab and milk, 50-50 in the glass and drink it. Daring!

Even now, it seems hideous, but then it seemed kind of cool and kind of dangerous in a not-really-dangerous way. It was unique. It was mine.

So after reading this – or after Coke examines data from drinks ordered at Denny's 40 years ago – if you see that Coke is introducing its new Tab With Milk drink, you can thank me.

I'm the unpaid 1980s intern at Coke who created the world's greatest drink.

Reach Brad Stanhope at bradstanhope@outlook.com.