Burning the red sox hat 2014

No better way to start the new year

Baseball season is over, again

Baseball season is over. At least it is for the Cardinals. For the other team the season will linger a little while as they enjoy the aura of success that surrounds them. For a few days their fans get to contemplate a possible repeat next season. It is nice that my team was playing until the last pitch of the season, but terrible that they were not on the winning side.

They had opportunities. The team that won was not that much better, but was better when in counted, in four of the past six games. For the Cardinals the hits were not turned into runs and the pitching did not dominate like it could have. So it's over.

As bad as this day is, in the big picture it is a minor event. It still hurts, though Jason Motte wasn't bothered too much by the loss and was quick to tweet congrats to the sox. From his twitter feed...

• "It's officially offseason baseball fans!!! "
• "1st: Congrats @RedSox on great year. 2nd: I had a blast watching our @Cardinals this year. Great guys. Happy to be a part of this team."

Well that's sweet. Maybe he can just stay in Boston, eat some beans, dig some clams, make some chowdah, take a woodworking class at Harvard, vote for every socialist on the ballot, put a JFK picture on the mantel and pretend to be an American.

Sigh.... cubs fans never get to go through this. The winning or the stench of losing. A cub would be happy just to be there, but not a Cardinal (except of course for Jason Motte).

Why do we get so emotionally wrapped up in the results of a game?   Its not like I lost a loved one, or a job, or wrecked a car. But in a way that's what a lot of life is like, a river of small victories and defeats that viewed individually don't amount to much. But when added up they tip the scales in a way that determines how much of this life we enjoy. 

 

Baseball seems more real than it is. It becomes part of how we measure ourselves. I tell you I am a Padres fan and you know I live in San Diego. I tell you I am a fan of the Cardinals or cubs or braves or yankees, or any of the other big footprint teams, and a different picture is painted. 

 

The love of baseball is good. But in a negative sense, it has a way of tying us to this world, of making us feel comfortable in a place that is not our home. Like we belong here.  

Post season

It is almost October and my team is still playing.

Rummaging through a storage bin yesterday I counted the numbers of gloves.

Nine, including one catchers mitt. Perfect.

 I wonder where they were when last used in a real game? The field at Fishpot Creek? Ballwin, Ellisville or Manchester ball parks? That information is long lost, but not the love of the game.

Go Cards!

Bullets and Patriots

There are sports teams I really don't like. Sometimes it ever borders on a form of hatred, though thats pushing it a bit. Some for a good reason, some for not. Fan allegiance is a strange thing and we find ourselves loving and hating teams for lots of different reasons. Like the way we feel about certain people, some biases make no sense.

Here are my sports prejudices, along with the reason.

Chicago Cubs - Obvious
Duke - Most obnoxious fans in the world and Daughter1 hates them
Drury College - Rival of my Alma mater
KU - Of course. Cheaters. jayhawkers.
Boston Patriots - Cheated to steal Super Bowl from Rams
Boston Red Sox - swept Cardinals in WS
Florida Marlins - won the Series after only four years as a team. that's not illegal but should be. ( i have a vivid memory of some lady screaming into a camera "weve waited so long for this!" really? talk to a cubs fan about waiting)
San Diego Chargers - no explanation, just never liked them, always want them to lose
Washington Bullets - for changing their name to the wizards
Toronto Blue Jays - dont like the bird, dont like the logo, like the country
Marquette - because my Son hates them
TCU - because Daughter2 hates them

Crazy Stuff

Cards march on the NLCS, and play into the hallowed deep weeks of October.

Best quote from the NLDS. From Game 5....

“I think the last three outs are the hardest in baseball,” Nationals first baseman Adam LaRoche said. “I don’t know why it’s so much harder than the other eight innings, but something about it. Crazy stuff happens in the ninth inning.”

I miss my wife, but....

My wife is gone for the week. I have the house all to myself.

I come home, run on the treadmill a while. Then I enjoy a really good cigar, in my living room, with ESPN, and a nice roaring winter fire.

I miss her, but when I have one of these, well, the absence is a bit more tolerable.

She comes back on Monday, late in the day. The trick is figuring out when is the latest I can stop smoking and have the house still smell reasonably nice. I'm thinking Saturday night, but that's cutting it close.

No matter, I earned this.

The greatest night for baseball this year (perhaps ever)

Last night was one of the best nights for baseball drama in years. Two teams in each league tied for the last playoff spot, the Cardinals and Braves in the NL, and the Rays and Red Sox in the AL. For a good part of the evening it looked like there would be two more games today to determine the wild card winners. In the end the Braves just ran out of gas while the combination of a Rays run explosion and Baltimore's hitters clicking in the 9th sent the redsox packing.

For me the greatest thing was that the Cardinals won, obviously. They just smoked the Astros, one of the sports teams I always despise. Don't know why, but I think it started with those orange striped uniforms in the 70's. The redsox, for reasons documented many times on this blog, are also on my bad list. For the Cards to be in the playoffs means all is right in the baseball world. Things are as they are supposed to be.

By the way, the stupidest thing of the evening was a little celebration that you would only see if you were watching in Minnesota. The twins beat KC last night and managed to escape the season with only 99 losses, not the dreaded 100. They actually celebrated on the field as though this was something to be proud of. I think it is the most idiotic thing I have ever seen on a baseball field and an embarrassment to the few twins fans on the planet. A picture of the celebration, from the twins website, is below.

But I guess even stupid things like this from the twins will soon be missed as the leaves fall and the snow begins. It won't be long before we will be wishing for a trip, any trip, to a ball park. Last night was a bit of what we love about baseball, the way that the highs and lows of the season can drag out to the last hours of regular season play. When it does, all the previous 161 games cast a shadow over the field. It didnt have to end this way, down to the wire of pain and elation. Change the outcome of one game in April or May and this night means nothing. On May 22nd the Cardinals blew a six run lead at Kansas City that sent the game into extra innings. They put runners on the bases in the sixth, seventh, eighth innings and loaded them in the ninth but didnt bring any of them home. Finally the Cards scored two in the 10th, off back to back bases-loaded walks. That never happens, but it did that night. The Royals added one more run and lost. Odd way of winning, odd way of losing for the Royals. Perhaps a game the Cardinals should have lost. But they didnt. Had they done so, no celebration in Houston, no post season.
Go Cards!!!!

My bracket

It's college basketball tournament time. Before it was "March Madness" or "The Big Dance" or other marketing lables it was simply "the tournament" at my house.

I did not grow up in a sports family. My dad had a passing knowledge of sports. Some from his days as a HS football player, some from being a casual observer, but no one would have ever called him a sports fan. I cannot recall him ever asking me to watch a game with him on TV, or to go to a sporting event (oops, he did take me to a Yankees White Sox game when I was 6). Nothing wrong with that I suppose, just a little weird. Dads are not perfect. Whatever sports skills we three boys picked up was due to our own interest, as this was simply an activity our parents neither encouraged nor discouraged. I played little league baseball in elementary school and somewhere around the seventh grade put on a team uniform for the last time.

But I always loved sandlot baseball and football, and as I grew older basketball. In college I played intramural football and once landed the job of coaching the intramural basketball squad of our dorm. Somehow we won the school championship. I have a memory of a game when a bounce pass landed sweetly in my hands and I launched a jumpshot that went straight for the rim while I hung motionless in mid-air. The trophy is in our basement, in two or three pieces. My college team was in the NAIA and because admission was free I was at almost every home game, watching us play UMKC, Evangel, William Jewell, or archrival Drury.  I also coached a third grade boys basketball team in college. When my wife and I brought our first child home from the hospital, she headed to the bedroom to rest. I laid on the floor with my new daughter and watched an Arkansas Razorbacks game. As a father I spent hundreds of hours playing basketball with my kids, usually my son, on our driveway. How many times did one of us yell, "...from down-town" and throw a bomb from the far side of the driveway? How many cheers did we get from Caroline, playing cheerleader on the sidelines. These and tons of other memories contributed to an interest in college basketball that has stuck.

I am not an expert. I cannot explain team matchups. I cannot argue the merits of a zone defense or under what circumstances you switch from to man-on-man. I cannot remember from one season to the next who the players were on my favorite team (Missouri). I can barely remember the coach. But I love to watch the game.

My interest in this tournament was generated largely by a guy named Rick Pitino. I watched him on late night ESPN reruns as his teams in the mid-80's began exploiting the new three-point shot as full game weapon. Most other coaches were using it only in desperation. He took a little school named Providence to the final four in 1987 and I think and I was hooked from then on. These were the days when you had to tune to ESPN to catch the early rounds as CBS didnt start coverage until the last 16 teams were decided. There are tons of other memories around this game. Going to my first Final Four in 1990 in Denver and watching UNLV school the nation. The fans of the other three teams, Arkansas, Georgia Tech, Duke, were mere sideshows. In 1999 I was getting ready to watch the championship game when I got word that my father had passed away. Duke vs. UConn. Funny that now whenever I see one of those teams on the court I think of the man who probably never attended a basketball game in his life. In 2005 I took my son to the Final Four in St. Louis and it was weird because neither of us lived there anymore. He was in college and I was in Minnesota.

So when the tournament rolls around my bracket seems to fill up my head. By the time of the first tipoff, it is all that is there. I stare at the pairings, drawing on every game I've ever watched to pull some insight into which team will prevail. During March I see the world through a 64 slot diagram. Investment decisions, menu options, routes into work, relationships.... all fit neatly in a bracket. I have dreamed about the tournament bracket. There is a mathematical beauty in the seemingly endless combinations (in a 64 team bracket there are 2^63 or 9,223,372,036,854,775,808 different ways of completing the bracket). With each game I am either a sports genius or idiot as my bracket looks less and less like actuality with each tick of the time clock. 

There is something about that ball and that hoop that set the rest of the world aside. If you have never had a gym all to yourself, just you a ball and the echoing thump of rubber on hardwood, you have missed one of the best treats in all of sports.

I dread someday going to a nursing home. But if it has a small spot where I can throw a baseball to my great grandkids, or better yet some asphalt and a chain net, I'm there.