prod & ponder

Oh no on three counts:
1. For the first time ever, I’m missing out on attending a Nats season opener. There was some thought given to just grading essays at the ballgame, but good (boring, lame, irksome) sense prevailed. Curse MASN for finally carrying the Nats and robbing me of my usual justification for midday tomfoolery. Tomfoolery… who talks like that?

On the plus side, now that Angelos/MASN v. Nats feud has burnt out, I can take advantage of working in Baltimore and catch an O’s game or two at Camden Yards.

2. Nook Logan’s heroic against-the-wall catch re-injurs his ankle. Can’t one good deed slip by unpunished?

3. Passover food.

My new briefcase recently arrived. It’s a Rawlings bag, made with baseball glove leather (matching my messenger bag), and a has hand-laced handle. It’s turning out to be a quick way to suss out fellow baseball fans.

Speaking of cool stuff, check out this clever online clock. And remember the guy who recently made a million dollars selling pixel-by-pixel ad space on his website? Well another dynamic of digital culture has reared its ugly head in reply to his success: online blackmail.

DCist is running a piece on the DC Democracy Tree. I think it’s a great story. How often do you see someone just spontaneously get up the gumption to create a public monument for what they believe in? I’m a little biased though. Mark Schaefer, the fellow who planted the tree (and now a chaplain at AU), lived just a few doors down back when I was living in Hamilton House apartments.

Here I’m doing some new school scoring of the Nationals-Brewers game this evening (5/18) on my Palm Pilot. Pencil and paper scoring still has its charm, but my palm includes up-to-date stats on all the players, and afterwards I can kick out my scorecard in everything from pdf to web & xml output. Lots of folks ask me about the program at games, so if you’re curious too, it’s scorepad. Apparently it’s also what’s now backending the jumbotron at Braves games.

It was a great game tonight, with a tie of no runs going into the bottom of the 9th. Then, with two outs and the bases loaded, Hammonds came through for the Nats and hit in the scoring run.

I’ll be at tomorrow’s (Thursday’s) afternoon game, which means I’ll have attended (cough, smirk, trying not to look too much like the cat who just swallowed the canary…) six Nationals games in the past seven days. Life is good.

The first pitch of the game, Vargas’ first pitch for the Nationals, and… it was socked for a home run. Not a great start to Vargas’ first appearence, where he gave up six runs in the top two innings. The Brewer’s Obermueller, on the other hand, gave a phenomenal performance, giving up only 2 hits and throwing seven (of eight) perfect innings on the mound.

Despite the thorough beatdown, it was a very fun game to be at. Watching a potential perfect game unfold is always fun, even if it is being thrown against the team you’re rooting for, and I lucked into sitting in a section with a great set of knowledgable and rowdy fans. I was keeping score with my palm pilot, and so here’s my score for the game: nats vs brewers 5/17

One of the nice perks of IG working with the spouse of a regional manager of a big movie theater chain in the area is easy access to opening-day screenings. So after tonight’s game we’re off to catch Star Wars Episode III. Considering the monumental catastrophy of episodes 1 & 2, I have the lowest of expectations. May the force be with us all.

Yeah, so first the blog gets overrun with Nationals commentary, and now I’m making commentary on college ball? Errr, yes. But see, here’s the thing: in today’s Flordida State game against North Carolina, part of a crucial series in ACC conference play, something wonderul happened…

It’s the bottom of the ninth, FSU is behind by two runs, with 2 outs, and nobody is on base. This is commonly a good time for lesser fans to start packing up and leaving the stadium. But then we get two men on base. And up steps Ryne Malone. He goes down by two strikes, things are again looking grim, and then… he hits a bomb of a home run straight over the heart of center field, winning the game. Everybody goes wild. It’s fantastic.

So in honor of the celebration of FSU baseball fans (known as “the animals”) that I’m sure is going down in Tallahssee right now, I offer a round of The Beer Song, which is sung to the tune of “Take Me Out to the Ballgame:

Take me out to the beer bash,
Take me out to the beer.

For it’s one, two, three kegs are down,
and we feel no pain.

(While FSU is best known for our football, when it comes to fans it’s baseball that really stands out, being easily the most oraganized, fanatical, and loyal fans in all of college baseball. You can find the complete songbook–yes, songbook–of the FSU Animals of Section B here. And to explain the reference, Jax is the second biggest place to get booze in Tallahassee, behind only Mike’s Beer Barn. Mmmmm… the drive-thru beer barn. )

Ok, now this is an example of very bad pitching, courtesy of Ayala in last night’s game against the Cubbies. If you don’t speak scorecard-ese, click on the image and it will take you to the flickr page, where I’ve annotated the markings.

It was a good game on the field, but really, I think I had a lot more struggle going on internally. I fell in love with baseball because of the Cubs, watching them play at Wrigley field. So it felt profoundly wrong to be rooting for any team other than them, and when “take me out to the ballgame” came on in the 7th inning stretch, it was this big character defining bit to sing “root, root, root for the Nationals!” as I was surrounded by Cubbies fans who had taken to (nicely) taunting me and tempting me back into the fold.

As I was leaving, a Cubbies fan said, “see, you should be rooting for the Cubbies… there’s still two games left in the series.” And then I thought about all the bonehead plays, comical errors, missed opportunities, and the defeat snatched from victory that the Nationals had just shown. “Nah,” I said, “I’m already rooting for the team that plays like the Cubbies.”

This first photo is from wandering around Philly yesterday. I didn’t take very many shots, since I got in a bit of a funk after going to visit Independence Hall and finding that it had turned into a virtual police state, complete with those loveable Wackenhut security goons at every corner.

On another front, ok, yes, the blog has gotten a little baseball obsessed. All I can offer is Joey Eichen’s reaction to Peter Angelos’ whining over DC getting its own team: “just going to have to suck it, suck it hard.”

It doesn’t make sense to write about baseball for the fans; they/you’ve already figured it out, and there are plenty of Nationals blogs that do an admirable job of exclusively obsessing on this stuff (e.g. 1, 2, 3.) I write about it here because I feel some compelling (and probably very annoying) need to take folks who don’t yet appreciate the beauty of the game and shake it into them.

Speaking of a bit of baseball “self reflection”, here’s a shot I got at Saturday’s game between FSU and UMD. I didn’t have time to nail the focus, but it was too good to pass up on. I’m not sure entirely what was up here. Usually a mound visit happens when a pitcher loses his stuff, but not, ummm, there. Are college players trying to get a jump start on MLB Viagra ad deals? Who knows.

Back to the shaking the love of the game into everyone theme, here’s a noteable baseball quote overheard on TV from Humphrey Bogart (ESPN Classics is on in the background while I wade through grading student papers): “A hotdog at the game beats roastbeef at the Ritz. You see nice people. You yell like crazy for your guys. Good for your lungs. Gives you a lift, and nobody calls the cops.”

All that said, I really am going to dial it back a few notches on the baseball news and commentary (or at least try). But, ummm… maybe that’ll just have to start with the next posting, because here I want to link to this post from Capitol Punishment, which tells the story of at least one good, pro-DC angle of the negotiated contract with MLB. Apparently it would be very expensive for MLB and management to once again yank the team from DC, leaving residents with the burden of a stadium with no team to play in it.

It was a fun day photography-wise. First there was a trip to the Maryland side of Great Falls Park:

After that I headed out to the Florida State-UMD baseball game, where FSU thorougly whooped the Terps 8 to 1.

Speaking of baseball, if you’re curious, here’s my scorecard for Friday’s Nats-Giants game.

Finally, I forgot to mention it yesterday, but DCist happy hour props also have to go out to Bluestate, which collectively did a great job DJ’ing the antics. If I wasn’t doing such a thorough job of socializing with my drinks, I’d have said hello. Next time.