Our game
Spring has sprung. It happened in Des Moines on Monday when the tree outside my bathroom window sprouted leaves. During my morning shower, there was nothing. By my late afternoon shower, (I take about eight showers a day) the season was in bloom.The first three days of baseball have provided just the escape from winter that I had hoped they would. The Cards debuted on Fox Sports Midwest last night to the virginal pleasure of Des Moines, IA. The Birds proved to be too much for Roy Oswalt, if not for Andy Pettitte (today's pitcher,) down in Houston. Cincinnati, the birthplace of professional baseball, enjoyed another thrilling opening day. (Surely, the high point of the Reds' season.) The Yankees and Red Sox played a great three game series that almost made me buy into the hype; and surprises abounded, from the shallacking of John Smoltz, to the Cubs waiting almost five full innings before their first pitcher was ejected.
Just a couple more thoughts...
1. The steroid talk in the media is mercifully subsiding, though strangely it hasn't shifted to football, despite the admissions of Saints head coach Jim Haslett and the investigation of the Carolina Panthers. The double-standard continues.
2. Still, the suspension of Alex Sanchez stinks to high heaven. Major League Baseball drops the axe on one player just before opening day. (Makes it look good.) Sanchez is essentially a nobody on a nobody team. I'm starting to wonder about the "anonymous" testing. I saw the list of seven or eight players who got tested in the Cardinals' camp. Of those, only Ray King made the team, and he's the union rep. Strange.
3. Spring Training Statistic of the Year 2005- Albert Pujols - 75 at-bats, 0 strikeouts
4. The Tony LaRussa book by "Friday Night Lights" author Buzz Bissinger reached bookstores yesterday. Here's an excerpt...
"The rivalry between the Cubs and the Cardinals is probably the oldest and perhaps the best in baseball, no matter how the Red Sox and Yankees spit and spite at each other. That's a tabloid-fueled soap opera about money and ego and sound bites. That's a pair of bratty high-priced supermodels trying to trip each other in their stilletos on the runway. But the Cards-Cubs epic is about roots and geography and territorial rights. It's intertwined in the Midwestern blood and therefore refreshing and honest and even heroic.
5. Think the Cubs are sensitive to their fans' nervousness over the health of Kerry Wood and Mark Prior? Prior was put on the disabled list, not with a designation of "elbow inflamation," but of "precautionary." Precautionary what?
6. Cincinnati Reds player Ryan Freel was arrested for drunken driving. I have no comment about it. I'm just pointing it out.
7. TRIVIA QUESTION- A handsome, hard-working, talented guy turned 30 years old this week. Was it?
a. "Chris Moeller Archives" administrator, Chris Moeller
b. his twin, Aaron Moeller
c. Cardinals' thirdbaseman Scott Rolen
d. all of the above
The answer below...
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Once, years ago, when I was operating the NCAA tournament pool at work, the boss took the jackpot. At the time I didn't think there could be any worse public relations development for the future of the pool, but this year at work, there was-- the teenage son of that same boss won the money. Everyone's none too excited that their hard-earned money will be spent on girlie magazines and new rims. No wait... those were my plans for the money.
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TRIVIA ANSWER- d, of course.
posted by CM @ 8:52 PM
3 Comments:
I should have picked up the check on our big Moeller birthday lunch trip to West Des Moines, but then I remembered that Jim "Thrifty" Zabel is my dad.
Chris, we made a tactical mistake, learning that if you invite too many people to your birthday dinner, no one's going to reach for the check. We should have invited them each to separate meals and let them take turns paying.
I would never fall for that.
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