Talkin' Baseball

Not only was Monday Opening Day for MLB, it was the start of another season of Little League for the Offspring. Frodo's elected to not play this Spring--which is both sad and understandable (and hey...makes things a lot easier on his parents--we'd have had 3 kids in 3 different leagues and would've had to clone one of us to cover everything).

Samwise has his first game of the year tonight, the Princess has hers tomorrow (immediately following Sam's second game). Arnold desperately wants to play this year, and is counting down the days 'til next season. I'm very impressed with Sam's coach--not sure what kind of results he'll get out of the kid, but am sure he'll get good stuff out of the team as a whole (and vice versa). Not as impressed with Princess' coach--seems to put a great emphasis on quantity of practice over quality.

On the professional side, looks like Torre's getting off to a good start in LA. Beckett and Schilling started the season on the DL. The Girardi-era Yanks got off to a decent start in their opener--the Melk-man doing most of the splashy stuff, but the pitching was as good as it needed to be. Like Patrick over at Yanksblog said, "You're not going to beat the Yankees very often when the only pitchers you see are Chien-Ming Wang, Joba Chamberlain and Mariano Rivera."

Someone asked me why I'm so obsessed with baseball when it's so "boring" compared to say football or basketball. Here's a snippet from Chabon's Summerland to give part of the explanation:

"I hate it that they even count errors," Ethan said..."What kind of game is that? No other sport do they do that, Dad. There's no other sport where they put the errors on the freaking scoreboard for everybody to look at. They don't even have errors in other sports. They have fouls. They have penalties. Those are things that players could get on purpose, you know. But in baseball they keep track of how many accidents you have."

[snip]
"Ethan," Mr. Feld said, shaking his head in sorrow.... "Errors . . . Well, they are a part of life, Ethan," he tried to explain. "Fouls and penalties, generally speaking, are not. That's why baseball is more like life than other games.