I haven’t said anything about it on this blog, but I’ve been dealing with some pretty serious shit lately.  For anybody who has asked, I haven’t hidden the fact that my mother and I were about as close as oil and water.

But, if there’s one thing in common that we did have, outside of religion, was the Astros.

It was my mother who introduced me to baseball.  My dad had one of the meanest sinkers I’ve ever caught, but my mother was the one who loved the game.  When her parents moved to Texas from New York, Babe Ruth helped my grandmother out by holding a certain little baby on the ferry.  When my mother was dying, I was able to tell her about my son, whose stroke looks like some melding of Reggie Jackson and the Babe.

It was my mother’s parents who had the badass tickets at Stros games when I was growing up.

The movie “Field of Dreams” is as much about Joe Jackson as it is about the caste system in India.  The movie is about the bond between a father and son, long since estranged (and dead, I guess) by the paths that life took them.  Without the game of catch, the last month has been some bed-ridden version of “Field of Dreams” for me, an excuse to bond with my mother.  We got to watch her almost beloved Yankees play her actually beloved Astros.  We got to talk about the poor composition of the team.

Then, she went to sleep.

Then, she died a couple of days later.

Out of everything else, it’s this simplistic bond - the bond of baseball - that I feel like I have failed at more than any other with my mother.  All other things considered, perhaps it’s that one commonality that we shared that could’ve given us more time together.  Perhaps, everything else considered, maybe not.

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve seen a co-worker persue his dream, and my mother died.  Why are they similar?  It’s always been those things I haven’t done that I’ve regretted more than the things I have done.

I wouldn’t have done things too differently, but I do regret certain parts of the situation.  And I think baseball could’ve been the key.

(This post is dedicated to CEP, who turned out to be a helluva stand-up guy at the end)

…for making the “big screen!”


Busch Stadium Fan Battle - video powered by Metacafe

I especially love those little orange shorts, and you pull the whole thing off so well.

(h/t Deadspin)

Too tired, stressed, and distracted for a real post, but here’s some serious fluff for my peeps (without bullet points!).

Evidently, Miggy Tejada is sooooo good, he can call his shot.  If you’ve ever seen one of the worst sports movies of all time, William Bendix’s betrayal (sic) of Babe Ruth in “The Babe Ruth Story,” you’ll know that the Babe did the same exact thing.  Cept, according to biographer Marshall Smelser, Ruth, ummmm, didn’t.  I mean, really, no player does that.  Maybe Miggy knew that Carlos Villanueva was going to be serving up gopher balls all night long (10,000 lake oysters?).  Who knows, but it took a lot of guts, to be sure.

Still, little Joey almost DIED when “Coop” Cooper choked.  Don’t we learn anything in this topsy-turvy world, dude?

Oh yeah, it’s like this.

I am a weepy, sentimental bastard this days, but Eight Belles was put down at the Churchill Downs after an amazing run.  I used to spend some time around horses, and I still get to say “Hi” every once in a while, but these injuries always make me sad in a non-obsessive-about-Barbaro kind of way.  Horses really do have unique personalities that you do get to know and love.  But, it does make me wonder what we would’ve done with Jeff Bagwell and Craig Biggio if they were horses.  Makes you think, doesn’t it?

Finally, congrats to “ship in every port” Roger Clemens.  I’m sure that, considering you have shown yourself to be such an honorable man, there’s NOBODY who’ll every believe you were shootin’ roids.  Nobody.  Nope.  Never.

I’ve been considerably more lax in posting on this site than I had hoped, and I’m sorry.  There was this little football draft
this weekend, but that’s just a lame excuse.  And not only that, but mlb.tv has proven that they really, truly hate my ass by being down for the past three days.  Seriously, if these guys weren’t a monopoly, they would’ve been out of business 85 years ago.  Incompetence is an understatement.  Even interns would do a better job than these asswipes.  OK, I feel a little better, now only if I get my $120 back.

So, now that I have apologized and begged for forgiveness, I wanted to take a quick tour of the leagues.

Hey, here’s a nice bar bet for ya: which team has the best winning percentage in the so-badass-fox-goes-crazy-with-love American League?  The Yankees???!  Why, no!  Oh, of course, it’s the Red Sawks.  Ummmm, no…..  Tigers?  Not so much.

That’s right, peeps, the Athletics have the best record in the AL.  No, they won’t keep it up, but they aren’t quite as nauseating as people thought.  I really wish I would’ve done a full league preview because the As are my pick for the AL West.  Between the Mariners and the Rangers, you’ve got a couple of really crappy teams to beat up on if you are the As.  Fortunately for the As, they got to start with a weak AL Central.

So……is the AL still the best thing in the universe Evar!?

In the NL, the Diamondbacks have the best record.  I think they’ll have the best record in baseball at the end of the season, as well.  It’s just a perfect storm of a team: Brandon Webb, Danny Haren, and a young, destructive offense.

But the Florida Marlins are leading the NL East?  Yes, it’s true.  Oddly, they have been equal opportunity badasses, picking on whomever gets in their way.  Mets?  Suck.  Braves?  Nationals?  Pshaw.

A big reason has been Scott “Psycho” Olsen, who suddenly understands that battling the opposition is far better than picking fights with your own teammates.

And if you are a Mets fan, precisely how suicidal are you?  Are you Lizzie Borden, where you want to kill and die in the chair?  Are you Kurt Cobain?  Or, *drat*, are you Jeffery Dahmer-esque?  Yeah, the Mets are 13-11, good for 2nd in the NL LEast, but the team isn’t instilling the fear I thought it would.  Carlos Delgado had a couple of bombs today, but there was talk that he would be released.  I can’t tell you how stupid that would be, but we are talking about the Mets here.

I’ve been writing about the Astros quite a bit, but I wanted to take a moment to talk about the rest of the baseballers in the league.  What you say?

Unfortunately, because I’m at work and even though I live 150 miles from Houston, the Reds/Stros game at 11 CDT will be blacked out on mlb.tv.

Because of that, I’ll be missing a fantastic matchup between the Astros en fuego offense versus one of the hottest young arms in the league, Johnny Cueto.  I’ve been able to watch two of Cueto’s starts, and he is delightful to watch.

Also, I hope to be able to post a little more soon.  Damn kids got me sick, and I have been fighting some horrendous crap the last couple of days.  Ugh.

It’s no secret that mlb.tv’s service has been total and complete ass since it was launched with incredible promise.  But instead of getting better, it seems to be getting worse.  And to top it off, there does not appear to be an answer to watch games if you are a Linux user, which I am.

In 2005, I ordered mlb.tv for the first time for the express reason to dump expanded cable.  I don’t watch TV outside of sports, and that’s what sports bars are for, anyway.  As a special treat, mlb.tv went to Silverlight, which is Microsoft’s proprietary technology…and we all know that Microsoft loves playing nicely with other OSes.  Or not.

Anyway, that’s it.  Just venting because I am pissed, and is there anything scarier than a pissed off geek?  Yeah, didn’t think so.

(BTW, if you think Linux is geeky, give Linux Mint a go.  It’s straight-forward, beautiful, and you don’t have to screw with anything to get it to work.)

Does baseball turn you on? Does reading the ramblings of a bunch of grumpy fans excite you? Then stay tuned.