ESPN shows how a 6-foot-1 wide out from Hawaii went to Oregon State, then had Chad Johnson say he’s “T.J. Who’s Your Momma?” and now Houshmandzadeh is a household name…
At least in the houses of those who play fantasy football. Everyone else in the free flipping world cares not of the Bengals’ second option in the passing game.
I’m sorry, but I can’t get excited about the NFL right now. Didn’t it just end like last week? I mean, I’m barely paying attention to the NBA playoffs, I don’t know what’s going on in the NHL playoffs and this is the best time of the year on the ice, but I’m really to belief the mass sporting public cares about who the Giants pick in the third round?
Sure, Jay Alford may be the answer to help stop the running game, freeing up linebackers (which they need desperately) to contain tight ends. Then again, maybe he’s another William Joseph…
I’m still waiting for this first round pick to become the run-stopping force that Barry Cofield was this past season as a rookie.
The point is, you never know who’s going to do what. Everyone looks their best when you give them months to work out, eat right and prepare to run really fast for the NFL Meat Market (AKA the Scouting Combine). None of it matters until September when they hit the field for real.
The only thing I’m saddened that I missed from the draft is seeing just how Mr. Tony did. As a loyal listener to his radio show, he’s been dreading the Draft since ESPN informed him he had to attend with the rest of the Monday Night crew.
I should have known it was going to be a bad day when my soon-to-be six year old wandered towards me as I finished work at the computer.
When I got home around 8:30 p.m., she was asleep on the love seat and I moved her to bed, starting “Finding Nemo” and leaving her alone. However here she was and I led her back to bed, starting the VCR with the six-hour tape featuring The Cheetah Girls.
It was a little past 1 p.m. when I finally slumped into bed, avoiding my wife’s attempts to hit me. Whether it was a natural reaction or part of a bad dream is up for debate, but I couldn’t have been down for more than five minutes before the 5-year old was next to me, asking some question I really didn’t understand.
Usually I carry her, but since she was clearly more awake than me at the moment, I walked with her back to her room. The TV screen was fuzzy, so I switched channels, got Nemo back on the screen and returned to bed.
Time doesn’t move fast enough when a soon-to-be six-year-old child is up and she was back way too soon for me to catch anything resembling sleep. She complained about something, then returned to her room, expecting me to follow. I did and was told to give her “something to drink” to ease her back to sleep.
I could continue, but she ended up sleeping on the end of my wife’s side, interrupting her already unsettling sleep. I woke up before the alarm and eventually got her dressed and off to school.
Upon my return, I was set to jog around the block twice, work out on the Bowflex, take a shower, eat breakfast and go to work. The only thing I accomplished was watching 15 minutes of Sportscenter.
My next door neighbor, yes the same one with the riding lawn mower, recently brought his tractor and parked it in the back yard.
He used this bad boy to haul a rotting pile of two cut trees from the side of my house to a burn pile on county property. With said tractor, he also pulled two tree stumps from the ground and basically made my backyard a better place for everyone involved…
After seeing my glee from riding the mower, he offered to teach me to drive the tractor and that brings me to my newest rule to live by:
IF YOU’RE NOT FROM A FARM, KEEP YOUR ARSE OFF THE SEAT OF A TRACTOR
I had to learn this rule the hard way.
His tractor had a lawn cutting feature and he suggested I use it to cut the grass in my backyard, which was getting a little high.
So of course I said yes, hung off the side as he explained how it worked, then switched places and cut my backyard.
Reader, I would love to say this is the end of our long and arduous tale. Oh how I would love to type how the Baudelaire children were now safe, that the evil Count Olaf was defeated and the grass was cut without anything of any further interest.
But then I wouldn’t be telling the whole tale. I wouldn’t tell how I managed to back the tractor up to cut grass around a tree and felt empowered. Empowered enough to believe I could cut the grass between my home and our alternate neighbor’s 8-foot wooden fence.
Driving the tractor into the space wasn’t a problem, but coming in reverse was a different matter altogether and in an attempt to avoid the neighbor’s fence, the newly built fence surrounding the concrete slab off my back door was driven into.
There are no pictures to retell this portion of our tale, no link to add because with the help of my extremely generous neighbor, I attempted to replace the fence before my wife returned home to witness the damage to said fence.
Oh, how I would love to tell you that I went to Lowe’s and got the right fence, got the power drill from Flash and put it back in place.
Alas, I went to Home Depot and got the wrong panel. So of course as this was noted and I turned towards the back door to think of an alternate plan, who was in the door but…
So kids, the morale of this story is…
IF YOU’RE NOT FROM A FARM, KEEP YOUR ARSE OFF THE SEAT OF A TRACTOR
There are no lines, no barriers to determine where exactly to park in the area in front of the Canton Dixie Youth Baseball complex. The result was a formation that made one think twice about leaving.
A line waited to enter the facility sprinkled with players and parents, color-coordinated to represent their hometown and armed with folding armchairs. They all came to see if their team would be crowned the 2006 Dixie Youth Coach Pitch state champions and were treated to two pristine playing surfaces.
“I visited this complex several years ago before (CDYB) Benny Street and his wife (tournament director Dawn Street) really got involved with it,” said Dixie Youth State Director David E. Smith. “It was a nice complex then, but what they’ve done to this complex is remarkable.
“If the kids can’t play on these fields, then they can’t play anywhere.”
Benny said earlier this week that the second field, aligned with grass from fence to fence with dirt cutouts for the bases, would look like AstroTurf when ready for play.
On Friday as the teams first saw the fields, the grass was so plush and inviting for face-first dives that there was no way it could be mistaken for carpet.
Each of the eight teams surrounded the infield of field No. 1 as professional photographers, video crews and every relative with a camera searched for space to capture a rarity - more than 120 boys and girls in close proximity yet standing still at the same time.
“I can’t even tell my grandson because the sun is beating down,” said a patron from the bleachers. She would eventually get inside the concession stand for a cooler climate, but few else would be so lucky.
I was never lucky enough to play in a state tournament, yet alone have my name (and nickname) announced before an estimated 400 spectators. The best I can compare with is my last name listed with two doubles in the box score of the local paper.
Watching players with names on their backs in uniforms I dreamed about donning in high school brought some envy, but I’ll trade it for avoiding the brunt of the heat. The next improvement they should add is a retractable roof.
Cleveland’s all-stars probably received the largest cheer, ever greater than that for the host team. Nevertheless, the loudest noise came when the announcer said “Play ball.”
When I was this age, the ball games were played in the street with cars as bases and hedges as fences. A change of locale to the high school parking lot gave us an umpire, thanks to a painted box on the side of a wall.
When I did play organized ball, the fields were never kept to the quality of the CDYB. It helps when Canton Academy’s Gerald Ray is willing to utilize his players as groundskeepers for the tournament.
Ray was watching his future roster which looks good, like when Canton’s shortstop Walker Prestel threw out Nelson Robbins of Noxubee-Kemper at the plate from left center field.
A play later, Prestel fielded a ground ball clean and proceeded to overthrow the first baseman. It’s a future that’s still far away, and that’s the truth.
I was supposed to be there. In April, I glanced at the schedule for the New York Mets and planned my strategy. I knew I wasn’t making it to the Big Apple this year, so the logical place to see the team I love would be in Atlanta.
I have a friend in Boston who has season tickets at Fenway Park. I’ve watched from his seats, and he offered me a chance to see the rematch of the 1986 World Series. But that would have been harder to do than NYC. Besides, the Mets got swept in three embarrassing games.
A secondary glance revealed the best time would be a three-game series at the end of July. I would take a brief vacation from searching the summer landscape for sports stories while waiting for the high school season to start.
I would call ahead, get a press pass and watch the game from an air-conditioned seat with free snack food and drinks. Maybe it would be under the premise of a story on Mets reliever Chad Bradford, a Southern Miss and Hinds Community College guy who throws just like Graham Upshaw, a Canton Academy graduate headed to HCC.
Then again, I could have tracked down Jackson Academy’s Logan McDowell and asked him about his father, former Mets reliever and current Braves pitching coach Roger McDowell.
I could have asked Logan if he’s learned the intricacies of the hot foot, and I could have asked Roger if he saw me during that ticker-tape parade in the fall of 1986.
I was the 9-year-old hanging from a street sign, two blocks away from the main strip but happy to be out of school, thankful to have a mother who realized it would be a moment I would never forget.
Don’t get me wrong. I would have written the feature story, the column, posted a blog with blow-by-blow details of my trip and taken pictures. I would have done whatever necessary to guarantee me a seat.
It would have been a weekend I never would have forgotten. It’s been a while since I’ve seen my team up close and personal - close enough to scream and be heard. I’m sure they could hear me during that spring training game in Orlando a couple of years ago, or when they played at Pac Bell Park in San Francisco. I’m sure they could hear me then.
This time was going to be completely different. I was going to be standing around the batting cage before the game, in the press box with the beat reporters from both cities and in the locker room afterwards.
After the games were over, I would have crashed at my sister’s place downtown and recalled each moment to an audience that wouldn’t have cared but would have listened aptly, hoping I would be taking them the next day.
But the next day became tomorrow and the following week and just like that, it was August. Like a sandcastle at high tide, my dreams of watching the demise of the Braves at the hands of my Mets slipped away day by day.
Each day of the three-game sweep by the best team in the National League, I was able to watch without commercials as if I was at the park thanks to the DVR with my satellite dish. However, to be on hand to watch my Mets stamp out the Braves like a deer through a glass door would have been priceless, and that’s the truth.
Just the other day, I was questioned what was the biggest change moving from my origins on the East Coast to the ‘Dirty South’, and I thought about it for a moment…
My answer was the urban lifestyle, a prevelent urban lifestyle, which means, more than anything, the ability to sit down and be served by a waiter after 10 p.m. AND not have that place be a national franchise chain.
It’s funny because it’s not like Tampa Bay is much better, but there is more variety and things are open somewhat late, especially with Ybor City, but that is another post entirely…
Jack town is what it is and that basically means that Chilli’s, Appleby’s and Logan’s all stop serving around 10 p.m., which is really about the time when I know for sure exactly what I want to eat…
At least it was back in the day. Maybe I should be happy about the changes that have happened in my life, forcing me to plan earlier, heading to bed earlier and getting up earlier to…
What am I saying?!?!? I hate it, but there are moments when my opinion has its foundation rocked a bit.
My association with Magnolia legendary baseball coach D.M. Howie has led me to sitting down for meals at some of the classic establishments in the Capital City. I wish I could remember names and exact locations, but what do you want from me.
I’m surprised I was able to find them in the first place.
Last night, I traveled on Highway 220 to Route 80, which rolls from Clinton through south Jackson and the Jackson State campus before funneling out into Rankin county.
For those of you not familiar with the area, let me explain. No, there isn’t enough time, let me sum up.
Middle class suburb to “Black” school in the “Black” part of town to a touch of the country with suburban traits.
Crechele’s (I’m positive about a speeling mistake there) is less than a quarter-mile east of the Metro Center Mall, the original mall in Jck before it got too black or people didn’t like getting stabbed and shot at while they shoped at Sears.
Long story short, the strip around it has felt the same abandonment issues, but spots like Crechele’s wouldn’t have felt the change anyway.
It’s clear that the patrons know about the place and the prices, which aren’t close to cheap. I could have got a Prime Filet steak at “Market Price”, which means more than the $22.95 they wanted for the Prime Rib steak.
But the funny thing about is, you can charge that price if the steak is worth it and while my steak only costs $14, it was cooked to perfection.
So good was the steak that although they gave us each a steak knife, I was adviced by the waiter that it wouldn’t be necessary.
With the high school lunchroom cutlery provided, I easily pushed through one of the better cooked pieces of meat I’ve had in a while, and you can ask my wife - If we go out, I usually order steak because Hey, why not?
The foursome I sat with should adjourn again in roughly a month’s time, and I can’t wait to see where I’m taken next.
As some of my selected writing from my compostion books post, I see the need for a bit of an explanation…
Bumblebee was written during my senior year of college, a great time for me as a person as I discovered the difference between Sam Adams Dark and the Boston Lager, between Skyy, Kettle and Stoli Gold, between Redman and The Grateful Dead (Thanks, Lauren).
Lauren, a Cleveland transplant with blond dreads, let me ‘borrow’ her book by Charles Bukowski.
He wrote short stories and poems and I was looking for a style, so I thought I would borrow his, something like Jamal Wallace when he found Forrester and a willing Anna Paquin, minus the white streak from that evil Mangento forcing her to use her powers to fuel his…
I mean, I was just getting my black pen going and wanted to try something new. I see I’ve got a couple more poems that will post soon enough…
Our staff photographer reminded me that I wrote about the lack of black athletes playing baseball last year, right around the same time Major League Baseball was ready to honor Jackie Robinson’s breaking of the color barrier.
He’s right and I feel wrong. Wrong that I’ve let this issue die from these pages for that long because it’s bigger than that.
“When you look at, not just high school, but look at the professional ranks. It’s not just blacks, it is whites also,” said Levi Lewis, head baseball coach at Lanier High in Jackson, MS. “Baseball is dying in America and we don’t care. We’re not doing anything to save it.”
You can only save something that wants to live, and former pros are trying to determine just that. In last week’s Boston Glove, Meridian native Dennis “Oil Can” Boyd was attributed to having plans of building an independent league ballpark in Mississippi, with hopes of drawing the community back into the game.
“My kids will play baseball. Ken Griffey’s kids, Barry Bonds’s kids, they’ll all play baseball because it’s handed down,” said Boyd, who played for the Boston Red Sox (1982-89), Montreal Expos (1990-91), and Texas Rangers (1991). “Because of the challenges of surviving in our society in the past 15 or 20 years, we’ve skipped a whole generation of people passing baseball down to their kids.
“We’ve got to make them realize again how important it is to our history.”
Jonathan Howard’s history has him learning baseball at the YMCA and playing in the North Jackson baseball league as a youth. He moved to Ridgeland as a two-sport athlete, excelling on the diamond and the gridiron.
“I really loved it,” the Ridgeland High senior said about football, “but I had to stop playing.”
Howard was forced to stop after his neck snapped while making a tackle as a junior.
“My neck snapped back and my whole body got numb. This happened a couple of times, but I never knew what was happening,” said Howard, who still has a visible scar after a plate was put in to replace a disc between the 3rd and 4th vertebrae. “It was real narrow and my spinal cord kept hitting it. The doctor said I was one more step away from being paralyzed for the rest of my life.
“He said I was born with it, but I don’t know.”
He does know that next year he’ll be playing baseball for Holmes Community College, one reason Howard likely would have chosen baseball regardless of the injury and subsequent surgery.
“Baseball is a great opportunity to go to the next level,” Howard said. “I think African-Americans should get into it because there’s a better chance for them going than relying on football and basketball all the time.”
The numbers back him up. The National Basketball Association has only two rounds for their annual draft, with those left on the outside looking in destined for low-level professional leagues at home or abroad. The National Football League’s draft may last two days, but it’s only seven rounds to help fill the 55 final roster spots available on any team. To fill the numerous levels of baseball’s minor leagues, which Branch Rickey created the framework, there are 50 rounds in MLB’s First-Year Player Draft.
Rickey didn’t have to use one of those picks to sign Robinson to a minor league contract in 1945. He didn’t even have to negotiate financial terms with the Kansas City Monarchs, the Negro League team that Robinson was playing with at the time.
“There’s a lot of money involved,” Howard said. “That’s why I think a lot of African-Americans don’t put the time into it because you have to buy bats, gloves and some people don’t have the money.
“But people in the Dominican Republic are using their bare hands and they’re still getting it done, so it’s not an excuse.”
The excuse I hear when I’m sitting at games is the same thing I hear about soccer, that the game is too boring, it doesn’t move fast enough and it’s hard to understand. But it may be as simple as monkey see, monkey do.
“You don’t have parental involvement like we used to,” Lewis said. “Now parents are involved with basketball, especially when you go to your black schools.
“Basketball is the number one sport and baseball is like the bowling team,” he added. “It’s not prioritized, so if the adults look at it like that, then the students will look at it like that.”
If those students don’t start looking at baseball as a priority, in the future the only Americans in baseball will be the ones in the stands, and that’s the truth.
The New York Mets flagship station is WFAN, 660 AM in New York City. You can call me a band wagon jumper, but in 1986 I jumped on a signpost to watch the ticker tape parade as they celebrated the World Series championship.
I own a copy of the Let’s Go Mets music video (Don’t ask why) and at the end, there’s a promo for Imus in the Morning.
From that point until I graduated high school, I listened to the FAN at night, either to catch late Mets games or fall asleep to sports talk radio (Rob, you were there). That would mean I would wake up to Imus, who’s show runs from 5:30 a.m. to 9 a.m.
I think anyone can see where this is going, but I’ll start with this comment - I’m not defending Imus or his calling the Rutgers’ women’s basketball team a bunch of “Nappy-headed ho’s”.
It’s a racist (For those of you who don’t know, nappy-headed is associated with the tight, uncombed locks of an black person’s hair) and sexist (Imus is not a rapper, so he can’t get away with degrading women as such) remark, made without any thought because that’s what he does.
You can read more about Imus at http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Imus_in_the_Morning&oldid=121912122
Imus is a racist, sexist, homophobic morning radio show host who used to concentrate on impersonating voices like Richard Nixon and Wilfred Brimley, making fun of the news of the day with racist, sexist and homophobic comments.
Towards the end of my listening time, he had grown more political, pulling guests like, "John Kerry, Dick Cheney, J.D. Hayworth and Harold Ford, Jr., as well as reporters and columnists from Newsweek, NBC, MSNBC, and other media outlets," according to Wikipedia.
They put him on MSNBC and despite doing a voice of Bill Clinton, I believe the former president was another guest on the show and even invited him to the Congressional Correspondent's dinner, basically the sign that a comedian has made the ultimate crossover jump.
Imus is good and bad and all that I've said before. What bothers me the most about this is the fact that the show has said and done SO MUCH WORSE than call a bunch of well-educated college girls from Rutgers "Nappy-headed ho's".
I listened to C. Vivian Stringer, the coach of the team, and the best point she made was that due to Imus, her girls which includes five freshman and will return the entire team, have been forgotten. The fact they reached the championship game, losing to Tennessee has been completely overshadowed by this "controversy".
And honestly, what was so wrong about this? You're going to tell me that Rush, Bill O'Reilly, Dr. Laura, Opie and Anthony and Howard Stern don't say stupid racist or sexist or homophobic things on a daily basis?
At least Stern and O & A are currently on satillite radio, so their 'filth' isn't polluting the national air waves.
It's just dumb, is all. I could recall back to Chris Rock's last special on HBO, where he started about the Jackson family and Kobe Bryant and a bunch of other unimportant crap, then reminded everyone...
IT'S ALL TO MAKE YOU FORGET ABOUT THE WAR!!!
We're at war, people. Right now, there are American soliders with weapons off safety, killing brown people (Thanks, George Carlin) for whatever reason you'd like to believe, whether that's for oil (which is strange since the price of gas keeps going up), or for Bush to get rich (He's already a multi-millionaire, but I guess more money can't hurt), to avenge his father, because Chaney was bored or to combat terrorism (HA!).
So instead of marches on Washington and sit-ins on college campuses, organizations like the National Organization of Women, the NAACP and the National Association of Black Journalists are spending their time trying to get Don Imus fired for a very stupid comment.
Why is it the only time I hear about the NAACP, it's for things like this?
It's all silly and Reecie said it best, just like Carlin before her and just like thousands of millions of people before and after them all.
If you don't like what you hear, you can just change the channel, turn the dial or turn it off and concentrate on more important things, like the dead-end conflict or the immense homeless problem in the country or the fact that the gap between the have's and the have not's only increases every day or that black people make up 12 percent of the population, but over 30 percent of the prision population.
If the NAACP looked into that, maybe I would join.
I’ve had Dish Network for a long time now. I first got it when I was in Middle of Nowhere, Missoura (Yes, I know it’s Missouri, but it’s not pronoucned that way and I hate going off on tangets to explain little things like this, so let’s just leave it be, shall we?)
Where was I?
Oh yea, it was there that I discovered the Digital Video Recorder or DVR. Since I was in the middle of nowhere, TiVo wasn’t even a thought and I was just giddy about recording my favorite shows and movies and watching them whenever I wanted to.
That’s how I got hooked on “24″ with Super Secret Rouge Agent Jack Bauer.
I would record the episode, then come back and watch it, skipping the commercials, then call my friend Sini and act like an excited 12-year old, talking about the Corry Feldman and Corie Haim hotline…
(Did I just date myself?)
Anyway, that’s what got me hooked. I’ve already talked about watching sports via my DVR and anyone who knows me now knows how I’ve got tapes and tapes of Simpsons episodes, shortly before they started releasing the DVDs.
All of this, slow-winding thought process, brings me back to Dexter.
I was sitting at home with my wife during a Showtime Free Preview and saw a commercial for “Dexter”. I liked Michael C. Hall’s work on “Six Feet Under”, a show that “jumped the shark” when Hall’s character, David Fisher, was car-jacked and forced to smoke crack and do other lewd acts before being released…
There’s clearly another tangent here, but I’ll leave it alone for now.
Anyway, I DVR’d “Dexter” and absolutely fell in love with the show. So much so that I watched the credits and saw it was based on the book Darkly Dreaming Dexter by Jeff Lindsay.
The show was good, but since Showtime is a crap channel and I wasn’t paying $12 a month for it, I was content to wait for a DVD release and read the book.
Well, I tore threw the book in about two weeks, which may seem a long time, but I don’t get as many chances to read for pleasure when I spend enough time reading my litany of newspaper websites for sports, including all five NYC papers and the Bergen Record.
That was so long ago, like Thanksgiving and some things that should not have been forgotten were lost…
History became legend. Legend became myth. And for two and a half thousand years, the ring passed out of all knowledge…
Or for about three months, I didn’t think about Dexter at all. that is until I got a letter from Dish Network. They basically showed me that I was about $5 away from getting all the channels, so like the TV pig I am, I signed up…
And now Dexter, episode two, is lying in wait on my DVR. I can’t wait to get back into this series, just like I’m sure you’ll gladly get back to whatever it is you were doing before reading this, so here’s a link to a taste of what I’m so excited about.
This was the first year in a long time that I actually entered a NCAA tournament bracket. Usually, I would fill out about two or three online because those don’t really count, but it’s fun to have some proof that you picked so and so to beat yadda yadda…
Anyway, I still did a bunch of different brackets, but my problem was for the one I was submitted.
I filled out three, all with slightly different beginning but a somewhat similar end - Florida repeating as champions.
Then I gave them to my wife and told her to pick and submit one. What I really should have done was have her fill one out, but in the grandest 20/20 hindsighted vision, i should have looked at all three and selected just one for the cash.
My friend Sini, he submitted one bracket in three different pools and won two of them. If that fool can win a bracket, well then it meant the whole thing was up for grabs…
Which leads me back to the MLB preview and predictions.
Anyone who went chalk, meaning taking the top seeds, did pretty well in the NCAA tournament. I’m going to stick with that theory, especially since I’ve got about five months to back away from any claims made here…
AL West - I think I’ve already said the Angels, but the LAofAA should roll.
AL Central - I would love to say the White Sox, but the Twins are always going to be around and with the reigning MVP, Cy Young and leading hitter, it’s easy to see them again because remember, as great as the Tigers were, they were the wild card last year, not division champs.
AL East - I’m not a Yankees hater. I don’t like their franchise or anything, but I’m not like most Met fans who go out of their way to dis the Yanks. But what I’ll say next will look that way to most if not all Yankee fans.
They don’t have the pitching to stick around in the American League. Mike Mussina is old, he’ll turn it around but he’s not an ace anymore. Andy Pettite is old and wasn’t great last year. He’s not getting any better. Carl Pavano will evenutally get hurt and Wang is coming off an injury.
If the Red Sox can take advantage of all of this with a strong start, their pitching is good enough to keep them in front and then Manny and Pappi and Drew should be able to hold off the Yanks late.
I think this is the year they finally take the AL East back. It’s a tough pick, but I’ll take the Sox in the East.
Wild Card - The Yanks bats should get them this, but obviously the Tigers and the White Sox will be there. I’m going take the Yanks because I can’t see them missing the postseason altogether just yet and the Central will beat up on itself a lot.
NL West - The Dodgers have the best starting staff in all of baseball, and Pierre and Furcal at the top is lethal. But there’s a lot of hope in rookies and young bats to score runs. Take your Jeff Kent and shove it.
The Giants are just the opposite. The lineup is old, but reliable and with Zito at the top, they look good on paper. The key to this division is Barry “US” Bonds.
I think Bonds breaks the record before the All-Star break, doesn’t get invited, then goes insane down the stretch to lead them to a division title.
NL Central - Here’s my one upset pick. The Cards are a Cy Young candidate (Carpenter), an MVP candidate (Pujos) and a bunch of bums. The Astros are only in the picture if they get Clemens back and that’s not set in stone.
What is set is the Brewers IF BEN SHEETS STAYS HEALTHY. If he does, they will cruise to a title in front of the Astros, Cards, Reds, Cubs and Pirates in that order.
NL East - I’m a Met fan, but really? The Braves? Really?
I mean, really?
Our pitching isn’t that bad, as bad as everyone wants you to believe. The bullpen is pretty good, better than everyone wants you to believe. They may trade for a starter at the deadline with a 22-year old five-tool outfielder who’s being pushed by two five-tool outfielders that are one and four years younger, but if they’re in the hunt, they might not need to because Pedro, Mota and Sanchez should be back by August.
Mets in another romp.
Wild Card - Braves will walk away with this…
Walking through the door was tough.
It took a couple of deep breaths and the shuffling of small feet behind me to exit the present and confront the past that affected my future. A strong breeze, diluted with cigar smoke, whiskey and painful memories hit me square in the face.
It would have continued and engulfed me completely, but Junior hit the switch on the wall that turned the fan off. As I stood in a methodical gaze at my past, my future strolled past me and brought life into the room.
The small hands touched and grabbed and tugged me into this Grand Ballroom. Looking at it now – the collected dust on the chairs, the mirror with no reflection — it had become just a ballroom. Not that it was Grand when I entered it, fresh out of high school with a speech and a dream. But that was so long ago. I was different now.
My feet returned to me. I walked into the future. This room was to be converted. As I wandered around, jotting down this and noticed that, my boys busied themselves as young boys do.
Junior went behind the bar and ‘Cowboy Joe’ waddled up to the counter. My back was to the bar when I heard the glass shatter; however, my mind was miles away.
I saw the vision that haunted my dreams for years. The American flag, wiggling and writhing to the music. Moving as if something was trying to be released, like a snake trapped in a bag.
Then, suddenly, it is lifted to the sky, with me at full salute. I stand strong and erect as it rises, admiring its stars, yet filled with anger at the stripes.
As I bow my head in shame, I’m engulfed in blood, sweat and tears for a mule that I’ve never known. I kneel in confusion and watch from afar as a briefcase closes over me.
I awake in darkness, the echo of a starter’s pistol stuck in my ears. On most nights, I reach for my wife and check my reality. However, lately I escape my private prison and watch my boys sleep.
In them, I see my wife’s fair complexion and her strong chin. However, as I stand in the dark and look closer, I see what I believe at first to be me.
As I watch my sons take one more small step closer to death, I begin to see my father. Then, the view changes and I see one face of reason inside clouds of confusion.
When I ask them why they broke Mr. McAllister’s window, I hear the answer but what I really hear is my grandfather’s voice. They say it was an accident, but I’m not convinced. I don’t, rather, I can’t believe them. Something seems to be underneath “I’m sorry and it will never happen again,” but I just can’t place it. It seems so familiar…
Daddy, it was Junior’s fault!
No it wasn’t…
Yes, it was…
They argue as if it didn’t happen. As if within this room, a glass wasn’t shattered. They speak as if it was not lifted from its place and brought out to this hostile territory. They act as if it was not violently dropped back down to the Earth, becoming hundreds of inconspicuous little pieces, nothing that could harm you, but there, nonetheless. Then picked up off the ground, the ground that seemed to become its new home. This one, however, was dark and closed, with no sign of escape. Swept out with the rest of the trash…
As the boys cleaned up the glass, I thought how it was similar. A young boy, with certain beliefs, and a will to change the world. I had entered this room valedictorian, Godamnit!
I didn’t deserve that treatment. I should have spit the blood in their faces, but I didn’t. I had never thought why, why I had swallowed my blood that day. But back in this town, back in this room, it all came back to me, like stepping on the wrong side of a rake. Everything raced back to me and stuck like polyester on a hot summer day.
The words had never stuck. I heard them every night in college, but they never stuck. I still hear them, hear them haunting me, reminding me of my past. Yet I never thought about its meaning. Now I knew. I knew what Grandpa meant now; and the best thing was, it wasn’t too late. I could still make a difference. I could still be the spy…
I felt like a large cloud had been lifted and I thought I saw a rainbow in the dust of the stage, however, it was just the light. I thought about my new-founded revelation as I wandered around the old room and felt like the star of a bad novel with a sappy ending.
I laughed to myself as I checked the measurements one last time. The boys were beginning to give me that ‘We can’t think of anything else to do’ look and I know in a few seconds, it would change into a full-fledged complaint. I could always come back later…
Come on boys. Let’s go.
Finally!
Daddy, can we stop for ice cream?
Yeah, I want a big vanilla ice cream cone.
Yeah, me too.
Fine, we’ll stop at the ice cream shop.
Daddy, why did we come here?
Cause this is gonna be Daddy’s newest liquor store, Junior.
Why can’t you have an Africa store, Daddy?
Because that wouldn’t sell, Junior. That wouldn’t sell.
