Oh, I lose control...

...when served filet of sole!

HAPPY OFFICIAL ST PATRICK'S DAY!!!

Cactus League Update: Sox lose to KC, 6-3. Takatsu opens the floods gates in the 4th, allowing 2 ER, but also striking out 2. Stewart follows with 4 ER in 2 innings, but also striking out 2, in route to getting the loss. Diaz looked sharp to start, if the box score is any indication - 3 IP no hits, struck out 2. The offense took the day off, Crede was 2 for 3, Willie Harris had a stolen base. Dye strikes out twice. The Sox leave 8 runners stranded.

Baseball Phrase of the Day: carry the mail v/arch. To run swiftly.

Today's Music Selection: The iPod was better behaved and mixed in some jazz with my Robert Johnson... and some old school Pretenders (whom I really don't like), choice cuts from Chris Whitley's Din of Ecstacy, Motorhead, and the Dead Milkmen. I know, I'm all over the board these days...

As I promised last week, I wanted to discuss some of my thoughts on James T. Farrell's My Baseball Diary, which I just finished reading. So, here is Part 1:

Farrell often ponders the question of baseball's popularity, and links it directly to fond memories of childhood. Back at the beginning of the 20th Century, before Playstation, Britney Spears, and "The OC", playing sports, specifically baseball, was often a kid's only distraction from the harsh realities of life in an emerging market economy. Youth then was very different than today - most kids worked to help the family survive, with school being a luxury for many.

Farrell discusses those memories in passages like these:

"The assumption that an interest in baseball is not worthy of a serious adult with presumably more serious interests is both true and false. Some adults think that to watch baseball is to waste one's time in a childish way. But for some of us, there is a peculiar attraction to baseball. It has its own drama. I have always loved the game. I don't care whether of not it is childish. Long before I possessed any capacity to examine myself or the reasons for the game's appeal to me, I loved it."

"There is not only fun and relaxation in baseball for a boy. There is also a poetry about the game. And the poetry of the game constitutes part of its appeal. It becomes a part of ourselves. The spectacle, the movements, the sounds, the crack of the bat, the swift changes from routine dullness to sudden and dramatic excitement, all of this is part of the appeal. But the drama of victory and defeat, the playing out of a boy's unformed sense of grandeur, of hope, is also bound up with this poetry of baseball."

(Visitng the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, NY)"You cannot remain long in the museum, looking about, watching the other visitors, overhearing chance comments and remarks without sensing that atmosphere is one of sentimentality. Many gray-haired men come and drift about from case to case. As they stare, their faces soften up. The past comes back to them. Boyhood, and young manhood glow in their minds once again. Those baseball in the cases are the balls that many of them never pitched, caught or hit on a big-league diamond. The uniforms are the baseball suits they never wore. The plaques speak of the records they never broke, the lives they never led, and the boyhood dreams they never fulfilled. These are some of the reasons why the museum is very popular."

"Why do many of us love baseball? I have never been able to arrive at an answer to this question which is full and satisfying to myself. But in our liking for the game, there is both fun and compulsion."

"Fans enjoy watching games, rooting, taking sides, shouting and releasing their enthusiasms and aggressions. Also, they have the acquired habits of interest. And since most of them had hoped in boyhood to become ballplayers themselves, they admire those who have been able to do what they couldn't. They admire the skill, ability and precision of players, talents which they themselves lacked."

My Ohio U Bobcats get Florida in the first round of the NCAA tournament on friday morning. I'll be at work, but will try to sneak away to catch the end of what could be a glorious victory for OU. I tell ya, between the basketball team in the Big Dance for the first time since 1994 (and with mostly freshmen - look out for these guys in 2006 and 2007!), and with Frank Solich signed on to coach the football team, we may be approaching an atheletic golden age in Athens, Ohio. Go OU, go Cats! Muck Fiami!