Spring! Sports. Baseball!

Well I haven't really used the blog to discuss one of my all-time favorite things. Anyone who knows me a little bit would know that would be baseball. It's Spring. That means baseball is back. Not a minute too soon. It's been a tough sports year - Michigan wasn't great at football (Appalachian St?), and terrible at basketball (must have faith in Beilein), the Redskins were their usual maddening selves, although they did make the playoffs. As an aside, how fast did that game turn sour against the Seahawks?? Blech. Syracuse basketball was at times maddening, at times awesome, and Jena and I are hoping that those fab frosh will stay for another year at her Alum, so we can hopefully go up and see them play together. While it was exciting to watch the close game against Georgetown and the not so close game with Michigan, the overall success of sports teams I follow has been lacking. Silver lining - Dean Keener resigned from James Madison after compiling a record of 4-2043 in his tenure (only a very slight exaggeration).

Fast forward. Put all those other sports out of your mind. The don't matter anymore. Welcome back, Spring. Welcome back, baseball. Welcome back, warm weather, long days, barbecues. Welcome back, kayak.

I got suckered into buying a 20 game package at the new Nationals Park. Nosebleed seats, only $10/ticket. Jena and I had tickets for the first couple of years of the Nationals, but RFK was a really awful place to watch a baseball game, so we let the seats lapse last year. I still ended up going to probably 10 or so games (including all three of the games during the Tigers interleague sweep...awesome). This year we will be heading down to the new park at the Navy Yard, hoping for better food, better starting pitching, better sightlines, wider concourses, and less grumpy ushers. Seriously, RFK had the grumpiest nastiest ushers. There were something like 94 people at some of the games I went to in August, and they would check every ticket to make sure people weren't sneaking into the 500s??? So strange. Anyway, still angling for some opening day seats, but hopefully something will come through - note to MLB ticket website designers, those captcha tricks obviously don't work that well considering stubhub was selling opening day seats about 95 seconds after single game seats went on sale, while I couldn't get a single seat. So, if you find yourself somewhere near the top of the stadium in left field, come check us out.

In other news, the Tigers look to be a dynamic offense, patently incapable of providing any decent relief pitching, so those games I watch on mlb.tv will likely be lasting until 12-1 am every night. I am okay with that =).

Welcome back, Spring. See you at the ballpark.