To mark the impending Opening Day, they dug up another baseball movie over there at the Encore channel: “The Slugger’s Wife,” from 1985. This movie has everything, including the Braves’ blue-and-white uniforms, Mark Fidrych and Skip Caray as themselves, and Rebecca DeMornay and Loudon Wainwright III singing rock hits of the late ’70s and early ’80s, including (why not?) Neil Young’s “Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black).” Not to mention the titular slugger having a chance to break Roger Maris’s home run record on the last day of the season while his Braves need to beat the Astros to capture the N.L. East title. (Levi, I’m sure, is bristling at the merest idea that this is what actually happened in 1985.)

While I’m at it, I’ll mention that some parts of the country got a baseball-related TV Guide cover this past week: Detroit got Ivan Rodriguez, Philadelphia got Jim Thome, South Florida got Josh Beckett, Chicago got Kerry Wood and Mark Prior, Houston got Andy Pettite and Roger Clemens, and Southern California got Vladimir Guerrero. Any or all of these people could be the answer to a future trivia question, since this was the first TV Guide issue since 1954 to contain eight days of program listings. (The national cover was “Where Are They Now?”, spotlighting such long-gone television personalities as Eriq LaSalle and Gillian Anderson. The current editorial staff at TV Guide seems to believe that the public’s memory extends no longer than eight days, an opinion they share with the producers of the VH1 show “Best Week Ever.”)

Still, it’s nice to see TV Guide using baseball in an attempt to drive newsstand sales in certain areas, rather than their regular standbys of “Star Trek” or an upcoming movie.

Oh, sovaldi sale and to explain the previous post: I had just been talking with someone here at the office about steroids and baseball and how the image of steroid abuse would be hanging over the whole season. So I wrote a post that was kind of continuing that conversation, the problem being that no one reading the post had been privy to the conversation.

Anyway, I promise this is my last word on the issue, unless Rabbi Klein is found to have been taking steroids during the heyday of the Diamond Kings.

30 days until Opening Day!

First off: I don’t much care about the steroids question, in part because we won’t ever know the truth. I do think maybe it’s time for the union to just give it up and offer a real testing plan. Not that I think they _ought_ to, or should feel ethically obligated to. I just think maybe they should consider it just to get all the chattering sportswriters and their disappointed eight-year-old souls to shut up.

One last thing for today, which I think I can promise on both of our behalfs: Jim and I will not be taking steroids before our trip, despite all the shady characters we will probably be associating with.

We have a blog

Three years ago, friends of ours named Luke and Sandy went on a baseball road trip and kept a joint blog about it. So I figured we should either rip them off, or pay homage to them, depending on whether or not Luke and Sandy are going to be reading this.

This is actually the replacement for some “manual” blogging I had been doing about this trip on my own web site, so I’ve copied all those entries over to here. The advantages are that Levi can easily make entries here as well, and we can both make entries from anywhere…including while we’re on the trip, if we can beg, borrow, or steal a computer capable of connecting to the Internet at some point.

It has also been rumored that Luke may be joining us for the first portion of our road trip. I hope he can make it, even if I disagree in part with his opinions on National Anthem etiquette. While I will happily sing along to an instrumental version (especially if it’s being played live by an organist), I will remain silent if someone is out on the field performing, because I actually want to listen to their performance. But I do agree that the cheering shouldn’t start until the end of the song, no matter how good the singer is at hitting the high note.

Therefore, in case they do instrumental versions of “O Canada” in Toronto and/or Montreal, I want to be sure I have the lyrics down.

On another note, my mother tells me that my cousin is getting married in Connecticut in July. Depending on the exact wedding plans (and the exact wedding location), I may attempt to come up with a scheme to visit New York for a day, a city which is a noticeable gap on the road trip itinerary. The Yankees will be in town that weekend, right before the All-Star break, playing my hometown Devil Rays.

I realized that there may actually be a few other people in attendance at the Expos-Dodgers game, due to the presence of Quebec’s very own Eric Gagne in the visitors’ bullpen.

However, the Olympics will also be going on that week, so maybe all the locals will be staying home to cheer for the Canadians. Let’s hope there aren’t a lot of people thinking that this year’s Olympics are taking place at Olympic Stadium, despite the name, because things could get ugly.

Well, in this age when people don’t have to take responsibility for their predictions, I guess Sports Illustrated will be okay despite clearly picking wrong in the National League Central.

I was going to post my picks this week, but I’ve been too busy with work and with hours on the phone trying to alter the car reservation Jim made. There is no reason to get a Taurus when we could get a purple Lamborghini.

The first tangible sign of spring

Hey, the Phillies tickets showed up in the mail already! We’ll actually be meeting up with my aunt and uncle at the game and our mutual friend Maura, so I’m going to mail those people’s tickets to them ASAP.

On another note, I bought Padres tickets over the weekend for a May game against the Cubs. This isn’t directly relevant to the road trip, except that both the Padres and the Phillies are going to be playing in new stadiums in 2004, so it’ll be fun to do a comparison and contrast. The Padres’ stadium, Petco Park, already gets points for being named after something warm and fuzzy (well, as warm and fuzzy as a chain store can be, i.e., much warmer and fuzzier than Wal-Mart), whereas the Phillies’ stadium, Citizens Bank Park, loses points for being yet another stadium named after a cold, impersonal bank. Actually, at least it’s a bank that still has “bank” in its corporate name, unlike its baseball stadium naming rights counterpart across Pennsylvania, PNC.

As so often happens

Straight out of the baseball preview issue, this is Sports Illustrated’s predicted order of finish for the various leagues and divisions, with the teams we will be seeing on this trip highlighted:

NL East
1. Philadelphia Phillies (1x)
2. Florida Marlins
3. Atlanta Braves
4. Montreal Expos (1x)
5. New York Mets

NL Central
1. Chicago Cubs
2. Houston Astros
3. St. Louis Cardinals (2x)
4. Cincinnati Reds
5. Milwaukee Brewers (2x)
6. Pittsburgh Pirates (3x)

NL West
1. Arizona Diamondbacks
2. San Francisco Giants
3. San Diego Padres
4. L.A. Dodgers (1x)
5. Colorado Rockies

AL East
1. New York Yankees
2. Boston Red Sox (2x)
3. Toronto Blue Jays (1x)
4. Baltimore Orioles
5. Tampa Bay Devil Rays

AL Central
1. Minnesota Twins
2. Chicago White Sox (2x)
3. Kansas City Royals
4. Cleveland Indians (1x)
5. Detroit Tigers (2x)

AL West
1. Oakland A’s
2. Anaheim Angels
3. Seattle Mariners
4. Texas Rangers

Honorable mention to the Twins and Mariners, whose Midwest League teams we’ll also be seeing.