Day: April 30, 2004

This is Priority Mail?

Way back in March, in this very blog, I maligned the AAA web site because it would only allow a total of eight destinations on the form to have a Triptik made for your upcoming road trip, so I had to make two separate requests, and then all I got in the mail was a Triptik for the final third of this trip; I had assumed that someone saw two requests by the same AAA member coming very closely together and threw away the first request.

Well, all this time, it turns out the AAA and their web site wasn’t at fault. It was the U.S. Postal Service. The Triptik covering the first two-thirds of this trip, it turns out, came in a much bigger box (because of all the Tourbooks that came along with it), too big to fit in one of the package lockers in my apartment complex, as the mailman discovered when trying to deliver it on February 4th (I know this because of a telltale scrawl on the address label). But he didn’t leave a note then, for whatever reason, and the package apparently got forgotten about somewhere in the North Hollywood post office until yesterday, when I finally got a note telling me to pick it up in a hurry or they would return it to the sender on May 3rd.

But now we have the small problem that all these Tourbooks are the 2003 editions, because the updated editions don’t come out until March or April (if I had remembered this, I wouldn’t have ordered the Triptik for this trip so early), and the more significant problem that the route shown on this Triptik doesn’t reflect our current plans, which involve going from Carmi, Illinois, to Detroit via University Park, Illinois, so we can drop Luke off at the Metra station.

So I’m going to go in person to a AAA office soon to get them to make a “corrected” Triptik while I wait, and maybe a big pile of 2004 edition Tourbooks, thus avoiding the Postal Service altogether, and the North Hollywood post office in particular. (My copy of the April 11th TV Guide also seems to have disappeared into a black hole, but TV Guide extended my subscription for two weeks to make up for it.)

Brain delay

Via Jon Solomon, from the Indianapolis Star-Tribune, on yesterday’s Louisville Bats/Indianapolis Indians game:

“The game was halted for 15 minutes after the third inning when Indians first baseman Jeff Liefer accidentally got locked inside the team’s clubhouse restroom.”

Original comments…

sandor: Glad to see the good ol’ Indy Indians get some press, however silly it is. I’ll be the first to admit there isn’t much to see on your way through Naptown, but Victory Field really is a treat. I treated my grandma to a game there a few years ago, and we had a blast. Highly recommended, even when the ballplayers are too dumb to remember how a door works.

(Small point: Last I checked the masthead it’s the Indianapolis Star, no -Tribune. You must be thinking of that -apolis, up north somewhere. Incidentally, the one AAA park that I know of that stands up to Victory Field is that of the St. Paul Saints.)

The Designated Hitter

Steven Goldman, writer of The Pinstriped Bible, a Yankees site worth reading–despite not being a Yankee-hating site–today calls the Designated Hitter “the Free Parking of baseball.”

Aside from the fact that the DH sucks all the time, whereas Free Parking only sucks when your opponent lands on it, I think he’s right on. Finding a good DH should be the easiest thing in the world for a team. That’s why, when the Cardinals (in interleague play) batted Miguel Cairo there a few times, or when the Yankees, this season, have batted Ruben Sierra there against lefties, it has brought sorrow and joy, respectively.