NEON GODS

Rain, boring stuff, and the remarkable Cleveland Indians.

You don't care, of course, why I've been silent recently.  I'm at the cabin in West Virginia preparing for the coming Board meeting of which I'm a member (homeowner's association, an election even I could win).

The winters out here are brutal, and by April warm, sunny spring weather to us is like gold to a pirate.  But it is missing this year.  11 inches of rain in April alone and it has rained steadily for the last 6 days.  Argggggh!  The trails are under water, our dirt roads are mud.  Maybe that's good because preparations for the coming meeting have required many hours of conversations and even more writing reports (it's a rather large association). 

I have found a substitute for the missing sunny days however: the lowly Cleveland Indians.  My Indians have begun the season at 25-13 (best in the majors) and they won last night by the rediculous score of 19-1.   Even Mitch McConnell can't quell my baseball excitement!

--Trakker

Why the rich should pay more taxes

Sometimes I get so sick of politics I just want to move to the Yukon and pan for gold or something. 

I've pretty much resigned myself to the fact that the Tea Party/Republican Party will destroy our economy, and I'm just as resigned to the fact the Democratic Party will do little to prevent it. The Republicans keep pushing, gleefully, closer and closer to the edge of sanity and all we can do is stand back and watch, knowing that at some point everything will crash...and the liberals will somehow be blamed.

Tea Partiers are like children throwing a tantrum, and like children, they lash out at authority and try to hurt it.  Often the tantrums are funny when you think about it.  "If you don't give me what I want I'll hold my breath until I die, and then you'll be sorry!"  Yeah, but what good will that do you?  You'll be dead.  Kids don't think that far ahead.  The Tea Party is the same way.  "If you don't cut the government right this minute I'm going to refuse to raise the debt ceiling and ruin our economy forever and ever, then you'll be sorry!" Yeah, and so will you.

Okay, so as my regular readers know, I hate spiders.  My biggest nightmare is waking up in the middle of the night with a spider in my bed. So I really try to avoid them. Today I had to replace the light outside our back door.  The old one had been there for 15 years and it was rusted and took a lot work to get it off...and of course the new light didn't fit the hole cut in the siding and the wires were stiff, and the screws didn't line up at all.  As I was trying to get the screws started, hundreds of tiny baby spiders started pouring out of the hole in the siding and crawling up my arm and into my shirt and yet I couldn't drop the light.  An hour later the light is installed and it works, but I'm still finding the little devils on me.  Rich people don't have this problem, they pay people to get bit by spiders.  That's why they should pay more taxes.

And now that I'm off topic, how about those Cleveland Indians!!!  12-4 after 16 games, the best record in baseball (tied with the Rockies).  I know it wont last so I'm enjoying it now, and I just had to gloat while I can!

Gloat!

--Trakker

Oh, the pain!

My regular readers know I'm a huge Cleveland Indians fan.  I suffered through all those terrible teams of the 60s, 70, and 80s, only to see the Indians rise to respectability in the middle 90s and early 2000s.  All signs pointed to more good years beginning with 2006, but that has not happened (with the exception of 2007).

Last year we were unexpectedly terrible and had to trade our ace, Cy Young winner CC Sabathia, away, but we were hopeful that this year we would put it all together and possibly win the AL Central. 

So why haven't I written about baseball this year?  Well, because this year's team has been a disaster!  We are the third worse team in the major league.  We traded away another Cy Young winner, Cliff Lee, and our captain - the heart and soul of our team - Victor Martinez.

Worse, it appears that next year's team will be mediocre - at best!  Thus is the existence of baseball's small market teams.

<sigh>  

--Trakker

"You Sign With The Yankees, You're A Jackass. It's That Simple"

I find myself longing for baseball for some reason.  As a Cleveland Indian fan this is hard to fathom given the pain we suffered last year, capped by the loss of our beloved CC Sabathia.  Over the years Indians fans watched Sabathia mature into a Cy Young pitcher.  We suffered through his growing pains(and, yes, that's a pun), but we embraced him for his fierce competitive spirit.

The role of small market baseball clubs like the Indians is to find and develop raw baseball talent and suffer through their early years.  Then when they mature and become household names, a player that can carry a team to the World Series and a World Championship, we watch them leave for teams that have pockets deep enough to afford them.  So when CC Sabathia siged with the f*cking Yankees (in Cleveland, there is no Yankee team, there is only a F*cking Yankee team) this winter, fans once again vented our frustration.  Some have raised venting to an art form.  No one does it better than Jay at Let's Go Tribe, in fact it's so good I want to share it.

Look, it doesn't matter what his reasons were.  It doesn't matter if he's a great family man and loves his kids and all that.  It doesn't matter that he earned the right, or that most players go to the highest bidder.

You sign with the Yankees, you're a jackass.  It's that simple.

C.C. Sabathia is a jackass.  Him and that all-time great douchebag, Roger Clemons.

After being introduced today as a Yankee, Sabathia trotted out the usual jackass trope:  "When it came down to it, really thinking about what I wanted, having the chance to win every year. That's something that I talk about all the time. That's the bottom line for me. There really was no other place to go."

No other place to go?  There were plenty of other places to go, highly competitive teams that will fight the good fight to get to the postseason, that will compete for a championship.

What C.C. is really saying:  "I want to have the postseason gift-wrapped like a special gift for me, every single year.  I don't want to have to compete for it and earn it."

The Brewers and Indians will compete for the postseason.  Every player will have to kick and scratch.  The Yankees will not compete; they'll just buy it.

A real competitor doesn't want to win with unfair advantage; he wants to compete on a level playing field. Star players don't go to the Yankees to "compete," they're going there for the loaded dice — and for the cash, of course.  They don't want to have to earn postseason berths; they want titles handed to them on a silver platter.  They don't want to get paid to get to the playoffs, they want to get paid to go to the playoffs.

There were plenty of places to go, but only one place where Sabathia wouldn't have to compete fairly.  He will just be handed a certain measure of success, one befitting  a player of his (ahem) stature.

Here's one final good-bye, then, C.C.  We had a great run together.  You gave us some great seasons, the best career of any Indians pitcher since Sudden Sam.  You left us with a nice little cache of prospects, too.

But you're just another jackass now.

--Trakker

Baseball Sucks Sometimes

This has been a very painful year for Cleveland Indians fans.  After coming within one game of the World Series last year, and having the very same team back this year, big things were expected.  We should have known.

Cleveland is a small market team in a professional sport whose structure favors the richer, large market teams. Teams like the Indians are actually the farm teams for the richer clubs.  The small market teams generally do poorly in nthe standings and thus get the top draft picks.  These teams maintain a farm system of their own which grooms players for the big leagues and eventually some become very good major league players.  Once a player becomes an established star and has played for the small market team for a few years, they can file for free agency.  Small market teams generally cannot come close to offering what the large market teams can afford, so they are constantly losing their better players.  This has a tendency to make fans bitter.

In recent years the Indians have lost Albert Belle, Manny Ramirez, Bartolo Colon, Jim Thome to free agency (Colon was traded away months before he became a free agent).

Because their season has totally unraveled, the Indians just traded away C.C. Sabathia, months before he was to become a free agent.  The Indinas knew they had no chance of signing him.  He will probably be offered a 4 or 5 year contract at the end of the year that exceeds the total payroll of the Indian's team.  C.C., a 6' 7" 300 pound left-handed Cy Young award pitcher, is a tough competitor and joy to behold on the mound.  Losing him in this ugly season is salt in the wounds of Indian's fans, a team that hasn't won a World Series for 60 long years.

C.C. began his career as 20 year old in 2001 and Indians fans have watched him mature into a better pitcher every year.  Last year he won the AL Cy Young award at the age of 27.  He is a serious and durable pitcher who will only get better in the coming years, years that he will be pitching for some other club.

Damn Baseball!

--Trakker

Trying Not To Be Angry

Aren't blogs great?  How else could a guy who made maps all his life write about such weighty issues as politics and impeachment - and even call our President a dumb ass! - and have people from all around the world read it?  I'm so damned impressed!

But let's give credit where credit is due.  Blogs owe a lot to office cubicles, and the growing number of office workers who use computers to do some or all of their work.  Cubicles give workers privacy, and boredom leads those workers to search the internet for something less boring to make their day go by a little faster.  Is it just a coincidence that my hit counts are highest between 8:00 and 5:00, and only during the week?  I guess I have corporate America to thank for that...

I think my political posts lately have been overly angry. I feel overly angry.  Part of it is due to the wasteful fight for the Democratic nomination.  Think of all the money Hillary and Barack have wasted fighting each other, money that could have been used against McCain.

I'm really getting sick of politics.  The political atmosphere has become so charged with anger and hatred...and it's only going to get worse the closer we get to November.  I often wonder how Barack can go on day after day.  Hillary too.  If it were me, on the first nice warm day of Spring I would have chucked the whole primary thing and gone hiking.  Alone.

I am really fascinated by the raid on the polygamous Mormon sect down in Texas.  It was triggered by a hoax caller and was fueled by sensational claims by former sect members of ugly sexual abuse within the compound.  The Texas authorities have made some stunning accusations of their own, and have taken what I consider extreme actions that seem to be as harmful to the children as the abuse they are being protected from.  Now there are 467 kids who will be defended by 467 lawyers.  I would say the deck is stacked against the prosecutors, because someone among those 467 lawyers is going to come up with a killer defense that the others will mimic.  If open to the public, this could be the summer's best entertainment - if only children weren't involved.

There are a lot of topics I'd rather write about than politics.  I've been working on a piece about a Black teacher I had in grade school, in Indiana, in the 1950s.  I am slowly learning how a Black teacher ended up in our all-white school in a town where Blacks were strongly encouraged to stay in their little section of town.  Unfortunately, she has passed away and I will have to rely on other sources to put the puzzle of her professional life together.

Other topics I enjoy writing about are baseball and cats (of course). I will try to limit my baseball posts, but cats are such remarkable and noble creatures that posts about them seem to write themselves.  How did these hairy creatures convince us to let them move in, AND get us to feed them, pet them, and clean their toilet?  Granted, they had to give up sex in return.

My very favorite type of writing, though, is humor.  Back before I realized just how screwed up our political system had become, I used to enjoy sitting down and writing something that would make me laugh. I've always been good at seeing humor in everyday life, but it's not easy to put it in writing.  Someday, when Bush and Cheney are on trial and the rest of their gang of miscreants are either in jail or afraid to come out of their houses, I will once again see humor in everyday life and put it to paper.  It's been a long, long time since I laughed.

--Trakker

Off Topic

Yeah, I know it's November and I should be sick of baseball after the spectacular choke my Indians did in the playoffs, but looky here.  Washington D.C.'s new baseball stadium is taking shape and promises to be ready for opening day in 2008.  I'm not a big National League fan and I really hate the idea of soaking taxpayers to build new sports stadiums so millionaires can get even richer, but...well, doggone just look at the picture (captured last evening from their webcam).  All I can say is "Play Ball!"

--Trakker

Baseball...

...sucks sometimes.  My first place Cleveland Indians came here to Washington to play three games with the Nationals.  As it turned out we were outplayed in 26 of those 27 innings, managing to salvage one of the three games with an exciting 9th inning on Saturday.  I attended all three games - three games in 45 hours.  It left me beat and depressed.  We squandered a couple of pretty decent pitcher's outings, the last being Jake Westbrook's return from the DL.  I did get some good pictures, however, including this one of Jake.  Sure didn't get much else done this weekend though!

(Flash- Sabathia pitched a complete game tonight, winning his 11th game.)

Life Is Good!

The ball that you see in the left side of this picture was hit by Travis Hafner for a grand slam home run.

The Indians played an afternoon game at Baltimore's Camden Yards this afternoon. and I found no good reason not to go.  I've been practicing sports photography for about a year, and was able to get some good pictures today.  I uploaded some at http://tinyurl.com/2qhuf2.

The Indians won the game 10-1.  The Orioles kept it exciting at 1-1 until the 7th inning when the Indians went up 5-1.  The Indians now have the third best record in baseball, a rare treat indeed.

The Tribe

I love baseball again.

I don't know how they did it but going into tonight's game, the Indians (and Milwaukee) have the best winning percentage in all of baseball.  The Indian's pitching has been just good enough, and Travis Hafner never ceases to amaze.

 

    C.C. Sabathia warming up