Spring Training

Baseball season is finally back. I put down $14.95 so I can listen to any game any time (almost) to either team's broadcast all season long. This is a great deal if you think baseball on the radio listening to a couple of elder blowhards desparately trying to fill airtime with whatever is cascading through their heads (which I do).

The package included the rites of spring so I tuned into the Minnesota v. Boston exhibition on Sunday which only the Twins were broadcasting. There I was delighted to hear from Rik Aalbert "Bert" Blyleven who I think has the most wins by HOF-elegible player who is not is the HOF (289) and I remember he was complainer member of the 1979 "We Are Fam-a-lee" Champion Pirates where he had 20 no-decisions in 37 starts which I someday will check to see if its a record. Anyway Bert had severe oral diarrhea during the game and in between his multiple Safe Driving Ads for the Minnesota Department of Public Safety (the set up is, acting (badly) as a Philip Marlowe-ish character, he announces some promotion for a Twins game and then somehow alerts the cops to arrest all the Twin fans who speed or otherwise drive unsafely in the rush to the park (Gee, thanks, Dik!) ) and then he went off for about 10 minutes on minor leaguers who never made it past A ball as being whiny failures who blew their chace and do not deserve sympathy. Must have had a bad ice cube. Ex-jocks can be really fun to listen to. Frank Gifford used to have a similar problem when Howard Cosell, Dandy Don, Alex Karras, or his later cohosts, Simpson & Namath -the Slasher & the Flasher- would get quiet.

I guess the theme of this post is practice before the real season starts. I wanted to see how this all worked as I promised LA Guy a week ago I would start writing. I promise I'll be more interesting & address more important topics as I go on- Hillary, Iraq, American Idol, the new Star Wars TV series etc...but today I missed the Sunday morning shows & just listened to the game.