Wooden's World of Baseball

Thursday, August 31, 2006

Wooden's World of Baseball

Not that I think anyone will read this, but here goes nothing...

This is positively the strangest time of year for a baseball fan. If one of your teams is in it (North Shore Spirit), you're looking forward to the prospect of an elusive league championship. If another has recently nosedived (Boston Red Sox), you can't stand to think how much worse it will get.

The problem?

I'm now in Northern Virginia, where my other two teams — the Washington Nationals and the Potomac Nationals — are bad-to-mediocre, the result of MLB putting the franchise formerly known as the Montreal Expos on autopilot the past four years.

The parent Nationals are just tough to like when the two best players are ex-Yankmes. The "baby" Nats are likeable, but they're basically a bunch of 25-year-olds who would have been otherwise weeded out and/or playing indy ball (Doug Vroman, for example, started the season at Potomac and is now with the New Haven County Cutters) were it not for MLB's tendency of drafting guys who could be slipped into AA and AAA (e.g. Ryan Zimmerman). Add to that the struggles of the parent club and you've got close to 60 players that have been through this season at Woodbridge.

Still, it's been a good summer overall, but listening in on the Spirit...there's the angst that I've been missing out on a magical summer (sorry, but this time in 2004, the Spirit were limping to the finish and looked like they were dead in the water).