IdahoBert

After living out of the region for almost the last 50 years — before the Internet era hit in stride — my ability to follow the team in earnest was spotty. When I discovered MTS in 2004 I followed the team minute by minute day by day no matter what. This year for the first time in 19 seasons I stopped following them. The team was like bad heroin laced with battery acid instead of good heroin that helped me take flight. This team was like waking up every morning and peeing broken glass into the toilet. Frequently before bed I would go “oh hey there was a game and I totally forgot“ and instead of following it assiduously in real time as before I would just look at maybe the box score or perhaps not even that. It takes a lot to wear me out and this team wore me out this year. The idea of more years of rebuilding futility makes me sad. Since so much unaccountable bad stuff happened this year next year has to be better but other teams are going to be better too so it makes me wonder if it’ll just be treading water, if that, again. Sigh…

I didn’t watch the game so I don’t know about Shep’s comments, but since I live in the northwest and all sorts of people from Seattle live in Idaho - which makes me scratch my head - some of them were heartbroken and wringing their hands that the Tigers won the first game of the series on Monday because that nixed the M’s home-field advantage for the playoffs and since they all have connections they were going to get tickets. HA! At least something positive came out of this.

The way these guys are playing gives me hope. I sincerely hate disliking this team. These guys are like Jennifer Beals in Flashdance and they’re really rising to the occasion. They are the D word, baby! “It can cut you like a knife, if the gift becomes the fire On a wire between will and what will be.”

How much further will General Harris’ March to the Sea take us? Through Minnesota? Will we burn Seattle to the ground?

Right now they have the longest current win streak in MLB of six games.

Achievable goals are good. Don’t lose 100 games. Don’t finish last place in the Central. Have a lower negative run differential than KC. On a cold December night I’ll snuggle in the icy air of my cold water flat with my teeth chattering and the memory of these achievements will keep me warm. It’ll be like that old Ambrose Bierce story where that guy thinks he’s on the gallows at owl creek bridge but actually it was a bad dream and he’s coming home to his loving wife.

It all starts at the top.

A sweep. They sent 30,000 plus Sox fans home shaking their heads in dismay three games in a row. Ending the season right now on a high note would be good. Close the book, the good guys win, they rescue the damsels in distress, and money falls from the sky like autumn leaves. Drinks are on me!

“I claim this land in the name of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain!” (Oh, never mind….)

And now, now, they are again trumpeting “rebuilding.“ The Neverending Rebuild. This is inexcusable. Yes indeed they had a lot of bad luck. But other teams have bad luck too. Other teams have enough depth to survive bad luck. And while I wasn’t expecting Tork or Greene to have Tony Conigliaro rookie years, I was expecting more. This franchise has eroded my ability to care. If they sold the franchise to King Charles III he couldn’t do any worse than Chris has done because neither of them know much about baseball.

Glad they won.

I’m not following the team too closely this year — that’ll probably change next year, I hope — but you guys must’ve been shitting your pants. 9-0 then OMG? And I don’t blame you. I’m glad I was too busy today to follow this game. I wish you all the best but I just don’t have the balls to watch this team this year. I tried to watch the free broadcast of mlb.tv’s Saturday game, but when I heard Shep’s voice my will to live left me. It’s a baseball version of PTSD Instead I woke up at 4:30 AM and watched cycling — Stage 9 of the Spanish Grand Tour — until 10 AM, then went out for a long walk with a friend and had lunch and then went to my reading group and got home ate a burrito and read the first 50 pages of Dostoyevsky‘s “The Brothers Karamazov” in which I think some really bad shit is going to go down by the time I get to page 848. I was happy. I wish I could share this season with you but I can’t. For the first time in the 19 years since I rediscovered this team of my childhood I just don’t have it in me. All I have to offer are complaints and negativity. You guys deserve better than bitching and complaining. Hope they’re better next year.

My prized baseball possession, handed to me personally by Hall of Famer Bob Feller during spring training in Tucson 35 years ago. I had been walking on the warning track of one of the practice fields and five balls in a row rolled up to me during BP and I threw all of them back to Mr. Feller and he threw this one back to me and said “Keep it kid you’ve done your work today.“ I was 35 years old and did not think I was a kid but now, oh how I wish I were that kid. So is this just a dirty old ball that’s been used a lot or could some of this be due to pitchers practicing illegal pitches and leaving trace‘s of their handywork on the ball?

Oh gosh thank you. 🥰

I was born in 1952 and started following the Tigers in 1961 and was huge huge into it through 1968 — baseball cards, glossy photographs of the players on my wall, pennants, all the paraphernalia symbolizing magical amulets that sort of it made me feel good made me feel a part of something bigger and better than myself. After the World Series victory in ‘68 I had got what I needed in life and was generally disinterested because I was a young man living a young man’s life and that was more nourishing than being a boy and liking a baseball team. It was like in the Bible where you put away childish things. In 1973 I moved to Arizona couldn’t pick up Ernie on the radio and the team sucked so often even a box score disinterested me. I pretty much missed The Bird and only saw him on national TV broadcasts. I was in my 20s and livin’ the life in the mountains and desert and it was better than the baseball team I worshiped as a child In 1984 in Tucson where half of my best friends were from Detroit we followed that magical season with shared passion. After games my friends who had lived in Detroit would tell me about going to bar in Corktown and seeing the players there. Gibby once crashed at friend’s house after a night of partying in Ann Arbor. I felt like I was sort of in the mix with my pals that year. I moved to Idaho in my mid-30s and ‘87 was a good year then hugely disappointing and I totally forgot about the team. Then in 2004 a fast and surprising start and my discovery of MTS through the Internet brought me back into the fold. The responsibility of life in my 30s was exhilarating and oppressive and going back to something from my childhood made me feel better. Now I’m back to generally not giving a shit. I’m 70 years old I could die in the blink of an instant because people I know are doing that all the time and my time could be better spent on something other than a profoundly unsatisfying team. The only thing that keeps me interested is you morons because I love you more than this stupid blanking team.

Good. I suppose if guys who should have been hitting and haven’t had been hitting, and if a lot of pitchers hadn’t been injured, this would’ve never happened. As it is the law of averages caught up with being shitty, like when a bank robber robs 22 banks successfully for a couple grand apiece and is taken down the 23rd time. Al Avila had more lives than we imagined but he wasn’t immortal.

Sweet.

I miss having a good reason to post the Double Dutch Bus video.

Aside from his prodigious physical abilities did Ruth gain some insight into how pitchers think by being one or is that an advantage that can be exhausted pretty quickly?

it wouldn’t be so bad if I hadn’t got excited and hopeful. But it’s really bad. For the first time years I often forget there’s even a game then check the score after it’s over. I don’t get the highs but I don’t get the lows so since there’s a lot more of those I’m better off not paying attention.

Thank you God for rainout we have received.

I can’t see that the Tigers have anyone at all in the futures game. So we have no future. The future is usually that which will be, which is predictable, foreseeable. But the French have a second word for the future, L’avenir (to come), which refers to something whose arrival is totally unexpected and unpredictable. It’s a future that is, if not more pleasant, at least more interesting. But we’re not French, so we’re screwed.

On the plus side Peacock is carrying the Futures game right now. We can see there the bright future we have in store for us. It’ll be a chance to watch all these happy people who have a future.