One, Two, Three Strikes-You're Out!

One, Two, Three Strikes You’re Out!




Well, here we are again almost at the start of a new baseball season. In fact, Spring training for pitchers and catchers starts this coming week when they must report for duty. The balance of the teams called “position players” don’t report until the last week in February, but then everything starts in earnest.

For me it’s the happiest time of the year because I am getting ready for another bang-away season for my team, the New York Yankees.

I know – everyone hates them except for Yankee fans. Their Front Office spends too much money on well established players, snagging the best every year. The Yankee fans are too arrogant and nasty to those who root for other teams. Everyone on the team is paid too much giving them crowing rights over top players on other teams. On and on it goes. I’ve heard it all – and then some – a million times.

None of which can take away from the sheer joy of hearing the cry, “play ball!” especially at the start of a brand new season where anything can happen, any team can come out on top, and most of the pundits are proved wrong again and again.

My youngest son is a die-hard Yankee fan as is my older son. The younger one has already predicted that the Yankees will only come in 3rd in their division this year. This before a single ball has been thrown in the new season that hasn’t yet started! What did I just say about pundits? Well, he may not be a household name, but my Anthony IS a baseball pundit. He can tell you batting averages and who does what all over Major League Baseball – not just the Yankee stats. His dream job, I guess, would have been to have been a baseball statistician, if not an actual player, but instead he is chugging along in the IT world at a major cosmetic company even as he and his friends hurl friendly, and sometimes not so friendly baseball remarks to one another all day long while attending to company business. Of course, I’m half-way kidding because yes, they are working at what they’re supposed to be doing, though interspersed with their paid jobs, baseball talk zooms around as fast as a Mo Rivera fastball, and that’s pretty darn fast! Lots of opposing players are still trying to hit it and most of the time, except when Mo is having an “off day” they come up empty.

So with the Super Bowl having been played and decided, we now are about to start on the REAL national pastime which is BASEBALL! And in spite of the fact that some people have picked my team, the New York Yankees, to come in 3rd – I kind of like the look of that World Series trophy and a No. 28 (they’ve won it 27 times to date) for the New York Yankees in the year 2010!