Officer, I can explain that Dead Head sticker.....

With Labor Day this Monday, this is very much the last hurrah for summer 2008. I was always amazed as a kid how quickly summer flew by but as an adult I'm gob-smacked. Wasn't it just last week that we had Memorial Day and the promise of this year's summer stretched out before us like a blank canvas?

What happened? I hope you had fun or got something done, because I didn't do either. I figured I had time enough and forget Lennon's observation, "Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans." As true for the son as for the father he barely knew.

For me, summer is always baseball even though this year (I think) it's possible the World Series (also known as The October Classic) will, or could, actually conclude in early November. I can remember as a kid, being allowed to bring in my transistor radio with the white cord and the earpiece and listen to the Series at lunch time or outdoors at recess. Our children don't do that, you know, because Major League baseball stopped almost completely playing day games in order to goose TV revenues which is what they used to backstop their bottom lines as player's salaries headed into the ionosphere. Of course the games at night go into the wee small hours and the kids, well, the kids, just drift off into a thousand different directions.

Yeah, the kids don't care because the kids don't watch but it's not just about major league baseball (we in Norwich, CT have a minor league team in Double A who are finishing up their season this weekend in Trenton, NJ ("Trenton Makes-the World Takes") and who didn't quite make it to the Easter League playoffs but by my reckoning sent a decent stream of talent upwards and into "The Show", the major leagues, which is (I think) what the farm teams are supposed to do), but here in the weeds and wilds of Dodd Stadium, it's mostly us Boys of Summer in the stands.

Southeastern CT loves its beaches and its casinos, and sort of, its baseball team. The reports of home attendance this year were upbeat (the team exceeded 200K for the first time in a number of years, and when you look at the population base around here, that's worth something or should be) but the team's owner has concerns about making (enough) money to keep the team here. A baseball team, or any sports franchise, is, of course, a business and needs to turn a profit-it's just weird to remember the Atlanta Braves were once the Milwaukee Braves and before that, the Boston Braves, as they searched for a bottom line they could live on and with.

At the Big League level, it looks like my Yankees (don't tell the Steinbrenners, okay? They're paying all the bills, and God Bless 'em for that, but they have more money than brains and far more than they have passion and heart, so I still like to think of the team as mine) will find out what most of us do on weekdays and weekends during the playoffs when you're not actually in them, for the first time in over a score of years.

And to think, getting Carl Pavano (whom I think of as this millennium's answer to Lou "Iron Horse" Gehrig) back into the rotation wasn't enough to put us over the top? I, for one, should be happy he didn't hurt himself showering off after beating the Orioles last Saturday. Carl, along with Kevin Brown, another Spirit of Yankee Playoff Past, certainly gave a whole new meaning to the 'free' part of free agent.

But that's just the bitterness surfacing and not fair to Carl or Kevin (at least not Carl) and has more to do with the time of year and my state of mind than with the pennant races. "Nobody on the road, nobody on the beach. I feel it in the air, the summer's out of reach." I think you look great in those wayfarers.
-bill kenny