The magic of math

We have a couple of weeks before Major League Baseball begins its season. I've been sitting at home, rehabbing my left knee for the last week or so, enjoying the addition of MLB Network to my cable provider's service (some of the stuff it gets packaged with, I don't understand but the great thing about freedom of choice is I don't have to watch the stuff if I don't want to).

I'm not a sports guy--can't tell you the batting averages or on-base percentages of anyone on any team, to include the teams for whom I root, and baseball is my most passionate sports interest (okay, tied with European (NOT MLS) soccer. MLS, for me is like watching PAL soccer and since none of the people playing it are my kids, it has zero appeal), in the the sense of I love the rhythm of the game and the visual grammar of how the action takes place. Until I had MLB I would spend all winter watching NESN and YES rerun old ballgames from seasons' past-I didn't care about the score.

Now with MLB TV I can watch the World Baseball Classic--I can, but I usually don't. I'll actually choose an exhibition game over the WBC since it appears to be baseball's equivalent to PAL soccer. Not that many years ago, the Olympic Committee removed baseball from the Summer Games; that so angered me I refused to laugh at any of the thousands of Mark Phelps' bong jokes circulating on line (you realize, with his lungs, his huff would make the big, bad wolf look like a piker, right?) and I confess to NOT getting the point of the WBC. Because of my love of the symmetry of the game, I think the WBC gets in the way of spring training, adds a bunch of distractions and doesn't help me appreciate any more of the game.

Yeah, it was weird one day last week to see Ramiro Mendoza and realize he's maybe the only player I know to ever be in a World Series starting roster for both the Red Sox and the Yankees. And then, Skippy, my evil twin, asks me if I'd like a quarter to call someone who cares--but wait, it may be long distance, so here's a another bright shiny quarter and instead I settle back to watch the KC Royals split squad take on the Cleveland Indians. Where do you think the Japanese teams have spring training? South Korea, Okinawa? How about Italy? Perhaps Sicily? And what about keeping in touch with the Dutch--how does the South Antilles strike you?

Next season, maybe, one of more of these squads might be able to work out in Norwich in our stadium, Senator Thomas Dodd, as it looks like our decade and a half romance with the business of professional minor league sports has ended. Monday night, our City Council, already owed close to 350K by the team in the stadium allowed a reassignment of the lease to a possible new ownership group who'll, we are told, attempt to take the Double-A team to Richmond, Virginia.

Regionally, we've already started the search for the guilty as to what happened--basically, another small business failed. We feel a bit differently about it because most of us, as kids, played this game, before it was a business, and we forget that you have to make money to remain a viable economic venture. Maybe the stadium was in 'the wrong place' as so many have have said, except lots of us went up there over and over again in those early years, even after the Yankees stopped being the major league partner. It was a great place to enjoy a very simple game--played by people on their way up the career and professional achievement ladder.

Sometimes a thing is only worth what someone will pay for it--and maybe that's what happened to the Defenders (I still almost type Navigators ("I have a photograph, preserve your memories; they're all that's left you")). And when Tater, Cutter and the memories of Roger Baker, the first voice of Dodd Stadium, have all been packed away and somebody comes up with a great idea to put a Single-A team, with a shorter season and almost the same overhead and expenses that the Double-A team had, maybe we'll all caravan through the Business Park and root for the home team, no matter how far from home, they, or we, are.
-bill kenny