A Little More History....

For those of you that don't know, I'm the guy who didn't know how to do his laundry. I guess I had an overprotective mother and a hyper-focused father. What I could do though was get batters out with limited natural ability and a combination of guile and strategic pitch command. The former was meaningless for my father, while the latter was a life goal. By time I got to college I realized that I was good at school work and baseball, but not good enough at the latter to make a career of it. I was essentially left without any other interests or past times, and when you find that you are no longer good enough to play baseball, well, you watch it. And watch it I did. In fact, in 1996, I watched 158 regular season Yankee games. I watched Spring Training, I watched pre-game, post-game, and that creepy show for kids on YES Sunday mornings. I watched the Yankees, because I had never known anything else. I come from Yankee country where everyone (except the depraved - who are Mets fans), watch the Yankees. Rather than wait and explore the field, I married my high school sweetheart so to speak, thinking that there was nothing better out there. From then until the Fall of 2007, Nate and I essentially stopped being friends for two months out of the year, what we would later call "initiating radio silence". It simply became a ritual for us. Watch games at different forums. Emails or text messages only (though once in awhile one of us would violate the accord by leaving a less than pleasant voicemail - I may have done that on the Boone homerun). On the night that the Red Sox won the World Series in 2007, the same night that Alex Rodriguez stated that he no longer cared to be a Yankee, I vowed to leave the Yankees forever if they took him back. Well since they're whores they did, and since I have never made an unreasonable promise that I didn't keep (ask Nate about Titanic when you get a chance), I skipped the trial separation and went straight to the "dead to me" divorce. I decided that I would pick a team that was young and exciting but had no conceivable chance of winning, by then known as the Tampa Bay Rays. Six months later, Nate and I had once again initiated radio silence. It lasted quite some time. Up until the final night of the 2008 Series, when I got a text from Nate that read "Sucks when your team walks out onto the field of play and pinches out a ham-fisted dump, huh?". Six years of education and an Ivy League degree and the best he could do was "ham-fisted dump". Yet it proves an important point: As educated and mature as Nate and I have become over the years, and as much as we love one another, in the end, we are still just two intoxicated d-bags in the bleachers with no shirts, twelve Utica Clubs deep, and VERY angry that we can't beat the Orioles. That fact is all you need to know about us on a going forward basis.