Despite my low expectations, tomorrow is still a big day. As you may recall, Mr. Wolffe has asked the City to respond to his sublease proposal by November 14. I’m not holding my breath, but hey - you never know.
First off, there was this seemingly troubling bit of news about the Grays dispersal draft. I dug a little deeper and found out that this was done as a courtesy to the current Grays roster - it’s asking a lot of a baseball player to sign up for more than two years of constant “visitor” status. If things don’t work out here in Ottawa for 2008, rest assurred there will be another “all road” team. (blogger: good thing someone’s keeping their eye on things!)
Catching up with the Canadian team at the 2007 World Baseball Cup, Canada sits tied for third in their Group B division with a record of 4-2. Not much detail yet from the official website, but today they beat Venezuela 6-3. The US team (which includes Lynx catcher, Jason Jaramillo), sits atop the A pool with a 5-1 record. It looks like playoffs begin on the 16th of November.
Games continue over in the Arizona Fall League, with the Peoria Saguaros sitting last in the West division with a record of 10-19. Unfortunately, Joe Bisenius who last pitched on October 29, was shut down due to a groin injury. Here’s Joe’s take on 2007:
Phillies reliever Joe Bisenius may just want to have 2007 erased from his memory. What began as such a promising year — he was on the Major League roster when the season began — quickly deteriorated, with the final blow coming last week when his AFL season came to an abrupt halt due to a strained groin muscle. He’s not sure when or if he’ll pitch again during the fall but says the injury isn’t so serious that it will impede his offseason work.
Bisenius got sent down to Triple-A Ottawa after pitching in a pair of games for the Phillies in April. He began to experience tightness in his shoulder while pitching in the International League and was on the shelf from the beginning of June to the middle of July. Though he pitched to a 0.84 ERA in his final seven regular-season outings, that simply lowered his ERA to 5.48, a far cry from the 2.25 ERA he posted while splitting the 2006 season between Class A Advanced Clearwater and Double-A Reading.
“It was a pretty disappointing year, to make the team out of Spring Training, then get sent down, then have the shoulder problems,” Bisenius said. “But you can take it two ways. You can mope or work harder. I’m working harder.
“It was frustrating to be on the DL in Triple-A and watch all the guys get called up to Philadelphia because of injuries. I feel like I’m throwing the ball well again here. I had one bad outing and then last outing I strained my groin. It’s definitely been frustrating.”
Because John Russell was named skipper of the Pirates on Monday, he will not manage the final two weeks of the AFL season. The Phillies will have Dave Huppert take over the Saguaros’ managerial duties starting on Tuesday. Huppert managed the Class A Advanced Clearwater Threshers to a Florida State League championship in 2007 and the Class A Lakewood BlueClaws to a league title in 2006. … OF Xavier Paul (Dodgers) took an eight-game hitting streak into Monday’s action, having hit .400 (14-for-35) over that stretch to raise his AFL average to .268.
Then finally, for today, there’s this piece from Charles Gordon, wayyyy back on August 19. Mr. Gordon clearly agrees with many who discovered that attending a Lynx game was about far more than just tallying up the boxscore - it was about the experience itself. Money quote:
A game is not only a game. It’s also an environment. When you have your head in your electronics you become absent from that environment.
Take baseball, arguably the slowest of all sports, and therefore an ideal environment for electronic gizmos. All that time between pitches, the time between innings, the time when the manager takes out the right-handed pitcher so a left-handed pitcher can pitch to a left-handed batter and the left-handed pitcher has to warm up and then when the next batter is right-handed, the manager takes out the left-handed pitcher and puts in another right-hander and the right-hander has to warm up — during all that time you could be watching your monitor and getting replays of previous warmups…
But if you had rented a hand-held video monitor at the Lynx Stadium on Wednesday night, you would have missed fine aspects of an excellent game, the kind of game that makes you realize what a loss it will be when the team leaves for Pennsylvania and becomes, as reported, the Lehigh Valley Iron Pigs… You would also have missed the fans walking around, in a wild variety of garb and carrying a wild variety of things to eat. You would have missed the between-innings musical chairs game and the cynical speculation that it might be fixed because the cute little girl always wins. Other things would have escaped you, such as the mascots, large animal-like things in stuffed costumes with which you desperately avoided eye contact. On the other hand, you would have seen how kids flock to these things, if you didn’t have your head in a monitor, looking at replays.
How would you feel if you came home and someone told you that while you were looking at a monitor you had missed seeing a boy showing off a goatee made of pink cotton candy?
Read it all. The rest, as they say, is here.
