Play Ball

I finaly have a few moments in which I can think and jot down a few thoughts.  I suppose I’ve been really busy or really lazy.  And both of those are equally possible.  I’e been finding it very easy to take a nap in my comfy chair as soon as I get home from work.  I don’t even always get to the crossword puzzle before I’m nodding off.  Maybe I need to start drinking 5-hour energy just before I leave the office?

I’ve been watching a lot of baseball recently.  Someone asked me if I’d seen a particular TV show and I realized that Mrs. Ender and I are either watching a baseball game or at a baseball game.  Not much non-baseball is being watched around the Ender hovel.

As I may have mentioned before, I am rather new to being a baseball fan.  I grew up in Washington Redskin territory and the whole family was a bunch of football fans.  I can remember being 5-6 years old, on warm autumn Sundays, with the football game on the 17" black and white "portable" TV in the family room.  My grandfather would finish off a beer (alway Carling Black Label) and he’d crunch the can and bend it in half and call out "hut, hut, hut" and my brother and I would jump up from the floor and fight each other over being able to catch the can and take it to the trashcan in the kitchen.  Remember when aluminum cans were several times thicker than they are now?  You could put the can on the ground and crush the heel of your shoe onto the can and it would sort of wrap around your foot.  You could then clump around with a can stuck on your foot like a piece of errant toilet paper.  Ah, good time.

Then the Redskins got Daniel Snyder and he drove the Redskins to suckage and drove me from being a football fan.  The Nationals had just arrived in DC, and I latched onto a new team in a new sport.  I wasn’t a fair weather fan, I’d stuck with the Redskins through some terrible seasons (the Parde years, Petitbon, Turner and Spurrier) and I easily remembered the Super Bowl wins.  But I couldn’t put up with Danny-boy.

I attended one Nationals game the first year they were in town.  It was pretty early in the season and they were still playing at RFK stadium.  It was exciting and I thought they might be fun to watch.  I watched, but only through the newspaper.  I didn’t go to another game until two years ago.  They were in National’s Park and the whole energy of the crowd was different.  They weren’t so good that year, but I was getting hooked.

I had the chance to go to about 12 games last year and Mrs. Ender and I were at 10 of them together.  Nearly all of these games were after her father died and I’m pretty sure that she was working through her grief by remembering her dad’s love of baseball–not that she hadn’t been a baseball fan before he died.  It just became much more important.

So we decided to get season tickets.  I actually had to suggest that full season tickets were way too much baseball and even a half season was going to be a lot of games.  But, I’ve enjoyed it.  We’ve enjoyed it.  How many guys have to complain to their wives that they don’t want to go to any extra games and they don’t want to watch games on TV that don’t involve their favorite team?  Just me?

Our renewal for next season’s tickets has already been sent in.  We’ve locked in our tickets for (hopefully) this years playoffs.  If the Nationals go all the way, we have our seats for the World Series.  Even if they don’t go all the way, I definitely became a baseball during the right season.

On a political note.  I can’t help but notice that too many of the GOP position on issues seem to be based on "I got mine."  I don’t want to say that it’s straight up hypocrisy, but is it too much to expect that children of immigrants would be more understanding of immigration?  Is it too much to expect that successful people would feel some desire to help others succeed, not just other well-off people, but the least of us?  No one is perfect and I am sure that, with a more critical eye, I could find much to complain about the Democrats, but "I got mine" seems to run through too much of what the GOP stands for.

Pat Robertson has always seemed to have something on which to blame natural disasters, especially hurricanes.  I’m waiting to see what the GOP has done to cause Isaac to spoil their convention.  Tell us, Pat.

Ender is out.