Waiting for Spring…

Most baseball fans and even some non-baseball fans are familiar with the following quote from Rogers Hornsby:

“People ask me what I do in winter when there's no baseball. I'll tell you what I do. I stare out the window and wait for spring.”

The view from my window can’t captivate me for months on end. I fill most of the time by getting together with my baseball buds (I have some super awesome baseball friends), acquiring, dusting, and organizing my baseball memorabilia, and planning my summer schedule around baseball games and events. When I’m not doing that (or working my 40 hours per week to pay for food, shelter, and my baseball habits), I’m watching hockey, attending concerts and the theatre, or playing games on my phone or tablet.  

The fact that social media is teeming with baseball posts and notes has helped keep my spirits up in the offseason. It allows me to get a small fix with my favorite teams’ news, Dominican Professional Baseball League action, and peeking into what players (and mascots) do in the offseason. My favorite follow right now is Joey Mellows (Twitter: @BaseballBrit) and his passion for the game of baseball and its culture, regardless of geographical location or level. In an upcoming post, I’ll be chatting more about him and his Summer 2020 United States tour plans.  

On a recent Sunday, I had a baseball card morning. My iPad was charging and there was no hockey on television.

I had been neglecting to file nine team sets that I acquired last year; five 2019 Mariners-affiliated minor league sets, three older Tacoma Rainiers sets (thanks to one of the aforementioned super awesome baseball friends who found them at the team store at Cheney Stadium), and a 2017 set of Class AAA Pacific Coast League prospects. A note on the prospects set - I bought it for the Rainiers prospects (of course), but in looking through that card set two years after print was quite interesting. While you’d expect most AAA prospects to make their way to the majors, not all of them do. Some of those players that I wouldn’t have paid any attention to in 2017 have become common names to me. Do Matt Chapman, Josh Hader, or Cody Bellinger sound like anyone you’ve heard of? No? Okay, never mind then. I was impressed, anyway.

I’ve been collecting cards for almost 30 years. Over the past several years as I’ve watched minor leaguers come to Everett and move up or move out, I’ve expanded my minor league team set collection beyond just the local team. One thing I enjoy about collecting the team sets for an entire franchise is seeing who was on each team at the time the set was defined. There is always a lot of movement among the levels, so players that spent a lot of the season with the AquaSox (for example) may have been in West Virginia (one level higher) on photo day. Apparently teams don’t assemble their “lists” at the same time, so there are generally players that were on the move between photo shoots and appear in two sets. There were ten double-takes in the Mariners system in 2019, including a pitcher I had never heard of. He's in the St. Louis organization now, so I guess I don't have to feel badly.

I’ll provide a primer for those who don’t understand or can’t justify collecting 2.5" x 3.5" pieces of cardstock with photos of baseball players (many of whom are destined to melt into obscurity). One storage option for sports cards are 8.5” x 11” clear pages with pockets for the cards. The pages can then be put into a 3-ring binder. This method makes the cards easier to look at if one is collecting for entertainment rather than investment, but the binders do take up an amazingly large amount of space when compared to a shoe box storing the same number of cards. Since the cards are printed on both the front and back, I choose to have one card per pocket so I can see both sides without removing the card. Four words: Heavy duty shelving unit.

My pages of choice are made with non-PVC, acid-free, ultra-clear polypropylene film. If I’m going to spend money on 2.5" x 3.5" pieces of cardstock with photos of baseball players (many of whom are destined to melt into obscurity), I’m going to spend money to keep them accessible and looking nice.

These card pages have nine pockets. This is a key point in my describing the pages because there are almost no team sets that come in a quantity that, when divided by 9, results in a whole number. I don’t mind having a few empty pockets here and there (especially if it means I can showcase a mascot card by having open space around it 😉), but when a team has 28-30 cards in the set, I whine a little bit. It is what it is, and I know it’s all on me. I’m unreasonably particular about arrangement; I no longer will mix sets to avoid having empty page pockets, but open space is not always appealing to me.

Having said that, one must be careful what one wishes for. The Pacific Coast League prospects set had 36 cards. No empty pockets! Joy! What didn’t sink into my brain at first was that there were 16 teams represented by either 2 or 3 players each, plus a checklist card to complete the set. Why does that make a difference? I’m glad you asked! I realized as I’m loading the cards in the pages that I had two players from the same team on different pages. Because of my irrational need to have things “just so,” keeping all the players on a given team together was desired - nay, imperative. Slapping them in the pockets as they came off the stack was not acceptable. I had to actually think and do math to arrange them. On a Sunday. Life is sometimes so unfair.

Through patience and creativity (neither of which are an everyday occurrence for me), I can declare victory. It didn’t actually take a great amount of time, even with the added self-imposed challenge to separate the teams’ cards in a way to avoid similar logos being next to each other. Example: The logos for the Fresno Grizzlies and the Sacramento River Cats look similar in shape and color, so I couldn’t POSSIBLY put them next to each other.

And that, gentle readers, is the difference between “unreasonably particular” and “neurotic.”

But it keeps me from staring out the window.

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The International Pastime

In my post on November 9 (toward the beginning of the Premier12 tournament), I mentioned there were two pitchers from the Mariners’ system on TeamUSA. 

Over the years as a ticket holder with the Everett AquaSox, I’ve had several opportunities to bid on and win game used autographed jerseys or caps. A bonus of having the player autograph my new treasure in person is the photo op. The furthest thing from my mind most of the time is the thought that I might be standing next to someone I’ll be watching in the big leagues someday. Honestly, I’m standing there trying to not look like a dork. I’m rarely successful at this, but I keep trying.

In spite of my looking less than stellar in the photos, I did share proof positive that I have met (for about 2 minutes) two members of 2019’s TeamUSA. A team that was vying for a spot in the Olympic Games. Wow.  

Through talent, determination, and some favorable planetary alignment, TeamUSA gave us a rollercoaster ride into the Premier12 bronze medal round. 
WBSC and USA Baseball were awesome enough to stream the games on Facebook. From November 2 through November 17, I watched two of the three TeamUSA games in the opening round and then all the Super Round games TeamUSA played in Tokyo. I took a vacation day from work so I could watch two games in one day [Pacific time zone] and get a power nap in between. Every time I thought I’d understood the playoff structure, I learned I was wrong. However, I did figure out enough by the end of the Super Round to know there was a game that was pivotal in determining whether TeamUSA would go to the bronze medal round, but in which they couldn’t control their own destiny. The Chinese Taipei national team had a lot of USA fans on November 16, knowing that Australia had to lose that game in order for the USA to battle Mexico for the Olympic berth. 

I’d like to interject here that I tend to wear my emotions on my sleeve and that I have a weak verbal filter. I’m slightly more polite at the ballpark because I don’t want to enhance the vocabulary of young people and because I know that more people find me annoying than find me amusing. I’m loud. I’m sarcastic. I’m melodramatic. And that’s just my warmup routine. Many games I watch can get me wound up, but a game with significant implications and personal emotional investment does not bring out the best in me. Ask my neighbors. 

So there I was… watching TeamUSA compete against the Mexican national team for the Olympic berth. The USA never trailed in that game… until the bottom of the ninth inning when Mexico tied the game. Without going into accounts of the game and discussions about different leagues and their rules for extra inning play, we end up at the bottom of the 10th inning. 

I watched as long as my blood pressure would let me. I knew what was coming but was in denial. I ended up listening to the Mexican national team get their walk-off because my eyes were closed. 

Am I disappointed that TeamUSA did not qualify for Tokyo 2020 in this venue? Of course I am. Because they didn’t achieve that berth, was it a waste of time for me to get up at 2am or stay up until 10pm (on the same day) to watch teams teeming with players I had never heard of? 

I got to “meet” new commentators (Tyler Maun, welcome to my radar!) and hear a local commentator who made the trip to Tokyo (thanks, Ryan!). 

I was able to see some young (and not so young) players I would not have seen otherwise, some of which I’ll be seeing again someday in an MLB uniform. Jo Adell is kicking it and I wish the Mariners would find a way to acquire him that doesn’t involve losing Mitch Haniger.

I was reminded of how very passionate the Japanese are about baseball. The fan enthusiasm is amazing. If we could look half that excited, there might not be as much of a push from above to find ways to speed up the game. 

I saw Penn Murfee get a surprise start and pitch three hitless innings on the way to TeamUSA giving the Japanese team their only loss in the entire tournament. 

I watched as Wyatt Mills came in mid-game against Mexico and used two pitches to send a batter back to the dugout. 

Regrets? None. 

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Am I really that crazy (again)?

A few weeks ago, I saw on social media that two pitchers in the Seattle Mariners system were selected for TeamUSA and were off to the Premier12 qualifying rounds for the 2020 Olympic Games in Tokyo. 

Hey, cool! 

Um, wait. What does that even mean? 

Does it even matter whether I know what it means?  

At the core of Kristin’s baseball [near] obsession, being on this Premier12 bandwagon is not just about the prospect of Olympic awesomeness for the nation in which I live. It’s baseball. It’s TeamUSA. It’s Wyatt Mills and Penn Murfee. Oh, by the way... I met both the aforementioned players when they were with the Everett AquaSox. I have pictures to prove it. I’m the short one. 

 

In the Premier12 opening round (hosted in Mexico), TeamUSA defeated the Netherlands, lost to Mexico, and defeated the Dominican Republic. I was able to watch the latter two games, and even though I had no idea how wins and losses played into the results, USA won the #2 seed to the “Super Round” in Japan. 

Hey, cool! 

Um, wait. What does that even mean?

I searched the internet in pursuit of clarity on the implications of next week’s games in the context of Olympic qualification. The more I saw, the more confused I got. I consistently read that the six teams in the Super Round are vying for “potentially” two Olympic berths. 

No one is telling me the meaning of “potentially.” [Insert melodramatic gesture of frustration]

I guess I’ll find out what’s going on over the course of the next week. In the meantime, I get to watch November baseball, albeit in relative ignorance of the big picture. 

And that brings me to the “this” part of “I told you all that to tell you this.” 

The first two games that the USA is playing in Japan are at 7pm Tokyo time. I am terrible at figuring out world time zones (it involves math, after all), but I have some experience in US-Japan time difference.  

Back in March of this year, the Seattle Mariners and Oakland A’s opened the MLB season in Japan. That is when I learned that 7pm in Japan 19 hours ago on the US west coast. And yes, I was crazy enough to get up that early to watch those two games (and go to work afterward), but that’s a different blog post. 

So, on Monday and Tuesday, I’ll be setting my alarm for a time that most people who work a first shift job (including farmers) don’t know exists. 

On Wednesday and Friday (in Japan), the games start at 12pm, which puts first pitch at a more normal baseball time in my area (7pm the previous day). “The previous day” is an important statement here. Not only does it make the math more difficult for me, but it raises my perceived insanity to the next level. 

TeamUSA will be playing in Japan on Tuesday at 7pm and Wednesday at 12pm. In my time zone, that schedule translates into Tuesday at 2am and 7pm. Yes, two games on the same day, with approximately 20 hours between the first pitch of the first game and the last out of the second game. With an 8-hour work shift and a medical appointment on my Tuesday agenda, I see no nap gap. 

Yes, I’m crazy.

But am I that crazy?

Ask me Wednesday morning. 

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