All that to say, he and a buddy gave a two-part show breaking down every team in the American League. I don’t like baseball, but I listened to the whole thing. And when they came to the Texas Rangers (the team of my youth), Bill was very optimistic about their season. He’s a gambler, literally, and pretty clearly intimated he had wagered on the Rangers’ 10-1 odds to win their division. He’s a Red Sox fan, among the only tolerable ones still out there, so giving credit to the Rangers says something.

And somewhere around that point, I thought about giving baseball another shot.

When the players went on strike in 1994, so did I. Only I didn’t come back. I was beginning my teenage years, where my affiliations to sports would be crystallized. The afore-mentioned David Robinson was at his peak, and the Cowboys were once again America’s Team. My high school didn’t have baseball, so my career (laughable though it was) in the sport was over. It wasn’t a choice. I was upset about the strike, I remember. But I don’t remember boycotting out of anger. Looking back now, I was just suddenly apathetic. By the time they settled it, I didn’t care. And the sport died to me.

When the home run era commenced a few short years later, I was sure that Major League Baseball had juiced the ball, made structural changes in the hopes of regaining fans. I was wrong about that, sort of. MLB was guilty, and juicing was taking place, but not like I thought. When all the steroid mess began, I didn’t care. I have gone from critical to humored to apathetic. I don’t feel robbed by the guys who broke real-world rules to break baseball-world rules. I’m tired of hearing about it, because I’d rather listen to basketball and football discussions. The sport doesn’t even exist to me anymore, only the talk about it.

For the past two years, I’ve wondered about trying it out again. I’ve even tried a few games here and there. Never stuck.

But today, I think I may have experienced the perfect storm, a storm whose torrents have the ability to baptize me back into the game. The podcast discussion was interesting to me. That team of my youth won big to open the season. Twitter was abuzz about opening day. Bezner tweeted about being there. Jerry channeled the classics with “Rangers win the Pennant! Rangers win the Pennant!” And to top it all off, Manu Ginobili, whose return was the Spurs only hope to challenge the Lakers this season, was diagnosed with a season-ending injury. So it looks like my June (if not May) will be wide open.

Maybe this is the year I come back to baseball.

Before I do, I need to see how much I have fallen behind. Way back when I followed them, they were a power-hitting team with no semblance of a pitching staff. They could win high-scoring games, but could rarely catch a whiff of the playoffs after the All-Star break. And they wore Red-White-and-Blue uniforms with a pretty boring logo.

So could someone update me? How far has the franchise come in my absence? Do you think I’ve missed too much to jump back on board now?

From today’s The Writer’s Almanac:

It’s the birthday of the poet Charles Algernon Swinburne, born in London (1837), a man who admired his own work more than his friends did. He wrote poetry that was considered scandalous during the Victorian era, but today sounds trite. He wrote:

Kneel down, fair Love, and fill thyself with tears,
Girdle thyself with sighing for a girth
Upon the sides of mirth,
Cover thy lips and eyelids, let thine ears
Be filled with rumor of people sorrowing.

Before he went to a friend’s house, he would place a manuscript of his poems in his breast pocket and then button up his coat to make the bulge more obvious. He would sit in a chair completely rigid, and then would say in an absentminded way, “I have brought with me such and such book.” He would wait in silence until someone said, “Oh, please do read it,” which he would eagerly do. While he read his poems, he would jump around the room, and sometimes he became so emotional that he would scream.

I’ve been a Spurs fan since I was a kid, but we didn’t have cable, so I didn’t get to see a lot of his career. Only the occasional NBC Sunday game and the playoffs.

I can’t give you a breakdown of his career and answer the critiques, but this guy can. What I can do is say that he’s the reason I became a Spurs fan, and I think he’s the reason the Spurs are what they are today.

The East-coast bias that was underrated, then overrated, but is once again underrated, always compared him to Ewing, and called him soft. That was until he won Championships and then they called him lucky. No one ever said he wasn’t a pretty great player and a pretty great person. There’s not a lot more you could ask for, if you hold to a particular value system that places character and success above glamour and self-promotion. It feels cheesy to say that, but as a fan of the Dallas Cowboys, it reinforces to me that some things do matter in sports. Since the Cowboys tied for the league record in Super Bowl victories, the Spurs have become an NBA institution. Not simultaneously, not taking turns. As far as Texas trophy cases go, the Cowboys’ Lombardi trophies are gathering dust while the Spurs O’Briens are still streaked with champagne. So every season, I clothe myself in the hedonism of watching a talented football team in a big-personality city put up highlights for the sports media machine, and I eat it up. And then, without fail, they lose when it counts. Meanwhile, every January, the boring little unhip tourist town with the boring superstar and media-unfriendly coach have begun another season establishing a legacy. What the Spurs are now is due to Pop and Duncan. But I don’t think it would have happened without Robinson. He was the foundation. All the words that get used to describe the franchise now-classy, successful, quiet, dominant-are words for his career. This is no coincidence.

I don’t know David Robinson personally, so I can’t really say what kind of person he is. Generally, all we know of athletes is hearsay. And since I’ll never see them up close without the aid of a TV camera, those accounts are all I have. But they’re pretty good. It’s not hard to see why a basketball-loving farm boy growing up in Texas during the ’90s without ESPN would be a fan of the Admiral.

Never mind that the gusts this morning
were strong enough to lift that eight foot stock tank
straight up on its side against the fence.

Never mind that the North Wind was so sharp this morning
that I had to dress for a blizzard
when the temperature was in the 50s.

Never mind the terrible majority of hours this day.
The last hour was perfect.
And the way things end is all that really matters anyway.

Or is it?

But you know me, uh blogging, uh writing, uh, me.

So instead I’ll write around actually writing. Like if you run in place long enough to sweat, you think you went for an actual run. So let’s see how moist and smelly I can get.

Changed up a few things here. Finally put some kind of about page together, called it More, just to be different. It’s still ugly on the formatting side, so I’ll try to clean it up, but it has the necessary social networking stuff there.

Also, I found and plugged in a great WordPress widget called Flickr Gallery. Awesome. At least I think so. Judge for yourself on the Photos page.

I tried to clean up the home page look. I thought I’d be adding a lot of images to that big box o’ pictures, but I haven’t been. So I just made it a smaller box. Then again, if you’re like me and only read this stuff out of your RSS reader, you neither know nor care what I’m referring to.

I wish it had taken as long to do all those things as it did to write about them. Because the latter took a minute, and the former a whole pant-load of minutes.

The only substantive thing I actually have to say right now is this. Watch Gone Baby Gone. I DVR’d it and let it sit there for a coupla months. Finally watched it, skeptically, sometime a few months ago. It’s good. Really good. Stick-with-you good. Recommend-it-on-your-blog-months-later good. The reason I bring this up now is that I’m reading an interview with Ben Affleck in which the interviewer (with Esquire) suggests that if a hot new director had directed it, Gone Baby Gone would have been hailed as something classic. But it wasn’t a hot new director. It was Ben Affleck, who everyone loves to mock. Forget that when you watch it. It’s really good. It’s a moral tale and is yet totally void of pretense or preaching. Casey Affleck nails it. And so does Amy Ryan, who you know as Holly from the Office. To top it off, it has the official (albeit unknowing) voice-over artist of cousin Jamie’s as-of-yet-unplanned biopic, Morgan Freeman.

And maybe by the time you watch it, I’ll be ready to work up a real sweat.

Away We Go

My favorite first-impression things about it are (in order):

1. John Krasinski in a good movie role.
2. Maya Rudolph in a good movie role (though I liked her in Prairie Home Companion).
3. Maggie Gyllenhaal.
4. Jim Gaffigan.
5. “Sweetheart, listen to your heart!”

I’m a big fan of March Madness. I love the take-home competitiveness of filling out brackets. And there are only two things you can count on at whritings.com:

1. Me quitting about the same time the Cowboys do
2. Me inviting you to join me in filling out brackets

This year’s March Madness bracket contest theme is Participation Ribbon. I want you to feel included in the team. Even if your bracket has more red than (insert economic/wall street joke here). We’re all winners if we feel like winners. Everyone deserves a meaningless green ribbon.

Here’s the link:
http://games.espn.go.com/tcmen/group?groupID=19776

The group name is “Participation Ribbon”.

The password is “Walter”. As in, the dude who will have the only blue ribbon at the end of this. Unless my Mom beats us all again this year.

Email me if you have trouble getting into the group.

This has always seemed like the biggest no-brainer in Replaydom. Anyone got a better one?