Baseball on the Radio

Tonight, I'm listening to the Sox game. (As opposed to watching it.)

I used to listen to games all the time. That was mainly out of necessity: In Portland, before mlb.tv, there was only Gameday Audio and the occasional national broadcast. Other than that, if you were out of area, the Red Sox were not available on television. You could only listen to it over the radio.

In 2000, I spent summer afternoons, from 4 until dinnertime, upstairs in the stuffy study with a scorecard or my journal, listening to the Red Sox. Okay, not every afternoon, but a huge amount of them. It's a very pleasant memory. Sleepy warmth and good baseball - I especially remember a come-from-behind win on a double off the Monster by Nomar against the Texas Rangers. It was a sweet summer, except for all of the drama with Carl Everett and Pedro getting punched by Gerald Williams of the Tampa Bay Devil Rays and barely missing a no-hitter against them.

Lately, though, I've been watching a lot more games. It gets cheaper every year on mlb.com, and it's nice to know what players look like, to see how they run, how they catch, what their wind-up or batting stance looks like. I heard about Jacoby Ellsbury scoring from 2nd on a wild pitch, but didn't see it - didn't see him play - until months after it had happened. Since then, I've preferred watching to listening.

But there are other benefits to listening to the games. For one thing, I like the announcers better. For another thing, you learn more. The announcers talk more - there's more color commentary and therefore more background information. And I like the commercials, because they're local - to Boston. It makes me feel closer.

Coincidentally, I was surfing the web today, looking for updates about the Portland Beavers, and found this Dwight Jaynes post about building a casino by the Rose Quarter. At first I shuddered. Can you think how horrific that would be? Whenever there's a concert at the RQ the traffic is insane. Imagine having concerts at the RQ AND a casino? And those horrible lights? And the very idea... I kind of agreed with Gov. Kulongoski when he refused to let a casino in Portland to fund MLB, even though I really wanted an MLB team. He was right: baseball and gambling don't mix, as Shoeless Joe and Pete Rose know too well. It was... in bad taste.

But then, while thinking about baseball on the radio, I remembered my favorite commercial: The Foxwood's Casino jingle. "Take a chance, make it happen/roll the dice, fingers snapping/Spin the wheel, round and round we go-o/life is short, life is sweet/grab yourself a front-row seat/and let's meet, and have a ba-all/at the wonder of it all" and then the background people chant, "Meet me at FOXwoods."

Scary, the things we remember, but I loved that jingle, and I was sad when they changed it. I would pick that to sing in a karaoke bar for sure.

And then I realized: there's one casino-baseball connection that isn't so horrible.

Kind of tacky, and really not something you want to associate with baseball.

But I think I'd rather have a casino and baseball than no baseball at all.

The Offseason

Lately I've been wondering about the prominence of J initials on the 2008 Red Sox team.

Call me a dork, but I love names. I collect names. What I mean by that is, I keep lists of cool names, usually with the pretense of using them some day in a story, but sometimes just because I like the sound or the spelling or whatever.

And lately I can't help wondering at the prominence of J initials on the 2008 Red Sox.

First we have the boys from the Pacific Northwest: Jason, Jon, Jed, and Jacoby (from North to South). These guys have a special place in my heart because of location, and whenever they do good I like to leave messages on facebook about Pacific NW Power and those good old Pacific NW boys. I think from now on I may have to come up with an appropriate and ridiculous nickname for them, for example, The Pac.

While doing a little google study of this group, I came across a Joe Posnanski "What's in a name?" column about Lowrie being possibly the most famous Jed. According to Posnanski, the "Northwest is our leading producer of Jeds".

These internet wanderings naturally got me wondering about all of those other Josh's and Jason's and the like.

When I finally went ahead and looked at the roster, I found 10 players on the 25-man roster whose first names begins with a J: Jason Bay, Josh Beckett, J.D. Drew, Jacoby Ellsbury, Jon Lester, Javier Lopez, Jed Lowrie, Justin Masterson, Jonathan Papelbon, and Jason Varitek.

That's a whopping 40% of the roster. I mean, we have lineups where 5 of our batters' first names begin with J. My scorecards, which always feature the first initial, are peppered with them.

Maybe one day soon I'll have time for a statistical comparison of the prominence of certain initials on Major League Baseball teams. I seem to remember an awful lot of Ds, or Gs, or something, on the Angels...

Because you know. Once the season is over, we have to find some way to while away our time while we wait til next year.

Only five and a half months to go...