Quick Thoughts - MLB Opening Day 2005

Alright, well this was supposed to be a journal – style chronicle of yesterday’s events, starting with the early Celtics/Sixers game, then flowing into the Red Sox/Yankees season opener along with my weekly Sunday Night No-Limit poker tournament. But you see, a funny thing happened yesterday…

… I was actually able to sleep late. I didn’t sleep at all on Friday night, then worked for six hours on Saturday, followed by a birthday party and no bed until almost midnight again.

Of course, with the evil that is the beginning of Daylight Savings time, I actually went to bed at 1AM before waking up at about 1PM, which was really noon. Oh no, now my brain is frozen...

Anyway, since I missed most of the first half of the Sixers mauling of the Celtics, I scraped the whole journal idea and just decided to go with my old stand-by…

Quick Thoughts while wondering how stupid Alex Sanchez must actually be…

- Nice timing by MLB yesterday. They’ve spent the entire off-season trying to dodge the steroids issue, and then decide to announce the first sacrificial lamb a few hours before the first pitch of Opening Day. Proving, once again, that the Commissioner’s Office (and the Player’s Union, for that matter) has absolutely no idea what they are doing.

- Although Sanchez must be stupid on an unbelievable level to get caught by this “test”. The tests are administered by MLB, not an outside agency, and the players are given a warning that their team will be getting tested, weeks in advance. I mean, how do you fail this test?

- I just have to keep reminding myself “It’s only one game, it’s only one game…” “They are coming off a World Series win…” “It’s their first loss (that counted) since October 19^th 2004…”

- Man, WEEI’s whiner line is going to be tough this afternoon…

- What the hell happened to Boomer Wells? He looked more like Boomer Berman on the mound last night. Such a striking difference between the 6’10” overpowering Randy Johnson and the 6’3”, 248 lb (Pfff. Yeah - and I’m 220…) soft curve throwing David Wells. Hopefully this isn’t a harbinger of things to come (thank you for the vocab word, Tim).

- Speaking of my friend Tim, congrats on the poker victory last night, narrowly outlasting me in the weekly no-limit event. It was a fight to the finish, with a back and forth head’s up match that lasted for almost 45 minutes by itself. I started with a pretty nice lead (about 65k to 45k), but three hands after a busted flush draw left me in bad shape (about 90k to 20k), my pocket nines couldn’t hold up to an unsuited A-7, especially not after an ace hit both the flop and the turn. Well done. I hope you got more sleep than I did, since everyone left at 12:30AM and I finally got to bed at about 2…

- I’ve decided not to write about my trip to Texas two weeks ago, which I’m sure makes most of you very, very happy. If you want the gory details, e-mail me and I’ll tell ya. Unfortunately, this means the journal I kept for the trip on the way to Texas was all for naught. Let’s just say it prominently involved infant children, Eastern European chicks, foreigners in general, and beer. And I can’t even imagine what the sick, sick minds of the people who read this are going to do with that information…

- Fantasy Baseball Update: Thanks to Randy Johnson’s solid performance last night, I jumped into second place in the only league in which I scored points last night. Although I would have been just as happy if Johnson had left the game with both an ERA and WHIP of infinity…

- Speaking of fantasy baseball, here are the links to my three teams as they looked immediately following each draft. (My League) (Bridgewater League) (Ashford League). I also included the league categories above the teams in each picture. There have been some changes made to each team (most noticeably, the loss of Eric Gagne for a couple of weeks in two leagues), but all-in-all, I am pretty happy with each team.

- Nice attempt at a comeback by the Celtics yesterday after digging a 26-point first quarter hole for themselves. Fell just a little short, but still a heck of an effort. Starting to get worried that Boston’s falling back into the same rut they were in just before the Walker trade, but luckily it’s baseball season now, so if the Celts fall apart, no one will notice.

- 115 days until I make my triumphant return to Las Vegas… not that I’m counting or anything.

That’s it, maybe I’ll have something more to say later this week.

posted by Big D @ 9:55 AM