The Sad Bear

April 6, 2009

"...and I've got more hits than Sadaharu Oh"

I've already commented about how glad I am that baseball is back, but I felt compelled to share with people who actually read this.

I move that Opening Day becomes a national holiday. That way we wouldn't have to take off from work to watch day games, and no one would be allowed to schedule any events, sporting or otherwise, on said day.

Well, by "we" I mean those of us who aren't in the sports journalism industry - I'd have to go to work either way. I'd just prefer it to have nothing else to cover but the opening of Major League baseball.

I have similar designs on making the first weekend of March Madness a nationally-mandated four-day weekend. Who actually does work on NCAA Tournament Thursday? I didn't - and I was covering the high school state semifinal.

Well, that's I lie...my game had ended and one of the girls games had started. It was a really slow and boring game, one of the ones where neither team scores more than 10 points until about halfway through the second quarter. The halftime score might have been 15-10.

Anyway, around this time, all the sportswriters found out that Memphis was losing to Cal-State Northridge. So we gathered in Mizzou Arena's media room and watched, completely ignoring the girls high school game.

If this was a national holiday, we wouldn't have to worry about such things as sportswriters not giving girls basketball its full, deserved, Title IX attention.

I wonder how many people complained to the ACLU about unfair representation of girls athletics that day?

Some ramshackle baseball linkage:
-SportsDesigner's baseball preview pages from around the country
-Interactive graphics from the New York Times: New Yankee Stadium and Citi Field
-Some Opening Day history in St. Louis
-Paul Lucas' UniWatch baseball preview
-UniWatch blog goes over Japanese baseball uniforms [day 1, day 2]
-The Kansas City Star has a pretty good Royals' blog. And although you may be thinking 'Who cares about the Royals?', apparently, the New York Times does - they picked them to finish first in the AL Central
-Cardinals lost today in the 30 degree very light dusting of snow. I listened to the game on the radio and remembered why the Cardinals annoyed me: their announcers and fans are self-righteous a-holes ("Don't throw the ball back," said one announcer after the Pirates homer. "You know who does that? Those North-siders! We're better than that!")
-Also, unrelated to baseball, but the Post-Dispatch had a pretty good blog called "Speaking Visually." Looks like they got rid of it, or at least, the main graphics guy will be starting his own blog not endorsed by the P-D sometime soon. I hope so, because I always thought it was pretty good.

Labels: baseball, basketball, blogs, Cardinals, sports

by JHitts at 7:04 PM |