Baseball On My Mind

It's been a good ten days since I posted. That bothers me, but I knew with my high school baseball season starting up that I wouldn't be able to churn out material as often as I would like. There are only so many hours in the day.

Even so, my mind has been swimming with baseball related content as of late. So, let's ramble a little bit here.

• I was watching the Cubs play the Indians the other night and it took nearly 45 minutes for the two teams to get seven outs. I know it's spring training and I happened to catch an inning (plus) with some scoring action, but WOW that's slow.
• You know what else is slow going? Sorting 14,000+ baseball cards from The Collection. It's fun though!
• I'm getting ready for fantasy baseball drafts and I'm slightly frustrated by Yahoo's system for automatic drafts. You can pre-rank your players, which is nice, but their rankings are constantly changing. For some reason I thought their pre-season rankings would be stagnant. I set up my draft order thinking that if I moved Kyle Hendricks up a round or so in my rankings that I would surely snag him, but then his Yahoo player ranking moved up as well. It seems Yahoo's pre-season rankings change based upon average draft position, which in many cases is fueled by spring training performance. My couple of hours tinkering seems to all be for not. Yet, oddly enough, I'm looking forward to going back in and playing around with my draft order even more. 
• Shohei Ohtani is good for baseball. I'm not sure if he's good for the small time baseball card collector like myself (higher box/pack prices), but I think he's helping the hobby, too. I hear he has some flaws in his swing. Yet, if he's the pitcher everyone thinks he is, then his cards will still command a premium, much like Yu Darvish's did when he came over from Japan. 
• I realized I enjoy hitting fly balls to my players and watching them chase them down just as much as I enjoyed catching them 20+ years ago. So much fun!
• I heard that MLB has put strict guidelines on how teams must store their game baseballs. Some are angered by this because they think MLB is trying to lower the number of homeruns, but I don't see that as the case. Yes, by asking each team to store their baseballs in a climate controlled environment the homerun totals may drop from 2017. But honestly, it would be hard to top the homer output from last season. I see it as MLB eliminating one variable that causes offensive fluctuation from ballpark to ballpark and season to season. My question is, "Will MLB try to eliminate other such variables down the road?"
• Someday I will wise up and move to a warmer state where, as a coach, I don't have to worry about not getting on our field before the first game. We've had two weeks of practice and I our first game is in one week. Our field is still a marsh. Thank goodness we have an artificial turf football field we can spend time on!

And one more point to make:  DAN VOGELBACH IS GOOD AT BASEBALL.

Yeah. It's spring training, but check out the batting average and the walk to strikeout ratio. The Vogelmonster is relaxed and having fun again.  I believe he is ticketed for Tacoma to start the season, but if he keeps hitting like this he may force Seattle's hand. 

That's it for today, but I have received a PWE (SCC) and a yellow mailer (ACB) that I'll try to get up in the near future. 

Thanks for stopping by!