Bambino's Curse

Happy Thanksgiving

Without a doubt Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday of the year. It's the kind of day that doesn't ask too much of you.  There are no gifts to bother with.  There are no religious overtones to make things uncomfortable.  Nope, all Thanksgiving asks of us is to take a look around and appreciate what we have.

And as the turkey roasts in the oven and we await the arrival of friends and family to our home for Thanksgiving dinner, once again the baseball sage A. Bartlett Giamatti has the perfect words for the occasion:

In baseball, why do we call it home and not fourth base?

Meditate upon the name. Home is an English word virtually impossible to translate into other tongues. No translation catches the associations, the mixture of memory and longing, the sense of security and autonomy and accessibility, the aroma of inclusiveness, of freedom from wariness, that cling to the word home and are absent from house or even my house. Home is a concept, not a place; it is a state of mind where self-definition starts; it is origins—the mix of time and place and smell and weather wherein one first realizes one is an original, perhaps like others, especially those one loves, but discrete, distinct, not to be copied. Home is where one first learned to be separate and it remains in the mind as the place where reunion, if it ever were to occur, would happen.

from "Baseball as Narrative," A. Bartlett Giamatti.

It gives me the chills to read it. So today let's all take a moment to be thankful for home and for baseball.

Postings will resume on Monday, November 26th.

Have a great Thanksgiving.

First new guy of the year

The Red Sox claimed Tony Clark off waivers from Detroit. No, he's not Jason Giambi and he very well could cost a pretty penny in the long run (I'm used to that anyway), but, as Hohler points out in The Boston Globe, this is "one of the clearest signs yet that the Red Sox aim to rid themselves of Carl Everett."

And that, we all know, is a very good thing.

Get out your checkbooks

Free agency began at midnight. The Red Sox failed to come to terms with Nomo by the deadline, but are expected to bid for him as well as going after 2nd baseman Bob Boone, should he decide to leave Seattle.

While I really enjoy this time of year, it often ends up feeling like a punch in the gut when the Yankees inevitably beat the Red Sox on signing the most sought after free agent players out there. I'm not complaining about the Manny Ramirez signing last year, though. I still feel good about that one.

Don't let the door hit you on the way out

Everyone's favorite effigy for all that was wrong with 2001, Carl they faked the moon landing Everett, says he wants to be traded.

Lord have mercy and let some compassionate club take on the hardship case that is Carl Everett.

When you wish upon a star . . .

Here in central Virginia we are officially in a drought, some 11 inches below our average yearly rainfall at this point.

For past 3 weeks we haven't seen so much as a cloud, bright sunny days, beautifully crisp and clear nights.

For the past 3 weeks, I've had Nov. 18th marked on my calendar. For the past 3 weeks I've been eagerly anticipating the annual Leonid Meteor Shower, coinciding this year with a new moon, making the night sky as dark as it could possibly be. To top it off, I live in a community that bans streetlights and I'm some 15 miles away from the nearest town. At night it is dark, very dark. On any given night I can see the Milky Way and countless stars . . .

Yesterday, experts from NASA were saying we could expect up to 4000 shooting stars per hour from the Leonid shower.

Last night, for the first time in weeks, it was foggy and cloudy. I awoke at 4am, the peak viewing time for the meteor shower, and I couldn't see a single star in the sky, banked in as we were with low clouds and fog.

What does this have to do with the Red Sox? I don't think I need to explain it.