A Sad Realization

Next Monday, we are taking another vacation home.  We'll be home for eleven stress free days.  This is great because it'll be the second time this year we'll be home.  The best part is that my brother and sister-in-law will be home as well.  Oh, they are also bringing their baby home.  So that's cool.  While it is always great to get home there are a few things I thought of that were a little sad.  Captain Bringdown to the rescue!

The first realization is that this may be the last vacation until next year.  I have the vacation hours at work so that's not the problem.  We could take another trip during the summer, but I also need to work so I get more vacation time.  It doesn't just magically appear.  So we try to space out the vacations to recoup the time off.  The problem is that working in retail means the last three months it is very difficult to get time off.  It's way too busy.  There is a small window in September and October but once you get into November....game over.  Until February.

The other realization is that we haven't ever really taken a vacation.  Yes, going home is a trip to see family and friends and it's time away from work so it qualifies as a vacation, but we have never traveled to different places.  The last place we went was St. Thomas and that was to get married and we had our honeymoon at the same time.  That was six years ago.  The problem is that it is crazy expensive to go places.  Think about going some place for a week.  It doesn't matter if it's Chicago or Baltimore or New York or Las Vegas.  Places outside the country as well.  There are cities in Canada I wouldn't mind visiting.  Seven days of hotel and food bills.  You also have to fly there unless you're close enough to drive.  It would be great to go to different cities and just explore.  See things and play tourist.  Drive the economy in another part of the country. 

And yes, you can take a road trip and see different parts of the country.  But that isn't free either.  You can go camping to save money and bring food to cook and all that stuff and get back to nature, but everyone that goes has to really be into it or else some are happy others are just annoyed.  We've gone camping with friends before and it's a blast, but haven't ever gone by ourselves.  I don't know how that would turn out.  I have no problem going camping to get back to nature.  My wife maybe not so much. 

It takes a lot of cutting back to save money.  And to save money for a vacation on top of that seems like a steep hill to climb.  I feel like you have to have a two or three year plan.  Plan a vacation two or three years into the future and start saving now.  Save a little here, a little there.  Put it into a bank account that you know you won't touch until you are ready to go.  Maybe reap the benefit of accruing some interest.  And where we are right now in our lives, we don't have that.  We don't have that disposable income just laying around.  Money goes to bills and rent and all that fun grown up stuff. 

The End of the Season

Well, the Red Wings put up a helluva fight over the course of the season.  The Wings fans witnessed an off season in which two veteran defensemen retired and another thankfully signed with San Jose.  The fan base was prepared by all the pro analysts that they would have trouble making it into the post season for the twenty second straight season.  And they truly did have a tough go the entire season.  They won out their last four games to make it in as the seven seed.  They drew Anaheim in the first round and mounted a great comeback in the series to win it in seven games.  Shortly afterwards, they started round two against President's Trophy winning Chicago.  A great team you cannot deny that.  I don't like any team from the city of Chicago, but I do respect the Blackhawks (except Bryan Bickell, he could not play another game in the NHL and I would be okay with that).  Doesn't mean I like them.  They are a formidable opponent and I would rather see my beloved Wings lose to an Original Six team than a team from California.

Anyway, as it is when your team loses in the playoffs, you get overwhelmed by emotion.  I have a tendency to go through all seven stages in a period of about an hour.  Here's what I felt shortly after they lost and their season ended.

• Disbelief:  I can't believe they gave up a 3-1 series lead. 
• Denial:  There's no way they should have lost this series.  What kind of collapse was that?
• Anger:  How could they not win just one more game?!
• Bargaining:  Are you sure they can't play a nine game series?
• Guilt: Maybe if I sat in the exact same spot for every single game they would have won one of those remaining games.  Did I gloat too much after they won the fourth game of the series?  Are the sports gods punishing the team for that?
• Depression:  How long until the next season starts?  I don't know if I can handle this. 
• Acceptance: Ya know, Chicago was the best team all year.  They weren't suppose to be much of a match up against them anyways.  And there's always next year.

Overall, I am very happy with how the season went.  I know that the ultimate goal is to win the Stanley Cup, but getting to the playoffs and winning a series is great.  Yes, they did just lose and are now out, however they pushed Chicago to a seventh game and it did go into overtime.  I can feel good about the team.  There were plenty of younger players that really grew up during the season and I feel that the future for the team is going up and there should be little decline with a full season next year.  All I ask is for Nick Lindstrom to come back and teach Brenden Smith how to play defense for a full sixty minutes.

Sports Introvert

I was working last night and there was a couple that came into the store wearing Detroit Tigers shirts and hats.  I was super excited!  There aren't a ton of Tigers fans around the Twin Cities.  Apparently there's a professional baseball team here?  I kid, I kid...the St. Paul Saints are a great team (ohhhhh.....).  Living outside the state of Michigan, there are few Detroit sports fans around.  So any time I see someone wearing a Tigers hat or a Lions jersey (saw someone wearing a Joey Harrington jersey yesterday at work.  Weird, right?) or a Red Wings toque I get really excited on the inside.  I want to run up and start talking Detroit sports with this random person.  But then I realize I don't want to look like a crazy person so I don't.  Even when I go to a game when I see others wearing Detroit gear I usually go with the head nod.  The 'yeah, we support the same team' nod.  But it's a head nod and we move on. 

I am a bit of an introverted person.  We went to the second game of the season for the Tigers here in Minneapolis.  We were surrounded by Twins fans with a few cells of Tigers fans around our section.  The nice thing about living in Minnesota and going to a sporting event is that there are no mean people there.  Minnesota Nice is a real thing.  The game ended with a walk off double for the Twins.  The guys next to us looked over, smiled, and just said 'you're team is better than this game.'  WHAT?!  You don't expect that.  You expect smack talk.  You expect gloating and screaming and yelling about how your team sucks and it's not their year.  Anyway, with the Tigers fans around us, we didn't feel it necessary to find out where they were from.  How do you relate to some random people you'll never ever see again that are from a different part of the state you may have never heard of and in the state you haven't lived in close to a decade?  Unless you find out they're from the same hometown.  

Even last year when we went to a game we ended up behind a family of Twins fans.  The father of the family turned around after we cheered about a Tigers hit or play and asked where we were from.  We told him we lived in the Twin Cities now but we were from the U.P. originally.  He said that he was originally from the Detroit area.  Part of me thought 'who cares' while the other part of me thought 'that's cool, but now you're a Twins fan?!  TRAITOR!'  I'll never cheer against the Tigers.  So it was an awkward conversation especially when he handed us is real estate agent card.  I understand he is an independent real estate agent and tries to network whenever possible, but still.  Awkward.  This is the kind of thing my mind tells me to avoid doing.  

I am not someone who will walk up to a random stranger and just start talking about a sports team because they are wearing a hat or a shirt.  Partly because I'm scared of them saying something like 'oh, I just bought the hat because I like the Lion' or 'I love the old English D so I bought the hat'.  Which would totally send me over the edge.  I would never buy a sports team hat because I like the design of it.  Wearing a sports hat usually means that you are supporting the team.  You should be able to walk up to someone and start talking about the season a certain player is having or the chances of the team making the playoffs.  If someone buys a hat because they want to have the hats of all teams of a sport (yes, there are people like that) or because they like the design of the logo are they even sports fan?  See, I don't want to go off the rails and start yelling something like that at a total stranger.

If someone comes up to me and starts talking Detroit sports, I will engage them about the team.  I'm polite enough to do so, but I know we won't end up all buddy buddy.  So keep it quick and focused.  Don't talk about where you're from because no one cares, just keep it on the team you are both there to see.  Talk about the highs and low of the season and where you think they need to improve.  And the chances of the team making a playoff run as it nears the end of the season.  Without jinxing the team.  So maybe at sporting events is the best time to approach others wearing your team's colors.  It makes sense, I know, but you would be surprised once you live outside your state how happy you are to find other fans of your team.  Happy enough to run up to them and start talking sports?  Maybe.  But without that awkwardness?  Maybe not. 

No Plan Weekend

It's a holiday weekend and I didn't have to work.  We didn't make any plans for the weekend because every weekend you have off you don't need to do anything.  Plus there was plenty of sports going on.  The Tigers are currently playing the Twins and I've been able to see each game of the series.  It's nice to be able to see them, but the down side is having to listen to the Twins announcers.  We watched some of the Red Wings game last night, got depressed because they didn't bother showing up and chose to watch a movie (Skyfall) instead.

The past couple of weekends I have had off, we made it a point to get out of the house and do at least something on either Saturday or Sunday.  Nothing major, just did some stuff to get out.  We found a couple of parks to go walk around and get some fresh air.  Even during the winter, we found ourselves wanting and needing to get out.  The weather was pretty cold for about four and a half months so 'getting out' just meant getting in the car and driving around.  Seeing something different. 

However, there are weekends when we don't really want to do anything.  This was one of those weekends.  We have a vacation coming up in a few weeks, so why not have a low key weekend?  As long as these weekends don't happen every single time I don't work, I'm just fine.  Sitting around two weekends off in a row feels like at least one of those weekends is wasted.  The next weekend I have off we'll be home and more than likely will be doing some sort of activity.  So why put all your energy into this weekend? 

After a weekend of doing nothing, I always feel really relaxed once I go back to work on Monday.  I usually get about eight to nine hours of sleep a night to make up for the week prior when I usually average about six.  The fun thing about going back to work is that I get the usual 'do anything this weekend?' questions.  When I happily say no, I get some weird looks.  Not everyone understands the point of a lazy weekend.  But I sure as hell do. 

30 or .400

I love baseball.  I love history.  There is a lot of history in sports.  Benchmarks are meant to be broken.  Sometimes.  There are things that have happened that I think will never be surpassed.  The career strikeouts will never be broken.  Nolan Ryan was a beast.  And he beat the shit out of Robin Ventura (go to Google and start typing his name and the first thing that comes up is this fight).  The fifty six game hit streak will never be surpassed.  Not because there are not great hitters, it's just not going to happen.  Pitchers are so good right now and players in the field are getting more and more athletic.

So I was thinking, which of the history making season accomplishments would I like to see?  Would I like to see a thirty game winner or a batter hit .400?  It'd be awesome to see both happen in my life because I like to see history being made.  Hitting .400 would be more impressive because the hitters play the majority of the games each season whereas the pitchers throw once every five or six days.  Granted, pitchers put more strain on their arm than a batter does on their body but the batters also play the field and have a chance of injuring themselves out there.  There is no good argument for one position being more of a strain over the other.

Since the last thirty game winner (Detroit's Cocaine [mean, I know, but it rhymes] McLain!) in 1968, the closest anyone has come to a thirty win season is twenty seven games.  Twice.  1972 (Steve Carlton) and 1990 (Bob Welch).  After the '68 season, MLB lowered the pitching mound so the pitchers would have less of an advantage over the hitters.  A couple of years ago, Tim Kurkjain wrote a great article about the '68 season.  As much as it pains me to link an ESPN article, it is Tim Kurkjain and I like him and his squeaky little voice.  Slowly but surely, the pitchers have started to come around and are becoming more impressive and borderline dominant.  Not as dominant as they were in years past, but there seems to be more strikeouts, more no hitters, more perfect games, more EVERYTHING pitcher oriented in the past few years.  I think within ten years, we will see a pitcher win thirty games.  That's right, I'm calling my shot.  Book it.  Even though it's been over forty years since a thirty game winner, the pitchers that are around now are closer to this milestone than the batters are to hitting .400.  

If forty years seems like a long time for a thirty game winner, consider the fact that it has been over seventy years since Ted Williams hit .400.  The closest anyone has come to this record is Tony Gwinn.  He hit .394 in 1994.  Being twelve at the time, I didn't concern myself with baseball things outside the city of Detroit so I don't remember this.  There have been a few seasons with guys hitting in the .370 to .380 range and that seems to be the new .400.  After the steroid era, anyone who is hitting a ton of home runs or hitting way better than their career average, comes under immediate scrutiny.  Looking at the guys who have hit in that .370 to 380 range over the course of the last thirty years, they are considered some of the best hitters of our generation.  Everyone except Barry Bonds.  Fuck that guy.  You have guys like George Brett, Tony Gwinn, Ichiro, Wade Boggs.  You can go back further to hall of fame guys like Clemente, Yaz, and Rose.  None of them ever really came close to .400.  It takes a fast start to the season to get the average up but it also takes consistency throughout the entire year to maintain that average.  If you look at a box score and see someone go 1-3 you think that's pretty decent for a day's work.  That's a .333 average.  But if someone is trying for a .400 season that 1-3 is terrible.  You would have to have several three and four hit games just to recover.  I didn't do the actual math to see what is needed to recover the batting average, I'll leave that to the nerds.

Even with some great hitters in the game right now, the pitchers have the advantage.  In the past decade the best season ending average was Ichiro in 2004 at .370.  In that same time the closest to a thirty win season was Randy Johnson and Justin Verlander.  Both with twenty four wins.  Six off the historic number.  A .400 season is the better of the two accomplishments in my mind, but a thirty win season is nothing to ignore.  One reason would be because the hitters are so far away to getting to that milestone.  A batter would have to be focused for half a calendar year.  There can be no slumps.  There can be no bad at bats.  There can only be hits.