I'm Dreaming of the World Series!

Usually, when I want to do a blog entry, I think about the title of my blog and go to what I’m reading or writing or watching or speaking about. But I have a problem this week. I’m reading two books and am not close to being finished with either of them. I have been writing some things, but none of them will appear for a few weeks. I don’t have any speaking engagements until the third week of October. And as for watching, I’m only watching one thing these days: Detroit Tigers baseball.

Sometimes I wonder if it’s good for me to spend as much time as I do watching sports. Gretchen usually does a crossword puzzle every morning and she’ll ask me “six letters, Merchant of Venice heiress” and I will look at her blankly. But if she asks “three letters, Giant legend” I always say “Ott” as in Mel Ott, the New York Giants Hall of Famer from the 1930’s. If only I’d spent all the time I spend watching baseball reading Shakespeare ….

But I really don’t care that I don’t know who Portia is. Last night we watched a couple of innings of the Tigers playing (and losing for the first time in two weeks) in Oakland and saw the A’s centerfielder Coco Crisp. Somewhere high on the list of reasons I love baseball are the names. Coco Crisp! Is naming your son after a breakfast cereal a guarantee of success? We started coming up with players on the All-Food team: Bobby Wine, Chet Lemon, Vinegar Bend Mizell, Darryl Strawberry, Zack Wheat, Billy Beane, Sam Rice … the list goes on and on. For those who like your food closer to nature there’s Steve Trout, Rob Deer and Bob Moose. There was a ball player once named Granny Hamner, which sort of makes me think of literature because George Elliot was a woman and Evelyn Waugh was a man. And there is a player named Shin-Soo Choo for the Indians. Shin-Soo Choo! His name is a tongue twister. Forget selling sea shells by the sea shore. Just say Shin-Soo Choo ten times fast. The sport keeps giving and giving. The other day I saw a pitcher whose last name was “Balfour.” Isn’t that perfect? Reminds me of the old pitcher Dave Heaverlo. “Heave her low, Heaverlo.” And I haven’t even mentioned the sublimely name Matt Batts, Johnny Bench, Rollie Fingers, Gates Brown, Duke Sims or Boots Day. Which makes me wonder how a guy with a name like Mitt Romney slipped away from his appointed destiny in baseball? There’s still hope. Maybe he could buy a team. After all, George W. Bush once owned a baseball team. He traded Sammy Sosa for Fred Manrique. Yeah, that Fred Manrique.

Don’t I have better things to do? Yes, I can read the newly arrived Sports Illustrated, which may have guaranteed the doom of the Tigers by putting Justin Verlander on this week’s cover. Surely, you must be aware of the dreaded Sports Illustrated jinx. Michael Jordan was on the cover of Sports Illustrated about three thousand times and you saw what happened to him. He was the greatest basketball player ever and got old and retired. I hope something terrible like that doesn’t happen to Verlander.

Yes, I should be more tuned in to what’s happening in Libya, but the Gaddafi wine my daughter and her boyfriend found in DC last week says it all: “nutty flavors and a curiously disappearing finish.” Yes, I should be more tuned in to other things in our culture, but a friend’s post on Facebook that said “every time you watch an episode of Jersey Shore a book dies,” has convinced me to stay away from that. Yes, I should care more that our governmental system allows a permanently-tanned guy from Cincinnati the power to frustrate the President at every turn, but all that makes think of is that Sparky Anderson came to us from Cincinnati, and he always looked tan, too, and now the Tigers are kicking butt again like they used to when Sparky was the manager.

Anyway, who wants to listen to John Boehner when you can watch Jose Valverde totter around the mound like a drunken elephant trying to walk on ice? Who cares that Sarkozy and Cameron showed up in Libya yesterday to pat each other on the back when guys like the oft-despised Ryan Raburn and ever-suffering Alex Avila hit pinch-hit home runs to tie a game in the ninth inning and then the disabled list-prone Carlos Guillen gets a hit in the tenth inning to win it? Who cares about evil empires developing weapons of mass destruction when we have Miguel Cabrera and Victor Martinez, two of the most potent WMD’s ever unleashed on the American League?

Our boys are going to be in the playoffs for the first time in five years. They will win their division for the first time since 1987. I’m dreaming that they will win the World Series for the first time in 27 years. Don’t try to guilt me into caring that the world is going to hell in a hand basket. The Tigers are on top and I could care less.