Favre and other frustrations

The Brett Favre Saga goes on unabated. The Packers have done everything they can to make Brett feel unwelcome ever since he suggested he might unretire, but Brett didn't take the hint until yesterday. Now, he says, "they don't want me back." Duh.

I can't think of any similar case where a legendary player for a team was so actively shunned. Maybe Bobby Hull with the Blackhawks back in the day.

It's probably just as well he's gone, although as a Bears fan, any distraction for the Packers is fine with me. I'm not as convinced as others that having Favre back makes the Packers better. Not if there's that much bad blood between him and the coaching staff.

A lot of folks around here would like to see Favre join the Bears, but that'll never happen. The Packers still own his rights, and there's no way they'll let him stay in the division. The Vikings would also love to have him and have made no secret about it, but once again, same division. Now, it looks like he'll be traded to Tampa for a bag of chips and a case of beer.

Kyle Orton gets to start tomorrow night's game with the Cheifs. It looks like the QB derby will be decided after the second exhibition game (which Grossman will start). It would be a shame if Grossman ends up the starter. We've already seen what he can do. Or, more accurately, can't do.

The Bears have reportedly told season ticket holders that they will not be allowed to tailgate once the game begins. I guess a fair number of people just sit at their cars and watch the games on TV outside the stadium. What's the point of that? Wouldn't it be a lot easier to do that at home?

Our area got pounded with storms the other night, leaving a lot of damage. My house was spared, but the nearby town of Griffith, IN, got hit with a tornado, leaving a lot of destruction in its wake. You can see some of the pics here.

My DSL service is out for a few days, which is making things difficult for me. Right now, I'm getting some online time at a McDonald's, where a little girl is entertaining the crowd with a rousing version of the "I just farted" song, much to her parents dismay. Could be worse, though. Could be March, when a DSL problem would have me moving out. Also, I could be sitting closer to the little girl.

At least I have power. I live on a small street and usually if one of us has a power outage, we all do. Right now though, our house is the only one powered up on our side of the street. Very strange. Also, we're the only ones who didn't get water, thanks to a battery backup sump pump. Best investment I ever made.

Catching up

A lot has gone on since I last wrote:

I saw The Dark Knight. It was fantastic. I don't know that I have much to add beyond what most of the reviewers have already said. Heath Ledger stole the show and the story was great. If I have any complaint, it's that it gets a little speechy at times (is "speechy" a word?). It's pretty cool, as a Chicagoan, to see the way the city is used in this movie.

The Cubs keep rolling. They went up to Milwaukee and kicked the Brewers back to the Cardinals in the standings. The team didn't make any trade deadline moves, but their big trade came earlier in July when they picked up Rich Harden and Chad Gaudin, both of whom have done quite well, despite Gaudin blowing a lead yesterday. Jeff Samardzija, the former all-American WR at Notre Dame, was called up to fill Kerry Wood's spot on the roster and has done a pretty credible job as well. He's got nasty stuff, and once he nails down his control, he'll be a quality starter. That is, if they don't make a closer out of him. Rooting for ND guys is hard for me, but I guess I'll just have to get used to it.

I had another garage sale. This one didn't go as well as the first because the main road near my house is under construction, which kept down drive-by traffic. I may do one more, or I may not.

I signed up to coach soccer again this fall, but for the second season in a row, I didn't get a team. I'm starting to take this personally.

I have also been working on getting CollegeBCS.com going for the new season, so if you are a subscriber, you can find my bowl projections and commentary on the initial coaches' poll.

I also joined up with Facebook and LinkedIn. Links to my pages on those sites are on the right side of the page.

Decluttering my life

I haven't written for a few days because I have been very busy preparing for, then executing, a garage sale.

There are two parts to a garage sale, deciding what to sell, and pricing it. Deciding what to sell is pretty easy for us. With four kids, and no more expected, we can try to get rid of clothes, toys and other things our youngest has outgrown. We also have a lot of furniture that we have acquired over the years, so we put the stuff sitting in my basement out as well. And then we grabbed a handful of things that we no longer used out (ok, junk) to see if we had any takers.

Pricing things is harder. Some of our furniture came from my grandmother and is pretty old, if not outright "antique." Some of it is in better shape than others. Some of the things we wanted to get rid of pretty badly, and some we wouldn't be disappointed to keep.

We ran our sale for six hours each on Friday and Saturday, and I was surprised that we made about the same amount of money each day. I thought Friday would be slower because it was a work day, but it was just as busy as Saturday. We did not sell any of our larger furniture items (couch, dining room set), but we did dispose of a dresser and some smaller tables and chairs. We were also able to find a home for a lot of our baby items, including a crib, bassinet and pack 'n' play.

And, amazingly, just about every knick-knack and piece of junk we were hoping to get rid was sold. We got rid of things like an old shake machine, a stationary, recumbent bicycle, and a couple of plastic, indoor trees.

One of the things I was least looking forward to was haggling, but even that wasn't too bad. Sometimes, people would ask if I would take a specific lower price for something (which I would accept or not based on how badly I wanted to be rid of the item), but most people just payed whatever I asked, or left it.

My expectations for this experience were pretty low. I didn't think I'd move very much. I didn't think I'd make enough money to make it worth my time. I was leery of having so many strangers traipsing about my place, even on the outside. I have to say though, it was a lot better than I thought. I can't say that I was "hooked" and that now I'll become one of those garage sale junkies, like the people down the street from us who have garage sales almost every week. I will probably try another one though. Just not this week. I need a nap.

Wake me when the big one hits

After a pretty restless night of not much sleep, I was pretty surprised this morning to see that we had one of the bigger earthquakes on record here in the Midwest overnight.

The Chicago Tribune reported that this was a near-record event, but it must have happened during the little bit of time that I was sleeping because I didn't notice it. Folks closer to the epicenter experienced some damage, and even people around here got rattled around a bit. My mother-in-law, who lives near Indy, was shaken awake.

It also awakened my wife, who is a very light sleeper. At that time of the morning though, she's pretty groggy. She wasn't sure at first if it was a quake, a strong wind, or if I was shaking the bed. She finally concluded that since everything was rattling, it must be a quake. But she didn't try to wake me.

Nothing and no one else in my house was disturbed, although with four kids, the house is such a mess that shaking it up might actually make it cleaner.

Maybe she was saying "foooooood"

I'm in the Indy area this week helping out my mother-in-law as she recovers from surgery. As you might imagine, this part of the country is overwhelmed with Colts fever as they get ready to watch them get beat by the Bears 31-28 in the Super Bowl. In the spirit of the event, I've been wearing my Bears jersey around here this week.

Late last night, I went to the local Meijer (the Official Superstore of the Colts) to pick up some stuff. While I was looking at something on the end of one of the aisles, I heard this loud howling sound. I wasn't paying too much attention to it, but when it didn't stop, I glanced up to see that it was coming from some lady about 50 feet from me who was booing me and waving her arms with the thumbs down sign.

I suppose I should be grateful she didn't use any of her other fingers.

Fortunately, I'm not a sensitive guy. I'm used to getting booed. I umpired baseball for 16 years and reffed basketball for 8, so that's part of the job. I get "booed" for my bracket predictions, the RPI and BCS pretty routinely. I even get booed at home sometimes (you call that washing dishes??! BOO!). But getting booed in the grocery store is a new one.

Curious promotional idea

Since sponsors spend a big wad of money to put on bowl games, naturally, they like to promote it. Champs Sports, which is a sports apparel store that sponsors a bowl, has a window display with a caption saying "We love football so much, we have our own game, and everyone's invited." The display has a space for four shirts, so around here (NW Indiana), you would expect Purdue shirts in the display because Purdue's playing in the game. Of course, you would be wrong. At the store in the mall in Hobart, IN, the display has four Indiana shirts.

When I went to the counter to buy, ironically, a Champs Sports Bowl shirt as a gift (if the person I bought that for is reading this, please act surprised when you get it), I couldn't resist asking the clerk about the display.

Me: "Can I ask a stupid question?"

Her (clearly exasperated): "I put Indiana shirts in the display because the manager told me to."

Me: "I take it I'm not the first to almost ask about it."

Her: "No. The manager says that the Purdue stuff is selling better, so he wants it where people can get to it. We have extra Indiana stuff, so he said to use that."

Me: "Don't you think that's kind of a silly way to promote the company's bowl game?"

Her: "I just do what the manager tells me to do."

The manager was unavailable for comment.

You make the call

I am sitting in a Panera in Bloomington (trying feebly to get some work done) and a woman at the table next to me told me that I look like Tim Robbins (Nuke Laloosh from Bull Durham, married to Susan Sarandon).

That's a new one. I've been told I look like other people before. I apparently have a long lost twin brother living around me because the folks at the grocery store are cosntantly confusing me with someone else.

The person I have been told I look like most often is my hero, Dave Barry. Even my own son has confused the two of us. One day, when he was about 3 years old, he came running up to me saying, "Daddy, Daddy, you're on a book!" When I asked him what he was talking about, he brought me "Dave Barry's Guide to Guys" which has a picture of Dave on the cover and said, "See. There you are."

So, you make the call. Do I look like Dave Barry? Tim Robbins? Someone else entirely? Or is it bad enough that one person has to look like me?

UPDATE: 11/14. In the comments, some said I look like Potsie from Happy Days. I don't think so, but that's probably closer than Tim Robbins. His pic is added.

Catch up/World Cup preview

It's amazing how little time I have now that we have another baby in the house. It's not so much the baby (she's doing great, BTW) that makes it difficult, but the fact that whoever isn't dealing with the baby (usually me) has to take care of the other three. That means writing for the blog has fallen down on the list of priorities.

Instead, I've been doing things like planting a garden, which is doomed to fail because I have a brown thumb. The only plants I can't kill are weeds. I'm the leading producer of dandelions in Lake County, despite attacking them with every form of chemical and home remedies known to man. Maybe if I let the big boys do most of the work, the garden has a chance.

I've also been trying to fix up a room so that we have a place for the baby to sleep when she outgrows the bassinet in our room. Whenever I attempt handyman-type stuff around the house, it always looks like vandals broke in and did it, so I have a friend who is a home builder helping me out and that's going much better than if I attempted it myself.

I'm also managing my two older sons' baseball team. It's a 7- and 8-year-old league, although my older son is nine. We held him back because he hasn't played much baseball and he isn't ready for the next league up. My team has four 7-year-olds and six 8-year-olds, plus my 9-year-old, which is roughly the age makeup of all the teams, but all my kids are about the same size, which is smaller than the average 8-year-old. Every team we play has at least one kid that looks like he's ready to start shaving, and all my guys are about the size of the bat. We're the only team in the league where the best player is a 7-year-old. That's not to say my 8-year-olds are bad players, but they aren't all-star caliber players. I'm really fortunate though that my kids do a good job playing hard and following instructions, and they're all getting better, which is the only goal anyway. It's a non-competitive league, so there's no score kept or standings. They are really good kids, so it's a fun team to coach, but it's a pretty time-consuming job.

So, today is the start of the World Cup and I'm excited to get to watch it this year without having to stay up until ridiculous hours of the night like I did four years ago when the tournament was in South Korea and Japan. I'm a fan of the game, although not as rabid as I am about more traditional American sports, but I watch some MLS games or some of the European league games on Fox Soccer Channel. I went to a World Cup game in Chicago in 1994 and saw Germany and Spain play to a 1-1 tie. I had my German jersey on and it turns out my ticket was in the top row of the Spanish cheering section. That was the only time I used all that Spanish I took in high school and college.

Anyway, Brazil is the big favorite in this year's tournament, and you'd have to be a blithering idiot to pick against them, so naturally, I will. I'm picking the host Germans. If you have a good enough team, and the Germans appear to have one, home field advantage is big and they'll use it to knock off Brazil in the final. Germany will be breaking in a new goalkeeper after the retirement of Oliver Kahn. They'll need a big tournament from his replacement Jens Lehmann.

I also like the US team to come out of a very difficult group E with the Czech Republic. They key for the US will be to get at least a draw with the Czechs in the first game. To be successful, the US have to be tight on defense, which occasionally lapses, and do a better job finishing its scoring chances. Italy is also in our group, but they've had some turmoil and look ready to be sent home. Ghana is probably not good enough to come out of this group, but is certainly good enough to be a spoiler for one of the other three.

Group A has Germany, Poland, Ecuador and Costa Rica, and it would be a huge upset if Germany didn't win the group and Poland didn't finish second.

England leads Group B and is the favorite despite the injury to Wayne Rooney. It looks like he will play in this tournament at some point, but Rooney's health will be a key to the Brits advancing much beyond the group stage. Sweden is a slight favorite to advance over Trinidad & Tobago and Paraguay, but both have puncher's chances to take out the Swedes.

Group C has a heavy favorite in Argentina, and I the rebuilding Dutch squad to come out of there as well. If the Netherlands struggle, then Serbia-Montenegro, which isn't a country anymore, will advance. The Ivory Coast is the other member of the group, and they'll leave with lovely parting gifts.

Mexico and Portugal will advance from Group D, but the order isn't as clear. I'll take Mexico, although they've not been sharp in recent friendlies. Expect an inspired performance from their keeper, Oswaldo Sanchez, whose father just died. The funeral may cause Sanchez to miss the opener with Iran. The others teams in this group are Iran and Angola, neither of which have much of a chance.

The Brazilians will win Group F and Croatia will finish second. The other two teams, Austrailia and Japan, could not compete with either even if they combined forces.

Group G is where we find France, which won the tournament as host in 1998. Zinedine Zidane was the star of that team, and he's still kicking around, but the new star is Thierry Henry. France should advance easily. South Korea, which did well in 2002 as host and has many of those starters back for 2006, will battle Switzerland for second. I'll take the Swiss, which were undefeated in qualifying. Togo will be satisfied to be a spoiler.

Spain and Ukraine figure to emerge from Group H, though neither look good enough to do much damage after the group stage. Tunisia has a chance to surprise, but Saudi Arabia looks overmatched.

Knockout stage picks:
A1 Germany over B2 Sweden
C1 Argentina over D2 Portugal
E1 US over F2 Croatia
G1 France over H2 Ukraine
A2 Poland over B1 England
D1 Mexico over C2 Netherlands
F1 Brazil over E2 Czech Rep
G2 Switzerland over H1 Spain

A1 Germany over C1 Argentina
E1 US over G1 France
A2 Poland over D1 Mexico
F1 Brazil over G2 Switzerland

A1 Germany over E1 US
F1 Brazil over A2 Poland

A1 Germany over F1 Brazil
E1 US over A2 Poland (3rd place)

First swim lesson

We baptized our baby girl on Sunday, and things did not go swimmingly. We needed to do an emergency diaper change about five minutes before the baptism, and most of that time was spent trying to find a suitable place to do that. I'll spare you the details, but I will say I could have really used a hose. As a result, she was slightly late for her own baptism (takes after her mother). This apparently did not make her happy, because she wailed during the whole ceremony, stopping only to catch her breath. The cops showed up because the neighbors called to complain about the noise.

OK, I made that last bit up.

I guess she was trying to make up for her brothers, who were no trouble at all during their baptisms.

Typical February weather

I'm sitting here watching the Olympics (which I am watching much less of than usual) and the warning sirens went off. The only time that happens is when we have a tornado warning or an air raid. Since it's mid-February, naturally I assumed we must have done something to annoy Canada, or perhaps Michigan, and were under attack. It turns out that was incorrect, but that we actually had a tornado warning. I've lived around here most of my 42 years and I don't ever remember a tornado in February. I guess that's more fodder for you global warming types.

Finally listed my car

My Camaro is for sale on Ebay.

Here's the link.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

“Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince” was released on July 16, and I was shocked to find it at the Anderson Public Library that day. I thought I was going to have to wait until I got home to read it. It took me about seven hours (actual reading time) to finish it. By now, I’ve read it twice through and the last few chapters several times. I’m a big fan of the series, and this is the best one yet.

I am pre-dating a blog entry with all the spoiler info, so if you haven’t read the book and don’t want to know what happens, don’t go there. Otherwise, here’s a link to my full commentary on the book.

Dyer is da bomb!

Any day now, I expect to see the most spectacular fireworks show of all time, which will be what happens when the town of Dyer explodes. I get this feeling every year, but it hasn't happened yet.

Dyer is a little town just on the Indiana side of the state line with Illinois, and because of taxes and the most idiotic law in all of America, 95% of the Dyer economy is based on the sale of gasoline, cigarettes and fireworks. The first mile and a half of US 30 from the state line into Indiana, which is the Dyer business area, you see a school, a couple of churches, five gas stations (three of which are Speedways), about a dozen places to buy cigarettes and another dozen to buy fireworks. Fortunately, there is also a hospital.

Lower taxes fuel the cigarette and gas sales from our neighbors in Illinois. The fireworks sales are seasonal (spring, summer and fall) and are due to a law which says you can buy any fireworks you want in Indiana as long as you promise to not blow them up here.

You'll be shocked to learn that law is not strictly enforced. If you had a cop on every corner, they still wouldn't be able to keep up. The only thing more surprising than that is that the fireworks industry contributes megatons of money to Indiana politicians so this stupidity can continue.

As a result of the spinelessness of our legislature, you can get anything from little firecrackers to thermonuclear devices in Dyer.

As you can probably tell, I'm not a big fan of the fireworks. The vast majority of the major explosives end up in the hands of kids who have no idea how to handle them. But, I'm just as offended by the wink-wink-nudge-nudge nature of the law. If we're going to let people buy the fireworks, we should let them shoot them off. If we're not going to let people shoot them off, then we shouldn't sell them.

I think they should be banned, even at the significant risk of turning Dyer into a ghost town, but either way, the Indiana legislature should make up its damn mind.

Time to sell my 69 Camaro

I inherited a 1969 Camaro from my grandmother when she died a few years ago. She didn't drive it much (only 60,000 miles), but she didn't care for it very well either. It's got a fair amount of rust on it and a dented fender, but I liked tooling around in it anyway. Now, it's not running.

I had always kind of hoped to fix it up and drive it around short distances, but I lack the time (mostly) and money (for now) to do that, and just keeping it around rotting in my garage is a headache I no longer want. So, it's time to get rid of it.

If it wasn't for the emotional attachment to it, I would have gotten rid of it long ago. I've had plenty of chances. Every week, someone comes to the door asking if it's for sale. Now it is.

Does anyone know how to find out how to price a car like this? Things like the Kelley Blue Book are useless because they only go back 20 years.

This probably won't be as exciting as trying to sell a car once owned by a pope, but I'll let you know how it turns out anyway.

That Didn't Take Long

I said earlier that I would be using Illinois Governor Blagojevich's phrase "testicular virility" whenever I got the chance, but I wasn't expecting that chance to be tonight.

That's because I had Bible study tonight. We were talking about how we came to be ELCA Lutherans and making comparisons to the LCMS (Lutheran Church Missouri Synod). LCMS is much more legalistic and exclusionary, and one way that manifests itself is that women aren't allowed in leadership positions. So, I suggested that perhaps the LCMS folks felt that women didn't have the testicular virility to be leaders.

That actually got a laugh. The people at my church are used to me by now. One of the things I like about my particular church is that I can say things like "testicular virility" at Bible study and not get, um, stoned.

Back-to-back Puck

My kids have had a double-dose of Puck the last two days.

Thursday, they got to meet Chef Wolfgang Puck as part of the celebration of Sue's fifth birthday party. My oldest even got a one-on-one cookie decorating lesson. He was very excited to get to meet someone famous. I guess I have to work on my Q-rating some more. :)

It was fun to see them on TV, even though it was so early in the morning. The CBS affiliate in Chicago did their morning news traffic segments live from the museum. Their traffic reporter, Susan Carlson, would interview somebody or do something with the kids during each segment. The teachers said she was great with the kids and the kids were pretty well behaved. You never know what you're going to get from kids, especially sleep-deprived ones.

They also got to do a dance to a song that Al Jarreau sang. "Dance" might be stretching things a bit. It was more like hand motions, but what can you teach kids in a short time.

Here is a link to Susan Carlson's page on the CBS 2 Chicago website, which has links to a few of the video segments from the museum. You can see my kids best in the one where Al Jarreau sings his new song, but the Wolfgang Puck one is kind of funny, even though my kids aren't in it.

Last night, I took the kids to see playoff hockey. Many of you may not be familiar with hockey. It's a sport where people skate around an ice rink and try to shoot a small rubber biscuit called a "puck" into a net. They used to play this sport at a high-professional level in this country, but they don't anymore.

They do still have lower professional levels, and the Chicago Wolves are one of the better teams in the American Hockey League. Last night, they scored four third-period goals to eliminate the Cincinnati Sitting Ducks 4-1. They'll face the Manitoba Moose in the next round.

My oldest hasn't typically had the patience to sit through an entire sporting event, but he really seemed to enjoy the game last night. My middle son likes sports and will sit with me and watch them on TV, so watching it live was fun for him. They gave out those thundersticks, and those entertained my oldest when the game wasn't.

I get to one or two Wolves games each year, and this was one of the smaller crowds I've seen at one of their games. They had just over 5,000 people there, and I don't think I've been to a game where the crowd wasn't at least 10,000. The Sox and Orioles played the same night, but that hasn't typically been a problem before. In fact, there have been nights where the Wolves outdrew the Sox when they played at the same time. I wonder if the NHL kamikaze mission has hurt attendance at the lower levels.

There was a lot of penalties in this game too. Usually, in a playoff hockey game, refs forget to put the peas in their whistles, so you hardly have any penalties called. In this game, though, there were 20 penalties called, all minors and each team had eight power plays.

Cincinnati was so bad on the power play most of the night that you often forgot which team had the man-advantage. The Wolves were better in the sense that they usually got a lot of shots, but didn't connect until early in the third period.

While I always enjoy going to these games (in fact, I'd rather go to a Wolves game than an Hawks game), they never fail to remind me that there is a reason why these guys are in the minors.

Sue Turns Five

You'll note by the time on this post that it is a ridiculous hour of the morning to be out of bed, but I am. Even more ridiculous is that my 6- and 8-year-olds are up also.

That's because they are going to the Field Museum to celebrate Sue the T-Rex's fifth birthday party and their school gets to be the background for the TV coverage on the various network stations in Chicago. They have to leave their school at 4 AM to do this.

Wolfgang Puck (making the cake) and Al Jarreau (singing Happy Birthday) are going to be there too. That's quite the A-list crowd for the birthday of a bag of bones.

If you live around Chicago, every station (2,5,7,9,32) is covering it at some level on their morning shows and/or local news programs. If you don't live around here, but get WGN on your cable, you might see coverage there.

We (parents) were given no specific information as to which channels were showing this when, so we get to spend the morning channel surfing.

Brain Dump again

Every once in a while, I get a lot on my mind, and I've got to get rid of it to make room for more useless things. This is one of those times.

I messed around with the color scheme on these pages. Let me know what you think.

I also created an expanded profile for myself. Blogger limits the "About Me" segment to 1200 characters, and I wanted to write more than that. So, my profile has two links, one to the expanded profile and one to the Blogger profile. When I get more time, I'll see if I can find a way to combine the two.

I was walking around my neighborhood the other day and saw a couple of relatively new girls' bikes left out in a driveway. I'm not sure what brand they were, but the model names of the bikes were "Slumber Party."

I don't know what thoughts cross a young girl's mind when she thinks of a slumber party, but I'm guessing bicycling isn't among them. What messed up marketing geek came up with that idea?

Only in Kentucky: According to the AP, a 42-year-old man was arrested for drunk driving - while riding a horse. He failed field sobriety tests ("OK, sir, spell 'Giacomo'") and blew .244 on the breathalyzer. That's three times the legal limit, and that means he was probably so drunk that he had to be tied to the horse to keep from falling off.

No word yet on the results of the sobriety tests on the horse.

Sergio Garcia tied the record for the biggest final round choke job in PGA tour history by blowing a six-shot lead on the final day and losing the Wachovia Open in a playoff to Vijay Singh.

Kellen Winslow Jr. was released from the hospital the other day after his bike accident. He's on crutches because of an injured knee. There is still no word on how long his recuperation will take, or even just how injured the knee is.

Six women's basketball players with eligibility remaining left the University of Alaska-Anchorage basketball program. That, combined with the loss of four seniors, means that for now, the Seawolves only have three players on its roster.

A couple of women left because of nagging injuries, but the others appear to have left because of a nagging coach. Actually, the words used to describe the coach were more harsh than that. Here is a link to the Yahoo! story.

Do These Kids Have a Life?

I’m as big of a sports nut as there is. I always joke that I don’t watch TV unless there’s some sort of ball involved. I was pretty obsessed even when I was a kid. I played baseball for nine years, even though I was the worst player not only on my own team, but in the entire league every season I played (note: I’m not making that up. I was really that bad).

Still, even the good players did other things. Many were three-sport athletes, which seems to be a dying breed. These days, kids specialize, and they do so at a young age. The Chicago Tribune published an article Tuesday which talked about how some parents pay up to $10,000 per year to put their 12-year-old sons on national traveling baseball teams. These kids pretty much play baseball and do nothing else.

Some of these teams attract some big sponsorship dollars to help facilitate this activity.

To me, this is a complete loss of perspective. These kids have had no childhood. They’re pros now at age 12, and to get to this level, they’ve had to pretty much devote their short lives to nothing but baseball. These kids talk about how they are chasing their dreams of the major leagues (which, even for kids this good, is a longshot at best), but when you consider how early they had to start chasing it, you wonder if it was their dream originally, or if they are actually living out their parents’ dreams.

The kids in this story are from California, where they can play baseball year round, but there’s some of that lack of perspective around here too.

I have three boys, ages 8, 6 and 1.5. The older two, like most boys their ages, are involved in sports. They have played soccer and baseball, more soccer than baseball. In fact, last spring was the first time they had played baseball. We signed them up for T-Ball in the Dyer Little League.

Dyer’s Little League 12-year-old team made the Little League World Series in 1997, so we figured they would be pretty organized and know what they were doing. What we found out was that when it comes to the all-star and travel teams, they did know what they were doing. That was because everything the league did was built around those teams.

The regular season schedule ended a little early, so that the travel teams wouldn’t have conflicts. That applied to T-Ball as well, which as far as I know, didn’t have a travel team. That day is coming, I’m sure.

Also, teams were “stacked,” by which I mean that the best kids were placed on one or two of the teams, so that the potential travel team kids played together. That led to some really ugly games. I was a base umpire for an age 11-12 game that ended 35-0. Do not adjust your monitor – you read that score correctly. In that game, the stacked team hit eight home runs, and had a stretch where they just missed hitting five in a row (the third kid in that stretch hit the top of the center field fence, but the ball bounced back into the field). How much fun do you think it was to be on the losing team for that game? What is the motivation for those kids? Even for the team that won, it couldn’t have been much fun.

That wasn’t the worst of it, though. There were even stacked T-Ball teams. We played against two teams that had nearly all older kids (6 and 7, though there weren’t a lot of 7-year-olds in T-Ball), and I would say that 90% of the best players in our league were on those two teams. We had one kid as good as any on either of those teams. The sandlot scouts must have missed him.

The league picnic/award ceremony (every kid gets a trophy) was two months after the regular season ended to accommodate the schedules of the travel team kids. The whole awards ceremony was built around those teams, although we regular folks did get our brief moment in the sun. We knew it was bad when the league president got weepy with joy and pride when she discussed how the 9-year-old team finished second in the state tournament. I was thinking, “they have a state tournament for 9-year-olds?”

So, since my kids are not likely to ever be travel-team caliber, my wife and I moved them over to Schererville Baseball this year in the hope that this league devotes as much attention to the fair-to-middlin’ kids as they do to the travel teams.

Things are so far, so good on that front. Our team has only one kid who appears to have the pressure of his father living vicariously through him. At batting practice one day, while I was working with him, his dad kept giving him pointers too. That wasn’t so bad since we were both saying relatively helpful things. At the end of his session though, I told him he had a nice swing (which he does, even though he doesn’t make much contact), and his dad said something like, “he should; he’s had hundreds of dollars in lessons.”

No pressure there, kid.

I wanted to tell him to save his money and just let the kid play, but I didn’t, of course. Of all the kids on our team, though, this one seems to be having the least fun. I can help him work on his swing, but I don’t know what to do for this kid so that the game is fun for him. I’m not sure, but I would guess there are a lot more kids like this one than the ones written about in that Tribune article, and that’s the real shame.

Preskool Sine-up

There is a preschool in our area that has a professionally-made sign out in front that says:

"Resister now for Fall '05"

I realize they probably don't teach a lot of spelling to preschoolers, but I still don't think I would send my kid to that place.