Pedro gone fishing

Ah, Spring training. The first tentative steps of March, the pleasant stroll before the long slog of the new season is upon us. What lovely baseball moments can we treasure from this week? Derek Jeter playing against the Yankees, The Straw saying "hell, yeah" to the thought of taking steroids as a player and Pedro Martinez, relaxing on his boat after lighting up the baseball world at the turn of the century.
For me I have the distinct lack of luck to have missed the peak of Pedro's major league career. Instead settling only for his time as a Met and these last two injury-ridden seasons. Pedro seems almost whimsical in his most recent quotes in the press. The guy seems to think he's good enough still to pitch in the major leagues, it's just no one else is entirely convinced.

Mets Spring Training '09

Here in England I'm only just adapting to not having to tread lightly on my feet to avoid slipping on snow and falling on my face. Over in Florida it's time to play baseball in the sun as teams take to the field tomorrow for the first proper games of spring training 2009.
For fans of every team it's a time to see some of the fresh faces hoping to make the big league roster alongside off-season signings and guys hoping for one last shot (even more so this year with players going off to join their World Baseball Classic teams in March.
Being a Mets fan, however, it's the team from Flushing I'm going to concentrate on. Alongside the hugely entertaining coverage of the intrasquad games from yesterday and today on the ever reliable Metsblog and various other amusing notes elsewhere (couple that with the picture above, is Duaner Sanchez having some sort of amusing face contest?) tomorrow will be a good chance to see (or listen to) some of the lesser known guys in camp as the Mets take on the Orioles (who will be presumably without their own exciting young players like Matt Wieters and Nick Markakis). According to Adam Rubin we can expect to see some none too familiar names tomorrow before we see the likes of Olly Perez, Jon Niese, Johan Santana and John Maine later in the week, being relieved by the likes of Sean Green, JJ Putz and K-Rod.
I might post some of my thoughts on the games as they happen later in the week. I'm just excited about live baseball again and I'll aim to watch the Giants Indians and RedSox Twins games tomorrow (when hopefully I'll have my sparkling new copy of Baseball Prospectus in my hands).
Enjoy the games.

Interesting finds

Continuing the cricket scoring part of my previous post -
I found a subbuteo cricket game that had been donated to the charity shop I work in today. In it was pages of scorecards that the previous owner had kept of the games he'd played. The first page I pulled out revealed itself to be a game between England and Kent. The first line read G. Boycott - run out 4.
It made me smile.

First Bloggo

I'm not entirely sure what I'm trying to do by writing this blog. At least part of it's creation stems from the fact that I rather enjoy writing. I spend most of my free time reading other people's blogs so I figured whilst I'm waiting for them to update theirs I could be writing mine.
The first problem was finding a name for the bloody thing. I want to make this kind of about baseball and perhaps cricket (as I'm finding some pretty interesting links between the statistical sides of the two sports) and other things that I think kind of belong here. "You could look it up" is obviously a rather famous Casey Stengel quote which set me off whooping with joy the first time I saw Bull Durham, BUT when I tried to have http://youcouldlookitup.blogspot.com as my URL I came across a rather disturbing new usage of the New York baseball maverick's famous words. Undeterred I tried for http://bennyprofane.blogspot.com which produced a rather more pleasing result but it seems that particular project never really got off the ground. (I know Benny Profane has little to do with what I'm writing about, aside from being my favourite Thomas Pynchon character). So, anyway, I'm sure we can all agree that the insertion of a little "-" can be a wonderful thing.
I feel it only appropriate that I finish this first post with a little fact: Geoffrey Boycott was the first man to be dismissed in a one day international cricket match.