Royal Blues (quietly) returns..

heya kids.

no quicker way to kill your recondite little site than to not post for a month.

um…I've been busy.

no, really. work has taken on epic proportions of new crap to do, and I've been a witness (and unwilling participant) in playing a lot of an uncoordinated, derelict style of baseball, and I'm usually just too damn exhausted to post anything worth anything when I finally get home.

plus, the royals suck. or, here, let me make a new post for google to point to for the most common search engine term people reach me by:

THE KANSAS CITY ROYALS SUCK

there. though you don't really need me to tell you why, so I'm not sure what, exactly, people are looking for with that kind of search. but they do suck.

my baseball team has scraped out a few more wins, and sustained some of the most embarrassing spectacles I have ever been a part of. it's a little shaming to even wear the uniform around the complex when other teams are playing sometimes.

well, let me give you an example…the "all-stars" for this team:

1. pregnant man
2. he who cannot play outfield
3. the guy who doesn't play unless he pitches, and he can't pitch
4. random guy who gets injured every other game

I think we picked our "all-stars" based on whoever the lady who runs the team could reach with a phone call, but it was still all the old-time players who have been with the team for a while…and who, coincidentally, are the exact reason this team will never, ever win against a team who knows better than to field their positions with oven mitts. honestly: if we play a team that knows enough to face the right direction in the field, we lose. our pitchers throw sequences like this pretty much every time:

1. ball (over the batter's head)
2. ball (wild pitch in the dirt)
3. ball (wild pitch in the dirt)
4. borderline strike
5. ball (wild pitch over the batter's head)

every other batter walks, and every walk turns into a run before the next batter even swings the bat. it's ridiculous. denny matthews always talks about the fact that you can't expect your defense to be on its toes at all times when your pitcher can't throw strikes, and it's completely true. I mean, I really pride myself in the fact that I'm able to concentrate and focus pretty well on every pitch, but if 90% of the pitches aren't even hittable, and 95% of the batters aren't good enough to drive the ball to left field, it's hard to maintain focus. yet, when you draw left field duty, with either the sun or the short 20-foot high lights beaming in your face, no one seems to realize that fielding one ball every 2-3 games (without any practice whatsoever) doesn't lead to highly effective outfield defense.

oh yeah, tonight – instead of making up our two rain-out games against the absolute worst team in our division (and we're in the bottom of the 3 divisions) – we have instead rescheduled with a team in the elite division. fuckin brilliant. I hope we liked being in distant 2nd place for one day, because we're gonna be ran out of our two games tonight in probably about an hour. for both games. other teams schedule rainouts against teams that are winless. we take on elite division teams that will smoke us twice before it even gets dark outside.

I would not play for this team next year…even if I wasn't moving in like a month. in fact, I'm totally coaching my own team next year. "Moneyballs", here we come!

Two games tonight, and one game tomorrow morning at 9:30. In honor of 1/3 of my teammates showing up pre-drunk to our last game, I'm returning the favor tonight. I've learned my lesson about playing when I'm hung over; might as well play before that shit happens. hope they have the dugouts stocked with air sickness bags, because I already feel a little coming on..

So, here's to a night full of first-ball swinging (and missing)! Hope nobody can actually throw a curveball..

Tipsily,
Joe Blow