re: Scott Van Pelt
I’m still glad I brought that up because without doing so I wouldn’t of known about that awesome Miami story. So hard to hate on a guy with a last name that Dutch. Glad I can like him without reservations now.

re: Red Sox rivalry/Os fans invading National Park
I was one of the Os fans that cheered on the invasion in DC, but I don’t really see it as contradictory. The way the Bawlmer fans have failed to show up at OPACY who can blame the Boston/NYers coming down in droves, my problem is how they have acted towards the few and the proud Orioles fans that did show up. If I were at the park in DC I would act respectful of the home team’s fans, but still cheer (and be proud of drowning out the home team’s) at the appropriate times.
Whoever mentioned the discrepancy between Fans of the Game and Fans of the Team was spot on, I love talking to/being around any Fan of the Game, even if they’re from north of the George Washington Memorial Bridge.

re: All-Star game
I only watched up until the 10th inning, I loves me my sleep. But has anyone thought that the ASG might be a better representation of the game/exhibition of that year’s best crop of players, if the game was NOT in a “baseball city”? Baseball needs to revive itself in the States let alone abroad so why not have the game in large markets without a team like Portland, Omaha, and even the land of the Midnight Summer Sun – Alaska? Why not shore up international markets – like Japan and Latin America – or even emerging ones like Australia, Curaçao, Holland, Sweden, South Africa, China/Taiwan? I wouldn’t mind the most “popular” (fan-wise) players getting in at that point so non-baseball fans have a better chance of recognizing names via teams AND the distance acts as a good balance against the crazy kool-aid fans voting in their entire favorite team because who would want half of their team having to readjust from jetlag after the ASG instead of just a couple?

Sorry for the long post.

WTB

I see a lot of chatter out there about how we have to trade Sherrill and we have to trade Huff and…etc. Well, actually, no we don’t. What we have to do is make only the right deal at the right time, because a bad trade can cause serious, long-term problems. If this team was utterly terrible then I’d say, yeah, what have we got to lose? But the fact is that we’re about a year ahead of schedule (give or take) and to ignore that would be foolish.

It reminds me of, and I heard this from someone else recently, when the D-Rays were playing better than they ever had and so they traded Aubrey Huff to the Astros, saying something to the effect of “If we are satisfied with .500, there’s something very wrong here. This is not the goal, and we aren’t going to meet the goal this year, so we’re blowing it up as best we can”.

We have a good team, but not a great team, and we don’t have a good thing here, not yet. I’d be careful not to confuse a good thing with a better thing.