Nothing to Eat

For a baseball fan, January is like being hungry when there’s nothing in the house to eat. You can look for news, but don’t expect to find anything. The adolescents, aka MLB owners and players, are busy in their little tug of war, unless you prefer calling it the sort of contest that will get a person arrested if done in public. And there are only so many stories on international-player signings that I can read before going blurry eyed. According to the pass I saved (and Adam Engel autographed), it’s eleven days short of three years since Clare and I attended our last SoxFest together. Ah, those were the days, when Nicky Delmonico and Daniel Palka at least had a chance of being part of the rebuild. Some things are not meant to be, I guess. The strike/lockout has me wondering if it’s even worth the bother to look for baseball magazines come March. Everything stopped on December 1st, so what’s to report on? If and when labor peace returns, there’s likely to be a flurry of activity that would make the rosters the magazines print dated the moment they hit the stands. No more Baseball Register, no more Who’s Who in Baseball, no more Street and Smith’s. No more anything? Just for the heck of it, I went on baseball-reference.com to see how many player photos I could identify, and all I got was Joe Torre. Then I checked the In Memoriam listing to see that pitcher Jim Corsi, a good nine years younger than me, died early this month. I’m shooting to match Eddie Basinski, who hung around for ninety-nine years before moving on four days after Corsi. According to his NYT obit, Basinski once serenaded Dodgers’ manager Leo Durocher with a violin in the Dodgers’ clubhouse at Ebbets Field. More of that, please. In a couple of hours, the grandson is coming over. He’s starting to crawl and throw things. Clare reports that he’s holding his spoon left-handed. My daughter always had a bit of Ted Williams in her. Maybe she passed it down.