D's Notebook

Month: March 2012 (Page 2 of 2)

NCAA Quick Thoughts

March 12, 2012 /

It’s mid-March, which means I should be sharing some NCAA tournament thoughts, right? This has, of course, not been a normal basketball season for me. So I honestly don’t have a whole lot to say.

I’m pleased KU got a #2 seed. That seems right. I’m pleased they get to start in Omaha, and should they be fortunate enough to win two games, have another reasonable trip to St. Louis the following weekend. A potential second round (Or third round, as the new terminology insists it to be) with Purdue could be fun. I imagine the Omaha police department will be called to break up a ‘discussion’ or two between Kansas and Missouri fans this weekend. Clearly the committee has a sense of humor.

But I opened this year with modest expectations and am, quite honestly, thrilled with how this season has gone regardless of what happens next. There will be no stress or angst from me this year. Unless, of course, we’re playing a 14 seed in the Elite 8 and things start going bad.

It’s Kentucky’s year, anyway. Everyone else is just playing for second.

Good luck in your pools.

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Three Things

March 9, 2012 /

Parenthood is a long, hard slog. It’s easy to get lost in all the negative things that wear you down each day/week/month. Thus, I’m going to attempt to end each week with three things that pleased me about my daughters over the previous seven days. Perhaps the public sharing of these acts will help me cope with the constant battles we’re having with them over other things.

M.: M. is our reader. She loves chapter books and is working through at least four different series right now.1 Thursday I went to the library and brought a stack of new ones home for her. As soon as I handed her one in the school parking lot, she began reading it. She read it all the way home. Once we got home, she sat on the couch and continued to read. Finally, around 4:30, she sighed, closed the book, look at me and said, “Daddy, I finished this book.” 163 pages in roughly 90 minutes!

C.: I love watching the constant give-and-take of big kid and little kid as our girls grow up. C. has an assignment from school to build a leprechaun catcher. Each time we talk about her plans for it, she lights up. Her eyes get big as she explains the ideas she has to lure the leprechaun in, how to keep him in, etc. She starts talking faster. The ideas pour out of her. She’s like a little tornado of big kid knowledge and little kid belief in magic.

L.: We’re having less issues with L. than her sisters right now, so it’s tougher to pick just one thing she’s done that delighted me this week. She is still using random phrases she’s picked up on TV or in movies. This week it’s been, “Well, whaddya know, Joe?” She’ll say it to me and her sisters. She’ll say it to herself in the van. She’ll say it while she’s playing with toys. It’s just funny.

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  1. The Boxcar Children, Ivy & Bean, Ramona, and then a couple fairy sets. ↩

Links

March 7, 2012 /

An important subpoint to my recent admission that KU basketball meant less to me than it used to is that I’ve drifted back to my first love: baseball. Baseball was the first sport I was nuts about. For a good chunk of my childhood, nothing else came close to my love of baseball.

Danny Manning and Michael Jordan changed that, beginning in 1985, and soon baseball was much less important to me than it used to be. By the time the 1994 strike wiped out the end of the season, I was fine being done with the game.

While I shunned baseball for awhile, I couldn’t stay away for good. Soon I was turning my back on the team of my childhood, the Kansas City Royals, and adopting the Baltimore Orioles for most of the 1990s. In the 2000s, I became a Yankee Hater, and thus hopped on the Red Sox bandwagon in 2003. Even then, though, baseball fell well behind my passion for basketball.

That’s been changing slowly over the past three years or so. The phenomenal MLB At Bat app reconnected me with the game in a way listening to games on my computer, or even the Reds and Cubs games we get on the radio here in Indy couldn’t do. The arrival of the MLB Network helped a lot.1 The youth movement of the Royals helped a lot. There were lots of factors, actually, but each of the past two winters I’ve found myself reading more about baseball and less about basketball.

That’s a far-too-lengthy introduction to what should be a regular feature here for most of the summer (I hope). Baseball links posts. So let’s get started, this week with some Kansas City-centric links.

Last spring Royals fans had hope for the future because of the glut of young talent in the organization’s minor league rosters. This year, though, feels different. There isn’t just hope and optimism. There is actually an expectation, even assumption, of success this year. I’ll write more later this month about that, and whether those feelings are misguided this spring or not.

Last week the Royals signed 21-year-old catcher Salvador Perez to a lengthy, and club-friendly, extension. There was something about that news, perhaps Sal’s comments during his press conference or the reaction of his teammates after, that immediately turned him into my favorite Royal. I know most of my readers who are also Royals fans already read Rany Jazayerli, but I loved his (lengthy) post about the Perez contract.

So as much as this deal looks like a bargain for the Royals, that doesn’t mean it can’t be win-win. Perez guarantees himself and his family a lifetime of security. The Royals ink a potential star catcher, a player they adore and who they think can be the catcher on a championship club, at a significant discount. The rest of us get to invest in a Salvador Perez jersey with the knowledge that he will likely be here for the rest of the decade.

Finally, and perhaps most important, I’ve selected my hat for the spring/summer of 2012. It was a difficult process. Do I go with a regular Royals hat, for the first time since the mid-1980s? Do I find an alternate hat as I did last year (A rather stylish gray hat with the standard KC logo)? Or do I finally pull the trigger on a hat I’ve had my eye on for three years? I went with Door #3. This year, I’ll be representing the 1955 Kansas City Athletics.

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  1. Ironically, I no longer have access to it as a Uverse customer. It’s on the next plan up from the one we are subscribed to. This is the only thing that was better about Time Warner than Uverse. ↩

Au Revoir, Peyton

March 7, 2012 /

No surprise. The Peyton Manning era in Indianapolis will officially end today, when the Colts announce that they’ve released him. It’s the correct move, yet still a gutsy one.

Much credit to Jim Irsay who has steadily made the moves this winter necessary to rebuild the franchise. A new GM. A new coach. And now a new quarterback. Perhaps if Peyton came back healthy next year, the team would still have another playoff run or two in them. But they would do so as weak contenders with salary cap issues that would prevent them from mounting a true challenge for a third Super Bowl appearance.

Irsay is wisely chucking the next two years to reboot the roster, hoping that smart moves in the next 2-3 drafts will set the team up for another decade-long run of winning. That strategy is not without risks. Andrew Luck could be a bust, or suffer a career-ending injury before he can establish himself as a franchise quarterback. Or Luck may live up to the hype, but the rest of the team’s draft and free agent choices may fail, leaving him as an elite player surrounded by mediocrity.

While there aren’t ever any givens in professional sports, moving on is the right, smart thing to do.

I don’t know that the relationship between Manning and the organization has been as drama-laden as the media has made it seem. There’s a part of me that thinks both Manning and Jim Irsay have been having a little fun with the media, ginning up controversy where there was none. Regardless, I think things will end on a good note today, with both men saying all the right things.

We moved to Indianapolis in 2003. The first home game that season, against then arch-rival Tennessee, was blacked out locally despite the Colts playing in the smallest stadium in the NFL. Nine seasons later Peyton Manning leaves behind a team that appeared in two Super Bowls, built a new stadium, became as reliable a home sellout as any in the league, and were good for 10+ wins for over a decade. Today, the city is firmly a Colts and football town.

The Peyton Manning era was a glorious success. We’ll be fortunate if the Andrew Luck era comes even close to it.

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Toeing The Line

March 5, 2012 /

M. gave up something big for Lent this year: playing the Wii. She had already lost access to it for a week because of a controller-related incident, but I give her credit for selecting something like that as her sacrifice.

Of course, by this weekend she was already saying she wanted to reclaim the Wii and exchange something else for it. Since we operate a very strict Catholic household, an arrangement was made. No one tell the Pope.

Speaking of all that, on Ash Wednesday I quizzed M. after school about her experience at Mass that morning. After telling me about it, she asked, “Why didn’t you get ashes on your forehead again?”

“Because I’m not Catholic.”

“What are you, Jewish?”

Nice that she already sees the world in binary terms.

We hauled the whole family to Mass Saturday night as it was the Mass at which all the scouts at M.’s school are honored. She was selected to help greet people, pass the collection baskets, and hand out bulletins afterwards, so she thought she was a pretty big deal.

She came and sat with us for a few minutes before Communion was presented. Sometimes I’ll kneel during the kneeling parts1, sometimes I don’t. Kind of depends on where we’re sitting and if there are people behind us. We were in a good spot Saturday, so I remained in my seat. M. look at me and said, “You don’t kneel because you’re too tall, right?” I have a feeling this whole My Father Has Different Beliefs Than I’m Being Raised With is going to be confusing/entertaining for a long, long time.

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  1. There’s probably a proper term for those parts of Mass, but I never learned them in my Heathen home. ↩

Reporter’s Notebook – Winter’s End

March 2, 2012 /

Baring something crazy happening this weekend, it appears my basketball coverage season is complete. We have four teams that are playing in tonight’s sectional semifinals – three in the same sectional – and even if two survive until regionals, our staff writers will have dibs on their games next week.

I didn’t work as much as I’ve worked the past two seasons, but thanks to favorable assignments over the last month of the season, my teams made a big comeback and left my Total Margin Factor for the season at +22. Four-straight double-digit wins wiped out the huge deficit I faced in early February. So thanks to those four teams for making it an enjoyable end to the year.

In addition to working less, it was a less eventful year. I think some of that comes with not seeing as many teams. I covered our best girls team twice and didn’t see the next-best girls team at all. In years past, I’ve covered both of those teams 3-4 times in a season. On the boys side, I saw our best team for the first time last week. I had averaged four of their games each of the last two years.

It’s all luck of the draw. Two years ago I was lucky enough to cover two amazing sectional games, both of which were decided in the final five seconds. I spent a lot of time with two teams that year, which made it both more interesting and the stories easier to write. This year there was a lot of meh.

Now comes the usual lull before the girls county tennis tournament in mid-April, and then sectionals in tennis, softball, and baseball in May. I’m hoping for better weather than last spring, when I was rained out five times and had to stand in rain for two of the three events I got to cover. Before you know it, I’ll be counting down the days for football to start.

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They Grow Up

March 1, 2012 /

Here’s the problem with your kids being fans of teen stars: the stars grow up.

Monday I’m at the grocery story, doing my thing. As I waited to check out, I took my usual glance at the register magazine stands. I chuckled at the tabloid headlines. I rolled my eyes at how often Jen and Angelina still make the covers. And then I was shocked to see, gracing the cover of Cosmopolitan, my girls’ favorite Disney star: Selena Gomez.

That’s right, sweet, wholesome, role-model worthy Selena picked about the trashiest women’s magazine on the market for her coming out party as an adult. There are grocery stores here in Indiana that slap Cosmo behind one of those metal flaps so you can’t read the cover blurbs about having the best orgasms of your life, that month’s sex quiz, or whether your lady parts are normal. It seems a curious choice.

I understand Selena’s Disney days are just about over; she turns 20 this year and Wizards of Waverly Place is no longer shooting new episodes. Her songs are getting more airplay on mainstream radio. She’s moving into more adult roles in films. But really, Cosmo? Aren’t there thousands of other women’s weeklies and monthlies that would have done the trick just as well?

Don’t get me wrong, Selena can do whatever she wants. I’m all for strong, independent women making decisions on their own, for the reasons they find most important. We are raising our daughters with that goal in mind. But Cosmo seems a little, I don’t know, aggressive, ambitious, disappointing even for someone with Selena’s reputation.

I’m just glad the girls weren’t with me, lest they see her picture, read the blurbs for the other features, and begin asking questions. “Dad, what’s a sex tip and why is Selena Gomez talking about them?”

Selena didn’t get a DUI or thrown into rehab. She wasn’t caught stumbling out of clubs late at night. There are much worse things my daughters’ idols could do. But once you’ve seen Alex Russo on the cover of Cosmo, it’s hard to unsee it. So yeah, I guess it’s really my problem, isn’t it?

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