Month: September 2013 (Page 1 of 2)

Obligatory weekend notes.

I was finally back on the road for high school football Friday night. The game itself aside, it was kind of a mess. Thanks to a big construction project on the highways here in Indy, a drive that normally takes an hour, or just over, on a Friday night took 95 minutes. I rolled into the stadium with 7:00 left before kickoff. Fortunately, this school saves a seat for us so I had a spot in the press box. After the game, which the home team won handily, I spoke to their new coach, who is a great guy. When I got to my car and pushed play on my recorder,¹ 3:30 or so of the roughly four minutes we talked was complete silence. And since I asked the questions I thought were most important for my story up front, the quotes I planned on building my story around were gone. So what should have been a good story about a nice win ended up being kind of shitty. Not the funnest of nights.

S. was on-call this weekend, meaning she rounded on kids in the mornings. I got to sleep in just a little both days and by the time I was up, the girls were already up and playing. They’re in that collective phase now where they can go long stretches where they play great together, then go through a period where every 30 seconds someone is complaining, whining, or arguing about something another sister is doing. Both mornings we had more of the latter than the former. I have a hard time starting my days that way. It tends to make me short-tempered for the rest of the day. So a lot of Saturday and Sunday involved me angrily asking the girls questions like “How many times do I have to ask you not to do something before you listen to me?”

I’ve found the best way for me to deal with these mood swings is to avoid the girls, which makes me feel guilty about ignoring them. I’m reading a philosophy-type book now and just happened to come across a chapter last night about various styles of parenting. I realized that no matter what you do as a parent, you’re going to second-guess yourself and worry that something you did when you were angry, tired, distracted, or just not as attentive as your kids wanted you to be in that moment will somehow scar them for life.

I keep reminding myself that we, mostly, have the big things right. We’re around our kids, directing them towards positive activities, keeping them clothed and fed and clean, and making sure they take advantage of their educational opportunities. On the days when parenting is a chore, I think it’s useful to give myself these reminders. No one can be perfect. Just make sure that you’re doing enough positive to balance the weaker moments.

Colts win easily, which was good. You can’t take too much out of a game against Jacksonville, who are truly awful. But that is a team that beat the Colts in Indy a year ago, and for some reason has always given them fits, whether the Jaguars were good or bad. Large game this week against Seattle. I think that will be a bigger test of where the Colts are at than the San Francisco game.

I just checked Stubhub and the most expensive tickets for the Colts-Broncos game on Oct. 20 are sitting at just under $13,000. And those aren’t even great seats. I imagine that price is going to keep going up as long as the Broncos keep making a mockery of the game.

That game is going to be massive. Don’t think there’s not going to be some serious angst here in Indy in the week leading up to it. Hell, in a ten-minute trip to the grocery store last night, I already heard several angsty calls on a local post-game show. It’s not that people here are second guessing the decision to jettison Peyton. While there are some die hards doing just that, most people here are smart enough to understand just because he’s doing this in Denver does not mean he would be doing the same thing here, with a younger team and a less-stout offensive line. No, where the angst will come from is “Can we want the Colts to win and still cheer for Peyton?” Sports force us into us-or-them boxes, and I think people here are having a really hard time seeing Peyton as the bad guy, even if only for one night.

Baseball playoff predictions to come tomorrow, after tonight’s play-in game. I think we should call this a Super Wild Card game. Then, if Cleveland had lost yesterday, turning it into a three-way-tie for the final spot, we could call the double play in games Super Duper Wild Cards!

I’ll assume that people who are long time readers of the blog, and/or have known me for many years, have mental lists of my many odd traits. I’m not even going to jog your memories with a few examples. You know what you make fun of me for.

Here’s one more you can add to your lists:

Several times a year¹, I have a dream in which it is Christmas Eve or Christmas Day, and I realize I haven’t watched any Christmas movies or listened to any Christmas music yet. And I freak out because between Christmas Eve Mass, family meals, and hosting people, there’s no way I’ll be able to squeeze in Elf, Christmas Vacation, A Christmas Story, and my hundreds of Christmas songs before the season is over.

Now what the hell does that mean and why does it happen so often?

I had that dream last night, thus the occasion to share it with you. Now proceed in your fun-making.

(Stealing a line from Twitter…)

This is how the season ends. Late at night, in Seattle, on another evening when the offense is pathetic while losing to a bad team. Of course, I was long asleep when the game, and the Royals’ playoff hopes, ended with a 6-0 loss to the Mariners last night/this morning. But I knew that the Royals had to win to keep the most meager of playoff chances alive, and was not terribly surprised when I pulled up the scores as I was waking the girls up this morning.

A full post-mortem will come next week. But I have to say, this was a fun season. There are so many ways that this was yet another disappointing season. Long losing streaks. Ned’s poor in-game decisions. Losing too many games to crappy teams. Players who never got going, or couldn’t repeat their performances of previous years. Getz at second for a huge chunk of the season.

But I’m choosing to join the group of fans who acknowledge the many failures of this year’s team, while also enjoying the many successes. Baseball, kind of, mattered again in Kansas City, for the first time since I was in college. Whether this is the beginning of something, or just another blip, like 2003, remains to be seen. I sure hope it’s a start, and that next season, and seasons beyond it, will require me to watch/listen/check scores well beyond the equinox.

Man, I remember the early days of Korleone Young well. First, there was that unforgettable name. Then, the fact an allegedly world-class high school baller was coming up in Wichita about the same time as JaRon Rush in KC. KU fans dreamed of those guys playing together, along with Quentin Richardson. Alas, while Rush and Richardson were once committed to KU, none of the three ever enrolled in Lawrence.

Richardson’s had a long and solid, if unremarkable, NBA career. Rush, infamously, washed out at UCLA and never lived up to his hype. It was cathartic and kind of sweet when he showed up at KU games with the mother of his son, a KU alum, when little brother Brandon was playing for the Jayhawks. I loved the happy grin and wave he gave the camera when they showed him on the video board before a game early in Brandon’s career.

And then there was Korleone. He got the full Grantland treatment last week. How crazy is it that his NBA career literally lasted 15 minutes? There are thousands of stories like his, of athletes who seemed to have the world in the palms of their hands and limitless futures but found a way to throw it all away. His story strikes a little closer to home because I first heard of him when he was 14 or 15, and because he grew up in Kansas.

”That’s a sad one there,” said Gentry, now a Clippers assistant. “He was one of those guys — he was the poster boy for what they do now, making them go to college for one year… Korleone was one of those kids that if he would’ve gone to college, even for a year, he could’ve had a doggone decent pro career. But he was so deficient in so many areas that he just wasn’t ready. He wasn’t ready for this league.”

The Forgotten Phenom

Your weekly weekend wrap-up, featuring a two-hour stretch from Sunday that was as good as any sports moment this year.

This was no ordinary weekend. No, we had visitors! The Nesbitts traveled from Kansas City (with the Belfords also traveling here, but staying with the Heberts) for the Missouri-Indiana football game Saturday. There were plans to attend the local high school football game Friday, but rain ruled that out. ¹

Saturday we cruised down to Bloomington for several hours of excellent tailgating and then the big SEC – Big 10 matchup. ² Fortunately for those of us who weren’t terribly interested in the outcome, IU made it a game for a little while, and then MU pulled away at the end of the third quarter so that we could leave a bit early. These 8:00 kickoffs are rough for old folks with sitters watching the kids 90 minutes away.

It was great to have good friends visit and to enjoy absolutely perfect weather for football on Saturday.

Sunday was a soccer day for us, and we got the ideal schedule, at least from the parents’ perspective. Three games, all at the same time. S. had to do some shuffling around to catch glimpses of each girl, but I was tethered to L.’s field as a coach. She scored two goals, and seemed a bit down on herself for just scoring that many times. Never mind most of the kids in the game didn’t come close to scoring and the competition was a little better than last week.

I was able to swivel my head and see C.’s field, but missed her scoring her first goal of the year. By the time we got to M.’s field, after the two younger sisters had slapped hands with their opponents and gathered their post-game snacks, we got to see the last 4-5 minutes of the U-10 team’s game. And they were clearly either up big or down big because M. was playing forward. Turns out her team won easily and she was happy, so it was a solid day all around.

Race home in time for the Colts game. As I’m watching their bruising first touchdown drive, I’m following the Royals game on my phone. When Eric Hosmer doubled to lead off the tenth, I turned the TV down and toggled the audio on MLB. Bases loaded, no outs, became bases loaded two outs. The Royals seemed to be Royaling the chance to win away.

3-2, two outs, and, well, many of you know what happened next.

Justin Maxwell ends the home season with a swing that will never be forgotten, no matter what happens over the final week of the season. It’s a shame the Royals aren’t just a game back and Cleveland was playing someone difficult this week. Because Maxwell’s home run could be like one of George Brett’s three home runs against California in that epic September 1985 series, when the Royals won three-of-four and leapfrogged into first place on their way to the World Series title. But, even if it’s not perfect, that was a pretty amazing way to end the final home game of the year, clinch a winning season, and send a capacity crowd home happy.

By the time I listened to all the post-game stuff on the radio, got the kids inside, and began getting dinner ready, the Colts were up 10-7 at halftime. Surely the 49ers would make adjustments at the half and take control of the game in the third quarter. But the Colts’ defense kept containing them and forcing them to punt while the offense missed a couple chances to increase the margin.

A missed Colts field goal seemed to set the Niners up to take the lead early in the fourth quarter, but the defense held once again and the offense put together another long drive, with Andrew Luck running the bootleg to put the Colts up 17-7. A Colin Kaepernick fumble followed by Ahmad Bradshaw’s second touchdown gave the Colts two scores in 72 seconds, and a huge road win.

As I wrote last week, I thought the trade for Trent Richardson was a great move for the Colts. I was a little surprised that so much of the national reaction was mixed. When I read Bill Simmons’ reaction Sunday morning, I started to get worried. This line was especially sobering.

After the Colts lose in San Francisco this Sunday, they’ll be 1-2 with a home-and-home against Houston, home games against Seattle and Denver, and road games at San Diego, Tennessee, Cincinnati, Arizona and Kansas City remaining. They won’t be favored in any of those nine games. It’s true.

I mean, wow. I hadn’t thought of that at all. And, as Simmons wrote, if Luck gets injured this year the season is completely shot and they traded away a top quarter of the draft pick for a running back with serious questions.

Turns out the Colts didn’t lose Sunday, though, and who knows if San Diego, Tennessee, Arizona, and the Chiefs will be as dangerous when the Colts play them as they are now.

I still don’t buy all those questions about Richardson. We’ll have to wait and see how he fits in in Indy. And who’s to say that if the Colts do suck this year and they would be in position to draft in the top five next April, the guy they picked then would be any better than Richardson? I still say it’s a perfectly reasonable risk to take given the rest of the roster.

And, more importantly, I’m hoping this new level of toughness the defense showed on Sunday is a regular thing going forward and not a one-week fluke after last week’s loss. They shut down a very dangerous offense, on the road. Keep that effort up and life should become much easier for Luck, Bradshaw, Wayne, and Richardson not needing 30+ points to win. Now, if they can just find a way to protect Luck better. He can only take that beating for so long.

Between the walk-off grand slam and the Colts terrific performance in San Francisco, Sunday afternoon was a great capper to a fantastic weekend.

I don’t obsess about music the way I once did. I blame that on the digital music revolution. As much as I love having access to a seemingly endless stream of music, it also means I don’t live with an album for weeks at a time the way I once did. But there are exceptions to that, certainly, whether it’s a Pearl Jam or Clash week or when I do fall in love with a record and listen to it beyond its first week of release.¹

And then there’s the lone recent band that I listen to with only occasional pauses: Frightened Rabbit. Man, do I love those guys. After finally putting their most recent album Pedestrian Verse aside for a bit over the summer, I’ve been listening to it once again in recent weeks.

And then Stereogum decided to include FR in the “Ten Best Songs” feature, where a writer breaks down an artist’s career and then lays out a list of their ten finest pieces. Which did a number on my brain. Between listening to songs and watching videos, I listened to, ohhh, two million FR songs last night. OK, that’s a slight exaggeration, but I listened to a lot.

I had a mental list similar to this in the spring. I think I put it together one night while we were on spring break and I couldn’t sleep because of the nasty cold I came down with. I never shared it; I feared that even with my efforts to sell the band to my readers it would still be too esoteric. But many of my favorites appear on the Stereogum list. “The Modern Leper” is one of my favorite songs ever, but “Head Rolls Off” is a terrific song and the line about making tiny changes to earth was one that resonated with me in the days before L. was born. My favorite song of 2010, “Footshooter,” is here, as is my 11th favorite song of last year, “State Hospital”. My favorite song of this year might be on this list, although there are several FR songs in the running, a couple strong contenders by other acts, and we still have new Pearl Jam and Arcade Fire albums ahead of us.

Anyway, if you’ve always wondered what it is about the band that I love so much, this is a fine list of songs to sample and hear for yourself.

The 10 Best Frightened Rabbit Songs
 

I wasn’t sold on every move he made in the off-season, but yesterday Colts General Manager Ryan Grigson showed why he’s one of the best in the business. He absolutely stole Trent Richardson from Cleveland. Sure, he gave up a first round draft pick next year for Richardson, but the Colts will not be drafting in the top ten next year. ¹ That’s a hell of a move for a team that was relying on Ahmad Bradshaw to carry the load by himself after the loss of last season’s running back revelation, Vick Ballard, to an injury.

The trade is not without risk. There are questions about whether Richardson will be a star in the NFL. The thing with him joining the Colts is he doesn’t have to be the star. The offense will be built around Andrew Luck as long as he is healthy. Richardson just has to take the ball 15-20 times a game, eat up some yards, and force defenses to stay home rather than go after Luck with abandon on every down. If he does turn into a premier back, giving Luck his own Marshall Faulk or Edgerrin James, that will be a huge bonus. But it’s not necessary.

The Colts were unbelievably lucky last year in going 11-5. That luck was bound to disappear, and so far, that would appear to be the case. They’ve had a couple huge injuries early. The breaks they got a year ago were nowhere to be found in Sunday’s loss to Miami. I stand by my preseason prediction that they take a step back this year, maybe only winning 7-8 games, before they begin an extended run of excellence next year.

But getting Richardson yesterday could be a sign that fortune is still smiling on the Colts. The results may not come this year, but with a franchise quarterback and potential franchise running back added to the offense in 17 months, the team is suddenly in excellent shape for the near-future.

Reviewing how Richardson’s brief career has gone got me thinking about busts. People are awfully quick to label both football and basketball players who were stars in college but don’t tear up the NFL and NBA quickly busts. ²

The undercurrent of the articles about yesterday’s trade was that Richardson may not be as good people had thought before the Browns drafted him. That may well be true, but isn’t it a little early to definitively say that he’s a bust? He played most of his rookie year injured, on a shitty team, and still gained nearly 1000 yards. The Colts’ o-line isn’t a top-tier one, but with Luck, Reggie Wayne, and T.Y. Hilton demanding attention, he should get a little more room to run.

Richardson may end up sucking. He may be one of those backs who just can’t stay healthy, and shows flashes of brilliance but can never play more than 10 games a season. Or he, like so many great college backs before him, may just not be good enough to be an elite pro back but still manage to run for 800-900 yards a year and a dozen or so touchdowns. He may never be the superstar Cleveland needed him to be, but being serviceable is enough in Indy.

Finally, poor Cleveland. Or rather poor Cleveland fans. Sure, the Indians will likely make the playoffs, but no one seems to care, as they bring in about 10,000 fans a night. They lost the original Browns. Michael Jordan killed them in the late 80s/early 90s. They lost LeBron. And the team the city wants to succeed the most, the Browns, has generally been awful since the 1960s. The franchise seems intent on scrapping their current rebuilding project, which is only a year old, and starting from scratch again. You’d think the city could catch a break from the Sports Gods at some point.

As promised, the long, boring, navel gazery that is the “Why I Changed The Blog” post. Feel free to skip.

First, the important things you need to know. The landing page will show the five most recent posts. If you want to read further back, just hit the Journal link over on the left and you can browse to your heart’s content. To the tune of 150 pages of blog posts!

That’s right, I’ve finally gathered most of my web writings since 2003 into one site. Notice I say most. Over the years I had deleted things here and there during other platform moves. Somehow, sometime, I lost about six months of posts from 2011. And I did clean out some posts while moving everything to the new setup. But there are nearly 1350 posts from June 2003 to today if you want to keep paging back.

The downside to that is, at this point, I have no cool search function or formal archive section. Hopefully that will come in the future but for now you have to manually work your way back.

As I mentioned a couple weeks ago, I’m no longer posting pictures of the girls here. I figure they, and their friends, are getting old enough to use Google, so why post pics that can be used against to identify and possibly embarrass them. Chances are you’re a Facebook friend, so you’ll still get to see the occasional pic of them there.

I’ve also done my best to scrub full names from the site. Which took some work, because I used to use a lot of full names in posts when I first began writing on the web! How come none of you ever complained? Hopefully you will just see first names and last initials or family names, but never full names. If you find one I’ve missed, please let me know and I’ll clean it up immediately.

Regarding the old posts, I gave them all a quick skim to remove full names, bad links to pictures, clean out sloppy HTML, etc. But there may be bad links or the occasional rendering error. You should get the gist of most of them, though.

Also deleted have been the old Friday Vid posts. I’ll still be posting Friday Vids, but the YouTube format I will be using here is different from what I’ve used in the past. Rather than go through and update a couple hundred posts with new code, it was easier just to delete them all.

Finally, some explanation on what exactly has changed for the other geeks out there.

Over the past ten years I’ve used Blogger, TypePad, WordPress, Tumblr, and Squarespace. I liked Squarespace a lot and would still recommend it to anyone with limited technical knowledge who wants to build a website. But for all the things Squarespace was good at, it kind of sucked for the thing I care about most: getting the words in. Its web interface was temperamental at best, its mobile apps were unusable, and there were no signs they planned on upgrading/improving them any time soon.

Over the summer I began researching static, or flat-file, blog systems. An overly simplified, and possibly incorrect, explanation of these is that rather than being built with through databases, static blogs are built with simple text files. To write a new post, I open up a text editor, type in some words, save it to the appropriate folder, and the site is instantly updated. No logging in, copying/pasting into a web interface, or any of the other steps database-based systems require. Static sites should load quicker, be much easier for to update the software for, and take up less server space.

I spent a solid week reading up on static systems, another weekend playing with the Kirby system, and finally decided to go with Statamic in mid-August. Since then I’ve been collecting all my old posts into a folder, playing with a mocked-up version of the site in a virtual server, and now, here I am. In addition to the simplicity and speed of Statamic, the real beauty of it is that all the site’s content is stored in a single folder as a stack of plain text files. If/when I decide I want to do something new and different, I can just copy those files into the next system and everything will be there.

So that’s that. So far so good, and I’m pleased with how things look/work. Statamic is a fairly young platform, so while I’d like to add a few functions as it develops more, I also plan on keeping the site pretty lean. Once I can offer a good archive page, I think it will be about perfect.

As always, thanks for reading.

Twelve games to play, 2.5 games out of a playoff spot. Isn’t this what I said was all I really wanted from the Royals earlier this year? Meaningful baseball in September? Well, we got it. And in late September, to boot.

It’s been a crazy, weird, frustrating, enthralling season. Thanks to all the peaks and valleys, this whole Wild Card chase thing kind of snuck up on us. Obviously, the Royals have played (mostly) great baseball since the All-Star Break. But those two bad weeks they wedged in between the three hot streaks kept excitement from reaching a fever pitch.

Yet here we are, in the penultimate week of the season, with six straight games against other Wild Card contenders at home, and I’m staying up until 11:45 to watch every minute of a game that was decided at least an hour earlier. Between innings I’m checking score for Tampa and Texas, Baltimore and New York, double-checking the Wild Card standings and mentally moving the teams around as the scores change.

The odds are against the Royals. They’re really only back in the Wild Card race because Tampa and Texas have gone ice cold this month.¹ Chances are at least one of them will right the ship over the next week and hold on to one of the playoff spots, while Cleveland, with their weak final nine games, will ease into the second opening. But, dammit, the Royals are still in it.

The consensus opinion on Twitter and in the Royals blog community was that the team needed to go 5-1 this week against Cleveland and Texas to still have a shot next week. Last night was a great opening salvo, but it was just one game. Tonight the Royals run out rookie Yordano Ventura for his first-ever big league appearance. Man, what a moment for the young fella. I’ll be hustling the girls to bed, grabbing an 80 Acre, and taking a seat on the couch to watch the Royals try to catch the team in front of them. It’s like September 1985 all over again, although I’m pretty sure I was drinking Cherry Coke and listening to Denny and Fred on the radio instead of watching MLB.TV back then.

Well, that was pretty easy. As you can tell by reading this, the site is up and running just fine. It took me about half an hour to make the final changes and move the site over to its new home. I’ll write about the changes in the next day or so, but the important thing is that everything appears to be working fine.

The weekend was chock full of activities for us.

Friday night was a series of special nights for our girls. M. and her buddy next door went out to eat and to shop with their moms. C. and her pal went with the neighbors’ dad to a jump place and McDonald’s.

Which left L. and I. I did not have a game to cover – I covered the county tennis meet on Thursday – so I asked her where she wanted to eat. And after shooting down her first two ideas – McDonald’s or Wendy’s – by reminding her we could eat at those places anytime, she shouted out, “Barbecue sandwiches!” Alrightie, then! So we went to a local ‘cue joint where she had the had pulled pork, I had a combo plate, and we had fun eating together. After that, I took her for her first ever round of miniature golf. She played it a little more like hockey, following her ball and batting it forward constantly, but she loved it.

To top off the night we hooked up with the big sisters and other parents at another neighbor’s home where a fire was roaring and the kids made smores while the parents drank beer and enjoyed the fire.

Saturday was a damn perfect day here. It was one of those fall days I kind of hate, as it was gorgeous outside, but there was lots of football on inside. And we have a couple new soccer channels so I could flip between soccer games in England, Italy, Spain, and France all at the same time. It’s a fine way to avoid Big 10 football. C. had a friend over to play, so they made cake pops for us all to enjoy. In the evening, S. and I got to go to a very nice restaurant for dinner with her partners. There’s never anything wrong with eating steak.

Despite all that, Sunday was the highlight of the weekend. It was our first week of soccer. The girls’ teams all opened the season a week ago while we were flying back from Boston, so they were anxious to catch up.

C.’s team is the opposite of her team a year ago, which featured three large, older boys who could power through the other teams at will. This year’s team is tiny and very young. And they were playing a team that was much bigger. It didn’t go all that well. But C. just runs around with a smile on her face and giggling the entire time she’s on the field. She got an assist late in the game.

I missed M.’s game, but her team lost a tough 1-0 contest. It sounds like she spent a lot of time on the field, but as has been her way over the years, she’s still kind of skittish early in the season and tends to shy away from action.

I missed her game because I was coaching L.’s team at the same time. Man, was she excited to finally play a game! Remember, this is the kid who would wear shin guards, cleats, and a hand-me-down uniform to her sisters’ games last spring. Her team is also pretty young, and we have some issues getting everyone to show up. But we had all five kids, it was warm but not hot, so things were looking good.

It didn’t take her long to score her first goal. Then another quickly after that.¹ Two goals in her first five minutes of action! The rest of her team did great, too; I was worried after some dicey practices that involved multiple meltdowns. I think every kid scored at least one goal. One girl scored two. Another boy scored three. And L. ended the game with five! I know, we don’t keep score, blah blah blah. But L.’s team won because homegirl scored three second-half goals. She knows how to finish strong.

So I had lots of high fives to hand out as the regular head coach was gone and I was on the field the entire game. I hate to read too much into one game this year, and C.’s team’s performance last year, but kids seem to score goals when I’m coaching them. It’s a gift, I guess.

The weekend wasn’t a total success. The Royals dropped two of three in Detroit, with an obligatory maddening managerial decision that affected the outcome Sunday. The Jayhawks lost their make-or-break game in Houston Saturday. The Colts let the Dolphins come to town and beat them. And I’m headed to 0-2 in fantasy football.

But that stuff would just have been icing on the pie. As I sit here watching Sunday Night Football on the big TV,² drinking my first Sam Adams Oktoberfest of the year, I can let those disappointments slide and savor an otherwise tremendous weekend.