A weaker entry into the series, but not terrible.

Stephen Strasburg finally made his Major League debut in spring training yesterday and he was everything that the Nationals could have hoped he would be in two innings. After receiving 15 M$ before ever throwing a pitch, you’d certainly hope he was amazing, but will he make the starting rotation?

His first two innings had two strikeouts, two hits, and no earned runs, making him somewhat of an oddity on a Nationals pitching staff that averages an over 10.00 ERA so far in spring training. Strasburg’s fastball was in the 96-98 MPH range over the 27 pitches he threw, with a few changeups around 91 and a wicked 81 MPH breaking ball. The man seems like he can pitch so far, but we’ll have to see how he does over the rest of spring training.

The question of whether or not he will make the opening day roster is not so cut and dry as whether or not he succeeds during spring training. There’s also the question of whether or not he needs more minor league experience to keep from burning out and the more important question of his contract. The way that baseball works is that once a player enters a full MLB level roster, his service clock toward free agency begins. Will the Nats try and wait him out so that they can have guaranteed control over him for longer? Can they afford to do that with the way they played last season? Who would come and fill the seats if they knew that Strasburg was being greedily held in AAA to save money?

In any case, the man’s only thrown 27 major league pitches, but I find myself buying into the hype. I’m pumped for this season. Hopefully I won’t have to watch such painfully bad baseball this year.

***

I don’t have any kids. This is actually a great thing for a guy in my position (24, single) and I wouldn’t have it any other way. The only time that I ever wish I did is when baseball season rolls around each year. I don’t know why, but there’s something about the game that makes me want to bring youngsters to the ballpark to take in the beauty of the sport.

It’s not like going to my first baseball game was a religious experience to me or anything, but I can remember the first time I took in a game at Joe Robbie Stadium (as it was named then) back in 1993, wide-eyed and seven years old. The Marlins were a new team in the MLB, I was playing my second or third year of baseball, and it was glorious. Joe Robbie’s seats were (and still are) orange, the sun was bright and hot, and I forever fell in love with a team dressed in teal. Throughout the years I remember going back to the stadium a few times with my dad, uncle, and even my little league baseball team, but I haven’t been to see the Marlins at home since 1998.

The team no longer wears teal, the stadium has changed names more times than any reasonable stadium should, and my family doesn’t even live in Miami anymore. Eric, David, and I are all in our twenties. Neither Dave, Eric, nor my parents care about baseball at all, but there is hope. My parents adopted three children and I’m sure that Eric will produce a child any day now. The next generation is coming and I have a chance to bring the American past-time to them.

There was a longstanding rule in my household that us children had to play a sport to keep busy and physically fit throughout the year. Like good Cuban boys, Eric, David, and I all started out playing baseball, but I’m the only one who really stuck with it. The new kids are getting to that age where it makes sense to start them up with some sports, but I’m wondering if they’ll end up trying their hand at the great game. More than that, I wonder what I can do to encourage it.

Given their age, it would be suicidal to try and take them to a Rays game, especially as a unit. The three of them wouldn’t be able to sit through one at-bat, much less an entire inning. The best thing to do, I think, would be to try and play catch with them instead or perhaps watch some baseball on the television with them. Chances are they’ll get bored partway through the game, but the seed will be planted. I already know they like playing catch and, honestly, what kid could resist trying to beat a ball with a club anyway, so it should be pretty easy, provided my parents start to enroll them in baseball teams, to build up a love for the game.

Of course, if I fail at it with this batch of kids, I’ve always got those future nephews or nieces to try on or, god forbid for many years to come, my own children.

In a sense, doing this blog is a really strange thing for me. I’m more than happy to share my opinion with anyone about the music, movies, or games that I love, but I get nearly crippling anxiety when it comes to actually compelling them to sit down and experience the media I’m trying to recommend. It makes no sense, of course. Why would it matter if they like it or not, right? I mean, it’s not like it’s life or death or that they’ll stop being my friend, but I still get nervous.

The weird thing is that I don’t ever quite reach the point of comfort with even my closest friends. Recommending stuff to my brothers is usually pretty simple since I know them so well. It’s an uphill battle most of the time to even convince them that what I’m offering is worth spending time experiencing, but once they do, I’m right maybe 90% of the time about whether or not they’ll like it. There’s almost no stress involved unless you take away that family element…

If it was because of a specific, tragic event, I must have repressed it enough that I don’t even remember it, but I can honestly say that there are few things worse than that feeling you start to get in your gut when you can visibly see that they’re just really not feeling it. It was just a few weeks ago that I was in Chicago hanging out with a friend of mine who attends Northwestern.

“Duffy, you’ve got to hear these guys. This is the perfect music for warming you up in winter. They’re brilliant.”

The disc in question was Vampire Weekend’s latest, Contra. It’s this crazy indie rock album with these great worldbeat sounds. I don’t really understand why they call worldbeat worldbeat when they mean Afro-Caribbean, but that’s just me, I guess.

“Yeah, sure. Pop it in.”

It all goes south from there. Knowing myself, I know not to look directly at someone who is listening to something I’m making them listen to. It’s agonizing. The silence from her side of the car is deafening. I start counting the number of times that “Horchata” calls out that Koenig is drinking horchata in December. Her hands lower the volume knob twice during the first song. I try to shake it off.

“Eh…well I love it. It’s got a different sound to it and that’s really what attracts me to it, but I can see where you might not.”

She hadn’t even said a word, but I was defeated. The rest of the trip I let her control the radio as we alternated between country music, Lady Gaga, and Ke$ha (and the musical part of my soul died just a little bit).

I loved Sambomaster before I knew I loved Sambomaster, but when I read “changing the world in japanese“, a fantastic article about the band by tim rogers, I finally learned the band’s name and heard their best song. It’s hard to justify how much I love the band since I can’t understand a single lyric that Takashi Yamaguchi is saying, but the band’s music does mean a lot to me and I did my best to evangelize “Sono Nukumori ni Yō ga Aru” as best I could to my friends and family. Dave took to it instantly and even the difficult-to-please Duffy thought that the music was “alright”, but I was stonewalled when I sent it along to my good friend Min.

“Yeah, I just don’t like music in a language I can’t understand.”

I’m sure that part of the whole anxiety thing comes from your run-of-the-mill fear of rejection, but I think that it might also stem from the perhaps too extreme emotional connection that I make with my media. Many of my strongest memories are tied to the media I consume and I sometimes make these connections almost instantaneously.

One week before I went to Chicago, I was driving up to Ithaca with Min to meet up with some old friends. We were listening to podcasts and All Music Considered, one of NPR’s finest podcasts, came up with their Valentine’s Day episode featuring breakup songs. Each of the staff members presented a breakup song that had particular influence on their lives and one chose the Stars song “Your Ex-Lover is Dead”.

“Wow. That was amazing,” I told Min.

“Yeah. A friend of mine sent that to me in high school.”

I didn’t tell Min that the song touched me in a profound way, but I think he could tell from my reaction. If Min hadn’t been there in the car, I might have found myself crying. It just brought back so many memories about my long and damaging relationship with Ashley that it was overwhelming.

“I’m not sorry I met you
I’m not sorry it’s over
I’m not sorry there’s nothing to save”

It could be that my reluctance to share is preventing someone from learning about media that they’d never heard of before, (I think back to all the times I’ve successfully shared Arrested Development with friends), but then there are times when my nature is proven correct. I correctly balked at exposing my father to Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, but he watched it anyway at the insistence of my brothers. He just didn’t get it.

There’s nothing like feeling that connection with someone over a shared experience. Having these interests in common gives us something to talk about and keeps conversation interesting. Maybe one day I’ll get over this fear of sharing. God knows I’m trying by writing this blog most days, even if I try to keep it a secret from most of the people I know.

Wow…that’s nothing like what I use Google Wave for…

Ethiopia

My war against France has not been going well. Rather than continue the pointless war of attrition thanks to my absurdly long supply lines, I’m working on discovering Mathematics, building catapults, and then capturing France.

I'll get you yet, my pretties.

Khmer Empire

With the sacking of Thessalonica, the Holy Roman Empire is no more. I learned from Eric that Justinian even made an impassioned plea to him to try and save his empire by going to war against me. He wisely wanted nothing to do with my army of horse archers and chariots and Justinian met his end. It wasn’t fair, but life isn’t fair.

The HRE is no more. Justinian has been removed from the game.

Another lovely side effect of the destruction of the HRE was that I gained the Great Wall wonder. You can see the breadth of my empire in the screen below. Note my mighty barbarian-repelling wall. Marvel at how useless it is since it lies mostly in the interior of my empire. Also note that the Mongolians are settling above me. Whether or not I should kill them is still a question in my mind.

Yep, the Great Wall is totally visible from space.

I also became Buddhist in this game since I captured the Buddhist Holy City of Constantinople (I know, haha). My work will be to spread its influence as soon as I can.

Portugal

The most pressing problems in Portugal are the oncoming barbarian swarms.

Weak barbarian hordes, but hordes nonetheless...

Other than that, Kublai Khan refuses to make peace, so my struggle continues. He attacked a swordsman and an axeman outside of his city with maybe six attackers and I miraculously fended them off. Thanks to that, the city will be mine next turn. Bwahahahahaha. Wish you made peace now, huh?

Some of Toriyama's famous and iconic monster designs

There are these little moments in Dragon Quest that are so lighthearted and ridiculous in the context of the tension of the narrative that I can’t help but laugh out loud. Tasked with re-entering the fairy kingdom to find a replacement Golden Orb, I noticed a cat outside a house. I don’t often talk to the animals in RPGs, but I’m sometimes struck with the desire to do so. This time the cat actually spoke. He told Dan that he was a magician disguised as a cat trying to get access to the fairy kingdom and asked Dan not to blow his cover. It’s tiny and insignificant, but it’s the little details like this that make me love Dragon Quest V. Yuji Horii is all about the small things.

Dan met with the Fairy Queen with the intention of getting a new Golden Orb, but instead found out that their attempts to make a new one had failed. They could only make a worthless imitation. However, all was not lost. A magical plan was hatched that only Dan could undertake and complete. By using a magical painting, Dan was able to travel back in time to Whealbrook, where I realized that I was not paying enough attention in the early game at all. Why did I realize this? Because I suddenly remembered interacting with a man dressed rather like me in purple in Whealbrook before. This man asked to see Dan’s Golden Orb and gave him some words of encouragement. The cleverness of it was almost too much. Future Dan had come back in time and swapped the real Golden Orb with the fake Golden Bauble. Ladja failed at his mission: he actually destroyed a fake all those years ago.

Beyond that, it’s also neat to get to talk with other people in the past and learn how they felt about Dan and Pankraz. Dan could even go and talk to Pankraz himself and fail at trying to convince him not to go to Coburg. It’s a well thought out sequence that doesn’t feel that cheap for a time travel story. I just love how Dan takes the time to tell his past self to stay strong and hold on. I can’t even imagine what it would be like to meet my past self after enduring the great multitudes of pain and sorrow that Dan has endured. What did Dan from the past tell Future Dan in response? “I won’t give up no matter how hard it gets, just like you said”

Golden Orb in hand, Dan returns to Castle Zenithia and raises it back into the heavens, awakening the actual Zenithians living within the magical castle. These winged dudes inform Dan that his next task would be reviving the Zenithian Dragon, which involves going to the Talon Tower and meeting up with some old enemies bent on stopping Dan’s progress…

Raptors are DANGEROUS! Watch out for them if you’re ever in Canada.

Uh….What?

Mega64 can be pretty hit or miss for me, but this was just hilarious and spot on. “Let’s go listen to some Weezer albums!”

They’ve really got my feelings on Sonic down pat.

The Olympic ice hockey gold medal match was a while ago (on Sunday) and it was a super-exciting game, even with its disappointing ending.

Despite owning the first seed coming into the competition, Canada was the clear favorite for the match thanks to its greater star power and skill and the added motivation of bringing home the gold on their own turf. Team USA put up a valiant effort with their squad, but just couldn’t get it done.

Canada put themselves up by one in the first period, establishing their game early when both teams were still playing extra strong, but surprisingly only added one more in the second when they had clear domination over the ice. The US squad was able to add one to their score, but were still trailing going into the third. Canada continued their domination in the third, letting up only every so often for the US squad to attack, but Team USA was unable to notch their second goal until they only had 24 seconds left thanks to an extra man on the ice.

The game was lost in the first OT when netminder Ryan Miller batted away a shot to the boards that was recovered by the Canadian offense and passed out to a strangely open Sidney Crosby who launched the puck between Miller’s legs.

Like the title says, it was the greatest hockey game I’ve ever seen, but it wasn’t without some very painful moments. The US team was definitely not as polished as the Canadians. All of our goals were a result of Roberto Luongo having an off night. He just couldn’t get his glove closed to reign in some of the rebounds and we made him pay for it. Canadian goals almost all came from sloppy US play. From Miller not properly clearing the puck in OT to the second period goal that resulted from a turnover in the corner, Team USA was just not as fundamentally sound as Canada. Worse still was our power play unit, which could barely hold the puck in Canadian territory and got maybe 4 shots on goal over three power plays.

Miller’s goaltending was fantastic as was our penalty kill, which successfully defended two (was it three? can’t remember) Canadian power plays. The offense wasn’t terrible, but they just couldn’t match the Canadian defenders.

It was a great game and it’s really got me pumped for the rest of the NHL season. Now I’m really hoping that it comes down to the Penguins and Capitals again at some point this year so that I can watch Crosby’s team get destroyed and lose their chance at the Stanley Cup.

EDIT: Totally forgot to mention! Spring Training MLB games start today! They’ve been going on in the NPB for a while now! Baseball is ALMOST BACK!