Baseball on Double Secret Probation

So my wife says to me she says, "You gotta make up with baseball." Now she doesn't understand the depth of my beef with baseball or the pain that beef has caused me. But I see her point. The Astros won last night to make this a Fresh Blood World Series featuring two teams that never get there. The Sox last played there in 1919 and I don't need to tell you what happened that time. It was immortalized quite completely in Field of Dreams thank you very much. The Astros have been a franchise since 1961 and have never gotten there despite the best efforts of JR Richard, Nolan Ryan, and Craig Biggio. Plus they just got hit with a hurricane, with the gas shortage and the overreacting and the bus fire and the evacuees.

The most important thing about all this is that I married into a White Sox Family -- you see, my wife's dad is heavily invested in the White Sox and since he's been around a while he's been waiting over 70 years for a return on that investment. So my wife's understandably taken with the baseball this year, and I must admit that ever since the Yankees put down their gloves in shame after losing to the Halos (or is it the Halo 2's) and A-Rod and Giroidsy and That Guy were kept from getting their Blood Rings for one more year, I've been following out of the corner of my eye, not content to just mock baseball and point out the fact that even hockey now has fiscal sanity, leaving baseball as the only major American sport that still alows the Yankees to exist. I've really been following it. Baseball, I mean.

Which brings us back to the main point of this delicious post, which is my wife's legally binding request that I embrace baseball and at least put the many wrongs it has perpetrated against me personally on the back burner for a while, and see how it goes. I have decided to go along with my wife's request and put baseball on my list of things I follow, albeit on a probationary basis until I know this year wasn't just a Happy Abberation and we're completely out of the grip of the Finanacial Insanity and if the Yankees are going to win it's because of good pitching and solid hitting and not just because they bought some guy to shore up their problems. I'm looking at you, Johnny Damon. Don't do it.

So baseball is on Double Secret Probation until either the Yankees don't make the playoffs or the Brewers do, at which time its reinstatement in my sports landscape will be complete and I'll have a ceremony in my own head involving Cecil Cooper baseball cards and imitations of Glenn Braggs (above) getting ready to bat. That guy looked like he wanted to strangle that bat. Good day.