Hey, where ya been??
Well, I’ve not been here. I notice that the last post I wrote was right after the Blacksburg shooting. Since then, my daughter has matriculated at Virginia Tech, my house has undergone a major renovation, and I saw a lot of baseball games.
Nothing much that many people will be interested in, I guess–but plenty has gone on. Baseball has consumed a lot of my attention this summer. The Washington Nationals had a much, MUCH better season than anybody predicted, finishing with a record of 73-89. That doesn’t sound so good, unless you consider that the major sports press predicted before the season that the Nationals would be “historically bad.” For example, Gary Graves in USA Today compared the Nats with the 1962 Mets.
The sports geniuses at ESPN.com had the Nats losing anywhere from 93 to 113 games. Sports Illustrated’s own geniuses predicted the Nationals would be dead last among all 30 major league baseball teams.
I am happy to report that all these “experts” were so wrong it’s laughable. The Nationals finished just better than four teams in the National League and four in the American League. The Nats were very important in the New York Mets’ collapse at the end of the season.
So, yeah, 73-89 is a mediocre record. But we gave at least a couple teams–Philadelphia and the Mets–a lot of heartburn in the month of September. And we made a bunch of sports pundits eat their predictions.
October 10th, 2007 at 3:07 pm
Your disappearance was so creepy, happening at the time it did. Glad to hear you’re alive.
October 10th, 2007 at 4:07 pm
Yeah, sorry about that. I realized a couple weeks ago that the last thing I posted was about the shooting at VA Tech. Actually, life has been going on quite happily since then, and my daughter actually enjoys it there (with the usual freshman homesickness now and then).