Journey into the Suns

This is the first, and could be the only, photo-centric blog post that I'll make on here because I'm terrible at remembering to take pictures when I want them.

From June 11-13, my good friend Phil was gracious enough to invite me down with him to visit a friend (Andy) who is interning for the summer with the Washington Nationals' Class A affiliate Hagerstown Suns (click here if you want to read a couple of great stories from the ballpark as told by Phil). Andy was awesome enough to get us free entrance into both Friday's and Saturday's game, both against the Charleston River Dogs (Yankees). Here are the pictures I took at the two games, along with a little commentary about the pictures and our experiences related to them: (sorry if the quality isn't the greatest; I took them with my BlackBerry phone)

Walking into the stadium. As you can probably tell, it's an older-style stadium that is maintained in such a way to keep its local, old-fashioned flavor. There are no video boards or electronic graphics in sight, just a public address system from the press box that sits atop the stands shown in this picture. The seating arrangement is as expected for any class A team's stadium: seating and bleachers ran most of the way down the base lines. Cars in the nearest parking lot, along the right field line, were very vulnerable to getting battered with foul balls.

The field from our seats on Friday. A roof covered the seats behind the plate, and there was virtually no way for us to catch a foul ball with the netting draped over the roof. The grass seemed decently well-kept; it looks like your average minor league field. The dimensions of the field are nothing out of the ordinary for a ballpark, and with the higher wall in left-center to center field, the field is less favorable for right-handed hitters to smack the ball out of the park.

The old school scoreboard, as seen from the beer garden down the left field line. As you can probably tell, outside of the electronically-kept ball-strike-out counter, it is entirely updated by hand; a nice staple of old-style ballparks. "Who keeps the score?" you ask. Well, the Suns have a Scoring Cowboy, fully clad in cowboy garb. He did a little bit of dancing when his presence was announced, and danced when the stadium had some danceable songs durring inning breaks, but he mostly did his job keeping the score with help from a walkie-talkie connection to the press box.

Finally, we get to some game action from Friday's game. Here, RiverDogs first baseman Luke Murton puts a pitch from Suns' pitcher Paul Demny into play, but flies out to right field to end the top of the 3rd. Unfortunately for the hometown Suns, the bullpen could not keep the RiverDogs in check for any possible comeback, the defense made some very untimely errors, and the offense never got going for the Suns. The RiverDogs won 8-2; all 140 lbs. of Kelvin Perez received the win. After the game, there was a nice little fireworks show that was very similar to the ones I've seen when visiting Erie for SeaWolves games.

The first fans through the gate for the Saturday game received a statue of former Sun and current Texas Ranger (as well as a member of my fantasy baseball team) Michael Young. I've always been a fan of Young, and I'm more than impressed that he's now collected the most hits as a Ranger than anyone else.

We got to sit in the VIP seating area for Saturday's game, as you can see from the close proximity of the action in the picture. At least some major leaguers like to swing pink bats during breast cancer awareness days; the Suns went with pink jerseys. The jerseys went to the highest bidders after the game through a silent auction.

Walking back to the dugout after just striking out against Suns pitcher Dan Rosenbaum is RiverDogs outfielder Zoilo Almonte. Almonte went 2 for 4 with an RBI on Saturday, following a Friday where he spearheaded the offense with two HRs. With such great hitting those two days, Almonte became a quick favorite of Phil's and myself. Rosenbaum went 5 innings, surrendering 2 runs and striking out 4.The Suns batter who I believe is swinging and missing at a pitch here is the Nationals' second round pick in 2009, second baseman Jeff Kobernus. As Phil describes in his blog, we had the distinct pleasure of meeting his dad, also named Jeff, who came all the way from Oakland to watch his son play in Hagerstown. Keeping with his season average, Kobernus went 1 for 4, though I did like the speed he displayed.Hagerstown did not disappoint in providing classic minor league between-inning entertainment. It's tough to tell from this picture, but I believe this contest was between two youngsters who had to dress themselves in the full baseball uniform while running all of the bases. That's one bit of entertainment that never gets old for me.Victory! After dropping one the night before, the Suns provided some very timely, late-inning hitting, including a HR by Justin Bloxom in the 8th, and secured a 5-3 win.

Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed the Hagerstown experience. It was both a traditional minor league ballpark experience with plenty of between-inning entertainment and elements of the town's culture itself, as well as a unique experience with the numerous retro touches around the stadium. Oh, and eating at IHOP for the second time ever was a nice finishing touch to the weekend as well. The 4 hours of driving there were well worth it.

Off-Topic Law School Update: I waited until all of my grades were in before I checked on them (in order to save me the repeated stressful buildup of going to check on my grades the minute they were released). Looks like they're keeping me around.

ATL

FINALLY, my final 1L semester of law school is over, and I can return to making entries on the blog without countless reading and writing assignments looming over me (I'm not counting the law review write-on competition entry due in just over a week).

So I've been kicking around ideas to get this blog running with frequency that a) are not the personal posts that I post once in a while, and b) are more than merely repeating statistics that you could find elsewhere on the Internet. As much as I love the Pittsburgh Pirates, I don't feel like becoming another Pirate blogger, when there are countless other blogs that do a fantastic job of covering the Bucs.

Enter the All-Timers League (the ATL). The plan is to have a draft of all the great major league baseball players since 1901 (the American League's inception) and create teams, probably using their average per-season statistics. I hope a sufficient number of people have interest in this. The amount of in-season manager involvement will probably be minimal, and will most likely be limited to making lineup changes resulting from injury. Unlike other replay leagues that use games like Strat-O-Matic, I plan to use the highly-acclaimed computer baseball simulator Out of the Park Baseball to carry out this ultimate of fantasy leagues. The game length will be the classic 154 games. As was done before division play, the top two teams (if the teams are not broken into two leagues) will meet in a best-of-seven All-Time World Series. We would be using the current 25-man roster limit; the manager can split up the position player-pitcher ratio as he pleases. The only restriction I will make on the players being drafted (besides playing after 1901, obviously) is to not include those who played completely in the Negro Leagues, only because I am not sure if they are included at all in the computer simulation and I do not know how their stats would compare to their major league contemporaries.

I hope we can get a solid amount of willing participants and find a day we can draft players. I will fill you all in on everything that I have not included in this post if you are interested. I hope this can be fun on a number of levels for not only myself as the commissioner of the league, but also everyone else who wants to participate.

First Semester Aftermath

If you don't know why his picture's leading off this post, Google him and find out. Then you may return for the rest of this post.

Before I begin, I wish for everyone reading this to have the best of years in 2010.

Although I’m only about a week away from starting back up with my spring semester classes, I just wanted to note my completion of my first semester of law school. It was a long, crazy ride, to say the least.

To those that say that law school changes the way you look at many things, I think you’re at least right in my case. My approach to watching programs on TV such as the legal issues of sports figures became a lot more critical, as I now have the knowledge to reason through what is most likely going on in their legal disputes.

Even in my everyday activities, legal principles arise in my brain rather quickly. The first time I drove my car after we finished discussing negligence in my Torts class, I made absolutely sure that I took all necessary precautions to ensure I wasn’t driving negligently should any accident occur. Yeah, I know, it sounds fairly paranoid. Blame law school.

Thankfully, despite not having anyone in my immediate family that attended law school, family gatherings weren’t dominated by discussion of what I was doing in law school.

I was pleasantly surprised that my section was filled with pretty good classmates. The classic description of one’s law school classroom is that there’s always "gunners", always willing to show off their knowledge of the subject and provide input, no matter how useless, to whatever discussion the professor has going at the moment. On the contrary, classes always seemed pretty civil and not dominated by a couple students. As always, I have to make a sports parallel; it was a team effort making it through our various classes this semester.

The law school curve does have me somewhat worried about grades (I should know what they are shortly after returning for spring semester). Thus, I tried not to carry on much discussion, if any, with classmates regarding how hard we thought the test was or how we answered particular questions. Really, any discussion seemed rather unproductive to me; the only person who truly knows and determines how well we did on the final exam is the person grading the exam: the professor. I’m hoping greatly that I can get a pleasant surprise soon from my grades. Good grades definitely would make me feel confident not that the big, high-paying firms will take a serious look at my resume, but that a wider range of good legal jobs will be more easily available to me.

I tried not to make this post too long; it’s merely to serve as my recognition, review, and basically celebration of completing my first semester of law school. Will it become more tolerable as the next semesters pass, as many say it does? I sure hope so...

Coming Soon...

Now that both leagues have decided their Cy Young Award winners, I will shortly post my version of the Cy Young Predictor. This year's award, according to the formula, was much more hotly contested than last year. As a sneak preview, I'll tell you now that unlike last year, where there were two much more clear-cut winners in both the voter's eyes and the formula's determination, neither of the formula's winners won this year...

The law school portion of my life seems to be moving along smoothly right now. The one graded exam I have taken went very well. With memos and such out of the way, I'll be focusing on wrapping up my classes, outlining for the imminent doom also known as 1L finals, and taking said finals. If only laziness were actually an option for a while before needing to study for finals...

That about wraps up my happenings for now. I'll make sure to get my big Cy Young post up ASAP. The Irish were robbed. Nice catch, Henry.

Assistance

Surprise! My first actual post here isn't going to be about something sports-related. I've just returned from the law building to finish typing this out.

A couple of years ago, while still attending the University of Delaware as an undergrad, a friend of a friend and his parents were touring the campus when they randomly ran into my friend and me. As a result, I ended up basically advertising the school to him and his parents through my take on what the environment was like at UD. The next fall, I found out that he indeed chose to go to Delaware, and I felt very pleased that I very likely had a substantial role in his decision.

With that being said, I invite anyone (and anyone who knows someone) who has questions about the University of Delaware, going to law school, and Pitt Law School to send your questions my way. I am more than willing to help you out with any concerns or points of interest you might have concerning each. I will give you one fair warning though: especially relating to Pitt Law, I might not have quite the requisite amount of experience to give you a solid opinion about it, but I'll do my best to explain what I know.

Essentially, I'm talking up my abilities to give a realistic perspective for others to use however they want. What I can tell you very quickly right now is that I certainly do not regret attending the University of Delaware. For the LSAT, you're probably not the kind of person who can just walk into the testing room and post a big-time score, so you'll have to take it from me and make sure you budget a decent amount of time to preparing for the different sections. I have no idea whether the approach I took in applying to various law schools would work for you as well, so if you're applying now, I can tell you what I did and what I'd probably do differently were I to do it again. As for law school, I'd be lying if I told you it's been easy so far, but the experience has been very rewarding intellectually and I've made friends very easily with many of my classmates. I'm thankful that my law school hasn't (at least not yet) served to be a cutthroat environment with professors willing to make class time extremely rough on students. Again, as for anything else you would like to know, feel free to let me know.

I think that about covers the basics regarding my invitation to give advice to those who seek it. Whether you use it or not, I wish the best to everyone who at least took the time to read this. Expect my first sports post to come just after the World Series ends; I have an interesting project of sorts planned...