I have to take a moment to say something about baseball. It's been a while. I enjoy the game and the team I have followed since 1994 has been the Cleveland Indians. They enjoyed their big years in the 90s, with sellout home games, and then lost many of their best players to big contract free agency (Albert Bell, Manny Ramirez, Jim Thome), or to big trades (Bartolo Colon, Roberto Alomar). They went through their "rebuilding" phase (a term teams use when their players are young and mediocre and they don't really expect them to compete). Well, this season, it may finally be paying off.
As of today, the Indians own the best record in all of baseball, have a 7 game lead in the AL central, and are highest in the league with +66 runs scored versus runs allowed.
One of the ways they got to this point was through trades. Trades of big name players, especially Cy Young award-winning pitchers (two years in a row!) is particularly painful to watch. You're giving up a proven and known quantity for "prospects." (Another baseball term that means "we think they're going to be pretty good.")
So looking at key trades over the last five years, we can see how the current team has emerged. Below is a partial list of trades. Who was traded, and who was received in return. I only included players who are on the current big league 25 man roster.
PLAYERS TRADED --- CURRENT MLB PLAYERS
Eduardo Perez
Asdrubal Cabrera
Ben Broussard
Shin-Soo Choo
CC Sabathia
Matt LaPorta, Michael Brantley
Casey Blake
Carlos Santana
Franklin Guiterrez
Joe Smith
Mark DeRosa
Chris Perez
Cliff Lee/Ben Francisco
Carlos Carrasco, Lou Marson,
Victor Martinez
Justin Masterson
Kelly Shoppach
Mitch Talbot
So in evaluating this chart, one of the questions we must ask ourselves is, knowing what we know now about these young players, would we make the trades in reverse today? In other words, would you exchange Justin Masterson for Victor Martinez today? Probably not.
Maybe when I "retire" I'll do this. I don't know, I guess you might say I already enjoy my dream job, but this would be even dreamer. It took this picture this summer at a Durham Bulls game. The house "organist" is just sitting out there in the open, doing his thing.
He gets to watch baseball every day, and make thousands of people listen to him while he plays the keyboard. I could do this.
Today we had a busy day. We have visited three churches and taken in five services in a little over 24 hours! It has been great to see how various churches "do church" and hear how other churches experience similar positive and negative issues from a musical and technical standpoint as we do at Providence.
We started our morning back at Saddleback where I went to the gospel style "Praise" service and Kenton attended the high octane "Overdrive" service. In the Praise service, they covered a couple of the Israel Houghton songs. Here is a little snippet of the service:
One of my disappointments about being away from home this weekend is that I was going to miss Joel and Sonia's version of "When I Think About the Lord." Well, I was fortunate to hear it covered congregationally at this service. A great sound!
A couple of quick observations.
There were a total of four songs in the opening.
Buddy Owen's sermon included some worship time at the end so I'm betting they did that today as well (we didn't stay for the whole thing).
They had another B-3 in this venue.
It appeared that the sermon was the 4:30 service from Saturday was the one they used in the outside venues all day.
The "welcoming pastor" spent a good deal of time inviting the congregation to thank-by-applause the members of the band and the vocal team and the choir, some specifically by name. I don't know if that was the norm.
Saddleback does a good job of welcoming people coming onto their sprawling campus.
It was interesting that with the venues spread out across campus, when the music your venue was done, you could often hear and feel the pulsating music from another venue.
Across the campus the venues focused on a theme, but did not necessarily contain the same songs. Each venue leader appeared to be allowed, maybe even encouraged to plan a service that matched the overarching weekend theme in the language of its venue.
After our time at Saddleback for the 9:00 services, we took off for Mariner's Church to take in their 11:00 service. This seems like a nice church. The whole courtyard area is set up for kids. Not sure if this picture shows all the beach balls and toys out in the lawn area, but I wanted to run out there and play.
The music was led by a band, song leader playing acoustic guitar, electric, bass, drums, keyboard, violin, and two female singers. The song selection featured a couple of hymn reworkings for band (Great is Thy Faithfulness and one other well-known one that I've forgotten), along with You Are Holy (Prince of Peace), and Heart of Worship.
The presentation looked nice, the worship leader was a little elementary-school singing some of his instructions which felt weird to me for some reason, but seemed likable and enthusiastic. The pastor's name is Kenton, which Kenton seemed to think was cool.
This was the church's version of laying hands on people during a dedicatory prayer for their VBS teachers for the week.
They must do it often because people didn't need much instruction on what to do. I just thought it was interesting. There was an overflow area we discovered that was pretty full, multiple flat screens carrying the service. I don't know what to say about the 45 minutes we spent there. It seems like a nice church--I don't know what I was expecting, but from a musical standpoint, from an engaging standpoint, it was kind of underwhelming. Of course, I had just come from a high-energy gospel style service to a small-sound presentation, but still, I was hoping for a little more on the musical side.
After this service we ran up to Dodger Stadium where we sat and watched the Indians play the Dodgers. The bad news was it was 94 degrees. The good news is our seats were in the shade from the overhang of the section above us. The bad news is, the Indians lost the game. The good news is, they won the series. The final score was 4-3. Paul Byrd was rocky in the first inning and gave up all four runs before the first out was made. The team never recovered.
I think Casey grounded out on this at bat, but a run still scored.
After the game, we drove a couple miles up the road to the 6:00 service at Mosaic Church. This church was in downtown L.A. It meets in a nightclub known as the Mayan Theater.
Erwin McManus is the pastor. I'm glad we went. It was an interesting experience. The church at this location (they have others spread around town) is geared for the 20-something crowd. They began a series today called "Practical Wisdom" from the first seven verses of Proverbs 1.
Here's what the room looks like. I captured this before the service started.
This band was led by a guy singer playing electric guitar, a female singer who also played Sleigh Bells and Orchestra bells. The drummer played "shieldless," and there was a bass player as well as a rhodes/moog-mod player and an electric violin player.
I think the mix was the best one we heard all day. The guy and girl sounded great and there was a third girl that played the piano (solo) and sang at the end. Also very good.
The songs were not familiar to me. Some seemed original, only on one song did I get a sense of the congregation singing along like they really knew it.
From the moment the doors opened (about 15 minutes before 6:00), a gal was sitting on a little side stage, evidently oblivious to the room. She was creating a thing in photoshop or pagemaker that was projected from her laptop onto an over sized tee-shirt "screen." She finished with it about three quarters of the way through the service (in the middle of the sermon), got up and inconspicuously walked away. No one said anything about her, or about it, pointed it out, etc. Just kinda happened.
McManus was great. After teaching a little bit on Proverbs 1:7, he decided to dispense wisdom by taking specific "what should I do in this situation" questions from the "community" with the help of people on roving microphones. He handled it really well.
This has been a really long day. Kenton has been sawing logs over here since 10:00. We look forward to seeing the rest of the Chapel crew arriving tomorrow.
....If you are an Indians fan. One game down, 161 to go. It was a good day for offense, not what one would expect when looking on paper at a pitching match up featuring CC Sabathia and Mark Buehrle. I rounded up some poor guys who could care less about baseball and we met at Champs, requested that they put on the game, and watched the whole thing--at least I did.
The two things that I don't care for are highlighted above. First, Victor pulled a hamstring (evidently) while running from 1st to 2nd on a wild pitch. Pulled up short and was tagged out. He's a force in the line up and you hate to see him go down. Something similar happened to him in game one last season when he pulled a quad while running to 1st.
The 2nd thing is "Progressive Field." I'm not a fan of that. It's nothing against Progressive, it's just hard to think of the place as anything other than Jacob's Field.
Is there bias in the media? I mean the baseball media? I mean, east coast, New York-centric media?
On the day the Indians become the first team in all of baseball to clinch their division title, here are the offerings on the baseball portion of MSNBC:
Yankee's clinch? No. Sox Clinch? No. Indians? YES. Story about Cleveland? NO.
For some reason, I enjoy reading the opposing team's home town paper to get their take on their sports team. Again, from the Detroit Free Press's Michael Rosenberg:
Well, I always wondered what it's like to be an obituary writer.
The Tigers are dead. Finished. Sans pulse. They are sleeping with the fishes, by which I mean the Marlins.
The Tigers are now 6 1/2 games behind the Indians with 10 to play. That's like being 6 1/2 miles behind in a five-mile race. Their wild-card hopes aren't much better: They are five games behind the Yankees in the loss column.
When the Tigers show up at Jacobs Fields this morning, they ought to wear black uniforms. Sure, it would be weird, but black would go nicely with their red faces.
Something like this is rare for Cleveland fans so we have to enjoy it while we can. But it's nice to see the diligence of a long-term plan coming to fruition. No panic, just stay the course. I like that.
I won't say the Tigers are finished. But if my life depended on them making the playoffs, I'd buy a lot more life insurance.
In the bottom of the 11th inning Monday night, Cleveland's Casey Blake hit one out of the park, and that means the Tigers will likely be out of the postseason.
Wish I could be in NEO, I'd be at a few of these games!
I sometimes think about conflicting things in my life and wonder what it says about me and the direction of my family. I also wonder on a macro level about how these things affect our culture, and the future of our culture. It has been said that our post-modern times are fundamentally contradictory. We think the world is falling apart, yet we consume and waste like there's no tomorrow. Religion is down, but spirituality is up. We build huge homes, yet the typical family spends less and less time together in them. We buy in to all these time-saving devices, yet feel as though we've never been busier.
My tensions, or conflicts are many, but here are some related specifically to technology that I've been thinking about lately.
On the one hand, I want a huge 1080p HD television with a BluRay player and HD satellite or cable so I can enjoy and experience the best in modern home theater entertainment. On the other hand, I want to get rid of our 27 inch CRT because of the low priority I want to place on it and how, compared to the average family, how infrequently we watch it.
On the one hand, I want to subscribe to cable or satellite service that delivers a million channels, especially the ones I know I enjoy, History channel, ESPN, Discovery, and so on, mostly so that I can spend my time flipping through all my options, not necessarily settling on one thing to watch. On the other hand, I need to be content with my life line cable, the major networks, a couple of Spanish channels, some PBS, WGN and TNT. Oh, and CPAN 2, for some reason. Why pay the money for all those extra channels if we're trying so hard to de-emphasize TV in our family?
On the one hand, I want an iPhone. Those things look so cool! On the other hand, I want to get rid of my cell phone. Not because I dislike it, but because let's face it, do I really NEED a cell phone? I pay Sprint $68/month so that people can reach me nearly on demand; yet I have email, voice mail at home and voice mail at work. I'm not THAT important!
On the one hand, I should dump MLB. It's a commitment. I've replaced the vacuum created by hardly watching TV with baseball. But for some reason I enjoy it so much. On the other hand...um, I enjoy it so much!
One the one hand, I should dump my online Blockbuster subscription. What a crazy thing it is to devalue TV/Cable/Satellite, think I'm clever because I'm not spending extra money on all those channels but then get movies I sometimes don't care about in the mail. And then I watch them! I should read a book! On the other hand, I enjoy movies. I like being caught up on what's being produced. I like the story telling, the art, even-- the production of movies. I enjoy a story, of just about any subject, told well.
As I type this I am becoming aware that what I'm dealing with is not a conflict of interests, but a conflict of values. I do value gadgets. I don't know why. I guess I also value the art of movies, the drama (though not all see it that way) of baseball.
I have not settled on where the moderate level of all these things would be. I jump in to a thing and soak it all up sometimes, even if it means just soaking it up on the periphery. I am not sure I have arrived at priorities. I mean, beyond the very important things of God, my wife, and my kids, these other things must descend in some meaningful way from there. I am uneasy or, uncertain, anyway, about how all this should balance in my life.
I feel like I owe someone a blog post. Truth is, I have so many things I could post about, I don't know where to start. Maybe I'll do the Gary Underwood bullet points to get caught up and go from there.
We recently returned from a long trip. First a drive to Iowa, where we spent time with Janet's family, here sister in the Waterloo area and her folks 45 minutes away on "the farm." While we were there we celebrated Lindsey's 6th birthday and the Chezik's 50th wedding anniversary. We had a great time!
I got to go to a worship conference at Saddleback Church in Orange County, CA. it was great! more on that some other time.
I visited the Y a couple of times while in CA. I like the Y in Raleigh better.
On the first night in the OC I skipped early registration and went to an Angels baseball game. They played KC who swept them in the three game series.
It's humorous to me that in CA, the highways are all qualified by the locals with "the." It's not "take 405 to exit 106," it's "take the 405 to exit 106." I'm gonna start referring to 440 and 540 as "the 440" and "the 540" and see if it catches on.
At church, I feel like we could do a lot of things better, but I also feel like we do things as well as most churches. I'm mostly referring to music and tech here.
I had the largest pork tenderloin sandwich I had ever eaten at this fair, in IA.
Before our trip, we had to spend about $860 in our van, plus get it inspected.
While returning to Iowa from CA, via DFW, I missed my connecting flight and had to sleep overnight in Ft. Worth. I hooked up with a couple of dangerous characters:
Over the course of many hours of driving, one of the ways I entertained myself was to "read" by audiobook Crime and Punishment. I'm about 1/3 through it.
Man, was it hard to go to work this morning. The services went well, but it was a lot of work! God works in spite of us.
It's been a long time since I've been able to see a Major League Baseball game. It was great to drive up to Baltimore and not only see a game, but see Camden Yards, and see the Indians play. We left around 6:30 in the morning and arrived right around noon (after three stops, thanks to the Starbucks boys). Keel flew in from Cleveland at the same time, arrived at the airport, took a train to the stadium and watched the game. It was great to see him again.
The view from our seats just before the game started.
Brian, Eric, and Mike all took in the game. We never could get Mike to wear that Indians hat he just carried around all day.
Eric "insisted" we get our picture taken with the Orioles Mascot. He (or she) stayed and posed even though we all had our Indians garb on. Notice who conspicuously offered to take the picture.
After Hafner hit the grand slam in the 8th (I think) making it 9-1, the stadium emptied and we moved down to the lower level, a few rows behind the dugout. Here's Grady Sizemore in the on deck circle.
The final score.
This is the right field plaza. The famous long building is on the left and right and right-center field is on the right.
The put these little plaques in the sidewalk to denote locations of where long home runs landed and who hit them and when.
This is actually on the wall of the long building on the other side of the plaza.
I think it's a great game, baseball, that is. But I do NOT understand this:
It's been a while since my last post (sorry) and I've noticed since I last had anything I felt was worth posting, the Major League Baseball season has started.
I was excited when I learned that the season started with the Indians at the White Sox on Sunday night, April 2nd. Excited because ESPN had requested that the game be pushed back from the original Monday afternoon start to Sunday night so that they could air a good division rivalry.
Eric, being the big fan the he is, and me, being the big fan that I am, decided we needed to ring the season in at a place where we could watch the game on a big screen. We found a Damon's and got some ribs. Dave B., Eric's brother in law, and former Ohioan joined us as did Mike P, whom we are slowly but surely converting [back] to baseball.
The game was a drag. They played three or four innings, ended up tied, CC left the game early with a strained muscle in his abdomen, then it rained (in Chicago, that is). It rained for three hours. We didn't stay for the conclusion of the game. We couldn't if we wanted to--the place closed at 10:00. In fact, I couldn't even stay awake for the conclusion of the game once it resumed.
In spite of a let down for the opening day of this season, there are a number of reasons to like baseball. Here's a list of random thoughts regarding the game and what's so great about it.
162 games plus spring training and play-offs
You don't have to wait a week for the standings to change
A team can overcome a multi-game losing streak and still get to the play-offs
Minor league development
Minor league games
"Duct tape night"
The "game within the game" --pitcher, batter, etc
No cheer leaders
Get into most MLB games for under $10. About as much as going to a movie.
Fan participation (foul balls, bats)
Free souvenirs
No clock to govern the game
Managers get tossed
Players get tossed
Sometimes there's even a bench-clearing fight (close to hockey, Mike and Dan)
The defense has the ball
Game of threes: 3 strikes/out 3 outs/half-inning, in a perfect game, each batter can face the pitcher 3 times (27 outs=9 innings)
No "tie" column in the standings-each game played until somebody wins
You can get a tan while watching the game
You can eat peanuts (the perfect snack) while watching the game
You can leave peanut shells under your seat and someone else will clean it up
I like baseball. I've been following the Cleveland Indians for ten years, practically since I've lived in NE Ohio. This is a young and exciting team that as of this post has the lead in the AL wild card. I've been fortunate to go to several games this season, both in Cleveland and in Chicago, Seattle, and New York. It's fun to follow the team at the away games!
With three weeks left in the season, the precarious one game lead over the Yankees and one and a half game lead over the Athletics could disappear in a hurry. But here's why this scrappy team has a chance. They are only number one in one major pitching category (see below) but rank in the top six of several other important offensive and pitching categories. For example, they are number 4 in the league in runs scored, number 5 in home runs, and number 6 in batting average.
Rafael Betancourt, one of the Indian's relievers, retires the last batter of the game Sunday night.
The pitching has done really well this season as well, with the starters' ERA at 4.10, putting them at number 5 over all among AL starting pitchers. The bullpen, however, is the best in the league. A fantastic 2.87 ERA puts them at the top, anchored by Bob Wickman with a league-leading 39 saves.
The Indians swept a three game series with the Twins Sunday night, pushing them 8.5 games back in the wild card race, and practically ending their playoff hopes.
So, when you take a team with stats like the Indians, not number one in everything, not dominant in slugging percentage with big boppers like Boston, or four amazing starters like the White Sox, but very good in almost every category, it adds up to a team with a lot of wins. Right now, they are 20 games over .500, and they're giving the AL big-budget teams a run for their money!
