Wednesday, June 9, 2010

Merry Strasmas



(Editors Note:  this is sports related… if you do not care about sports, stop reading now… you won’t offend me.  Also, please keep in mind, this may happen often on this blog… )

Ok so growing up I wavered back and forth between rooting for the Mets and rooting for the Orioles.  My best friend Timmy and I played on the Orioles in little league, beginning my interest (that and Cal Ripken Jr.) in the O’s.   This was further complicated by the fact that my local minor league team (the Norfolk Tides) was a Mets affiliate who later drafted third baseman David Wright who went to high school about 3 miles from where I grew up.  Long story short, I didn’t really follow baseball that closely until the last few years.  It was then that I truly realized that of my two teams one was destined to get their asses handed to them for all of eternity (O’s) and the other is managed by the worst ownership/management team in the MLB…. [I was going to say in all of sports but then I laughed and thought about the Clippers… ]. 

I decided it was time to select a new team to root for.  I thought long and hard.  I watched a lot of games.  I ordered the MLB package.  I stayed up late to see Padres/Dbacks games.  And eventually I came to a decision.  It had to be the Nationals.  They are only three hours away, have a brand new beautiful stadium, their games are on TV for free, they have sweet new unis (http://presidentsrace.files.wordpress.com/2008/11/new-nationals-uniforms-dc.jpg), they have a great young team that I can root for (Zimmerman happens to be a local Virginia Beach kid) AND they had one of the best pitching prospects of my lifetime working his way through the minor league system – Steven Strasburg. 

Fast forward to last night.  Steven Strasburg’s major league debut.  The game was scheduled for 7:00 against the Pirates (gotta give the kid every advantage).  I sat down at 6:30, beer in hand, to check out pregame.  Two hours later,  Strasburg had gone 7 innings, given up 2 runs and had 14 strikeouts!  The third strike of the last K I was literally jumping up and down in front of my TV.  I do not remember any regular season baseball game I have been half that excited about.  I am very much looking forward to being a Nationals fan during the Strasburg/Harper/Zimmerman/Storen era.  


2 comments:

  1. How dare you betray the beloved Mets like that! (Although, I do love the Nats, too.)

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  2. A huge bunch of my buddies from UVA are HUGE Nationals fans. Of couse they all live in NOVA now, so that makes it even easier to love and enjoy the team. It was so much fun being in Boston where Baseball is big and it makes sence why it's America's past time. Glad you found your team to root for!

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