i'm excited that baseball season is here again. the cubs are 1-1...i haven't gotten to watch any game yet, but maybe tonight.

one of the things i like most about baseball is that while yes, there are incredible athletes in the game, there are guys who look to be pretty regular guys as well...even guys with beer bellies and such. i mean sure, you have your superstuds like kerry wood and richard farnsworth and sammy sosa, but you've got your jon liebers in there as well. one of my favorite players ever was john kruk from the philadelphia phillies. the guy wasn't an athlete in the least bit, at least to look at...but he was one hell of a player and i hated that he was on an opposing team.

when i was a young boy, i had this sick obsession with baseball. before i discovered girls, love, music, or anything i enjoy now, there was baseball. i didn't know anyone that played it, i never played it myself because there weren't enough kids in the neighborhood and it never worked out for my parents to let me join a league...but man, was i into it. i spent most of my time playing by myself, anyway, so the baseball thing made me even more the weird kid. i spent so much of the summer in the backyard wherever we happened to live building stadiums, wearing basepaths in the lawn, scrambling across other yards and across streets to retrieve home runs and foul balls alike, driving my parents nuts with the continual thumping required as i perfected my pitch control and sense of the strike zone. i spent my very little spending money on baseball cards like crazy (some of which may be worth a good bit of money by now) and while my g.i. joe figures did partake in usual wartime exercises, they spent literally hours living out my baseball fantasies. as in, i created leagues, teams, stars, etc. i listened to WGN constantly, soaking in pre-game, play-by-play, post-game, everything. one of the biggest days in my young life was when my father somehow obtained a large antenna big enough to tune into catch the chicago stations and watch the cubs on television. i rarely got to go to a game but i still remember that one rather chilly spring day when i was in elementary school, we saw jamie moyer pitch against rick honeycutt as the cubs played the dodgers. i read biographies and autobiographies, of course, like crazy...i was an avid reader and reading books about baseball naturally followed. i'm pretty sure my parents would have gone ballistic had they known the kind of language and terminology i was learning from reading autobiographies of people like bo jackson. i cried when Harry Caray died...he was as much a part of my life as any of my friends in person.

so i'm all grown up now, or at least i'm 25. it's been a while since i went to go see a cubs game...it just hasn't worked out the last couple years...and now i've moved 8 hours from chicago as opposed to being just 2 away. my dream of playing baseball isn't around anymore. my parents moved three years ago and i didn't have access to wgn and there was no radio reception where i worked.
but...despite the new distance...i have wgn now (though half the games are on some fox sports channel i can't get) and can listen to them on the internet radio realaudio station at work...and it's april and i'm feeling excited.