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Take me out to the ball game

It's the first weekend of the new baseball season and my team, the Astros, are at .500. That means they are on a pace to win 81 games this year. That's after losing a record 106 and winning only 56 last season. Winning 81 games this year would be a miraculous improvement.

Of course, this is a very, very young and inexperienced team and probably no one, except maybe their mothers, really expects them to have a winning season, but stranger things have happened in baseball. Stranger things happen every day in baseball. That's one of the reasons the game never gets boring - except to boring people.

The Astros are playing the Colorado Rockies at home in this first series of the season. In the first game of the season yesterday, their youth and inexperience showed. They made four - count 'em, four - errors. You can't win a major league baseball game when you make four errors and give up four unearned runs, and the Astros didn't. They lost 5-3. But at least they did hit two home runs in the game. Home runs were scarcer than hen's teeth in Astros games last year, but in today's game they again hit two home runs. That means they are on a pace to hit 324 home runs this year!

Well, 324 home runs in a season aren't going to happen and 81 wins probably won't happen either, but today, after yesterday's awful game, they played error-less ball and looked like champions. Their young pitcher, Lucas Harrell, was particularly impressive. It gives their die-hard fans hope that this may at least be, if not a winning season, an interesting one. If the young guys pull together as a team and improve throughout the coming months as we have every right to expect they will, then it will be an interesting season.

It might even be a winning one. It is April, after all, and hope springs eternal in April. In April, any team seems capable of making it to the World Series. Even my Astros.
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  1. SnapApril 8, 2012 at 7:28 AM

    All is well with the world. Baseball season has started for the pros and Dorothy has made her first baseball post! :D :D I got the biggest kick out of watching Harrell. He was having such a great time. The smile on his face was priceless! I've often thought, if you aren't having a good time playing baseball, you shouldn't be playing. That young man should be playing a very long time!

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    1. Dorothy BordersApril 8, 2012 at 9:36 AM

      Harrell's smile after finishing his night's work was incandescent and that said it all. I agrees, Snap, that if you can't have fun playing baseball (or even watching baseball) you are just about hopeless!

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