Welcome aboard, Beaver backer

This is one of those times that qualifies as a who-woulda-thunk moments: I am now a big Beaver baseball fan.

Growing up, the Pac 10 was far enough away that it often felt like it was closer to the Australian Collegiate League (if there is such a thing) - except that Pac 10 teams occasionally won national titles here in the U.S.

Now, my rear end is firmly planted on the bandwagon. The reason is an easy one: My wife's cousin, Rob Summers. Rob is a redshirt sophomore for Oregon State's baseball team, and actually leads the team in ERA. (OK, truth be told, he appeared in one game this year, pitching 1/3 of an inning, so that gives him an ERA of 0.00.) I did an interview with ex-OSU standout Jacoby Ellsbury in the spring - a former first-round pick, now a Boston farmhand - who assures me that Rob will get more PT next year.

(It's kind of hard trying to keep track of which schools I'm supposed to like. Depending on which family member I'm with, I must be knowledgeable about OSU, Oregon, Washington State or, primarily, Washington, since that's where the most of the most immediate in-laws went. So, sorry everyone else, but go Huskies. My brother-in-law went to Oregon, but I know he understands the necessity of a happy household. My family doesn't prevent that many problems, as it's Penn State or bust. Random people like Notre Dame or Alabama, but it's a clear-cut majority for the Lions. Anywho...)

At the moment, I'm listening to those Beavers pummel Stanford 12-0 in the Corvallis Super Regional. (Crap, I forgot about my cousin's husband, who went to Stanford. Sorry, Alan. Please see that line about happy households.) And I'm very happy for Rob and his teammates as they seem well on their way to making their second straight trip to the College World Series.

I'm proud of him for even getting as far as he has. To go play for Oregon State is nothing to sneeze at; while it doesn't have the tradition of a Texas or LSU or Miami, it's definitely a program on the rise. My job allows me to see how hard it is to even get to a major school like OSU; there are a lot of good high school baseball players and wrestlers that I come across that wind up at Division II or Division III schools.

(That's not to slam D-II or D-III schools. I played four years of D-III football, so I'd never slam those kids.)

So for him to then latch on to a team just at the beginning of its success is an even cooler deal. In my four years of football, we made the NCAA playoffs once, during my freshman year. We went out to western Pennsylvania and got beat by Washington & Jefferson, which was a superb team. Therefore I can't imagine the pride and joy he must feel at making two trips to Omaha.

There is something to be learned from that trip to W&J, however: Getting back is never a given. Ask Dan Marino or Roger Clemens or any of the other great athletes that made the championship game/series early in their career and waited years to get back (in Marino's case, he never made it back to the Super Bowl).

Enjoy it, Rob. You probably know it's one of the coolest things you'll ever do. Savor it and treasure it. But remember, there's no promise it'll be that way next year - all the more reason to savor it and treasure it.

Please, just hand me the remote

My wife and I walked into a nearby pub tonight and saw all four TVs tuned to ESPN. Not much of a surprise.

Also not much of a surprise: The "Worldwide Leader" was showing Red Sox at Yankees.

Enough.

I realize that Bristol may be halfway between the two cities - or somewhere close to halfway - but enough already. For a supposed national network to concentrate so heavily on two cities is ludicrous, no matter how intense the rivalry. And it sucks for the other 98 percent of the country that - gasp! - could care freaking less about Boston or New York.

I tried looking up TV schedules for the week, but they've since gone the way of the internet afterlife. So I can't be certain just how many Yanks-Sawx games have been broadcast nationally. I'm positive it was at least two, and don't doubt for a second that all three were.

(Surely a fourth would have, but Wednesday's game was postponed by rain. Surprisingly, ESPN chose not to show us a static shot of the tarp-covered Yankee Stadium infield.)

This rivarly was once a cool deal, one that peaked in the 2004 ALCS, when Boston famously rallied in the final inning of Game 4 while the Sox were down 3-0. They won one, one another and another ... and suddenly they had vanquished the vaunted Yanks. A four-game sweep over St. Louis ended the suffering for Red Sox Nation and began the suffering for the rest of the nation.

Boston is now inescapable, living off of its 2004 World Series title. A disappointing finish to 2005 didn't ease the coverage; it's been a season and a half since the St. Louis sweep, and the Red Sox, deserving or not, are shoved down our throats. It's to the point that two Red Sox fans I know admit that their team is overexposed.

The Yankees are, of course, the Yankees and have been inescapable since the dawn of time. No team elicits more cheers when it fails as much as the Yankees.

ESPN forces many things upon us that we may not like - poorly-done feature films, incessant self-promotion and Stuart Scott among them. But that's how things work in a monopoly.

And I know ESPN could care less what I have to say. Fine. But that's what this thing is for - part exploration, part vent.

By trying to capitalize on the 26 million combined people in the New York and Boston metro areas (not all of which are Yanks or Sawx fans), ESPN and Fox's never-ending coverage has alienated another 75 million or so that populate the remainder of the country's top 15 metro areas (http://geography.about.com/library/weekly/aa010102a.htm).

Consider this graf from Fox's own Web site: "The Yankees and with new center fielder Johnny Damon, make nine MLB on FOX appearances while National League MVP Albert Pujols, Cy Young Award winner Chris Carpenter and the St. Louis Cardinals are featured eight times this season. The Fox Saturday Baseball Game of the Week schedule also includes eight games each for the Red Sox, Braves, Mets, Cubs, Dodgers, Angels and Giants. Both the World Champion White Sox and National League Champion Houston Astros are scheduled six times."

So let me get this straight: Sox/Yanks combine for 17 appearances, 2005 World Series participants combine for 12 appearances.

Dear God: Please make it stop.

Thankfully it will until mid-September, when Boston and New York hook up for a three-game weekend series. Then it starts all over again.

It's painful to even think about.

Inside the busy week

It's been better than a week since I posted on here, and there's a good reason: Work's insane at the moment.

That's not a terrible surprise. The Virginia High School League (VHSL) plans it this way, so that all of the spring sports have their state semifinals and finals on the same weekend in roughly the same place. They call them their spring sports jamborees.

To get that far, of course, a team must make it through regionals. And to get that far, they have to make it through districts. Since teams in our county comprise roughly one-half of the region, there's a fair chance that several teams make a fairly deep postseason run.

And as the games continue, they grow in importance, so it's important that we cover them. So that leads to things like last week, when I covered four games in five days, including a girls soccer game in Haymarket, Va., on Memorial Day. Meanwhile, we're prepping our All-Area teams and continuing the cover the two area pro sports of the moment - the Washington Nationals and their High-A affiliate, the Potomac Nationals.

So, as one might understand, I don't have as much interest to write even more when I get home. That's why updates have become rarer lately.

But the positives about it are this: Come Sunday morning, one way or another, our high school season will be finished. All of the state tournaments should be wrapped up by then, and I won't have to cover another high school game until the fall.

I don't consider my summer to have begun until I send that final All-Area page. That's going to take some doing, since I've only started to make the first-team picks. Laying out the page? That's a long way off.

But the end of another school year is nigh. And I can't wait.

At the very least, it means more random missives that you've come to expect on here.

Live from Lehighton...it's Saturday night!

I am writing from my hometown, borrowing my parents' computer to peruse the net and file another missive on this bad boy.

My wife and I came up for a brief visit this weekend, one that will last little more than 24 hours but involves a family celebration. So it was kind of important that we come.

Plus, we were able to finally pay off my mom. We promised her a dinner for Mother's Day, but during our visit to Delaware Park, we lost some money (damn horses) and couldn't find a suitable restaurant for her day. So today was the day to make it up.

The four of us all ventured to Allentown to a place called the King George Inn. Dinner was very good and rather pricey as well - aided in no small part by the several Yuenglings I enjoyed. But I was happy to take care of the bill.

The ride back was a bit depressing, however, for reasons I can't quite explain - particularly once we hit the small burb of Bowmanstown. There was a restaurant open, another stand-alone restaurant open and ... well ... nothing. Something about those really small towns where nothing is happening becomes somewhat depressing for me.

I glanced over at an appliance shop, one that's been there for decades and prominently displays a big Whirlpool logo on the front face of the brick building. It looked lonely there, all dark.

Obviously, this whole region - even in the bigger cities of Allentown, Bethlehem and Easton - are all far, far different than Northern Virginia. To me, there's something comforting about openness and seeing buildings lit up and ready for customers; NoVa has plenty of it, 24 hours a day. Here, much less so, which probably isn't surprising, since this county has around 30,000 people. (The city of Alexandria alone has nearly 200,000 in 33 times less space.)

Saturday evening would seem to be the time when restaurants would be buzzing and people - not everyone, but someone - would be out and about. But the restaurant/station combo seemed devoid of customers, either filling up with gas or food.

Perhaps that's why I find Sunday nights so depressing; traditionally, stores and shops close much earlier, leading to that dark, closed feeling.

Or maybe it's just because I'm thinking too much again. This stuff probably doesn't bother 99+ percent of the population, yet it rattles around my head.

Career ramblings

I'm sitting here in the press box at RFK Stadium in Washington. The Nationals' pitchers have just taken their version of batting practice, and appear to be giving way to the professional hitters.

No one's here yet. No fans, anyway. Players and other team staff is all around the field; media are clustered on the top step of the Nats' dugout. (I'm up in the box because I had to write up an entry for my paper's NASCAR blog; the link is on the right.) AC/DC gives way to another song on the P.A. system.

How could someone give this up? Well, that's just the pretty side of it. Like any other job, there's a lot of unseen stuff that goes on.

The hours can be a grind; this is probably the busiest week of the year with all of our high school playoffs beginning. I probably won't spend any appreciable time with my wife (unless she can secure a lunch date) until Saturday. In my situation, there's not a whole lot of room for advancement and the pay isn't close to being enough to live by yourself.

There's a whole lot more that goes into it, certainly, but it's stuff that I have no desire to get into on here. As a result, my resume has flown through e-mail channels in all corners of the DC metro area (and, given the limited journalistic opportunities here, many of them are PR-related).

But then there's the other side of it. I grew up a sports fan and have loved sports all of my life. So how does one go from being on the inside (or a reasonable facsimilie) to being completely on the outside? It's an issue I grapple with every time I send out a resume and think ahead to what if - what if an interview happens and what if a job offer comes along?

There's no question that I get to do a lot of things that are pretty damn cool, there are a lot of things I've seen that many others would love the opportunity to see. But at what price? When do all of the cool things get cancelled out by all of the negative stuff?

I've counted up the number of MLB and NFL teams I've ever seen play - either when I was young and went to games with my dad or when I was older and covered games. In baseball, there are a total of nine teams I've never seen play (which will fall to eight after tonight's Nats-Astros game); in the NFL, there are 14 teams.

Am I going to bail out before I get to all of the teams? Increasingly, it looks like it.

But that doesn't mean it's going to be easy. I'm sure I'll second-guess myself if any sort of change occurs. What it boils down to is that I'm worried if I leave, any new, non-sports job will make me even more unhappy than I am now. And that's a difficult thing for me to get past.