Radical Georgia Moderate

• I’m all booked for a trip to New York to watch the Yankees play Oakland on July 18. Hopefully there won’t be a strike this summer.
• Why you should never buy another gift card. Ever. This commenter’s summary is spot on:

  I guess this is another reason why gift cards are stupid: they make you a creditor, exposed to the risk that your debtor (the business that issues the gift card) will weasel on the loan, using any of the 817 standard weasel-tactics.

  Found via Garrett’s comment on Amber’s blog.

• Speaking of buyer beware, always, always, always seek out independent reviews of an online merchant before buying something from it. In an incredible lapse of judgment on my part, I ordered something from Camera Addict (no link for you), having never done business with them before. A co-worker asked me, “Where did you find that camera so cheap?” So I sent him a link, and he sent me one back that said, uh Rusty…

  I am very fortunate that I had the opportunity to cancel my card before they had a chance to charge it. All it cost me was feeling stupid all day Friday for having been duped. A lot of other people haven’t been so lucky. There was no excuse for this lapse on my part, as the link above was the first link that came up in Google under “camera addict reviews.” I really should know better.

• If you don’t use it, you lose it. I played a live game of poker for the first time in a couple of years this past Friday, and ended the night down $27. Not that I was ever all that great, but I gave away my hand a couple of times, fell into a routine with my betting, and wasn’t nearly aggressive enough. It was a cash-out game with eight people, so even if I had played well it’s doubtful I could have won outright (nobody else did). But I had the opportunity to do better than I did.

I never really blog about baseball, which would probably be a surprise to some people who knew me growing up. For almost 15 years, playing and watching baseball were the central activity in my life.

I started collecting baseball cards when I was 8 or 9 years old, buying packs of 1988 Topps and Donruss sets.

The card industry has changed a lot since then. There used to be one set at the beginning of the year with 600 to 800 cards, and then a “traded” set near the end of the season with 100 to 200 cards or so featuring traded players and September call-ups. That was it. No rare issues, special editions, and glossy sets. Only a couple of different manufacturers, not 20.

Still, my brother and I were like little stock brokers with our Beckett’s price guides, and could recite hundreds of prices from memory. In retrospect I’m not sure why we did this, because we rarely sold any of our cards.

When I was 10, my interest in cards prompted me to sign up for Little League at East Marietta, a league which gained national recognition for winning the 1983 Little League World Series. Most kids who play there don’t start much later than 6 or 7, and many start playing T-ball at Terrell Mill around four or five.

I was pretty lousy the first year, but my brother and I spent the entire summer between when I was 10 and 11 walking a mile or so with our equipment to the ball park and practicing with an older kid. I came back the next year still looking a little awkward, but having developed pretty good hitting skills and a strong throwing arm.

East Marietta had an A-league and a B-league. I was one of those kids who was good enough to dominate the B-league but wasn’t quite good enough to make the A-league. This was a pattern that continued all the way through my playing days. Freshman year of high school, I made the JV team as a pitcher, but only got a couple of innings, and rode the bench the rest of the time. I was cut the next season, and worked harder than I ever had worked at anything to try to make the team the following year. Didn’t make it.

When I quit playing after my junior year of high school, I had worked my ass off for years without a lot to show for it. I’m not going to whine about not making the team junior year. Sure, there were some politics involved that didn’t work in my favor, and I didn’t get much of a look from the coaches. Maybe I was better than the bottom three or four players who made the team.

But I wasn’t good enough to be indispensable. And even if I was better than the bottom three or four players, they sucked in a way that looked more athletic than my sucking a little less did. And my mouth occasionally got me in trouble (big surprise there).

Nevertheless, I was bitter about the experience for a long time. That doesn’t entirely explain my loss of interest in baseball though.

Part of it was a couple of years later when college football captured my imagination in a way baseball had years earlier. There’s not enough room in my life for two sports obsessions.

Part of it was that it seemed nothing in baseball would ever compare to the magical feeling surrounding the early 1990s Braves teams. The only events in pro sports I’ve ever attended that compare to an SEC football environment were the 1991 and 1992 NL playoffs, and a regular season series between the Braves and the Dodgers in (I think) 1992. After the curse of decades of petulance was lifted from the organization, fans became complacent and much of the crowd’s energy was zapped. I then started to hate being around those people, which made me part of the problem.

Part of it was a trip our family took in summer 1994. Months in advance, we planned a trip to the northeast to visit Cooperstown and to attend games at Yankee Stadium, Shea Stadium and the Skydome in Toronto. The strike started the week before our trip, so we didn’t get to attend any games.

So, I’ve never watched a game at Yankee Stadium. I meant to in 1994, but was thwarted. This is the last season the Yankees will play there before they move to a new stadium. I think I owe it to myself to take another shot at watching a game there before that happens. I feel like I have some karma to balance out.

Anybody want to come with? In addition to balancing karma, we could also get drunk.