Therefore, I figure it'll be a good exercise for me to try to keep all of my basebabble in one place.
A brief intro: I'm Deanna. I grew up in Philadelphia, and my mom had season tickets to the Phillies, and her father did before her (they won their only World Series 3 weeks after he died), so I went to many Phillies games as a kid. The only World Series game I ever attended was in 1983, and the Orioles beat the Phillies, which has scarred me to this day. I went off to college at Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh in 1994, and attempted to follow Pirates baseball when they weren't making me want to blow up the stadium *with* the team inside. I moved to Seattle in 2002, and now the Mariners suck too. Go figure! I must just be bad luck. I still follow the Phillies and Pirates as my "other" home teams, but the Mariners are my primary these days.
By day I'm a Perl programmer for a medical software company in downtown Seattle, and by night I'm a gamer-musician-writer-athlete-etc. I'm a nerd, and I like the Mariners, and therefore, this is Seattle MariNERDs. Nice to meet you.
My favorite Japanese baseball team is the Nippon Ham Fighters, and not just because the "Fightin' Hams" seems like a funny name. They were actually the first Japanese team I ever went to a game of, back when they still shared the Tokyo Dome with the Giants. I bought cheap seats in the outfield, right in the middle of the Fighters cheering section, and I was hooked! From then on, the Fighters were the team I'd always follow, even after they moved to Sapporo. I can even sing several of the players' cheer songs now :)
This year I started following the Chiba Lotte Marines though, just because they were the underdog team that actually was going somewhere, and it was a very exciting year for them indeed!
(I speak and read Japanese, yes, although I'm rustier than I used to be. I passed the JLPT 3-kyuu in 2001. I read boxscores quickly and articles slowly.)
Anyway! Babbling aside, here's what you can expect to find here:
1) My reports from baseball games I attend (most of which will involve the Seattle Mariners).
2) My reviews of baseball books I read (I've been wanting to get my thoughts on several books down, so this'll be a good excuse to.)
3) My reviews of baseball movies (again, these won't be strictly new movies, but occasionally I'll just decide to watch Mr. Baseball or something again and babble about it.)
4) Parody lyrics about baseball that I write.
5) Random links to baseball stuff I find interesting, which may or may not be interesting to anyone else.
Here's what you will NOT find here, most likely:
1) Tons of stats and analytical stuff. While I read sites like USSM, and stuff like Baseball Prospectus, and things written by people like Bill James, I will fully admit that I don't know as much about the stats as the other people do, so I'm not going to even try to break any new ground there.
2) Real inside connections other such scoopy stuff. I'm just a girl who loves baseball. I think the most I've said to most baseball players has been something to the effect of "Would you please sign this?"
There's not even a guarantee I'll actually really continue with this. Let's call it an experiment.
Oh yeah, and I'll get around to editing this template and making it look less stupid someday. Really.
Play Ball!|||111303545327710327|||A new place to babble.