At the Helm: Is it February 14 yet?

10 January 2011

Is it February 14 yet?

After returning home from a weekend at Big Bear, I turned on my television and was immediately bombarded with football. Now, I don't hate football like my friend Robert does, but I can hardly remember the last time I watched a football game in its entirety. So while reaching for the Supertramp DVD that I borrowed, I began to wonder ... is it February 14 yet?

Even though my Angels are going to suck this year, I can hardly wait for baseball to again take hold of my daily consciousness the same way it has for virtually my entire life.

Going through the emails that had piled up along my information superhighway, I noticed a response from a recent posting, a response from my friend Darrell who lives in Calgary. My father and I met Darrell and his family on a Jay Buckley baseball tour in the summer of 2006. Darrell and his family are Seattle Mariners fans. And Darrell is possibly more frustrated about his Mariners than I am about my Angels.

"I would say be fortunate that you are not a Mariners fan," Darrell says, "a team that has not even sniffed the World Series. They remain one of two franchises to never make the World Series (the other being the Washington Nationals/Montreal Expos), and continually they are bad. An odd good season here or there, but overall, lousy from top to bottom throughout their history."

Now Darrell's next comment made me immediately think of my friend Charles, a Yankees fan who seems to think that Yankees' GM Brian Cashman could conduct his own Village Idiots Convention. According to Darrell, former Mariners GM Bill Bavasi "was probably the worst GM in MLB history and decimated the organization with brutal trades, giving up solid players and great prospects for retreads and players on the downside of their career."

As an Angels fan, I only wish that Cashman and Bavasi had cornered the market on stupidity and short-sightedness. Rumor has it that Angels GM Tony Reagins just made his reservation for the 2011 Village Idiots Convention, going so far as to offer to co-chair the event.

-B. C. Helm

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About B. C. Helm

My father took me to my first baseball game when I was seven years old ... way back in 1973. Little did my father realize he had created a monster.

Since then, I have gone to hundreds of baseball games, both Major League and Minor League. And I plan to attend many, many more games. Eventually, I will go to games in all Major League Cities.

The Anaheim Angels are my favorite team. Win or lose. Sadly, the Angels have done a lot more losing than winning. We (yes, we. The Angels are my team) have won only one World Series Championship since our inception in 1961.

But being a baseball fan is about more than cheering only for your team. Baseball ties generations together like very few other things can. Baseball has been in existence since the 1700s. Though the sport has experienced many advancements, the sport is still essentially the same as it has always been.

In this blog, I plan to write about anything and everything that is baseball, anything and everything that piques my interest. I will do the best I can to site sources and attach weblinks, unless doing so destroys the flow of reading.

I will assume that if you are reading this blog, you have a working knowledge of baseball and are capable of doing your own research.

If you read something I have written, and think I left something out or misstated a fact, feel free to bring it to my attention as a comment. That said, I am not interested in anyone hijacking this blog. If you want to be a critic, then go write your own blog.