As this season begins, I feel more excitement about baseball in general then I have in probably a decade.  I am playing fantasy baseball, I bought a 20-game package of 4 seats to the Padres (yes, I am "stuck" living in San Diego and thoughts of Garvey vaguely haunt me every time I go to a Padres game), and I have plans to get to Chicago for a couple games at Wrigley this summer, and hopefully to Colorado, San Francisco, and Arizona.  And of course, I am becoming a regular reader of BCB.

This morning, in an effort to lift the fog of discomfort over what I witnessed happen in Cinci yesterday, I did a Google search on Harry Caray and took a trip down memory lane back to a time of warm summer afternoons spent with my grandmother at her lake house in northern Illinois, listening to Harry being Harry and anxiously anticipating the next Ryno at bat.  And, it occurred to me that something about baseball has lost me, despite my efforts to recapture my love for the game this year.

Maybe Harry's death is part of it, and the transition to Skip, and then watching him leave, and Steve leave on bad terms, and now I just feel like I'm listening to two dudes that I share no connection with.  Maybe it's the pain I felt in 2003, when I decided  to jump on a plane at 5:30am the morning of Game 7, was at the airport an hour later, was in Chicago several hours later, and found myself walking around Wrigley to find a ticket, enjoying everything about that day, but also feeling that sense of gloom that shouldn't have been accompanying a Game 7 with Kerry Wood on the mound.  I still wear the t-shirt I bought on the way out of the park that night, "2003 NL Champions, Chicago Cubs."  I refuse to accept what happened.

Maybe it's Sammy, Mac, and the rest of the muscleheads that cheated their way into our hearts.  I was as caught up in Sammy as anyone, actually debating whether he would someday overtake Ryno as my favorite Cub.  Then the cork.  Then the excuses.  Then the denials under oath to Congress.  This stain on the game is something I will never be able to fully forgive.

Maybe it's PriorWood.  It's funny how when we left Floriday in 2003 to come home, we all said "it's ours with Prior and Wood pitching Game 6 and 7!"  Amazingly, we lost both games at home.  Then we left Game 7 saying the future is incredibly bright with these guys anchoring our pitching staff for the next decade.  I sat next to Jerry Prior, yes Mark's Dad, all the way home from Chicago the next day.  I found so much revealing in that long conversation, including multiple references to the Yankees possibly being a home for Mark and Kerry someday.  And of course there was Jerry's comment that he was afraid that Mark would be a "Dan Marino" having lost his only chance to win a championship with the Chicago Cubs.  The downfall of these two has been an incredible drain on this organization over the last few years.

Yesterday put my feelings about baseball these days into a nutshell.  I am spending $20/mo this year to get "premium" access to MLB on my computer.  I do work at home, but love to work at my desk with the game on my second monitor and paying some attention at least to my work on my laptop.  Playing fantasy baseball made "Mosaic" a must-get.  Six games at once, easy switching, fantasy baseball player alerts.  Wow!  Sounds incredible, eh?

So I spent much of my morning trying to get it to work.  The player tracker doesn't work at all.  They couldn't stream games as they had planned for whatever technical reasons.  MLB has all these people shelling out $20/month and many of them couldn't get any games all day.  They have had all offseason to get this thing right, and they couldn't do it.  They ask for patience.  Yeah, well, how about a free month?  Yeah, right.  I watched the Cubs game in hi-def on my Plasma.  Talk about a game you DON'T want to see in hi-def!

And then there was the game yesterday.  Part of why I am so excited about baseball this year was the commitment to winning put out by the Cubs organization this off season.  All the years of "they don't have to get players, Wrigley will sell out anyway" seemed to be behind us for at least a year.  Not only do we have the talent and depth, we have a manager now that will stress fundamentals, make that DEMAND fundamentals.  He will motivate our guys, and make all the right moves.  Um, oops.

Our ace couldn't throw strikes, or at least not ones promptly parked 425 feet away by Adam Dunn.  Our first two innings we didn't get a baserunner.  When we did get baserunners, there was no clutch or situational hitting.  It was the same type of play that lost us 96 games last year.  I was particularly disappointed when Lou didn't us Itzuris to bunt over DeRosa with nobody out and Z and Soriano coming up and down 2-0.  

And then of course there's the sale.  Is this good or bad?  What's the future of Wrigley?  Z's contract?  Does this mean the entire 2007 season will be one with a cloud of uncertainty hanging over the team?

So, I feel hungover this morning with all this weighing on me.  Why do I love this game so much?  Do I love this game?  Or am I forcing myself to love the game, or convincing myself that I do, when there are so many other things I could turn my attention to, and go back to just passively checking the standings here and there unless things get interesting?

I guess this morning I long to get into a time machine and go back to baseball when Harry and Ryno were still around.  When moving the runner over to third with nobody out by poking one to 2nd base was still an art.  When nobody heard of steroids or Bartman.  When everyone thought Prior and Wood would carry the Cubs to the World Series multiple times.  

But, here we are.  As Al says, just an off day.  Tomorrow game 2 of 162.  Somehow, though, I feel like I did walking into Wrigley Field for Game 7 back in 2003.