FRS

Rocket Man

Somewhere here before, I kiddingly mentioned that I should root for the Houston Astros instead of the FRS. A search can’t locate it, so that means one of two things, it happened in 2004 and I thought it wasn’t worth saving or it happened prior to 2004 and it is still in the archives. Well starting tonight I guess I will root for them, at least for the next 4 to 7 games. Houston and the Chicago White Sox will play in the 2005 World Series and I hope my cheering for the Astros doesn’t hurt them. 🙂

I gave a couple of reasons why I should switch allegiances, one of which that the Astros current uniform is a pretty good match for the Emperor’s color, so I would be stylin’ and profilin’. The second was tonight’s Houston starting pitcher, Roger Clemens, AKA Rocket. Donna and I were lucky enough to see the young 20-something Clemens pitch the New Britain Red Sox to the Eastern League Championship in 1985. Ever since I have almost always liked the guy (there was that one stint of pitching for the Yankees.)

Go ‘Stros!

Maybe Next Year

Now that is more like the team I know. The FRS were swept out of post-season play, three games to none tonight by the Chicago White Sox. At least they didn’t lose to the Yankees.

I said way back in June that I would quit complaining about the erratic reception of WEEI on MLB.com and I kept my word, but now that the season’s over…I’ve got nothing bad to say. Sometime not too long after the All Star Game the internet broadcasts settled down, loosing all the annoying cut outs and became listenable again. I guess that means I’ll be signing up for next year broadcasts. When I’ll get treated to 162 ups and downs on the roller coaster life of a Red Sox fan.

I Hate It When I’m Right

I called it yesterday, “they will probably win by a closer score in game 2.” The White Sox did just that tonight, 5-4 over the FRS.

Now if I can only be right about the second part of the prediction, “Once the FRS are down two…sweep the final three games to advance.”

Now We Got ‘Em Right Where We Want ‘Em

The Chicago White Sox will still be reeling from their lopsided 14-2 win tomorrow, so much so that they will probably win by a closer score in game 2. Once the FRS are down two and their backs are against the wall, then they will kick it in and sweep the final three games to advance to the American League Championship Series.

Two years ago their rally cry was “Cowboy Up” and they lost to the Yankees in the ALCS. Last year it was “Why not us?” and they won it all. This year it is “Just 11 more wins.” Right now though it had better be “Not 2 more losses.”

Odds & Ends

I have decided to only restore 2005’s posts. 2002 through 2004 will languish in a file on my hard drive. Maybe when I get around to it I will go back and read through them and publish a “Greatest Posts” page. There are only 2 surviving 2004 posts and those are the Mr. Fletcher’s Ride photos and are part of a series that will finish up later this month. When that happens I’ll probably create a separate gallery for the images. Speaking of separate galleries for images, that is more than likely what will happen to the photo meme posts which weren’t restored along with the rest of this year’s posts.

The FRS won today big time over the hated Yankees and clinched the wild card playoff berth. In honor of this accomplishment I have given them their own category here on the blog. A five game series with the Chicago White Sox starts Tuesday afternoon in the Windy City. The Wild Card route is how they made it into the playoffs last year and look what happened then, they won it all. As a matter of fact the last three World Series champs have been Wild Card teams. So here we go…

We got a late start this morning, so we skipped the planed bicycle ride and decided to take a Miata drive instead. We got about a mile away from the house when we ran into a wall of light rain. Quickly turned around and found a spot to remove the boot cover. Then, still top down made another u-turn and proceeded with the drive. We managed to keep dry as we kept making direction changes to stay under the partly blue in the sky. While we took a walk around the North Augusta mile walking track the top went up as a precaution. The top made a cycle one other time while we were still moving to avoid a passing soaking rain, but after that it was a nice little drive.

Part of it was to go check out where our used-to-be-local Mazda dealer went to. There is a for sale sign in front of the old building, but it looks like they are still selling Izuzus there. The new digs are way over on the west side of Augusta and is the former Honda dealership building. There were still quite a few Hondas on the lot (I guess the new Honda store isn’t completely finished) and there were a lot of Mazdas on the other half. Only three new Miatas MX-5s were on hand and they were off in a corner. One red Grand Touring with black top and interior, one black Grand Touring with the tan/brown interior and one silver Touring. All of them with a supplemental sticker adding $599 dollars to the MSRP for premium handling, 5 year warranty and a couple of other bogus add ons…

New color scheme in honor of Halloween.

West Wing is on at 8:00 PM on Sunday nights, not 9:00 PM, so I gotta go…

Started down, went up, back down, up again, down again, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/05: 309

FRS II

FRS IIYou know you are in trouble when the ace of your staff is a knuckleballer. Today Tim Wakefield fooled some of the people some of the time, but not all of the people all of the time. Even though the Red Sox didn’t win it was not entirely Tim’s fault. Randy Johnson pitched well, but he was beatable and even though Manny smacked a couple of monster home runs, they never got the offense going against him. I think it was more the sputtering offense and stupid base running that doomed the FRS to an 8 to 4 loss.

At least Cleavland lost today too. That means that even if they lose tomorrow and the Indians win they will still have a shot at the playoffs. The 2 teams would play a winner take all game on Monday to see who will advance to the “real” playoffs as the American League Wildcard team.

Started down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/05: 305

0 for 2

Well, so far this I am 0 for 2 in watching the TV shows I want to watch. First, I missed Sunday’s “West Wing” premiere and last night I missed the “Best of the Beatles” on PBS.

I read the article in the paper a week ago about the show that said it was going to be on 9/28 at 10:00 PM. I made a mental note to watch it. Some one at work who knew I was a Beatles fan handed me a copy of the article in case I missed it. Knowing PBS can be wonky with their scheduling and that I have access on cable to both the SC and GA channels I went to the PBS website to check the times and dates they were going to show the program. Both confirmed the paper’s 10:00PM start on the 28th. As an extra precaution against losing this info out of my sieve-like brain I subscribed to their handy email reminder thing.

Sure enough when I got home from work yesterday there was my reminder email. At about 10 minutes ’til ten I shut off the FRS radio broadcast (mercifully I might add, as they were losing 7 – 2 to the Blue Jays) and made my way into the living room. Flipped over to the clearer of the two PBS channels and waited. They were running a thing about Pop Music as it related to the protest movement and it was fairly entertaining. At 10 o’clock I waited for it to end, but it didn’t. Huh? Checked the other station and they were both in lock step showing the same show. I watched for about 15 minutes thinking maybe they were running late or something, but the protest music kept right on coming.

Plodded back to the PC and checked the PBS website and lo and behold the Beatles show ran from 8 to 9:00PM. Shit! Opened the reminder email back up and it said the show started at 8. I guess I should have read it more carefully…

Started down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/05: 305