Spent the day at our local minor league stadium. Charlotte’s softball teamed was honored before the game, accompanying the home team as the players were announced. Everybody had a good, long day at the park. Lex got a foul ball, and all kids got to run the bases and play catch in the outfield after the game.
I’ve gone over to the Dark Side
Actually broke down and purchased my first Apple product last week – an iPhone.
I must admit that I’m pretty impressed with the technology. One of the more impressive apps is one called AutoStitch which stitches together photos taken with the phone enabling you to produce some pretty good panoramas with the phone. Here are some photos I took at yesterday’s Spike’s baseball game.
The phone also take some pretty decent video. I decided to try out the video feature for the first time when one of the Spikes came up to bat in the eighth inning. I got pretty lucky as he hit the game winning home run.
And incredibly, I hear you can even make phone calls on this thing (although I haven’t tried that yet)
A Baseball Weekend
A fond farewell.
Lex at Red Sox v Yankees
Lex and I went to the first of a 4-game series Thurs night. Lex’s first night game and first Red Sox game (he learned some new swear words.) We were both really pumped for the evening. Got there very early, in time to watch all of batting practice. Went to the outfield wall to try to catch a ball. Didn’t, altho a ball nearly caught us. Drank soda, ate Cracker Jack, Foot-Long Hot Dogs, Cotton Candy and Lemonade Sherbet. Priceless.
One problem, the Yankees never showed up: 7-0.
The best photo I have ever taken
or probably more correctly, ever created since it’s a panorama of five shots I took at the home opener of the State College Spikes Thursday.
The latest addition to my blogging empire…
My empire is expanding
The UncleLar web empire has grown once again. The latest is an addition to my Happy Valley brand of Penn State sports related sites. You might remember Happy Valley Hoops, my basketball site that I told you about back in January. As a compliment to that I’ve created Happy Valley Hardball, a site devoted to the Penn State baseball team.
“Fear the Deer”
You might remember a post I made a couple of months ago about a blog that I was creating about the State College Spikes baseball team. The intention at the time was to just track the Pittsburgh Pirates draft choice to try to figure out which ones might get assigned to State College. Well that worked out so well that I decided to keep it up for the entire season.
Not surpisingly I’ve swizzled the blog a lot since I originally created it – I’ve changed the format a couple of time, added a few features, and actually renamed it “Fear the Deer” which is the team’s rally cry.
I occasionally add some editorial content but for the most part the blog is simply a collection of news stories, game reports, and box scores about the team. Even with no effort of my own to promote it, it’s generated a modicum of success:
- I’ve had over 7000 visitors to date and hope to hit 10,000 before the season ends.
- I’ve made my way to the first page of Google search results when you search for “State College Spikes”.
- WordPress.com listed me as #78 on their Blog of the Day Growing Blogs list a couple of weeks ago.
- Numerous baseball blogs have found me and included me in their links, among them are:
- “The Pittsbugh Lumber Company” includes me in their blogroll
- “Bucs Dugout” has me on their homepage in the Pirates Links section
- “Crawdad’s Blog” – a blog about the Pirates Hickory TN farm club has me in their blogroll
While it certainly hasn’t enjoyed the exposure my “Every Day is Valentine’s Day” exploit did, it’s really not doing all that bad – and I’m having fun doing it.
State College Spikes – Season 2
The State College Spikes are a short season Class A baseball team – short season meaning they don’t start play until the end of June. Major League Clubs support short season teams so they have a place to stock the players whom they sign through their draft which takes place after high school and college regular seasons are complete.
Today is that draft day. It will begin at 2PM and the first few rounds will be televised for the first time (ESPN2 is carry the draft).
Since I have time on my hands, I’ve thrown together a website to track the Pittsburgh Pirates draft choices (the Pirates are the major league affiliate for the Spikes team) because the Spikes roster will be primarily populated with kids from this draft. This provide a way for friends of mine, who actually have jobs and have to work, to actually follow the draft today and get a feel for who might be playing for the Spikes this year.
I seeded the site yesterday with those Pirate players whom minor league baseball currently lists as being owned by the Pirates but not yet playing with a Pirate minor league team (they are primarily holdovers from last years short season team who didn’t get promoted to a higher level team this year – some of them will be cut before the short season play starts June 20th). During the course of the draft today I will be updating the site in real time as the Pirates make their picks.
Here’s the link to the site.
And here’s an RSS feed that will be updated as each pick is made.
FOLLOW-UP: While the blog turned out pretty good for a quick and dirty deal, I ran into some Blogger issues (WordPress has spoiled me) when I tried to put some bells on whistles on the blog.  So I’ve converted the blog to WordPress and here’s the link to the current version.
Yankees vs. Red Sox
This is going to break Gary’s heart, but I set foot in Yankee Stadium (in full Red Sox gear) on Sunday to see the Red Sox beat the Yankees. It was a great game, Manny hit a homer as soon as we were walking to our seats. The bus picked us up in Portsmouth, NH at 6am and dropped us back off around midnight. Thank God I took the next day off of work!