Sporting With Egon
Created | Updated Jul 9, 2003
Egon is without an internet connection this week, so he hands his column over to aka Random for a full Baseball report.
Hi, folks! Our e-mail problems have seemingly been solved by Egon and I having to delete hundreds of messages stacked up in our in-boxes.
It's just past the halfway mark in the Major League Baseball season
over here. I am pleased to report that on the Cleveland Indians' Fan Forum1 we have a Scotsman or two, a player for the Manchester Express, people talking German, a fella from Holland and posters from across the US, plus a couple from the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico, so we're pretty much international there, too, and this might just be posted there if my partner Nancy sees fit to do so.
So MLB is entering the final week before the annual All-Star break, and there is considerable controversy over which players have been selected to play in the game. Basically it is an exhibition between the 'best' players in the National and American Leagues, as selected by fans on-line, a vote from the players, coaches and managers.
This year sees the added incentive that the winner of this 'exhibition' contest will get home field advantage for their league in the October World Series. This means games 1,2 and 6,7 are at one team's home park while games 3,4 and 5 are hosted by the opposing city.
Theoretically, there is a home field advantage, a team playing before its' own fans on a field they have been accustomed to playing on for the 162-game season, but, looking over the standings, there are at least five ballclubs who are playing better on the road, rather than at home, so the advantage is dubious.
So past the mid-point of the season and heading into the three-day break for the All-Star game, the two best teams in both leagues are the Seattle Mariners and Atlanta Braves. Seattle had a ML team in the late 60's called the Pilots, but they moved to Milwaukee and, years later, Seattle got another ML franchise, which has been pretty successful. The
Atlanta Braves were originally the Boston Braves, moved to Milwaukee, and then to Atlanta for media mogul Ted Turner2's cash. I think the fact that Coca-Cola has its' corporate headquarters in Atlanta helped, also!
Nothing really weird or exciting happened the past two weeks, just teams playing ball and travelling the country like vagabonds, so I'll be back next week, hopefully with some news from the All-Star Game, which is to be played in Chicago. This is several/a/k/a random, from along the Great Lake named Erie, over and out.
