Watching Ken Burns’ Baseball on MLB Network.
The commercials show that they’re doing MLB divisional previews, which I think may be premature, with the Winter Meetings coming up and Spring Training a couple of months away.
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If the Giants do not get Mike Stanton, maybe they should pick up free agents Brandon Morrow and Curtis Granderson from the Dodgers.
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There I was, the black grandson of a slave, the son of a black sharecropper, part of a historic occasion, a symbolic hero to my people. The air was sparkling. The sunlight was warm. The band struck up the national anthem. The flag billowed in the wind. It should have been a glorious moment for me as the stirring words of the national anthem poured from the stands. Perhaps, it was, but then again, perhaps, the anthem could be called the theme song for a drama called The Noble Experiment. Today, as I look back on that opening game of my first world series, I must tell you that it was Mr. Rickey’s drama and that I was only a principal actor. As I write this twenty years later, I cannot stand and sing the anthem. I cannot salute the flag; I know that I am a black man in a white world. In 1972, in 1947, at my birth in 1919, I know that I never had it made.
― Jackie Robinson, I Never Had It Made
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I do miss baseball. As I do every year, after Thanksgiving Day.
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I’m gonna play a couple of games of my 1967 San Francisco Giants season replay.