Baseball game:

I went to my first (and realistically only) baseball game of the season tonight. It was really good-- the Braves won, Maddux pitched well, Furcal was 4 for 5, and Sheffield got a home run. And it was $1 hot dog and soda night, so that was cool. It was really nice tonight too, cool and windy.

I know a lot of my friends hate baseball. They think it's boring, moves interminably slow, etc. But baseball is such a summer game. It's the only sport that's played outdoors at night, since it's too hot during the day to play (Cubs not withstanding). It's the sport you sit outside on your porch and listen to on the radio, since you never really feel like you miss anything in baseball if you don't watch it on TV. Baseball is a sport for those non-air-conditioned small towns where there isn't much else to do in the summer so everyone talks about the closest team. St. Louis is a baseball town, and in the Ozarks in the summer all you hear on the radio is the Cardinals. In a hundred small towns in north Florida and south Georgia, everyone talks about the Braves, whether they are good or not.

Though baseball isn't really a sport to get excited about, for me nothing can ever match the feeling of the Braves going to the World Series in 1991. That was so exciting, it was all everyone in Atlanta talked about from July on. Every day, you expected the house of cards to fall down, and when it didn't and didn't and didn't you could barely breathe. Even not winning the Series wasn't much of a let-down. That was such an amazing series and it was so great to even be a part of it.

So, how 'bout them Braves?