Second Verse, Same as the First...

It snowed again last night. Two inches or so. Just enough so that I had to pull out the shovel again. Feh. I will admit that the constant dust of clean snow is keeping the landscape pretty, but c'mon now. Enough is enough.

The good news is that the Dodgers open their Grapefruit League schedule today against the Marlins. Scott Erickson is starting for LA. Erickson was a Cy Young winner with the Twins in 1991 when he was 23, but unfortunately never approached that level again. The best you can say is that he was a serviceable pitcher for a number of years. He's in camp on a minor league contract, hoping that Jim Colbrun and the rest of the pitching gurus can pull his career off the scrapheap, as they did with Alvarez and Lima. It's the longest of longshots. His best pitch is his sinker, so if it's effective and he pitches well enough to make the team, he could do well throwing in Dodger Stadium. You have to root for the guy.

In Other News...

I'm listening to baseball (Mets vs. Nats) on my computer RIGHT NOW, AIFG.

I have to decide whether or not to buy the mlb internet radio package this year. It's only $15 for the season, so it's not a matter of cost. It's that they have the nerve to charge for it in the first place. I used to be able to listen to Dodger games over the net for free a few years back on the local radio's site. Then the PTB at MLB saw a revenue source, and they took all the net radio feeds and made them exclusive content of mlb.com. It's not like they took out the ads. It's the same content I could get over the air for free if I was on the other side of the Rockies. I once swore I would never do it. Even said it in an email that got published by a columnist in Network World. (He'd done a piece on it.)

I fear I'm going to cave. It's less than I spend on an average trip to Newbury's. OTOH, I really will be annoyed with myself if I do.

And the Nats win their first game as Nats, 5-3.

The other interesting thing I have discovered is that so far, the Nats games are free, no doubt the result of them not yet having any kind of radio contract with a real station.