Back on the Saddle

I’ve fallen off the beat badly of late – no new material ever since the Barrie game eight days ago was rained out, if memory serves. Since then, the Twins have gone 2-2 – the high-water mark of which was beating the defending champion Brantford Red Sox 4-3 on Wednesday (on the road, to boot), and the low point a 9-0 drubbing at the hands of the Guelph Royals. In between, they dropped a 9-6 road decision to the Kitchener Panthers, and picked up their first ever home win by a count of 7-5 against the perennially awful Hamilton Thunderbirds.

(as an aside, I wrote some time ago that the Thunderbirds were ‘perennially competitive to the best of my knowledge’, but the best of my knowledge wound up not being good enough – the T-Birds have been easy pickings at the ICBL level for the past several years; apparently, that part of their program has been neglected in favour of their elite youth teams)

They’re back at home tonight (Friday) against Oshawa, and I’ll get some input from coach Calcagni about the four games I missed. I’m guessing that my line of questioning will be something like ‘how did you beat Brantford, get killed by Guelph and only barely beat Hamilton?’ and hopefully that will lead to some great insight. On Saturday, they host Kitchener to make it back-to-back home games, and then they get a rare Sunday off.

I’ll be at both home games, but after that I think I’ll be off the beat for another ten to fourteen days. It circles back to the whole pay grade variable – always! I’ll probably make an effort to contact coach Calcagni and the other principals for those games I miss and do game stories, something which I did not bother to do for the past several games I’ve missed due to being busy with some other stuff.

Supposedly I have a couple of Blue Jays pieces running in a daily paper in the United Arab Emirates fairly soon – once those are up, I’ll post the links right here! I also need to do a Jays piece for The Varsity (U of T’s newspaper) in the next 48 hours, and once that’s up I’m sure I’ll provide ya’ll with a link.

I know there’s (at least a few) readers, and there’s every reason to comment! I promise I’ll reply to all of them – feel free to provide opinions on anything Twins, Blue Jays or general baseball, and I’ll be happy to respond and debate you if necessary. Casual observations will be treated more kindly. ;)

Look for something up tomorrow night after the Oshawa game!