I was at a friends house for dinner on Sunday as we watched the Cowboys give away a victory and I kept seeing the ads for game 3 of the NLCS and I got more excited for that than the Cowboy game. Baseball is my first and true love when it comes to sports as I have probably said before. The fact that I can get jazzed for a NLCS game in which I could care less about who wins more than the local football team illustrates this. I don’t know if it is the playoff atmosphere or the flow of the game or the one on one battles between hitter and pitcher but to me it is the great game.

Being starved for good baseball around here, i tend to lose the feeling in August and September. The heat and the barage of Cowboy pre-season stretching gets me to dread any kind of sports talk. The doldrums of the NASCAR season and the fact that the Rangers suck so bad that the could just end the season with the All-Star break make me just want to sit in a chair under the AC and drink ice cold lemonade and not do anything that requires any rooting effort. But then the fall arrives and playoff baseball gets into the blood and the weather gets better so you can actually move without threat of a heat stroke.

I get fired up at watching teams use every pitcher they have in order to stay alive. i like the talk of 3 days rest and pinch hitting for the pitcher. I love watching baseball where the jackets and sweatshirts are prominent in the dugout and every pitch means something. This gets me ready for the spring and the next season. I am wondering if the Rangers can find something on the off-season and if Nolan actually can turn this thing around. And, actually, I am looking forward to the World Baseball Classic this spring. I did enjoy it the first time around and I hope it just gets better. But the pinnacle of playoff baseball will never be surmounted by anything else in my sports mind.

Tags: off-season, playoffs, rangers, world baseball classic