Is It Baseball Season Already?

Yeah we'll be seeing a lot of that this year

This always happens to me, this year's NFL draft will be the third I have covered for the Redskins, and while noodling away my time on Curly R with concerns like free agency, mock drafts and the detritus of seasons past all of a sudden I look up and baseball games are happening every day.

I try to get excited but I cannot.

I love baseball, I really do. But football is the sport I love so much I have chosen to spend hours every week writing about it for an audience I cannot see and is really nothing more than a list of entries in a Sitemeter. I love a baseball game, the hot dogs, the beer, the crack of the bat and all, sadly though I would almost always rather sit here in my disgusting home office and gin up 500 words on the Redskins than head across town and spend fifty bucks at a game, and that is after the free tickets.

The funny thing is I got started as a blogger writing about the Washington Nationals. After incessant water cooler conversations on the Nationals, a friend invited me to join his blog, The Curly W. Together we turned it from an irregular publication to a daily, added new features and together we were the first blog on teh webs to post up a regular Five Questions feature, wherein we exchange questions with a blogger covering the other team in a series. By 2007 it was de rigeur on sports blogs and I had more or less abandoned it here at Curly R. We still run it occasionally, when I get asked and when for old times' sake with partners from 2006.

I wrote pretty reguarly for Curly W from July of 2006 to April of 2007, by that point I was pushing one post a day on Curly R and had come to the kind of sad conclusion that despite my desire to be a baseball guy, it just was not there for me. I would sit down to write a post on the Nationals and have to surf stats or read Barry Svrluga or check the Nationals blogroll before I was inspired.

With football I can sit down and rip off a post with no prep any time of day or night, twenty-four hours a day. Being a lifetime football fan and Redskins fan will do that to you.

No, the biggest time consumer here for me is not coming up with a story or an opinion or an angle, rather the challenge is often finding the link I need to back up an assertion, we are very much focused on citing sources and standing up for the work we publish.

So baseball is here, I plan to see some games and have some fun and troll some blogs. The Nationals have a large and growing blog network, baseball blogging being a few years more mature than football blogging, and the meth addicts at DC Pro Sports Report helpfully published a Nationals blog viewers guide for this season. If you are local to the Washington DC area or otherwise follow the Nationals, pick through here and find some sites to visit for this season.

I will mostly be over here in the corner writing about the Redskins...



Ryan Zimmerman and Cristian Guzman missing another one: Reuters Pictures from here.