Diary of a Diehard

While many would argue that a sure sign of spring is Groundhog Day, I have found a more reliable indicator. You can always tell Spring Training is upon us when teams announce who they will be inviting to Spring Training. Today the Arizona Diamondbacks released their invitee list to Spring Training for non-roster players. This is both an exciting and frustrating time for me each year. It is exciting because it means I have survived yet another long off-season and in just a few short days pitchers and catchers will begin to arrive in Tucson to start preparations for another baseball season. It is frustrating because after patiently waiting by my mailbox and pestering my mailman to the point where he is now talking about a career change, I did not get an invitation. As I walked back to the house dejected after another day without a formal invitation, I began to realize I could be Cinderella. I’m not talking about the ending of that story when Cinderella gets the prince and the whole “happily ever after” part. No I am talking about Cinderella – The Early Years.

Continue reading ‘I Feel Like Cinderella’ »

Today the Arizona Diamondbacks announced an enhanced phone number for fans wanting to buy season tickets, group tickets, or suite tickets. According to the press release the goal is to give Diamondbacks fans a more direct line to ticket representatives eliminating any potential delays that could occur by going through the regular ticket purchasing system. This is such a cool idea. I feel like Commissioner Gordon on the old Batman television show. I now have a direct line into the Diamondbacks that I can call for ticket stuff. I can definitely see this as a jumping off point to all kinds of things. It started my mind racing as I thought about additional features and functions that could be added to this service.

Continue reading ‘My Own Personal Bat Phone’ »

I am not much of a football fan. Even when the NFL is in the midst of the post-season I can’t get too excited about it. It’s hard to be enthusiastic about a league whose season only lasts 17 weeks and teams are only required to play once a week and even then they need a week off. Today is the pinnacle of football as it is Super Bowl Sunday. This game has become a spectacle and a huge media type. The pre-game show starts several hours before the game and as viewers we are shown clips from eons ago that have little or no bearing on the game of the day. We are enlightened not only with a player’s life story but also the life story of friends and family members. During one segment we heard from important people in the life of one of the players playing in Super Bowl XLI who had the game dedicated to them by the player. For most of these it was a parent or special family member. I give Marvin Harrison some credit as his special person was his high school geometry teacher. I’ve never heard of anyone dedicating anything to a high school geometry teacher so that was pretty original. I decided at that point that if I am ever arrested and interviewed on television as I am led away in handcuffs I am going to dedicate that moment to my high school geometry teacher. So like countless others, I sat there on my couch waiting for the Super Bowl and more importantly the Super Bowl commercials to begin.

Continue reading ‘So What, It’s Still Football’ »

Quite regularly Trina and I meet people and begin talking to them. Through these conversations we get to know each other. Somewhere along the line the subject of baseball comes up (I know real shocking). As we start to talk about baseball the subject of the Arizona Diamondbacks comes up (I know, again real shocking). At this point things get kind of animated as I start to describe the upcoming season or reminisce about previous seasons. Soon they have typecast me as some kind of fanatic which as near as I can tell is a word derivative of “fan” and “addict”. Trina has also used that term to describe me but she normally leaves the “fan” word out of her description. The next thing that usually comes out of people’s mouths is, “have you ever seen the movie Fever Pitch?” Now I don’t get that. How can we be having a perfectly normal conversation about the national pastime and then make some quantum leap to whether I had ever seen a movie that came out in 2004 with a limited box office return. Where did that come from? For the longest time I had no idea what the movie was even about though from the title I guessed it had something to do with baseball. Finally a year ago my kids bought that movie for me to watch while I was recovering from shoulder surgery. I watched it but still didn’t quite get why people kept asking me if I had seen the movie.

Continue reading ‘I’m Not an Addict’ »

Groundhog Day is an interesting tradition. I’ve never quite understood where we got the notion that a furry rodent was capable of climate prognostication. I consider myself to have a fairly vivid imagination but even I could not come up with a story believable enough to get people to buy into a chubby hibernating woodchuck telling them when winter is over. But here we are celebrating a holiday with just such a premise. You just gotta love this country. Growing up in Idaho I looked forward to Groundhog Day and prayed that the little rascal would not see his shadow and spring would be here. In Idaho winter seems to last an eternity. I once attended an Independence Day parade where it snowed so warm weather and seeing grass was something that was high on my importance list. Since moving to Arizona, Groundhog Day has become less important in my life. Normally the difference between winter and spring is about 9 degrees in temperature. The concept of Groundhog Day was still intriguing and I wondered what would happen if we happened to change the event to predict baseball instead of weather.

Continue reading ‘It’s Ground Hog Day’ »

I received a very nice email yesterday from the guys over at AZ SportsHub. They have just launched a new web site and asked for feedback. I’m always looking for Diamondbacks news and as a fellow Arizona sports aficionado I just had to go take a look. The site is very professional and has a great feel. The fact that they included my blog in their AZ Blogs section was also a pleasant surprise. [Note to self: Send Matt a new cool graphic icon for Diary Diehard along with a note of thanks.] As I was perusing the site, I was intrigued by an entry posted on January 23 discussing the Diamondbacks potentially hosting an All-Star game in 2011. The post was based on a story in the East Valley Tribune newspaper. As many of you know, I have fairly strong feelings about baseball snubbing the Diamondbacks and I have chronicled my frustration that Commissioner Selig for whatever reason does not want to award Arizona with an all-star game. Over the course of the past 8 years teams with new stadiums were given the midsummer classic to showcase the new facility. Sure Selig talks a great game telling fans and media how he would love to have Phoenix host an all-star game. After all, he lives here part of the time so it would be perfect. After that sound bite he awards the game to yet another city. So this story in the Tribune intrigued me.

Continue reading ‘Let’s Not Get Our Hopes Up’ »

Today is definitely a Sedona Red letter day in my life as I am sure it is in thousands of other baseball fans’ lives. Not because it would have been Jackie Robinson’s 88th birthday or that it is Nolan Ryan’s 60th birthday. No, today is special because it is the day where final payment is due on season tickets for the Arizona Diamondbacks. Sure there are always two sides to every story. Some of you may be thinking, “How can this be such a great day, after all you have to send hundreds or thousands of dollars to a faceless corporate entity who has no feelings for the every day fan.” To you I would say, stop channeling my wife. No I am kidding; Trina is as excited as I am about today. Well maybe not as excited but she is at least putting up with it. After all, can you possibly imagine what life in our house would be like if I didn’t get season tickets? That would mean I would be around all the time and she would lose 83 nights where she can do whatever she wants knowing I will never find out about her trips to the craft store or the scrapbooking store. And even if I did find out she knows that if I have season tickets then she can justify her purchases by stating, “Well it is cheaper than your baseball tickets.” There really is no comeback for that so she has an upper hand in our marriage from April through September. I’m ok with that as long as I have season tickets.

Continue reading ‘A Proud New Owner’ »

New products and services seem to come along constantly but very few make a dent in my life. I find I am just too busy with the day-to-day chaos of activity that I just don’t have time to devote to trying out all the new toys and gadgets. This is really a depressing fact for me as I just love new technology and trying new things. But even though I seem to be overwhelmed with my normal life flow there are times that a new product or technology just bowls me over and changes my life. I have divided my mortal existence into two phase, pre-Diamondbacks and post-Diamondbacks. In my pre-Diamondbacks state I was much like an unborn child. I was growing and developing but I wasn’t really aware of my surroundings. That all changed on March 9, 1995 when Major League Baseball awarded a franchise to Arizona. From that point on I began to have real experiences that I could remember. So in my post-Diamondbacks life phase I have had three major technology advancements that I would call life-changing.

Continue reading ‘My Technology Love Affairs’ »

For 63 days I have successfully dodged the piercing glares and probing discussions from my wife as she has attempted to get me to commit to work around the house. If I kept up that pace I may be about to slide through the next 19 days until pitchers and catchers report. At that point I could plead that baseball season had started and I had so much work to do between the blog and preparing myself for Opening Day that I could not possibly be expected to do chores. Today Trina was preparing her weekly calendar. This is a ritual that happens every Monday where she writes down important events that each family member has so that we can make sure everyone is where they need to be each day. Usually my activities never make the cut on this schedule. I am not sure I understand why that is so today I made the mistake of actually asking. Trina explained that “go to the Team Shop” was not an important event especially since I had written it on every day of the calendar. With the month nearly over, Trina flipped the page to begin filling in events that were scheduled for February. It was at that point she noticed that I had circled February 17 in red and put hearts next to it. She commented how thoughtful that was that I had remembered to make a note to myself about Valentines Day but that I had marked the wrong date and that Valentine’s Day was actually February 14. There are sometimes that I just don’t know when to leave well enough alone and this happened to be one of those times. I told her the markings on the 17th were not for Valentines but were to remind me that was reporting day for pitchers and catchers at Tucson Electric Park. It wasn’t a heart she saw; it was a Sedona Red baseball diamond. I’m not exactly sure why but this seemed to trigger something in my wife replacing her normally sweet disposition with that of Linda Blair from the Exorcist (without the pea soup). She began to speak incoherently; ok maybe it was just that I wasn’t completely listening since I was still thinking about Tucson Electric Park and what non-roster invitees the Diamondbacks would bring to Spring Training. Anyway, when I tuned back in I found that Trina had produced a stack of official looking papers and laid them in front of me.

Continue reading ‘Oh No, Not the Honey-Do List!’ »