There is a baseball in our house that we leave on the floor for the cats – we’ve discovered that they both enjoy batting it around and chasing it from room to room as it rolls across the floor. So I’ve decided, from observing this behavior, that my cats are baseball fans. Therefore, it came as no surprise that for the first half hour of the draft last night, Allegro perched herself on the second-story ledge overlooking the living room, gazed down at everyone in curiosity, and continually meowed quite loudly as we made our picks. (Was she approving our choices? Warning us against bad decisions? Wondering aloud whether or not she would actually land on her feet if she leapt from the second floor onto the couch below?) Fortunately, she eventually returned to the safety of her couch cushion and spent the rest of the draft napping… (I can’t say the same for skittish Piva, who was hiding under the bed for most of the evening. About 45 minutes before we finished, she finally decided she needed either food or a litter box, so she scampered across the floor as quickly as she could and took cover in the laundry room for the rest of the night…)
The draft began pretty much as I expected – with lots of pizza, Tim displaying last year’s first place champion baseball, and plenty of testosterone. Also as expected, my first pick was C.C. Sabathia, which I’m quite happy with. I love me some C.C. :) By the seventh round, I realized that no one had taken Jeter yet – and since I needed a shortstop, how could I pass him up? Towards the end of the draft, I realized my roster was stocked with Yankees – Jeter, Matsui, Cano and Cabrera. And I hadn’t even MEANT to choose that many. I wasn’t attempting to draft the entire Yankee lineup for my team – but they kept popping up at opportune times. When the best player available happens to be a Yankee, well, that’s just serendipity…
By the end of the draft, when all the “good” players had been chosen, people were making obscure picks and Rick and I were frantically trying to keep up with the unfamiliar names – we were entering players into a spreadsheet, to keep track of which ones had been chosen and who had made the choice. It was about this time that Eric and Debbie (in town from New Jersey this week) popped in to observe the mayhem. I imagine they found the obvious seriousness of the proceedings in my kitchen to be rather amusing – ten people in deep concentration on laptop computers, Rick frenetically searching for random baseball players and shouting “slow down for a second!” every time someone called out another pick, Echo struggling up from her napping position on the floor to bark, “get me away from all these crazy people” (at least I THINK that’s what she was saying…). And even though this is the third year I’ve done this, I’m STILL not used to how LONG it takes to get through twenty-five rounds of draft picks…
All in all, I’m pretty happy with my team, and I’m really looking forward to the start of baseball season – it’s like the harbinger of a nice, warm spring after a long, cold Texas winter. Oh wait… we don’t get long, cold winters… nevermind… Well, whatever… I’m still looking forward to it… :)
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