My day started with a meeting at Cricket Queensland, with Mike Young. But baseball was involved. When we got to the dual grounds of CQ and Cricket Australia we first took a tour of the place. I saw one of the fields, and the offices for both of the organizations. I met the head honchos of the Brisbane Heat, the local Twenty20 cricket team. And before we settled in for our meeting, I had only one awkward conversation. That's pretty decent for me, at least for the start of a day.
Mike kept introducing me to people and telling them that I am a statistician for the Toronto Blue Jays and that hopefully because of that I might be able to help out with some newfound cricket statistics. When he introduced me to one of the guys in the office that way, the guy started talking about Moneyball.
The guy asked me something like if the Blue Jays got that guy from the movie to be the General Manager in Toronto right after the time of the film. I responded that yes, we got J.P. Ricciardi from Oakland but it was before 2002, the season that the movie is about, so Ricciardi would have been already in Toronto at the time. He was adamant that I was wrong and that Paul DePodesta (in the movie his character name is Peter Brand) had come to Toronto from Oakland to be the GM of the Blue Jays. I tried to be polite but in the end, I probably wasn't.
DePodesta was never the GM of the Jays and he didn't come to Toronto from Oakland. Instead, Toronto got J.P., who obviously missed the Moneyball boat, considering he gave out several massive contracts to guys like Alex Rios, Vernon Wells, B.J. Ryan and A.J. Burnett. So that was weird. What a great way to make an impression in cricket land.
The conversation during the scheduled meeting actually went much better than that. I suppose it almost had to. Mike did most of the talking but I threw in some wisdom every once in awhile, as did the woman we were meeting with. Her name is Judy and she is one of the official scorers for the Brisbane Heat, and she obviously also does something in the Heat office, though I'm not sure what it was. She did make it sound like it would be beneficial to have someone come in and keep track of defensive statistics for cricket, giving out errors and helping runs after errors not count against the bowlers, and stuff like that.
Brisbane has their first home T20 match of the season on Tuesday at The Gabba, so I mentioned that I was going to head to that. Mike asked Judy if I might be able to get into the scorer's box with her and the other scorers, just to see what goes on and how things work. She mentioned that while it is often very busy and quite crowded, she would try. But I'm not sure I hold out much hope for that because she didn't sound too optimistic. I do believe that she will try, but I just don't know if it's a remote possibility.
I do plan on heading to the match anyway though. I think Carl and maybe a couple of the players might be interested in going as well. Tuesday nights are usually reserved for practices, but since it's the week of Christmas, I suspect that the guys might not have to practice. There are no games next weekend, so I am thinking that perhaps we can all head to the cricket match. I am probably going to make an attempt to write down some notes and keep track of defense and errors and things like that, but I'm still not sure if I know the sport well enough to do a great job of it. We'll see next Tuesday.
Mike offered to drop me off at the office when we were finished our meeting, but I instead asked him to drop me off at home. It was perfect timing to call my mom and I thought I would take the opportunity when presented to me. So I called home and had a chat with my mother. We discussed some cricket and how my meeting went, and of course the weather and sun is always a topic. I'm glad I'm not in Canada for winter. Let me just point that out once again.
I had plans to make myself useful at home but before I got to any of that, I fell asleep. I had a nice little midday nap to get me ready for the afternoon. Perfect.
When I woke up I realized that I really should be more productive so I headed to the grocery store. I got a few groceries, enough to tide me over for a couple of days, which is how I operate, and checked out the names of the cereals to see if I might have any Rice Bubbles incidents in the future. Nothing else jumped out at me as being as ridiculous as that, but I might have to take another look next time.
Before I'd left the apartment I had made plans in my mind to head to the bank as well, but that wasn't about to happen since I'd left my bank card at home. Just think, I was all up in arms about not having a bank card for a couple weeks and not being able to do anything at the bank, and I haven't used the card once since I received it.
So I went back home and decided to come up with some questions for people I am hoping to interview in the near future. I wrote down some questions for David Nilsson, with whom I am still hoping to have a chat so I can write a story on him and Graeme Lloyd. But so far, I only have one half of that story. It's not the Nilsson half, in case you didn't happen to catch that.
I also jotted down a bunch of random questions for the Japanese players. This upcoming weekend series will be their last with the Bandits, as they head back to Japan for Christmas and they stay there for the remainder of the Australian baseball season. They start their own season in February and will essentially take January off to train I think. My plan was to talk to them at practice tonight, and I had informed Monna, the interpreter, of this so I was hoping we could work something out.
I also put down on paper the questions that I had emailed the guys, just in case anyone wanted to be so kind as to answer them at practice, instead of emailing them back to me.
And by the time I was through with all that, Carl was already at the park before practice, so I headed over there. The Japanese guys are always the first to get to the field and I figured I would be able to catch them before they started running and hitting and getting into game mode.
No one was around but Carl when I got there though, so instead of working or doing anything like that, we got out my gloves and started playing catch. Carl still seems to have a fear of breaking my face or something every time he throws to me, so he is very inaccurate and I end up chasing a lot of balls down. At least he blames it on not wanting to hurt me but who really knows?
Much to my surprise, the Japanese players were not the first to arrive on this day. Durket and James Albury showed up super early and Durket took the opportunity to finally hit me the ground balls he's been promising me. I wasn't so bad, though he wasn't hitting very hard. Everyone's afraid to hurt me I guess. But Durket was kind enough to play until he had to go for his pre-game run. Or pre-practice-game run as it were.
After doing a little more of nothing, I introduced myself to Albury and we talked a little about what I do and where I’ve worked and when I said I live in Toronto he asked how far it is from London. I told him London is where I am actually from and it’s only a couple hours away. He knew of the city because of the new team in the Frontier League, the Rippers of course. He mentioned the same thing that Durket did, that a lot of American guys might run into difficulties with the league if they don’t have passports, because they won’t be able to travel to the games in Canada. Apparently it’s a lot more difficult to get a passport in the US of A.
Several people joined us at different times when we were sitting around. Chris Mowday came over and we started talking about his time in Canada, playing for Medicine Hat when he was 16 and 17 years old, and then later playing for Edmonton and Calgary. Mowday signed a million-dollar contract at 16, and went straight to professional ball. He didn’t finish high school, and I asked him if he regretted that decision. He said he wouldn’t necessarily go back and do anything differently, but he doesn’t really take pride in the fact that he’s a now 30-something-year-old without an education playing at home on nights after which he’s laboured all day. I would love to actually sit down and talk to him and write an article about him, but I don’t know if he’d be up for that. Maybe I’ll find out one day down the road. For now, I have material with which I need to start writing and I already don’t have enough time for that. So it will wait.
Carl and I got to work when Gonzo arrived and we started setting up the field for the practice game. Mostly everyone came out to help and in no time, they were doing it themselves. The Bandits were once again facing the Brisbane All-Stars, though this time the opposing team had only nine players I think. That was good news for me though, because it meant that Carl and Gonzo and I got to take some fly balls in batting practice since there weren’t enough fielders to go around. I fielded decently, despite wearing sandals. It must have been all the practice I’d had earlier. Thanks Durket.
I decided to score the game on paper while we were there, so that I would have something that I could take back to Judy and show her, and try to compare to cricket scoring. It turned out to be a slightly more difficult task than I’d originally thought since the Bandits were using three designated hitters in their lineup, and they were batting out of order. Perfect.
Near the beginning of the game, Carl, Gonzo and I had all started a discussion about how hungry we were. We decided the best plan of action would be to order a pizza to the field. It took us a little while to figure out a phone number for a pizza place, but finally our order was in and we only had 30 minutes to wait. It was probably the longest 30 minutes of my life though. I kept asking Carl how much longer probably about every five minutes. I don’t know why I was so hungry but I was, and when the pizza arrived, we crushed it. We had two large meat-lover’s pizzas and a loaf of garlic bread and I’m pretty sure I ate a whole pizza and half the bread to myself. And by pretty sure, I mean I definitely did. It was delicious. But I am probably going to regret that later. I’ll have to run a marathon every day for the next couple weeks if I want to make up for it.
After the game, we redressed the field with its various tarps and such and Gonzo gave me a ride home.
Also, Carl is concerned that people think we're dating. We're not. He's also concerned that I make it sound that way in these journals, and though I don't think that's the case, I will try to make it clear. We're not. Sorry if there's been any confusion. We're friends and we have been since I got here, though we may be getting sick of each other at this point. Friends for now, I should say.
But at the end of the day, it was bedtime early to be ready for tomorrow’s events. Early baseball.
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