Oakland Athletics prospect Grant Desme is retiring from baseball to enter the priesthood, Desme announced on Friday, Jan. 22, 2010.

I was poking around on a website called Creative Minority Report.

Check it out. Baseball is an interesting sport and different from the others. Here is another story about this rare phenomenon.

It reminds me of a time a few years ago when I was wandering around the NFL Hall of Fame and Museum in Canton Ohio, just down the road from The Best Damn Cheesemaker in Ohio and perhaps the USA.

I turned a corner and ran into an alcove with nothing in it other than an Army dress uniform with a number of medals and the name Tillman above the right jacket pocket.

I guess football is also an interesting sport.

I am assuming that most normal people, if they are not doing open heart surgery or something similar, are watching the baseball playoff games prior to the World Series.

Is the quality of the umpiring unusually bad or what? I watch a fair number of regular season games at all levels and have not seen this many obvious gaffes in a long time. There was one joker behind home plate that had the smallest strike zone ever seen, granted he called them that way for both sides, but then he suddenly started enlarging the zone in the later innings.

In Game 4 of the Angels/Yankees game the 2nd base umpire misses an obvious pickoff play which didn’t need a replay even, then a little later the 3rd base umpire calls a guy out for leaving too soon after an outfield catch, while watching the outfield make the catch. Was he just trying to make up for his partner’s bad call at 2nd?And then to top everything off, with Yankees on 2nd and 3rd and 1 out an infield grounder catches the guy on 3rd halfway home, so the Angel catcher runs the guy back and both are obviously off the bag and both are obviously tagged out but the umpire can’t believe the runner from 2nd is that dumb and refuses to call him out. Everybody, out of embarrassment I guess, goes back to the dugout. C’mon, what game is being played here?

Maybe these guys are just the old bulls of the major leagues, calling them as they guess they should be? I thought they were supposed to be the best rather than the oldest.

The Mustangs lost 3-0 to the Helena Brewers. I listened to the crowd in different places tonight. Only a few were unhappy. Most people knew what the outcome was likely to be. They were accepting, almost serene. But they also knew what had happened last night. Amazingly, two walk-off home runs, something not seen this year at Dehler Park, had enabled the Mustangs to win a Pioneer League double-header.

So hope is not entirely beaten out of us. And therefore, almost everyone stayed to the end. They all gave our Italian pitcher a warm send off back to his home to play in World Cup games for Italy. He did well. Our batters have failed us all year but we are forgiving fans. We will be back next year.

The team actually has six more games to play before the season ends. 4 in Missoula and 2 in Great Falls. I might just take in a couple of those.

This is the scoreboard just after 18 year old Daniel Corcino induced the 8th batter in the 9th inning to line out hard to the first baseman Nurre for the final out.

The other youngster from the Caribbean was 16 year old Yorman  Rodriguez, the under age beer batter for the game. I wonder, do they have any child labor laws in Venezuela? He was just picked up a few games ago and seems to have a big bat. He had a double and a home run tonight, the second since he came to Billings.

The pitchers did well until the ninth. Snowden threw 6 scoreless innings. Then a couple of relievers put them down until the ninth when the first four batters singled and two runs had ruined the possible shutout.  Then young Corcino came on to get the double play with another run scoring and emptying the bases.

We all breathed a sigh of relief and held our breaths while the next batter singled and the next is walked. Can this be a repeat of something we’ve seen earlier in the season?  It turns out to be a ploy to heighten the tension, finally broken by the line drive into Nurre’s trusty glove. Whew!

I wonder if it is reasonable to hope for a .500 season this year? Not hopeless but possibly out of reach already.

There were the usual number of errors for both sides plus a couple of triples over the head of the Mustangs’ left fielder, which doesn’t happen that often. A couple of hits in the bottom of the 10th gave the win to the Mustangs 6-5.

Our cheerleader-in-chief managed to turn down the volume after the first inning or so which made all of us happy.

As you can see it only takes 4 guys to water the infield at the AAA level, whereas I think it takes about 12 to do it for a major league team at least in spring training.

The title: Those are the names I came up with in 3 seconds of not-very-serious thinking about what to name a baseball team from any city in Nevada. There are probably hundreds more and better. The name finally bestowed on the DiamondBack’s AAA Tucson franchise, which I suspect that Tucson lost rather than Reno won, was the Aces.

This very new park is fairly close to downtown Reno and seems to have plenty of enthusiastic fans this first season in the Pacific Coast League. It reminds me of Dehler Park, except that this one is bigger and has many nice luxury boxes providing shelter for those in them and under them, perhaps like Dehler Park was supposed to be originally.

The only drawbacks were the cheerleading announcer and the dopey mascot—see below. I think you ought to be forced to wear a short skirt and carry pom-poms on the dugout if you insist on announcing the home team  and providing inter-inning blather in any other than a normal tone of voice.

With the addition of Reno to the Pacific Coast League you can see a lot of AAA baseball within a couple hours drive. There are the Sacramento River Cats, who used to be in Canadian Vancouver, champions of the PCL last year, and part of the Oakland farm system; and the Fresno Grizzlies, belonging to the Giants.

And then the Las Vegas 51s, now belonging to the Toronto Blue Jays as the Dodgers went back to Albuquerque where the Dukes had been for a long time, only now they call themselves the Isotopes—don’t ask why; and of course, the Reno Aces, part of the Arizona Diamondbacks system. The last used to be in Tucson but I guess that city got tired of supporting a AAA team in the manner they would like to become accustomed to.

There will be almost continuous baseball ’til sometime late in the evening Saturday and Sunday at Pirtz Field. Dehler Park, the more deluxe venue, will host three games Saturday, Sunday and Monday with the Scarlets v. Red Deer Braves (yes, from Alberta, north of Calgary, whew) set for Saturday evening at 5pm, Royals v. Scarlets at 5pm on Sunday, and Scarlets v Laurel 5pm on Monday. In addition to action at Dehler and Pirtz there will be a couple of games at Urbaska Field (17th & Poly) on Sunday and Monday starting at 2pm.

Let’s see, Scarlets, Royals, Cardinals, Blue Jays. Oh, I almost forgot, the Emmanuel Halos (formerly the Billings Lobos, a surprisingly good Babe Ruth and now National Baseball Congress team) and the Billings Big Leaguers (a conglomerate of several teams in this area).

In the opening game at Pirtz Field the Halos edged the Blue Jays (playing in old Royals uniforms) in a nicely pitched game 3-2 with two runs in the 7th inning. The Halos didn’t look quite as good in their 2nd game played at Dehler Park as the Cardinals took an 8 run lead, enough to “mercy” them. Loose play in the field and lack of hitting were problems.

Pirtz Field really looks good with lights and new bull pens and some very good cheeseburgers, lean beef with some ButtRub for flavor.

Of course, Dehler Park has the advantage of Johnsonville bratwurst. Try them both.

While waiting for Dehler Park to get warmed up with baseball on tap everyday we thought we had better check up on some of our grandchildren. Enroute to Ashland OR we stopped to visit them in Issaquah WA and went to a game in Tacoma on Sunday afternoon.

Cheney Stadium is 50 years old and looks it. Not surprisingly, it was once thought to be the latest thing in minor league baseball stadiums. Like Cobb Field in the 40s perhaps and maybe Dehler Park in the 50s, the 2050s that is. Pretty good food. Prices are the usual gouge.  We were lucky, as we didn’t need a moveable dome on Sunday afternoon.

The Tacoma Rainiers, AAA farm team for the nearby Seattle Mariners, hosted the Sacramento River Cats, champion of the Pacific Coast League for the last two years. The TRs looked pretty good with their dancing moose and young girls on the home team dugout above. One nice thing about the sound system: they didn’t feel like they had to entertain us between every inning, nor did they have to pretend that the home team needed special announcing skills. There were the usual dopey contests of course.

I got home to Billings just in time to see the Montana State University Billings baseball home opening weekend 10-11 April  against Northwest Nazarene of Nampa Idaho. According to their very useful program, ($1), they have been playing since the middle of February at least on weekends, though some of those games look like they might have taken place in Arizona. They are 16-18 for the season up to today’s 1st game, part of which I saw at Dehler Park.

Yesterdays’s games (9 and 7 innings) were won by MSUB 6-3 and 6-5. Today’s first game also went 9 innings, won by MSUB 6-1. This could have been a 3 hit complete game shutout by left-hander Brian Howe [N.B. the Gazette on Easter Sunday had a different pitcher; not sure who is correct]  but the right fielder lost a ball in the sun late in the game to allow the Nazarene’s only run. Howe looked strong in the 5 innings that I saw him pitch. I didn’t see the scoring by the Jackets as it was early in the game.

From the box scores of yesterday’s games, conveniently provided in today’s program, the pitching must have been fairly strong too. The statistics for the hitting and pitching, also provided in the program, shows 8 guys .280 or above, and 5 pitchers in the 3 to 5 ERA range, pretty good for college games with metal bats.

The rest of the schedule looks like 4 games next weekend here in Billings against Central Washington, then 8 games against Bemidji State and Western Oregon the first couple of weekends in May.

I heard from Bob Sandler that the Legion teams start playing games in May as well, and don’t the Little Leagues start playing her in late April/early May too? Wow, watch this space for your baseball fix. As you can see there are a lot of good seats available for these games, @1.50/game, a good deal.

Oh, I almost forgot, the announcer was a sensible, low-volume guy for whom the home team batters were not the cousins of Jesus Christ: just name, number, position at a reasonable volume and non-tortuous announcements and music between innings. Sometimes he didn’t say anything, bless him. He should give lessons to the Mustangs announcer.

I should know the names of these flowering trees on the edges of Dehler Park. They are coming out just as baseball is starting, how convenient.

Spent some time in Lakeland Florida, including a baseball game at Joker Marchant Stadium on this last day of March 2009. Of the half dozen or so baseball stadiums we attended during the last 10 days this one has to get our highest accolades. They have a large parking lot right next to the park; decent seats in the shade cost only $16, and hot dogs were only $3.50! Those are very fair prices down here this spring.

The Tigers played the Washington Nationals. Both had young pitchers starting who looked very good the first time through the lineup but then the Nats started hitting in the 4th and 5th innings. We should have left at our usual time in the 6th inning as the 7th saw a ton of water falling very quickly. It was kind of fun watching the ground crew wrestle the canvas over the infield.

Lakeland is a nice old town too with a fairly prosperous downtown area, though not as well off as Sarasota and Fort Lauderdale and Fort Myers. Amtrak comes through town too. This might be a good place to come back to.