It's been an exciting, event-filled, eventful last couple days. It began on Friday morning when it was brought to my attention that Rob Neyer, one of my all time favorite baseball writers, had mentioned A Building Roam in a little blurb on his ESPN Sweet Spot blog. He drew readers' attention to my post last week about the Jim Joyce incident and the number of views for this blog went through the roof which is exciting considering that I haven't even reached 50 posts yet. I've been a Rob Neyer fan for many years and for a while I even paid for an ESPN Insider monthly subscription for the sole purpose of reading Mr. Neyer's blog (which is no longer behind the subscription wall) so it was an absolute thrill to be mentioned on there.
Later that afternoon, my girlfriend returned home after 3 weeks of traveling and we had a nice dinner with my brother, his wife, and my 5-month-old nephew.
Yesterday, June 12th marked the two year anniversary of my arrival here in San Diego after a 10-day, 15-state migration across the country from Staten Island, New York. It wasn't until the end of an eventful Saturday, sitting up in the rightfield stands at Petco Park watching the Padres and Mariners, that I realized "holy crap, I've been here for two years." In the morning we had gone over to a nice little bookstore in Seaport Village to meet Josh Wilker, one of my other favorite current writers and author of the highly-regarded new book Cardboard Gods which he was promoting and signing. I've been reading his blog for many years and even briefly corresponded with him through e-mail before, but when I met him in person I froze up awkwardly and barely managed to say anything. I'm still working on what will probably be a lengthy review of his book and will have it up soon.
After my embarrassing moment of shyness, we spent the rest of the afternoon killing time before the 5:30 pm Padres-Mariners game. Lunch at a randomly chosen but nevertheless delicious Italian restaurant, a cheap but extremely satisfying one-hour massage, and a stroll around downtown San Diego before we made it to the ballpark for what was a fun ballgame. I expected a low-scoring pitcher's duel between the two lefty starters, Cliff Lee and Wade LeBlanc, but Lee got tagged for a two-run bomb from Adrian Gonzalez early and LeBlanc only surrendered one run but allowed 10 baserunners in his six innings. It was still a close ballgame (3-1) in the 8th when the Padres blew it open with 4 runs including three on a line-drive homer from pinch-hitter Oscar Salazar. I was questioning why the Padres would use Salazar to pinch hit instead of pinch-hitter extraordinaire Matt Stairs, but Salazar made manager Bud Black look good and sent the ballpark into a frenzy.
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