Marinerds, etc.

I went to the USSM Pizza Feed tonight.

It was pretty fun. I showed off some of my Japan baseball photos (printed out, I still haven't made a lot of headway in preparing a subset of 2500 pictures for online consumption), got to chat with a whole lot of cool people, and was very entertained by Dave, Derek and Jeff. I only had one slice of pizza, though, as the distribution method (of which there was none) didn't work particularly well. Fortunately, unlike some people, I wasn't there for the food. In retrospect, I was there for the Dave Cameron Comedy Hour, I think.

And yeah, I was fully decked out in Fighters gear (Ogasawara jersey, Fighters hat, little "BB Bear" mascot keychain on my sling bag), as threatened. Oddly, there were very few people wearing baseball-related clothes -- Laurie had an awesome "Doyle #32" jersey, and David J. Corcoran was wearing a Meche t-shirt, and that's about all I recall. I suppose everyone else had come over after work as well.

We all got to watch the Mets-Cardinals game on TV, including the part where So Taguchi came in for his second plate appearance of the postseason, and hit another home run, off Billy Wagner. I tried to organize a cheer of "SPEE-ZEE-OH!" at one point, and was fortunately ignored by everyone.

A whole bunch of people off my blogroll were there, including J of Mariner Minors, the inimitable Jason Churchill of Prospect Insider, and Conor Glassey with his new StopTheWave.com t-shirt. The Everett Aquasox announcer, Pat Dillon, was also there, and we had a nice chat about Japanese baseball, which was cool. And of course, frequent commenters msb, Gomez, Dylan, Mike Snow, Brian-no-relation-to-Matt Thornton, Lauren the Token Chick, and others I'm probably forgetting because it's 3am were also around.

And even though he wasn't there, PositivePaul has me started on another song parody. I've been churning it in my head since this morning, maybe I'll write it this weekend.

Honestly, I wish I could have spent more time just sitting at a table and listening to Dave, Jason, J, and Pat talk about prospects, and learning by osmosis. That's probably my one real regret about the evening -- not using enough time to learn stuff from a room full of good baseball minds. I mean, I'd love the opportunity to just pick, say, Dave Cameron's brain, for baseball knowledge and camera geekery. Oh well -- hopefully there'll be another gathering during the offseason at some point. Maybe when Derek's book comes out...

It's funny, I keep thinking I spend too much time on this blog and should really stop writing it, but then events like this happen and I remember that I'm lucky to be part of a great community like this around here, and renew my time-wasting contract for another season.