Marinerds, etc.

Happy New Year, folks. I'm still in Philadelphia, where the Iggles managed to somehow win their division with a bunch of second-string and third-string guys on New Year's Eve. For a while this weekend I was fairly sure that "E-A-G-L-E-S EAGLES!!!!" was Philadelphian for "Happy New Year 2007!", as I remember drifting off to sleep around 3am on New Year's Day, when all of a sudden, outside my window, some more people were stumbling home from the bars down the street yelling "E-A-G-L-E-S EAGLES!!!!!"

But anyway, that's why I haven't really written much. (The being in Philadelphia and celebrating New Year's part, not the football part.) I did pick up a book about Veterans Stadium the other day, which could potentially be very good or very bad; it's by Rich Westcott, and my general opinion of his books is that they are full of awesome information but I have a lot of trouble staying awake while reading them. He tends to write about Philly sports in general, and I have no doubt in my mind that his brain is a vast store on the subject.

Today I went to the Franklin Institute, which is a really old science museum in Philadelphia which I went to several times a year when I was growing up here. They have a great room now on "Science and Sports", which has things like a simulated wheelchair race, a rockclimbing wall, a racecar reflex test, a "how high can you jump?" measuring gadget, and a speed pitch machine, among other stuff. I throw like a girl. But that's beside the point -- another feature of the room is a bunch of sports figures pictured along one wall, including Bobby Abreu to represent baseball, and Al Iverson to represent basketball, and they even have the Phillies and Sixers uniforms from those two framed and displayed. I don't think they actually had a named Eagles player on the wall, but I'm sure whoever that is would have to get traded soon too!

In sadder news, George Sisler Jr. died this weekend of Alzheimer's. The strange part is that I read it first in the Japanese baseball news instead of over here. I didn't even realize that Sisler Jr was a minor-league GM and president for a while; to be fair, I know very little of the Sislers except for the George whose record Ichiro broke. I should remedy that sometime.