I mean, give me a break, a perfect game and then you drop the next three straight?  You were tied for first place and now you’re three out?  Come on!

Great catch, Joan, both of them. 

The flip side of knowing how frustrated the President of the United States is by his baseball team, being a lifelong White Sox fan — I know, Mr. Obama wants to be just like me — is to know how delighted he is, as well, when something really fun and quite impressive happens.  My son Mark has been a Mark Buehrle fan since he was little.  He still has his 56 shirt, his sleep shirt, and it still fits him well enough to sleep in it.  My Mark is a little league pitcher in the Mark Buehrle style, a guy who doesn’t smoke batters with his fastball but deceives them with his pitches that drop and dance.  My Mark has an offspeed that makes batters look sick.  My Mark is one happy fellow right now, no happier than his brother, but Tom was always a Paul Konerko fan first and foremost.  All that said, the glee of that one delightful game is surely lighting up Mr. Obama’s day today.  As it is mine.  

Oh, if you missed it, Mark Buehrle pitched a perfect game yesterday against the Tampa Bay (Devil) Rays, a team with a .350 on base percentage.  It’s the second best on base percentage team in the history of baseball to be on the losing end of a perfect game.  

Well, as long as the new cover is on Amazon, I guess that means it’s been finalized and released, as it were.  So I will include it here.

Let me know what you think.

We snuck one last game in, a scrimmage I suppose, playing the American League 11 year olds.  We threw guys who hadn’t had a chance to pitch in the tournament, and they pitched very well, surprisingly, delightfully well.  When we ran out of those guys, we put in a couple of our regular pitchers, and they didn’t do as well as expected, but were fine.  Our guys were loose and having fun.  Their guys were tense, wanting very much to prove something.  So guess who won?  The loose team.  It was 8 to 5, but it wasn’t that close.  

Fun, though.  Nice to get a chance to wear the uniforms again.  

These are the dog days, when ain’t nobody buyin’ the book, the dull time when we’re a couple of months from the paperback version.  Here and there I read that people who got the book in early review copies are just now picking it up.  And you wonder why I keep writing about little league.  Ah well. 

We are finally knocked out of the All Star Tournament.  It was quite a run.  We needed to play better defense, in fact, our loss on Sunday was all about our defense.  It was heartbreaking, but, as parents say all over the world when their kids finally get knocked out after months of nothing but sports, “The bad news is that we lost.  The good news is that we lost.  Finally.” 

A little more time to ourselves, no more practices EVERY evening (for weeks).  Unwind.