Looking Forward to Some Happy Recaps

I gotta admit, I’m glad this is my last guest blog for a while. The last time I wrote, it was a couple of days after we survived the first trimester of having a kid. Now, it is a couple of days after we finished up the contract on a house, and we just found out that the inspection process has gone smoothly, so I can happily state that in two months or so, we’ll be living about 30 minutes from Allen Fieldhouse, home of the soon-to-be Final Four bound Kansas Jayhawks.

So, welcome to Royals1985: Alleviate the Curse of Don Denkinger! And hopefully no more life-changing moments in the next couple months.

But first, some thoughts on the tourney brackets. My Elite Eight, after about 15 solid seconds of thinking, is UCLA-Xavier, Kansas-Wisconsin, UNC-Tennessee, and Memphis-Stanford, with UCLA, Kansas, Tennessee, and Stanford going to San Antonio. My most shocking upset may be Boise State over Louisville, which is a great upset that has zero chance of actually happening.

But this is a baseball blog, so let me talk about what has really got me excited. When we move, we’re getting a new car for the baby, and I only get one feature veto. In other words, I get to insist on just one thing, and what I’m getting is built-in satellite radio and an XM subscription. Because on the list of “Things Cousin Dan Likes More On a Relative Basis To Everyone Else”, somewhere behind cucumber salad but way ahead of the NBA, is baseball on the radio.

Growing up, I listened to WHN every night before I went to sleep, with the dulcet baritones of Bob Murphy bringing me to a restful place. (And, occasionally, keeping me up – one of my first sports memories ever was waking up in the middle of the night on July 5th, 1985, and listening to the last two innings of the infamous “Rick Camp Game” that the Mets won 16-13, leading to the latest Fireworks Night in the history of Atlanta).

I could even get WFAN down at Virginia in college, and would listen to games before sleeping on those rare nights where I went to sleep before 11 pm. (Editor's Note: Cousin Dan actually listened to a lot of games in college, because he was kind of a dork then.)

Fortunately, as a Mets fan, we’ve always had great radio voices to listen to. From Murph and his happy recaps, to Gary Thorne (who, post-Mets, pleasantly delivered us the 2001 World Series “hit in the air to center field, IT’S OVER!”), to Gary Cohen (the best radio voice in the business, bar none), to Howie Rose and "put it in the books", we’ve always had the very thing that John Sterling and Suzyn Waldman can never bring to WCBS. An enjoyable, non-obnoxious call of the game.

Well, and competence. So I guess it’s two things.

It is on that note that I happily report that I was able to listen to the first few innings of the Tigers-Mets game on Sunday afternoon – as Pedro worked through four scoreless that made us all smile – and the new guy, Wayne Hagin, was excellent without Sterling-ing up the Reyes triple or the consecutive strikeouts. Ed Coleman is a nice sidekick when he’s not inventing Coco Crisp trades, and Howie will be back puttin’ things in the books soon enough.

Admittedly, I’m bummed that I’ll not be here for the last game at Shea or the first game at the Citi. But I’ll have Howie and Wayne on my evening commutes and weekend diaper runs, and that sounds pretty darned good to me.

- Cousin Dan