Expensive week this week. The check engine light on my car came on last week so I took it out to have it checked on Monday. $1100 later it is fixed. This is the third one of these in the past 4 months and it is getting old very fast. After doing some Internet research this past week I found that my model, a 2010 VW Passat is the worst of the bunch when it comes to the check engine light. In reality I had little issue with it for the first 160,000 miles so I don’t really know what to expect. As a further boot to the berries my hot water heater started to leak. It is 17 years old so it was going to be replaced shortly anyway but I was hoping it could make it to spring. Almost. At least here I got a used hot water heater from my dad (Thanks for that!) so that could have been worse than it actually was.
On a more positive note I bought my ticket for the Wales/South Africa rugby match on June 2 at RFK Stadium in Washington. This was much cheaper than the ticket I purchased for Ireland/New Zealand in Chicago in 2016 and I don’t have to drive anywhere near as far. Now the countdown begins until I can watch some more big boy rugby in person.
Baseball also announced new pace-of-play rules for the minors. The pitch clock itself has made AA and AAA games much more enjoyable over the past few years and I wish the pitch clock would come to the majors. Under these rules the pitch clock moves from 20 seconds to 15 seconds with no runners on base which should speed things up even more in AA and AAA. I’ve never really taken mound visits to be an issue in the minors so I don’t know how limiting them will affect anything. I’m also not a fan of the placing a runner on second in extra innings but I have been to several 15+ inning minor league games and somewhere in there a hitter almost always pitches. Minor league teams only have a 23 man roster so they have fewer pitchers to begin with so I can see why it was implemented. For the record I am OK with this being done in Rookie ball but I’d rather not see it in A ball on up.
We’ll all see how this goes but I don’t really think that the pace of play is as big of an issue in the minors as it is in the majors. I also see a mound visit limitation as a plus in the majors since they seem to happen every hitter in some games and that will speed games up and I think a pitch clock will only speed that up better. I know major leaguers are against it but think about this guys: Fans come out to watch a game and if it is going into the 7th inning at 10:00 that means the game ends around 10:40. Those people have to get up to go to work the next day and probably have 30-40 minutes to get home from the park or maybe more. Games that end that late are only going to start driving people away and you don’t want that.
Limited week in sports but one that was not good. Took in the second round of the PIAA tournament at Reading. Milton Hershey took down Bishop Shanahan of Downingtown. It was a tight affair for most of the game but Milton Hershey was just too quick for them and made the plays in the end when it mattered. Following that York High took on Bonner-Prendergast from the Philly Catholic League. I didn’t really expect the game to be close since they are the #2 team in the state but New Oxford had hung with them in the first round so you did have to wonder. Well Bonner’s star player is from New Jersey and one of their 6’8 kids is from Delaware. Both transferred in from other catholic schools in their respective states so it’s not like they had nowhere to go back home.
Oh, an both are getting scholarship offers from D1 colleges so its not like they just transferred in to get some playing time. When you can bring in kids from multiple states and you’re playing a school with defined boundaries, well, what do you expect? The PIAA expects one set of schools to play by one set of rules but let another set play by another set of rules. That’s BS! Imagine the outcry if York High went to Baltimore to recruit some players. Bonner won 93-73 but York hung around enough and never gave up which is a credit to the kids. They led after 1 and cut the lead to 11 mid-way through the fourth quarter but Bonner was too much. Bonner also got to shoot something like 40 free throws and had no player with more than 3 fouls while a lot of York High players had 4 fouls on them. That’s what happens when you can take the ball to the hoop and the other team can’t. Now I do realize that if Bonner wasn’t there another PCL school would have been that did the same situation so my problem is not with Bonner but with the PIAA. But remember Bonner fans, you and your 25 or 30 fans at the game wouldn’t have been in that spot if you didn’t have those players.
Considering I did not expect York to even have a winning record this year this far exceeded my expectations. Kyree Generett went off in the post season scoring well over 20 points per game. Gonna miss him next year that’s for sure.
On Saturday I was going to head down to the St. Patrick’s Day Parade but then I found out that Ireland and England were playing rugby on NBC at noon. I watched that instead even though Ireland had already wrapped up the Six Nations Title. It’s not everyday one can watch big boy rugby on TV here in the US. England made far too many mistakes and Ireland was the better team. They won the Grand Slam for only the third time in their history so a big congrats to them.
Took in the YAIAA Senior All-Star Game on Sunday. The girls game was a fairly blah affair, lots of missed shots. The boys game was a high scoring affair with lots of 3’s (and the misses that come with lots of attempts) and dunks. An entertaining way to pass an afternoon.
I am sure like most Americans that my brackets are busted for the NCAA Tournament. I started off well until Loyola hit. Of course I did not have UMBC either but then no one did outside of the coach’s and their player’s moms. I went with the U against Loyola, mostly because I saw Lonnie Walker play a lot for Reading so that worked well! I got clobbered in the South Region but did pretty well in the West and Midwest. The East was just kind of blah. I still have three of my final four left (Villanova, Michigan, Kansas) but got only 5 of the Sweet 16 right with one game still being played. I’m pulling for Auburn but it doesn’t look good.
I do normally fill out an NIT bracket but this year I thought what’s the point? I never do well in that anyway.
