It was a glorious opening night for the new Nationals Park.  My son and co-author here on SBY watched the game at Gators, a nearby sports pub, at least through the fourth inning when we packed it up and headed back to the house to watch the rest of the game.  Franchise third baseman Ryan Zimmerman, from right here in Virginia Beach, blasted a walk off homerun in the bottom of the ninth to fend off the Braves.  Of course they did it in typical Nats perilous style, surrendering the lead with two outs in the top of the ninth on a passed ball.  I had almost finished ranting and raving about how the Nats were going to lose this game stupidly and might finish with a hundred losses this season when Zim hit his shot.

You gotta believe ;-)

If you just can't wait until tomorrow night to get a peek at the new Nationals Park--and even if you can--check out the construction cam.  Not only does it provide a current view, you can go back to any date, or even view a time lapse of the construction.

Check it out here.

Wow! The Nats finally released John Patterson. Maybe they are serious.

Patterson had an outstanding 2005, but, if you remember, that was an odd year. The Nats in their new Washington home were hotly competitive, at least until Atlanta, in that final dynastic breath, handed Screech his bird butt. Since then Patterson has embodied the Nats misfortunes, starting as an ace every year until revealing himself to be a joker.

No huge knock on Patterson, per se. He is a middling middle-to-late starter on a middling team. But he came to represent something lackadaisical about the Nats, that attitude that they were going to lose anyway so it didn't really matter. As The Prince of New York notes in his 2008 Baseball Guide, that isn't the attitude manager Manny Acta is instilling in his team as evidenced by Washington playing like they were still in contention late last year versus the supposed to be in contention Mets. I suspect his release was meant to be a wakeup call to any other sleepy heads in D.C.

Keep an eye on this team. They are on the way up.

I am an enthusiastic proponent of international baseball, but exporting opening day was not a good idea.  I could deal with the Sunday night contests, which were sort of like opening one Christmas present on Christmas eve.  You fell asleep and then it really was Christmas.

There was something very special about Opening Day, the sense that the races were beginning.  But tomorrow they will be playing spring training games as well as regular season games.  Goofy.

I don't like it.

The Chinese government has defied international anger at its crackdown on Tibetan independence protests, accusing the Dalai Lama and his "splittist clique" of being out to destroy the Olympics and damage China's international reputation.

Independent.co.uk

And exactly what reputation might that be?  Certainly China can't be deluded that their abominable record on human rights has somehow escaped the world's attention.  You don't run over people with tanks and not create a sensation.

Of course China may be right.  There is something unseemly, unholy almost, about the endless stream of protests designed to exploit the world's attention attendant upon the Olympics.  The idea behind the Olympics is to lay aside political differences for the games, not resolve all of them.  Zeus knows the ancient Greeks went back to fighting each other as soon as the last meddle was awarded.

What makes this particularly intriguing is that the Dalai Lama functions as a kind of spiritual guru.  If he is, indeed, interrupting the "spirit" of the Games, then that raises some interesting questions beyond the political.  The Dalai Lama, to his great credit, recognizes this and is threatening to resign if the Tibetian issue cannot be resolved peacefully.

Maybe Richard Gere can sort it all out for us, carrying the Dalai Lama out of this conundrum like he did Debra Winger in An Officer and a Gentleman.  Lord lift us up where we belong.

Just ordered The Prince of New York's 2008 Baseball Guide.  Paul (Lebowitz, aka The Prince of New York) has forgotten more about baseball than most of us will ever know, so despite ribbing him it had better be good, I guarantee from having read his blog for awhile it will be.  Plus let's face it, the book is a small price to pay to encourage a fine independent sportswriter and allow him to ply his trade.  Pick up your own copy.

The way I see it, it's a great thing to be the man who hit the most home runs, but it's a greater thing to be the man who did the most with the home runs he hit.

Hank Aaron, I Had a Hammer

There is growing talk of a boycott of the 2008 Olympics in Beijing in protest of the brutal repression of Tibet, which the Dalai Lama calls "cultural genocide":

The Dalai Lama called Sunday for an international investigation into China's crackdown against protesters in Tibet, which he said is facing a "cultural genocide" and where his exiled government said 80 people were killed in the violence.

The demonstrations were the fiercest challenge to Beijing's rule in the region in nearly two decades, leading to sympathy protests elsewhere and embarrassing China ahead of the Olympic Games.

China's actions 'cultural genocide'? - China- msnbc.com

Of course Major League Baseball is ignoring the unfolding tragedy, blinded by the vision of billions of Chinese wearing overpriced official logo gear:

Perhaps no emerging nation presents the potential for economic benefits like one with 1.3 billion possible baseball fans. Selig, having lived through the Cold War, noted the symbolism of the flags of the United States and China flying together beyond the center-field bleachers.

The Official Site of Major League Baseball

The thought of that old Cold Warrior Selig with his cap over his greedy heart singing the national anthem of still communist China makes me mist up.  (Wasn't it Selig who coined the phrase "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!"?  Who writes this schlock for MLB.com?  Oh, nevermind.)  He was probably scheming on a deal for Tibetian bats.

As anyone who has read this blog very long knows, I am a strong advocate of the internationalization of baseball.  This is one thing Selig has actually got right.  There are, however, significant issues to be faced which I'm sure has never entered his amoral equations. Shall human rights be ignored?  How do you deal with international conflict? The Olympics have never adequately resolved these and a host of other issues.  Is it reasonable to expect MLB will?

Or will they just take the money and look the other way, like they did with steroids, another issue already familiar to the international athletic community? 

One thing is for certain: MLB is as facile as the Chinese government with strong arm tactics, and, as we've seen here on MLBlogs, as comfortable with suppression of freedom of expression.  So perhaps communist China is the perfect cultural fit for MLB.  Tell the Dalai Lama he is welcome in the Red Sox Nation.

You have to hand it to the Clintons, they are diabolically clever.  Having realized that the mathematical possibility of winning the nomination outright are nil, they have apparently decided that the cost of the presidency is holding their nose and putting Obama on the ticket: as the vice president.  This stratagem leverages the Democratic throng clamoring for a "Dream Ticket"--with Clinton on top of the ticket, of course.

Never mind that he has won the most delegates and the math favors him.  Obama will be the bad guy if he doesn't embrace the "compromise" that resolves the party's conundrum.  This is an exquisite variation of the triangulation the Clintons are infamous for, although I'm sure to Obama right now it feels more like strangulation.

For the Clintons, what does it matter?  With a "two fer", the vice president is essentially irrelevant to their presidency anyway.  As Maureen Dowd notes:

If he thinks Hillary has cut him down to size lately, he’d better imagine what his life would be like as the Clintons’ vice president

Maureen Dowd, The Monster Mash - New York Times

Machiavelli has nothing on the Clintons.  They didn't learn from him, he foresaw them.

The irony is it is precisely this sort of political ruthless cleverness that one side believes is absolutely necessary to confront a hostile world, whereas the other side proclaims a better world can be forged.  Which is right?

That is the underlying philosophical question of the election, meaning we will be deciding whether we Americans at the beginning of the millennium believe our cup is half fool or morally empty.

NOTE:  I know this post has nothing to do with baseball from your perspective, but it does from mine.  The irony is I started blogging about baseball because I knew this would be the election of a lifetime and figured I would only get myself into trouble blogging about politics.  Who knew?

Actually, my interest in history and politics has always been offset by my passion for baseball.  At times when I became so misanthropic from my study of history or the shenanigans of politics, I turned to baseball for refuge.  I must confess to being somewhat alarmed that because of blogging they are now becoming intertwined.  I have been paying close attention for over a year and a half now, and it has finally reached the point I have to write about politics as a matter of therapy.  I can always rationalize they started this when Congress started holding hearings on baseball.

You can find all my political and historical writings at New World Wanderings, the natural evolution of my defunct project, The Jamestown Site.  Feel free to drop by and comment, and be sure and leave your blog url when you do!

The title of this post is taken from an African creation myth in which a being called Bumba retches up the earth, moon and stars, and eventually men.  Like all creation myths, one can argue with the facts without abrogating the meaning.

After a winter of lies, damned lies, and, not statistics, but baseball players themselves, it is easy to succumb to the cynicism latent in the African Bumba myth.  After all, our heroes have proven to be what we knew they were all along, deep down.  The Mitchell Report vomited up men in all their frailty and evil.  Another persistent theme in creation myths is the creator running like **** to get away from his ultimate creation, man.  Even in the Biblical creation God posts armed guards at the gates to keep the little ******* from re-entering paradise.

Yet every spring man does re-enter heaven when he crosses that chalked line onto the geometrically perfect diamond where baseball is played.