Double breaded for your pleasure

You know it's June when baseball grabs this much nationwide media attention. The town of Strasburg, Va, with a population just over 4,000 (making it the biggest town in Shenandoah Co.) was previously best known for its railroad museum and yearly oktoberfest festival, but no more!

RenameStrasburg.com is behind a move to rename the town after the heralded young Washington Nationals prospect, Steven Strasburg, who makes his major league pitching debut tonight.

Upon first hearing this, I foolishly thought that this player was actually from Strasburg, VA, but after seeing that the two names were spelled exactly the same, I realize that's all the similarities a small town requires to try and grab a cheap pop (he's from San Diego). Somehow I was out-foolished by Strasburg residents, who believed the name change was going to be permanent. Town council members probably hope for it to be a boon to the local tourism economy, because evidently towns and cities of all sizes, even those in the rural edge of Virginia, want people to come and spend money.

Of course now the pressure is squarely on the shoulders of a 21 year old expected to soon lead the Nationals rotation and make them a playoff contender. How soon people block the memories of a team which had the worst record in baseball last year, a team that was called the Expos and

played in Canada less than 6 years ago and hasn't

made the playoffs since I've been watching (they

had the best record in '94, but a strike ended the season after 114 games).

None of this stopped fans from showing up at 9:30 in the morning for a game that doesn't start until 7pm. As for baseball analysis, I don't know what this will mean for the Nationals, who at 4 games under .500 have seen a vast improvement this year, but still find themselves 5th in the fairly tough NL East division. I doubt they are favorites to make the playoffs all of a sudden, any decent team could claw their way somewhat close to the playoff race by fall, just make sure you're not named the Royals or Orioles.

I asked my Dad once who he'd root for in a hypothetical unholy pact of an Orioles/Nationals World Series, and he said Washington. As a youth he went to Senators' games with his dad in D.C, so it was originally and is now his local team. Myself, I prefer the Orioles, because during my formative years in Maryland they were the only baseball team around, and my father took me to games at Camden Yards.

Now that the Nationals are better, someone has to take the very bottom spot in baseball. I figure whatever invisible germ or baseball ghost of crapiness that determines these things simply got lazy and decided to hope off 1-95 after like 35 minutes. Baltimore has a .281 winning percentage, plopping them 5.5 games behind the 29th worst team in baseball.

My annoyance over this has been temporarily replaced by incredulousness at why there is so much hooplah over an umpire crying while apologizing over blowing a call. This is one of those things that reminds me how silly baseball is.

What would've been the third perfect game of the year is now not, because of a missed call in a sport where missed calls happen all the time, a sport that celebrates its statistics but has always had its officiating subject to human error. Somehow this entire incident was propagandized to show how some moments go "beyond the game", which I guess shows just how rare forgiveness is in our society. Baseball has the summer, but 'America's pastime' is absolutely the nation's 2nd favorite sport.