Ichiro Goes Home, Confronts the Bright White Future

Baseball semi-started this week, with a Mariners-A's series at Tokyo Dome. I saw my first-ever professional baseball game there in 2005 with Marti. In this picture, I didn't really like baseball and I'm holding a #24 flag with absolutely no awareness of its emotimagical connotations. Life gets different, sometimes.

For instance, Japan turned the Mariners Moose into a giant, break-dancing inflatable.

Time made Ichiro's hair turn gray and Dustin Ackley's beard grow. Time may also have turned Dustin Ackley into a good baseball player, because he hit the first home run of 2012.

I've been so singularly focused on Derek Jeter aging that I've neglected to remember that the same thing is happening to Ichiro out on the West Coast. Acknowledged or not, we're all getting older. Here's a photo of Ichiro confronting the bright white future.

Dustin Ackley is still young. TWENTY-FOUR, in fact. Are you going to be great this year, Dustin?

It's not "now or never," but it is "soon or get old and disappear."

Who Are You?

Today, I felt like looking at some people that I've never seen before:

Mike Moustakas and Dustin Ackley have been sitting on my Grinnell College Fantasy bench for roughly three months. I took them in the last two rounds of the draft because I saw their names in some magazines and no one else seemed to want them. They were both called up in the last week, so they can finally earn points and victories for me. Who are you and where did you come from?

This person, Eric Hosmer, has been on my team for a while. No one drafted him. I chose him from the list of 1,300 free players listed by Yahoo! Sports Fantasy Baseball. I like him so much that I named a player on my iPhone Baseball '11 Season Mode team after him.

New people appear. Old people get injured and you don't see them for a while. Life continues!