Wisconsin bound

The Wheaton College Lyons won the Northeast Regional, in Harwich, Massachusetts, with a 16-5 win over the University of Southern Maine.

The Lyons will play their first game at the Division III World Series, in Appleton, Wisconsin, on Friday, May 26th, with a 1:15 pm game against North Carolina Wesleyan College.

Now it's time to make travel plans, reservations and enjoy the last leg of a magical season.

This is not....oh, whatever!

In my other, non-blogging life, I'm a baseball fan, or better, a grumpy traditionalist that hates the direction of much that constitutes the professional version (you mean there is another?), but can't shake my boyhood experience with baseball that forever etched the national pastime into my consciousness and being. Having said that, a few readers know of my interest in said sport and also know that my son Mark (orgininator of GMBO, the genius behind Everyday Yeah and Mind Salt) is a pretty fair college player and will be leading his Wheaton Lyons into action tonight at 8 pm, in Harwich, Mass., in the NCAA Division III Northeast Regional.

For those who have an interest in catching the action via the wonders of the world wide web, here is a release from Scott Dietz, Wheaton's SID.

Each of Wheaton's NCAA Regional Tournament baseball contests to be webcast
May 16, 2006
NORTON, MA- Each of the Wheaton College baseball team's NCAA Division III New England Regional Tournament games will be webcast through D3Cast, beginning with the top-seeded Lyons' opening contest Wednesday at 8:00 p.m. The webcast will include both audio and video and be available through dc3cast.com.

RealPlayer will be required to access the free webcasts, which will be available as live links on the front page of D3Cast and in the archive section of the site approximately 30 minutes after each game. The D3Cast staff will provide play-by-play and color commentary for each of the tournament's contests.

The seven-team, double-elimination tournament will be held at Whitehouse Field in Harwich, and Wheaton opens play by taking on the winner of tomorrow's 9:30 a.m. game between Salem State College and the University of Southern Maine.

Wheaton, which is ranked sixth nationally and first in New England by the American Baseball Coaches Association (ABCA), brings a 35-8 overall mark into the NCAA Tournament. The Lyons are making their sixth NCAA appearance in the past seven seasons after only being elevated to varsity status in 1998.

Wheaton won its eighth New England Women's and Men's Athletic Conference (NEWMAC) regular season title in the league's eight seasons and notched its seventh postseason tournament crown to earn the automatic bid to the NCAA Tournament.

This is not a baseball blog, part I

Mainers can play baseball. While we don't have the sheer numbers of college-level players and even professional athletes that warmer states boast, for a state with a small population and our baseball fields deemed uninhabitable (or at least, unplayable) for large portions of the annum, Mainers do just fine.

Beginning Wednesday, I'll be on the Cape, watching my son and his Wheaton Lyons teammates, take on six other opponents, in the NCAA Division III Regional tournament, in Harwich, Massachusetts. Mark is a senior, so this will be a sentimental three or four days, for me. We've developed much of our father-son relationship on lonely baseball diamonds, with me throwing batting practice and as he got older, lining baseballs back at his father, watching time erode my former cat-like reflexes. While the Lyons have had a remarkable run this spring, including a team record 24 game winning streak, #6 ranking in the country and the #1 seed in the regional, this will all be for naught, if they can't advance to the Little College World Series, in Appleton, Wisconsin.

Division III baseball doesn't receive the fanfare (or the scholarships) of the Division I brand of college baseball, but for the young men who play, actual student-athletes, they bring much of the same intensity, passion, and often level of skill to the game, of their bigger, sometimes faster, large-college counterparts. For me, small-college ball seems somewhat purer.

Against my own personal storyline, is the Maine backdrop of three Maine small colleges being represented, with their large contingents of Maine born and bred ballplayers. I'm hoping some of Maine's sports reporting community will pick up on this. I've send the following release to many of my contacts, in hopes that this story gets picked up.

Maine well-represented in NCAA baseball tourney

In college baseball circles, Division I programs often receive much of the attention and the lion’s share of press coverage. In New England and more specifically, Maine, Division III baseball, while sometimes overlooked, has often overshadowed and often outperformed Maine’s lone Division I program, headquartered in Orono.

It’s been over two decades since the Black Bears, then coached by the legendary John Winkin, appeared in the College World Series. On the other hand, Ed Flaherty’s USM Huskies have won two national, small college championships, in Division III, first in 1991, then again in 1997.

This year’s Division III, Northeast Regional, in Harwich, Massachusetts, features an abundance of Maine-grown baseball talent, with three Maine-based schools participating. Never before has the Pine Tree State been this well represented in a regional college tournament, before.

With Bowdoin College, USM and St. Joseph’s College all participating among the seven seeded teams in Harwich, there are 51 Maine-born players on the various rosters of the combatants. Bowdoin and St. Joseph’s are making their first appearances ever, in a NCAA regional baseball tourney.

Even Massachusetts-based Wheaton College, the #1 seed, as well as 6th ranked team in the country, has six Maine players on their roster, with four position players that start and another considered one of the Lyon’s top starting pitchers.

In addition, many of these players have all played one or more summer’s in Portland’s Twilight League, Maine’s premiere summer college baseball league.

Here is the breakdown of teams and number of players from Maine:

USM (seeded #5)-19 players
St. Joe’s (seeded #2) 18 players
Bowdoin (seeded #7)- 8 players
Wheaton College (seeded #1)- 6 players

That’s 51 players with roots firmly planted in Maine! Who says Mainers can’t play baseball, particularly of tournament-caliber quality?

It would seem quite obvious to me that there is something newsworthy about this, certainly from a sports perspective.

Comedy's "truthiness"

In a nation that seems to have mutually lost its spine and its soul, Stephen Colbert’s performance at the White House Correspondents dinner is still being talked about all over the blogosphere, some two weeks after Colbert showed President Bush and his administration no mercy in skewering its policies, practices and indicting the mainstream media for being co-conspirators in the removal of our democratic underpinnings. There are those who might argue the merits of even using the “d-word” in relation to the United States, at any time in our recent past. That’s a discussion for another post. What I’d like to highlight, is at a time of timidity and caution, Colbert threw expediency and diplomacy to the wind and let it rip, when given an opportunity to make his case about the president.

Oddly, the one consistent place to find some “truthiness” has become Comedy Central, with its nightly duo of Colbert and former comedy partner in crime, John Stewart, tag-teaming Bush and the political debacle we find ourselves in, during the first quarter of 2006.

While it’s not the first time that comedians have provided some context for politics during wartime (anyone with a cursory knowledge of Lenny Bruce and his comedic salvos understands comedy’s ability to provide a working framework for current events), it’s been awhile since the nation’s turned its weary eyes to the comedic profession for truth and understanding.

While the late Bill Hicks provided a fringe take and hot poker to the ass of much of what passed for right-wing lunacy, Stewart, and now, Colbert, bring a needed perspective, albeit one less caustic (but just as deadly), to a much wider audience, particularly the living rooms of middle-America. Better yet, they have found a way to reach an apathetic group of 20 and 30-somethings, who have tuned out politics and rarely focus on traditional news outlets for their political or cultural understanding.

Arianna Huffington offers up her perspective on Colbert’s gutsy performance, one in which he dared to speak truth to power, when power was a stone’s throw away, literally at his right elbow. In fact, Colbert walked into the lion’s den with nothing more than his comedy routine and schtick from The Colbert Report and systematically put poor little rich boy, George, squarely in his place with a comedic, “up yours” to the commander-in-chief.

Huffington’s take is a good recap for anyone who’s been living under a rock for the past two weeks, as well as summarizing the perspective of other bloggers and pundits on Colbert’s comedic tour-de-force.

For the health of it

File this one in the category of "facts to confound your patriotic, flag-waving friends and family," especially when they trot out the tired canard that goes, "well, America is still the best place on earth to live," which inevitably follows any mention by you about quality of life in other places on the globe.

To the "true believers," there is very little room inside their brains, riddled by talk radio, for information bathed in reality and pregnant with facts. Most likely, they'll have to resort to the usual ad hominem attack, or Euro-bashing that is a favorite activity of the Faux set.