I will have a sad on Sunday night...

... because that marks the end of Mariner baseball for 4 to 5 months (I don't remember when it is that they start broadcasting games during spring training). Being a west coast team baseball fan while living on the east coast means alot of late nights listening on mlb.com or using the mlb streaming app on my iPhone. It's been a fun season to be a M's fan (almost erasing the 101 loss horror of last year) with the squad's MacGyver-ish gift for improvising ways to win. Sporting awesome defense, reasonably good pitching and homeopathic levels of situational hitting (at this writing they're 80-76 while having been outscored 675-613 and compiling an amazing 33-20 record in games decided by a single run), it's been an eventful ride with great moments such as the one I had walking from Joe's Pub to the Highline Ballroom a couple of weeks ago listening to Dave Niehaus' call of Ichiro hitting a 2-run walk off homer in the bottom of the ninth to beat Mariano Rivera and the Yanks. I'm also a lucky fan because of the excellent blogs (Baker & Stone at the Seattle Times, Lookout Landing, USS Mariner and Shannon Dreyer) that provide plenty of time-wasting opportunities with provocative, informative, fun and uniformly well-written posts. On that note, I'm so glad to see that Shannon has captured the funniest moment from the radio broadcasts this season, which I heard yesterday while half-assedly studying the Chausson Poeme in a house in the Fire Island Pines during a rainstorm yesterday.

Another memorable moment:

Me and my Dad at an M's/Giants game last Memorial Day weekend

Dad meeting Mariners manager Don Wakamatsu before the game

Only 188 days until the Mariners' 2010 season opener!

Junior wasn't playin...

they really did use the Nutcracker March for Adrian Beltre's first at bat coming back from his injury.

Classical music is culturally relevant!

...and serving useful purposes for my favorite team, the Seattle Mariners, according to onetime prodigy turned grand old man Ken Griffey Jr:

Yeah, I always have fun. Our third baseman is out after getting hit in the nuts. When he comes back next week, his first at-bat, his theme music is going to be the Nutcracker Suite.


And I worry about the music I study and perform being disconnected from the larger culture!