Bill Roper's Journal

Today was our annual APBA baseball draft. This is an eight-team continuous ownership league, so there are a lot of very good players on the existing teams. We also have a cap on quality starting pitching, so there's a good big of jockeying for the starters available under the cap. This year, the cap was going to limit us to five or six starters.

I was drafting last, which means that the team was successful last year, a good thing. My starting lineup and bench were largely solid and hard to improve upon given what was available in the draft. My starting pitching was strong, but could always use some help. My bullpen had completely disintegrated, aided by Emmanuel Clase's foray into illegal collusion with sports betters, so it had to be completely rebuilt.

I would have liked to collect another outfielder, but the only one who really suited my needs, given that I have Juan Soto, Julio Rodriguez, Byron Buxton, and Ronald Acuna, was Roman Anthony. And he was available to me with the eighth pick of the draft, but I decided that I really needed Hunter Brown, a quality starter from the Astros, instead.

Roman Anthony was drafted with the next pick. I was not surprised.

It was now time to rebuild the bullpen, starting with a couple of strong relievers with control, Adrian Morejon and Randy Rodriguez. There was no great hurry to draft the rest of the bullpen, as there were a lot of similar relievers available, so on the fourth round, I collected catching prospect Samuel Basallo from the Orioles. He is not allowed to play this year due to limited at bats, but since I already have Moreno and Herrera at catch, that was not a problem.

In the fifth round, I drafted promising Brewers pitcher Jacob Misiorowski -- in this case, one pick before the fellow drafting after me was prepared to take him. Yay, me!

In the sixth round, I continued collecting Jacobs. No teams really needed a shortstop which meant that talented A's rookie Jacob Wilson had gone into freefall in the draft. I stopped that fall.

The seventh and eighth rounds added two more quality relievers, Bryan Abreu and Brad Keller.

In the ninth round, I picked up Sandy Alcantara as a pitching prospect, hoping that he is now completely recovered from his surgeries.

And for my final draft pick in the tenth round, I grabbed reliever Garrett Whitlock to finish rebuilding the pen.

With the exception of Jacob Wilson, this was what I will refer to as my "Duracell Draft", as there were nothing but the two sides of the battery, pitchers and catchers.

This was largely a draft which relied on going with the flow and seeing what came my way. Overall, I'm quite happy with it.

Now, let's see how the team does. :)

It was over sixty degrees this morning, so you'd think it would be a lovely time for Opening Day at Wrigley Field.

You would think that incorrectly.

Gretchen was good enough to drop me at the Skokie Swift after we got some breakfast and the temperature was dropping rapidly. It was below fifty degrees at game time, which would *still* have been ok.

That is, it would have been ok except for the high wind blowing directly in from the north, right at the first base side of the park, which was where I was sitting. Five innings of that was enough.

The fact that the Cubs were trailing substantially didn't help, but the Cubs could have been *leading* substantially and it would not have kept me in those seats today.

Maybe if it were game seven of the World Series.

Of course, if it were October, I would have worn my parka.

I spent a lot of time over the weekend working on getting bugs fixed for our upcoming release. More time than I really should have, but -- on the other hand -- I am taking Thursday off to go to Cubs Opening Day, so I suppose these things average out.

I need to pick up the guitar. I have two song prompts sitting waiting to be used, but they require a bit of time and nurturing. Work is sucking up the creativity right now.

But that will change. :)

I took K out to Texas Roadhouse for lunch in the interest of getting more protein into the kid. This worked admirably. Then we proceeded to the grocery store and to Sam's Club to acquire things for dinner.

Dinner tonight was a very nice corned beef, because K will not be home with us when St. Patrick's Day rolls around. There is probably another corned beef in our future although probably not until K is back at school.

In the meantime, the monthly bills are paid (actually, all of the credit cards are now on autopay, but the money has been moved around to fund those payments), and I've run the final session for last year's computer division in our APBA league. I finished second, five games out of first, largely courtesy of a 12 game losing streak two sessions back. But I finished first in the combined first half, so my team will make the playoffs based on that. Three of the four playoff teams are pretty much locks from the various first place teams, so one spot is left to be determined by the final results once the face-to-face division finishes up.

Should be interesting. :)

Today, I finished off the sixth load of laundry in the six days following Capricon, which means that I am caught up on the laundry, at least momentarily. Yay!

I also went to the post office where I filed an extension for the Dodeka tax return so that should the IRS open it late again this year after I mail it on a timely basis, they won't try to charge me hundreds of dollars in penalties for late filing. I also mailed the Capricon sales tax, because the State of Illinois has changed the rules and no longer collects event tax from us when we file our sales tax for the year for reasons apparently unknown. Neither Gretchen or I recall having been notified about this change, although we seem to have been notified about all sorts of things that don't actually matter to us.

And I mailed a gift to one of Julie's friends. That cost $22, which is a painful amount of shipping charge and explains why paying for Amazon Prime shipping looks so good.

Meanwhile, I ran another 13 games of the second half for the computer division in my APBA league, so there are only two more rounds to go there.

And I finished making the adjustments to the Dodeka taxes, which means that I should be able to start putting numbers on the forms tomorrow.

After which I can try to get *our* taxes off to the accountant.

Whee!

After the Windycon meeting tonight, I ran out to pick up a pizza and Gretchen and I turned on game 7 of the World Series up in the bedroom. When the Dodgers tied it up in the top of the ninth, I commented that if the game went 18 innings, they could set the clocks back at some point during the game.

This got me a really dirty look.

Happily, it only took 11 innings total for the game to end.

I turned on the Tigers / Mariners game in the fifth inning, figuring it was about halfway through.

The game is now going to the 15th inning. Wow!

The Cubs beat the Brewers tonight by a final of 4-3 so they survive for another day.

They scored four in the first, chasing the Brewers' starting pitcher, Quinn Priester, who had been quite good for them, but not tonight. The offense then pretty much went to sleep for the rest of the game, leaving the pitching staff to nurse what started as a 4-1 lead to the end of the game.

Remarkably, this trick worked.

Tomorrow's game is a night game, so I am hoping that the remote parking lot is open. :)

And the Cubs beat the Padres in the Wild Card Series, two games to one, and move on to face the Brewers in a best-of-five in the NLDS. I had tickets to all three games and sold all of them, because getting to the games from Des Plaines when the remote parking lot is unavailable was being untenable.

I have, however, managed to recover my Ventra card and load it into my Google Wallet which means that getting to NLDS games next week should be much more likely, although still non-trivial. At least it will be once I know when the Cubs are playing...

Today was a long and frustrating day, although we did make some progress on cleaning off the kitchen table, which had become a great disaster area. It still is not clean, but it is *nearly* clean and that is going to have to do under the circumstances. I also managed to get four loads of laundry done and run over to Sam's Club to pick up important supplies (like dog food). And I managed to replace the battery in the external garage door opener so that it works again.

Calvin was not at his best-behaved today. This makes me sad, because I really like the puppy, but there are a number of lessons that he needs to learn that are coming slowly.

But tomorrow will be better!

And tomorrow, I am going down to Closing Day at Wrigley Field to watch the Cubs play the Cardinals in a game that is now completely meaningless to both clubs. Well, I guess it will determine whether the Cardinals will have a better, worse, or identical record to the Miami Marlins. *Barely* meaningful, I suppose...

The Cubs, of course, will be playing next week at home in the Wild Card series. Times still to be determined. I would like them to be determined soon.

And that will be tomorrow.