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Mehring Monday: Spring, Plans, Website

February 25, 2013

I have a few things to get to this week in the column.

The first deals with baseball.  Big surprise, I know.

I am pretty sure that it was the MLB twitter account that noted last week that February 17 was the last Sunday without baseball until November. 

PLAY BALL!

The Milwaukee Brewers split their weekend games to open their Cactus League schedule.  There was a 2-1 win over Oakland on Saturday and a 7-4 loss to Cleveland on Sunday.

Highlights for former Timber Rattlers in those games included Mike Fiers (2IP) and Jim Henderson (IP) with scoreless work on Saturday and Scooter Gennett with a single on Sunday.

Also, that was ex-Rattler Justin Thomas who walked four and gave up a run in 1-1/3 innings on the mound for Oakland on Saturday.

A quick check of other highlights from the weekend shows a solo homer by Luis Valbuena for the Cubs on Saturday and a three-run homer by Raul Ibanez for the Mariners on Sunday.

And when I say highlights, I mean boxscores.  The only games that had highlights from Saturday's games were Toronto-Detroit, Tampa-Boston, Houston-Philadelphia, and Washington-New York Mets.  On Sunday, Toronto-New York Yankees and Oakland-LA Angels were the only games with highlights.

There will be a lot more highlights and a lot more baseball during Spring Training, so I'll keep one eye on the boxscores and another eye on the calendar.

Why keep an eye on the calendar?  Six weeks from today is the home opener for the 2013 Timber Rattlers.  That's why.

That brings me to my second item.  I suppose I should mention that the off season features will be winding down over the next few weeks.

There are a few more Flashback Fridays that I want to get to before that features calls it quits for the season.  I'll have a few more Mehring Mondays.  Plus, there are a lot of editions of The Interrogation Room that need to be done.

Over on the blog there are still three more Walkoff Wednesdays (1999, 2011, and 2012) and there are about ten more 1994 Foxes Home Games to cover.  I did not forget about MLB Memory Lane either.  I hope to get three more of those in before the season starts.

The plan is to have a Renovation Update video for you every Thursday.  I'll add some pictures in on the blog post this week, too.

But, this is the time of year when there is so much else to do that a lot of the fun stuff has to take a back seat for a while.  You also noticed that there has been a change to the look of timberrattlers.com and I am still learning how to get stuff online through the new site.

That change brings me to my last point.

This is the third or fourth different website design the Timber Rattlers have had since I started working for the club back in 2000.

I have always written the game stories.  But, in my first few years I did not put the story on the website.  I used to borrow a computer at the ballpark, write the story, and give the story to someone else to post online.  Since I didn't have a laptop until 2001, there were no road game stories in that 2000 season.  In 2001, I would send the game story to someone else after road games, but that story wouldn't get posted until sometime the next day or on Monday when the games were played Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.

There was this one time that my Gateway laptop stopped working for NO REASON! while I was on the road.   I wrote the game story out on a piece of copy and faxed it back to the Timber Rattlers office for someone else to post.  I did that for a week.  I was less popular than usual when I got back from that road trip. 

Now, I can quickly post a game story from wherever I happen to be.  That includes putting the story about the first game of a doubleheader up between games…IF no one comes in to talk to me between games.

We are still getting to know the new website and making a few changes.  For example, the gold lettering on the links was difficult to read so we made an alteration to make them red.  I'm telling you, stuff like that puts us back in the running for another Larry MacPhail Award.

Click back to the home page and cruise around there to check it out.

That's everything I wanted to get to this week.