First Post

Over seven years after starting a blog, I'm starting another. This one is dedicated solely to my favorite sport, baseball. (Note not favorite pastime: that would be either playing with my son or eating Cheez-Its.)

I've been thinking about doing this for quite some time. My original plan was to write about baseball and football, but (1) baseball is quite enough for one blog, (2) I love watching football but can't explain it very well. And after picking up and reading a big of Faith and Fear in Flushing, by a Mets blogger, I realized anyone can write this if they can construct a sentence reasonably well.

I'm a lifelong Mets fan, but I now live in suburban Illinois. Which is fine, because we have three teams to follow: the Cubs and White Sox, of course, and the Milwaukee Brewers are just an hour and a half away. (In fact, the last two MLB games I've gone to were both Brewer games. It's a great stadium.)

After browsing through books by Bill James, Tom Boswell, and Roger Angell, I chose the name The Eleventh Inning because that's a make-or-break time in a baseball game. If you're tied after nine innings, no big deal, everybody can go another inning. By the eleventh, it's a game of attrition. At least one manager is out of bench players (or only has the catcher left); relief pitchers start to go two or three innings instead of one batter, or sometimes a starter will come in. The eleventh inning separates the men from the boys. Or the men from the Men, as the case may be.

Strange time to start, I know, but I'll be writing during the offseason as well.

Thanks for reading.