First Homestand Out: Fan Media!

By Taber on April 22, 2010

Our Richmond Flying Squirrels didn't disappoint in their first two series on the Boulevard, cruising to a 6-1 record at home to offset their 1-6 record on the road. And holy buckets of nuts, did you people have fun. Funn. Whatever, however you spell it.

Non-Moving Pictures

Luckily, it looks like a goodly pile of folks had their camera phones and Twitterthings working over the homestand. Speaking of Twitterpating, if you're not following @nutcap and @RVAFS yet, go ahead and do so to keep yourself saturated in squirreliness at all times.

Moving Pictures

Bus Leagues Video: Opening Night Hey Ya! [Bus Leagues Baseball]
Baseball Part 2 [Phil Has a Blog]

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What can be done to fix The Diamond’s concession lines?

By Taber on April 19, 2010

photo: StefZBy a lot of accounts, the home opening series at The Diamond was successful. The home team took three of four games, we all loved the cup holders and individual seats in the lower levels, and that mascot of ours is positively relentless. Not to mention that it just feels good to have baseball back in our city after a drought that felt excruciatingly long. Unfortunately, the return of pro baseball to Richmond brought along its own excruciatingly long waits: at the concession lines.

Even with the great overall atmosphere at the park, the great baseball, and the death-defying antics of the supernaturally energetic and excitable Nutzy, the one thing everyone's mentioned when I've talked to them about their first visit to The Diamond is the long wait for ballpark food. My own party skipped supper to make the 6:35pm start of Saturday’s game, figuring ballpark food and beer would be a treat. However, we quickly realized people around us needed several innings of time to return with air-conditioned room temperature Bud Lights and naked hot dogs, and the only vendors we saw were hawking $5 cotton candy, hardly a solution for famished grown-ups. We wound up leaving the park before the game ended and cooking pork chops at home. At 9:30pm. No way is this what the team’s front office had in mind.

People are paying their way into this park to watch baseball, and it's hugely frustrating for fans to miss a lot of baseball just to keep from being thirsty and hungry. Boulevardizen suggests pregaming, but I'd think the front office would like to improve matters at the park to the point where fans won't have to either eat beforehand or bring along a DLW (Designated Line-Waiter) to catch the baseball they want to see. They've told the RTD they're aware it's bogus, and they're working on it, which is a relief.

If I may, though, here are my suggestions for getting this under control so I never have to bust out a skillet at home after an abbreviated Saturday trip to the ballpark again:

  • photo: RW PhotoBug

    More vendors in the aisles with more products. In our lower level 3rd base side section on Saturday, we didn't see a single vendor until the 5th inning, and our excitement at seeing a person selling things we could eat coming down the stairs was quickly deflated when we saw she only had cotton candy, the least food-like non-souvenir item I can imagine.

    Being a long-haul sport, the baseball park experience has evolved to maximize fan time with their eyes on the game by sending concessions out into the stands. Hawkers obviously can't carry a large array of items, but they form an important stopgap between trips back into the dank concourses to buy more substantial food and drink.

    The team says 15 vendors were walking about on Thursday. Let's have more of those on big attendance nights, and let's arm them with things people want: hot dogs and beer are an excellent start.

  • More stands, fewer options. This is a tall order for the physical structure of The Diamond, but any more spots where things can be quickly distributed and take the pressure off the full-service concession areas with the full ballpark menu would be extremely welcome.

    There was a couple near us Saturday that was loading up on nuts because that was the only food line that wasn't completely impenetrable. When orders are easier to fill, they get taken care of more quickly. Let's see if we can't have more things like the Beer Express lines and the nut stands to connect fans with food in the concourses more efficiently.

  • Quicker, more novel ways to pay. Cash handling and card authorizations can take a serious bite into the time workers have to fill orders. Group packages include chances to purchase "Acorn Dollars," a kind of Diamond-only currency that fans can use at concession outlets and the team store. Could it improve transaction time if fans could pay in advance for a package of tickets that were directly exchangeable one-to-one for certain popular items?

    Here I'm thinking that, if you gave me the opportunity, I would happily buy a $20 single game lower level ticket that included the price of an undiscounted beer and hot dog. I would also definitely take advantage of a program that sold packages of tickets for stadium items at a slight discount, say $55 for 10 bottle beers or $75 for 10 drafts (a regular price bottled Budweiser is $6, a big draft is $8).

    There's no change or receipting at the time of the transaction with such a scheme, and fans would be able to get their payment out of the way and out of their head before the game even started rather than constantly waiting for the credit card machines to grind through authorizations across the ether. You've built in incentive for package buyers to come back to the park again and use their tickets, and the club scores bonus revenue if people forget to cash in all the tickets they've bought. Good deal, no?

  • Can we order delivery? A promotional game for Ledo Pizza at Saturday's game actually got me wondering about this. The way the game worked was, they pulled pairs of kids out of the stands and had each pair represent a side of the park, either 1st Base or 3rd Base. They got one of the kids dizzy and had him try to toss frisbees into a pizza box held by his partner. The one that caught the most frisbees won pizza delivery for their side of the park.

    As hungry as we were at this point, I don't think anything has ever sounded more delicious in my life. I watched the kids toss frisbees with an unreasonable degree of urgency, thinking "c'mon, c'mon, please let it be us, there's no food and we want to eat, pizza PLEEEASE." Which makes me wonder, if we can get pizza delivered to our houses by making phone calls, couldn't we use our phones in the stands to call in orders for seat delivery?

    I don't know if there's any precedent for that, but it would be an awesome perk the team could charge serious premiums to provide. Heck, while I'm dreaming, give Pizza Hut the concession and let people use their awesome iPhone app to get pies to hungry fans.

I'm really thrilled as a fan that the masses are coming to The Diamond again, but to keep them coming back, the experience at concessions needs to be as smooth and friendly as it possibly can be at our aging park. I know a lot of you made it out this weekend -- what else would you do to fix the food problems at the park?

Squirrels addressing long concession lines [Richmond Times-Dispatch]
A Squirrel's Tale of a Line! [Boulevardizen]

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We actually like The Diamond. Who knew?

By Taber on April 17, 2010

photo: John Murden, RVAnews

Made it to The Diamond yet to catch a game? I know there've only been two opportunities, and people were trying their best to gouge on Craigslist for Home Opener passes, but still, you need to get this "go see a game" thing on your calendar. Five more games in this homestand, folks. Get on it.

  • Fans of the VCU Main Hospital Cafeteria and other Aramark contract service foodstuff operations, prepare to be disappointed. The Diamond's food is all being taken care of in-house, and features squirrely fries served by vendor-tainers. Vendor-tainment Tonight with Mary Hart can't be too far behind. [Style Weekly]
  • "3 hit game a great sign from Gillaspie after his recent power surge. If he can maintain the BA/OBP with the added power, we have a prospect on our hands ... if he can field a position." [When the Giants Come to Town]
  • The Home Opener was a real hit, fan experience wise: "[I]n spite of what you may have heard, baseball on The Boulevard still works [...] At one point kids were shooting stuffed flying squirrels at other kids who tried to catch them in baggy pants … you had to be there." [Richmond.com]
  • John Murden's photos from the game reveal the existence of a "Nutshack Club." Also, the guy in the American flag explosion outfit that I once saw put an Italian Sausage onto a funnel cake at the Chesterfield County Fair and eat it just like that. I wish I was making this up. [RVAnews]
  • Bus Leagues Baseball had the best interview you can possibly have with a mascot. Nutzy's going to be the most popular dude with an outsized head in this city in no time. [Bus Leagues Baseball]
  • Baseball America's business blog wonders if Washington might be looking at an affiliation with the Squirrels when their San Francisco PDC is up at the end of this season. As they note though, Harrisburg does have a fancy new stadium and isn't that far from Washington, so, why bother? [Baseball America]
  • As you'd expect with such a killer logo, merchandise sales are majorly brisk. Tattoo shops, here's your notice: stock up on red and black ink. [Richmond Times-Dispatch]

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Home Opener Tonight!: Blog Roundup

By Taber on April 15, 2010

It's the day we've been waiting for since the day we all discovered there's a real place called "Gwinnett:" time for the Home Opener here at our own little Magic Kingdom of Boulevard, The Diamond. All 9,560 seats in the park (yes, that's fewer than there used to be) are long sold and spoken for. The forecast is clear and warm, with maybe just a touch of chilly April air as the evening goes on, so, perfect.

  • The Flying Squirrels don't suck (and bring you fireworks!) - RVAnews
    If today's game will be the first Flying Squirrels game you'll catch,  you've already missed a lot. Reassurances from John Murden that our 1-6 team isn't coming home just to lay stink bombs on us; they're actually looking quite good so far.
  • Flying Squirrels Guide - Richmond.com
    Colleen Curran has your comprehensive list of fireworks dates, so you can either be at the Diamond if you're a fireworks afficionado or make a note not to call Civil Defense if you hear lots of explosions in the evening hours on those days. The R.com staff also got a sneak peek at the freshened Diamond with Flying Squirrels broadcaster John Laaser back in March, and posted the video.
  • The always handy Richmond Good Life has their comprehensive 2010 Flying Squirrels Guide up and rolling for your reference.
  • and the Science Museum of Virginia has come to bat with a post about actual, real live flying squirrels.

Gates open at 4:30, game starts at 7:05. Hope everyone can make it, and here's hoping tonight'll be an excellent opener. Go Squirrels!

Photo: Flickred!

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Are the Flying Squirrels leaving too many men on base?

By Taber on April 15, 2010

photo: Billie Hara

Jon Heyman at Sports Illustrated applied a measurement he called the "Worry Meter" in a recent column, detailing a few major league teams "who have struggled out of the gate, and just how worried they should be."

Despite leaving Altoona with a 5 game loss streak at the back, I'd put the worry meter for the Squirrels somewhere in the 2 range out of 10.

Only 13.3% of events that get a Squirrels player on base have resulted in runs so far this season, quite low compared to an already low league average of 27.4%. Last season's aggregate league total was 40.2%. Game callers tend to fixate on men being left on base as a problem a team should be able to correct, perhaps with some kind of mystical "clutch hitting ability."

This isn't a problem, though; it's just bad luck. Joe Posnanski ran the numbers on LOB% a couple of weeks ago, and the thing about leaving men on base is, it doesn't lose games. The team that leaves the least men on base only wins 41.8% of games.

A far more useful predictor of win probability is more total men on base. The team that puts more total men on base in a matchup can expect to win 82.7% of the time. And that's an area where the Squirrels outperform both of their opponents to date: Richmond is posting a team on-base of .308, compared to .290 for Altoona and .286 for Bowie.

Even better than on base as a win predictor, the team with more total bases wins 84.7% of the time, and it's another area where Richmond outperforms both their early season opponents, posting 83 TB (league 5th) to Bowie's 70 and Altoona's 69. Those are pretty significant differentials, and very positive indicators that the basement isn't a product of poor performance.

The only problem to date with this offense is sample size. If the lineup keeps producing just like it has, the win column won't stay so quiet for too long.

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The Flying Squirrels Schedule is Unbalanced, and That’s OK

By Taber on April 14, 2010

photo: dotpolka

The Flying Squirrels are in the midst of their second series of the season in Altoona, with two games down and one more to go this afternoon. In a lot of leagues, you'd be right to expect we wouldn't be seeing more than a couple more meetings with the Curve. Eastern League schedules are different though. The Squirrels will play 53% of their games against just three teams, one of them not even in our division, and play actual divisional title rival Akron just 6 times. It looks pretty spectacularly lopsided for fans used to more traditional head-to-head formats, but it's neither arbitrary nor unfair, and it's a plus for baseball fans. The league is scheduled this way thanks to simple economics, player comfort, and the nature of AA baseball. Here's how it works, and why it's a good thing.

The Schedule

Flying Squirrels 2010 Matchups

Out of 142 games, about 60% will be against other Western Division teams. Just two teams, Bowie and Altoona, account for a whopping 38.7% of all games Richmond will play this season. As such, a lot of the Squirrels' success will depend on performance against these squads. Add up the five most frequent opponents, Bowie, Altoona, Reading, Erie, and New Britain, and you've accounted for 71% of the season.

Eastern League schedulers are bound by only one requirement when drawing up the plan for the coming season: each team has to visit each opponent for one three-game series. The minimum number of times a pair of league teams can face each other is six. The Flying Squirrels will call in that bare bones requirement with four teams -- Akron, New Hampshire, Portland, and Trenton -- and go just one over for seven against Binghamton.

There's one big factor you might notice about the difference between the teams Richmond meets constantly and those it meets rarely: the teams we face most often are generally the closest as well. Here's the curve fit:

It's no accident that our nearest neighbor, Bowie at 120-ish miles to the northeast, is our most frequent adversary, and two of the furthest teams from Richmond, New Hampshire's Fisher Cats and Portland's Sea Dogs, both see us the league minimum number of times. The median distance of all Eastern League opponents from Richmond is 403 miles, but the median distance of the top three teams from Richmond is just 258 miles.

The reason goes back to the Rule 56 in the MLB Business Rules, the Player Development Contract (PDC). This arrangement governs the relationship between minor league clubs and their parent organizations, and specifies who's responsible for what. Most commonly, the major league club pays the salaries of all players and coaches, and the league pays for umpires and officials. The minor league club itself pays operational expenses like facility upkeep, and critically for our purposes, for staff travel and accommodations. Those are hardly trivial expenses in a league with the sheer geographical extent of ours.

Map in Bus Cockpit

photo: Jeff Werner

I added up the mileage of every trip the Squirrels will have to take over the course of the season between series, and it comes out to a jaw-dropping 9,022 miles, with a mean 273 miles per leg. Let's imagine a single bus cruising comfortably at highway speed can squeak out about 6mpg. That's 1,504 gallons, and with diesel hovering about $3.08 per gallon at this exact second, that adds up to $4,632 just to fuel one bus for one season. Not to mention the bare minimum 167 hours the team would have to spend on buses if they somehow got through a miracle summer of travel with no traffic delays in the crowded Northeast Corridor. Think about how much you like taking long bus trips. Think about bus bathrooms. Go on, just think about it for a second.

It's clearly to the Flying Squirrels organization's advantage to be scheduled in such a way that there are relatively few long hauls between series, in terms of money and in terms of player sanity.

Doesn't it skew the competitiveness of the league though, that inevitably some teams will wind up closer to the best teams and the furthest from the worst? Well, yes, but it's not really a bad thing, and the situation on the ground can change rapidly. Compared to major league clubs, each roster slot on a AA club is much more fungible. Callups, demotions, trades, and other major shifts are common and expected, and to some extent at the mercy of the major league affiliate.  And don't forget either that despite being in the upper rungs of the minor leagues, AA baseball is still an instructional league where players are still learning professional baseball skills.

Given these factors, each team can go through significant shifts from month to month and even series to series, becoming better, worse, and different as quickly as the weather changes.

Why It's a Good Thing

Tornado at Adventureland

The cringe-inducing wasteland of Altoona, Pennsylvania. Photo: gocyclones

As a baseball fan, I'm excited about this kind of scheduling, because it bolsters two of the best features of sport: aggressive rivalry, and getting to know your opponents intimately. The divisional and league championships still require winning more games than anyone else, and we know exactly who we have to steamroll to crank out wins. It doesn't matter that they're in different divisions. Fans still have incentive to become excruciatingly familiar with the outfits we play the most, and that makes for a lot of fun. I expect to develop a reflexive and innate loathing for the Baysox to the point where I'll be slightly physically ill when I hear the word "bay" in isolation. I plan on finding piles of ways to mock the horrifying (pleasant, in reality) city of Altoona and their (pretty good, actually) horrible squad of monster-people they call the Curve. I will relish this.

The unbalanced Eastern League schedule is a feature, not a bug. We've got a great season of Flying Squirrels baseball to look forward to, and we're lucky that so much of it is happening so close to home.

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The DH Rule is Different in the Eastern League

By Taber on April 13, 2010

DH RuleI hope none of you were excited the Richmond baseball team would be part of the Giants organization because you love watching pitchers tally outs. If you caught the game in Altoona last night, you caught another first in franchise history (I'm tempted to call them "FIFHs," but there's no way an English speaker can pronounce that) -- pitchers on the lineup card. So just a moment to clarify how Baseball Rule 6.10, otherwise known as the Designated Hitter Rule, works in the Eastern League.

It's really simple: the pitcher bats when both teams are in NL organizations. There are 5 teams with NL parent clubs in the Eastern League: Richmond, Altoona (Pirates), Binghamton (Mets), Reading (Phillies), and Harrisburg (Nationals). When any of those clubs are playing each other, there's no DH. Easy, right?

The Flying Squirrels have 63 such games on the schedule this year, so there will be a DH in 55.6% of their matchups, and for the other 44.4% of games, pitchers get to handle bats.

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Squirrels Leave Bowie 1-3

By Taber on April 12, 2010

Photo: joshmcconaha on Flickr

After several days where I felt like someone should send John Laaser a button he can press to say "first in franchise history" rather than having to repeat it with his own voice, the Flying Squirrels finished up their first series in franchise history with three losses and a win at Prince George's Stadium in Bowie.

The Good

Clayton Tanner

LHP Clayton Tanner

Starters: Mike MacDonald kept the bats relatively quiet for the portion of Thursday's interrupted game he had under control, getting into a little walk trouble in the bottom of the 2nd but getting out of it with a throw out at home from Roger Kieschnick, and despite dropping four consecutive hits in the 4th, only one run got across the plate. Phew. Aussie Clayton Tanner had a particularly inspired outing in Friday's win, pitching to a whopping 13 ground outs and giving up just one hit, a double to Bowie catcher Phllip Britton. Daryl Maday went five innings with only two runs off four hits on Saturday, though he did let three bases on balls slide through. Finally, Sunday starter David Mixon had a few problems with the long ball, watching two glide over the wall in the second inning, and hit lead off Bowie hitter Danny Figueroa in the 3rd, followed by Figueroa stealing twice before scoring on a sac fly by Miguel Abreu.

Mixon might need to get rearview mirrors installed on the bill of his cap, but in aggregate, the 1-4 pitchers in the Flying Squirrels rotation produced pretty well. 7 runs in 19.1 innings, and 4 of those were from Mixon's difficult start.

Offense: It wasn't enough, but it's a nice start. Third baseman Conor Gillaspie knocked the only long ball of the series, and there was some nice production all around out there. In addition to nabbing the first hit in franchise history, Thomas Neal went 1 for 4 in 16 at bats. Shortstop Brandon Crawford drew four walks and five hits for a sweet even .500 on base over the series, and backstop Jackson Williams got a lot of contact, five hits, in just nine PAs, three for extra bases. That's pretty sweet.

The numbers are a little disappointing coming across to home, though. Eleven runs out of 37 hits and 13 walks? Yeesh. I'd rather not be 9th in Eastern League run creation coming off the opening series, but nothing to be too concerned about yet. Bowie's got a pretty good stable of arms, and their park tends to favor pitchers to boot. Just another reason they're our sworn enemies.

The Bad

Ronnie Ray
Ronnie Ray. Photo: Tom Clifton

Bullpen: Daniel Turpen blew an away game save opportunity in spectacular fashion on Saturday, permitting two singles before Joel Guzman homered to drive them both in and letting one more base hit come in for a total of one hit and three runs in his inning and quickly souring the score from 4-2 Richmond into a two run Bowie lead. Former Angels draft pick Ronnie Ray struggled at the resumption of the rain-delayed game on Friday, giving up six hits and four runs in 2 1/3 innings of work. His runs include two charged to him left on base after he opened the 7th with a pop out and two singles and left for Andrew Sisco to try and work through.

Overall, eight runs came across the plate in about as many innings of relief. That's not gonna cut it.

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Richmond is the Juggernaut of the Eastern League

By Taber on April 10, 2010

JuggernautWhen the Richmond Braves skipped town for Gwinnett County, Georgia back in 2008, the move triggered a wave of psychic trauma here in Metro Richmond. The R-Braves had been our team for an astonishing four decades, and we never really thought, despite the rumors, there was any danger they could go away. They were the Richmond Braves, after all, and no other place name would sound right in the spot of ours. Well, except for Atlanta, or Rome, or Danville. But, nitpicking. The Braves lived here, and they would stick around here as long as we would let them. The news they were not only leaving Richmond, but for some upstart Atlanta suburb with a comical name and no avenue lined with statues of war heroes, got us talking in defeatist terms about all the ghosts of sports teams past haunting our city along with the Civil War soldiers.

Richmond sent two arena football teams, the Speed and the Bandits, screaming into the night, despite the Bandits taking their league championship their inaugural year. We alienated a Renegades ice hockey team before we sent the RiverDogs packing, and then some poor sap brought us another ice hockey team called the Renegades which we summarily dispatched with our ennui. The Richmond Kickers stick around, but there's a Ukrop in charge of that one, and plus, soccer? Fútbol? How very un-Richmond. No, thank you. Pass the bourbon, Bootsie.

Men's Health coverIs Richmond just toxic to sports teams? Do we all just loathe real sports and wish we could be left alone to go shopping for fancy horse racing hats or whatever? It seemed like a real question during the dark times, brought to a fever pitch by a piece in Men's Health -- since when do we turn to Men's Health for guidance on demography? -- ranking America's top "sports towns." They set a team of Men's Health urban affairs and public policy experts, by which I mean probably some intern, about the task of figuring out what a sports town is, and how you decide one place is a better sports town than another. Their formula came up with bad news for us. We were merely 92nd in sportstownitude nationwide. Our rival Tar Heel metros Charlotte and Raleigh scored 9th and 18th. It was small consolation that Hampton Roads made it into the bottom ten as well with a ranking of 90. After all, they still had an International League team, and a handsome new waterfront ballpark. Don't remind us.

The damage was done all the same. In the aftermath of a heartbreaking team loss, "Richmond's just not a sports town" achieved talking point status as the most plausible and comforting explanation for what happened, and why we were suddenly in an awkward situation where people can see pro baseball in Woodbridge and Salem, but not in the state capital and second largest metro.

Why should we expect success and support for our new pro baseball team then? Won't the players be crushed by the weight of Richmond's collective indifference to sport and sporting in all its forms?

Easy. We can expect success, because the numbers are completely on our side. There are more people here than in any other metro in the Eastern League. If 10% of our population gave even the slightest, most passing notice to the Flying Squirrels, that would equal the entire population of our smallest Eastern League opponent, and I guarantee you everybody in Altoona doesn't follow their Curve. Those odds sound pretty good to me.

The Numbers

Eastern League cities by population

Let's get this straight: as much as Richmonders downplay it when we've all seen or claim to have seen Sabrina Squire grocery shopping in sweatpants, there are a lot of us. We're the 43rd most populous metro in the country, outsizing a significant number of places most people would say are way bigger if you asked them to guess. When it comes down to finding a market for a professional sports team, the numbers really can be that simple: more people, more people who like baseball, more people who could like baseball if they tried, and a better market for a team. Yahtzee. For this instance, and this league, we're the big kids.

The Diamond's a pretty big place though, so I wondered how the Eastern League cities compared with Richmond in terms of stadium size, and what percentage of the population needs to buy tickets to sell out the Eastern League parks. Here in Richmond, the Diamond fills to capacity when a scant 0.77% of the population, 1 in 130 people, buys a ticket. That's slightly below New Britain-Hartford's sellout rate of 0.51%, but their park is smaller by a good 3,000 seats.

Eastern League Cities by Park Seats per Person
City Population Park Capacity Population per Seat % to Sell Out Park
Altoona PA 126,122 7,210 17 5.72%
Binghamton NY 244,694 6,012 41 2.46%
Reading PA 407,125 9,000 45 2.21%
Erie PA 280,291 6,000 47 2.14%
New Hampshire / Manchester-Nashua NH 405,906 7,500 54 1.85%
Trenton NJ 366,222 6,341 58 1.73%
Portland ME 516,826 7,368 70 1.43%
Akron OH 699,935 9,097 77 1.3%
Bowie / Prince George's MD 834,560 10,000 83 1.2%
Harrisburg PA 536,919 6,302 85 1.17%
Richmond VA 1,238,187 9,560 130 0.77%
New Britain / Hartford CT 1,195,998 6,146 195 0.51%

"Sports Town" status be damned

We might not be the number one metro in the country for wearing football jerseys in public, which is a good thing if you've ever seen what grown non-football-playing men look like when they wear football jerseys, but hurts us in the esteem of the Men's Health editorial staff. That's fine. Richmond doesn't need the ranking.

There are 1.24 million people here, and if less than a percent of them take a tangential interest in our new team, then the Flying Squirrels have a significant fan base in Richmond. Let's avoid indulging in our hobby of reminiscing about how it used to be. The Richmond Flying Squirrels are here, pro baseball is here, and they're going to be very successful in our city and the Eastern League.

Survey Says: Richmond Not a Sports Town [Style Weekly]

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Hey Richmond! Let’s hate the Bowie Baysox.

By Taber on April 8, 2010

Competitive sports give us (in the really grand, societal, macro-level "us" sense) reasons to hate people we'll never meet. That's a good thing, and it's to be encouraged, even if in Philadelphia that means people wind up booing Santa Claus and throwing batteries at J.D. Drew. That Santa Claus figure has always seemed kind of smug to me anyhow. He had it coming.

For a new franchise like our own though, it's a little tricky to get the competition thing right. We don't have a long-standing, passed down through the generations kind of rivalry of the kind that nullifies engagements with anybody. Richmond Flying Squirrels fans are a tabula rasa for unadulterated irrational hatred.

As such, I'm totally on board with John Murden's suggestion that we go ahead and decide to hate the Bowie Baysox. His case is tight. They're a consistently good team, owing to the lately lauded depth of the Orioles system. They're way closer geographically than most of our other rivals. We play them more than any other team, a whopping 29 times this coming season.

John was too polite to mention it, but I'd also like to jump in and point out that their mascot is terrifying and looks like something I've pulled out when cleaning the garbage disposal. What is that thing? Is it a baysock? If it is, well, baysox are officially my worst nightmare. My own personal hell would be to be trapped in an elevator for all eternity with like 18 of these things.

The coffin nail: they pronounce the name of their town wrong. "Bowie," under no circumstances, can be uttered as "BOO-ee." BOO! BOO! BOOO!

Let's get this mutual misunderstanding and hatred started. Down with the Bowie Baysox! Long live the Flying Squirrels! Start building your effigies now, kids. It's gonna be a long season.

We hate the Bowie Baysox [rvanews]

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