Hard Times

So you're sat in your living room, three months removed from the World Series and still a full two months away from any meaningful baseball. You've exhausted your somewhat limited library of baseball books, watched Faith Rewarded, Still We Believe and MLB's All-Century Team about a dozen times and are now really starting to feel the full-blown physical symptoms of baseball withdrawal: logging on to MLB.com every morning in the hope of finding something other than an article on Roger Clemens still not knowing what the fuck he's doing in 2007, waking up at 1:05am and jumping out of bed to try to catch a Sox game on the West Coast, even getting excited about the prospect of catching Terrain d'Entente - in French - on TV next week.

All of sudden, you notice an e-mail sitting in your almost-forgotten Hotmail inbox, the one you use pretty much exclusively for MLB.com e-mail, because despite having modified your contact details all over their website, they insist - maybe for sentimental reaons - on sending e-mail to the address you first used to sign up to their services. "Oooh - e-mail from MLB.com! Maybe it's a Spring Training preview. Or a 75% discount in the online store, so I can get me a Trot Nixon jersey and show my support for our dirt dog right fie... Oh shit - I forgot."

So you open the aformentioned e-mail, eager with anticipation. And this is what you read:

U.S. Figure Skating extends a special invitation to MLB.com fans to check out Icenetwork.com's ground-breakingcoverage of the 2007 State Farm U.S. Figure Skating Championships. For the first time ever, fans will get anall-access pass with behind-the-scenes broadband coverageof the Championships, taking place in Spokane, Wash., Jan. 21-28.

If you're guessing that my initial reaction was "WTF???", you'd be about right. If you can ignore the fact that the e-mail arrived on January 26 for something that began on January 21, you still have to wonder what bizarre thoughts went through the mind of the clearly very tired MLB marketing executive who thought that what any self-respecting baseball fan needs to help get through those long, dull winter nights is bloody figure skating (with all due respet to Kristen).

All of a sudden, Fever Pitch - "Le Vol", "La Malédiction du Bambino" and all - doesn't seem such a bad way to spend an evening.