Vern Blog #2 - What to do during a long, cold Mallards Baseball off-season

So I’m a day late in my blog posting here…I’ve got a feeling that this won’t be the last time my entry is delayed, but I’ll do all I can to make the wait worth your while. So this is kind of a crazy time of year in the life of a person who works in baseball. We don’t have our 2009 schedule yet, nobody really wants to talk baseball during the holidays & we’re mired almost exactly in the middle of the baseball off-season.

Fortunately this fall has offered me all kinds of ways to keep busy. My 14-month old daughter Chloe has been the big highlight. Already walking for a few months she has turned to new challenges, like how to trick me into holding & entertaining her every moment that we are together. To be clear, I love the attention but I can’t help but be curious how she has become so infatuated with me. My wife Kallie says it is just a phase that all kids go through…but I think it is the start of her struggling through the same thing I am. The complete lack of baseball! I’m sure she is thinking to herself, “I can’t believe it is 72 days until pitchers & catchers report to Spring Training!” It follows that the only rational thing she can do is to latch on to the closest thing she has around the house that will hopefully talk some baseball with her. Keep in mind that in her short time here on earth she has been to at least 60 baseball games (if you count in utero attendance) & it makes sense that she misses the comforting confines of a baseball field. Well I’ve been working on helping her develop some new habits to help get her through this terrible time of year.

One that we’ve focused on is music. Kallie brings her to music class once a week & at night I normally will play some classics to augment what she hears in class. Last week we listened to a lot of Beatles, Rolling Stones, Lorretta Lynn, Stephen Malkmus & others. Her favorite though appears to be a band called Blitzen Trapper that I saw at the High Noon Saloon a few weeks ago. After a pretty impressive show I picked up their CD & the next morning I looked at the CD titled "Furr" & thought to myself “man, did I just waste another $10 bucks on a CD by a band I’ve never heard of & probably never will ever listen to again after I throw it on one time?” To my very pleasant surprise it turned out to be some of the best new music I’ve heard in a long time, kind of a modern mix of Dylan & The Flaming Lips or something along that line. To make it even better whenever we played the CD (which was a lot) Chloe would start dancing all by herself! Good Stuff.

Other than that, Mike, Nick & I are heading to Las Vegas next week for the Baseball Winter Meetings. I have plenty of ideas for off-season moves my Twins should make, but as of the publishing of this blog they had not returned my phone call requesting a meeting with GM Bill Smith to review my concepts. I guess we’ll have to settle on spending most of our time at a pretty impressive trade show where we will hopefully find some great ideas for use during the 2009 season out here at the “Duck Pond.” After we’re done with that I’m not quite sure what we’ll do…is there anything fun to do in Vegas? Please feel free to send us any ideas…I don’t think we’re capable of having any fun there though…at least that is what I’m telling my wife!

Talk to you soon!