Now that February is upon us, my mind can't help turning to baseball. As with any subject, there await tales of CB to be told. The above picture came from a Marlins-Expos game played in Chicago in September of 2004. I unfortunately missed the one the previous day which featured Josh Beckett - instead I got stuck with Ismael Valdez vs Scott Downs. Nonetheless, I managed to get closer to the action than anyone in their right mind should be able to for $15 (and I got my friend to cover the $10 for parking in exchange for my driving). I even managed to score on sunblock - since it was late summer, my part-time employer of seven years (Jewel-Osco) had generic imitation coppertone on 40% off clearance. On top of that, since I bought generic, I got an extra 10 percent off of that. But the sunblock is beside the point.

The moral of the story here is that baseball is baseball - if it takes two teams coming to your town in the wake of a hurricane to bring the national pastime within your budget, so be it [CB's note: I religiously foresake my CB-ness every February and buy whatever Cubs tickets I can get hold of for the coming season...and no, I don't turn around and sell them]. This game was almost Cubs-Sox Lite, in a way - the Marlins had beaten the Cubs in the NLCS the previous year and were fighting them for the Wild Card at the time; thus, every Sox fan refused to leave without asking Miguel Cabrera to marry them and snapping a photo-op with Billy Marlin [someone conveniently posted a memento of this love affair for your viewing pleasure]. Meanwhile, the single ladies in Cubbie blue expressed their unrequited love for Alex Gonzalez, the Cubs' ex-shortstop who'd been jettisoned to Montreal for botching a double-play ball in the 2003 postseason. To the rest of Cubdom, the fact that Montreal wore Cub-esque colors and weren't the Marlins was reason enough to pull for them.

Ultimately, for $15 and a half tank of gas - back before gas cost more than my Tuesday night Guinness [$2 for a pint] I got to see a thrilling 8-6 Marlins win that came down to the wire, with Ryan Church lining out to right with the bases loaded to end it [Thanks, Retrosheet]. And I still have the clearance sunblock [that's not me, folks!].

* For those of you who are baseball fans, I'll have more meanderings on the subject as the weather warms up. For all who couldn't care less about baseball, don't worry - I'm sporadically cheap enough to have tons of non-sports CB stories, too.