Baseball season starts today !

OK, well not totally.
But pitchers & catchers do report to 'spring' training today in Florida.
Hey, it IS a start.

In reality, we are not yet quite past the midpoint of winter,
which will be about the 21st of this month
(winter starts December 21st and ends March 20th).

Thanks in part to global warming, it's been a very mild winter thus far.
I haven't had to shovel snow once this winter and it's almost 1/2 over.
Unfortunately, we may have to pay for that later this summer.
Summer last year was brutal.

This is the first year in about the last 15, that I haven't spent the winters in Florida.
I do miss it. I have friends down there and I love the winter season down there.
It's ideal.

But, the head coach on one of my teams is dying. He's in his 80's and has
liver disease, which has progressively gotten worse and he's in no condition to
have surgery. At this moment, he is cycling between hospice care and hospital
procedures. Unfortunately, the end of his life is near. It's very sad.

I was asked by the league commissioner to take over the team, to prevent it from disintegrating.
Subsequently, from the league secretary, I discovered that no roster was submitted by the coach to the league for the past 2 years. My coach was the league vice-president.
The coach is non-communicative at this point.
The family can't find a sheet with contact information for the players.
Thus, I've been very busy trying to recover some of those players, as a couple I had contact information
and they had contact info on one other and he had contact info on another, and also recruiting a lot of new ones.

At this time I've been able to assemble 18 players including myself and 5 of the players from last year.
All of the new players so far are the better players from the other
3 teams I am on in other leagues. It's going to result in being a great team, much better than our 4th place finish from last year. Perhaps the best team I've ever been on, and that includes the state championship team, that I played on 3 years ago.
The starting 11 will be fantastic.
But, that's only on paper.
The proof is in the.....results. Time will tell. Injuries happen. Family obligations interfere, etc..

I'm also not quite done with recruiting. It could actually get even a little better.
I am focusing now on back-up players, who can play well at several positions to cover for when the starters are injured or missing for other reasons.
You know the saying, "a chain is only as good as it's weakest link".
The other team will go after the weakest defensive player. So, back-ups have to be
good too.

It appears, that I will probably miss out on Florida this year and my coach
will likely not survive this winter.