Old Time Family Baseball

While tonight’s rain delay extends the 2012 season for at least one more night, I can’t help but feel the hard, heavy weight of a cold winter without baseball coming down on me. Given the nature of the game and the feeling of transience that a finished season leaves in its wake, I thought it best to ruminate on potential future project that today’s players might undertake in the entertainment business once they leave the diamond behind.

Late Bloomers - Willie Bloomquist plays Bill Bloomlist, a forty-year-old single father trying to get his newly planted garden emporium off the ground in small town Pennsylvania. Bloomlist has to do it all to the make the business work: running the register, helping customers find the right mulch, and filling propane tanks, among other things. He slips into each role with aplomb, dishes out advice to the townspeople on “having it all,” and, perhaps, finds love along the way.

Strikeout with Adam Dunn - Adam Dunn gives out dating advice to personable young men who hit it out of the park every now and then but just can’t seem to string together a number of good dates in a row. Those who move on to a second date earn the dream night of their choice. Those who - strikeout - earn the scorn of Adam Dunn.

Hillbilly Handfishing - When reached for comment about why he doesn’t take pay for his role on this show, J.D. Drew responded: “I’d be doing it anyway.”

Maybe It’s Just Society - Vernon Wells plays an alienated, twenty-something recently out of graduate school with an M.F.A. With a set of skills that can’t seem to get him a job and recently dumped, he returns to his hometown to try and reclaim his more genuine childhood roots. Along the way, he reconnects with his high school baseball coach (Mike Sciosica type as played by Brian Dennehy), who teaches him that, sometimes, it’s just society, and we aren’t mean to understand.

I Have Seen the Crimson Hills - An Old Hoss Radbourn biopic with a noticeably cleaned up John Axford in the title roll. The movie details Radbourn’s bouts with opium sweats, his heroic efforts in the Civil War, and his inscrutability on the mound.