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Central PA - Winter 2021/2022


Bubbler86
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Baseball saddens me.

First game I attended was in 1971 at brand new Veterans Stadium. I was 6 at the time and was immediately hooked. (though NOT on the Phillies...but baseball in general) By the mid 1970s I knew every player on every team. I lived and slept baseball. No cable back then but I'd watch every O's or Phillies game that was televised locally. 1981 I got my license and 2 years later I was an 18 year old who owned his first season ticket plan with the Orioles. At this time I was going to 40-50 games a season in Baltimore, Philly, NY, Cleveland, Pittsburgh...wherever I could reasonably drive to, I'd be there. By the late 1980s I started booking flights to LA, San Diego, Chicago, Atlanta...I was consumed with baseball. 

I held my season ticket plan in Baltimore until the late 1990s. By this point, marriage, family, job demands, and an increasing frustration with strikes and lockouts had me starting to pull back. I replaced Orioles tickets with Senators tickets. I had those until several years ago. These days, I might see 1 or 2 games a season. Mostly for fun, the passion I had for baseball has long since waned. It is what it is - there's so much about the game and the way it's operated that I can't stand. Final straw was the hideous extra inning rule and the 7 inning doubleheaders. As a baseball purist who developed his love for the game 50 years ago - seeing what's transpired over the years makes me sick. 

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13 minutes ago, Itstrainingtime said:

Baseball saddens me.

First game I attended was in 1971 at brand new Veterans Stadium. I was 6 at the time and was immediately hooked. (though NOT on the Phillies...but baseball in general) By the mid 1970s I knew every player on every team. I lived and slept baseball. No cable back then but I'd watch every O's or Phillies game that was televised locally. 1981 I got my license and 2 years later I was an 18 year old who owned his first season ticket plan with the Orioles. At this time I was going to 40-50 games a season in Baltimore, Philly, NY, Cleveland, Pittsburgh...wherever I could reasonably drive to, I'd be there. By the late 1980s I started booking flights to LA, San Diego, Chicago, Atlanta...I was consumed with baseball. 

I held my season ticket plan in Baltimore until the late 1990s. By this point, marriage, family, job demands, and an increasing frustration with strikes and lockouts had me starting to pull back. I replaced Orioles tickets with Senators tickets. I had those until several years ago. These days, I might see 1 or 2 games a season. Mostly for fun, the passion I had for baseball has long since waned. It is what it is - there's so much about the game and the way it's operated that I can't stand. Final straw was the hideous extra inning rule and the 7 inning doubleheaders. As a baseball purist who developed his love for the game 50 years ago - seeing what's transpired over the years makes me sick. 

Letting go of a passion,  any passion is that we pursued all our lives and seen circumstances beyond our control to make it unenjoyable is hard.

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15 minutes ago, Itstrainingtime said:

Baseball saddens me.

First game I attended was in 1971 at brand new Veterans Stadium. I was 6 at the time and was immediately hooked. (though NOT on the Phillies...but baseball in general) By the mid 1970s I knew every player on every team. I lived and slept baseball. No cable back then but I'd watch every O's or Phillies game that was televised locally. 1981 I got my license and 2 years later I was an 18 year old who owned his first season ticket plan with the Orioles. At this time I was going to 40-50 games a season in Baltimore, Philly, NY, Cleveland, Pittsburgh...wherever I could reasonably drive to, I'd be there. By the late 1980s I started booking flights to LA, San Diego, Chicago, Atlanta...I was consumed with baseball. 

I held my season ticket plan in Baltimore until the late 1990s. By this point, marriage, family, job demands, and an increasing frustration with strikes and lockouts had me starting to pull back. I replaced Orioles tickets with Senators tickets. I had those until several years ago. These days, I might see 1 or 2 games a season. Mostly for fun, the passion I had for baseball has long since waned. It is what it is - there's so much about the game and the way it's operated that I can't stand. Final straw was the hideous extra inning rule and the 7 inning doubleheaders. As a baseball purist who developed his love for the game 50 years ago - seeing what's transpired over the years makes me sick. 

 

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Humor aside, I agree with almost all of this. The extra innings and doubleheader rules from the Covid season honestly make me wish there hadn't been a season at all that year.

The Astros trash can scandal also left me with a bad taste for baseball and how only Hinch and Cora felt any real punishment. Multiple players should have been banned for life for that shit and at the end of the day, opposing pitchers didn't even have the sack to throw at the bums and they managed to get to the World Series. Thankfully the baseball gods (and Jorge Soler) had other ideas for how it would end. 

The placement of the permanent DH in the National League also pisses me off. 

 

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6 minutes ago, Atomixwx said:

 

1149189094_fetchimage(1).jpeg.50a6401a64554da3f87b68bb90d05b8a.jpeg

 

Humor aside, I agree with almost all of this. The extra innings and doubleheader rules from the Covid season honestly make me wish there hadn't been a season at all that year.

The Astros trash can scandal also left me with a bad taste for baseball and how only Hinch and Cora felt any real punishment. Multiple players should have been banned for life for that shit and at the end of the day, opposing pitchers didn't even have the sack to throw at the bums and they managed to get to the World Series. Thankfully the baseball gods (and Jorge Soler) had other ideas for how it would end. 

The placement of the permanent DH in the National League also pisses me off. 

 

Both of those things illustrate perfectly what I was talking about. 

It has to be very hard (if even possible) for those who are in their 20s and even 30s to understand how big baseball was when I was young. NFL was a far distant second to baseball in popularity...shoot, the first few Super Bowls were played before thousands of empty seats. Imagine that. 

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1 hour ago, Itstrainingtime said:

Baseball saddens me.

First game I attended was in 1971 at brand new Veterans Stadium. I was 6 at the time and was immediately hooked. (though NOT on the Phillies...but baseball in general) By the mid 1970s I knew every player on every team. I lived and slept baseball. No cable back then but I'd watch every O's or Phillies game that was televised locally. 1981 I got my license and 2 years later I was an 18 year old who owned his first season ticket plan with the Orioles. At this time I was going to 40-50 games a season in Baltimore, Philly, NY, Cleveland, Pittsburgh...wherever I could reasonably drive to, I'd be there. By the late 1980s I started booking flights to LA, San Diego, Chicago, Atlanta...I was consumed with baseball. 

I held my season ticket plan in Baltimore until the late 1990s. By this point, marriage, family, job demands, and an increasing frustration with strikes and lockouts had me starting to pull back. I replaced Orioles tickets with Senators tickets. I had those until several years ago. These days, I might see 1 or 2 games a season. Mostly for fun, the passion I had for baseball has long since waned. It is what it is - there's so much about the game and the way it's operated that I can't stand. Final straw was the hideous extra inning rule and the 7 inning doubleheaders. As a baseball purist who developed his love for the game 50 years ago - seeing what's transpired over the years makes me sick. 

Damn, a lot of this post hit home.  I still love baseball and will always call it my first love, but not the way I did back in my youth.  I didn't travel the way you did but I had a massive card collection and knew every player in the league.  Nothing was better than the baseball All Star game or the Fall Classic, and now they seem to be losing more and more steam every year.  I know football kind of takes the life out of everything with how dominant it has become but baseball will always be our nation's pastime in my eyes and it's sad what's happening to it.

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24 minutes ago, Mount Joy Snowman said:

Damn, a lot of this post hit home.  I still love baseball and will always call it my first love, but not the way I did back in my youth.  I didn't travel the way you did but I had a massive card collection and knew every player in the league.  Nothing was better than the baseball All Star game or the Fall Classic, and now they seem to be losing more and more steam every year.  I know football kind of takes the life out of everything with how dominant it has become but baseball will always be our nation's pastime in my eyes and it's sad what's happening to it.

Word for word, I'm completely with you. Perfectly said. 

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2 hours ago, canderson said:

No reason to waste time doing so until late this week. It’s a dead week across the entire eastern half of the county. 

Dead enough that I ran my new Jeep through the car wash today to get the heavy salt off of it. The bottom half was pure white...

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43 minutes ago, Mount Joy Snowman said:

Damn, a lot of this post hit home.  I still love baseball and will always call it my first love, but not the way I did back in my youth.  I didn't travel the way you did but I had a massive card collection and knew every player in the league.  Nothing was better than the baseball All Star game or the Fall Classic, and now they seem to be losing more and more steam every year.  I know football kind of takes the life out of everything with how dominant it has become but baseball will always be our nation's pastime in my eyes and it's sad what's happening to it.

 

19 minutes ago, Itstrainingtime said:

Word for word, I'm completely with you. Perfectly said. 

Ditto for me.

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1 hour ago, mahantango#1 said:

Letting go of a passion,  any passion is that we pursued all our lives and seen circumstances beyond our control to make it unenjoyable is hard.

Sadly, for the younger folks around here (including myself), it’s my fear that this may also apply to weather someday (well, it’s not technically beyond “our” control as a human race, but it’s beyond my control as an individual).

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1 hour ago, TimB84 said:

Sadly, for the younger folks around here (including myself), it’s my fear that this may also apply to weather someday (well, it’s not technically beyond “our” control as a human race, but it’s beyond my control as an individual).

My parents aided with the post storm collection and reconstruction of Homestead, Florida. I fell in love with the weatherman (Tom Casey, WTAJ in Altoona) around the same time. I used to pretend to do the weather on the wall of my apartment outside as a kid. Weather is something I love. I love reading about it, learning about how the weather works, how storms occur, why they act the way they do, and why they don't sometimes. I enjoy the post-storm analysis or autopsy when things go wrong. 

I love the extremes of all seasons. I get off on disaster. Not so much the human toll, but the toll the planet takes from an EF5 tornado or from a 7.1 magnitude earthquake, or how Texas shuts down when it's below 60. The problem is, the extremes seen to be heavily slanted towards one thing: flooding. I don't find any interest in flooding. I know how water works. I know how the lack of dikes work. It does nothing for me. 

So the current global trend is kind of boring and sad to me. So, yeah. Some of us may lose the passion for weather as we all become Roanoke. 

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18 minutes ago, Atomixwx said:

My parents aided with the post storm collection and reconstruction of Homestead, Florida. I fell in love with the weatherman (Tom Casey, WTAJ in Altoona) around the same time. I used to pretend to do the weather on the wall of my apartment outside as a kid. Weather is something I love. I love reading about it, learning about how the weather works, how storms occur, why they act the way they do, and why they don't sometimes. I enjoy the post-storm analysis or autopsy when things go wrong. 

I love the extremes of all seasons. I get off on disaster. Not so much the human toll, but the toll the planet takes from an EF5 tornado or from a 7.1 magnitude earthquake, or how Texas shuts down when it's below 60. The problem is, the extremes seen to be heavily slanted towards one thing: flooding. I don't find any interest in flooding. I know how water works. I know how the lack of dikes work. It does nothing for me. 

So the current global trend is kind of boring and sad to me. So, yeah. Some of us may lose the passion for weather as we all become Roanoke. 

What a dweeb.

But as the earth continues to warm weather will continue to get more violent. We have seen extreme events every year now in America and it’ll just increase. Hell a standard squall line here now can throw down 60 mph winds like it’s no big deal. That’s not normal. 

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11 minutes ago, Atomixwx said:

My parents aided with the post storm collection and reconstruction of Homestead, Florida. I fell in love with the weatherman (Tom Casey, WTAJ in Altoona) around the same time. I used to pretend to do the weather on the wall of my apartment outside as a kid. Weather is something I love. I love reading about it, learning about how the weather works, how storms occur, why they act the way they do, and why they don't sometimes. I enjoy the post-storm analysis or autopsy when things go wrong. 

I love the extremes of all seasons. I get off on disaster. Not so much the human toll, but the toll the planet takes from an EF5 tornado or from a 7.1 magnitude earthquake, or how Texas shuts down when it's below 60. The problem is, the extremes seen to be heavily slanted towards one thing: flooding. I don't find any interest in flooding. I know how water works. I know how the lack of dikes work. It does nothing for me. 

So the current global trend is kind of boring and sad to me. So, yeah. Some of us may lose the passion for weather as we all become Roanoke. 

It amazes me how many of “that kid” there are. I had no idea. I didn’t know any other weather nerds growing up, but I also spent a lot of time making hypothetical forecasts, following actual stats, watching hours of the Weather Channel and tuning into all three local news broadcasts at 6:15-6:20 every evening, tracking storms and being thrilled when they panned out and devastated when they didn’t. Back then I probably thought it was kind of exciting when Pittsburgh got to 100 that day in the summer of ‘95 (I was too young to understand the magnitude of 1988), but I have no use for heat records now and even less use for warm winters. Even so, things haven’t changed enough to ruin this hobby for me yet, outside of maybe that 18 month period in 2016-2017 when every single month had above normal temperatures here.

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It’s good to know that there are many like us on this weather board.

I used to watch the local news and flip around trying to catch all 3 weather reports when I was in middle & high school.
Weather World was a must watch every day during the Winter at 5:45 pm.

The trusty old Weather radio also was a must listen a few times per day during the Winter, and even more when storms were in the short term.

The Weather Channel was also great back in the 90’s as a go to before the Internet really took over towards the turn of the century.

I used to look at newspaper forecast pages from various papers when I would stop by a convenience store to try to get any weather info.

The internet changed everything with more information from various platforms; including forecaster blogs and our own access to the weather models. 

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2 minutes ago, Blizzard of 93 said:

 

The internet changed everything with more information from various platforms; including forecaster blogs and our own access to the weather models. 

I’m still trying to decide if this is better or worse. Probably better, but when the subject of following weather in the ‘90s comes up I still get severe bouts of nostalgia.

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10 minutes ago, Blizzard of 93 said:

It’s good to know that there are many like us on this weather board.

I used to watch the local news and flip around trying to catch all 3 weather reports when I was in middle & high school.
Weather World was a must watch every day during the Winter at 5:45 pm.

The trusty old Weather radio also was a must listen a few times per day during the Winter, and even more when storms were in the short term.

The Weather Channel was also great back in the 90’s as a go to before the Internet really took over towards the turn of the century.

I used to look at newspaper forecast pages from various papers when I would stop by a convenience store to try to get any weather info.

The internet changed everything with more information from various platforms; including forecaster blogs and our own access to the weather models. 

Wow, this is like my childhood! Don't forget the weather phone number you could call to get the forecast as well. Friday evenings were my favorite for Weather World, as they did the long range then! I remember them showing all the spaghetti plots.

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Great stuff.  Was also an avid Weather World watcher.  Paul & Fred, Elliot Abrams, Joe Sobel, Joe Bastardi (what the heck happened?), Lee Grenci, etc.  Seemed like Elliot was everywhere back in those days as Accuweather must have had exclusive contracts with local radio.  I even won the Snowflake contest a few times and the grand prize in the trivia contest once (one year subscription to Weather Bell).  Hardly ever used it, lol.

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41 minutes ago, TugHillMatt said:

Wow, this is like my childhood! Don't forget the weather phone number you could call to get the forecast as well. Friday evenings were my favorite for Weather World, as they did the long range then! I remember them showing all the spaghetti plots.

Yes! I forgot about the weather phone #.

I remember the days leading up to the Blizzard of 93 calling that phone# several times per day!

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