6/26/2010 Odds & Ends

Jason Castro: now a major leaguer

It's Saturday, time again for another Odds & Ends post. In keeping with the tradition of not writing a whole ton on Saturdays during the season, this will be another short one. It just seems that the real news is the games and that's what I spend the rest of the week covering. That being said, there are a few notable events in ABL-land that have occurred away from the ballparks: 

- Tuesday was the Major League Baseball debut of a former ABL player and the guy who I ranked the #1 Top Pro Prospect among ABL alumni this season, Jason Castro (Bucs, 2006), catcher for the Houston Astros. He really showed off his powerful arm in his debut, throwing out two runners. I've said it before, but with the kind of abilities that Jason has combined with the fact that catcher is a pretty shallow position in MLB right now, Castro has the potential to be a very big star. Congratulations to Jason! You can read the full story and see his first at-bat here.

- Some photos from the Midnight Sun Game have been going around the series of tubes we know as the internet. One really cool photo was posted on, of all places, TampaBay.com of the St. Petersburg Times. Check this out, third photo down. It's pretty cool that somewhere as far away as Florida would sit up and take note of this event. Now, on the other hand, if you're not satisfied with a single artsy photo, the Fairbanks News-Miner has a whole slideshow of pics.


- Taking a look at the schedule, and thinking ahead to which games I might catch, it looks like everyone is going to be out of the Anchorage/Valley area until Wednesday or so. Unless I can swing a road trip somehow (can anyone think of a good pretext for burning a lot of precious gasoline?) I'll be grounded until then. I might try to take in either the Miners at Bucs on Wednesday or the inverse on Thursday, and then head in to finally catch a Pilots game. They have a good long stretch where they play against the Bucs and Miners a lot, so that will be a good time for me to play catch up on them. In the mean time I'd like to hear the audio of some Fire games, so I can kinda keep up with them until they take their big road trip down at the end of July and I can get some more of their live games in. If I've learned one lesson from this year, it's that next season I should be more organized! But we'll see if that actually happens...

Have a safe and fun weekend! If you're a reader from Fairbanks or Kenai, this is a great week(end) to see some baseball in your home town, so head on down to the park. If you do make it out to a game, and want to give you an opinion or heads-up on anyone, feel free to leave me a comment. I always like to hear from readers!