157 Days to Opening Day 2008

Opening Day 2008 for the Timber Rattlers is April 3. That is 157 days from today. This off-season, the countdown will be based on books. Each day between now and Opening Day 2008, I will pick a random book out of my library and excerpt a passage off the page number corresponding with the number of days remaining to the first pitch of the new season. I will try not to repeat a book during the countdown.

Today’s book is TR: The Last Romantic by H.W. Brands. This is a comprehensive biography of Theodore Roosevelt.

The excerpt from page 157 is about a trip out to the Badlands and tells a lot about how Teddy made decisions and put faith in other people. The ‘they’ in the excerpt are Sylvane Ferris and Bill Merrifield, prospective business partners of Teddy.

When they explained their situation, he offered to buy them out: contract, cattle, and kit. They said they’d have to go to Minnesota to talk to their employer, but they liked the idea.

They liked it even more when Roosevelt pulled out a checkbook and scribbled off a draft for fourteen thousand dollars. This was to cover their expenses, to buy a few hundred cattle beyond the 150 they were already managing, and generally to get the operation going. They were flabbergasted at Roosevelt’s dash and decisiveness – and at his trusting nature. When they asked if he wanted a receipt, he replied that if he didn’t trust them – whom he had known a total of several hours – he wouldn’t be going into business with them. Decades afterward, Merrifield still wondered at the event. “We were sitting on a log up at what we called Cannonball Creek. He handed us a check for fourteen thousand dollars, handed it right over to us on a verbal contract. He didn’t have a scratch of a pen for it.” To which Sylvane Ferris added, “All the security he had for his money was our honesty.”

Put the today's entry into a baseball context.