167 Days to Opening Day 2008

April 3, 2008 is Opening Day for the Wisconsin Timber Rattlers. That is 167 days from today.

This off-season, the countdown to Opening Day 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 The Chronicles of Amber (Vol. 1), a collection of books by Roger Zelazny. This is a fantasy series that can be a little mind-bending. Corwin is a Prince of Amber, who is recovering from amnesia, out for revenge against the members of his Royal Family, and out to become the new King of Amber. There is magic, treachery, and heroism.

The excerpt is from page 167 and is early in the second book in the volume The Guns of Avalon:

I thought then about a Ganelon. I did not want to, but I did. He had been a traitorous assassin and I had exiled him from Avalon centuries before. I had actually cast him through Shadow into another time and place, as my brother Eric had later done to me. I hoped it was not to this place that I had sent him. While not very likely, it was possible. Though he was a mortal man with his allotted span, and I had exiled him from that place perhaps six hundred years ago, it was possible that it was only a few years past in terms of this world. Time, too, is a function of Shadow, and even Dworkin did not know all of its ins and outs. Or perhaps he did. Maybe that is what drove him mad. The most difficult thing about Time, I have learned, is doing it. In any case, I felt that this could not be my old enemy and former trusted aide, for he would certainly not be resisting any wave of iniquity that was sweeping across the land. He would be right in there pitching for the loathsome beasts, I felt sure.

Add your own baseball context to this excerpt.