127 Days to Opening Day 2008

Opening Day 2008 for the Timber Rattlers is April 3. That is 127 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 excerpt is from For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway.

The passage is a quick discussion about a topic of which Hemingway knew a little.

“Because the people of this town are as kind as they can be cruel and they have a natural sense of justice and a desire to do that which is right. But cruelty had entered into the lines and also drunkenness or the beginning of drunkenness and the lines were not as they were when Don Benito had come out. I do not know how it is in other countries, and no one cares more for the pleasure of drinking than I do, but in Spain drunkenness, when produced by other elements than wine, is a thing of great ugliness and the people do things that they would not have done. It is not so in your country, Inglés?”

“It is so,” Robert Jordan said.

Put today’s excerpt in a baseball context.