134 Days to Opening Day 2008

Opening Day 2008 for the Timber Rattlers is April 3. That is 134 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 The Odyssey by Homer and translated by T.E. Lawrence.

This is from near the end of Book 12 as Odysseus describes how he survived...again.

‘At last the West wind ceased its frantic blowing: only to be succeeded by a South wind whose strengthening brought more pain to my heart; for it meant my measuring back each wave towards fatal Charybdis. All night I was sea-borne, and sunrise found me opposite Scylla’s cliff facing dire Charybdis as she gulped down the ocean. Her eddy whirled me upward to the tall fig-tree. I caught and clung there like any bat: not able, though, to find a foothold or any standing-place thereon: so far beneath were the roots and far above me the boughs. Long and vast these boughs were, shading all Charybdis. I held on grimly waiting for her to disgorge my mast and keel. Very late it was before my hopes were answered and the came: as late as the supper rising of a justice from the courts, who has stayed to settle the many suits of his hot-blooded litigants: so late it was before the spars reappeared. I let go and dropped with the sprawling hands and feet, to splash heavily into the water on the lee side of these great beams. Across them I sat and paddled hard with my hands. The Father of Gods and men spared me further sight of Scylla, else should I inevitably have died.

‘So I drifted for nine days. In the tenth darkness the Gods cast me ashore on Ogygia, where lives Calypso, the high but humane-spoken Goddess who greeted me kindly and tended me.

Before putting today’s excerpt in a baseball context, remember where you first heard about Scylla and Charybdis...

You consider me the young apprentice
Caught between the Scylla and Charibdes.
Hypnotized by you if I should linger
Staring at the ring around your finger.
I have only come here seeking knowledge,
Things they would not teach me of in college.
I can see the destiny you sold
turned into a shining band of gold.

I'll be wrapped around your finger.
I'll be wrapped around your finger.

For fun, put both the excerpt and the lyric from The Police into a baseball context.