Missives of a Baseball Milquetoast

Hello, I am the Baseball Milquetoast and I am a San Francisco Giants fan whose World Series championship dream has been crushed at the hands of Joe Maddon for a second time. His first transgression was that he was the bench coach for the 2002 Anaheim Angels who defeated the Giants and I'm pretty sure his strategies enabled that stupid Rally Monkey. Maddon spent 31 years as a player, coach and manager within the California/Arbitrary SoCal City Name Angels organization and this celebration in 2002 was easily one of the greatest highlights of his tenure. Maddon is now the manager of the Chicago Cubs and his second wrongdoing toward San Francisco came last Tuesday night when the Cubs rallied from a 5-2 deficit to defeat the Giants thus advancing to the NLCS. The wound is too fresh to bear the thought of  sharing a photo of this recent iniquity but for this one you can do an image search without my help. I am however happy to share a photo of a young Joe Maddon when he

I'm realizing that I've been fixated on this need to spotlight teams with "original" monikers and I think it's time to switch things up a little bit. Just because a team was called the "Midland Angels " doesn't mean it lacked an identity of its own. It might just seem like some weird combination of logos from the Los Angeles Angels and Texas Rangers, but this Midland Angels cap from the mid-1990's is a fine example of a minor league club achieving an ideal balance of showing respect to its parent team while also displaying (Texas-sized) state pride. In 1999 though, things became more confusing for baseball fans in the Southern Plains of western Texas when the team's 14 year long affiliation with the Angels ended and a new one (that still lasts today) began with the Oakland Athletics. They rebranded themselves as the Midland RockHounds, a nickname that I still do not understand. I guess there are special dogs that roam patches of rocks in