Ready Or Not, Here Comes Baseball's Opening Day!

 The Milwaukee Brewers will kick off the 2023 season today in beautiful, chilly Wrigley Field, facing the Chicago Cubs in the season opener.

We'll wait until Monday for the Crew's home opener against those big spenders, the New York Mets. Will be in attendance for Monday's game. As home openers go, and this is Milwaukee's 53rd,  I think this one will push me north of 30 for in-person viewing.

Lots of rule changes for baseball heading into this season, things that had been tested at the minor league level with an eye toward speeding up the game. Seems the moves had trimmed 26 minutes off games, getting them well under the 3 hour+ average of last year. Will reserve judgement until I see them in action.

Will be a new-look squad that takes the field on Thursday, for sure. New faces at catcher, the infield and the outfield. The strength of the Brewers will still be their pitching staff. That starting rotation of Corbin Burns-Brandon Woodruff-Freddie Peralta-Eric Lauer-Wade Miley could well be one of the best in baseball. Certainly in the top five.

Keep thinking that the key to the success of this Milwaukee team hinges on getting Christian Yelich back to form. I would settle for 80% of what he was prior to the injury a couple of years ago. If he can get on base consistently, he's gonna be a threat to steal a ton of bases (remember, baseball increased the size of the bases this season. When it did so in the minors, steals increased by over 26%).

The new rule the effectively eliminates the defensive shift will also benefit Yelich, who won't see three guys on the right side of the infield and two more in the outfield.

It's probably a given that the hated St. Louis Cardinals will win the Central Division. But I expect the Brewers to win 90 games and grab a wild card berth after battling those Red-Birds down to the wire.

The Wisconsin Badgers exited the NIT semi-finals not with a bang but a wimper this week, falling to North Texas 56-54. That's what happens when you fail to score a friggin' point for the final 9 minutes of the game!

This is the Badger team we've seen all year, one that lacks a consistent, take-charger scorer. This is a hole that Coach Greg Gard needs to fill via the transport portal. That and a big, athletic body down low. Steven Crowl might be 7-feet tall, but he's not the most athletic guy on the court.

Wisconsin finished 20-15 for the season, but played 23 games that were decided by six points or less OR ended in overtime. The squad went 13-10 in those games, and that's just not good enough.

Let's see who comes in via the portal, who goes and how the 2023-24 Badgers shake out.

All of the  #1 seeds heading into the tourney are now headed home; first time since 1979 that's happened. And speaking of the tourney, ESPN reports that, of the 20 million bracket entries on their site, only 37 had the correct Final Four of UConn, Miami, San Diego State and Florida Atlantic. That's a whopping .000185% with the correct picks. OMG!

Time to put up a statue for women's hockey coach Mark Johnson, whose Badgers won a seventh national title, and the third in five years (counting the missed COVID season).

There are those calling for Johnson to take over the floundering men's program, but let's slow that roll. Men's hockey is a different beast facing different challenges (losing players to junior programs and the NHL, for example).

March Madness Reigns Supreme

 Are your brackets busted?

You're not alone. Most of us have suffered through a Lawrence Welk opening round (unless you're a certain age, YouTube the reference!)

Am referring to A One anna Two anna Three used to start the music, only in the case, it denotes the teams knocked out early in the men's NCAA tournament.

One-seeds Purdue and Kansas are done -- Purdue knocked off by a 16-seed and Kansas by #8 Arkansas in round two. Two-seeds Arizona (beaten by #15 Princeton in the opening round) and Marquette (bounced by #7 Michigan State yesterday). Tough to count out Coach Tom Izzo, who has taken Michigan State teams to the tournament 25 straight years.

It truly is a year in which anything can happen.

Just when you think you've seen, along comes the D-5 championship game in the WIAA girls' state basketball tournament.

Chippewa Falls McDonell Catholic Central beat Blair-Taylor 61-46. McDonell was 23 of 28 from the free throw line. Blair-Taylor NEVER went to the free throw line. That's just amazing!

In the boys' state tournament, hats off to DePere, winning the D-1 title for the school's first championship in 89 years! Their 30 wins the most for an unbeaten champion (and the most for a team overall) since Appleton Xavier went 28-0 on the way to the D-3 title in 2017.

Am thinking that the WIAA competition committee needs to take a long, hard look at how the parochial/private schools are divided up come tournament time. Schools like Chippewa Falls McDonell Catholic Central and Wausau Newman Catholic, the teams the squared off in the D-5 title game, have a distinct advantage over the majority of small, rural state high schools.

Same could be said for Kenosha St. Joseph and Onalaska Luther, the teams in D-4.

Perhaps bumping them up a division, regardless of enrollment, is the way to go. And don't even get me started on the topic of public money supporting these schools.

Have to laugh at tournament time of year. It made my Grandma so mad. Not that she had a bundle of cash bet on a team, but that the local ABC and CBS stations carried the games -- and NOT her "stories" as she called the soap operas so common in the 1960s.

Kids, these were the days of few channels, no cable and no VCR or recording capability. And stations couldn't run their regular programs at 1 or 2 in the morning because stations signed off at midnight.

Many of you know just what I'm talking about. Still, fond memories all in all.