A Week Gone By

So after one week, the Ra'anana Express are a disappointing 1-4. We are leading the league offensively in strikeouts (thanks in part to my 4), defensively in errors, and our pitchers have allowed the most walks. It doesn't take a baseball genius to figure out that a team with that stat line is not going to be in first place. I'm still optimistic though because we are just getting our back foot out of the starting gate. With 40 more games to play we have nowhere to go but up.
Since our Dominican catcher has had a bum shoulder recently, I have caught the last 4 games. Defensively I'm doing well but offensively I haven't got it going yet. Granted, in the four games I started, three times we have faced a Dominican pitcher with stuff dirtier than Howard Stern's mouth. I do have four walks though, so at least those are keeping pace with my K's. Tonight we face an Aussie, so I'm looking to get off the schnide and put a crooked number in the hit column.
On a much more important note, since we had no games Friday afternoon through Sunday night, I had some free time to travel around the country. On Saturday morning, the players sober enough to wake up at 7 o'clock in the morning boarded a tour bus headed for Jerusalem. We stopped by the Palestine border, went to an Elvis, that's right..Elvis diner in the outskirts of the city, and walked through the Armenian, Arab, and Catholic quarters of the city. For obvious reasons, the Jewish quarter was as dormant as a dead fly on Saturday.
As the rest of our contingent headed back to Ramat Hasharon, five of us stayed in Jerusalem for the night because we had bought tickets the day before to go to a Jackson Browne concert scheduled for 3:00AM Sunday morning. Why would we do such a thing? Because the concert was a sunrise show at Mount Masada, home of the last stand between the Ancient Jews and Catholic Romans. The backdrop of the show was the backside of the enormous mountain, with the southern part of Dead Sea off to the left. I felt like I was at the end of the earth, watching the concert unfold as the sun came up. It was an intimate show as only 2,000 people were present. The main act was a singer/songwriter named David Groza, and Browne came onstage to perform two songs with him. It was quite an experience.
I eventually got back to my room around 10:30AM, took a quick power nap, and boarded a bus at 2:30PM to face that same Dominican pitcher on the Modi'in Miracle who was a former to Yankee prospect. Quite a weekend, I know.