Still waiting for A.A. to acquire my X-mas present, something good for the Bullpen.

All-expenses paid trip to La Belle Province (the province, not the restaurant) to see the Jays and the Reds square off at the Big Owe next April!

I also got a 75" TV - that sorta counts as a Blue Jays gift I guess, since I don't watch much else on TV.

Merry Christmas everyone. Peace and love to you and yours.

The 42 (Jackie Robinson) Blu-ray (which I had asked for) and the Ken Burns' Baseball DVD set (which I hadn't asked for, but is quite welcome as it's years since I watched it). Also got a Frommers travel guide for Chicago (in case I go to SABR 2015).

I finally got around to reading the Bill James Handbook 2015 this week. (Didn't realize Josh Donaldson made so many throwing errors, despite the strong defense rating overall.)

In non-baseball gaming, the 7-year-old nephew taught me to play Blokus, Ticket to Ride, Frog Juice, and (one I already knew from long ago) Battleship. I had to look up the Serpent Cube solution online.

I thought "42" was one of the best films of 2013.  I'm sure some small factual errors crept into it, but I thought it was a very powerful indictment of racism in baseball, using all of Hollywood's contemporary tools to show what Robinson must have endured as he broke the color barrier.  (Chadwick Boseman was excellent, and he followed it up with another superb performance in 2014 -- as James Brown.)

I've read countless JR & Brooklyn Dodger books and have even met Roger Kahn, who signed my copy of Boys of Summer. I think this reason is why I didn't enjoy 42 at all. I was probably expecting too much, and felt like they did a pretty poor job overall.

"Baseball" by Ken Burns is absolutely magnificent. And the second/third/four time watching some of the innings is well worth it.

Got several baseball magazines, and my son gave me the cards for the upcoming Strat-O-Matic season as he does every year.
Happy 2015 to us all, and that includes on the Rogers Centre field.

Loved Burns "Baseball" but really hated how short a time he gave to MLB crossing into Canada (did he even mention it?) and how Cito Gaston being the first black manager to reach the playoffs and then to win 2 World Series was an afterthought - really dumb when he focused so much on race and the like to skip what was, at the time, the biggest breakthough - a black man given a team viewed as a contender (but down on its luck at the moment he was named) who proved without a shadow of a doubt that a black man could manager a ML team and win it all (ie: so much for not having the necessities to manage). 

FYI: I noticed the warm thoughts over on the other thread but felt this was where to mention it - thanks everyone.  The two baseball groups (this and Baseball Think Factory) raised a lot of money to help out, more than I ever expected.  Christmas was very, very hard to get through but I think it was a success for the girls and I had fun too in the end.  It was super-hard to buy gifts and I never did send out cards this year with lights going up outside only days before Christmas and the tree decorated the weekend before (normally done on the 1st).  We didn't even put the Santa on top (a decoration me and my wife bought our first Christmas together) until the 24th.

As an update, I do have a lawyer digging into everything with the hospital. The hospital admitted to me and my in-laws that they were at fault with a weird analogy (that it was like a pilot ignoring his instruments and flying into a mountain because he thought he did everything right and wouldn't believe what his eyes were telling him) and seeing some of the notes from that night ... lets just say if this was in the USA it would be a very, very big case and easily won, but up here it will be significant but not put into the papers unless they force us to which I doubt it'll come to as they do seem to understand they royally screwed up multiple times (as one of the 'code blue' team members wrote down in his notes...he couldn't believe he wasn't called in much earlier).  I do give the doctor credit for not hiding though - he was at that meeting and did apologize to us directly rather than leaving it to administrators to do for him.  My rage at him and his team is weakened by the fact I can see he is visibly damaged by it and will never forgive himself.

On the brighter side, we received a stack of gifts from a group in Georgetown where we used to live and another stack from a group here in Thunder Bay which helped the kids and made it so 'Santa' gave me gifts too.  It is good to see how many people really care about the girls.

ach the Padres just got Shawn Kelley from the Yanks for an AA reliever.

that's exactly the kind of move we should be in on. dammit.