Take Me To Vanuatu

On the quietest day of the year in sports, let’s all go to Vanuatu and grab some vine.

Seriously, are you telling me that’s the happiest place on Earth? I just spent four days in the happiest place on Earth. The problem with that survey is that America is so big, the happiest place shifts from place to place on a given day here. The red carpet is rolled up and tomorrow, after I’ve caught my flight out tonight, Pittsburgh and PNC Park will be home again to the reality of a .333 team with the worst record in the Majors. But they were happier than anyone on the planet just recently when their Steelers won it all. Happiness comes and goes here. So I guess what they are saying is that in Vanuatu, happiness never goes away, moving from one side of the island to the other. They are just happy doing whatever they are doing. I am happy for them. But I don’t think Vanuatu is the happiest place on the planet. I think America is, maybe Canada. After all, we have baseball. We even had a commissioner named Happy Chandler. Baseball makes me happy, and maybe you, too. I know Aubrey Huff is probably very happy right now. He’s on a contender today. I’m not sure if that makes Cardinal bloggers happy. But they’ve been happy quite often as well. Happiness moves around. Read the last question answered by everyone of the Spheroids featured here over more than a year and you can see what makes certain people in the MLBlogosphere happy.

And for that matter, do you really want to be happy all of the time like they apparently are in Vanuatu? No. You want an occasional ball to dribble between Bill Buckner’s legs, or to be robbed of Willie Mays’ great catch at the Polo Grounds, or to even go decades and decades without celebrating a world championship at Wrigley Field. Because you know that one day, your happiness will be unmatched by that of Vanuatu or anywhere else on Earth. It’s what makes happy feel so good.

So, how are you spending the quietest day of the year in sports?

David Wright will be spending it tonight on David Letterman. He just posted the latest installment of Wright Now, which relives his one-of-a-kind All-Star week. And it doesn’t even include that great bash Sunday night at Heinz Field that he and A-Rod threw. It’s hard to believe this guy is just in his second full season. Someone asked me if Jeter and A-Rod were that popular when they broke into the game. No. The Mariners were all about Junior Griffey, the smiling face on that Upper Deck rookie card. This is the big man on campus now and he’s an MLBlogger.

Really good news today here in the Sphere: We have a Giants blogger! Presumably everyone in San Francisco, Home of the Blogs, already has a bunch of them. Maybe that’s one theory for the strange relative paucity of Giants MLBlogs in our first year-plus. Certainly a lot to blog about there. In any case, here’s a big welcome to I Left My Heart in San Francisco.

I want to blog from Vanuatu. In fact, I want to liveblog the vine-bungee jumping. 12:00 pm: Jumped. 12:00.0001: One meter lower. 12:00.0002: Two meters lower. Suspense builds. 12:00.5: Came within inches of hitting head on ground. I’m so happy!

Thanks, Pittsburgh. Incredible ballpark, incredible Red Carpet parade, incredible FanFest, incredible Futures players, incredible food, incredible home runs, incredible All-Star finish. Here is one last memory from here. It was during the parade yesterday.  Wright’s Chevy Avalanche had just gone by, and Lo Duca’s was behind him. Players were throwing Baby Ruths into the crowd, which was 40K+ on a workday between 3-4 pm. Wright’s truck pulled over so the FSN folks could interview him. Lo Duca’s passed him on the left, and I laughed as Lo Duca threw a Baby Ruth at his teammate who he had just pitched to in the Home Run Derby. It’s the little things like that. The things that make you happy. Seeing people in this country having fun.