Nothing could have eclipsed my pleasure of seeing Donna enraptured by acres of beautiful tulips of every color. Well, actually…. On the day of the much-hyped eclipse, Donna and I took a day trip out to Nokesville, Virginia to visit Burnside Farms to pick tulips. Getting there from our home in Maryland requires driving through dreaded, crowded, heavily trafficked Northern Virginia. Shockingly, we made the 50-mile trek to Nokesville in an hour and a quarter, with no real slow-ups. And once we got off I-66, the landscape quickly morphed to suburban, then bucolic, with fields dotted with sheep and cows and a barn here and there. My heartrate slowed, my grip on the wheel loosened, and we eased through sanguine country lanes. The serenity was palpable. We arrived at just about noon at what we expected to be a quiet little tulip field. Ha! It seemed that a majority of the billions of people against whom we had been jostling on the screaming Northern Virginia interstate had been en route
Ten years ago, my daughter Eileen and I went to Spring Training to catch a couple Grapefruit League games in Florida. This spring, Donna and I headed south to Sarasota to see the Orioles, who have returned to postseason relevance after a four-year rebuild that saw them lose 100 or more games for three straight years. During the rebuild, under the direction of General Manager Mike Elias, they traded away their veteran players for prospects. In addition, those eye-poppingly bad seasons netted them high draft positions, and with a new focus on analytics and new approaches to drafting and player development, their farm system has been transformed into what is considered the best in all of baseball. Young players such as Adley Rutschman, Gunnar Henderson, and Jordon Westburg already contributed to last season's remarkable 101-win season, and many more are on the cusp of joining, and hopefully impacting, the Major League team’s success. I wanted to see these young studs up close. But