Holy cow. The Mariners, apparently not satisfied with filling step one of my philosophy on baseball (stock your team with speedsters like Chone Figgins), are apparently a little bit of paperwork away from filling step two, which is to stock your team with top-notch starting pitching.

Cliff Lee is about to be a Mariner. CLIFF LEE!

I haven’t been this excited since the Erik Bedard trade, the last time the M’s landed an ace-level pitcher. Except this time, the trade isn’t going to cripple our team, mostly because our current GM isn’t named Bavasi. Also, Cliff Lee is a proven multi-year talent, while Bedard had had just one great season as the basis of his success.

I mean, did you see Cliff Lee pitch in the postseason? Holy cow. I’m so glad we’re going to still be in the States for (at least most of) the 2010 baseball season.

In other news:

• Emily prompted me to look up Rainbow Brite on Wikipedia tonight, after she jokingly embraced my sarcastic suggestion that we name a child, should we ever have one, Rainbow Bright Clayton. This led me to discover that the cartoon character of ’80’s lore starred in a whopping 13 (thirteen) broadcast episodes, almost exclusively in 1986, yet somehow grossed $1 billion (with a b) in 1980’s dollars from merchandising. Or $77 million an episode. And you think baseball players get paid a lot.
• I have edited 19% of American Dream On‘s chapters and 14% of its pages in the last three days, working on a sporadic schedule. It’s exhausting. Completely wiping me out. I was in no way prepared for the sheer physicality required of intensely editing a book this size. At the same time, it’s been going far better than any major editing project I’ve ever undertaken, something I can credit in part to countless hours of editing grant proposals and other paperwork for Glide in my last day job. The amount of work I’m putting in, the amount of change manifest, and the amount of satisfaction I’m getting from the newly emerging draft are all great indicators that I’ve shed my reputation as someone who has trouble with editing. Unfortunately, getting to 100% is a must before anyone sees the thing, so we may be looking closer to New Year’s than Christmas for distribution to first-run readers. My interest in getting feedback is keeping me motivated.
• Plus, I can edit in the Chancellor Green Library. So there’s that. Pretty much anything is worth doing in there, no matter how much energy it takes.
• Spent Saturday in New York City, taking the train all the way from Princeton’s “Dinky” station to downtown Manhattan and (almost all the way) back to see former ‘Deisians for a day of games. Managed to tie for a win in Citadels and run a distant third in Railway Rivals, a stellar railroad game that was West Germany’s 1984 Game of the Year. Hm. I guess you don’t have to take my word for it.
• Cliff Lee!