Hey, pitchers and catchers report in just about 10 days.  Excellent!

But its been a slow month for baseball.  So slow, in fact, that I recently saw an article “reporting” that Derek Jeter was hitting in a batting cage with his team’s hitting coach.  Wow, that’s shocking “news”!

To fill a tiny little part of the pre-spring training baseball void, I thought I’d share a picture of Ryan Rowland-Smith that I just slapped together:

For some reason, I was recently thinking about the Australian flag, which of course features six stars.  Before long, I figured I should replace those stars with the Houston Astros’ star logo in honor of C&S Hall of Famer and new Astro, Ryan Rowland-Smith.

After combining the Australian flag and the Astros’ logo, it was only logical to go the extra step and create a nickname for RRS with another Australia-Houston Astros smash up.  So, I came up with “The Houstralian.”  Of course, “Australia” also blends nicely with “Astros” — so I modified RRS’s jersey to read “Austros.”  (I also modified it by adding the “18″ from my RRS Mariners jersey).

So there you go MLB play-by-play announcers and color commentators, feel free to start tossing around “Ryan ‘The Houstralian’ Rowland-Smith” or the more formal ”Ryan ‘The Houstralian Austro’ Rowland-Smith” while commentating.

Is its baseball season yet?