It is great to be a fan.

Last week I went to Silverwood and had a great time. Snagged an elephant ear, lost a couple carnival games, saw the magician illusionist, people watched, and of course, went on a bunch of rides. In the middle of trying to fake boredom for the camera on Tremors the realization hit me that a roller coaster is the perfect analogy to being a sports fan (it was also determined that a log ride/water ride classifies as a roller coaster). From the anticipation at the start, to the ups and downs, the twists and turns, to the feeling (good or bad) of needing to throw up a roller coaster and the life of a sports fan are one and the same. Shoot, the genius' that made these rides even accounted for the varying degree of fandom. They covered the label of "die hard fans" with the rollercoaster that hits 100mph and keeps you glued to your seat the entire time. A roller coaster you want to know everything about from top speed to height of the biggest drop to the height of the second biggest drop to the length of the ride and so on. On the opposite end they built a "coaster" representing the "laid back" fans with a good old fashioned log ride. A ride that floats along and allows you to stray away from the ride itself and enjoy the distraction of everything going on around you while you are still on a ride. It has it's one or two moments during the course of the entire journey but overall it's extremely tame. For those of you that aren't fans of a sports team and never have been please enjoy the ferris wheel.

Quick sidenote: I couldn't find a ride that covered Mike and Jimmy's level of fandom from the movie "Celtic Pride" and to that I say, "Get on the ball roller coaster makers".

Why in the world does this matter on a blog that says it's about the Spokane Indians? THAT is another paragraph in and of itself. Last summer my buddy Andy and I decided that we needed to fall in love with the Spokane Indians. We have our local football team to love in the fall, and our local basketball team to love into March but when the summer hits their was a major void in our sports life when it came to getting passionate about a local team. So last summer we went to a couple Indians games together and like every summer whenever we go we enjoy the heck out of the experience but again, we only went to a few games. Then football and basketball rolled around and we immersed ourselves in our teams and knew what classes Brandon Kaufman (thanks for leaving early...) was taking and who was teaching them, we knew what menu items Drew Barham was ordering at Chipotle, we knew that just like on the football field Beau Baldwin likes to gamble at the craps table and just like on the football field he's a winner, we could tell you the scores of all the league games that happened on a given day, we knew that if you needed to stay "warm" outside of Roos Field that you needed to find Rhett and borrow his thermos... Stats, check. Player bios, check. Coaching staff middle names, of course. Total fandom. Does it seem over the top? Absolutely. But is it what we like to do with our free time? Double Absolutely on the rocks. That last fact is the reason for this blog. Andy and I love our sports teams. We love to fill our free time pining over stats or arguing about strategy. We love learning about the players we root for and finding out about the people that make the teams we cheer for tick. This is why we needed a summer project.

Over the course of the summer we plan on diving head first into the Spokane Indians with an attempt to become super fans. This isn't about just finding out if the Indians win or lose and then just get ready for the next game. This is about immersing ourselves into this organization. Get to know the players and what life on a short season A team is like. Talk to the managers about spending a summer trying to keep the reigns around a bunch of college aged kids. It's about finding out why Avista Stadium is the best venue in the league and what it takes to maintain and improve on it's reputation. This is about filling our sports driven brains with everything we can get our hands on that has the words "Spokane Indians" attached to it. In other words we want to walk into the Indians amusement park and step on every roller coaster that they've got from "die hard" to "casual" and figure out why people have been enjoying this ride in Spokane for countless summers.

Over the next few weeks Andy and I hope to really get the blog rolling on this site. Look forward to some audio and video along with articles over the course of the summer. If you're looking for game by game analysis or up to the minute roster moves this probably isn't going to be the place to go for that and I'd direct you over the the Spokesman Review Indians Section. As of now we're still trying to get our foot in the door with the Indians to see how involved with the team they'll let us be (or if they even give us any access at all). Hopefully you'll enjoy all the randomness that comes out of our brains and maybe this will get you fired up about a team that we can't wait to learn more about. Go Indians.

Thanks to some random dude for supplying us with this shoddy video of the field that we will be dominating this summer: