Good thing I did NOT leave for Kansas City after yesterday’s game, nor today. I have been locked behind the door of my room at the TownePlace Suites in south Columbia since getting back from the ballpark yesterday.

LSU lost 11-5, and Mizzou won its first baseball series ever against the Bayou Bengals. It was bound to happen. Paul Mainieri was in such a hurry to get out of the Show-Me State that the team left for the airport in their uniforms. Hopefully the team was able to fly out of Columbia; they had to fly into Jefferson City last Thursday due to runway construction at Columbia. It could have been much worse; they could have been flying commercial, which would have forced them to fly into St. Louis and bus 110 miles west on Interstate 70.

Mainieri’s club needs to get it together. The Bayou Bengals play Louisiana-Lafayette in New Orleans tomorrow night, then return to Baton Rouge to face Florida in a three-game series starting Thursday. The SEC race is halfway over, and the next 15 conference games will certainly determined whether or not there will be June baseball at Alex Box Stadium, Skip Bertman Field.

Fortunately for me, I have enough leftover White Castle from the entire trip (I got more sliders than I paid for Thursday), although I need to grab another bottle of pop from my car. I am leaving tomorrow at high noon (or earlier) for the City of Fountains, where the local Major League Baseball outfit will not be. The Royals left last night on a road trip following their three-game sweep of the Indians.

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April 15 is the day income taxes are due in the United States, but there have been many more famous (or infamous) incidents to occur on the date.

The Titanic sunk in the week hours of April 15, 1912. The Boston Marathon bombing was on April 15, 2013. And now the massive fire at Notre Dame de Paris (the proper term for Notre Dame Cathedral).

Then there was the disaster at Hillsborough Stadium in Sheffield, England, on April 15, 1989. It was the nadir of English football during a decade which saw many horrible incidents involving the sport which resulted in a five-year ban for England from all European competition and the near-banishment of England from the 1990 World Cup.

Ninety-six supporters of Liverpool, one of the iconic football clubs not only in England, but in all the world, perished when they were crushed against a fence at Hillsborough Stadium, the home of Sheffield Wednesday. The site had been chosen as a neutral venue for an FA Cup semifinal between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest. Hillsborough should never have been chosen as a neutral site due to flagrant safety violations which were overlooked by the Football Association.

Liverpool is attempting to exorcise those demons on the 30th anniversary of the disaster by winning its first Premier League championship. (Liverpool won numerous First Division championships before the formation of the Premier League in 1992, but has never been to the top in the new era.) Jurgen Klopp’s men are in good shape, leading reigning champion Manchester City by two points with four matches to go.

England qualified for the 1990 World Cup, but it had to play all of its group matches on the island of Sardinia. When the Three Lions ventured onto the mainland for the knockout stage, extra safety precautions had to be undertaken. Nobody in the United States shed a tear when England did not qualify for the 1994 World Cup.

The good of April 15 includes Jackie Robinson’s MLB debut on this date in 1947 (and the subsequent retirement of his number 42 across all of MLB on April 15, 1997), the founding of General Electric in 1892, the introduction of insulin for diabetics in 1923, the opening of the first McDonald’s in 1955, and the third and final full day of my Baton Rouge trip last year.
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Am I mentally ill? I don’t like Tiger Woods. I don’t watch Game of Thrones. I don’t watch the Olympics. I don’t like Michael Phelps. I don’t like Serena Williams. I’d rather watch English football over American soccer. I’d rather a Canadian team win the Stanley Cup.

I guess I am not normal. Sorry.