But not enough to make it to the post season.  The Oklahoma City Redhawks took the division this year.

I speak of the minor league baseball team the Albuquerque Isotopes.  I made a day trip down to Albuquerque today to drop off one of our company guys at the airport and the ball park is right in the neighborhood.  So I stopped in to see what kind of merchandise I could score.  While I was disappointed to learn the season ended a week ago, when I was just leaving for New Mexico, I am the proud owner of a new hat and a sweet hoodie.

I was pleased to see one can meet Homer Simpson at an Isotopes game.  (Anyone who went to a large cineplex in the summer of ’07 might recognize that plastic statue.)

For those who don’t know the back story, on the TV show “The Simpsons”, their town of Springfield has been home to a minor league baseball team called the Springfield Isotopes since the very first season.  In a 2001 episode, Homer discovers the team’s owner is secretly planning on moving the team to Albuquerque and goes on a hunger strike until they admit it.  Two years later, Albuquerque got a minor league team to move to town and the name “Isotopes” won handily in a survey conducted by a local newspaper.  Given the state’s contributions to America’s nuclear program over the decades, they went with it and so the world’s greatest Simpson’s reference was born.