Chocolate Ears

Halloween, of course, is the No. 1 candy day of them all. Except it's a bit misleading.

Halloween features the wide range of candy, where really nothing is off limits.

If, however, you're all about milk chocolate, as TigerBlog is, you really can't beat Easter. What's better than breaking off a piece of a chocolate bunny's ear?

And then there's the Dove chocolate eggs. They would be as perfect as any candy ever, were it not for how hard it is to peel off the wrappers.

Sometimes, you get the fold perfectly and it opens without issue, but that's only about 10% of the time. The other 90%, you have to fight your way through and end up with little scraps of wrapper and chocolate under your fingernails.

TB isn't sure why chocolate became such a big part of Easter, but he's fine with it.

Other than the fact that it involves the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ, Easter is as close to a Jewish holiday as there is in the Christian calendar.

How so? It's not on the same day every year. It's not like Christmas, which is always Dec. 25. Or, more secularly, Thanksgiving, which is not always the same exact day but is always on the same Thursday.

Easter is like Hanukkah, which can be anywhere from late November to late December. Or the High Holy Days of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kipper and always seem to come "early" or "late" but never right on time.

This year, Easter and Passover fell on the same weekend, which is a rarity.

This year's Easter also fell on the Sunday of the first weekend of the baseball season.

If you look at the standings now, the Yankees are 0-3, while the Mets are 3-0. The Red Sox are 0-3, while the Orioles are 3-0.

What does it mean? Nothing. Though it did make for some good panicky phone calls on sports radio.

For a Yankee fan to panic now would be like a fan of an NFL team to panic if the team was down 7-0 at the end of the first quarter of the opener.

Meanwhile, Princeton has one active Major Leaguer - Will Venable of the Padres, who is 2 for 10 after going 1 for 4 yesterday. Venable had a very good spring for San Diego and a good start would be a nice carryover.

Ross Ohlendorf is at Triple-A Pawtucket for the Red Sox. Chris Young is in extended spring training for the Mets.

Back in the Ivy League, each baseball team has played eight games, all against the teams in the other division.

Right now, the four Gehrig teams are all over .500. In the Rolfe Division, no team is above .500.

TB has no way of checking this, but this has to be a rarity since the league started with two divisions around 2000 or so.

Princeton, at 6-2, is a game back of Cornell. Penn and Columbia are both 5-3. This weekend's schedule has Penn at Princeton and Columbia at Cornell for four games apiece.

On the softball side, the Gehrig Division (called the South Division in softball) is the stronger as well.

Cornell is 7-1, followed by Princeton and Penn at 5-3. Harvard is out to a 7-1 start in the other division, with no other team better than 3-5.

Each game is huge as the teams now play in their divisions in both baseball and softball.

TigerBlog is always amazed at the all-out sprint that is baseball and softball as the teams play their 20 league games in a span of 30 days, leading up to the Ivy League Championship Series.

Easter to Mothers' Day.

It goes pretty fast.