now for something only slightly different
It’s past halfway, now, so we can start taking stuff seriously again. The A’s are 48-53, 10.5 games back, and the Giants are 42-57, 12.5 games back. It’s either a lost season or, like, five losses away from being one. Theory was, we made our peace with that awhile ago. Of course, communism worked-in theory.
I feel obligated to listen to blowouts driving home, to stick around at blowouts (raise your hand if you’ve seen the bottom of the ninth in the home bleachers, down 16-2, because I feelya) even though watching six consecutive base hits off the third reliever kinda makes me want to kill myself. Nine game losing streaks. Seven runs (three bullpen-allowed, though that, like most of my excuses for him, is wearing thin) in four innings for my boy, who is doing his damnedest to be the very worst free agent signing in the history of the world that didn’t get hurt first. Last place in the division for both, for months and months at a time (though no longer, thank god). Rich Harden, whom I fear I’ve totally fucking jinxed. Everything bad about major league baseball hanging out legless in our left field, honestly kinda sick at how this incredible thing is about to go down, if he doesn’t get his ass shot first.
You know, it’s been a rough year.
But at the same time, fuck it. Baseball, no matter the form it takes, is infinitely preferable to the lack of it. We’re hard by it, because there’s that day a week or two after the World Series, gaining on us as the nights get longer, when all you’ll really want to do is take a nap in front of a game, and it’ll tear you the fuck up, thinking that you got five months left.
In the off-season I sometimes listen to the oldies music they play on the A’s station, just because. In the off-season I judge books by their covers, and buy them if they’ve got a picture of Mickey Mantle. In the off-season I lose track of the days because I’m not carrying around pocket schedules anymore. The off-season sucks, and is only partly redeemed by Halloween and Christmas and New Year’s. There’s no excuse for February. I’m pretty sure that most of the longest things I’ve ever written were written in the off-season (though that is based on fickle memory and no solid evidence, so show me numbers if you want to convince me otherwise).
Baseball is always worth it, and there’s that whole live-and-die thing, so, okay. It’s been a decade since both my teams were this bad at the same time-a lucky consequence of dual loyalty, the law of averages playing my way for a long time. You know what’ll give you hope? Good young pitching, and hell, we got that taken care of, at least.
So I find myself reading Fire Joe Morgan at each rare available interlude, and devaluing batting average and RBI more every day, and listening to day games on the East Coast at work at eleven in the morning, and looking for Jack Cust on the streets (saw him once, you know, at the Jamba Juice up the hill from where I work. Got his autograph on the back of a ticket I had in my pocket! Nicest guy! Totally surprised that someone recognized him! Dude hits nine hundred foot home runs! Got him for a bag of seeds and a case of Bud!).
Since Aaron moved out here on the first of April, he’s been making friends, as you do, and getting to know my friends, as you also do, and our varied friends have made note more than once of the remarkable depth of our obsession with baseball, kinda baffled the way that civilians get, you go to how many games?
We go to two or three games a week. We watch, listen, Gamecast, keep up by text message, whatever, every time either team is playing, to the very best of our abilities. We talk about baseball incessantly, in shorthand and acronyms. We enter and win baseball trivia contests at the All-Star Fanfest, which is why we now have a free year-long membership to the Hall of Fame (okay, that was Aaron. But I knew all the stuff too, and also knew the Final Jeopardy question that he missed, 2006 NL batting champ, and I tried to signal it to him by putting my hand over my eye-you know, like a Pirate).
We’re trouble, the two of us. It’s reminiscent of drug addiction, though of course entirely healthy and fulfilling and not destructive to society, but still there’s that exponential danger of having a sympathetic friend.
I’ve been figuring it out the past couple of days; counting tickets, food, tolls, and miscellany, I’m probably spending three hundred dollars a month on this most excellent hobby of mine, which is also reminiscent of drug addiction, though I think we should probably leave that analogy alone for now. Suffice it to say, I am very seriously thinking about finding a new job in the near future, if only to subsidize this habit (damn it! sneaky fucking analogy!), because everything you’ve ever heard about educators and their shit pay is one hundred percent accurate.
But Aaron and I go to a game every Sunday, and when someone invites us somewhere else between one and four o’clock, our answer is always the same: “Can’t miss church.”
So. It’s July 25th as I write this, just more than a hundred games in. Tonight, I saw my 34th game of the year. Because statistics are the new world order:
A’s: 12-6
Giants: 8-11
Random: Rangers over Mariners (spring training)
(For the sabes, the math works out upon realizing that several of those games were Giants versus A’s.)
Frankly, I’m pleasantly surprised that I’ve seen practically the same number of games for both, because usually it tilts one way or the other depending on if I’m broke (A’s) or lazy (Giants). To be fair, the A’s did have a sizable lead there for a while, until the last six games I’ve been to have been Giants games. And it’s a pretty accurate representation of their years too, considering how the A’s play at home and how very, very bad the Giants are, home, away, anywhere.
I’ve seen Jack Cust and Eric Chavez hit walkoffs, saw Zito’s first start in orange and black (it . . . did not go well), saw Zito’s first National League hit (did you know he’s batting over .100! I was knocked right off my feet). Saw the sun come up over AT&T Park from our tent pitched in right center, at the Giants Slumber Party with the polar wind lifting little kids bodily off the grass, pixar movies on the Jumbotron when we’d been expecting Field of Dreams or The Sandlot at the very least, but still one of the best ideas ever. Saw the Home Run Derby. Saw Mark Ellis hit for the cycle (same game as Chavvy’s walkoff, actually). Saw a bunch of homeruns that will, no matter what we do about it, go down in history. Saw the A’s score fifteen runs and I saw Curt Schilling no-hit us for eight and two-thirds, and when Stewart poked that single through the right side, you woulda thought Marco went yard again.
And Marco Scutaro off Mariano Rivera, off the foul pole, saw that. I’ve seen Marco hit or be directly involved in about seven game-ending hits, and it’s unbelievable about Rivera, but that’ll never be the Marco Game for me, because I already got one of those, back when I needed it more.
I’ve got two months, sixteen more games to hit goal. Nobody’s been mathematically eliminated yet, and no matter my dark predictions, I think you guys know that I have faith in the impossible, which is the benefit of playing without a clock. Only thing that’s for sure is October, and yep, sleep in November. Either way, though, it’s like I said before: good luck and see you in the spring.
It has been a good season. Ignore what I said above. Every season’s a good season.