brainwagon

I love baseball, and this is the time of year that baseball is the most
fun (except of course for the impending end fo the season). Once again I find the A’s embroiled in the playoffs. My beautiful wife decided that I needed one more game before
the end of the season, and the promise of a matchup between Tim Hudson and Pedro Martinez was too much to resist. Two upper level seats were purchased and we were off.

While I love the A’s, my experience with playoff baseball and the A’s is not good. I’ve attended six playoff games of the A’s in recent years, and have seen no wins. So this time I left my “lucky” jersey at home, and merely wore my Athletics windbreaker.

It seemed to be a good move. The resulting game ended in an A’s victory, and was one of the best games of all time.
Yahoo! Sports has the complete recap, but let me mention a few quick highlights.

• There were four lead changes. No team was ever really out of it.
• Great defensive plays, like Chavez’s diving play to third base in the top of the 12th to prevent the go ahead run from scoring, or Chris Singleton’s retrieval of five consecutive fly balls in the outfield, including one which very nearly doubled
  off the wall.

• Mysterious calls of balls and strikes. Nobody ever seeme dto find the strike zone reliably. Plenty of base runners, lots of big outs.
• A double play called on an interference call by Terrence Long.
• Two different submarining pitchers (Kim and Bratford).
• An awesome duel between Durazo and Martinez in the seventh, where Durazo eventually walked.
• Durazo singling in Byrnes in the bottom of the ninth off Kim to force extra innings.
• The end all to beat all: a bases loaded bunt by Ramon Hernandez in the bottom of the twelfth inning, scoring Chavez on the suicide squeeze.

Baseball simply doesn’t get any better than this.

Okay, this isn’t really news. Rush Limbaugh is an idiot. If you don’t know that by now, you’re probably an even bigger idiot. I’ve lately become uninterested in the NFL (baseball being a far
more civilized endeavor) so I didn’t realize that Rush had been employed by NFL Countdown Sunday as a commentator. That’s probably a good thing, because I can’t think of a more
fatal affliction for a sports announcer or commentator than to be egotistical enough to think that
the program they are on is about who they are and what they think.

Rush Limbaugh is afflicted with this particular fault in spades. On this particular occasion in a discussion on the low ranking of Donovan McNabb, Rush opined that in fact McNabb wasn’t
really good, and that he was merely being trumpeted as a media darling because he happened
to be a black quarterback.

One wonders why he didn’t follow this statement up with the logical extension: that this NFL affirmative action program was costing some talented white quarterback from getting a crack
at the big time.

I suppose before this I remembered that McNabb was in fact black. I remember that Ray Rhodes
is black. I remember that Warren Moon was black. I remember that Randall Cunningham was black. But when you bring up their names, what comes to mind is not the color of their skin, but
what they do on the field.

It’s a pity that Rush can’t put his own agenda in neutral long enough to concentrate on
the game. Some of us care more about the colors of uniforms than the players wearing them.