Sitting at home on a Sunday afternoon, watching the raindrops fall, watching bad movies and just about ready to make dinner.
I flip through the baseball channels, see that the A’s are hosting the Yankees on Comcast Ch. 780, and I put the game on.
One eye on it for two hours, the A’s had a 2-0 lead for the most part. I left the room, came back, it was 4-2 Yankees. I made the obligatory wisecrack about the Yankees, the Orioles and how F-ed up baseball is.
Then came the ninth inning, packed house (VERY pro-Yankee, I might add at the Coliseum today) and future Hall of Famer Mariano Rivera sauntered out of the pen on what looked like a short-sleeves lovely kinda day in the East Bay
(By the way, I LOVE the Bay Area, too, and especially love that stadium — it’s kinda like 33rd Street on the inside and the Ravens won the AFC Championship there and I have some fond memories, if you know what I mean!)
The first two A’s — Chavez and Crosby — go down quickly. This looks to be a Yankee victory.
Rivera gives up a two-out single to Todd Walker, then walks Jason Kendall. By the way, during his at bat, I reached for www.baseballreference.com to discover that Jason Kendall has made more than $56 million in his career, and last year made almost $12 million for hitting .295 with one home run. Not an incredible value for the A’s, or the Padres or the Pirates, or whoever is paying him for the mistake they made a few years back.
But he made his value known today, Kendall fighting off Rivera and drawing a full-count walk after staring at what everyone in the stadium thought was strike three at the knees (some guy named Laz Diaz was behind the dish).
Marco Scutaro scuttles to the plate. His average (.050) was so bad, they only said on the screen that he was “1 for 20 on the season.” Coming to the plate, Scutaro clearly looked overmatched and the A’s looked like dead meat.
He fouled off one pitch and missed on an inside pitch, providing a souvenir foul ball down the ample third base line in Oakland.
The next pitch, he turned on a Rivera slider and launched it off the “fair” pole for a two-strike, two-out, ninth-inning walk-off, three-run home run.
His teammates mobbed him at the dish, the few A’s fans in their own stadium went nuts, A Rod slammed a bat into the bat rack and I thought for a minute again — man, BASEBALL IS GREAT SOMETIMES!!!!
I want that feeling back…
FREE THE BIRDS!!!
