If I only could have been born to A's fans

At the beginning of every baseball season I have the same crisis. Do I want to fork out the 40 bucks a month and get cable so as to watch baseball or do I stick with trying to catch games on the radio. I never take the plunge as I soon remember that all I care about on TV is baseball. Yes, I am left out of the conversations at work about last night’s “24” or what will happen during the last Sopranos episode, but this doesn’t bother me. These conversations always seem stupid and useless anyway.

It all came together this year when I discovered MLBTV. For $15 a month I can watch ALL baseball games. All teams, everyday, any day, I can tune in to see what’s happening. When I get home after work at 11pm, I turn on the replay of the night’s Giants game. If I care to watch GOOD baseball, I might check out the Mets or Brewers. I might even see what the Dodgers are up to if only to hear Vin Scully. With Mark Grace doing color, Diamondback games can be a lot of fun too. Notice that I don’t watch American League games. When I am not at work, I am watching baseball. Okay, sometimes I read a book and other times I watch a Seinfeld DVD, but usually it’s baseball.

Take today for example. The internets listed a day game at Wrigley between the streaking Cubs and the not-so-streaking Giants. Matt Cain, an outside favorite to win the Cy Young early in the season was going up against the Cub’s ace, Carlos Zambrano. The Giants field one of the best starting rotations in baseball despite the record they have put up. A pitcher can blow everybody away, but if his own team scores few runs, wins will be hard to come by. Hence, the 2007 San Francisco Giants. Matt Cain, despite having a 95 mph fastball that he can place with precision and a 3.53 ERA owns a record of only 3-10.

Cain started out strong today, but so did Zambrano. It was a pitcher’s duel going into the 5^th when Ryan Klesko and Pedro Feliz missed ground balls. Combine that with two passed balls by catcher Guillermo Rodriguez and the Cubs left the inning after scoring nine runs. The Cubs are the team that for over a century have been known for imploding on themselves, but today it was the Giants. It reminded me of watching the Giants from the early ’80s before stars like Will Clark, Robby Thompson and Matt Williams arrived. The years when losing 100 games in a season was a given. But pitching remained a question for the Giants even when they were one of the best teams of the late ’80s and into the ‘90s. This year’s starters brought me hope. But now I think about what must be the growing frustrations of a great pitching staff on a offensively struggling team.

So, as much as I enjoy the good-natured ribbing of how much the Giants suck, for the record, I KNOW HOW MUCH THE GIANTS SUCK!