Are we there yet?

OK, now it's over

The Giants did as I figured.

Though I didn't figure them to fall short in so painful a way, they did. No World Series repeat this year.

The Giants did me a favor.

They freed me.

I crawl out now from under my self-imposed tyranny, of following the Giants' every move, every triumph and torturous pratfall.

I am relieved of the sweet burden of having stayed with my team for the last seven months.

I cast aside the nightly yoke of watching the Giants perform dinner theater for me, of tracking them surreptitiously by radio devices at work. I am pardoned from trying anxiously to follow the postseason by text at church: "Score?" I'd type from behind the hymn book where the choir sits at Mass. "3-2! Posey just doubled in Pagan," my wife would answer from her seat in a far-off pew.

As much as I enjoyed hanging on every pitch through the crisping fall last year, as the Giants clawed their way to the national title — and two years before that, and two years before that — I needed a break.

The Giants did too, I suspect.

This hot-and-cold pattern has gotten so routine that I've decided the year after a championship is hard on the Giants, and makes me appreciate all the more those teams that win back-to-back titles. Not only have the Giants played longer than all but one other team in their championship seasons, they wear themselves out the following season with pregame ceremonies commemorating their glory.

I don't know how other teams do it — I've heard more than once that the Giants "do it right" — but the Giants' ceremonies are exhausting, to fans and players. They cram festivities too full of pomp and circumstance, and speeches and novel ways to deliver trophies, and orgasmic variations on The Natural's theme song — that the players lose momentum come game time.

Time for the Giants to rest up, take month-long naps, refrain from celebrations. Time for me to be normal again.

No more baseball until April. No more sports, for that matter, certainly not football, which has more and more become a sad microcosm of our American ills — corporate cartels, violence and its encouragement, celebrity worship and soap-operatic bad behavior, reported breathlessly and daily in the media.

No baseball playoffs. I'm not a baseball fan; I'm a Giants fan. I have no interest in other teams.

It's sort of like being facebook®™ friends with people because of one common interest, and then being ushered in pictorially to their children's proms or their parents' birthday barbecues. I wish them well, of course, but I have nothing invested in those events, nor is it my place.

Time for other fans of other teams to enjoy the drama and take up the burden through the long, cooling autumn.

Although I'm glad the New York Yankees are already eliminated, and hope the Los Angeles Dodgers go quickly. It's a Giants thing.

Now I join the masses who wait 'til next year, with the potent stuff of daydreams to get me through winter. Rightfielder and charismatic leader Hunter Pence, benched first with a broken arm and then with muscle strains that kept him out most of the season, will be back. So will sure-hitting second baseman Joe Panik, out the last months of the season with back injury; fans hope, anyway.

Rookie Matt Duffy, who came up from Double-A as a bench player and soon owned third base and made everyone forget about the contributions of Pablo Sandoval, who fled to the (American League East last place) Boston Red Sox, is most likely to raise fans' hopes.

The Giants have late call-up rookie Kelby Tomlinson, a skinny Clark Kent, who took over for Panik at second and might likely get turned into an outfielder because the team will want his bat. Leftfielder and leadoff hitter Nori Aoki and first baseman Brandon Belt, both felled by concussions, will be back, though if I had to bet I'd say Belt will get traded for some pitching.

Catcher Andrew Susac should return too. Boy, the Giants crumbled with a lot of injuries, losing outfielder Gregor Blanco and his good year; centerfielder Angel Pagan, hurt during big chunks of the year; outfielder Juan Perez; and utility infield Ehire (yeah, the broadcasters can't pronounce it, either) Adrianza, who had finally, finally, finally figured out how to hit in the Major Leagues before he went down with a concussion.

Four season-ending concussions. You'd think this was football.

Still, the Giants stayed hopeful right into the last week, losing to the hated Dodgers at home and officially getting eliminated from postseason play. The Giants had to watch the Dodgers use their home turf for celebration.

The Giants finished the season ignobly, taking the last game into the ninth inning with a 3-0 lead before the last-place (by 24 games) Colorado Rockies broke out with seven runs and marred a day already heavy with the retirement of relief pitcher Jeremy Affeldt (and yet another ceremony). The Giants also watched veteran starting pitcher Tim Hudson retire, having given him the opportunity to win a World Series ring last year after 17 seasons in the majors.

Someone else will take Hudson and Affeldt's places. Someone good, we hope.

We'll make do with old episodes of The Six Million Dollar Man (just as bad as I remember; worse) and look out the window, until April beckons again.

It ain't over

Masters of malaprop and malfeasance: From left, former Mariners' manager and Yankees®™
star Lou Piniella, former Dodgers©® manager Tommy Lasorda, Hall of Famer Yogi Berra,
Reds superstar and Hall of Fame®™ reject Pete Rose, and Yankees®™ and Mets manager Casey Stengel.
Cover for a book collection of baseball quotes and stories.

My wife says I should write about Yogi Berra, and so I shall, late as usual to the eulogy.

The Associated Press' initial story of Berra's death last week referred to the Hall of Fame®™ Yankees©™catcher as "Yogi Bear."

The error makes perfect sense to me; I will not pass judgment. Having lugged around a Yogi Bear doll through toddlerhood, I was shocked in childhood to discover an actual human named Yogi Berra.

The human had to have been named after the cartoon bear, I reasoned, because cartoons were more real to me at that stage in my life.

In reality, Berra's representatives sued animators Hanna-Barbera unsuccessfully to stop its use of "Yogi Bear" for the porkpie wearing, pick-a-nick-basket-stealing cartoon denizen of Jellystone National Park.

Sued for what, defamation?

Yogi Berra died a cartoon, for all the good and awful that word implies.

For people my age who remember Berra, he was the old baseball manager known mostly for mangling English. He's one of those public figures who became magnets for unfortunate but funny twists of phrases, including those they didn't actually say.

What Berra did actually say:

• "You can observe a lot by watching."
• "When you come to a fork in the road, take it."
• "I can't think and hit at the same time."
• "I want to thank everybody for making this day necessary."

What Berra might have said, though probably not as we know it:

• "Ninety percent of the game is half mental." (or "Baseball is 90 percent mental. The other half is physical.")
• "It ain't over 'til it's over." (About his 1974 New York Mets rallying from fifth place to win the division). He might have said instead, "You're not out until you're out." 

What Berra probably didn't say, but seems so darn likely that it's tattooed into his mythos:

• “It’s déjà vu all over again!” 
• "Nobody goes there anymore (to a restaurant). It's too crowded."
• "It ain't over 'til the fat lady sings."

Berra appeared to have embraced this malapropping persona, which I and everyone else expected of this grandfatherly little guy with the big black beetly eyebrows behind giant glasses and a bulbous nose above a rubbery grin. He even authored a book subtitled, "I Really Didn't Say Everything I Said!"

Even the source of his nickname — Lawrence Peter Berra is his real name — is fuzzy, maybe or maybe not applied by a baseball teammate for the way he sat, like a yogi, waiting for his turn at bat.

But the gentle buffoonery masked the mastery of his baseball career. Wherever Berra was, championships were sure to follow. The New York Times reports he appeared in 21 World Series from 1946 to 1985 as a Yankees player and a Yankees and Mets coach and manager. Nobody has played in more World Series games, gotten more Series hits or whacked more Series doubles.

Newsreel footage made me think he was an unlikely baseball superstar, and his peers apparently thought likewise. His Yankees manager, Casey Stengel — master of accidental witticisms himself — said, “Mr. Berra is a very strange fellow of very remarkable abilities.”

He looks so tiny in the newsreels, so much smaller than the catchers I grew up watching, and still see today. His bat looked too big for him, but obviously appearances deceive: Berra hit .285 over 19 seasons, with 358 home runs, and was a 15-time All Star®™.

My image of him as a baseball player comes in black and white and gray, when he actually leaps like a little kid into the arms of pitcher Don Larsen after Larsen pitches a perfect Game 5 in the 1956 World Series.

God bless Yogi Berra. He's why I love baseball: Funny names, rich lore, humans playing a game.

I don't do numbers. Though I can tell by a batting average where a hitter stands in the pantheon of the day or of history, I still couldn't tell you with confidence what an earned run is. I am vaguely aware that  a low earned-run average tends to portend a good pitcher. All these other new stats? OPS? WHIP? I'm lost.

Give me a good story, any time. Give me Willie Mays turning a double into a single so the pitcher would be forced to give a good pitch or two to Willie McCovey, hitting next in the batting order. Give me Roberto Clemente, tortured soul on the field, gigantic bleeding heart and soul off it. Give me Coco Crisp, Rusty Staub, "Three Fingers" Brown, Shooty Babitt, Preacher Roe, Jarrod Saltalamacchia, Joe Garagiola and Buster Posey, just because.

The San Francisco Giants this week are trying hard not to break my heart. Barring a miracle, they will. They're five games out of first with five games left in the regular season, fielding a starting lineup half of whom were in the minor leagues a month ago. The Giants have to win all five, and the first-place Dodgers, whom the Giants are playing right now, have to lose all five for the Giants to get a chance at winning the division.

It would make quite a story, the Giants flopping into the playoffs on kids and fumes. The odds are not in their favor. It ain't over, though.

Win or lose, the Giants always manage to make new rich memories of the people who played the game, not their statistics.

As Yogi said — or didn't — "The future ain't what it used to be."

How I spent my summer vacation

The penultimate pitch; the next one would loft weakly to centerfield
to end the game …

The A's beat the Dodgers 5-2. That's an important detail.

Not the most important, but a satisfying denouement.

It was a win-win for Rob and me: The Oakland A's won (he's happy) and the Los Angeles Dodgers lost (I'm happy).

The Giants didn't gain any ground, losing later that day to the Cardinals. We heard the bad news over the radio on the drive home.

The most important detail is we were Doing Something Out of the Ordinary — not going to work! In the middle of the week! To a ballgame!

An A's game! Quite out of the ordinary for me, not an A's fan.

(I could have been, in an alternate universe. Were I an adult while the A's were winning back-to-back-to-back World Series in the early 1970s, in their garish green and yellow uniforms, retro handlebar mustaches and wild muttonchops dripping from their faces, I would have found them inviting and refreshing.

But I was a kid adhering to inexplicable kid logic in liking the San Francisco Giants, and decided the A's were piratical and anathema.*#

That feeling has stuck, all these years hence.)

In an alternate universe, I would have loved the A's ballpark, now called the O.co®™ Coliseum (naming rights are not always pretty). It feels small inside, close in, intimate. As a kid, I would have lost my breath at first look of the emerald grass, glass flat and carefully brushed by optical illusion to different shades of green, and would have picked the A's for life, just as I had with the Giants on first sight of the grass at Candlestick Park — Giants vs. Cubs doubleheader, almost 43 years to the day before yesterday's game.

Nearly 25 years ago, I sat almost opposite the vantage point of this image, high in the upper deck, now blocked off by great green tarps. My brother-in-law had invited me to Game 4 of the World Series. The Cincinnati Reds swept the A's in four games. A National League fan, I had to sit on my hands that game and withstand the gnashing of teeth around me.

It was the last time I had been to the coliseum.

This was a happy return. Rob had bought some great seats, as you can see, just to the third base side of home plate, about 10 rows back. I have never sat so close; the players appeared actual human size, and strangely not heroic. They loom in closeup on TV, their twitches and mutterings and hard stares and wild shouts writ large. In person this close, their strikeouts and hard groundouts and even their curving rocketed home runs seem ordinary, as if a bunch of fans had climbed down from the stands to play a game of pickup.

Rob and I had hung around in the journalism department back in college, and re-met a year or so ago through the miracle of facebook®™, learning we had migrated to the same city. He reminded me yesterday that I had even taken his place in an apartment with another friend after he went off and graduated.

We were playing hooky in the least delinquent manner, planning ahead, notifying bosses, warning family, changing our out-of-office messages.

"We look exactly like we're going to our one game for the year," I said. We had our wide-brimmed sun-blocking hats, our street clothes like we were going to an after-work mixer (if we were after-work mixers kind of people), our sunscreen to be applied later.

Weekday ballgames used to be called businessmen's specials, and we fit the yesteryear profile, even if our office was two hours back northeast.

We had not a stitch of league-approved baseball gear on, and probably looked out of place joining a sea of jerseyed and hatted fans — overwhelmingly Dodgers' fans — salmon-running into the stadium.

It was the second to last jam we sat in, getting to the ballpark, interstates 80 and 880 having clogged on the way into Oakland. For the briefest moment in our planning, we entertained taking public transportation, and the nostalgic notion of hopping the train from Sacramento right to the porch of the ballpark.

The price quickly put us off. Memo to Amtrak®™ and other purporters of public conveyance: Really?! If you want us to use your ride and ease the traffic mess and reduce our carbon footprint, wouldn't you make the price somewhere approaching reasonable?

The slow jam didn't bother us. We got to catch up. We got to see the architectural details of buildings on the side of the freeways in Oakland, the massive Star Wars™®-inspiring white loading derricks of the Port of Oakland.

Twenty bucks to the attendant at the entrance of the Coliseum parking lot, and after that we were on our own to find a way around the lot without getting hit.

Twenty-two bucks and change for two beers, which tasted good; something about the ballpark. The woman who poured the beers was cheery and genuinely glad to serve us. The beer tasted better.

You don't want to know how much for the sweet Italian sausages and drinks, served by another friendly woman who seemed to know the best way to combat the frustration fans feel over the traffic jam of humanity at the hot dog counter was to greet them warmly and make them glad they bought lunch at her window.

"You gotta splurge every once in a while," said Rob, and he was right.

We sat in the sun, I in my completely sun-blocking camping hat and long-sleeved shirt.

"Aren't you hot?" said the young Dodger fan next to me, wise despite the error of his allegiance. I was, but I wasn't going to tell him. I sat still except for helping the fan in front of me who, along with his mother, started some timely "Let's go, Oakland! (CLAP CLAP clap clap clap)" rally cheers.

The son was wearing a Rickey Henderson No. 24 jersey, old school. Mom swooned for current player Josh Reddick, he of the long auburn locks, and wore the rightfielder's jersey.

Reddick went 0-for-3 yesterday, but it didn't matter. Despite a two-run homer by Dodgers' waning shortstop Jimmy Rollins (who I was sure would die a Philadelphia Phillie), the A's put together a couple of innings of bat-'em-around baseball to cut down the Dodgers and quiet their fans, who left without incident.

Reed-thin starting pitcher Jesse Chavez held the Dodgers to that home run and one other hit over eight innings, striking out Rollins as his final act.

The A's have the worst record in Major League Baseball, but it didn't matter. They beat the leader of the National League West division.

The Dodgers had lost the night before too, the A's winning in a 10th inning walk-off base hit, which I commend highly.

Crawling out of the stadium, on the freeway at 30 mph up I-80 until past Vallejo, we didn't care. We got the chance to talk about everything and nothing. Jon Miller and Duane Kuiper on the radio narrated the Giants' tenuous lead against the Cardinals, then the sad news that the Giants had lost, unable to keep one more home run from escaping the field.

The day flew by too soon, the game ending too fast, as did that one good beer. We were not quite ready for work the next morning, but we'd muddle through.

Just the way summer vacation should be.

* piratical and anathema, two words I didn't use as a kid, and barely know how to use now.
# really good name for an alternate universe alt rock band …

What goes around …

Any good news source worth its salt commits to telling you the whole story, pursuing the conclusion with unflagging patience so you, dear reader, may know the whole truth, may find out how it all turned out, and …

Who am I kidding?! Just count yourself lucky I remembered writing about this stuff in the first place.

Now I'm following up:

Scouting nearly reaches the 21st Century

Put aside, for a moment, the weirdness that Robert Gates, former CIA chief, now runs the Boy Scouts of America.

Forget that the premier organization for American boys selected as its president the chief spook, the guy who ran the U.S. Defense Department under a couple of presidents. Forget that after a lifetime of controversial statesmanship, seeing the world's dark horror firsthand, Robert Gates now wants to be the chief Scoutmaster.

Consider instead that Gates quickly unleashed some reality on Boy Scouts: It needs to lift its ban on gay leaders.

Scouting earlier this year had changed its policy to allow gay Scouts, but not gay adult leaders. It was a massive empty gesture, looking progressive but effectively doing nothing but the same ol' same ol.'

"We'll help you become a man, and work that gayness right out of you so you can be a right-thinkin' red-blooded American adult."

Not gonna happen.

Gates said as much when he spoke to Scout leaders earlier this month at its annual meeting.

“I was prepared to go further than the decision that was made," Gates said to the Associated Press before the meeting. "I would have supported having gay Scoutmasters, but at the same time, I fully accept the decision that was democratically arrived at by 1,500 volunteers from across the entire country."

Enrollment dropped after Scouting's decision. The decision has divided Scouting. Gates' first task is to shore up flagging membership. But his direction is the right one. Whether Scouting installed him as the tough-talking high-profile figure to do what the organization couldn't — speak truth to power — it's the right direction.

Opponents arose anew.

Headlines for Gates' speech included, "Robert Gates Caves on Gay Agenda for Boy Scouts," from Newsmax.com ("Independent. American." is its tagline; "consistently way right of center" would be more accurate); "Robert Gates to Boy Scouts: Surrender Your Principles," from the Catholic Crisis Magazine.

And the triple-whammy headline from another "independent" news source, WorldNetDaily.com:

THE GAYING OF AMERICA

Robert Gates' surrender of the Boy Scouts

Exclusive: Pat Boone to group's prez on homosexual policy: 'What are you thinking?'

What Gates was thinking is that Boy Scouts can't hide from the real world anymore. Its obligation, its mission is to help boys of America be independent, self-sufficient leaders. Not just some boys: All boys who want the Scouting experience of learning citizenship and leadership from the lessons the outdoors teaches. Because few boys live anymore in Lem Siddons' world of "Follow Me, Boys!"

Life ain't a Disney®™ movie. It's waaaay more complicated. Boys need something more. Better. Gates, who's steered through the dark, complex world, knows that.

Keep climbing, Scoutmaster Gates.

Hung out to dry

I'm happy to report my neighborhood has dried out. Where not two months ago I saw stubborn greenery and wet sidewalks in the face of the fourth sere year of drought, now I see lovely brown, lovely yellow. Lawns are drying to the left of me, dying to the right, as neighbor after neighbor has let their curbs lose appeal so that we might all have enough water.

Our ugly former lawn doesn't seem so lonely anymore.

Granted, some folks still water, and their simple act of sprinkling lawns seems now so aggressive and wanton next to the brittling landscape of their neighbors. Eventually their sprinklers will go dusty too, I hope.

I have to laugh at the California Department of Boating and Waterways, appealing to boaters in its public service announcements that a day without watering their lawn will mean one more day of fun their boats, with enough water to prevent running aground. Seems a stretch, but hey, the advertising is free, I guess. Whatever floats your boat.

We're a long way from saving, and it may be too late. Some communities in the eastern San Joaquin Valley are out of water, and hot summer has yet to come.

Sprinkle a little holy water for hope …

It is designed to break your heart

A. Bartlett Giamatti, short-lived commissioner of Major League Baseball, said that about the game.

Don't I know it!

I like winning as much as the next red-blooded fan. But not at the cost of hard reality.

The brutal math of baseball means a hero loses his second chance. The Giants sent journeyman ballplayer Travis Ishikawa packing.

In baseball lingo, The Giants designated Ishikawa for assignment. That means he has a short time to decide whether to go down to minor-league baseball and hope for a chance with the big club again later, or try his luck elsewhere.

Elsewhere is where he was last year, schlepping it out with the Pittsburgh Pirates after he'd been let go before by the Giants. He was thinking of quitting. Then the Giants reacquired Ishikawa, and he made his way back into the lineup in the second half of the season.

Good thing, too, because Ishikawa hit the greatest home run in San Francisco Giants history (Bobby Thomson's "Shot Heard 'Round the World" in 1951 was the New York Giants' greatest home run, propelling that team over the Dodgers into the World Series.)

Ishikawa's improbable two-out, bottom-of-the-ninth, three-run homer against the St. Louis Cardinals put the Giants into the World Series for the third time in five years, and the Giants went on to win their third World Series ring.

The Giants nation went wild.

Then Ishikawa got hurt as this season began, and others took his place. The outfield soon filled up with too many lefthanders like him. He was built to be a first baseman, but the Giants have more than enough of them.

Ishikawa, October's hero, loses out. Winning has won out. It's a damned shame.

I hope he never has to buy a drink — even if it's milk — in the presence of a Giant fan for the rest of his life. He deserves that much at least.

We'll always have the memory of that home run, Ishikawa sprinting around first, arms upraised like wings.

Do some damage wherever you land, Mr. Ishikawa. Just not against the Giants.

Not bad

Dear Mr. San Francisco Giants,

Ok, that's better.

Not great, but better.

You're not losing so much, like you thought that was the object of the game.

You're winning more with last-minute heroics.

You've got a rookie who can really pitch, making up for the loss of one veteran and the wheezing efforts of a couple other veteran pitchers.

Another rookie can really hit, and quietly demonstrates that maybe you shouldn't have traded for a third baseman, because you've been grooming one all along.

You've got a real and permanent left fielder now, who makes me want to be in front of the TV when he's up to bat. He can cobble a hit simply by slapping a high bouncer into the infield.

Timmy's pitching like the old Timmy, only craftier. Romo struck out the league's scariest hitter with bases loaded! Crawford hits and hits, and hits for power. Panik's so good, it makes me wonder why more baseball players aren't named Joe. They're almost obscuring Angel Pagan's consistency, raking doubles and triples. Almost.

You're entertaining and exciting.

Keep it up. The Dodgers have 53 home runs. You've got 21. Work to do.

I hear basketball is being played somewhere. That's nice.

Home of the brave face

Dear Mr. San Francisco Giants,

I don't expect you to win another World Series this year. I don't think you expect a World Series ring this year, either.

Not that you're not going to try, I expect.

Word is you've got a lot of money sitting around, which you could spend on talent enough to chase another title, but I think you're holding back, seeing how honest a shot you can make of a title run with the considerable talent you have, then maybe spending big next year after your players have rested up with a regular-length season. After all, you're trending toward championships every other year.

Keep us interested this year, make us hungry next year: Good strategy all around.

I'm happy watching your considerable talent take that honest shot.

I just didn't expect you to forget how to win. Four and 10? Eight losses in a row?

That noise, by the way, is righteous laughter from everyone who wants to see you go down. The high cackle is from Dodgers' fans, showing up tonight.

Quit fooling around.

Unless that's your problem, and the game isn't any fun. In which case, start fooling around.

Try to win at least every other game.

Until then, I'll slap a smile on my face and stay tuned.

Yours very truly,

A. Nony Mous
Fan

Out of habit

Here's the Giants' chance to go 162-0.

Or: It's gonna be a long season.

I hope it's long and glorious, but I'll settle for just plain ol' long, the next six months of re-grooving the daily habit of following the San Francisco Giants, fresh off their third World Series championship in five years.

Have I mentioned that before?

(I know, you are probably one of the very very few who have made it to this paragraph. My baseball posts are not popular reading. Thanks for hanging with the curve.)

For the next six months we in this household expect to watch the Giants at dinnertime, just as we did last night as the Giants squeaked past the Arizona Diamondbacks 5-4 in the Opening Day game. But the Giants have trouble with two starting pitchers right off the bat (pun intended), and their superstar rightfielder is out for April with a broken arm. That 162-0 record might be in jeopardy.

Or I expect to be listening to games on the office radio during luxurious mid-week day games. I will count on my four companions — broadcasters Jon Miller, Dave Flemming, Mike Krukow and Duane Kuiper — to cheer and jeer and tell with their golden voices.

(I expect as well to shirk my duties as a National Public Radio listener to check in on the morning baseball aftermath at Giants flagship station KNBR, the Murph and Mac Show, and their regular interviews with Giants and broadcasters. If they ain't talkin' baseball, I ain't listening, so I've dismissed KNBR the last six months.

(This is also a good place to mark the passing of longtime Giants broadcaster Lon Simmons. As a narrow-minded baseball fan, I don't have a lot of history with Simmons, a Hall of Fame™® broadcaster who called all kinds of sports.

(What I remember is that Simmons required you to listen to games differently than other broadcasters, to pay closer attention. He wouldn't say, for example, "Barr winds up … here's the pitch … just a little high and outside." Simmons would say, after a long moment filled only with the noise of the crowd, "Ball one!" and maybe not say anything again until, "Strike!")

Starting yesterday, we have sloughed off the tolerable and semi-dark last six months, when we replaced ballgames for "Jeopardy!" and "Wheel of Fortune" (though I had left the room by then) and Sitcoms We Otherwise Deemed Beneath Us ("The Middle," we found out, is genuinely funny in a loopy way, and carves dangerously close to the truth).

I may have to switch over to reruns of "Bob's Burgers" at 9:30 PST (I'm a latecomer to that show but now I'm hooked). By June 1, I'll have weaned myself from that habit too.

It's all baseball from then on. Everything's exciting and new!

I'm in, win or lose. I swear!

…

In other news:

I couldn't fit this anywhere else, but had to post it: The best email sex products come-on (so to speak) I've gotten yet:

A complete line of products for bed flaccidity

Because, of course, nothing heats the juices quite like "bed flaccidity!"

Also, I get a new round of consistent demands that I paint my garage floors, seek college scholarships for my children and get myself into luxurious senior citizen housing. Good to see what my swim friend Dave calls "spray and pray" non-targeted advertising isn't dead. Eventually, advertisers figure, they'll strike it rich with me.

Play ball already!

Never have I been more anxious for the baseball season to begin, but not for the obvious reason.

I just want the San Francisco Giants™® to Shut. The hell. Up!

Really, the Giants©™ had just won their third World Series®™ in five years. You'd think the team could just bank all its publicity on that amazing fact.

You would be wrong.

You, like me, have no stomach for marketing.

I love the Giants®©. I tell people I'm not a baseball fan: I'm a Giants™® fan. My interest in baseball extends to the Giants©™ and whomever they're playing.

I'm not going to not follow the Giants®™ for another season. But the Giants™® and their promotional media will not risk that chance.

They are in my face, literally, many times per day.

I'm not talking about the preseason scuttlebutt: Ace pitcher Tim Lincecum has his fastball back, and he's reunited with his dad to retrieve his unique technique! Pitcher Matt Cain has returned from elbow surgery, better than before! Catcher Buster Posey is refreshed! New third baseman Casey McGehee looks solid!

File it all under "Hope (1 Each) Eternally Springing." It's what you expect to hear right before the season starts, when every team's in first place, every team has a chance.

What drives me nuts is the miscellany that must be aimed at the casual fan who likes the idea of the Giants, if not the actual team and all that pitching and strategy and baseball stuff.

I blame myself, of course. It's my fault because I "liked" the Giants'©® facebook™® page. So check yourself before you wreck yourself — even if your relationship with social media is minimal and passive

How do the Giants®© pester me? Let me count the ways.

No, way too much counting. I'll just touch on a few of the ridiculous lowlights:

• Pictures of a bunch of signed baseballs — can you guess which player's autograph is which?
• Behind-the-scenes pictures of Team Picture Day — as in, pictures of players not posing, before they pose. What?
• Pitcher Madison Bumgarner pitches to Buster Posey for the first time ever! Posey homers!
• Vote for Buster Posey as The Face of Major League Baseball©®!
• Oh, please please please vote for Buster Posey!
• Don't let (Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim outfielder) Mike Trout be The Face of Major League Baseball®™! Vote Posey!
• Did you vote for Buster Posey?! Do it now!
• We said Now!
• You did it! Buster Posey is The Face of Major League Baseball®™!
• Day 1 highlights of Spring Training. Also Day 2, Day 3, etc.
• Actor Will Ferrell, promoting a movie or maybe just himself (he's the next generation's Bill Murray), plays for 10 Cactus League teams in one day, including catcher for the Giants.™® What?
• Where are the Giants'®™© World Series®™ trophies now? Visit them now at ____________.

And on it goes, all day, every day. Just so much puffery.

I'm not really sure what it means that Buster Posey is The Face of Major League Baseball™®. Why is it even necessary? It may have something to do with drumming up sales of Posey memorabilia, but people tell me I'm a cynic.

Buy your Posey jersey! Let's buy two!

As for the trophies, ugh. My enjoyment of the Giants' spectacular season ended with the very first moments of the on-field celebration of Game 7, when third baseman Pablo Sandoval caught the last out in foul territory and the players rushed toward Bumgarner, the Series'™® Most Valuable Player,©® on the mound.

Everything else — the Giants' fourth locker-room celebration of the season, complete with exploding champagne and beer bottles and ski goggles … the parade through San Francisco and the long string of speeches — feels like such empty preening, something meant for the players alone that we talk ourselves into watching, like the Oscars.™®

I'm not going to stand in line and look at their trophies.

I will, however, tune the radio and listen to the first pitch of the season, if I can, Monday, April 6, first pitch 7:10 p.m. And I'll follow every pitch for the rest of the season if I can, win or lose. (And why be greedy? The Giants have three championships in five years. I'm not gonna sweat if they don't do win another.)

Opening Day can't come soon enough.

The season in selfies

April 2014 (actually, it starts March 31!).
The San Francisco Giants' season promises so much:
Michael Morse, a new left fielder I'd never heard of …
acquisition of a veteran pitcher, Tim Hudson, who always seemed
to give the Giants fits. Lovable third baseman Pablo Sandoval shows up
thinner and more nimble. Pitchers are healthy, center fielder Angel Pagan
returns uninjured and in shape. Let's play ball!
Giants go 17-11 through April.

You can hate the San Francisco Giants. I don't blame you.

They've now become one of those teams that show up often enough in the playoffs to make people say, "Not the Giants again! I hate the Giants! I'm not watching!"

I hated the Atlanta Braves for the same reason, back when they were good. Even if they cast off many years of mediocrity and made the playoffs again, I'd still say, "Not the Braves again! Let somebody else in!"

I hate the New York Yankees no matter what. I hate the Los Angeles Dodgers because it's part of the Giants fan by-laws. I hate the A's because they aren't the Giants.

"Hate" in the sports sense. Good healthy fun hate.

Now the Giants have won their third World Series in the last five years. It never should have happened, had no good reason to. But it did.

The good news: This will be my last Giants post until baseball resumes in March. Probably.
The bad news: This will be my last Giants post until March.

Until then, watch my mug reveal the ups and horrible downs and improbable end to the season:

Holy Cow! ("Holy Cow!™® is a registered trademark expression of
the Chicago Cubs®™ and late broadcaster Harry Caray. Void in Inyo and Kern counties.)
The Giants are rolling! New left fielder Morse is slugging! He's the resident fist-pumping surfer dude,
getting the team to wear weird warrior helmets in the locker room.
Pablo "Kung Fu Panda" Sandoval is catching everything hit.
The team is scoring its runs with two outs —
in fact, seems to be waiting until it gets two outs before engineering
strings of runs. The Giants are unstoppable!

May 2014. Even national broadcasters are saying things like "The Giants are on a pace to win
100 games," or "(right fielder) Hunter Pence is on a pace to drive in more than 100 rbi," or
"The Giants have already put this season out of reach." Yeah, they're that good.
Oof, first baseman Brandon Belt breaks his thumb when hit by a pitch. Not gonna worry.
Giants go 20-9 in May.

June 2014. Early runs, two-out hitting binges, comeback wins,
an ever-lengthening lead over the Dodgers. Dare I say
the Giants were almost becoming … boring?

10-game lead over the Dodgers. All right with the world. Center fielder
Pagan goes out with a bad back. Giants pull a rookie, Joe Panik,
up from the minor leagues to stop the revolving door of weak hitting second basemen.
Beloved center fielder Angel Pagan, the engine of the team, out more than
half of last season to a hamstring injury, goes down this time with a back injury.
OK, minor adjustments. Nobody panic. Even though the Giants
go a miserable 10 and 16 in June, including losing six in a row.

July 2014. OK, maybe start panicking. Lovable starting pitcher Tim Lincecum
may have pitched a no-hitter in June against the Padres, but
he wasn't fooling hitters before that or since, and suddenly all the
Giants' hitters have stopped hitting. The far-gone Dodgers are closing in.
All that early season karma fails to produce many All-Stars:
Only Pence and pitchers Hudson and Madison Bumgarner make it.
Giants go 12-14 in July including losing another six straight.

The Giants collapse. It's so bad, I wish the team would forfeit take a day off,
reset, regroup, rethink. No sooner does Brandon Belt return than he
gets hit in the face with a ball, and disappears with a concussion.
The Dodgers creep closer …

… and closer. Hitters aren't hitting, pitchers aren't pitching,
Giants aren't winning … and closer …

… until the Dodgers overtake the Giants.

The Giants appear dead …

The team trades for Red Sox pitcher Jake Peavy, who used to pitch
as a youngster with the Padres under Giants Manager Bruce Bochy.
Maybe the Giants figure they're not out of this yet.

August 2014: I can't tell: Are the Giants planning to make a run?
Ooof, starting pitcher Matt Cain goes out for the season, needing
elbow surgery. Second baseman Marco Scutaro, hero of the 2012
World Series and missing most of 2013 with a bad back, shows up,
bats a few times, disappears. Second base goes to the rookie Panik.
Infielder Matt Duffy from Double-A ball, and Andrew Susac from
Triple-A get called up, and like to hit. Pagan shows up, goes down again,
finally calling off the rest of the season so he can get back surgery.
I dunno — am I allowed to hope?
Giants go 16-13 in August.

I mean, they seem like they're still in it, playing brilliant baseball
between bouts of embarrassing baseball comedy. Relief pitcher
Yusmeiro Petit, who the season before came within an out of
throwing a perfect game, sets a Major League record for retiring
46 consecutive batters.

September 2014: Giants officially concede first place in the National
League West to the Dodgers. The best they can hope for is a
wild-card chance at the playoffs. They finish 14-12 in September.

They make a wild-card berth. Without ace Matt Cain, without Pagan, now without newcomer Morse, injured.
The Giants sweep Lincecum to the bullpen, and take away the closer role from Sergio Romo.
Belt is just coming back from his concussion. Somehow, they have to beat the Pittsburgh Pirates
in one do-or-die game to get into the playoffs. The Giants should not be there, but trounce the Bucs 8-0,
with a grand slam by shortstop Brandon Crawford and a complete-game shutout by Bumgarner.

The Giants face the Washington Nationals, the best
team in the National League for the Division championship.
The Giants are not supposed to be there, but beat the Nats
three games to one, including an amazing 18-inning, six-hour marathon, the longest
game in playoff history. San Francisco moves onto the National League Championship against
the playoff perennials, the St. Louis Cardinals, who beat the Dodgers.
The Giants aren't supposed to be there, but beat the Cards four games to one, topped off with a
walk-off home run by retread Giant Travis Ishikawa, to go to the World Series.

The Giants should not be there. But neither should the
the Kansas City Royals, upstarts who knocked off better teams to
the top. Two teams so like the other, slugging each other to lopsided
whallopings, all the way to Game 7. All the way to the last out of the
last inning, a runner threatening at third, and 25-year-old Madison
Bumgarner on the mound, already established as one of the best pitchers
in history. Three days before, Bumgarner pitched another complete-game shutout.
He has pitched more innings than any other in a single postseason.
The Giants should not have won, but they did.
Somehow, they did.

Now it's a long cold lonely winter. No more baseball 'til March.
I'll subsist on video replays. Go ahead, hate the Giants all
you want. It's your prerogative. I'm smiling on the inside.

Someone must pay

While my San Francisco Giants bounce improbably into the playoffs, advertisers need to sit the bench.

Not all of them. Just a couple need to "grab some pine, Meat!®™" as Giants broadcaster and former pitching ace Mike Krukow is wont to yelp.

Baseball is business, I know, I know. Advertising has been around baseball since a baseball has been round.

We're a generation removed, I expect, from advertising splashed across jerseys, the way professional soccer does now.

Advertising pays the bills.

The Budweiser®™pitch right before the first pitch of a Giants radio broadcast, the one in which play-by-play guy Dave Flemming is contractually obligated to exhort, "Grab some Buds©®?" Clever! I never do — grab Buds™®© or buds — but I can't forget that slogan.

And every change of pitchers during the broadcast of a Giants game has come with the slogan all Giants could recite automatically: "When it's time for a change, think SpeeDee®™ Oil Change and Tuneup."

My really bad impersonation of living legend Dodgers broadcaster Vin Scully is of him saying "Farmer John™® hot dogs!" one of my earliest baseball memories.

From long before the first pitch to the final out, sponsors rule, promoting the National Anthem, the possible fifth-inning grand slam, the seventh-inning stretch, the eighth-inning summary, and selected great plays, stolen bases, saves, big hits and fan foul-ball flubs.

Most advertising fits the grain and rhythm of baseball, even when it's aggravating, such as when Krukow, pitching Coors Light©®, must always say, in his strangely invented way, the slogan: "The World's Most Rrrrrrrrrrrr(r's rolling here)eeeefreshing beeeyur!®™©"

Or when Hall of Fame´™ play-by-play radio guy Jon Miller exaggerates his delight for the cheap beer and burgers he must promote, signaling his dislike for having to pitch the products at all.

I take these as part of the game. Most ads — and this is the discomfiting truth about advertising — are just so much white noise between innings. I don't really even hear them.

Two ads, though, stop me dead, and not in a good way.

• One is Sports Authority®™. It's not their commercials. They're fine, I suppose — I couldn't tell you what they're about, sports stuff probably.

It's the slogan I abhor: "All Things Sporting Good.®™"

( … )

What does that even mean?!

Four words clumped together have rarely proved so inane.

No one uses "sporting goods" anyway, except to describe those kinds of stores. Nor does anyone, under any circumstance, say "sporting good," singular. At all. Ever.

Perhaps "sporting" here is a verb, from the meaning "to wear or display." Perhaps it means, "all our merchandise symbolizes the active lifestyle of sports," or "The stuff you buy here conveys a sense of well-being and goodwill to all."

Perhaps not.

This is classic sloganeering by committee. It had better be, because if this is the work of a highly-compensated advertising firm, the apocalypse is already upon us.

More likely a bunch of Sports Authority®™ decision makers sat around a big table in their big board room.

"The kids these days (10 years ago) say, 'It's all good!' one of them probably said. "How about, 'It's all sporting good?"

The discussion went roundabout, erupting into argument and limp threats until, like your typical organizational mission statement, saying everything and nothing at once, this dumb slogan finally issued forth.

Why a slogan at all? Doesn't Sports Authority®™ kind of say it?

The fact that I'm worrying about the slogan defeats its purpose as a slogan. I'm so slowed down by it that now I bear ill will toward the store.

• The other grating ad is for the Dolan Law Firm — actual slogan, "The best lawyers we hope you'll never need™®" — a radio commercial that airs only during games. Since I began writing this post it has mushroomed into an awkward advertising campaign; make that mushroom cloud, complete with toxic fallout.
  
  The original commercial was meant to leverage our collective love for baseball as analogy to tout the powerful benefit of hiring these lawyers.

Instead, it's a 30-second long passive-aggressive melodrama that vomits a little on the National Pastime.

It's a conversation, and you know how natural those sound in commercials! It could be principal attorney Christopher Dolan and his "daughter" had never met before taping. "Daughter" could be a 60-year-old voiceover guy.

(Imagine Wally Cox as Underdog as Christopher Dolan begins:) "Audrey has a question:"

"What does batting .300 mean?" Audrey asks.

— I'll stop here. This sounds like a teachable moment, daughter to father. Dad gets to explain baseball; he gets to say something like, "It means for every 10 times a batter comes up to the plate, he gets a hit three of those times. The best hitters usually hit about .300. One of the best there was, a man named Ted Williams, said the hitting a baseball was the hardest thing to do in sports."

But Christopher Dolan doesn't say that.

He says, his tone wheezy and dismissive, "That means they only get a hit one-third of the time."

"How come they get paid so much money for only hitting the ball one-third of the time," the daughter asks. Which, of course, is the first thing a little kid in this conversation is going to say.

— I'm stopping here again. Fair question! I'd answer, "They do make a lot of money, don't they? That's because a lot of people want to see them play, and they pay money for it. Maybe doctors and people who do important and useful things for other people should get paid that much, but that's not how the world works."

Christopher Dolan doesn't say that. He pauses for the briefest moment, and then, channeling his most petulant Wally Cox, says,

"I don't know, dear …"

He then quickly gets to the pitch, " … but at the Dolan Law Firm, we've been hitting over .900 for more than 20 years …"

The commercial ends with the daughter saying, "Go San Francisco, knock it out of the park!"

(… )

Again, what does that even mean? Hey, whole team (or whole city?), generic baseball phrase I just learned!

No no no no no! Sorry, dad and "daughter," you don't get it both ways. You don't get to poop on baseball and more than a century of statistical constancy for your own financial gain, and then try to kiss and make up with the game. And you don't get your "daughter" to clean up the mess with a hackneyed cheer for San Francisco.

This makes fine dinner-table talk. I think players make too much money — so do lawyers — but this is not the way to win the hearts of Giants fans who might need you to chase their ambulance.

A better commercial would be:

"Daddy, who's Willie Mays?"

"He's my favorite player (see? Winning hearts!), the best ever!"

"It says here he was an All-Star™® for 20 years."

"That's right dear, and that's how long we've been all-star attorneys for our clients!"

Harmless, hardly unique, but it would do the job: "We're lawyers, we like baseball, you like baseball, and in that convivial spirit, we want you to hire us."

Another Dolan commercial explains "we're all terribly excited" for the Giants' chances this season, in a way that doesn't sound excited at all.

Dolan Law Firm has apparently taken some heat for the first commercial, not for my problem with it, but about the math. The first two commercials have disappeared and two new have replaced them, the first a father-daughter spot explaining that getting a hit one-third of the time is a .333 average, not .300.

After which "Audrey" says, "What?! I don't understand that! That's confusing!"

Christopher Dolan follows: "So there you go, everybody. Please stop sending me emails. What's important is that the Orange and Black win." He sounds as if he really couldn't care less.

Dolan follows this with another game-only, cringe-worthy commercial in which he sounds peeved he can't say "Giants" in his paeans to the team, because as a legal expert he knows the team owns rights to the name. He says "Giants" several times but the word is bleeped just as he begins the soft "g" sound. He finishes with "make sure there is a giant win today." (See what he did there?)

(Here I will type, for the first and last time in my life, rofl.)

As his daughter might tell him, let it go, let it gooooooo.

Fall will soon become winter. The Giants continue their improbable quest for a third World Series win in five years. Whatever happens, we will rethink and rest and heal over winter, and get ready to try again come spring, players and advertisers alike. Grab some buds.

We're all terribly excited.

There's no conjugating in baseball!

This didn't happen, despite what the guy said …

Sports announcers talk funny, especially baseball announcers.

One notices such things in the languorous unfurling of a season.

Ain't no shoulda-coulda-wouldas — linguistically speaking — in baseball.

Plays either happen … or they happen in a parallel universe.

For some reason, announcers don't like to use the third conditional tense — the if … then — to analyze plays.

I don't know if it's superstition, or a weird elocution technique that imparts clarity over the airwaves … or maybe the announcers just don't know how to use the conditional tense.

They do know how to second-guess, though — it's why they get the big bucks! — so you'd think shoulda-coulda-woulda gets right in their wheelhouse.

Instead, after the play-by-play announcer describes a play, using present tense …

"One-and-two count to Garcia … here's the pitch … Garcia swings and shoots it up the middle! Past the reach of the glove Doober into shallow center field! Harris rounds third headed for home! Here's the throw and … he's safe! Dragons win, and the end of the world commences!"

… the color commentator then tells you what went wrong — because he knows! — in that moment before global collapse.

But he doesn't say:

"If Doober hadn't have been digging goobers out of his big schnozz, he would have had extra time to move to his right and spear that ball for an easy out."

Which he should say because none of that happened. It coulda happened, maybe shoulda, but didn't. Conditions, namely goober-encrusted nostrils, prevented it.

coulda

He says instead, using handy-dandy present tense:

"Doober gets to that ball a bit quicker and he throws Garcia out at first. Inning over!"

As if the world had spun backward on its axis and a different result resulted!

Somehow, we baseball consumers understand this torture upon English, that the world hasn't really reversed its spin.

Though for many games, I'd really like it to.

You'll notice another odd twist of the tongue in baseball announcing — when the play-by-play guy said "the glove of Doober." Even the best announcers go all Elizabethan on our ears, sounding almost as if they're translating directly from another language.

They don't possess the possessive forms, is what I'm trying to say.

They don't say, for example, "the ball bounces past Doober's glove." They say instead, "the ball glances off the glove of Doober."

I'll guess they do that to make sure they're understood, as apostrophe+s has a way of fuzzying the sound of a sentence. And do you say it "Ramirez" or "Ramirezes(eses)" when talking about the possessive form of the name? Oh, heck with it, just say "the bat of Ramirez" and let it go.

Still, it sounds weird.

Now for something completely different:

English — the queen's English — got extra weird over the summer, in the few moments I watched World Cup soccer.

In Britain, teams are referred as plural nouns. I'd say "San Francisco is playing Philadelphia tomorrow," but in Britain it would be "San Francisco are playing Philadelphia." Of course, no one would care in Britain, but that's how it would be said.

"England are playing Spain," is something one might have heard from British broadcasters at the World Cup — or in an alternate plural-noun world in which England did not bow out after three games. Sorry, England. You have a bad result.

American sports is (are?) not immune, now that newer teams have (has?) taken on singular mass nouns — Miami Heat, Oklahoma City Thunder, Minnesota Wild — essentially nouns without quantity, which can't be separated into countable parts. "Three Heats driving home from the game last night came to the rescue of a stranded motorist" just doesn't work. (And who outside of the news media says "motorist?")

Americans still say "Minnesota is" rather than "Minnesota are," so we haven't lost complete control.

There you have it, sports fans. You can't tell the players without a copy of Strunk & White. Even then it's hit and miss.

Same as it ever was

A moment inspired by an early moment in
Vonnegut's The Sirens of Titan.

I don't read much. Which may be plain to you.

It's quite possible I type more than I read, which is a bad recipe for good typing. Or writing.

Reading has always been … such … a … chore. As a kid, I couldn't overmatch the notion there was always something else I could be doing. As an adult, I'm sure there's always something else I should be doing.

Yes, yes, reading transports and enriches and transforms and immerses. I understand that. I have even felt these a few times. But reading always feels to me like extravagance, excess, impediment, like purposeful time wastage — and I waste too much time already.

What's more, when I do read, it's usually before bed, so to read at any other time induces a Pavlovian reaction to sleep. I'm done after five minutes.

What's even more, the ocean of books I am supposed to read as a useful citizen of the world is whipped to killer waves, a ceaseless storm swallowing up the shore all around, and I am small and hopeless in my inner tube.

Behold, then, the miracle that is me, reading two books at once! A little bit of each in sequence, not simultaneously, of course.

Not only that, get a load of me already drawing parallels between these two disparate works — and with the way I think at this point in my life.

It's very early yet and I could be wrong as wrong can be about these comparisons. At worst, I'll get another post out of this, a mea culpa.

One book is A People's History of the United States, by Howard Zinn.

The other is The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut.

Should I finish them, they will be major conquests in my barely perceptible onslaught against the family library, or what I call, "What are all these books and where did they come from?"

I picked up Vonnegut because, beaten about the corners already, it could take the abuse a recent family camping trip might render. Zinn's History is fat and hardbound and pristine and unwieldy, and wouldn't fit in the car.

I'm trying very hard not to read anything about Zinn's History, even though I'm suspicious. I pried it off the shelf because I had missed a lot of U.S. history in school (long story) and thought I could get it all back in one fell tome.

It reads like a well supported opinion piece, and I'm afraid by the time I flop exhausted onto the last page (688, before the bibliography!) I'll end up with many more thorny questions than answers.

Zinn's point so far, which I gather stitches his book together — the Constitution is set and the country is just now trying to figure out how to behave when I left off — is essentially: Them that has, gets.

Columbus showed up and began the brutal decimation of native cultures through might and greed. White Europe found nothing wrong and everything right with similarly decimating Africa and turning its people into chattel for its own gain, with ready new markets in the New World. Colonists wanted the western lands, and too bad for the Indians who lived there. The insular rich colonists were only too happy to let their lesser displaced citizens and white former servants fight the Indians because, you know, less muss and fuss.

So were the Colonial people in power too ready to rally their lessers to fight their battles against the British, with just enough romance in the Declaration of Independence to delude the lessers into some unrealizable idea of the American Dream — without disrupting the power base and their holdings.

Land barons got to keep their ill-gotten land under new rule. Slaves would still be slaves, Indians would be driven into the ground, women had no say, no rights.

All men are created equal. Except not you or you. Definitely not you, who don't fit the strict definition of "men."

Power and money rule, is Zinn's theme. Same as it ever was.

I slog ahead in glacial anticipation of how all of this turns out.

Vonnegut says the same thing, though he means: Same at it ever was, since the beginning of time until the unending end.

By not reading much, my literary DNA is gunked up with a lot of John Steinbeck and Vonnegut. Something about the way Vonnegut voices his ideas fits like snug proteins between the cadence of my thoughts.

Vonnegut writes a lot about humankind's inhumanity and cruelty and madness, its pointless quest for just about anything. Slaughterhouse-Five was about as reasonable a reaction as could be to witnessing the firebombing of Dresden during World War II, in which Vonnegut wrote of Tralfamadorians, alien people who exist throughout all time at once and see the great arc of absurdity and want us to chill out because it's always this way and always will be.

I understand I'll encounter the planet Tralfamadore soon enough in The Sirens of Titan.

Though one is science-y fiction and the other may end up being a weighty screed, the two books speak to the same thought: All this craziness and unfairness? All this injustice? It's been going on for a while. The pattern is quite predictable and traceable, actually.

Each book implies the unanswered question: What are you gonna do about it?

Oh, just remembered — I finished another book not long ago: Willie Mays: The Life, The Legend, by James S. Hirsch: It was our son's and came to our house some time ago to gather dust.

My favorite player whom I never saw play, Willie Mays troubled me as an adult because he came off in interviews as arrogant. For the longest time I stayed away from the book because of it, unwilling to mess up my romantic manufactured memories of Mays as player.

But Hirsch's book revealed Mays is just being frank. He is probably the best player ever, gifted and able and willing to play the game the way no one has before or since, so to him such brilliance is just a recitation of facts. In fact he is shy and suspicious of adults and more comfortable around children.

A deeply flawed and inconsistent person — and aren't we all, except spared the public stage? — Mays was sure and supreme on the field. The book describes the Giants' (New York and San Francisco) rocky and rollercoaster existence, punctuated a few years by triumph. Mostly though, heartbreak and disappointment, games so important at the time now just so many statistics trampled underfoot. Such is baseball.

Same as it ever was, as I listened to the Giants lose to the Arizona Diamondbacks last night, knowing the Los Angeles Dodgers had beaten the Colorado Rockies, dropping the Giants to four games out of first place in the National League West behind L.A. with only a week and a half more regular season baseball to play.

What are you gonna do about it?

Rainy days and Mondays

On the best good workdays, Jon Miller and Dave Flemming talk behind my back.

They're the San Francisco Giants' radio broadcasters, and on the best good workdays, they're unfolding the tale of another game from a Giants road trip back East, their voices crackling three timezones away on the little silver digital radio in my office.

Usually it's a Wednesday or Thursday — getaway day, what used to be called the businessman's special — first pitch a bit past 10 or even 9 Pacific Standard Time!

Baseball! Before my third cup of coffee! That doesn't happen very often.

(Yesterday was an exception, a so-called "wrap-around" series, the last of four games that began on Friday with the New York Mets and ends on a Monday. The Giants don't typically play on Mondays, but games seem to get crammed together as the season goes down the stretch.

(The Giants won 4-3 and took three of four from the Mets. Hurt players are coming back, a new starting pitcher replaces one who's out for the season, so maybe doom is premature. Hold that thought.)

I can listen to the game, good or bad, and get work done before my stomach can tell me it's lunchtime.

Only two problems with a morning ballgame, one small and one heart-breakingly huge.

Small: No baseball later that day. Just 57 channels and nothin' on. Sorry, not watching the A's.

Heart-breakingly huge: Rainouts!

It doesn't rain on ballgames in California. But three time zones away, summer means rain and rain delays baseball.

Though far away and high and dry in my office, I drown in the downpouring despair of rainouts. I wash down the drain, grim and dour. I lose the day in mourning.

No, really.

The worst is when a game gets under way but stalls as storms roll in and the grounds crew pulls the giant tarp over the infield and the broadcasters unfurl their limited supply of rainy day stories, hoping all those steps will soon reverse and the game can resume.

When they don't, the broadcasters toss it back to the radio station and the people on the regularly scheduled program must vamp until the next update. I didn't tune in to hear the talk-show hosts prattle. I want my baseball!

Every so often, the broadcasters return with hopeless updates, ephemeral as Sputnik sightings, here and gone. Back to you in the studio.

Almost as bad, though, is when the game resumes hours later. Everyone's attention is elsewhere by then, even the players'. The starting pitchers have changed, the players shambling about with knots in their muscles. The energy has changed. After rain delays, I just want the game to get done and get over.

And drought to envelop the earth. During baseball season, anyway.