Watch With Me

First Inning:

Just as I sit down in front of the TV with my meatloaf, tater tots, and cola I think to myself, “These 5:30 start times always kill the A’s. I think briefly about game five of the 2000 ALDS when T-Long lost a fly ball in the sun and cost Oakland the game in the first inning. Boom. Home run Jeter on the first pitch of the game. Here we go again. This happens every time they make us play at 5:30. It’s bullshit. This never happens to the east coast teams. We have to take this shit just so the game can fit into ESPN’s schedule. Fuck ESPN. TV shouldn’t have this kind of impact on the games. Neither should the Raiders. I hate Al Davis and the way his extra seats fuck up my outfield. End of the first, 1-0 Yanks.

Second Inning:

Yer fucking kidding me. I hate Mark Bellhorn, he just hit a dinger. Fly ball…can we get some love from the wind? No, damn! But I’ll take that error by Sheff for two bases. I like Jay Payton. I was against that trade, I loved Byrnsie. Last week Payton ran in from center field and got a force out at second base. Payton comes through with the RBI and it’s 2-1 Yanks. Oh Bullshit! This ump sucks, that was not a strike to Johnson. Fuck! Well He should have swung to protect the runner anyway. End of the second 2-1 Yanks.


Third inning:

This ump really does suck, that was strike to Sheff, now he’s on first. I hate Giambi. I hate watching Chavez take fastballs. I hate it even more when he tries to pull pitches on the outside corner. Great, end of the inning, 4-1 Yanks.

Fourth Inning:

I need more meatloaf. Damn, a double by Jeter leading off. This is trouble. Jeter’s going to hit for the cycle. And there goes Jeter stealing third. And a triple for Matsui. I’m switching over to Entourage if this keeps up. Base hit for Sheff, 5-1. This game is over. Zito’s out after 3.1 innings and in come Yabu. Zito was up in the zone with everything tonight. (I’m at a point in my life where beer commercials actually make want to buy beer.) This is what it’s like to be an A’s fan. I’m almost numb to it now. I feel like a pro, never getting too high, never getting too low. Knowing that heartbreak is just around the bend if I let myself get caught up in hoping. Scott Hattberg’s weak grounder to lead off the inning is a metaphor for the A’s in this century. At first, when you can’t really grasp the angle, it looks like it might get through, but then it doesn’t. Every time you’re ready to believe in Oakland, they lose a crucial series to the Yanks or Angels. As I wrote the last sentence Johnson hit into a double play. Typical. End of the fourth 6-1 Yanks.

Fifth Inning:
Finally we keep ‘em off the board. I hate how much cheering there is when the Yanks do something good. Why can’t we own our own park? Ha! A-rod just fell over trying to catch a pop-up; finally something to cheer about. One out, two outs, Scoooooooooooooooooooooooot! Scoot was a good story last year, he’s a good story this year. He is the second coming of Frank Menechino. He’s that guy who’s not going to start on his own merits, but you want him there when the main guy goes down. He’s that gritty little Eckstein type, but not quite as good. (Which reminds me, why doesn’t Jamie Carroll get more time for the Nats?) End of the fifth, 6-2 Yanks.


Sixth inning:

Great, slow point in the game and now they start to recap the A’s futility against the Yanks in the playoffs. Of course this means they’re showing “The Jeter Play” again. They already showed it at the top of the show, but like the Varitek-A-rod fight they’ll show it every time these two play on ESPN. Well, Yabu is holding them down, but if the A’s are going to do anything they better do it soon, before Gordon and Rivera come into play. Beagle’s are cute. I like watching the hometown fans. They seem so zany and fun on TV. A walk with no outs and the crowd is alive. They think we can get something going here. Then Chavy pops out. A hittie for Hattie and there are two on for Payton. Ahhhhhhhhh!!!!!! FOUL! Damn, there I go hoping again. Can John Miller stop saying people are “a former Red Sox.” It looks better in print, say it out loud. See how stupid that sounds? I know it’s spelled with an ‘x’ but how can some one be a plural thing? It sounds like shit. John Miller is an idiot. Giambi is a former Athletics. Well for all that Oakland gets zilch. End of the sixths, 6-2 Yanks.

Seventh Inning:

I love rum. Rummy rum rum. A robot can make you a car, a bike, and a microchip; but none of these things can make you a robot. Wow, so this is why people think baseball is boring. Running down the A’s injuries just for fun: Kotsay, Crosby, Harden (best pitcher the last two years). Speaking of Harden, why didn’t the A’s start him on the next to last day of the year in ’04? Kendel’s up. He has the most at bats without a home run out of all players in MLB this year. It’s been like 50 years since someone had 500+ at bats and no homers in a season. Sigh.

Eighth Inning:

It’s fitting that MLB is kicking off its hurricane relief on Roberto Clemente day. Clemente died flying relief supplies to Nicaragua after an earthquake. I’ve never liked Joe Morgan. He’s saying that whoever plays against the Wild Card team should get four out of five home games in the first round. That’s idiotic. His logic is that the division winners have earned it (fine), that in the NFL Wild Card teams play all they’re games on the road (not true, depending on who else wins/ loses the WC in the NFL may host the conference championship game), and that this would be the only way to “crown a true champion.” (BTW Witasick just loaded the bases.) The thing is that if the division champ is so much better than the WC team, why do they need the edge? If you need an artificial edge like double home field advantage are you a true champion? If you’re the true champion shouldn’t you be able to beat everyone? If you lose, you lose. Stop whining. Back to the game…We’re going to lose this one, just hit Bellhorn in the face. He walked him. If yer gonna walk him anyway you might as well hit him in the face.

Great, it takes Chavy getting fooled before he’ll take one the other way. Hattie, fielder’s choice and the A’s get one more. That’s all they’ll get. End of the eighth, 7-3 Yanks.

Ninth Inning:

Huston Street is good. Non-save situation, Rivera’s in anyway. Game over. I think the phrase “He fisted him” should be banned from baseball broadcasts. That’s it, end of the game, 7-3 Yanks. Good night folks.

Rush Makes Waste By DMJ

Well, at least ESPN got their money's worth.

We're barely four weeks into the NFL season, and already the Disney-owned cable sports channel's investment in porcine windbag Rush Limbaugh is paying dividends in the form of free publicity--and lots of it.
Limbaugh's claim during the Sept. 28 broadcast of "Sunday NFL Countdown" that Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Donovan McNabb was overrated because of a shadowy conspiracy among the media to promote an African-American quarterback has already become fodder for sports-talk radio and unknown dozens of sports columnists nationwide.
Never mind that the same sports media he speaks of has savaged other black QBs like Kordell Stewart and Charlie Batch. (Breaking news--as I'm writing this and watching game 1 of the division series between Your Oakland Athletics and the Boston Red Sox, ESPN has just announced that Limbaugh has resigned from the show. But let's not let facts get in the way of a good rant, shall we?)

Never mind that Limbaugh was silent about similarly "overrated" quarterbacks like Brad Johnson (perhaps the greatest recipient ever in the Super Bowl Sweepstakes, thanks to a truly awe-inspiring Tampa Bay defense). Quite frankly, nothing Limbaugh said has surprised me at all. I've known for years that this obnoxious, braying jackass was also a racist, sexist, and pretty much the poster boy for closet xenophobes everywhere.
This is the man who said in 1994, "If you want to know what America used to be--and a lot of people wish it still were--then you listen to Strom Thurmond," referring to the thankfully-dead hatemonger who once ran for president on a platform of "segregation forever."

This is a man who said in 1990, "Have you ever noticed how all newspaper composite pictures of wanted criminals resemble Jesse Jackson?"

This is a man who told a radio caller, who said black people need to be heard, that "they are 12 percent of the population. Who the hell cares?"

So nobody, least of all the suits at Disney, should have been the least bit surprised when, left to his own devices, Limbaugh spewed ignorant invective all over the set Sunday. Let's go to (a transcript of) the videotape:

"I think what we've had here is a little social concern in the NFL. The media has been very desirous that a black quarterback do well. There is a little hope invested in McNabb, and he got a lot of credit for the performance of this team that he didn't deserve. The defense carried this team."

I'll leave discussions of McNabb's relative worth to the aforementioned call-in hacks and "jake reporters," to borrow a phrase from Rich Gannon. The real outrage here is not that Rush said something so stupid and racist--hell, he's made a career out of saying, stupid, racist things, and judging by the radio ratings, there are a whole lot of people in this country who agree with him. No, my anger here is directed squarely at ESPN--a "sports" network so desperate for ratings growth that they recently aired a one-hour special about Anna Kournikova's swimsuit calendar shoot (I didn't watch--more than
once, anyway). If you tune in right now, you may catch shows like "Playmakers," "Around the Horn," or "Pardon the Interruption," which offer nothing except solid proof that no one at ESPN learned anything from the way MTV so destroyed its network with endless episodes of "Cribs" and "The Real World" (sorry, Malik) that they had to start a new network and advertise that it just played music videos--what a radical idea!

So ESPN hired a congenital liar like Limbaugh, a man whose experience with football pretty much starts and ends with the "knee injury" he claims to have sustained during a high school game and that kept him as far away from Vietnam as humanly possible. Proving that he can't even tell the truth about himself, Limbaugh later claimed that his 4-F status in the draft was because of a pilonidal cyst, which is basically a disgusting, hairy boil on his ass. (Sorry for sneaking in that horrifying mental image there.) They can't possibly make the argument that there weren't enough experienced football commentators available--outside of the usual cast of former players and coaches always clamoring for some of that TV money, the network had just fired former Green Bay Packer Sterling Sharpe, a thoughtful, insightful
commentator.

They can't make the argument that they were "experimenting" with the idea of bringing in an outsider, an Everyman, to provide a fresh perspective on the game--their sister company ABC's experiment with Dennis Miller will go down as one of the most embarrassing moments in the storied history of Monday Night Football. To paraphrase a much better writer than myself, King Kaufman of salon.com, if I wanted to hear an uninformed idiot's perspective on the game, I can turn to either side of the couch and ask one of my friends.

So we are left with this--ESPN hired this one-man Klan precisely because they knew what a polarizing figure he is. They knew that his "dittoheads," so named because they parrot everything Limbaugh says without bothering to mentally process it, will tune in to see their man. They knew that football fans will continue to tune in, because, what, we're gonna go to church instead? Hell, they were probably banking that even people like me, who froth at the mouth at the mention of Limbaugh's name, would tune in, looking for more reasons to hate him (like I needed more).

Limbaugh's hiring was a crude, craven act by a company that (surprise, surprise) puts the scrambling, scrounging, desperate search for ratings and money above everything else. They gave a platform to a man they knew was a liar and a racist, and now they'll expect us to believe that they are shocked, that they feel terrible about what was said, and that they meant no offense to McNabb or the millions of African-Americans whose achievements are routinely dismissed by racist conservatives like Limbaugh as either the gifts of affirmative action or failures masked by a crusading liberal media.
They'll appear contrite in front of the cameras, telling us with glum faces what a disappointing affair this has been, and how Limbaugh's statements don't speak for ESPN, or Disney, and how much they value diversity. And then they'll go back behind closed doors and high-five each other when the ratings reports come in.