First off, a split isn’t too surprising in a championship series. I would not have put good American cabbage on the Tiggers taking the first two in Oakland, though. Shows what I know. I eagerly await Big Dick’s take, since he were there.

Second off, I’m completely conflicted about who I’m pulling for in this series. I lived in Detroit for about a year during the EDS-GM merger way back in the dawn of computing. I was something of an ace pilot of the IBM mainframe, and was part of the first tech wave that went into the belly of the beast. Had an absolute, total blast. Learned to love the yankees, and by gawd, they sure as hell learned to love me. Much, much good times. Post-Daytwah, I went to Flint and Saginaw for minor short-term stints, but here’s the cool thing — I was a Tiger regular during the great Blue Jay rivalry. It was the days of the great Gibby, too. Bet I went to 15 or 20 games at the old joint downtown, and spent many a dollar on post-game refreshments arround the stadium for my new Pollack pals. That’s where I gained a true appreciation for the downtown stadium, and why I hate the Rangers’ sterile suburban home. It’s probably been thrown out, but I’ve got a Tigers road hat from those times that I cherished dearly. So, I’m kind of a Tiggers homer. Plus, you know, Pudge.

On the other hand, I’ve admired the Athuletics since learning of Billy Beane’s Moneyball way of doing bidness. You can’t not admire it, not if you’re a baseball man and Scottish to boot. I mean, The Big Hurt, people. Who expected that giant to do what he did? Nobody but Billy Beane, who probably didn’t spend a nickel more than he needed to. Plus, an AL West World Serious would be a salve to my battered Ranger heart an eensy bit. I’ve never been to Oakland, though, but I sure do dislike San Francisco and the rest of the Bay area until you get to the redwood-coasty part of that country. However, the Bay area and all the eggheads (like Big Dick himself) have indirectly provided me a living since 1995, and that’s kind of important.

Bottom line, I think I don’t care who wins. I want a nice long seven-game series that keeps me pinned to the couch like tonight. I want it to be a battle of gutty pitchers vs. battling hitters, with some dazzling defense thrown in for good measure. And then I want them to handily kick the ass of whatever candy-ass NL team wanders into their buzzsaw.

To my dear blogspot.com readers and commenters,

Your cheap-ass hosting company, the largest internet success story in the history of the internet, has never bothered to take the time to write even the first rule aimed at stopping the explosion of spam blogs. Unfortunately, that has drawn a veritable plethora of them. The leeches then use those splogs to comment on non-free riders like myself and draw down whatever minimal Google juice this smoky dive of the internet might offer them. I’m tired of cleaning up after them, so I have therefore added a rule* to force comments with blogspot.com URLs into moderation. And if there are 200 of them every morning and evening, like there seems to be lately, it is likely that your comment will get burned when I throw a match on the diesel-soaked pile every day.

Sorry, that’s just the way it’s got to be. Go get a TypePad or Wordpress.com site if you want to leave a comment here with your URL in it and be sure it gets seen. Splurge that $10 per year,anyway…you’re worth it, I promise you.

Your loving and humble servant,
TFG

* Or I think I have…if it doesn’t work, then I’ll just have to get a larger hammer.

I so do love this stuff:

Two things:

Sly plays the same old Telecaster that Buck Owens played. A good guitar is a good guitar, and that’s just that. My, um, research says that the Tele is the best guitar ever made for my ears, with the singular exception of Stevie’s Strat.

The other thing is the horn section…in this one, and all of those below. I love a horn section. What ever happened to the horn section? Was I just a lucky duck to be in the middle of all this random mish-mash of stuff in the late 70s? How the heck did that happen? Or am I just a nostalgic old man?

Whatever…you kids get off my lawn!