The Last Innings

I love baseball. I know very little about the sport, relatively speaking, for such a passionate fan of a sport in which history and statistics are as important as the game in front of you. And I have a terrible memory for players' names, so I'm quite incapable of holding an intelligent discussion about even the game in front of me.

But still, I love the game, I love the history, I love the stadiums, I love the sound of a ball hitting a leather glove, I love sipping a beer on a summer afternoon at the ballpark.

Or on an early fall afternoon, as the case may be: I'm heading on the briefest road trip ever -- 12 hours roundtrip in two days -- to Philadelphia, to see the Phils play the Braves tomorrow (thanks to my Dad, who rocks).

I am extremely superstitious, though -- call me silly, but I can't help it -- and harbor the belief that I am bad luck for them, because it seems whenever I watch the Phillies play, everything falls to pieces and then when I walk away from my seat or from the television, they get it back together. So I'm tempted not to go, because they're so close to the playoffs.

But not that tempted.

Actually, I'm so excited, I can hardly breathe.

Just after Mike Liberthal's grand slam, July 30, 2006.

In other news... I'm not the hating type, but I hate the Yankees, in the, you know, good old sportsmanshiply way of hating a team, mostly because their fans are so smug, although people probably say the same thing about USC fans, and so I know that most Yankees fans are probably nice people, just like most of us USC fans are nice people. (Unless you are a UCLA or Notre Dame fan. But that's neither here nor there.)

My point is that, regardless of how I feel about the Yankees, I am choked up about the last game at Yankee Stadium and not a little bit disappointed that I never made any effort to visit the stadium. Let this be my lesson to see more things, just for the sake of seeing them.