"It's great to be young and a Yankee."

I like west coast games during the week, because it's like prolonging the virtues of the baseball day. More anticipation time, but more importantly, I have a shot at making it home in time to see the game instead of draining myself with the necessary task of filtering the play by play from CBS 880am for legitimate narration.


So here's the game recap. Unfortunately the Sux pulled out a win today, barely. 6.5 games is a nice lead, but 7.5 is even better. If we've learned anything from the 2006 Mets, it's that no lead is safe.


A few years ago I had to go on a business trip and the client insisted on staying at the W. Awesome, spending a weekend in a hotel room twice as big as my shoebox apartment, on my employer's dime? I'll take it. The only problem was that the $650 a night room rate subsequently basically depleted all the company's travel budget and for the next 2 months of traveling, we were all forced to take red eye flights and hole up in motels that most likely inspired the movie "Vacancy."


Which is perhaps what happened to the Yankees tonight when they eeked by the Mariners in a game where they could only patch together 3 hits against a pitcher I've never even heard of. A night after the Yankees mistook a regular season game for a batting practice session, our powerhouse lineup faltered and could barely hit beyond the infield.

Not tonight though.

Did a binge-offense last night have anything to do with a scavenging one tonight? Probably not. But it's ultimately immaterial, because with every game, the Yanks are finding another way to dig their fingers into the win and to maintain their stranglehold on the best record in the game.

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Other notes on the day, before I try to pass out for 2 hours...

Friday nights are a bit rough ont the west coast count. It's 4:24am and I have no stupor to show for it. However, what I DO have to show for it is:

I bought this off craigslist this morning, sold on mostly the fact the woman offered to deliver it. Done. Lock it up. But it was delivered a la Ikea, aka in about 23,103 pieces of faux-wood and bizarro hardware that all remind me of the washer Stromboli gives Pinnochio.

Oh, but with no instructions. I felt like I was on some kind of "Legends of the Hidden Temple" game show where the color coded co-ed adolescent teams have to run an obstacle course and assemble weird Eygyptian artifacts to win either space camp, a telescope, or Reeboks.

And in 23,103 pieces it probably would have remained for the next month, had my sister not come over to make fast work of the project and assemble it faster than women running into a conference room the second they learn there's leftovers in a conference room from a client meeting.

NB: My sister hates strenuous activity. She'd probably rather watch oil paint dry then climb up my old 5 flight walkup ever again. She was a biology major at Georgetown and can dissect a human body, do test tube shit, understand things like Krebs Cycle and "Orgo"...but I swear I'm pretty sure she wouldn't know how to boil water.

But just like a down and out pitcher who comes back like a rising phoenix to pitch a shut out, she assembled that thing while we watched the game, admidst my attempts to "help" that more often than not just made everything worse. She had a thing for Erector Sets when she was little, maybe that's the root of all this. Either way, it was f'n weird. Like Poltergeist-stacking-all-the-chairs weird.

"WHERE is this coming from? Who are you?"

"I don't know. I'm acting like Dad, though."

True story.

She must get this from our Dad, who once spent 7 hours assembling a bed loft. There were so many pieces that came in the box (unassembled) that the combined weight of both of the shipping boxes a little less than double my own weight. The best--sort of--part about the whole thing is that once it's assembled, he hands a big jar of coins and informs me that thoese "were the ones you don't use."

And I was like, alright well I don't mind seeing a big bowl of unused screws if you've just assembled a coat rack. But if I'm sleeping nearly 7 feet off he ground, I'd like to know there's 201 nuts and bolts keeping me from plummeting mid-REM. Dads are always right. I never fell off the bed once.

When she finally trusted me enough to get involved, she was all "I have ONE job for you, just stand here and hold the columns together while I get a screwdriver."

So I'm standing, holding the glass doors and columns and what not, just doing what I'm told. Trying to anyway, but, well, not really I guess. And my sister returns to the doors hanging off their hinges, the shelves rapidly slipping out, and my cat literally swinging by his front 2 paws from the rope keeping everything in place.

(In my defense, has there ever been anyone who excelled after being assigned one signular assignment like that? Meaning, that expression was patently designed to facilitate the "You had ONE job to do and you blew it" --TWSS--lambasting.)

More in my defense: my "one job" coincided with the moment when Tex took the Mariners deep.

Which now marks the 2nd time too much excitement over a Tex ding has not boded well with my sister.

She's actually lucky that all I did was lose my grip on the wall unit, rather than lose my ability to fetter my excitement, aka not accidentally give her a fat limp again.

During all this, my cousin Jeremy and his friend Alden is texting me from Safeco, not only with atmosphere-capturing shots of BP, but with his 160-character-or-less captions sent via SMS that far trumped the generic "Woohoo! At the game!" boilerplate copy you usually get in these situations. I was much more pleased to hear about the stuff I couldn't know about just by watching the game on tv:

"Ichiro's favorite snack is an eclair! Who knew"

When I asked if any of the drunk Canadians surrounding him was a Yank fan, he said the only thing he knew about them is that the ones around him have been basically mired in a conversation about what constitutes drug trafficking.

(Which just made the Top #5 in the "I'm going to be pissed if you talk during the game, period. But if you start talking about any of the following, consider yourself canceled" list.)

My cousin is not only an f'n badass for traveling across the country to pinstrepresent, but to suffer through aforementioned inappropriately timed, MID-INNING DRIVEL, courtesy those wacky Canadians.

(And of course, special thanks to him and Alden for all the great shots from the pre-game!)

Well it's officially 6:41am now. Which leaves me 45 minutes to get ready for a bridal shower. It starts at 1:30, which means my parents will start calling me in about 1 hour in a panic, making sure I'm up and getting ready.

Yeah, I don't like Friday West Coast games. Nope. They're just as rough as West Coast 1:00EST football games.