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

I have a love hate relationship with West Coast games, because I love the fact that when all the other baseball games are wrapping up, the Yankees haven't even started yet. I'm not sure what the psychology is behind this, but it's like when me and my sister were little and eating Chicken McNuggets (and it's amazing how much food takes the role of currency in the absence of a salary).

And we loved these things so so much. Still do. But I loved them so much that I hated having to watch Laur continue to eat hers if I had already finished mine. So I would hide one under the table, trick her into thinking I was done, and the devishly furnish the last nugget.

(As if my sister even gave 2 shits about who got the last bite.)

So yeah, West Coast baseball is sort of like that. I like being able to have one last nugget when no one else gets to, but I don't like how it feels when the Yanks lose on the West Coast. It's like staying up to watch a 15 inning game that your team eventually drops.

That's sort of like how very loss on the other side of the country feels. The Yanks lose at 10pm, fine. They lose past midnight, and it feels like I just watched them surrender a walkoff in the bottom of the 14th.

The Yankees lost to the Oakland Athletics, but the former is still the best team in baseball right and the latter is more excited about their shot at the Guiness Book of World Records. That's right. For something totally baseeball-related, too (nope): Most dogs at a stadium. I wish Strange's dad could have been there. If my dad is the patron saint of all things dead animal, then Mr. Strangeman is the patron saint for all things living canine.

You know what I don't get? Why the A's were playing the Yankees and they still had a summer promotional gimmick for the fans/ticket sales? I thought the only times you get the free mousepad or the ugly-corporate-logo-on-back-NYY-logo-on front hat, or the inconveniently heavy Old Timer figurine...was when you were playing a team that you couldn't GIVE AWAY to tickets to see play.

Whatever, no point in questioning it now. Whats done is done and 718 dogs showed up to the game, and I've been hanging out with the 4L boys for too long, because as soon as I finished typing that, my head starting overloading with mean jokes about other things that "dog" could be referring to.


Meanwhile, you know A's youngun' AJ Griffin was 100% battling the moral dilemma every rookie faces when up against the NYY: how crippling is it to your career to ask a professional ball player for his autograph? Clearly awestruck, but maybe by end of game, it should've been other way around?

Nah. But still, it was kind of cool. He looked TERRIFIED in the beginning of the game. Like a little kid who can't believe how many bowsers are in the final Super Mario Castle.

("They're only supposed to be 1! How the hell am I supposed to manueveur this when I'm used to only having to deal with one bad guy at the end of the castle??" Little kid. Or 31 year old with an old school nintendo set and a diminishing interest in living like an adult.)

He was good though, and he was also an entry in type casting for the above average pitchers who blank the Yankees by way of off speed pitching. That's all it really takes to send the Yanks into a tizzy. And yet the only pitchers who ever seem to do it well are the young ones who aren't second guessing themselves yet. Go figure.


Then on the other hand, there was our own Sweaty Freddy taking the mound against plucky Griffin. Sweaty wasn't quite as effective. Not bad, really, since 4 runs isn't exactly a rout, but, well, they lost, so by design he wasn't as good as he could have been.

"I was fighting every pitch. I was in trouble the whole game.When I threw the fastball they hit and drove in runs."

He half shrugged it off/half flayed himself over it. I love this type of candor from athletes. I think admitting when you suck is a good way to demonstrate that you know you DON'T suck. So alll Sweaty really has to do pitch a few Ws and he's back in the black in Yankee favor. I have no idea why, but makes me think he's a poor man's Allergy (of the Bartolo persuasion, not the real allergy).

In other confusion news, there was a bizarro play at 3rd (I think??)..I'm not actually sure how the play began or ended, but I know it looked like some kind of Rube Goldberg machine gone awry, where everyone was on automatic pilot until a glitch made everyone forget what they were supposed to be doing.

(Not AJ though, who had the wherewithall to back up 3rd, which is why rookies are so great. They're still playing by the rules. Running out infield hits. Crow hops. Calling parents Mrs. and Mr. etc. They haven't been polished by baseball blase-ness yet.)
My best attempt to explain what happened is that it looked something like that play during the Jeter diving catch in the stands game, when everyone thought the Yanks had pulled off a bases loaded triple play. It was confusing and no one knew what was going on, and this play today was sort of like that, only more players were involved.

But in both cases, Arod looked like someone who's sitting in motionless traffic and then gets out of his card and walks a few cars up wth his hands up in the air yelling stuff like, "C'MON, what's the holdup, eh?"

Anyways, so the Yanks lost and we can forgive this one because it didn't even play out like a real baseball game, what with the freshfaced boy on the mound, the central park softball play-of-errors and hysteria, the dogs arriving en masse, etc.

The only thing that was business as usual was that Cano got a hit.

Tomorrow's another day. (Today, I mean. It's 4:43am. So, today is another day. By design.)

Happy Friday!

(Also, you know how some people have this signature on their work phones that are like, "Sent from my mobile device. Please excuse the brevity, spelling and punctuation"? I normally hate them because I'm like, why do peeople get to be lazy so long as they give us "fair warning"?

HOWEVA, I'm going to do something similar to that for the next week of games. I think it's pretty well documented that I'll go days without sleeping, but then when sleep DOES hit, it hits like a ton of bricks, and a lot of times this occurs mid-blogging, and every reader is treated to something like 23 rows of uniterrupted g's or something that reads like it was the result of Microsoft trying to convert an old version of a file to the updated software or like the Lorem Ipsum stuff art directors put into layouts before copy is written for it.

West Coast games engender this type of rampant sleep-typing. So here it is: Written in REM. Please excuse gibberish, spelling, and acute departures from coherent thought.)