I follow all major professional sports. I do not consider hockey to be a major professional sport; not until the playoffs at any rate. But I follow football (both kinds), basketball and baseball. I spend absurdly long hours watching ‘my teams’: The Warriors, the Earthquakes, Tottenham, the Raiders, all manner of collegiate teams. I watch them play, I chat about them at the bar, I ‘like’ their fan pages online, I do all this from mid-October through March.
Then comes April and with it baseball. Then come the A’s. I don’t just watch the A’s. I identify with the team, with their connection to Oakland, to the mission-impossible the team faces every single day. The A’s came here in 1966 via Philadelphia/Kansas City. They quickly became a Bay Area icon, rocking mustaches and cigars while the rest of the Bay wore tie-dye and patchouli. They had a steroid-addled encore in the late ’80s and a likewise-addled gasp of success early in this century.
Then came last year. Manager Melvin steered a band of misfits, rookies and castoffs to the AL West title. They did it day by day, inning by inning, the way any baseball team – even the mighty cock sucking Yankees – do it. But they did it with a sense of joy and sheer abandon, something those cock suckers in the Bronx can no longer understand.
Happy Easter and best of luck to everyone. And let the A’s continue what they started last year. Lord knows Oakland needs the morale boost.
The Baseball Messiah League 