Bring on the Winter

 

So that’s it. The Boston Red Sox swept the Colorado Rockies to win the 2007 World Series and another baseball season comes to a close. You’d think that, as such a big fan of the game, I’d be sad to watch the year end, but to tell the truth, I’m glad to see the back of the ’07 season.

           
The year didn’t start well (if you look back to my post on the Oakland A’s off-season from the spring) for Oakland, and just never got on track. As an Athletics fan, I was used to slow starts (I can’t remember the last time the A’s entered June with a winning record), but I was also used to the team rallying in the second half of the season. For weeks after the All Star Break I kept watching A’s games, waiting for the team to catch on to their season plot, start winning games, and come back to take the American League West. I kept waiting, and waiting… and waiting. Then, out of nowhere, it was August and the A’s were still a losing team.

 

This was the year that the A’s stopped “getting good” in the second half. An inexperienced coaching staff and a steady stream of devastating injuries made sure this team didn’t mount their traditional comeback, and it left Oakland fans wondering where it all went wrong. For next season, all that fans can do is hope the A’s stay healthy (which has been a problem for a few years) and pray that they remember how a season is supposed to go in Oakland – start slow, get hot, and fade in the playoffs. 

 

Of course, the playoffs weren’t much better. A string of disappointing early rounds led to possibly the most boring World Series I’ve ever watched. From the time the playoffs started, most of the baseball world knew that the fight for the National League pennant was just teams trying their hardest for the honor of losing to whoever won in the AL. The Boston Red Sox simply demoralized the Colorado Rockies in four games, which were, for anyone other than Sox fans, painful to watch. In the end, I would guess that I watched about four total innings of the World Series, and I think that was plenty.

 

This hasn’t been a great year, for A’s fans or fans of Major League Baseball in general. Thankfully, the Red Sox put a mercifully quick end to this year by sweeping the Rockies, and we can look to 2008 with hope of a better – if not more entertaining – season. Our long national nightmare is over. I’m such a nerd…

College Football Anticipation

This is a hard time of year for me. As a high-school student, I’m praying for time to slow down so that I can enjoy the last moments of summer before school starts up again. But then again, while I watch ESPN reports on college training camps and tear through team and conference previews online, I can’t wait for Saturday, September 1^st at 8:00. That’s when the University of California’s 2007 season starts. At home. Against Tennessee.

One year after their season-opening 35-18 embarrassment at the hands of the Volunteers, Cal now takes on the SEC powerhouse at home. This one’s gonna be good.

The Tennessee game opens a very exciting year for Cal. Their tough schedule sees the Golden Bears take on Oregon (in Eugene) and USC, four years removed from Cal’s stunning upset of the Trojans in 2003.

Cal’s season isn’t the only thing that has me way more excited than I should be. College Football makes the fall fun. During the week I spend five days in school staring out of the window, pleading for the bell to ring and release me. Saturdays are my day. I choose to wake myself up early (which, on a Saturday, means 9:00am) so I can sit on my couch and watch college football for about twelve hours.

My day starts with the East Coast and Midwest games. Since I have about ten channels that have college football games, I spend my mornings bouncing around from the SEC to the Big Ten to the ACC. By noon, if I’m not going to a Cal game at Memorial Stadium, I’m watching the Big 12 and Pac Ten. Once it’s evening, I take in the “Game of the Night,” which generally lasts until 9:00pm. By the end of the day I will probably have seen a part of at least a dozen games.

For me, there’s no better way to spend a Saturday in the fall, and that’s why I’m thinking this September might not be so bad. Cal comes into the year with a ton of promise, the Pac 10 promises to be one of the best conferences in football, and USC’s coming to Berkeley. And not only is the local football season shaping up nicely, other conferences across the country have a ton of promise.

In the Big Ten, three teams – Michigan, Wisconsin (my 2^nd favorite team), and Ohio State – could take the conference championship. The SEC is, as always, an exciting conference. LSU and Florida are #2 and #3 in the USA Today Poll and Georgia, Auburn, Tennessee and Arkansas are all in the Top 25 as well.

A new college football season is upon us. Thursday, August 30^th sees the first teams take the field. From that point until the bowl games end in January, this college football season promises to hold plenty of excitement.

I’m already singing Cal’s fight songs in my head…

Watching History I’d Rather Not See

It’s a beautiful summer day at Wrigley Field. The thunderstorms that soaked the area the night before are nowhere to be found, and Barry Bonds steps up to the plate in the second inning to a chorus of boos. It was a great day: the Cubs were leading 4-0 (and would go on to win the game 9-8), I was seeing my first game from inside the “friendly confines,” and I was emphatically jeering my least favorite player in baseball.

Then Barry had to ruin it by blasting the first pitch he saw for his 752^nd career home run.

I knew it, pitcher Ted Lilly knew it, and the 40,000 other people at Wrigley knew it the second Bonds swung his bat. The ball sailed out of park and onto North Sheffield Avenue putting him one home run closer to Hank Aaron’s all-time record of 755.

And as he rounded the bases, I booed.

In the seventh inning, he did it again, this time with a three-run shot that barely cleared the ivy-covered walls of the Wrigley outfield for number 753. Again, I booed.

As you may be able to tell by now, I’m not a big fan of Barry Bonds. I think he’s a part of a steroid trend that is ruining baseball, and I’m more excited about Bonds being indicted for perjury than I am about him passing Aaron’s record. So, watching Barry’s steroid-inflated head (it’s grown a full hat size since 1998) round the bases (again) while booing my head off (again), I was conflicted.

Yes, Bonds is in my mind the worst thing to happen to baseball in a very long time, and yes, I can’t stand him. But I had just seen two impressive home runs (one literally out of the ballpark, the other into a stiff Chicago wind) to put a player within two homers of what many writes call the most hallowed records in sports.

How was I supposed to feel? Should I be angry I had seen a ‘roid-raging jerk (I doubt stronger language would be allowed) bring himself closer to a record? Or should I save my ticket, game program, and hot dog wrapper to sell on eBay, and be excited to have seen the home runs?

I’ve since decided to do both. I still can’t stand Barry Bonds and I’m still waiting for people (i.e. federal prosecutors and grand juries) to confirm he lied under oath about taking steroids. Then again, I got to see a fantastic ballgame at the best stadium in the baseball, not to mention a couple of extraordinary home runs by a person on his way to breaking the all-time record.

Even if that person is a steroid-pumping, fan-hating, under-oath-to-a-grand-jury-lying cheater.

Best. Lunch. Ever.

As the title might imply, I just had the best meal of my life. It was a cheeseburger (thin patties of beef that had been sitting under heat lamps, a cold bun, and a slice of rubbery American cheese), some cookies (which were actually pretty good), and a cup of root beer, all served at a Northwestern University cafeteria. What made this lunch so great was not the food – which was awful – but the company. Michael Wilbon, co-host of ESPN’s Pardon the Interruption was there. Sitting at the same table as me. Talking about sports.

You see, right now I’m at a journalism camp (which, by the way, doesn’t look very impressive when you write it down…) at Northwestern. One of the people on my floor happens to be a friend of Mr. Wilbon and got him to come to this camp on Thursday. For an hour and a half, he talked to the group about reporting and his views on the future of journalism. Then he had lunch with us. Awesome.

In the week leading up to Wilbon’s visit, all of the sports fans (in this case, that means all of the guys) were going crazy. It’s Michael Wilbon! From Pardon the Interruption! The night before, we were all giddy with anticipation. We even made little masks with his face on them, like the ones PTI uses for their segment, Role Play. Needless to say, we were a bit excited.

But one of the coolest parts of the day (and this was a pretty cool day) was right after the lecture. Standing in the lobby of Northwestern’s McCormick Tribune Forum, the guest of honor realized he had a text message. “Looks like we’re going to be neighbors in Scottsdale” the message said. It was coming from Grant Hill, who was letting Mike know he signed with the Phoenix Suns.

Honestly, how cool is that? Before 99% of the sports world knew about what happened, we found out because the man gets text messages from Grant Hill.

For the next hour, he sat around a big table in Hinman Hall’s cafeteria, taking questions and shaking hands with the twenty guys gathered around him. Through this conversation I learned that Mike has had dinner with Barry Bonds, that Barry doesn’t like Hank Aaron (“It’s complicated”), and that, despite being on ESPN almost daily, Michael Wilbon is afraid to sing “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” at Wrigley Field.

What an awesome day.