The Prodigal

So here we are, a day before the World Series begins in Tampa, Florida, with my old team (the Phillies) the mild underdog to the Upstart Rays.

A fine word, Upstart, and not just because it makes my brain fire off its Marx Brothers ganglions from "Duck Soup." Here, won't you join me in the tangent. (Skip ahead to four minutes, but only if you're in a hurry. The Hot Stove riposte has always been one of my favorites.)



Anyway... I'm an ex-Phillies fan. In the mid '90s, after the Mitch Williams Experience and the slow dissolve of the Blue Snow Team of Dykstra, Hollins, Kruk, Incaviglia and Eisenreich (I'm omitting Schilling in the same way that you omit family relations that later did time for cause), the team simply stopped trying. They held their breath and played the Small Market Blues (never mind that they live and work in a top five media market with, as it is clearly apparent now, oodles of cash), and the few players that didn't stink on ice got out of town as fast as they could. There's no way that you can tell me that the franchise was making an honest effort to actually win baseball games in those days. It was easier, far easier, to lie back and turtle up for the dominant Braves teams and wait for a new yard.

There was also The Strike. And well, baseball did not recover in Philadelphia for a very long time after that. The NFL moved into the vacuum with a vengeance, and instead of the Eagles gradually taking over the consciousness around mid August (say, when pre-season games started), it got more like early July. If the Sixers or Flyers went deep into the post-season, it was almost as if the Phillies didn't exist at all.

I gave up on baseball. Entirely. I was an obsessed musician, and after that petered out from band turnover and the simple reality that the world didn't hear our songs that way that we did... well, that drive got turned over to work and family and writing. (Books, then much later, this blog.) If I ever wanted to turn on a baseball game, the Yankee Dynasty cured me of that with a quickness.

Then, we moved to the West Coast for my career and (what felt like) for good. So my Philles fandom wasn't only over, it was dead and buried. They closed the Vet, and that was that. The coffin was buried, no words were said, and I wasn't watching any baseball, let alone the Phillies.

Then, a funny thing happened. On a lark, my wife and I took our tiny little girl to an Oakland A's game. And that team -- the Chavez/Tejada/Giambi pre-Moneyball club, the one that could actually swing the bats in addition to having exciting young starting pitchers -- sucked me right back in.

Here was a club that played in a cheap old dump (Oakland Alameda is basically the Vet with grass). The fans had chips on their shoulders from being the second-class citizens to the Giants... much in the same way that Philles Fan chafes over the Mets (and to a lesser extent, the Eagles). Unlike the scumbags that had been taking MLB revenue sharing money without making any kind of effort, they won games, made great trades, and generally seemed smarter than the other meatheads in the baseball GM ranks. They were the perfect team to drag me back in.

And then I got an invite to restart my fantasy sports addiction, which had been dormant for 15 years or more, back into my college years when I wanted to be, well, a sportswriter.

Flash forward to now. After many good years, some heartbreaking playoffs, and a partial season ticket plan, the A's have become, for all intents and purposes, the Phillies of the mid-90s -- a team that makes salary dump trades of the players they hit on in development, only to tell you that no, no, it's not a fire sale, honest.

I've moved 3,000 miles away from them for my career, and don't expect to ever see my team in person again.

My kids don't really care about sports, so it's not like I have to defend my serisl baseball adultery.

Rooting for the Mets is like punching yourself.

Rooting for the Yankees, given the lingering memories of the Freaking Jeremy Giambi Slide Play, is like rooting for the guy who used to punch you.

Rooting for your fantasy league guys, at least in the playoffs, is pretty close to meaningless.

Not watching baseball at all, given the blog's existence, isn't really an option, either.

So, um... er... go Phillies. I'm with you all the way. With the fury of... a twice-divorced fan, who should be old enough to know better, and who will never root for you with a hundreth of the intensity that he had back in the day.

Yay, Team!