I just loved living in Oakland. I didn’t really pay attention to the sports except that there were Raiders stickers on every old beater in town. Any nicer car was usually owned by a john picking up a prostitute on MacArthur Blvd. on his way to the suburbs. The prostitutes, BTW, looked like many of the young respectable girls around today (gobs of makeup and revealing clothes). In my eyes, the beauty industry is in it for the money, so they convince these girls that what God gave them is to be covered up by their products.
Across the bay was San Francisco, where we went for culture; and Chinese food (I saw Allen Ginsberg in a Chinese restaurant there once). Then home to the affordable neighborhood. But to me, SF was where the Dodgers’ rivals lived. Then there is across the country, instead of across the bridge to the most prosperous town in the USA, Washington DC. It is not prosperous because they produce something of value there. They are prosperous because they are a cartel of extortionists. But still, they have a baseball team, which redeems them to a small extent.
Last night the Giants beat the Nationals in 18 innings, almost six and a half hours. Ha! Pitching duels are an intellectual affair, with some action thrown in just to recapture our attention. You can read a pretty good story on the game here:
I couldn’t find any specifics, but I watched a game on TV in the seventies that went, at least, 22 innings. I wanted to watch a movie that was on afterwords, “The Seventh Seal,” and I stayed up late into the next morning and got-er-done.
The movie was Swedish with Max von Sydow as a soldier returning home from The Crusades. The Plague was raging through Europe. People were desperate and grasping at any crazy idea to explain or stop The Plague.
Hmmm. Today we still have religious wars and pandemics. Thank God for baseball.
alternativebyfritz 
Baseball. Would you have watched that 22-innings of non-stop boredom if that film hadn’t been schedule to air after the game?
Baseball and soccer – both good games for alcoholics who want to quit drinking. In soccer, if the alcoholic only takes a drink when a goal is scored, he’d be cured in a couple of matches. Similarly in baseball, if an alcoholic only took a drink when an over 350 hitter arrived at the plate, he too would be quickly rehabilitated.
Don’t you ever wonder why there are no cheer leaders at baseball or soccer games? Maybe owing to the lack of excitement?
Baseball requires no endurance on the part of the “athlete” and players aren’t required to be as athletic as in other sports.
Baseball can last for hours and hours and hours, and when you watch it, there’s nothing but waiting, waiting and waiting, with a lot of nothing happening.
You could include all the action in the entire game into about 4-minutes of actual, “riveting” play.
The designated hitter is just a professional, overweight guy who, on somewhat rare occasions, can put his bat on the ball and send it flying.
And the likelihood is that a regular guy off the street can beat at least 60% of the MLB players in a footrace.
And “World” Series? Other than Canada, whenever have any other nations competed?
The batter and the base-runner are not allowed to make their own decisions. A coach has to tell the batter to swing, or not, and the base-runner to run, or not.
The next type of pitch (fastball, curve-ball, slider, etc.) is often decided by the catcher or by the manager or coach.
But I know . . . it’s a “thinking” man’s game. Yeah, one is thinking about why he’s watching such a slow motion activity.
As to Oakland, I had a food plant there (in fact two of them) for which I had oversight responsibility. It was quite a bizarre show whenever The Grateful Dead came to town for concert performances. All the ’60s deadheads who would follow the band around from venue to venue parked their VW vans and similar old vehicles helter-skelter around the food plants. The place near the Oakland Coliseum was an encampment for ex-beatniks, ex anti-Vietnam War protesters and Oakland cops.
Fritz — you’da loved it.
No. I wouldn’t have stuck it out that long. I found out late that my dad was a pretty good ball player in college. Before, he only talked about UCLA as a bunch of commies, then mellowed as mortality stared him in the face (I guess). He was smart enough not to play football, at least. ALS is no fun. We do agree on the designated hitter, huh? I’ll tune in AM570 to hear Vinny tonight ’cause I’m a nostalgic old fart. BTW. As the coach of the Pilots (little league), dad hardly played me because (he said) he didn’t want to show favoritism. Then the last game of the season we were barely ahead and he put me in to pitch. I struck out nine straight to finish. They’d never seen this weird sidearm. But maybe I’d be a conservative or liberal if my brain had been knocked around a little more. It’s like gambling, eh? At least we are free to do it. But in the welfare state we share. Should we eliminate food stamps from gamblers. health care for smokers and football players? I know. Lou Gehrig played baseball. The obvious answer. Eliminate the welfare state.
On Mon, Oct 6, 2014 at 5:13 PM, alternativebyfritz wrote:
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this is a good one dad