A’s win; Angels lose; the AL West is all square.

That’s the good news.

The bad news is this quote from Macha in the SF Chronicle about bringing in Huston Street with a four-run lead (emphasis mine):

“He had two days off and I’m not playing a statistical game right now,” Macha said. “There’s only one statistic and that’s to win the game. You’ve got to go with your best guy, and for me, tonight, that’s a save situation.”

I wasn’t so much bothered by bringing in Street; if a runner gets on, he’s gonna have to get up in the pen anyway. What bothers me is that I was right about Macha yesterday when I said this:

Macha is choking. He’s changing his managing style, just because it’s September. Perhaps we should call him Maucha.

The A’s are where they are today because they play a statistical game. Now Macha has declared that he’s suddenly throwing statistics out the window, and he’s going to manage however the hell he feels like, logic be damned. All of a sudden, the A’s have Dusty Baker in the dugout.

Worked great in Cleveland, dude. Way to improve our odds of winning.

Are you watching, Pittsburgh? This is the real Ken Macha, giving the middle finger to sabermetrics when it counts the most. Macha must know he’s outta here. He must be figuring, this could be my last shot, so if we’re gonna lose this time, we’re gonna lose my way.

*Shudder…*

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGHHH! Macha has cost the A’s two games in this series with stupid stupid stupid pitching decisions. (Well, the game isn’t over yet as I write this, but I need to rant.)

Last night, he took Kirk Saarloos out too soon. Tonight, to make up for that bonehead mistake, he leaves Barry Zito in way too long.

What the **** is Macha watching? Zito had control over nothing–nothing–but his fastball. He seemed afraid to throw his changeup to the Indians power hitters. His curveball was hanging all night long.

He did well to get to the seventh with the game tied, given his lack of stuff tonight. Zito tiptoed through the heart of the Indians order all night long. He should have left after six, and let someone else face that part of the batting order. Or perhaps you let him face the first two batters, and take him out after facing the lefty Travis Hafner.

But Macha decided to keep playing with matches. He left Zito in to face switch-hitting Victor Martinez with two on and no outs. Zito got lucky: Martinez swung at ball four and struck out.

At this point there’s one out, still two runners on. It could easily have been bases loaded, no outs. Zito had thrown over 120 pitches, there was a right-handed batter (Ronnie Belliard) coming up. Anyone with eyes can see that Zito is out of gas, but Macha goes out to the mound, and somehow leaves Zito in the game!

And so Zito, of course, hangs a curveball to Belliard, who parks it over the left-field wall for a home run. 6-3 Indians.

Gggggggggahhhhhhh! I need a Ken Macha voodoo doll, pronto. I need to throw it across the room. I need to smash it onto the wall. Otherwise, I’m certain to break my remote control.

Macha is choking. He’s changing his managing style, just because it’s September. Perhaps we should call him Maucha.

* * *

If there’s any consolation to these bonehead moves, it’s that Mike Scioscia keeps matching Macha, dead brain cell for dead brain cell.

You keep on playing Steve Finley every day, Mike. You keep letting Erstad face those lefty pitchers. It’s our only hope.

Why why why did Ken Macha take out Kirk Saarloos from Tuesday’s game? It makes no sense:

• He had only thrown 89 pitches in six innings.
• The umpire, Larry Vanover, was giving Saarloos a dream strike zone.

Saarloos is a sinker ball pitcher; he wants his pitches down. To beat him, you have to make him throw the ball up in the zone, where he is quite hittable. A low strike zone helps him a lot, a high strike zone is trouble.

Vanover was calling pitches six inches off the ground strikes. Cleveland manager Eric Wedge got himself ejected complaining about it. Rightfully so.

The umpire was giving the A’s a huge advantage. Saarloos could just keep throwing the ball right at the hitters shoetops, and they’d either swing over it, pound it in the ground, or take it for a strike.

Ken Macha took that advantage out of the game, at least one full inning before he really needed to. Witasick came in (these days, he’s starting to give me the heebie-jeebies every time I see him warm up), and the game fell apart immediately. Boom, boom, 5-2 loss.

Unless Saarloos was hurt or something, I don’t get it. At all.

* * *

I figure the wild card is pretty much out of reach now. The wild card will go to the Indians or Yankees. If the A’s somehow play well enough to pass both those teams, they’ll play well enough to pass the Angels, too. The A’s playoff hopes are all about the division title now.

Miraculously, the Angels lost again tonight. I was monitoring the game on my computer until the Angels loaded the bases with nobody out in the top of the ninth, tied 1-1. At that point, I gave up and went and did something else. Somehow, though, Seattle escaped that jam, and scored in the bottom half of the inning to win the game.

Whew! The A’s are still a game out.

* * *

The AL West pennant race seems pretty exciting to me, but obviously, it lacks the quality of the AL East. We’re second-class citizens out here, so we make do with what we have.

(Link via Pearly Gates.)

When was the last time you tried to Google something, and the information didn’t seem to exist online in any format?

The A’s are cursed, and here’s the proof: not only are the A’s 0-9 in their last nine chances to clinch an ALDS game, they are also 0-9 in their last nine playoff coin flips. Odds against that? 1 in 262,144.

I remember when I was a kid, the Oakland Raiders had a coin-flip specialist, Warren Bankston. He would get visions of the coin flip during the week, and then proceeded to call correctly about 17 coin flips in a row.

Anybody else remember that story? It was a long time ago. I’m not sure if I remembered it correctly, so I tried to Google it. I found nothing, except the fact that Bankston correctly called the coin flip in Super Bowl XI.

Wherever Bankston is, the A’s should look him up and hire him. He’s gotta be better than whoever it is they have calling their coin flips now.

Then again, if they’re cursed, I guess it doesn’t matter.

My five-year-old takes one look at C.C. Sabathia last night and bursts out, “Man, that pitcher is fat!”

Sabathia pitched well, but lost to the A’s, 2-0. Whatever was wrong with Dan Haren last time out got fixed in a hurry. Indians lose, Angels lose to Seattle…the A’s still have a heartbeat.

* * *

Two hours later, same daughter gets her first look at Barry Bonds this year and says, “Whoa, Bonds is fat, too!”

Fat don’t matter, kid. Bonds looked like Willie McCovey at the end of his career, his knees barely supporting his huge frame as he slowly hobbled around the field, but the dude can still swing the bat. That 11-pitch at-bat for a double was amazing stuff.

Sign that Bonds is not Bonds, Barry Bonds: the Padres pitched to Bonds in the seventh, then intentionally walked Ray Durham. 2001-2004: that never happens.

Ken’s scouting report: don’t throw Bonds fastballs away. He proved he can hit those. Give him fastballs in, changeups away, until he proves his timing is back. Then start walking him.

The A’s didn’t get much help this weekend. The Angels, Yankees, and Indians all played contending teams, but only suffered one loss amongst them.

Oakland took two of three from Texas, but still managed to fall one game further back in the wild card and division standings.

In the next seven days, the A’s play three games against Cleveland, and four against Boston. The Angels play three against Seattle (and miss Felix Hernandez), and four against Detroit.

That’s a recipe for getting buried in a hurry. One losing week now, and the A’s are done. The playoff odds chart for the A’s could easily take a quick nosedive over the next few days.

BP puts the A’s wild card odds at only 2.6%. I imagine those wild card odds will approach zero if they don’t sweep Cleveland. The Indians have seven games left against Kansas City, almost automatic wins. To pass Cleveland without sweeping them, the A’s would have to blow through their remaining schedule. And even if they do sweep them, the Yankees lurk.

If the A’s do somehow play well enough to pass up both the Indians and Yankees, they’d probably end up passing the Angels, too. Their division odds are 28.1%. So at this point, it’s pretty much division or bust!. Still, it would be nice to keep those wild card hopes alive, too, by beating Cleveland.

I expect the Angels to go 5-2 or 6-1 this week. The A’s need to remain within two games of the Angels by the time they play them again, so that a 3-1 series win would bring them to a division tie.

I have tickets to the last A’s home game of the season, against the Angels. Here’s hoping it will mean something.

A ticket to last night’s Cubs-Giants game fell into my lap. So I hopped on the ferry from Alameda, and headed over to SBC Park.

I was hoping to catch Barry Bonds’ debut, but alas, no such luck. Instead, it was just an ordinary September ballgame between two teams that are pretty much out of it.

Nonetheless, I have a photo slideshow here.

This team…

*mouth agape, shaking head*

…I just don’t know what to say. Words fail me.

Luckily, they don’t fail Bill King. When the A’s tied the game (and later won it) in the ninth, after entering the inning down 7-3, King described it like this:

The A’s offense, just like Lazarus, rising from the dead!

It’s amazing how King always knows where to go to describe what he sees. To explain this team, you need to go beyond our normal dimensions, to unlock a door into a land of miracle and wonder, the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, between the pit of man’s fears and the summit of his knowledge.

You have entered…The Athletics Zone.

I went to the game today. Took my 5-year-old daughter, and my sister-in-law, in town from L.A. Sat with Kenny Louis out in the Blichiros, as my sister-in-law called our right field section, whose demographics today were probably 80% Japanese.

The game was horrible. If you were an alien who dropped in on this game from outer space, you’d think these were two teams out of contention, playing out the string in the last few weeks of the season. There was no energy to it at all.

Dan Haren had nothing, and the Mariners raked him hard. It was the worst game I’ve ever seen him pitch. He seemed to be out of gas from the first pitch of the game. He left in the third inning, trailing 5-0.

The A’s offense did nothing off of Ryan Franklin for three innings. At one point, I screamed out, “This is Ryan Franklin, fercryinoutloud! Get some hits!”

* * *

The A’s offense seems to get sucked into a black hole from time to time, disappearing from our universe altogether, and then, out of nowhere, it bursts back into existence in a brilliant massive explosion.

* * *

The A’s didn’t explode in the middle innings, but they did some nice foreshadowing.

In the fourth, Eric Chavez hit a screamer over the center-field fence for a solo homer. The next inning, Mark Ellis led off with a single.

My daughter asks, “Is Mark Ellis going to stay on first base forever?”

Kenny bursts out laughing.

The way the A’s offense has sputtered lately, it feels like Ellis could indeed be stranded at first a long time. But for some reason I reply, “I don’t think so.”

Instantly, Jason Kendall singled, Mark Kotsay doubled, and the A’s had two more runs. But the rally fizzled out when Chavez and Jay Payton followed Kotsay by swinging at bad pitches, even though they were both ahead in the count.

Bah! They were so close to bursting forth, and then they got sucked straight back into that black hole.

The A’s did nothing on offense from that point on, until the ninth.

* * *

There’s an excellent series about string theory on PBS called The Elegant Universe. You can watch the whole series online. I highly recommend it.

There are many contradictions in conventional physics. The smallest pieces of matter are both particles and waves, at the same time! How can that be?

String theory helps resolve those contradictions mathematically, by describing the fundamental ingredients of nature as simple tiny strings, vibrating in eleven dimensions.

Our universe, the theory suggests, may be one of many “branes”, multi-dimensional membranes floating around an even higher multi-dimensional soup, and every time one “brane” collides with another, we get a massive explosion, a “big bang”. One minute you have nothing, and the next…everything.

* * *

And so Oakland enters the ninth inning, trailing 7-3. The A’s offense seems non-existent. What a puzzle this team is! So many contradictions: they’re unstoppable at times, and completely motionless at others. It’s like they’re both waves and particles all wrapped into one. They make no sense.

The A’s playoff hopes are fading fading fading fading away. But I still retain a feint glimmer of hope. Something starts bubbling inside me. I suddenly felt… clairvoyant, like I have some strange connection to something…I don’t know what….

My daughter asks: “Are the A’s going to lose?” And I feel something strange coming on, and odd sort of defiant confidence, that something weird and wonderful is about to happen, so I say:

“No. The A’s are going to tie the game. The game will go extra innings. They will keep playing, and playing, and playing, and never stop. Nobody will be able to score. We will have to leave, because your bedtime is 8 o’clock. But no matter, when you wake up tomorrow, they will still be playing. The A’s have a flight to Texas, but they will miss it, because this game will never end.”

And my daughter says, “That’s not going to happen.”

And I say, “No, you’re probably right. Someone will score before then.”

* * *

BLAM! Somewhere, suddenly, two universes collide, and the A’s offense explodes into being, once again.

* * *

Nick Swisher singles to lead off the ninth. Mark Ellis gets to a 3-1 count. I say, “Ellis, you better not swing at this.” My daughter says, “He won’t swing.”

He doesn’t swing. Ball four. Runners on first and second.

My daughter says, “I want Kendall to hit a home run!”

I say, “No, that’s too much to ask for. He can’t hit a homer. I want him to single to left field.”

Kendall singles to left field.

“He did want you wanted, Daddy. What do you want now?”

I say, “I want a double.”

Kotsay hits a double. “He did what you asked for again! Now what, Daddy?”

Chavez comes up. I’m feeling it now. I don’t know how, but I know exactly what’s going to happen. “I want another double.”

She says, “Chavez can hit a double. He hit a home run before.”

Chavez hits a double. Game tied, 7-7.

Now I’m getting cocky. I feel like James Earl Jones in Field of Dreams, when he starts pontificating: “Oh, people will come, Ray. People will most definitely come.”

I say, rather dreamily, “They will walk Payton. Hatteberg will bunt. They will put Johnson on to load the bases, and then it will be all up to Ginter.”

They walked Payton. Hatteberg bunts, but pops it up to the catcher.

“Be careful what you wish for,” I mutter to myself. I was mad I didn’t specify that Hatteberg would bunt successfully.

My anger deflates me. The flow of predictions that came from some mysterious dimension within me instantly dries up. The force was with me no more.

Then Johnson hits an infield single, the bases are loaded, one out, and as I had foreseen, it was indeed all up to Ginter.

* * *

My supernatural connection was now gone. I had no idea what would happen next. Would the A’s score, and win the game? Or would the game indeed go on, forever and ever and ever, as I originally predicted?

I just watched, holding my daughter up so she could see, and hoped.

* * *

Jeff Nelson replaced Eddie Guardado. Ginter promptly grounded into a fielder’s choice, with Chavez thrown out at the plate. Now there were two outs, bases loaded, bottom of the ninth, tie game.

Nick Swisher, who had led off the inning, came up again. Like a string looping back on itself, he would close the circle. Either he would win the game, cutting off my paranormal experience once and for all, or he’d send it into those endless extra innings I had foreseen. It was up to him.

He worked the count to 3-2. Nelson threw him a pitch high and away. Swisher took it. Ball four. The game ended.

* * *

For a brief moment this afternoon, I understood. I was “in the zone.” I stretched beyond the normal four dimensions we normally look at our baseball teams with, and saw the true nature of the Oakland A’s. It was beautifully, beautifully elegant.

* * *

But now that zone is gone. I can’t recall a thing about where it is or how to get there. All I’m left with is this nagging feeling that some strangely ironic plot twist awaits just ahead.

I just found this out: many kids’ vinyl lunchboxes are contaminated with lead.

I happened to have a lead-testing kit at home, so I tested the vinyl lunchboxes my kids had been using, and sure enough, the results were positive for lead.

Don’t eat lead! Throw out your vinyl lunchboxes! Good ol’ fashioned paper bags and aluminum lunchboxes will be back in vogue very soon, I’m sure.

Just so happens, I have a couple of aluminum lunchboxes:

I was thinking that maybe I could make some money selling those things on EBay someday, but instead, my kids start using them tomorrow.

Lloyd McClendon has been fired in Pittsburgh, Ken Macha’s hometown.

The door is open now, either for Macha to walk out the door, or for Billy Beane to gently guide him that way, as he did with Art Howe. I guess we’ll soon find out how much mutual love there really is in that relationship.

The Pirates may want him. CEO Kevin McClatchy said he wanted an experienced major-league manager.

FoxSports’ Ken Rosenthal suggests Jim Leyland and Art Howe are other candidates for the job, but thinks the Pirates should go in another direction.

Frankly, I don’t think it matters too much if Macha stays or goes. Whoever Beane hires after Macha will be just like Macha, implementing the philosophy that Beane wants implemented. It would be interesting, as a point of curiosity, to see what kind of philosophy Macha would play with in Pittsburgh, where he’d probably be left to his own devices.

During each baseball game on Wednesday, September 7, Major League Baseball will “pass the hat” (literally!) to collect funds for the Red Cross hurricane relief efforts.

MLB will match up to $1 million of those donations.

Teams playing road games tomorrow will have a separate “Pass the Hat” day in the near future.

* * *

For A’s fans, there are two ways contribute to this matching fund program:

• During the second inning of tomorrow’s A’s game against Seattle, ushers will pass hats or buckets around the ballpark to collect funds.
   
• Donations will also be accepted at the Guest Relations booth behind section 120 throughout the ballgame.
   

Donations can be made by either cash or check. Checks should be made out to “American Red Cross Disaster Relief Fund.”

* * *

I’ll be at the game tomorrow, ready to put my check into the hat. I had been looking for some way to get my contributions matched, but hadn’t found one I was eligible for before this.

You figure that passing the hat with 30,000 people at 30 ballparks, they would be able to get $1 million, but I’ll add my share help ensure the full amount gets matched.

* * *

On a side note, if anybody would like to meet up for the game, let me know…

Barry Zito wasn’t himself on Sunday. It turns out he was pitching with sore ribs. Update: Bobby Kielty hurt his ribcage, too, and may miss a week or two.

How come every time the A’s run into a cluster of injuries, they also run into the Yankees?

* * *

I saw March of the Penguins today. Reminded me of this A’s season.

You’re a bird. You need to lay your egg. Your nesting ground is 70 miles away. No problem, right?

Oh, but wait, we can’t let it be easy. Sure, you’re a bird, but unlike other birds, you can’t fly. You’re built to swim! But…you can’t swim there, either. You have to walk. Walk 70 miles!?! You barely have legs! Yes, 70 miles…in the snow! But there’s nothing you can do about it, so you perservere. You get there. Shortly after you arrive, the sun disappears. It won’t be back for several months. It gets even colder. But wait, there’s more! There’s nothing to eat! You will go without any food through a full winter in the coldest place on earth.

Still alive? Don’t count your chicks until they reach the sea.

The weather starts to turn for the better. It starts getting lighter and warmer. You have some hope. But suddenly, some birds that can fly just float right in as if getting to this place is the easiest thing in the world, and start trying to eat you alive.

Life is just one damn thing after another.

* * *

The Yankees took their bite out of Oakland, and moved on. Monday, the A’s only have to face Felix Hernandez and the Mariners.

To the sea! It’s good to be alive.

As promised, here’s a slideshow of pictures from Saturday’s A’s-Yankees game.

I went to the game today. The A’s lost, 7-0, but the game was much closer than that. Here’s the play of the game, in the seventh inning:

If Hideki Matsui doesn’t beat out this double play ball, the A’s head to the bottom of the seventh trailing 1-0. Instead, a walk, a single, and a homer by Jason Giambi followed, and the game was suddenly out of reach.

I’m not quite sure how that didn’t become a double play. Matsui hit a rocket. Perhaps Scutaro was too slow getting over to second base? I don’t know, I didn’t see a replay. Looking at this picture, I still don’t know how Matsui beat it out.

So it goes. More pictures later…

On September 1, 1991, I had tickets to an A’s game. I gave them away, and got married instead. It was the best decision I ever made. I got a lovely wife of 14 years, instead of a wasted afternoon watching the A’s lose 5-2 to the Detroit Tigers.

The A’s finished that day 71-61, in second place, 8 games behind the Minnesota Twins in the AL West. Coming off three straight World Series appearances, Dave Stewart and Bob Welch had suddenly gotten old, and the A’s started scrounging around the scrap heap looking for a few more arms to give them one last shot at glory before the whole thing fell apart. The rotation started getting some very un-A’s-like names inserted into it, such as Andy Hawkins, Ron Darling, Joe Slusarski, and Eric Show.

There were days when the old magic seemed to return, and other days when the old bones seemed to creak. The next year, the A’s captured the old magic just enough to win one last division title before the generation had run its course. But while the ’91-’92 A’s were still good teams, they no longer intimidated anyone.

* * *

Tonight, the A’s enter a series against the New York Yankees, where they will face Al Leiter, Aaron Small, and Shawn Chacon. They’re all decent pitchers, I suppose, but those aren’t quite the names you associate with The Yankees(™).

Perhaps there are some parallels to be drawn. The ’91 A’s weren’t done as contenders, and neither are the ’05 Yanks. This generation of Yankees may win another title or two, as those A’s did. Those ’91 A’s still had McGwire, Canseco, and Rickey to damage opponents, just as the ’05 Yankees still have ARod, Jeter and Sheffield. The A’s still had Dennis Eckersley to close games, and the Yankees still have Mariano Rivera.

But like Stewart and Welch in ’91, Randy Johnson and Mike Mussina are aging, and you can sense that they only have a year or two of glory left in them before they’re done. And the supporting cast around the star pitchers has started to become a desperate revolving door.

At this point, they’re still a good team, but they’re a good team amongst many, not the intimidating presence they had been in the recent past. The Yankees may come into Oakland and sweep the A’s this weekend, but the converse, once seemingly impossible, now seems almost as likely.

Billy Beane learned a lesson from the mistakes made by the early 90’s A’s, and rebuilt the A’s in 2005 without letting the team get too old. The question is this: have the Yankees learned from those mistakes, too, or are they doomed to repeat them?

Over at Baseball Prospectus, Dave Haller points out that the A’s have the most difficult schedule of all the remaining AL contenders.

If that weren’t enough of a disadvantage on top of the rash of injuries, there’s this: the A’s and Angels each play Seattle six more times. It looks like the A’s will have to face phenom Felix Hernandez twice, while the Angels will avoid him altogether.

If the Mariners keep a strict five-man rotation, the A’s will face Hernandez on the last game of the season. Gulp…

Although the A’s currently occupy a playoff spot, the A’s nonetheless face an uphill battle to keep it. Their best chance is to beat the Angels head-to-head and take the division. They need to take at least three, and possibly four of the remaining five games against the Anaheimizens. Must win tonight.

Bobby Crosby will likely miss the rest of the regular season with a fractured ankle.

Now we’re back to where we were in May: both Crosby and Rich Harden will be out for an extended time. Were the injuries really the reason the A’s struggled in May? We’re about to find out.

Besides the obvious problem of replacing Crosby’s numbers with Marco Scutaro’s, losing Crosby really hurts the balance of the A’s lineup. Crosby balances the the 3-4-5 slots the A’s order, giving them a right-handed power threat to go with lefties Dan Johnson and Eric Chavez. Having three lefties in the lineup in a row makes it too easy for the opposing managers late in ballgames.

Against LHP, Kielty is the obvious choice to replace Crosby in the middle of the order; he’s hitting .311/.392/.444. But against RHP, Kielty struggles to the tune of .230/.328/.343. You don’t want those numbers killing any rallies.

The other options against RHP fall into two groups:

• the low OBP/high SLG options
  • Jay Payton: .274/.295/.585
  • Nick Swisher: .263/.338/.508
• the high OBP/low SLG options
  • Scott Hatteberg: .285/.360/.370
  • Mark Ellis: .308/.363/.439

The problem with Hatteberg is that it makes three straight LH bats in the order, which causes a matchup disadvantage late in ballgames.

The problem with Ellis is that nobody really believes those 2005 numbers reflect his true talent level. He’s never hit with power like this before. I’d rather have him hitting second and getting on base ahead of the big boppers.

The problem with Swisher is that low batting average, which is not ideal for an RBI lineup slot.

My guess is that Macha puts Jay Payton in the middle of the order, as he did last night. I don’t really like that choice, but I don’t like any of the choices.

I had been opposed to bringing up Daric Barton and putting him on the 40-man roster before it’s absolutely necessary, but with Crosby’s injury (and Kotsay’s) it may be time to revisit that position. If the A’s show any signs of struggling on offense in the near future, I’ll reserve my right to change my mind on that one.

Last night’s game between the A’s and the Angels was baseball nirvana.

It was exactly the kind of game I love. Pennant race, division rivals, team aces (Bartolo Colon and Barry Zito) matching zeros head-to-head, crisp defense, extra innings, and the game decided by a small break off a top-notch reliever. (Well, perhaps not so small: Bobby Kielty hit a monster home run off a Frankie Rodriguez fastball.)

For a regular season game in August, it doesn’t get any better than that.

I had speculated that my desire to win might make this series too too tense to take. But as the game progressed, desire dissolved into appreciation. I became consumed by the sheer aesthetic joy of watching a game well played.

I’m not sure why. Games like this, with so much impact on a pennant race, usually have me shouting things at the TV, and throwing things at the sofa. But perhaps, spiritually, it was exactly the attitude I needed at this moment in my life.

It was a lesson in the Second Noble Truth of Buddhism: desire is the cause of suffering. By about the fourth inning or so, I had let go of the desire to win. The game became bliss.

When Robb Quinlan hit the home run to tie the game in the eighth, it did not bother me. Everything was exactly as it should be.

I’m sure this moment of spiritual ‘enlightenment’ is temporary. It is comforting to know that this mental state is available to me when I need it. But I am not a monk trying to follow The Path. When my psyche is ready to handle the suffering, I’ll be back to my old ways, wanting to win. I have no desire to live without desire.

* * *

Or perhaps this ‘zen’ feeling isn’t really a religious experience at all; perhaps it’s just brain chemicals. In Mind Wide Open, Steven Johnson explains how his wife had a very calm, almost indifferent, reaction to September 11, because she was breastfeeding.

Breastfeeding, and other life experiences that involve intense emotional attachment, such as childbirth and sexual climax, causes a chemical called oxytocin to be released in the bloodstream. Oxytocin puts you in a calm and nurturing mood. It’s an alternative survival solution to the fight-or-flight stress responses: tend-and-befriend. It’s the chemical of social bonding, parent-child bonding in particular.

Perhaps because I’ve spent the last five days intensely tending to my daughter’s illness, my bloodstream is flooded with more oxytocin than usual. The testosterone-driven fight-or-flight response I normally have to the stress of a baseball game got replaced by a completely different and opposite response.

* * *

Hmm…maybe there’s Mel Gibson movie to be made from this. I’ll start working on the screenplay right away.

I hadn’t updated the Heavyweight Championship (see sidebar) during my little AWOL period. For the first time since the first series of the season, the Yankees are champs again, after defeating Seattle, who beat the White Sox, who beat the Twins.

* * *

If the Yanks beat Seattle on Thursday, the A’s will get another shot at the crown this weekend.

* * *

Quote from Tim Keown:

It makes no sense to win two out of every three when you can accomplish the same thing — and have much more fun — by losing 10 straight and then winning 15: The Oakland A’s, baseball’s extremists.

Not to mention, it’s a better method for holding on to the heavyweight crown. The A’s have a seven-win lead over the Blue Jays entering September for the overall heavyweight title. They’ll be hard to catch.

I feel a bit like Rip Van Winkle at this moment. I went to sleep for a while, and I awoke to find that everything had changed. The A’s have a 1-game lead in the AL West? What happened? Last thing I can remember, they were 2 1/2 games out.

* * *

I did not intend to be AWOL from the blog the last few days, but my little Jason Kendall fan suddenly got sick. We’re not sure what it was, but it resembled West Nile Fever: she got some mosquito bites, followed a few days later by headaches, a high fever, and a skin rash.

You treat West Nile Fever just like the flu, unless there are signs of meningitis or encephalitis, which happens in 1 out of 150 cases. So not being sure–it takes a blood test to confirm the West Nile virus, but that doesn’t change the treatment, so why stick needles in her?–I spent last four or five days just watching her closely for any signs of trouble.

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Last night as she went to sleep, her fever was still above 102. Today was supposed to be her first day of kindergarten. You only get one first day of school per lifetime. How sad that she would have to miss out on sharing the first-day experience with other kids.

But when she woke up this morning, her fever was suddenly gone. Four days of high fevers, and miraculously, everything was back to normal, just in the nick of time.

Wow. OK, so, I guess you get to go to school after all, kid.

We saw her off to her classroom, made sure her teacher kept a close eye on her, and said our goodbyes. My wife and I hung around the school talking to other parents until recess, so we could check her temperature again, just to be sure. She was fine.

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When the school day was done, and both my kids were home playing with each other, I snuck off by myself for a little while and turned on the radio. The A’s were playing a tense extra-inning battle, which they won on a Nick Swisher homer in the 12th.

Winning is nice, and first place is nice, but that wasn’t the best part of the game. Happy endings aside, it was simply a relief, even for a few minutes, to escape.

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I’m totally drained. Going from worrying that my youngest kid could be seriously ill, to sending her off to school for the first time, all within 24 hours–my emotional tank is empty.

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Tuesday night, the A’s-Angels series begins. The pitching matchups should make for three close, exciting ballgames. It should be baseball at its best. I should be looking forward to it with intense anticipation.

But I’m not. I don’t think I can take it, I really don’t. Not right now. It’s too much.

Wake me when it’s over.