Friday Baseball Post

OK, I'm a little on the late side...pennant race and all.  Didn't want to write during the game last night, and then didn't want to write after it.

And I'm still not really up for anything analytical at all.  Maybe next week.  I'll do nostalgia, or something like that, instead.  My first Giants pennant race was 1971.  The Dodgers had a local affiliate in Phoenix, so we had the Dodgers on the radio every night...Vin Scully was pretty good at doing two games at once, so he let us know what was happening, certainly in the final week of the season, with the Giants.  But that wasn't all -- we could, barely, if we tilted the radio the right way, on most nights, pick up the Giants broadcast from San Francisco.  I'm assuming it was KNBR in 1971...I know it was Lon Simmons, and (checking) it looks like Bill Thompson, who I really don't remember, was the other guy.  So the last week of the season we did a whole lot of tilting the radio and trying to hear through the static, and trying to decide whether we were better off hearing three quarters of the Giants broadcast than all of the Dodgers.  And Marichal beat the Padres on the last game of the season, and the Giants were off to get clobbered by the Pirates.

The next time it went down to the last week was a lot different for me -- I was in the Eastern time zone, pre-ESPN (at least for me), and so I was sometimes finding out what happened, not in the next day's paper, but in the following day's paper.  Really stunk -- I spend the 1980s mostly without cable, living on the east coast, following a team on the west coast.  In other words, I spent a good part of the 1980s scrambling around trying to get a score. 

Skip ahead -- I need to mention that I was at the Brian Johnson game in 1997. 

And now, it doesn't really matter where you live, because there's always mlb.com, so unless the network is down I'm listneing to the great Giants radio team whenever I want, so I don't have to miss a single one of the double plays that the Giants hit into, no matter how mundane or creative they may be.  Damn Freddy Sanchez.