On Baseball

Attended my first baseball game of the year last night - Dodgers-A's and it was a good one. A's lost, but it was a classic kind of game - back and forth, low-scoring, good defense, clever base-running. My favorite moment of the game -

The A's have this new guy Rajai Davis playing center field and hitting 8th. I've seen him play a couple times and like how he plays. At the plate, he takes good cuts and last night he made an incredibly smart baserunning play (the easiest way to impress me as a ballplayer). He's on first base and Nomar lobs a pinch hit single into left field. Davis runs hard towards third base and doesn't really slow down. Nomar takes an aggressive turn at first base to maybe stretch into a double. Pierre sort of lazily lobs the ball towards second. Meanwhile, Davis sees this and just takes off towards home. The ball gets to the second baseman who tries to quickly throw home, but the play isn't even close. That tied the game at the time. Very alert play. Don't see plays like that too often. Anyhow, I like this guy.

And then Bill Simmons writes about the golden era of baseball, which happened to coincide with my biggest period of childhood fandom and the dominant team in the league was the Oakland A's - getting to the World Series three years in a row but only winning once.