The End of the Season

Around here, baseball season ends when fall arrives. The trees are changing colors in earnest (at least, the 25% or so of then which change are doing so), it's getting a bit cooler (our annual Indian Summer will come later this month, no doubt), and the Athletics and Giants have played themselves out of the playoffs.

The A's needed to win 2 of 3 from the Angels to win the AL West, and they got clobbered 10-0 on Friday, then blew a 4-2 lead Saturday to lose 5-4. End of story, the Angels are AL West champions, despite the A's last gasp effort today. The A's pitching has been shaky-to-awful all year, despite having a good offense. Barry Zito has been mediocre-to-bad (the joy of being an extreme flyball pitcher), while Mark Mulder completely melted down in August and September, for no apparent reason (word is his mechanics are bad; my intuition tells me he's suffering a recurrence of his hip problem from last year, or something similar. The A's are noted for not releasing much medical information about their players if they don't have to). The A's miss the playoffs for the first time since 1999. Pity.

The Giants entered the weekend needed to sweep the series from the Dodgers to tie for the NL West, and needed to out-play the Houston Astros (who were playing Colorado) to win the NL wild card. They won on Friday, and took a 3-0 lead into the bottom of the 9th inning on Saturday, only to give up 7 runs as their bullpen (but mainly an overworked and wild Dustin Hermanson) imploded, capped by a Steve Finley home run. Sadly, they then won on Sunday, and if only they'd held on Saturday they'd have achieved that tie and had a single playoff game to determine the victor. Meanwhile, the hapless Rockies couldn't win a single game from Houston - who revived their fortunes from "nearly dead" to "playoff-bound" in just two months since firing manager Jimy Williams. My friend Syd - a lifelong Astros fan - is happy.

Me, I'm not emotionally attached to either team, but I'd hoped all three races would come down to the wire just to make Sunday's games as exciting as possible. Alas, Debbi and I watched football today instead.

On the bright side, the Red Sox are playoff-bound (the AL wild card team), and face the Angels in the first round. This seems like the best thing, since they can avoid facing the brutal 1-2 punch of the Twins' Johan Santana (the likely Cy Young Award winner) and Brad Radke - a duo who will hopefully carve up the Hated Yankees instead.

As always, I will not watch playoff series with the Yankees in them - even against the Red Sox I'm only likely to watch if the Sox have a significant lead. I just boycott 'em. That's what everyone should do. Hopefully the Twins will unceremoniously boot them in the first round, and after that it will be an entirely enjoyable postseason.

We had a very fun weekend. We took Deb's car to get its 10,000 mile service (okay, that part wasn't exactly "fun", but it was simple). We hit the Los Altos and browsed the booths and checked out the classic car show (very impressive!). I bought some "air plants" and hung them on the wall of my stairwell, where they look pretty stylish and hopefully will get enough indirect light to thrive. I've had my eye on getting some for a couple of years, and Deb finally convinced me to get 'em.

Today we hit the farmer's market, went out to breakfast for the first time in a while, and then came back home where Debbi baked cupcakes (she had a craving) and sat around watching football. I did a little housework and cleaned up the porch and patio. The cats enjoyed the company. And overall it was a nice, lazy, cloudy Sunday fall afternoon.

Just what we needed.