Cats and Tales

If you follow baseball, then you know it's been a tumultuous first round of the playoffs. If you don't follow baseball, then you may want to skip to the next section (which involves kitties).

Wednesday evening I joined my friend Syd to see the Red Sox play the A's in the first game of their 5-game series. And boy, was it a squeaker. Pedro Martinez started for the Sox, and Tim Hudson for the A's.

Traffic was horrible, and I got to the gate only 10 minutes before first pitch. Or, rather, I got to the line for the gate then; I got to my seat when during the bottom of the first inning, with the Sox up 1-0 on a Todd Walker home run.

The Sox later added 3 more on home runs by Jason Varitek and Walker - again. But the A's stayed right in there, touching up Pedro for 3 runs, leaving it 4-3 heading to the bottom of the 9th inning. Sox setup man Mike Timlin breezed through the 8th inning, but the Sox nominal closer, Byung-Hyun Kim, started the 9th. His sidearm delivery with his high leg kick is very funky, and every pitch felt stressful to use Sox fans in the stands. Well, he ended up putting men on base, and Sox manager Grady Little then brought in Alan Embree to face a left-handed batter with two outs, who singled in the tying run, and we were headed to extra innings.

I found Little's moves here frustrating. Timlin is hands-down the Sox' best relief pitcher, and taking him out for the 9th seemed ill-advised. Then, Little didn't have the courage of his convictions to let Kim work out of it, and the so-so Embree came in instead. It seemed like the Sox managed themselves out of a win here.

The game ran 12 innings, with Sox starter (and former closer) Derek Lowe pitching the 11th and 12th. The Sox seemed to keep allowing the leadoff man on base, and in the 12th they ended up with men on second and third. The Sox then walked Terrence Long to get to Ramon Hernandez and load the bases with two outs, and Hernandez then bunted in the winning run. The Sox managed themselves out of this one, too, first by facing Hernandez rather than Long (Hernandez is a good hitter, and Long is not), and second by lining up on defense without allowing for the possibility of a bunt (not to mention that if Long had been at bat, he'd have bunted towards first base most likely, making for a shorter throw to get the last out).

The Sox lost, 5-4. And it seemed like they had ample opportunity to stave off the loss, and kept making the wrong choice at every turn.

I was practically the only Sox fan in several sections of the stadium, but I got my licks in (shouting "root root root for the RED SOX!" during the 7th inning stretch, prompting the girl in front of me to make a face). Damn, but it would have been nice to win that game, though.

The Sox behind Tim Wakefield lost the next day, too, 5-1, seemingly not really showing up to play. However, they've bounced back this weekend, winning yesterday 3-1 on an extra-inning home run by Trot Nixon, and today 5-4 against the A's closer Keith Foulke. So they're flying back to Oakland for the deciding game tomorrow, Pedro vs. Barry Zito, the winner to face the hated Yankees (who beat the Twins in their series) in the ALCS.

Over in the National League, the Florida Marlins - one of the hottest teams in baseball in the second half - defeated the defending NL champion Giants 3-1 and will face the Cubs (who beat the Braves) in the NLCS. The Cubs basically did it with pitching (as their offense is pretty weak), while the Marlins, well, I'm not sure how they did it (though the Giants' pitching is not particularly strong, and they pitched around Barry Bonds a lot). So that could be a pretty lively NLCS.

I personally would laugh if the Marlins manage to win the World Series. But of course I'm hoping the Red Sox can pull it out (and frustrate legions of Bay Area fans yet again) tomorrow.

But damn, they should have won that first game and be in the ALCS already...

Okay, I lied; non-baseball fans should skip to the next section. Just wanted to mention for those who care that I finished 5th overall in my fantasy baseball league (and not far behind 3rd place), and finished with the best overall offense, which was good for one of the prizes in the league.

Drafting Carlos Delgado, Marcus Giles, Edgar Renteria, Jason Kendall and Johnny Damon was enough on top of my keepers from 2002 (Albert Pujols, Carlos Lee) and in-season pickups (Miguel Cabrera, Morgan Ensberg, Jody Gerut) to give me a powerhouse offense. If I can continue good drafting next year, and hopefully draft good pitching as well, then I think I'll be well-positioned.

Yesterday Debbi, Lisa, Michel and myself drove down to the house of one of Lisa's cow-orkers to look at kittens. No, I'm not getting more cats... but, well, Debbi is. She's going to get two of the kittens for herself, a little black male and a calico female she'll name Blackjack and Roulette. They're the kittens of a feral mother, but are getting domesticated pretty well. They're about 10 weeks old; they aren't from the same litter, but act as if they were (which makes me wonder if my cats might not be from the same litter as I'd been told, but simply were born around the same time and grew up together).

Yes, this does mean that I will have two more cats much of the time, since Debbi's going to bring them down on weekends, and I'll probably watch them whenever she's out of town and I'm not (and they might stay here when we're both out of town).

It's, well, going to be a lot of cattage around the house on the weekends. I think that if the kittens and my cats get along that it will not be bad (though it will be a lot of litter-scooping), so we're going to do our best to help them get socialized together: Give both sets of cats a chance to meet slowly, and to have their own space apart from each other for a while. It helps that my cats have met other adult cats in their adult lives and have been pretty mellow about it (even in the face of being hissed at by the others).

My guess is that Newton will enjoy having some energetic kittens to run around with, but Jefferson is so attached to me I think he'll need a lot of attention.

So I'm a little concerned about it, but Debbi's had cats herself for much of her life, and has been coming home to an empty apartment for the last three years (since he last cat passed away), so hopefully it will work out. And, well, I am something of a sucker for kittens...