Somebody got my favorite retired sports columnist, Bill Lyon, to get out of his well-earned rocking chair for awhile and head back to the keyboard. Here's his pre-opening day take on baseball:

• The manager
• Pitcher
• Catcher
• First base
• Second base
• Third base
• Shortstop
• Left field
• Center field
• Right field

M's fans, reading tomorrow's paper, will probably assume that tonight's 8-7 loss to the O's was the result of a combination of bad pitching, fielding errors, and a few highly questionable calls by the gentlemen umpires. And they would be right, mostly.

However, the contribution of the fans should not be overlooked. Specifically, the two idiots just down the row from me, who in the bottom of the third with the score 5-0 in the M's favor, announced to the section at large: "Well, this game is over."

--

Wild game. Bracingly cold, for one thing. "Football weather," one of the fans called it. The lead seesawed through most of the game. Ichiro hit a two run homer to right field in the fashion of a baseball hero, and later grounded into a double-play in the bottom of the ninth, in the fashion of a goat. Jose Vidro, our so-called designated hitter, astonished the crowd by figuring out how to apply bat to ball.

Then there was the sloppy umpiring. Two key plays went to the O's on blatantly, magnificently bad calls. The home plate ump's interpretation of the strike zone was sufficiently inscrutable that McLaren, the M's manager, normally a quiet character, got himself tossed while pointing out the ump's deficiencies. The temper tantrum McLaren threw was enthusiastically supported by the crowd.

Most of the sparse crowd had left by the bottom of the ninth inning, so they missed the two drunk idiots who decided to sprint across center field. One of them almost made the stands before getting gang-tackled by about six guys; the other one didn't make it that far.

A good game all around. Thank God I brought gloves.

The baseball fans among us should, I suppose, extend an apology to everyone else out there.

For the next couple of days, you're going to be hearing a lot about the "Mitchell Report," a long-awaited league-sanctioned inquiry into the use of steroids and human growth hormone in baseball. Result: the league has been drowning in the stuff for the last twenty years. Names were named: everyone from well-known pitchers to journeymen playing for minor-league teams. Everyone who's surprised, raise your hands.

Fine, you say. I don't give a crap about baseball anyway. The players are overpaid egos with an entitlement complex and the owners are a bunch of greedy slobs. They can all go to hell in the same cargo elevator.

It's a totally valid viewpoint. Still, in case you're wondering, here's why I'm going to be angsting with the rest of the baseball fans:

Baseball people care deeply about the history of the game. We keep track of this stuff. We know that the last time the Red Sox were so dominant was in a six-year period from 1912 to 1918. Lou Gehrig hit more grand slam home runs than anyone in the history of the game before dying of the disease that bears his name.

We smile when we read the funny stories. There was the White Sox game in 1961 where all of the vendors in the box seats were midgets. ("Hey, you were complaining that your view was blocked. We did something about it.") In a 1918 game Casey Stengel paused during an at-bat, stepped out of the batter's box, removed his cap, and watched the bird he'd hidden inside it fly off to God-knows-where.

We wonder: how would Ted Williams have fared against modern pitcher Roger Clemens? Would Ichiro Suzuki still be the same phenomenal hitter if he were facing the Cardinals' Bob Gibson (1960s) or the Boston Red Sox' Smokey Joe Wood (1912) or the Negro League's Ray Brown (1930s)?

The comparisons don't quite match, of course. You keep hearing about the "steroid era" because it's just one era of many. Back in the day there were multiple "dead ball" eras of killer pitching and low scoring. The eras usually come to an easily definable end because of subtle rule changes in how the game is played, like the height of the pitcher's mound.

Here's the problem with the steroid era for the baseball fan: we don't know when it started. We don't know when it will end. We don't know who was juiced and who wasn't. We don't know how to compare.

How can you know? How can you take a performance on faith? How many of Barry Bonds' home runs were because of his baseball talent, and how many because of the chemists?

No, I'm not going to stop watching baseball. I like the game too much for that.

I've skimmed the Mitchell Report, though. Mostly what it reminds me of is this: I'm tired of the asterisks.

I'm quoting this mainly because I want to be able to find it later. From Roger Angell's Season Ticket: A Baseball Companion:

In September 1986, during an unmomentous Giants-Braves game out at Candlestick Park, Bob Brenly, playing third base for the San Franciscos, made an error on a routine ground ball in the top of the fourth inning. Four batters later, he kicked away another chance and then, scrambling after the ball, threw wildly past home in an attempt to nail a runner there: two errors on the same play. A few moments after that, he managed another boot, thus becoming only the fourth player since the turn of the century to rack up four errors in one inning.

In the bottom of the fifth, Brenly hit a solo home run. In the seventh, he rapped out a bases-loaded single, driving in two runs and typing the game at 6-6. The score stayed that way until the bottom of the nignth, when our man came up to bat again, wtih two out, ran the count to 3-2, and then sailed a massive home run deep into the left-field stands....

His manager, Roger Craig...said, "This man deserves the Comeback Player of the Year Award for this game alone."

Sometimes poise is about being able to recover from your screwups.

I hadn't made it to an M's game all season, so when bubblesutonium's friend Eva asked, I jumped at the chance. It turned out to be a good choice. Yesterday's game was one of the most entertaining I've ever seen.

( M's vs. Red Sox )

If you're a baseball fan, and you're not following this World Series, you're missing out.

Two nights ago the ChiSox and the Astros had been trading the lead throughout the game and were tied going into the bottom of the ninth. Everyone was settling in for a hotly contested, extra innings game when Scott Podsednik banged a walk-off home run.

Last night the Astros went up 4-0 before they blew their lead in the 5th, leading to a 5-5 tie at the end of the ninth. The game went on...and on...and eventually became a test of stamina and bullpen depth.

Ezequiel Astacio, the Astros reliever, wasn't pitching well in the fourteenth inning. Everyone in the stadium knew it. A camera caught two of the White Sox players watching him and talking, and it was easy to read their lips. "He's losing it," one said to the other. But the Astros had already gone through six pitchers, and there wasn't anybody else.

And then Geoff Blum, Sox utility infielder, a guy who'd batted exactly once previously during the entire post season, hammered a low fastball off Astacio into the cheap seats for a home run. The ChiSox dugout was as surprised as everyone else. The game ended a mere 5 hours and 40 minutes after it started.

Yeah, the White Sox are almost certainly going to win, and they may well end up sweeping the series. Don't let the box score fool you. The Astros are making the White Sox work for a living. This is the most entertaining World Series I've seen since the Yankees played the Diamondbacks in 2001.

My loyalties as a baseball fan are fairly straightforward.

I always cheer for the Seattle Mariners under all circumstances.

I quietly follow the Boston Red Sox, and cheer for them unless they're playing the Mariners.

I'm very happy with any team that beats the Yankees at any time in any ballpark.

You might think that past stints in Philadelphia and Phoenix would have given me some level of loyalty to their teams. Nope. I never learned to follow baseball until I went to college in New England and subsequently moved out to the Land of Liquid Sunshine. I know quite a bit about the American League pitchers and players past and present, but almost nothing about the National League. (Well, that's not quite true. Barry Bonds is a jerk, and that 'clear' and 'cream' he uses must have been made with fairy dust, since he says it wasn't made with steroids. Aside from that...)

All that said, it's been the kind of year to make a baseball fan's teeth grind.

Just three years after a season where they won 116 games, the Seattle Mariners spent most of the 2004 season at the bottom of the AL cellar. Ichiro was consistently good - he set records last season for number of hits - and the journeymen they brought up near the end of the season were entertaining and played hard. That was about it for highlights. Bret Boone, our longtime dependable second baseman, went into an incredible hitting slump. Rich Aurelia and Scott Speizio, our high-profile off-season acquisitions, turned out to be utterly useless hitters. Rich was gone by mid year, and Scott kept a low profile while he worked on his swing and kept working through injuries.

So nobody was expecting miracles this season. John Olerud and Freddy Garcia were gone. The M's had hired a couple more bats, Richie Sexson and Adrian Beltre. Mariners fans did not go weak at the knees in appreciation. Still, I thought we might at least be able to turn in a .500 season.

Nope. We're about two thirds through, 47-62, sitting comfortably in the cellar. Again. Ryan Franklin's maybe-steroids haven't helped any of the M's batters. Bret Boone put up such a lousy performance for the second year in a row that we traded him to Minnesota, where he promptly struggled to get up to a .170 batting average before being released.

Memo to management: give up on the quick fix. Hiring another big gun is not going to help. We need a strong farm system. We need consistency in the bullpen. We need a hitting coach who understands that RBIs are even more important than HRs.

The Safe is, notoriously, a pitcher's park. In the spring and fall, the low temperatures and humidity turn well hit homers into wet rocks that land somewhere in center field. The guys who are used to belting stuff into the bleachers always struggle here. The hitters who succeed are the ones like Ichiro who plug singles and doubles into the gaps in the outfield.

There are signs of hope. We've got a great closer in Eddie Guardado, who management was smart enough to keep in the last round of horse trading. Felix Hernandez looks like he might actually be as good a pitcher as everyone says he is. Willie Bloomquist is coming into his own, hitting .280. Chris Snelling is back. Snelling had amazing hustle and great hands two and a half years ago, but he's been plagued by injuries. If he can stay healthy, he could do great things for us.

And then there's a guy with the unpronounceable name: Yuniesky Betancourt, a Cuban boy who jumped on a boat to the US last year. He stepped up to the plate for the first time in the major leagues on July 28, facing off against Cleveland pitcher Cliff Lee. Lee welcomed him to the bigs with an opening fastball. Betancourt hammered it into the deepest corner of left field for a triple.

I was getting some good schadenfreude out of watching the Yankees struggle, but they've crept back into second in their division behind a complacent Boston. I caught a game with zauditu in Baltimore this year, before they had their disasterous run in July that ended with their manager getting thoroughly fired. Meanwhile, the Chicago White Sox are still the best team in baseball, and judging by their attendance record, nobody cares.

Still. Take me out to the ballgame. Buy me some peanuts and crackerjack. I don't care if I ever get back.

I'm off to drink beer and watch the hydros. God, I love Seattle in the summer.

We really like your closer.

Love,

WoS
(M's season ticket holder)

Every now and again you write something, look at it the next day, and think, "Wow, I wish I had someone else to blame for that."

The squeamish may wish to avoid yesterday's entry. No, I'm not that morbid. Really. I kinda like my life at the moment, actually. Just, y'know, mindgaming. Thinking about what could've been.

A New York Post columnist, already bored with the World Series, has suggested that the Yankees see if the Red Sox want to go double-or-nothing. I approve.

I walked into my office near Seattle today, and announced loudly, "Have I mentioned how much I hate the Yankees?"

Six people immediately gathered around my door to gripe.

To my Red Sox fan friends: you have all our sympathy.

It's sports night here on the Stuff and Oddments page.

The Detroit Tigers are on pace to beat the '62 Mets for the record of Worst Team In Baseball. They need to lose 4 more games, for a total of 121, to beat the record. Mike Celizic on MSNBC wrote a column urging them on to infamy.

In the middle of record-breaking 106-degree heat, the woebegone Arizona Cardinals beat the Green Bay Packers 20-13, after losing to the Seattle Seahawks last week 38-0. The link isn't working as of when I write this, but the Arizona Republic is offering an online poll to find out which coach the fans think should be fired first.

I refuse to discuss the current performance of the Seattle Mariners. My blood pressure is high enough as it is.

In happier news, the US Women's soccer team beat Sweden 3-1 in the first round of the Women's World Cup. Last week the professional women's soccer league (and you knew the US had one, right?) folded after three years, prompting the usual round of articles about how there's no audience for soccer or women's sports in the United States. Right.

A bit of history: The league was originally formed after the spectacular finish of the 1999 women's world cup. After a scoreless tie, the US team won on a penalty kick, prompting this famous shirt-less celebration by soccer legend Brandi Chastain while 90,000 soccer fans in the Rose Bowl screamed themselves hoarse. Hopefully a bit of the magic can come back this year. As usual, Bill Lyon wrote the most succinct explanation of why this is a sporting event worth watching.