Opening Day, And The Crowd Goes Pfeh

When I was growing up in Santa Rosa, baseball was for me the whiffle ball and the whiffle bat, tossing the white swiss-cheese plastic ball up in the air, smacking it with the hollow tube of plastic, trying to propel it across the yard, over the wire fence with the wooden railing, the demarcation of home runs. It was also baseball cards in their plastic sleeves in albums; it was posters of Will Clark; it was the Oakland-San Francisco Bay Bridge series in 1989, before the earthquake disrupted the whole process. It was accessible; it was beautiful and full of stories and larger than life names and faces.

This year, I've recaptured some faint traces of that same passion. I've been looking forward to the new year, making a pledge to myself to go to at least one game, Giants or A's, every month, with already an Oakland-Boston game and a Giants-Diamondbacks game planned for this month.

San Francisco, I've always been a sucker for the Giants. Oakland, though, I've had my ups and downs of feeling for them. For one thing, their stadium, with the tarped-off upper deck and a decidedly-industrial field to the ballpark, is much less aesthetically pleasing than the Giants.

But in this off-season, a sudden surge of acquisitions reversed the trend of selling the young core, continuing the cycle of short term investment, brief frissons of excitement between selling the stars. Matt Holliday. The return of Jason Giambi. Orlando Cabrera. Even Nomar Garciaparra, Mr. Mia Hamm himself. All this plus the return to health of Eric Chavez promised excitement on the other side of the Bay.

This despite Lew Wolff's determination to move the club to Fremont or San Jose or just about anywhere that is not served by the Oakland Post Office.

So I was looking forward tonight to watching Oakland versus Anaheim on ESPN, especially if the NCAA Final between North Carolina and Michigan State proved to be less than a nailbiter--and indeed, the basketball caused no harm to my cuticles.

Imagine my consternation when the feed on ESPN was actually a sports news show.

Apparently the game was blacked out locally on ESPN, for the benefit of Comcast Sports Net California, with whom the A's signed a special deal for lots of money recently. It isn't that the game was played locally and wasn't sold out, which is the normal reason for a game being blacked out. No, it was blacked out so it could only be shown on one channel available only to certain people, I think on satellite.

It all boils down to money, and not to the fans, and that leaves an unpleasant taste in my mouth, and I no longer feel excitement for the Oakland season. Well done, Lew Wolff; you now have my blessing to get the hell out of town. I don't care any more about you. Brilliant bit of Machiavellianism.