Special midday blog.

I know that I'm breaking form, and might regret this if I have nothing else to say this evening, but I had to strike while the iron is hot here... I have a few things that I wanted to mention that are somewhat out of the norm of my standard topics.

The first thing is baseball. I can't get enough of it, as many of you know, but that's another blog altogether. There are two things that have been bothering me this season. The first is the media's short-changing of the Oakland A's. All the major news outlets seem to think that this rag-tag group of misfits are a fluke. Just like the 2002 A's who should have knocked off the Yankees in the playoffs if only Jeremy Giambi knew how to slide were a fluke. Apparently they don't realize that the A's thrive in the role of David to most Goliaths you put them up against. Like this season; at this very moment that I am writing this blog, the A's are one game behind the Angels and lead the Wild Card race by two games. If you didn't know, the Angels are constantly touted as one of the "elite" teams in baseball right now. The A's are beating the Orioles in the Wild Card, the very same Orioles that had everyone on the eastern seaboard holding their breath for the first two weeks of the season because they were in first place over both the Yankees and Red Sox. So I say "Up yours, mass media" for trying to short the already excellent season my team has put together, and I just say look out, since the A's always really crank it up after the All Star break.

The other problem I have with sports media these days are all the misinformed fools that think that Barry Bonds should still be playing in San Francisco. They find small examples of people who still pull for him. A recent article mentioned a kid in the stands who had a "bring back Barry" sign one day. How can a whole city's perception be based on a kid with a sharpie? I'm sure there were some bigots out in Atlanta who had "Rocker was right" signs at a Braves game after that whole fiasco, but no one lumped all of Atlanta in with those yahoos. What's worse, we're even getting press in the Wall Street Journal because of that steroid-pumped idiot. There was just this week an article about the economic downturn at AT&T Park because of Bond's departure. Of course, everyone had dollar signs in their eyes at the prospect of catching one of Bonds' home run balls and turning around and putting it up on ebay that night. But that's not the problem. The problem is that the Giants are currently miring below the .500 mark, and lost eleven of their first seventeen games. They are miraculously in third place in the West right now despite the fact that their team home run leader has hit four dingers over the course of the first thirty two games and despite the fact that they are playing horribly fundamentally unsound baseball right now. Oh, and Fred Lewis, who took over in left this season.... yeah, he leads the team both in batting average and runs scored.

One last tidbit for the morning: if I should somehow drop dead unexpectedly well before my time, I am going on record right now in saying that I want this coffin: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,354137,00.html That man does every Pabst drinker proud.