Any Given Thursday

Seriously, you guys, yesterday I was following the last few innings of the Yankees-Orioles game online at work, and as the game went into the bottom of the ninth with the O’s up by one and the O’s also having won the previous two games of the three-game series, I started mentally composing a blog post for today in a fair amount of detail. I’ve said before that I respect my wife’s Baltimore allegiance and that the frequent Yanks-O’s series throughout the season are always bittersweet for me. I’ve also said that it’s almost impossible for me to opine from my own personal baseball perspective in which everything, especially the AL East, is divided into “New York Yankees” and “Not Yankees” and anything I say granting any positives to the non-Yankee portion of the universe tends to come across as condescending or worse. But you know, when my team gets swept, in my team’s home stadium, by an underdog, what can I say except “good on them”? I was on the cusp of opening a new browser tab and looking up the last season in which the Orioles swept a series in the Bronx, so that I could reference it specifically …

… and Nick Swisher hit a walk-off two-run homer to let NY salvage one win and maintain their uncomfortably thin lead in the standings. Wow.


So maybe we should talk about football instead, huh? It’s hard to believe that the Superbowl (which was immediately preceded in our neck of the woods by the second blizzard, the one that caused SB parties to be cancelled and gave rise to the backup plan wherein my wife walked to the neighborhood Italian place for subs as I kept shoveling our driveway) is so long gone that we’re into the next NFL season already, yet here we are. I think the Saints will probably win tonight, but I don’t think they’ll repeat as champs, and I also think this may be the season where it becomes so painful to watch Brett Favre that come off-season ’11 no one will want him to unretired ever again. Beyond that I don’t want to say too much because my wife of course reads the blog and I don’t want to give her too much insight to my betting strategy in our football pick’em pool. Not that she’d get a leg up, and not that I expect to be able to surpass her in weekly wins this time around – I’m just trying to minimize the mock-worthy ammunition I hand her.