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OK, so the Yankees ruined the A’s Opening Night celebration on Monday with an absolute demolishing of Barry Zito and the A’s, to the tune of 15-2, with the added insult being a grand slam from A-Fraud. Thankfully I watched that game on Tivo (actually on bush league Dish Network wanna-be Tivo) from the comfort of my bed, compressing the misery into a nicely manageable blur of 30 second skips. (The Big Hurt’s homer in his first at bat as an A was pretty cool though.) The beauty of baseball though is that the A’s could come back the next night and again tonight and win both games 1-0, take the series 2 games to 1, but be outscored in the series 15-4. While that’s not what happened, the point is that a 15-2 ass kicking doesn’t really matter over the course of a 162 game season. As the saying goes, in baseball you need to have a short memory. I’m sure Zito put on some velvet pants and Elvis sunglasses after the game, went home to the Marina, fired up some John Mayer, lit some candles, and maybe wrote a song or two. He’ll worry about Seattle in a couple of days.

I rarely go to Opening Night because the tickets are hard to get, traffic is bad, etc., and it’s usually the same night as the NCAA Championship game. But I did get tickets to game 2 on Tuesday and game 3 tonight. Last night I went with Brad “I don’t read blogs” Lipscomb, who along with Mark “Attorney at Law” Le Clerc, are my A’s buddies. Crappy weather all day on Tuesday gave way to partly cloudy skies in time for the game and I met Brad at the Coliseum at around 6:30. A great pitching matchup between Stanfurd’s Mike Mussina and Rich Harden was on tap, and while there’s no point in going into great detail about the game (you can read the recap here) the highlights were obviously Harden striking out Sheffield, A-Fraud, and Giambi with 2 on and of course Scutaro’s clutch walk-off hit in the bottom of the ninth. Despite the rain that had begun by then I had stuck it out until then, and I’m glad Scutaro saved me from having to decide how long to stick around in the freezing rain on a school night.

Mark was at the game with his Dad and brother Chris, so about the 6th inning we headed over to their seats to hang out for the rest of the game. That portion of the evening was highlighted by the debut of Mark’s sweet new Iron Maiden ballcap and Dr. Le Clerc’s discovery of ticket stubs from 49ers playoff games in 1992 and 1996 in his jacket pocket! Perhaps if he had dug a little deeper he might have found some weed he bought at the University of Michigan in 1965.

Game 3 was tonight with my bro’ Jason “what’s a double play?” Cole. Thankfully I got my quota of baseball discussion the previous night with Brad because, well, let’s just say that Jason and I didn’t discuss whether Dan Haren should throw a breaking ball to Sheffield with a 3-2 count. But I did get to hear all about Jason’s recent trip to Nashville and his rubbing elbows with some bigwigs in the songwriting industry, as well as hanging out with Richard Marx and Gunnar Nelson. I also got to check out Jason’s new beard, which was not any planned new look but rather a result of him leaving the charger for his shaver at home and then spending a week in Nashville.

So, quick game summary (read the real one here): A’s get down 4-0 early, rally back to tie it on a big hit by Milton Bradly, then score 5 runs in the 8th, capped off by a bases clearing double from the Big Hurt that was very nearly a grand slam. Utter pandemonium! Then Street shuts the door in the 9th. What a great game. So, skip the first game, they get blown out. Go to the next two games and see a walk-off win and an 5 run tie-breaking 8th inning on successive nights. Not too bad.

Go A’s!