Ah, the Twilight Zone. I’m in the middle of a half-dozen or so episodes that show up every night on cable, halfway paying attention. It’s always fun when another episode rolls onscreen, and I can remember the general plot of the episode before Mr. Serling appears. The current one is some weird Civil War-based (read “we have no money for a set this week”) story about people returning from Gettysburg down a trail, and a widow seeing soldiers that are really dead. Or something. It’s better than watching NBA wrapup coverage, anyway.

Baseball season and the Twilight Zone always go hand-in-hand for me. When I was a kid and in love with Serling’s master work, I would stay up late to watch the episodes on WGN. They were on at 10:00 Monday thru Friday, and in grade school, that meant I could only watch on Friday, unless it was a vacation, then I got in five episodes. Anyway, WGN was the home station of the Cubs. And when there was a west-coast away game, sometimes the 10:00 time slot would get pre-empted for a little Cubs@Giants action, which always thoroughly pissed me off. And considering this was the early 80s, when only the Mets kept Chicago out of the dead last spot in the NL East. But aside from that, most commercial blocks had a bumper announcing the next game.

Much like the Cubs, the only think keeping the Rockies out of the bottom slot of the NL West are the Padres. The pitching rotation has fallen apart; defensive ace Troy Tulowitzki will be injured for weeks if not months; the big bats are not so big; and things are not well. And the thing is, last year, my first game was on June 7th, and they were not doing that well prior to that. Maybe if I would have started in April, I would have seen as many losses as I have this year. I think the rational thing to do would be to give it up and become a Dodgers fan, or even better, a Diamondbacks fan. But for me, it’s about the nostalgia (which is the wrong word, when describing a team I’ve followed for less than a year - loyalty maybe), and because I am not paid according to the team’s performance, it doesn’t matter that much. They won today, so that’s good.

I am drinking a large glass of sugar-free Kool-Aid right now, and it’s not a 100% replacement for the real thing. But I am slowly getting off the sugar kick, and I even drank a Coke Zero without retching yesterday. The whole diet thing is getting better, and as of yesterday, I’m below 200 pounds for the first time in about ten years. The headaches and random crashes are about over, and I’m running fine on the smaller amount I’m eating. And to be clear, this diet is not a “diet”, like where you only eat grapefruits or bacon bits or whatever. It’s just portion control, a hard limit on fast food, and cutting out all of this sugar. This is roughly like what I did in 1997, and I was able to drop about 30-some pounds with no problems (until I went back to Cokes and junk food.)

I have a new idea for a blog-like project, and I have been hacking away at that. Stay tuned.

I’m back. I have been since Friday night, after a minor scare in which my airline (Frontier) went bankrupt on the day I was supposed to fly out. Luckily they were still flying, because I probably would have hitchhiked home, or maybe bought a $8000 plane ticket, just to get out of there.

I think everything in my last post summed up what the return to Denver was like, although by the end of the week, it was greatly magnified. I realized there is no single place in Denver I really wanted to eat, except for McDonald’s or maybe Qdoba. And I was staying in a hotel by the office, which is in an area that basically has a Target and a gas station. (Also, five miles away is a Sonic.) So when I got out of work each night, all I wanted to do was sit in bed and flip channels, jumping back and forth between nine different CSI/Law and Order shows at the same time, while watching my hands turn into dust from the lack of humidity. And now I’m filling out an expense report that’s basically 17 receipts from Burger King.

The game on Tuesday was great, though. I got there super early, and parked in the lot that was right outside our apartment and my office, the one I used to watch from my desk. It was only $10, which gives you an idea of the relevance of a game early in the season against the Braves. Anyway, I went to Breckenridge, one of the sports bar places on Blake Street, to kill some time and watch Detroit lose again. I am not a big sports bar person, but this place had some okay food and nice people, so it was a good place to go for some nachos (unless it was during a Broncos game and you weren’t a Broncos fan.) Instead of going in gate B, where I usually went, I got there early enough for batting practice, so I went in the outfield bleacher entrance, and got to watch the home team belt out a few. It felt so good to see Coors Field again, to look out and remember all of the places I sat - this one for the NLCS, this one for the World Series, this one for the tarp game when it poured rain sideways, and so on.

Once they opened the concourse and I walked over to the Sand Lot bar, I smelled the hot dogs on the grill and that one scent immediately represented the whole baseball season last year. I got my bratwurst, watched the visiting team bat, and listened to that Rob Thomas song “Streetcar Symphony”, which they always play before the game, and is another thing that immediately makes me think of the summer months I spent up in section 331, watching the makings of that 20/21 streak brew on the field.

I had club seats (which is now called the Wells-Fargo Club level), so I caught an elevator up there, got my cracker jacks, and settled in. There were some small updates to the stadium, mostly a lot of propaganda about being the 2007 NL champions: a new logo on the top of the scoreboard, the tops of the dugouts, flags above left field, and so on. The scoreboard had a slight improvement in graphics, and I got to watch the new round of Rockies commercials, which are pretty awful. They also have these new player blurb things in the pre-game slideshow that are a good idea, but are fairly pathetic. All of the trivia stats are things like “tied for 4th place in total RBIs for the team record for players with three vowels in their name”. Christ, a two-second web search could pull up more impressive factiods. How about “career leader in batting average for all active MLB players” (Todd Helton), or “highest batting average, hits, RBIs, doubles, extra base hits, and total bases in the NL in 2007”. (Matt Holliday) Eh.

(Here’s a weird fact - Todd Helton played football in college and was backup quarterback to Peyton Manning. Outfielder Seth Smith also played football in college and was backup quarterback to Eli Manning.)

Anyway, the game - it was cold as FUCK. It started at about 50, but the winds picked up, and after about the second inning, I started hoping it would start snowing after the fifth inning so I could leave. It always feels so weird to be in this below-zero weather and remember when it was like 105 degrees last summer, and I was going to day games with my laptop bag packed in blue ice packs so I could stick my hands in them and try to avoid heatstroke. But I had the similar strategy of retreating to the clubhouse after the third inning, except instead of sucking in the air conditioning, I was sitting over a heater, trying to get the feeling back in my fingers and toes.

The game rambled on, and the Rockies pulled it out, although it was not as interesting as the game the next day, in which the pitcher hit like five Rockies, and in the sixth inning, there were two three-run homers. Another weird moment came when I pushed through the crowd going out, and found I had to walk the same way “home” as I did after all of the games last year, except this time, instead of going in the apartment building, I walked past it, got to the car, and drove half an hour.

I think that’s the thing that fucked with me the most. I am really glad I moved to LA. (Hell, going from a snowstorm to 90 degree weather and tropical humidity tells me that.) But when I was in Denver, I really wanted to come home to 2200 Market and see Sarah and the cats and all of my stuff waiting for me. When I was at work, I really thought I’d hop on I-25 at 6:00, head north, and open the door to two four-legged ravenous felines awaiting their dinner. And to see that apartment sitting vacant made me sad in a really weird way. And some people’s reaction to that would be “oh, you miss Denver”. But it’s not that. It’s definitely more complicated. Anyway, by Friday, I was desperate to get the fuck out of town, and I did, and I am so happy to be back here. I’m glad I made a few bucks, but there’s something to be said about looking out at palm trees and a high of 79 today.

So I just dropped Sarah off at LAX - she will be gone until Wednesday on a quick business trip. In the meantime, I have a complete fuckload of stuff to do. Everybody in the world wants work from me this week, and THIS week happens to be a short week, and I have so much to do for this Milwaukee trip, which is for our wedding reception family reunion thing. I am supposed to be putting together this slideshow on the Mac, and despite all of this iBullshit, there’s not an easy way to do exactly what I want. Now I am making a book in iPhoto and then exporting the book to a slideshow, and exporting that to a movie. So that’s a major pain in the ass. And I hope this whole thing can go without a major hitch, although I now have about 150 people who are all expecting an entire weekend of facetime with us, and when you do the math, you realize a certain amount of load balancing has to happen. And this isn’t an IP network, so I can’t just go lease a Barracuda appliance to get this to work, so people will inevitably get pissed off. Also, I still don’t know what I’m wearing.

With that, I should get to work…

So, I got married. On Friday the 19th, Sarah and I eloped, went to the courthouse, signed the paperwork, exchanged rings, then had a nice dinner later in the evening. Then on Saturday, we flew to the Bahamas for a week of not-working and honeymoon and whatnot. American Airlines completely fucked up the vacation by routing and rerouting us all over the western hemisphere to get to Miami, fucking up our upgrade to first class, almost stranding us in Atlanta, and then losing Sarah’s luggage for almost five days. But we had a lot of fun and did a lot of nothing.

I should also mention, as an aside, that we went to game 4 of the World Series on Sunday. It cost me $500 for club level tickets, but there were still a large number of Massholes to deal with. The better team won, however. (When you define better as having over three times the salary.) And last night, we went to the Broncos-Packers game, but missed the first half because it was impossible to park. It was interesting to see a game at Invesco, which holds about 77,000 people, and was louder than fuck. I can’t say I would want to start being a football fan, but I’m glad I saw the one game.

Anyway, the Bahamas. I need to write the whole thing up at some point. We stayed at The Cove at Atlantis, the newest addition to Paradise Island. Our suite had a view of the ocean, a patio, two HDTV flat screens, and a bathroom roughly the size of a dorm room in college. Even though there was miles of white sand beach overlooking the water, there were also umpteen highly overdesigned swimming pools and water rides, including a huge slide that goes through a tube that bisects a tank of great white sharks. My favorite ride was the tube rapids track thing, and I got completely sunburned on it. Luckily, you can buy codeine over the counter in the Bahamas.

We went into New Providence and the town of Nassau three times. (Once to buy stuff, including clothes for Sarah; once on a bad bus trip; once on a much better tour from a limo driver we hired.) Paradise Island is naturally separated from the real town, showing that they learned something from Disney. It’s hard to get away from the resort, so they charge you $5 for a can of coke. In Vegas, I’d drive to Safeway and buy one; here, you have to find a cab and fight your way into town.

Most of the Bahamas reminded me of the African/Ugandan landscape of The Last King of Scotland, mixed with a bit of Pappilon. Buildings were either elaborate British colonial, or squat concrete block, usually painted a coral pink. People drove on the left side; the road was filled with right-hand-drive Toyota and Nissan trucks you’ve never seen in the US, and hucksterism abounded. Everyone spotted Mr. White Devil at a range of a hundred yards and immediately started in with a sales pitch for some fine conch shell-fabricated jewelry. The resorts were super ultra high end, and the city was complete poverty and desolation. It was interesting to see the two so close together without a war going on. Anyone bitching about the widening gap between rich and poor in this country really needs to go check out what the fuck’s going on down there.

So yeah, I went in the pool and the rapids ride a lot. We ate a lot. We went to a comedy club and saw Mo Alexander, who is the funniest fucking comic still living. No gambling. A lot of pictures (coming soon). A good time, aside from the luggage (fuck American Airlines) and the sunburn (fuck sun.)

And if you are hurt and offended that you didn’t hear first that we eloped, get over it. Even our families didn’t know. We were planning a big wedding next spring, but we realized it would be cheaper to buy a Lexus with every option available.

So that’s done. Baseball’s done. I think AITPL #12 is close to done, or at least the sales of it are. Maybe I can take up knitting. Or build a boat in my parking space. Actually I found out that if you spend $500K on real estate in the Bahamas, you get residency, and you never pay taxes again. So maybe I should start listing more shit on eBay.

World. Fucking. Series. Can you believe it?

We were at Monday’s game, where the Diamondbacks were swept, advancing the Rockies to the World Series, a first for the club. Are you ready for a post-season bulleted list summary?

• Tickets to this game were $70 each for possibly the worst field-level seats you could get. And they were hard to get, unless you did like me and bought them back when it looked like the Rockies weren’t going to get the wild card.
• We left at 6:00, and first pitch was 8:18, but the place filled up ultra fast. There were also way more people than usual in purple, with purple hair, with signs, with posters, and in costume. Granted, the thing was being broadcast on TBS across the country, which was a new one.
• Sunday’s game got on and off rain and temps in the 40s, which was pretty horrid. We had the same temps, and some wind, but no moisture. It started out not bad, then got cold, then after the game, it was unbearable. I went there with a t-shirt and black leather jacket; after an inning or two, I added a hooded sweatshirt to it. Taking off my coat to put on the sweater was like changing spacesuits in a vacuum.
• Eric Byrnes, who had not-kind words to say about the Rockies, was in left field, right below us. The people in our section were absolutely horrible to him. It went beyond the entire section chanting “YOU SUCK” and booing at every at bat; people were screaming some fairly fucked up shit at him. I’m not complaining, but it was funny, especially the guy who yelled “HEY ERIC, I HOPE YOU LIKE TO PLAY GOLF, BECAUSE YOU AREN’T PLAYING BASEBALL TOMORROW”.
• Unique plays: someone hit a line drive right at Troy Tulowitzki, but maybe nine feet in the air. Without even showing any effort, he leaped in the air and caught it. It was like a basketball manuver or something. Also, a baserunner took off when Ubaldo Jimanez was pitching. Instead of throwing to third to get the guy, he kept the ball, sprinted off the mound, and tagged him.
• I went to take a leak, and when I was coming back and when the usher wouldn’t let me in, Matt Holliday smashed his three-run homer. I watched it practically float way above the stands in the air, and then plummet down and into the fountain at the far side of the field.
• John Elway was at the game, and when they showed him on the big screen, people cheered like Jesus announced he would be cutting an album with Tim McGraw and Shooter Jennings.
• People didn’t cheer, but George Brett was also there. I’m guessing he’s pals with old teammate Clint Hurdle, but maybe he just likes baseball.
• The game was another one of these back-and-forth pitching battles, and although the Rockies had a five-run lead at one point, that shrunk to two points.
• Our seats were okay with two issues. One was this group of two girls sitting next to me, who basically paid $70 plus $10 a beer to spill beer all over themselves, not watch the game, piss off everyone behind them, and yell stupid shit. The other was this whorish girl sitting behind us who kept yelling at every possible moment in one of those too-loud, I am a whore who will sleep with anyone at a sports bar sort of voices. Also, the one next to me kept swinging her towel around, and every time, it came within millimeters of knocking me in the face. Luckily, both entities had to leave for an inning every inning to go smoke or buy more beer to spill, so it wasn’t that bad.
• By the height of the game, it was so incredible just how many people were there and how nobody was leaving. After going to so many day games where the attendance didn’t crack ten thousand, it was so overwhelming to see 52,000 people, all on their feet, all yelling and cheering.
• Byrnes made the final out in the top of the ninth, which was fitting. Then the line of a thousand cops came out, the fireworks went out, everybody was screaming, the new NL Champion graphics came up, and a ton of workers constructed this makeshift stage at second base. The team was awarded a trophy the size of a grandfather clock, and all of the players had their wives and kids out on the field. (Matsui was with wife and kid, and I didn’t even know he was married.) When an interviewer asked Holliday if he and coach Hurdle talked a lot about the series day-to-day, he said they spent more time talking about their fantasy football pool. Then a bunch of players ran back to right above our seats to hoist up the 2007 NL Champion flag onto the flagpole, and everyone else ran into the locker room for yet another round of Bathing in Champagne.
• Everyone either went apeshit yelling and screaming, or found the TBS cameras and went crazy trying to get on TV. We had to walk all the way around the stadium, which took forever. Outside, there were cops everywhere, and a bunch of people got arrested for dancing on top of a cop car and denting it in. But otherwise, we got home with no major problem, except it was 12:30 and the car horns went off for another hour or so.

Pictures? Of course!. Don’t mind the blurriness; I had to shoot fast, and the whole lit up at night thing confuses the camera sometimes.

It’s been a strange summer for baseball for me, and I thought that it was over back on the 19th when we saw the Dodgers. Colorado won, and the Rockies were doing well coming out of that, but my schedule got too weird to get in on any of the other games, and I figured that victory would be a nice high note to end on, and then the team would get blocked by the end of the year by the Padres or something.

And it has been strange being a baseball fan here. First of all, I was not really that much of a baseball fan prior to moving here - I saw a couple of games, it was neat, but I didn’t know the difference between a foul tip and a strike. And when we moved to Colorado, most people asked me if Denver even had a major league team, and I found that among many locals, the Rockies were somewhat of an inside joke, something that took off with a flash about fifteen years ago, and then slowly took its place behind football, hockey, soccer, and basketball. Hell, the rodeo is bigger than football was back in Indiana.

But I had an apartment a block from the stadium, I had a work-at-home/part-time gig that let me skip out for day games, and tickets were usually cheaper than going to a movie in New York. So I went whenever I could. And two things happened. First, I learned to really love baseball. I love the mathematical aspect of it, the statistics and numbers and team records and batting averages. I also love the subtleties behind the game. Football (as far as I see it) is this brute force game of conquest, of pushing and shoving and blocking. (The passing game is another story, though.) Basketball: endurance, and running back and forth; it’s basically a track and field event with a ball added. Hockey: I don’t even understand hockey. But everything in baseball is knowing how to gradually change your stance or your angle or your position in order to exploit a known issue with the other team. The difference between a strikeout and a home run is a millimeter’s difference in how you hold the bat. A split-second decision in fielding is the difference between the other team scoring two or three times in one hit versus turning a triple play. You have to be strong to belt one 500 feet, but a little dude (like Kaz Matsui) can easily dominate the offense based on his ability to read the other team and react. And if a guy like Prince Fielder, who makes me look like a damn anorexic, can dominate the game, it makes me feel closer to the game, even if I could never play at the company softball skill level.

The other thing that happened is that the Rockies got good. They didn’t at first, but right around the time I started going, they started winning more games, and doing more impressive things on the field. They swept the Giants; they won two of three against the Red Sox at Boston. Then after a ton of losses, they swept the Mets. They swept the Yankees. They went into a slump, but swept the Brewers in one of the most lopsided set of games of the year. And as this picked up, I followed more games on the computer. I bought an AM radio to listen when I wasn’t there. I spent a lot of time reading up on players and opponents and history and the game itself. And I loved it even more.

And then it got weird. The Rockies simply could not lose. They lost three pitchers and had to replace them with triple-A transplants or kids right off the boat from the Dominican Republic. Matt Holliday messed up his oblique muscle. Matsui strained a ligament. They brought up a catcher, a replacement for a replacement, that dorked up his leg early in his very first MLB start. But they kept winning. A four-game sweep against the Dodgers. A road trip where they swept the Padres, then swept the Dodgers again. Then two of three against the Diamondbacks. And that meant the Rockies were tied with San Diego for the wildcard. In a 13-inning game at Coors Field, the Rockies just barely squeaked by and got the spot. People were going absolutely apeshit here - some people were actually more interested in the Rockies than the Broncos. And then the Rockies beat Philly twice on the road, (which included a phenomenal grand slam by non-power-hitter Matsui) setting up a huge huge huge Saturday night game, which could advance the Rockies to the next level, where they’ve never been before.

Anyway, I managed to get two tickets to the Saturday game by sheer luck. I bought them online before the wild card was decided, meaning I basically made a $150 bet that they’d finish. But they did, and I went to the box office and picked up my tickets on Friday. They’re different than the regular season tickets, printed on a golden-looking ticket blank. I even managed to get club seats, which meant we got to hang out in the fancy concourse and we had padded seats that were wider than the regular ones. Nice.

The game started at 7:30, so we left at 6:00, and there were already masses of people everywhere. Notably absent were ticket scalpers, since it was a sold out game and nobody was parting with their seats. Everyone got a free Rockies towel to wave around. By the time we got to our seats, it was almost an hour before the game started, and over half of the seats were already full. That’s about how many people show up for the average ho-hum game during the season, and I knew the crowd would double. It was at least as crowded as when we saw the Yankees, an event that brought out droves of no-neck shitheads to boo the home team because their $200 million dollar roster was getting slaughtered by a $50 million dollar team. This time, it was a sea of purple and spinning towels.

There were many changes this evening over all of the regular season games I saw. First, the NLDS logos were everywhere: on the grass, on the signs, on the souvenir cups you get with a Coke, and on many t-shirts, official and bootleg, in and on the audience. The advertisements were different; probably because of some MLB-brokered postseason deal. Some of the ads contradicted other ads in the stadium: a Budweiser next to a Coors; a Pepsi next to a Coke. Some were ads completely new to Coors Field: XM, Nike, TBS. They also showed some between-inning PSAs that we don’t usually get, like one about steroids. Ironically, another was for some “best season ever” thing that spotlighted Barry “will work for HGH” Bonds, which got many boos. The biggest change was the national anthem; a million Marines brought out this football field-sized flag and opened it up. Then there were a few shots of fireworks, and a million purple balloons were released into the sky. There was also a long, protracted introduction of all of the players and staff of each team. There were six umpires instead of four. Also, there was a video of John Elway saying “go Rockies” or some shit, and if Jesus would have showed up and told everyone there were keys under their seats for a free Hummer H1, it would have gotten less applause.

One of the more moving things in the game (as if there was a shortage) was the first pitch. Mike Coolbaugh was a player turned batting coach for one of Colorado’s minor league teams. Last July, he was coaching at first base and was hit in the head with a line drive, which killed him. He left behind a pregnant wife and two young boys, three and five years old. The Rockies have gone the extra mile in helping out the Coolbaugh family, holding charity events, and opening up their own checkbooks. When Matt Holliday won the Clemente award, he basically signed the back of the check and gave it to Amanda Coolbaugh. The team also unanimously voted to give the family a full share of their playoff earnings (not the *team’s* earnings, but the *player’s* earnings, right out of their pockets), and guessing at how the stadium sold out, that should be a decent chunk of change. Anyway, young Josh and Jacob were cute, and got a standing ovation from 51,000 people without a dry eye among them. As I read on a constant basis about what total shitheads most professional athletes are these days, it always amazes me when the Rockies do something like this.

We joked a lot about the plague of locusts or whatever that fucked with the pitchers in the Yankees-Indians game the night before. And a second later, these huge gale-force winds started blowing in, right into home plate. They whipped around a ton of garbage, and pitchers were able to put major heat on the ball, while the offense couldn’t hit anything out. And with the wind, the temp dropped fast. I was wearing a light jacket and thin t-shirt, and suddenly wanted a winter coat and gloves. Sarah went to the gift shop and bought a ton of stuff, and I guess everyone else did too, because the store looked like a grocery store the day before a blizzard. I put on a second shirt and a hooded sweatshirt, and that mostly kept me warm. I felt sorry for all of those Latin American ball players who never saw temps below the mid-80s in their lives.

Then, in the middle of the second inning, all of the lights in all of the light clusters went out, one by one, and in about three seconds, the entire field was dark. I seem to remember this happening at a Cubs game recently, and of course Lou threw a fit, because that is a game-calling event. A minute later, a small subset of the field lights went on, like those emergency lights that go on when the power goes out. All of the other lights were on, though. A quick-thinking PA dude put on the Springsteen song “Dancing in the Dark”. Within 15 minutes, the lights were back on, and the game continued.

And what a weird game. It was one of those pitching battles, where there were no hits or walks, and it just went back and forth, except every time Jimanez threw a pitch, there was a huge cheer. If it was two outs and a 1-1 count, everyone was on their feet like it was the final out of the final game of the World Series. Same goes for balls thrown against Rockies players. But nobody was making any progress, until the 5th inning, when the Rockies got in one. I was pretty sure the entire stadium was going to get rocked off of its foundation after what normally would be a pretty mediocre run. Then the Phillies got a single-shot homer via Victorino in the 7th to tie it up, and I anticipated the game going back and forth for another 19 innings.

In the 8th, Holliday and Helton both flied out, and things started looking very dicey. Then Atkins got a single; Hawpe got a single, and Atkins got to third. The next up was pinch hitter Jeff Baker. Baker hadn’t played much this year, and then in a Cubs series, he got hit in the face by a fast pitch, which gave him a concussion and kept him out for a while. But for whatever reason, Hurdle sent him in, and the crowd went absolutely apeshit. And on the second pitch, Baker singled a grounder to right field, driving in Atkins, and riled up everyone like throwing bloody meat into a shark tank.

At the end of the 8th, at least a hundred security people came out to the field, standing at each side three feet apart. In the 9th, Manny Corpas came to the mound, and people were yelling and screaming at each pitch, more than ever. Ryan Howard - strikeout. Aaron Rowand - a dribbled ground ball right at Helton on first base. Victorino, who had the only home run of the game, came to the plate It seems like four hours between each pitch. Strike. Foul. Ball. Then a grounder to Matsui at 2nd, throw to Todd at first - and that’s that.

Everyone was going totally absolutely apeshit. Towels were everywhere. Brooms were all over. A huge barrage of fireworks were shooting out of the scoreboard. All of the Rockies charged the field. At least a dozen police motorcycles drove up onto the warning track, and there was a SWAT team truck below our section. The screen went to the cameras in the clubhouse, and there was an entire boatload of champagne being shot all over. LaTroy Hawkins was dancing like he was auditioning for a part in Breakin’ 3. We went downstairs and I took a lot of video with my camera. I looked out onto Blake street, and there were tens of thousands of people running around, yelling, with purple hair, purple face paint, brooms, signs, and spinning towels. We fought our way back downstairs, and Glen Hurdle was trying to give a speech on the monitors, but he looked like he just jumped into a swimming pool of bubbly. Outside, every car horn in a two mile radius was glued down. Every person we walked past wanted a high-five. Luckily, we were only a block away, and got inside with no worries.

Now that would be a great end to my season, right? Almost - I got us tickets to see the second home game of the NLCS, against the Diamondbacks. Should be fun! (Especially if it snows first.)

Anyway, pix here.