Here comes game six

Here we go. Game six back in St. Louis on the horizon.
Thanks to the Red Sox win tonight it will be at 4 eastern so 2 mountain. How in the world will I be able to function at work during the afternoon knowing the game is on. It will be very hard. I just might have to get sick.. cough, cough.. hack.. weeeze.

The decision has been made. Pete Munro gets the start in game six to allow Roger to pitch on full rest in game seven (if necessary) or extra rested for a possible game one of the World Series. It chills me just to type that out. I almost don't know what to do or say.

I started getting into watching baseball in the mid 80's. Growing up in a smallish town light years away from professional sports is much different I would imagine than growing up with people talking about the home team all the time. I played little league just like about every other American boy. A couple of years of it. I could field but not hit. I moved on to soccer later, then tennis. This led me to not grow up rooting for a team by birthright like so many other people. My baseball fandom grew differently.

It basically started because of a friend of mine. His name was Charles Robertson. He was a tall lanky redheaded guy with a cool sense of humor and he always wore a Detroit Tigers baseball cap. For some reason I found that to be cool. I thought I needed to get me one but which team. I did not want to copy him or just pick a team at random. That's about the same time my father finally allowed us to have cable tv, just in time to miss out on the best part of MTV. Anyway, one of the channels we got was HSE or Home Sports Entertainment. Living in Carlsbad, New Mexico logically we got the Texas feed of it. One of the things they showed on HSE was tape delayed Houston Astro ballgames. This was my introduction to pro baseball. This is where I discovered Nolan Ryan, Mike Scott and a very young Craig Biggio. I was hooked by their and his hustle right away. I had found my team. I have been an Astro fan ever since, with Biggio being my favorite player. Nothing will ever change any of those two things.

Since Biggio came up in 1988 you see that I just missed out on the 86 disappointment and of course the 1980 one too. I did see replays of some of those games on HSE too however, so rather quickly did I become familiar with the Astro history. All of this should explain why this thought of being one game away from the World Series is so new to me. It has to be why I cannot seem to think straight ever since Jeff Kent clobbered that home run to win game five.

It amazes me how sports can suck you in and make you get all wrapped up in it. I will write more of my thoughts about it in the future. One thing is certain and that is that playoff baseball, or football, or hockey or basketball, or whatever surely not only intensifies the players but intensifies how us fans get all twisted up inside. It is certainly one of the most interesting things about us being human.

There are so many ways these two games can end tomorrow in the AL and NL. So many storylines and subplots. It has to be making Hollywood quite jealous, doesn't it?