When I was first told last February that I was required to write an Inside Column at some point during the semester to receive a paycheck from this newspaper, our former news editor told me that the easiest thing to write about is something I care about.
So naturally, I decided to write about skydiving.
That might have been a good choice if I had ever actually gone skydiving, but since I hadn't, it was slightly sketch.
So today, I'm going to actually follow my editor's advice and write about the baseball playoffs.
For those of us who view football season as a filler from the World Series to Spring Training, the baseball playoffs are the greatest thing to hit America since the Declaration of Independence. And this year's playoffs are looking pretty good so far.
At least better than the latest chia pet alarm clock that some spammer tried to sell me last week.
We've been treated to some great games so far, if not necessarily great series. Games like Game 2 of the Yankees-Indians series - which was a great pitchers' duel (Fausto Carmona is a baller) and gave us two innings of bonus baseball - are any baseball fan's dream.
Best of all, it ended with a bunch of angry New Yorkers whining about the angry bugs swarming the field and conspiring to fix the game, as if gnats were NBA refs or something.
Games like Game 3 of the Cubs-Diamondbacks series turn me on too. Especially since I'm a D-Backs fan. And we won. When Livan Hernandez got Mark DeRossa to hit into a DP in the bottom of the fifth, even someone who was in my room to watch the ND-UCLA game and who was a self-described "very small Twins fan" got excited about it.
While we're talking about the D-Backs, I'd like everyone to know that Stephen Drew is a future Hall of Famer.
You heard it here first.
He's a great defensive shortstop, and if this series was any indication, he's putting it together offensively too (not that three games can really indicate anything).
The Red Sox's 6-3 win over the Los Angeles Angles of Anaheim in Game 2, which the Sox won on a ninth inning three-run, walk-off homer by Manny Ramirez off the great closer Frankie Rodriguez, was a classic too. I'm no Sox fan, but Manny's homer was orgasmic.
So what's the moral of this story?
Well, as I'm sure you've probably gathered by now, I'm not smart enough to come up with a moral. So there really isn't one.
But if you're not watching the playoffs, you should. Because they're amazing. And if you are, keep it up.
And go Diamondbacks!
