OK, imagine you’re in St. Petersburg, Florida in mid-September. You’re at Tropicana Field for Tampa Bay and the Royals, both about 45 out. There’s hardly a soul in the house, not even that loudmouth who sits behind home plate. When you yell "Let’s Go Devil Rays," you can hear your voice echo off the outfield wall. ("Devil Rays" because you’re not having any of this new name, the one that makes it sound like Ray Romano bought the naming rights to the team.)

That was roughly the atmosphere in the Tokyo Dome tonight. Despite word that the game was a sellout, there were a couple of thousand empty seats (there weren’t any last night), and the fans who were here wouldn’t have disturbed the cats at a Japanese cemetery.

The local fans sat on their hands. The Red Sox fans never got a chance to get anything going. And there just weren’t enough A’s fans in attendance to make a dent in the place even as we responded enthusiastically to the redemption of Emil Brown and the dominating if slightly troubling performance from Rich Harden.

That being said, it was still a great day in Tokyo and at the ballpark, and not just because the A’s got that first W and ensured that however good the Red Sox are this year, hey, at least they won’t win it wire-to-wire. (Toronto or the Yankees and Tampa Bay or Baltimore will be a half game ahead of the Sox at the end of play Monday.)

The weather was sunny and in the high 60s during the day, with a soft, narcotic breeze. The cherry blossoms are out with a vengeance on practically every street and in every park. This time of year, Tokyo must be the most beautiful city in the world, and the people who live here are taking obvious pleasure in it.

The good feelings baseball fans from all over the world brought into yesterday’s game – can you believe we’re here? How great is this? – carried over into tonight.

A whole bunch of A’s fans I sat with last night in section 20 – $170 a shot in the first deck right over what turned out to be the Boston dugout – did the same thing I did and went cheap for game two – $70 a ticket to sit in section six at the bottom of the second deck, again over the Boston dugout.

It was a reunion of a bunch of people who’d gotten to know each other the night before, and there was plenty of beer, high fives and e-mail addresses exchanged. Maybe even one romance got started, if I’m right about what was going on between an A’s fan and a Sox fan sitting near me.

The early A’s lead, which never appeared in jeopardy, made for a relaxed cruise through the game, and we were as raucous as we could be, to the appreciation of the Japanese fans sitting near us, but not the stadium PA crew, who played insipid organ tapes everytime we started chanting, "Let’s Go Oakland." It was like being shushed by a librarian with a really, really loud sound system.

About Harden, because I know your heart skipped a beat when I used the words "Harden" and "troubling" in the same sentence. You went to mlb.com this morning and saw Harden’s line – 6 IP, 3 H, 9 Ks – and you figured that at least for now, all is right in Hardenland. So what’s the problem? Maybe nothing, but Rich topped out at 155 km/h on the stadium gun. That’s 96 to you and me. He only got that high once. (A first inning ball to Youkilis way up out of the strike zone.) Most of his fastballs were in the low to mid 90s, and he threw more breaking pitches than I can ever remember seeing him throw.

It was completely unlike him. I know worrying about Harden is an occupational hazard of being an A’s fan, and it could just be that he shifted his pattern because the Red Sox were sitting on his fastball and his breaking stuff was working, and then there's that it’s so early in the season the season hasn’t really started yet, so maybe he wasn’t as ready as he’d like to be or will be in a week or two.

I don’t know. In any case, I found myself holding back a little as I watched him dispatch the Sox. It’s going to take a while before I can root for him wholeheartedly, and I definitely want to see if his approach tonight was a one-time thing or represents some shift in what he can do and, therefore, what we can hope for from him.

Other notes from tonight’s game, and a couple of ones left over from last night:

-- The only t-shirts commemorating the game went for $38 a pop at the Tokyo Dome – if you could get one. They were sold out before very long on Tuesday. Aaron Salles (note the correct spelling tonight; he’s the Humboldt Stater in the pic yesterday with Billy and the Wolff) scored one and literally had people come up to him tonight trying to buy the shirt off his back.

-- The Tokyo Dome turns out to have a good selection of sushi and sashimi to go with it’s yakitori; while aisles behind the stands look the same as the ones in crappy hockey arenas (or the Metrodome), the food is first rate, maybe the best I’ve ever eaten at a ballpark.

-- The stadium PA played Sweet Caroline before the bottom of the eighth each night. Yup, felt just like being in Oakland.

-- Dr. Emil was named MVP of the game and received a check for one million yen. He planned to use the check to launch a campaign of emil world domination until it was pointed out to him that one million yen is only $10,000, and that he got $40,000 just for getting on the plane to come to Tokyo, and that baseball is a multi-billion dollar business. So never mind.

-- Rich Harden got 500,000 yen as the recipient of the Fighting Spirit Award.

-- This is why people love to play with Big Papi, besides all the HR and RBI: Red Sox down 2-0 in the fifth last night, runners on first and second, nobody out, Big Papi steps to the plate and practically before he settles into the box, he pops out foul to Hannahan. Manny follows by being Manny, whacking a double into the left-field corner to tie the game. First guy out of the dugout to greet Pedroia and Youkilis, who’d just scored: Big Papi.

-- I don’t know if the Red Sox have a budget line for acquiring mid-season talent, but if they don’t, they better get one. Their bullpen is Papelbon and Okajima and a bunch of guys who’d have trouble making the Kansas City Royals.

-- The opening ceremonies tonight again involved introductions of both teams, but this time the pre-game stage show was way better: hundreds of samarai and a woman painting on a huge roll of paper laid out between the pitcher’s mound and home plate. After the game, the A’s and the Sox lined up on the baselines again and Francona and Geren each made a short speech thanking Japan and all the fans who showed up for the games.

-- A lot was made of the bandbox nature of the Tokyo Dome, but I didn't see any cheapies out there. The home runs by Ellis, Brown and Ramirez were crushed, and the ones by Hannahan and Moss would have been out at either Fenway or the Coliseum.

-- Jack Cust walked in his only appearance tonight. In six plate appearances in the series, he never put the ball in play.

-- Travis Buck went 0 for the Far East.

-- On the other hand, Keith Foulke and Alan Embree between them have faced fourteen hitters, given up only two singles and induced two double plays.

-- I want to thank everyone for the kinds words about what I’ve been writing from Tokyo, and in particular blez and baseballgirl for making it possible.

For the pics, first, from around Tokyo yesterday and today, then from the ballpark: 

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The Kaneiji Temple, near Ueno Park, built in 1638.

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A rabbit from the rabbit-themed Tsuki shrine in Urawa, north of Tokyo. 

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A gothic Lolita girl checks for messages at Harajuku, a neighborhood and shopping district in Tokyo that thrives on the gothic Lolita -- it's exactly what it sounds like -- and Cosplay subcultures. 

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I took this on the subway today for a couple of reasons: first, two of the women are wearing surgical masks. They're a familiar sight in Tokyo: One in fifteen or twenty people you see on the street is wearing them, either because of allergies, pollution, or to politely avoid infecting other people if they're sick. (The explanation varies depending on who you talk to.)

Second, we're on the subway, and they're checking their messages: it seems like everyone in Tokyo has a spiffy phone, and they all work everywhere on the subway, even ten stories underground. People are asked to voluntarily not make or receive calls on the subway, and turn off their ringers, and amazingly, they do. I'm guessing this kind of system would not work in the US.

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The opening extravaganza at tonight's game gets under way. Eventually, a woman will paint that square of paper between the pitcher's mound and home plate.

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Mark Mangassarian, who has posted on AN as "mango" or "mango315" (he can't remember which),  stopped in Tokyo to catch tonight's game. He's on his way to China.

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You can put it on the board.... Hai! A's win!

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By popular demand,  a shot of the Japanese baseball stadium beer distribution system, this one in the Tokyo Dome.

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The author with two cats at Yanaka Cemetary.

By now you know that the A’s were killed by the B’s tonight – two miscues each in the field by Barton and Buck and a tenth-inning baserunning disaster by Emil Brown that was hard to believe. And you know that we’re going to have to temporarily rename Huston Street Desolation Row.

But hey, it was Opening Night in Tokyo, a once-in-a-lifetime experience, and I’m here to tell you it was a blast despite the sad and unnecessary outcome.

For me, it was a blast before I even walked into the ballpark: when you walk out of the Korakuen station – in a train that is on time, of course, and deposits you directly across the street from the stadium – you have a serious what the hell is that moment. It’s the Thunder Dolphin roller coaster, adjacent to the stadium, the fifth highest coaster in the world, and one of the most creative: it’s route includes a showstopping drop that would give any respectable acrophobic night sweats, and the coaster line runs through the middle of a Ferris wheel and a hole in an office building. It’s completely freaky.

A few steps takes you to a nice plaza outside the main entrance to the stadium, which tonight was filled by two separate, yet equally important groups: the police who are very, very self-important, and the press who feed on them. Both turned out in mass quantities. There were also a whole mess of fans, who, when not being interviewed by CNN, or NHK, or Canal Plus, or the BBC, were doing the strangers-stopping-strangers-just-to-shake-their-hand thing. Everyone wanted to know how you got there and why, and where you got your allegiance to the A’s or the Sox or baseball. It was as happy a crowd as you will ever see.

I talked to a bunch of people before the game, including Kaoruko Yamoka and her family, who are Japanese and took a trip to San Francisco last year, went to see the A’s because they happened to be at home, and became die-hard A’s fans overnight. They could hardly believe their luck to be seeing them play in Tokyo.

Then there was Aaron Sales, a Humboldt State student on his way back from the States to Shanghai, where he works as a cartographer. "I asked my airline how long my layover could be in Tokyo, and they said ‘As long as you want,’ so here I am." Sales is a serious China guy and had a lot to say about what’s going on there, none of which I can repeat and none of which is very optimistic. (After the game, he e-mailed me a picture you have to see to believe. It’s below.)

And it turned out that once I found my seats, I was sitting next to an old AN contributor, Matt McCracken ("roscoeparrish"), now a high school junior in San Mateo, precociously socially adept and charming. Big Obama supporter.

I ran into other A’s and Sox fans from Hawai’i, Osaka, New England and Taiwan in town for the game. "I used to think that flying five hours from San Francisco to New York was a big deal," the guy sitting behind me during the game told me. "Now I live in Singapore and I travel seven hours just for a good weekend. I’m just here for the game. I’m flying home tomorrow."

The Tokyo Dome itself – the PR flacks for the place like to call it "The Big Egg" – is not a particularly exciting venue, reminiscent, really, of the Metrodome, not exactly a crackling recommendation for A’s fans, or at least A’s fans before The Zito Masterpiece.

And the place was filled with an odd crowd: lots of Japanese of course, but with large pockets of visiting Red Sox fans, and a few narrow pockets of A’s fans. It turns out that the Red Sox ticket sale made things practically impossible for their fans to get tix – just like at Fenway Park – so a lot of them found a way into the A’s sale and were seated among A’s fans. Bizarrely – if you’ve seen the behavior of Sox fans at the Coliseum – the ones who did were apologetic and good sports about the whole thing.

The Japanese fans were a whole ‘nother thing: lots of businessmen – tickets were expensive; my seats between home and third went for $170 each before the dollar died – and a lot of sophisticated fans who weren’t ready to give it up for the American players. The wonderful bleacher creatures in my earlier post about the Saitama Seibu game were completely absent from this one.

The Japanese fans did provide the oddest moment of the game, though. 

It’s not quite a cliché, and I’ve been known to utter it myself: every single time you go to a game, you see something you’ve never seen before.

 It was true tonight in Tokyo: the crowd favorite, by far, was a middle reliever. The place exploded when Hidecki Okajima came into the game, and he was the easy winner in the all-important flashbulb index.

 (Big Papi was a distant second, and Manny Ramirez, after his third and fourth RBI, an even more distant third. No A’s registered on the flashbulb index at all, except of course for Country Joe’s first pitch of the ballgame.

(Daiseke Matsusaka got a surprisingly lukewarm reception, and his utter inability to control the strike zone quieted whatever support he had. His fastball, which topped out at 91 on the stadium gun, didn’t win any converts. It may be that the Red Sox have committed a Pavano-esque blunder with Dice-K; after a mediocre ’07 shattered his mystique, I’m looking at a guy with an average fastball and indifferent command of a couple of breaking pitches. I don’t see how that’s worth nine figures.)

As far as the A’s go, Bobby Crosby is still lunging, Mark Ellis looked as sure as ever, it’s hard not to think that the A’s OF is a complete mess, Alan Embree looked exactly the same as last year, Jack Hannahan remains a wonderful story, and many of the pitches that Huston Street threw were fastballs and sliders that drifted directly into the Happy Zone and the concomitant bad results were not particularly the result of good Boston hitting. You have to wonder if this is going to be an ongoing problem.

Other notes on the game:

-- A lot of the usual suspects were there tonight, including Stomper and Lew Wolff, who was accompanied by a police escort and absent for long periods from his first row dugout seat.

-- The yakitori: again, the way to go. The Japanese have much to teach us about ballpark food.

-- Watching Keith Foulke pitch was fascinating. I tracked the speed of his pitches, and this is what I got:

Kevin Youkilis, 86, 82, 80, 86 (that’s the one he whacked to the warning track in straightaway center.)

David Ortiz, 75, 81, 81, 87, 75, 80, 78, then Foulke shook off Suzuki, threw a fastball, 86, which Ortiz whacked the hell out of, but on a line to Brown in LF for an out.

Manny Ramirez, 79, 81, 79, 79, then Foulke again shook off Suzuki, threw a fastball, 86, but this time Ramirez takes it for strike three.

All three times he tried to finish off guys with a fastball. Twice, he came within a hair of getting taken deep, the other time he polished off a disbelieving Manny.

-- The place was stone sold out, and except for a few people leaving after the ninth, and a few more after the Red Sox scored two in the tenth, it stayed that way for the entire 3:43 and five lead changes of the game.

-- Cherry blossom season started early this year; the walk in Ueno Park was packed with delighted Tokyoites. During this time of year, it’s certainly one of the most beautiful urban parks in the world.

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The scene in Ueno Park, in Central Tokyo, early in the afternoon before the game.

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The view of the Tokyo Dome as you come out of the subway.

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The Thunder Dolphin 'coaster, hard by the Dome.

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More Thunder Dolphin.

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Kaoruko Yamaoka (in the blue A's cap) on the plaza outside the Tokyo Dome.

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Humboldt-stater Aaron Salles with two unidentified A's fans in the Tokyo Dome Opening Night.

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Inside the Tokyo Dome as the Red Sox take batting practice.

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Matt McCracken, San Mateo resident and the former "roscoeparrish" on AN, discusses his predilections for Far Eastern travel.

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A jet-lagged Stomper trudges through the infield as MLB and Tokyo Dome drones prepare the pre-game extravaganza, which had no known relation to baseball. Part of the extravaganza was a phalanx of hot girls in short, short, short hotpants, which Kevin Youkilis spent the entire show ogling while pretending to jog back and forth in front of the Sox dugout.

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The free schwag handed out to all fans in atttendance at the Tokyo Dome tonight. Almost makes the $1,000 flights from the Bay Area to Japan worth it, don't you think?

Greetings, AN, from a contributor in AN’s prehistoric past, and from Tokyo, where I’m here to see the A’s and the Sox – I’ll be posting after the games on Tuesday and Wednesday –  and even a little Japanese baseball.

Speaking of which, does this sound familiar: A team dominates in the ‘70s and ‘80s.  Wins two different sets of three straight championships. Plays in the shadow of the more popular, better funded Giants. A series of near misses in the early part of the Oughts gives way to futility and serious questions about the desire of ownership to leverage income into payroll, in particular when it comes to established, front-line pitching.

And: the team has been given a brand new "regional" name.

I refer, of course, to the Saitama Seibu Lions, who play in one of Japan’s two major leagues, the Pacific. The Japanese season opened last Thursday and I took advantage of that to head out on Sunday afternoon to Tokorozawa in the western ‘burbs of Tokyo to see the Lions – the A’s of Japan! – play at their home Seibu Dome against the Orix Buffaloes.

The only serious way to get to the ballgame – to get anywhere in and around Tokyo – is the incomprehensibly efficient train system. I’ve been here a week already, taken trains dozens of times, I’ve never had to wait more than three minutes for a train, and I still haven’t seen one that’s even a minute late, and that includes the long-distance shinkansen. (Those are the bullet trains, the ones that go over 200 MPH and travel routes hundreds of miles long.)

When you get to the Seibu Dome, owned by Seibu Railway, home of the Lions, owned by Seibu Railway, it’s literally across the street from the last stop on the Ikebukoro commuter rail line, owned by Seibu Railway.

The Dome is a story in itself. The Lions had a large one-deck outdoor ballpark, reminiscent of Kauffman Stadium, set into a hill, a bit like Dodger Stadium, but decided in the late ‘90s to go state-of-the-art in Japanese baseball. That meant a dome.

Instead of blowing up the outdoor stadium and starting from scratch, Seibu built a dome on top of the existing ballpark, leaving a gap of between fifty and a hundred feet, depending on where you are in the stadium, between the rim of the stadium and the bottom of the new dome. A dome with a breeze, a little like Safeco in Seattle. It’s striking, more so later in the season, I’m guessing, when the trees ringing the stadium have leaves.

Anyway, the game:

 I wanted to see it because I love the baseball, and seeing how others worship in the Church of Baseball is always informative – sometimes as much about your own church as it is about theirs. I’ll never forget going to see Los Aguilas de Mexicali play a couple of years ago. I ended up sitting next to the player wives and girlfriends. I don’t speak Spanish, but it didn’t matter. They were exactly the same women you see sitting behind the visitor’s dugout at the Coliseum. In Japan, it was the umpires; if you’d told me that the umpiring crew was visiting from the US, I would have believed you without hesitation. Their gestures, stances, demeanor – all of it exactly the same.

The game on the field is awfully similar to American baseball – perhaps more like the top colleges and the minors than MLB, for reasons I’ll get into later – but when you come to the fans, it’s like you’re watching a different sport altogether, in a way that might be familiar to A’s fans.

Imagine the Coliseum bleachers in the days before Mt. Davis. Now imagine that the drums and flags guys are there. But more of them. A lot more. In fact, everyone in the left field bleachers is a drums and flags guy, all in green and gold. And it’s not just drums and flags. There are guys with bullhorns leading cheers, whistles and a horn section made up of fans which has worked out arrangements to original songs for various players and occasions. Which every single person in the bleachers knows the words to and sings along to.

That was the scene at the Seibu Dome for an otherwise nondescript early-season game between the flagging Lions and the Orix Buffaloes, who are the Tampa Bay of Japan.

That’s not even the end of it, though: the Buffaloes, who are based in Osaka – think Oakland and Anaheim in terms of travel between Tokorozawa and Osaka – filled about a quarter of the rest of the bleachers with their own drums and flag guys, horn section and cheerleaders. The Buffaloes guys and the Lions guys cheered only when their boys were at bat and brought an excitement and spontaneity to the game you just don’t see in any American ballpark for anything but the most intense post-season games.

This was despite the fact that the game only drew 12,632, virtually all of them in the bleachers or in cheaper, general admission seats on the Seibu side of the field, between first base and the right field foul pole. The high dollar seats behind home plate were sparsely populated and the entire third base side of the field, where Orix supporters were encouraged to sit, was virtually deserted.

As to the play on the field, the thing that is most striking is the way the players look: they’re gifted athletes, fast, great hand-eye coordination, all the things you need to be a professional baseball player, but they look like ordinary people, not the hulks we’ve been seeing in MLB. (Although I’m not here to talk about the past.)

It makes the game different, if a little less spectacular. Most of the players in both line-ups were quick, which meant a profusion of big leads by baserunners – Japanese players love them some secondary leads – hit-and-runs and bunts. Orix CF Tomotaka Sakaguchi may be one of the fastest players I’ve ever seen. He hit a routine, line-drive, one-hop double to the wall in right-center. Seibu CF Kenta Matsusaka  played the ball nicely, made a strong throw towards the infield, the relay was strong and spot on and – what the hell? – Sakaguchi was standing on third base. Standing. It was Ichiro-like. Or Chuck Carr-like, if you remember him.

Made the difference in the game, too, a 2-1 Orix win.

That’s not to say the game is without power. There were two solo home runs and a couple of deep fly balls, but pitchers were obviously not spending every AB wondering if the back-up catcher was going to take them into the upper deck in CF. (That’s a shoutout to you, Sal Fasano.)

Glovework was awfully slick, too, and obviously a priority, as you’d expect in a league where the ball is sprayed around a lot. Both teams took full infield before the game – when’s the last time you saw that in MLB? – and there are stars all over my scorebook, the ones I use to note a special fielding play. In particular, I don’t think it’d be an exaggeration to say that the Seibu DP combo of Hiroyuki Nakajima at short and Yasuyuki Kataoka at second is better than Crosby and Ellis (and I love Ellis).

 Then there’s the pitching. Remember a few years back, before every team had someone, or even several guys who could bring it in the high 90s, when everybody was wondering what happened to the fastball? It was like that. The fastest pitch anyone threw in this game, by Seibu reliever Chikara Onodera, topped out at 145 km/h – 90 MPH. Saitama Seibu starter Matt Kinney – after bouncing around between the Twins, Brewers and Royals, he spent all of last year in the Giants’ system in Fresno, then signed with Seibu this off-season – topped out at 86, and most of his fastballs were 83, 84. One of the Orix relievers threw a pitch that was 61.

(Kinney, by the way, was making his first start in Japan and it might turn out that he’s one of those guys who has trouble making the mental adjustment required in the move from the U.S. to Japan. He was wild high and inside – and only high and inside – for all six innings he worked, he hit two Orix batters and narrowly missed three more. His body language was putrid.)

 Other ballpark notes:

 -- The scoreboard at the Seibu Dome is monstrous, stretching all the way from left-center to right-center. It is completely unhelpful to those of us keeping score who don’t speak Japanese; except for the team nicknames, there wasn’t a word of English up there, or even the Roman letter-version of the player names. I got lucky; a nice guy who saw the blank left side of my scorebook offered to fill it in for me. Of course, he had "Kablera" batting fifth for Orix; turns out to be "Cabrera," but our "l" and "r" correspond with only one phoneme in Japanese, which accounts for a lot of that kind of confusion.

 -- The stadium organist knows the obscure country weeper "Once A Day," recently covered to great effect by Van Morrison. I still can’t believe she played it.

 -- Hiram Bocachica can’t break into the starting line-up for Saitama Seibu, either.

 -- Not only is beer vended in the stands at Japanese games, but so is whiskey, and all of it – at this game anyway – by cute young Japanese girls. Beers are 700 yen, $7 US.

 -- The seventh-inning stretch was a trip. Everyone in the stadium spent the top of the seventh blowing up long, blue balloons, which they didn’t tie off; during the stretch, they sang a song, then at the end, everyone in the stadium let their balloons shoot up into the air and deflate.

 -- The Bo Diddley beat – not a Japanese fan clapping skill.

 -- The Japanese league has a reputation for abusing pitcher arms. I don’t know if it’s true, but I know this: Japanese pitchers who are in the game start playing catch in front of their dugout when their team is batting with two outs, and Seibu had six different guys throwing in the pen at different points, two per inning from pretty much the fourth inning on. Only two got into the game. (The new Orix manager, Terry Collins, by contrast warmed up only two pitchers, and brought both of them into the game in short order.)

 -- The Seibu mascot is the famous Japanese anime character Kimba the White Lion, which brings back cartoon memories to those of us of a certain age.

 -- The food at the Seibu Dome is great, especially the yakitori. You can get hot dogs if you insist, but I looked at them carefully and definitely wouldn’t recommend them.

 -- The Japanese press has reported that the six billion yen ($51 million then; $60 million with the dollar’s recent collapse) the Lions received for "posting rights" to Daisuke Matsusaka will be enough to pay all of the team’s player salaries for at least two years and still net some extra cash for Seibu. Lions fans are bitter, the Japan Times reports, that none of the money is going into luring star players to Seibu.

 -- Earlier in the week, I visited Hiroshima. The Hiroshima Carp play their games in an outdoor stadium across the street from the A-Bomb Dome, the shattered remnants of a building which was directly underneath the detonation point of the first nuclear weapon ever used against people. The dome and it’s accompanying museum are an incredibly moving and powerful experience, not to be missed, and the stadium where the Carp play is one of the few outdoor parks in the Japanese League.

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The Seibu Dome, as viewed from the subway exit.

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The Seibu Dome, looking across the outfield.

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An Asahi girl pours a fan a cold one. Whiskey is available too. Note the knee sox: every girl in Japan under 25 is wearing them.

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During the seventh-inning stretch...

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...and the end of the seventh-inning stretch.

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A view of the Seibu Dome infield, from right field.

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More cheering from Lions bleacher die-hards.

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A shot of the author.

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There are a lot of different kinds of good managers. I'd break them down into five categories.

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I've been watching the Yanks-Sox game on Extra Innings, and it's a very odd and unsettling day up there in New York.

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AP's annual survey of ticket prices turns up the information that the A's are 24th out of the the 30 teams in ticket cost, with an average ticket cost of $16.49.

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Herewith, my fearless predictions for the '05 season.

AL MVP -- Vladimer Guerrero (again)
AL Cy Young -- Randy Johnson (he got robbed in the NL last year)
AL Rookie-of-the-year -- Huston Street

NL MVP -- Phil Nevin
NL Cy Young -- Oliver Perez
NL Rookie-of-the-year -- Conor Jackson

AL Playoffs: LA, Clev., NY, Bos (WC)
NL Playoffs: SD, Chi., Atl, NY (WC)
AL Champion: NY
NL Champion: Atl
World Champion: Atl

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The A's have announced their 2005 TV schedule, and while some teams (Boston, San Francisco) are televising all of their games, and others are coming damn close (The The Angels Angels are going to go with 158 this year), the A's will have 130 telecasts spread out over six channels.

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The Chronicle reports today that a woman named Kimberly Bell testified before the BALCO grand jury last week that she was involved with Bonds for 9 years and that he told her that he used steroids:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/03/20/MNGJKBS9QM1.DTL

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Michael Chabon, the great Berkeley writer, and a man who still managed, despite his considerable talents, to marry up,

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I don't know why I assume that Josh Suchon of the "Tribune" is a kid -- everybody named "Josh" is a kid in my mind? The "Trib" only hires low-paid kids? -- but whoever he is, he's the A's beat writer, and he's doing a fantastic job right now.

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I asked everybody last month how many games they thought the A's would win this year.

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At least in the college ranks, where you can see some outstanding baseball and a lot of weird stuff... I've been to two games already this year. Herein, a brief report.

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The Marlins and Carlos Delgado have agreed on a four-year deal.

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After one of the most hectic and important off-seasons in A's history....

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[EDITOR'S NOTE] - Since I know many of you are waiting for this kind of info, I figured this deserved a spot on the main page. I'm glad to see they've moved to bobbleheads for players that will be around for at least a few seasons. - Blez

Just got more season ticket holder's information, which I'll pass along here:

FanFest is from 10 am until 4 pm Feb. 12 at the McAfee Coliseum (yup, that's what it says on the tix).

The first two bobblehead days are Sun., Apr. 17, vs. Anaheim (Bobby Crosby), and Sun., June 5, vs. Toronto (Rich Harden). The last two bobblehead days are July 31 vs. Detroit and Sept. 6, vs. Seattle. The bobble-ee hasn't been designated for those games. As in past years, 15,000 bobbleheads per day.

Cap Day is Apr. 30 vs. Seattle. A's neckties -- they were fantastic last time -- go out on June 19 vs. Philly.

Dennis Eckersley Day is Aug. 13 vs. Minnesota, and includes a Dennis Eckersley jersey to the first 10,000 fans.

There are a couple of "player figurine" days, as well as an "A's Player Marionette" day on July 16 vs. Texas.

No umbrella this year, but on Apr. 26, on what will undoubtedly be a chilly Tuesday evening against the White Sox, it's A's Fleece Blanket night.

The A's will also be giving away a "trucker cap" on beer festival day vs. Toronto on Sat., June 4, and "wine charms," whatever the hell that is, on Wine Festival Day Sat., Aug. 20 vs. KC.

The A's apparently consult United Airlines before making their plans for FanFest because, for the fifth year in a row, I'm going to be out of town on that day. I have a couple of free passes. If anyone's interested, e-mail me.

Dark Days Ahead

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When the 2005 schedule was released, much was made of the fact that the A's are doing more traveling, as measured by air miles, than any other team in baseball.

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It will come as no surprise to anyone here that Steve Schott, who famously can't afford a $3M catcher, has no budgetary constraints when it comes to what he thinks we can afford.

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Not every team is as parsimonious or as neglectful of it's fans as the A's; a bunch of teams have released their tentative 2005 schedules.

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The Chronicle reports in a Ray Ratto column today that Steve Schott took home $17M in profit from the A's in 2003.

A Place to Discuss Playoff Games Tue., Oct. 5

LA (Perez) @ StL (Williams)
Bos (Schilling) @ Ana (Washburn)
Min (Santana) @ NYY (Mussina)

arrggghhh

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Where the Rubber Hits the Road

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Some advice, please.

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A quick look at post-break pitching on the A's and in the AL

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"Manager Ken Macha wrote a list of the things going right for the A's as reminders their playoff hopes are alive."

-- AP article today on A's September woes

Somehow, a copy of that list found it's way to my mailbox.

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[EDITOR'S NOTE] This is a good first person account of a reader's experience this week in Texas, for those of you that are always wondering why Bill King avoids Texas like the plague.

First, the ballpark. It is absolutely in the middle of nowhere (Arlington isn't really a "city" in the usual sense), on a big, flat windy plain far from both Dallas and Fort Worth. Surrounded by parking lots, stagnant pools and endless grass landscaping (the water required to maintain all that grass on an arid plain is wasteful, not to mention completely unnatural), there is no sense of occasion or place.

The park itself is nondescript. It's got a brick exterior, which I guess is Retro Ballpark Construction 101, but out of an urban context, it looks most like a suburban chain restaurant.

Surprisingly - it's only ten years old - the park is in pretty bad shape. My guess is that Bush and his partners put the thing together on the cheap and figured he'd be long gone by the time anybody figured it out. The brick and marble outside the park is falling apart, and inside, the attempted architectural grace notes look tacky and cheap, not built to last, and the seats are dull and faded.

The stadium is completely enclosed because of the constant winds in the area, which means it's got a real football type feel to it; it's also apparent from the layout that Bush and Co. originally thought they might be able to schedule some football games.

With two levels of luxury boxes and fairly deep first and second decks, the third deck might as well be on one of the many planes leaving close-by DFW during the games. It's worse than Cleveland or Chicago, I think, previously the two remotest upper decks I've seen. The upper deck even wraps around into left field, which means that any day there are more than about 30,000 people at the park, there are a lot of people there getting ripped off.

(We sat over the A's dugout in the first deck for Wednesday night, and in the second row of the first deck, a little down the left field line, for Thursday afternoon. The first deck is a very nice place to watch a ballgame; it's close to the field - there's no foul territory at the place - and steeply terraced, so that you have an unobstructed view from every seat. However, on afternoon games, it turns out that you want to be on the 1B side, not the 3B side, where the sun is absolutely brutal. There's a general recognition that sun is an issue at the park. Ushers aren't uptight about where you sit, and the park was built with a massive amount of shaded room behind the stands.)

The park's most famous attribute is the notion that it's "Baseball Land," i.e., a collection of attributes from other famous ballparks. It's just as jumbled and hard to look and insulting to baseball or architectural purists as you'd think; there's no sense at all of unity or grace or flow in the appearance of the place, and it's fully of blatently artificial "quirks."

The Bush group contracted out with TGI Friday's for the main restaurant in the place but they were booted this year and replaced by Rawlings. The glove manufacturer. Nothing says "food" like processed leather! The restaurant is now a hellish combination of baseball kitsch and leftover TGI Friday's crap. My friend and I both noted the tendency to obesity at the park and in the metroplex in general - it's obvious and startling - and Rawlings provided a partial explanation: we each ordered a salad and an entrée and ended up with about two-and-a-half meals worth of food. Per person.

Other notes:

Great main scoreboard. Both line-ups constantly displayed, very readable, lots of useful stats, very much unlike the Coliseum. The infield scoreboards on the first and third base sides, on the other hand, are way too small, almost to the point of uselessness. They've got another scoreboard in left field that displays pitch count, including total balls and strikes, but they flash other information on it between pitches, so you have to learn to time your looks at it if you want to see how many pitches have been thrown. It's annoying.

Public transportation? Not how they do things in Texas. (Fortunately, we were staying at the same hotel the A's use, which is only a couple of blocks - if they had blocks in the middle of nowhere - from the park.)

Earlier, I mentioned the crowd. Wednesday night's crowd was drunk. I mean pervasively,  obnoxiously drunk with a violent undertone. And we were sitting in Section 21, a high-dollar, season ticket holder kind of place. I asked around at the ballpark, and around Dallas and Ft. Worth, and was told my experience wasn't unusual at all, that a lot of people won't go to nighttime Rangers games anymore because of it.

The crowd on Thursday afternoon was completely different: much smaller, of course - the weekday afternoon thing hasn't taken off there the way it has in Oakland, mostly because of the weather, I bet - but I had a number of great conversations with smart, baseball-saavy Rangers fans and even going into the bottom of the ninth, with the Ranger season three outs away from being snuffed out, the fans were good-natured.

OK, one political note: a guy at the game on Wednesday night tapped my shoulder and told me it was "rude" to wear my Kerry button in Texas, and two other people told me they liked my button, but whispered it and looked around while they were doing it. Seriously. It was creepy.

As for the ballgames themselves, what is there to say? The A's looked flat and listless. Chavy, in particular, seems completely out to lunch - his swings are tentative and mostly fruitless, and he fanned on a ground ball doing one of his patented, in-complete-contravention-of-all-baseball-instruction-I-take-my-ground-balls-on-the-side plays. Crosby botched two double plays at critical times, Zito was early Barry again - an intense wind howling in from CF saved his bacon time and time again - and Hudson was unbelievably lucky to escape with two runs in seven innings. And Jermaine. Jermaine Fucking Dye. I might still be in Texas, in the eleventy thousandth inning if Jermaine had played Dellucci's ball properly in the 9th on Thursday.

Oh: and Mark Kotsay is a god.

And Buck Showalter could outmanage Ken Macha with half is brain tied behind his back.

Other notes from the trip: the Dallas Museum of Art has a collection with no depth or rigor at all, but some spectacular highlights; the Lonesome Dove restaurant in Ft. Worth is one of the better restaurants I've ever eaten at; Deep Ellum, formerly a well-known ne'er-do-well district in Dallas, is now a typical southern party district; the Sixth Floor Kennedy Museum at Dealey Plaza, where JFK was shot, is heartbreaking and impossible to visit without tears and a sense of lost promise.