Day 2 in Scottsdale - “He’s my son!!”

“He’s my son!!”

(Dawg fucks up)

(3-13-10)

Ya like that piece yesterday where I called for the Giants to take a whole new tact and
start the season leading off with Molina batting first and Aubrey Huff second because
neither were complete players (Bengie’s slower than Muni and has a pop gun instead of a
cannon for an arm and Huff doesn’t have big league defensive skills) … you recall
that? Hell, it’s only been 24 hours. What do you mean you didn’t read it?

So, anyway. I thought it was a great idea. Worth trying at least. Only on
the road. Molina leads off and totally pissed at h. brown drills a single to left.
He’s immediately replaced by the gazelle, Eugenio Velez and Aubrey Huff comes to the
plate. Totally pissed off at h. brown he scares the shit out of the pitcher with
his intensity and walks. He’s replaced on the basepath by Torres (what’s his first
name?) and we have two speed merchants on the base paths and averted 2 double play
grounders and at least one costly error later in the game.

Pablo Sandoval steps to the plate and coached ably by hitting coach Meulins takes 2
pitches wide and high (Meulins is gonna mean at least a 5 point rise in our team
batting average) and tags a pitch down the middle (he did this 2 days ago in the first
game we saw here in Scottsdale) … hits it into the left centerfield gap for a
double and the Giants are up 2-0 and here comes Freddie Sanchez.

And, Juan Uribe. And Aaron Rowland. And Renteria. And Nate Schierholtz.
When we take the field in the bottom of the 1st we’re up 5-0 and have our best
defensive team already on the field.

And, you can do this 81 times a year. On the road. If you hold true to the
model you never do it at home because you lose your defensive edge for the top of the
1st and that could cost you dearly.

Hey, it’s certainly worth a try. First of all, everyone gets to play and they get
to play using their best skills. The biggest difference is that guys like Molina
and Huff get to hit once instead of 3 or 4 times. They’re essentially top notch
designated hitters with a guarantee of one essential crack at the ball 81 times a year.
I like the equation. How many times have you seen a guy whom you thought was
overpaid come through in just the situation he was paid for and it changed the entire
season? I think overall it makes the team much stronger. It bothered me when the
the Giants traded 162 games for degraded defense and took away the earned ‘time in the
sun’ for Posey and Velez and Torres and Ishikawa for an occasional homer. I’m a
defensive kind of guy. And I like peace in the dugout and everyone knowing they’re
gonna play. Try this Brian Sabean. At least one or two games in Spring
Training. Like tomorrow before we leave and head back to Sf.

So anyway, how did this lead to the woman in the elevator in Scottsdale making the
exclamation about her son? Well, I was going down for my third cup of coffee of the
morning (I’m up early in the morning cause I pass out early at night – it’s an Irish
thing) and I’m relating my theory to the people in the elevator (almost everyone at the
Hilton where I’m staying is here to watch the Giants) … so, I’m selling my theory
and I make a disparaging remark about Huff’s poor defensive play and that’s when the
woman said with surprise and disappointment that indeed, Aubrey Huff is her son.

I cudda crawled under a rock

I want to apologize to Ms. Huff and her son. I certainly have no ill will for them.
I’m, in fact, a rabid Giants fan and most of us are from San Francisco where we
tend to think and unfortunately sometimes act outside the box. Ms. Huff, I think
your son is a great major league hitter. I want to see him bat second in the road
lineup and pinch hit at home while he catches thousands and thousands of ground balls
in practice and chases thousands and thousands of pop flies … in practice.
Shit, by the end of the season he might be a gold glover.

This is a vacation/family visit first

My daughter (Mona) … her boyfriend, he’s the majority owner of the group that hosts
the Giants’ Triple-A team in Fresno (the Grizzlies) … his name is Chris Cummings
and as you’d assume, he’s a baseball nut like me and my buddy Daniel Cohen who made the
trip down here with wife Becky (I’ve known them for 30 years) … Chris and Mona are
putting me up at the Hilton and he has provided tickets for all 3 of the Scottsdale
games we’ll see in our 4 days here …

So, that’s how an SRO political muckraker from SF’s Skid Row ended up crossing an item
off his ‘bucket list’ this Spring at Giants Spring Training in Scottsdale, Arizona.
And, it has been great and we’re only halfway done and yesterday while the team
traveled to Tucson we went to Jerome.

Jerome, Arizona … 8,000 years and counting

There were Indians in what we now call Jerome at least 8,000 years ago. They came
to take the precious metals and other minerals out of the mountain 120 miles north of
Tucson. Mostly copper. That’s why the white man came too. Personally, I came
looking for a shortcut to San Francisco in somewhere around 1980 (records for this
period of my life are scarce and incomplete). When you sit in the local bars in
Jerome (population 400, down from their record 15,000 in 1929 at the peak of their
mining) … they tell you that’s how almost all of the residents got there (I was
talking to this bartender and she was looking good but no Spring chicken and she said
that she used to be a pole dancer and - you don’t need to know more) …

So Chris drove and the Cohens and granddaughter, Tandiwe (who’s now 6 and a genius like
everyone’s grandkids and took pictures out the window all the way there and they were
amazing and Luke will post them with this piece when we get them to him) … we drove
through the cacti (did you know that the type called Saguaro are nicknamed ‘the
redwoods of the desert’ – they’re the ones that look like someone surrendering – that
they can be over a thousand years old?) … to Jerome at 5,000 feet just above the
town of Cottonwood.

After getting my friends to drive that far and take a full day out of a 4 day mini
vacation I was worried that Jerome had changed in the 10 years or so since I’d taken my
last friends there. Not at all.

It’s a town of old hippie artists. Was then, is now. Art shops. Bars.
Restaurants. A volunteer fire department (Daniel and I met the chief and chewed the
fat in a bar with the pole dancer). One cop and every sign on every building that
is restored (lots aren’t and there are a bunch of skeletal foundations on the steep
mountainside) everything is a work of art.

There’s a little museum behind a gift shop on a corner. Not so little, really.
They have a history of the place going back the aforementioned 8,000 years and the guns
of the original sheriffs and marshals and the first doctor’s little black bag and
ancient photos of all complete with a fancy red satin bed from one of the more
prominent brothels from the 1800’s and a bar and roulette wheel from same and a
reconstructed dark section of the copper mine complete with the one man cage to lower
miners and equipment and a portable 2 seater shitter with removable buckets for
transport to the surface (that’s interesting, no?).

There are samples of the vast varieties of ore that were taken from the mountain and
pictures of the crews going back to the birth of photography and it is all so amazing
to go up and down those streets and eat great food and drink $3 a brimming glass well
bourbon and …

And we drove the rest of the way (2,000 more feet to an elevation of 7,000) up the
mountain where we all had a snowball fight with Tandewe and there are pictures and we
came back to Scottsdale and took a nap and were out last evening using all of our time
possible to enjoy the vacation.

And Daniel and Becky treated us to a ride on a horse drawn carriage through the
touristy and really fun Old Town and the horse was named Leo and the dog riding under
the afghan next to the driver was a very old rescue poodle named Pookie who fell off
into the street at one interseciton (very few cars there even on a busy Friday night)
and he was OK and I retrieved him and everyone went to the hotel’s hot tub but me and
here I am the next morning writing to you.

Today we see training for 200 and a game

John Avalos wrote to ask me to look at a player at the Giants Double A franchise in San
Jose named either Thomas Neal or Neal Thomas or something or other. John’s a Giants
nut like Daniel and Chris and I. We’re going to the team’s main training facility
which is a couple of miles from the baseball stadium (sold out with around 11,000 first
game we saw) … and the facility has a couple of hundred players directed from watch
towers by coaches like Bear Bryant used to watch his players in Alabama and that’s
enough for this morning.

Closing notes

Best of luck to my good friend, Tom Dean who is battling for his life back in St. Louis
from a variety of ailments that hit us as we age. I’ve thought of him often as I
watch Renteria and Uribe and Sandoval move after ground balls. Tommy was the
shortstop on our city chamionship softball team at Dunn Recreation and Civic Center in
St. Louis in 1958.

Congrats to Gavin Newsom for entering the Lt. Governor’s race which he will certainly
win in a walk and leave chaos on the SF political scene which I truly do love.

Thanks to the lower echelon D-6 supe candidates (Villa-Lobos and Zamura) for telling
lies and throwing crap at each other early and doing my job while I’m on vacation.

Good luck and a wave of the tattered Green Party banner to Ross Mirkarimi who has
become yet another political tranny and emerged an outed Democrat. The Green Party
is a great place to be born into politics but … just ask Matt Gonzalez and Ralph
Nader and …

Go Giants!