recently went to two S.F. Giants games in one week. My cat even thinks I'm crazy, let alone my wife. I'm feeling a bit loopy myself. And then it happened. In game two. I was sitting with my baseball buddies at a Dodger night game (I have baseball buddies?). Fights were erupting on a regular basis. It's a Bay Area tradition. But the fights didn't bother me because it was proving to be a great game, for Dodger or Giant fan. Good pitching. Sporadic hitting. Knuckle-balls. $3.25 Drumsticks. Barry Bonds. Mike Piazza. Hecklers. And it was April, the cruelest month. Was T.S. Eliot on serotonin uptake-inhibitors? This was the shit, man. We're sitting in something like the fourth row behind the Dodger dugout. Tommy LaSorda is getting booed all over the place and he's waving his cap around like he's getting a standing-O. Two nine year olds sit in front of us and one elbows the other. "Hey, look," he says pointing, behind me. Were they catching the signs Wendel Kim was giving Matt Williams to indicate that the hit-and-run was on? Dream on Ben, these kids are nine years old. They're watching a fight in the upper deck. "Whooah. Look. They brought cops! Look dad, cops!" The father does his best to ignore the little punk, but I can't. I look right at him and point out into right field and say: "Baseball." The kids stop and look at me like I'm from, from ... I don't know ... Sacramento. The kid's father starts laughing, which makes the kids even more confused. But they slowly get down off their knees and reluctantly watch Mark Carreon drill an offspeed pitch into the right field corner for a triple and a game-winning RBI. I can't imagine what I was thinking. I could have been home watching Cops. Backward © 1996 Tweak