words from the speechless

First, thank you all, we represented today across the country and at the ballpark.  Regardless of the pathetically short shrift we get from the most of the national media... I say let them all talk until their lips fall off about how we suck and have no chance.  The more the they run their mouths, full of the sychophantic worship of wealth and easy success they rely on for their ad revenues, the better our boys will be motivated to do and the more lofty the heights we scale will be.

This was really and truly a day I will remember for the rest of my life, and on Bill King's birthday, no less.  I realize that we have to go one step at a time and heighten our focus to a level of relentlessness not previously imagined, but I must say that we may be seeing something so, so special taking shape, something we've only dreamed of.  Something we will all -- each of us who scrutinizes every move this team makes down to the rust particles on the Big Hurt's rebar -- remember for the rest of our lives, if not for the rest of our lifetimes.

I'm starting to believe in Bill's presence, that he's watching this unfold somehow, or his residual energy from having done so much of his life's work at the Coliseum and with the A's is a part of all of this in some inexplicable way.  Stranger still that Buck O'Neil died today... I was thinking that had the majors been integrated back when he was in his heyday, he might have ended up with the Athletics in KC, where he was a superstar.  Just weird, a weird but vital sense of energy convergence and dispersal today.  As if it wasn't painfully obvious 9 months ago, Buck should be placed into his own wing in Cooperstown tomorrow morning, if not sooner.

I can't begin to describe what it all felt like from sec 128 row 6 today, it's just too much to process and articulate.  That place, I've never heard it louder, and the chanting of Marco's name at the moment of decision was from another world.  I don't know if any of you were listening to the ESPN national radio feed of the game, but I heard it later and when that happened, the announcer yelled "Marco!!!! Scutaro!!!!" into the microphone just as the crowd was doing.  It was beyond electric, it was a higher, purer form of energy that has yet to be invented and harnessed.  

Let's just say that when Marco cleared the bases I let out a scream that was not a "your team just did something good in the game" scream... it was primal.  I don't know where it came from but the energy was overwhelming today, just so deep and so resonant.  I was certain that after I screamed like that security would somehow have to come take me away, it was that guttural and primordial.  Maybe it was the demons escaping from the 0-9 elimination-game exorcism our boys were performing out there, but whatever it was it was serious.  Something about it reminded me of the energy at a music concert, not a big stadium show where it's all diffuse and not everyone is focused on the performance at any one time but like at a smaller venue, a 3- or 5,000-seater let's say, where there's still a lot of people and they are feeding the vibrations back to the performers and something of a higher vibrational nature is created and brought into focus.  That's the only analog for today's experience I can find.

Let me tell you what's more beautiful than a fool such as I could hope to describe.  Beautiful is that a team with the highest payroll in the history of sports is thoroughly unable to score and could be about to be eliminated because their $27 million poster boy is to this point a postseason choke artist for the ages, and we are 8 one-game-at-a-time wins from winning the World Series and our MVP (so far anyway), who's gotten hit after hit in impossibly clutch fashion, is an unconditional waiver claim we got for n-o-t-h-i-n-g.  If that isn't validation of the Moneyball ethos and proof that Beane and company are not, in terms of doing the most with the least, the greatest executives in the history of sports, then I don't know what is.  To take it deeper, it's what makes me love and live and die with this franchise more than anything else: because it proves, in however fleeting a way, that the millions (billions?) of people who believe in quantitative judgement over qualitative judgement and who defer to wealth just because it's rich and they wanna be so it should always win, are wrong.

Party on this weekend, and then it's back to the wars on Tuesday.  There is so much more work to do... I bought ALCS tickets for all the games today and I can't wait.  I bet our boys can't wait either.  I think we can do this.

Eyes on the prize.  Hold on, friends, hold on.