One of my biggest beefs with my favorite baseball team is its reluctance to celebrate the club’s storied past, from its Philadelphia roots to a mostly successful- and sometimes special- tenure in Oakland.
One of my biggest beefs with my favorite football team- relax, I am making a point here- is its stubborn insistence to force-feed its fan base its storied past, despite the fact the glory days have been washed away during a recent string of historically poor play.
One of my biggest fears is that at some point- if it hasn’t happened already- the fans of my favorite baseball team will become like those of my favorite football team, and spend their days clinging to a period long forgotten, while the current generation of fans will have only highlight films and historic posts (ahem) to remind them how it used to be.
And while it wasn’t that long ago that our A’s were very, very good, there’s no telling when the next wave of greatness will occur. Or just one awesome year, for that matter.
As it stands now, there have been precisely 100 World Series games played since the fourth contest of the 1990 Fall Classic- including last night- and twenty teams since then have made their way to the championship round at least once.
The A’s are not one of those twenty teams.
So maybe it’s not 1954-long ago, but in Oakland years, it’s plenty long. I guess what I am getting at is how much longer do we get to play the "we have more than you" card in a society that screams, "What have you done for me lately?"
Meanwhile the team across the bay is three wins from erasing that Giant 0-for-San Francisco stretch, and to give you some perspective, the last time they won it all, my mom was a senior in high school.
Enjoy the game.
