Kerbleh

We'd had enough.

My wife was standing in the doorway with her bike, ready to go out. The Dodgers and Padres had delayed our afternoon bike ride long enough, and we were going to go even though the game was still dragging on, inning after inning of the Dodgers stranding runners and the Padres making even Rudy Seanez look like an ace reliever.

It was the top of the seventeenth inning at this point. I watched Kent take his at-bat and hit a ball that I fantasized was a home run but in reality went into Cruz's glove, where all Dodger would-be big hits seemed to go to die in this game. Then we were ready to go, but Valdez was up, and I just couldn't let go ... I kept saying, "one more pitch". So it was that we saw him get on base on the error, and we both cheered that, but my wife was still ready to go. She didn't think the Dodgers would score with us watching. I almost went along with going right then, but then I remember that Russ Martin was coming up. "We have to watch him bat," I said. So we did, and Martin popped up, and I bitterly said, "That should have been a double". I'm not sure why I thought a pop-up should have been a double. I guess I just expect a lot of Russ, or not very much of the Padre fielders.

And then we left, because I figured that was the end any real chance in the inning and the Dodgers would just strand another runner. As it happened, the very next batter doubled and gave the Dodgers the eventual winning run, so we just missed seeing it. I found out what happened when I called my mother from the bike trail for news of the Dodgers. It's pretty galling to watch 16+ innings but miss seeing the most important hit of the game, but my wife insisted if we had stuck around Clark wouldn't have got the double. We had to leave for the Dodgers to win.

This is nonsense, of course, but I suppose it's about the same as all the superstitions about not talking about a no-hitter while it's going. And we have had a strange TV voodoo work for us before. Once in 2006 we were watching a long extra inning game and my wife kept insisting that we had to mute the TV when the Dodgers were up, and I kept telling her this was just silly, and when I finally relented and let her mute it feeble-hitting Ramon Martinez hit a home run to win the game.

During this most recent game we tried moving cats around to affect the outcome. One cat was the slump cat, and he had to be out of the room, while the other was the rally cat, and she needed to be able to see the TV. The cat thing didn't work, though; or perhaps the cats could only work their magic after the humans had left on their bikes. I hope their cat magic didn't involve throwing up in some obscure corner of our apartment.

If only Lowe hadn't walked Blum then it would have been a normal nine inning game. We're going to tomorrow's game at the Stadium, and we'll likely not get to see Martin play because of that walk. I think rather than start Lieberthal tomorrow, Little should make Lowe catch just to teach him a lesson. And Wolf will only be allowed to throw knuckleballs, to really make the lesson stick. I bet Lowe will never walk Blum again if Little does that.