Pooray Boru

The baseball season kicked off this morning at 3AM PDT with the first of a two game series between the Oakland Athletics and World Champion Boston Red Sox in the Tokyo Dome. As eager as I am for baseball to start, I did not get up at 3AM to watch this game, but I did get up at 6AM PDT to catch the exciting end of it.

The A's were expected to play the Washington Generals to Dice-K and the Harlem Globetrotters in these two games, but they usually play the Red Sox fairly close. They won the season series last year, and have a better Spring Training record this year (which isn't that relevant -- just throwing out HillaryStats(tm) in the A's favor) so the games should be competitive. The A's were also supposed to play the Generals role five years ago for a series in Japan against Ichiro and the Seattle Mariners, but those games got sidelined by the start of the Iraq War.

Even though (spoiler alert) the end of today's game didn't turn out the way A's fans would have liked, it was competitive to the end, which is all we can ask for. I'm standing by my prediction that it's going to be a lot of fun watching those pesky young Athletics this year. We'll see how that plays out when they're ten games under .500 in mid-June and battling the Rangers for last place, but they're a lot of fun to watch in late March.