I will have a sad on Sunday night...

... because that marks the end of Mariner baseball for 4 to 5 months (I don't remember when it is that they start broadcasting games during spring training). Being a west coast team baseball fan while living on the east coast means alot of late nights listening on mlb.com or using the mlb streaming app on my iPhone. It's been a fun season to be a M's fan (almost erasing the 101 loss horror of last year) with the squad's MacGyver-ish gift for improvising ways to win. Sporting awesome defense, reasonably good pitching and homeopathic levels of situational hitting (at this writing they're 80-76 while having been outscored 675-613 and compiling an amazing 33-20 record in games decided by a single run), it's been an eventful ride with great moments such as the one I had walking from Joe's Pub to the Highline Ballroom a couple of weeks ago listening to Dave Niehaus' call of Ichiro hitting a 2-run walk off homer in the bottom of the ninth to beat Mariano Rivera and the Yanks. I'm also a lucky fan because of the excellent blogs (Baker & Stone at the Seattle Times, Lookout Landing, USS Mariner and Shannon Dreyer) that provide plenty of time-wasting opportunities with provocative, informative, fun and uniformly well-written posts. On that note, I'm so glad to see that Shannon has captured the funniest moment from the radio broadcasts this season, which I heard yesterday while half-assedly studying the Chausson Poeme in a house in the Fire Island Pines during a rainstorm yesterday.

Another memorable moment:

Me and my Dad at an M's/Giants game last Memorial Day weekend

Dad meeting Mariners manager Don Wakamatsu before the game

Only 188 days until the Mariners' 2010 season opener!