October baseball

I am a baseball bigot. Other sports barely exist.

The irony is that I rarely watch a whole game on television. It can drag. Too much time between pitches. Too many commercials. I lose focus.

But the playoffs and World Series are different. Every event is magnified. Pitchers are stellar, and the one-one-one confrontation between a great pitcher and a power hitter can be dramatic.

So I have watched much more baseball in the past two weeks. We have witnessed classic sequences: Roger Clemens as the last pitcher off the Houston bench, sentenced to the mound for interminable extra innings against the Braves, and he wins; Albert Pujols carrying his bat like a thin tree limb, slowly walking to first base as his laser beam of a home run bangs off the back wall in Houston to win Game 4; and the last three innings of last night's World Series Game 2, with each team fighting back to tie or go ahead against the other's best late-inning reliever.

I am not rooting for one team in this series. I root for seven games -- even though one team will be disappointed.