Watching Jeff DaVanon

I have been, and will continue to be, quiet for about a week. I'm working a Microsoft conference that is in town. I working transportation, which I've never done before, and my main responsibility is to write down when the conference buses pass my location. I only mention this because I find it so hard to believe that I'm being paid what I'm normally paid to run a whole event to do this "closely watched buses" exercize. And also because I do this task all alone, with no one to talk to except the wacky homeless guy who enjoys crossing the street against the light, over and over again, just because he can. Fun this is not. If anyone is in downtown the rest of this week, send me an e-mail or something, wear an Angels hat as you walk around and I'll try to spot you, I don't know. Crossing the street against the light is starting to sound like an interesting and viable way for me to spend *my* time.

But I was treated to a lovely close-up view of the massive power outage yesterday. Starting with the traffic lights in my area blinking for about an hour, followed by more sirens and fire trucks than I've ever seen all flying off in different directions at the same time, and followed by the hotel I was stationed at and every other building going dark. We got power back fairly quickly. The traffic lights took a little longer. The nearest corner to me was media central, with 4 camera crews and a bunch of photographers taking pictures of... the intersection. I could almost understand this during the brief time that we had official people with little white gloves directing traffic, but they continued to film and photograph long after the signals were back on-line. Meaning they were filming a perfectly normal intertersection operating normally. I guess a citywide blackout in broad daylight is not an intrinsically visual event, so they were taking what they could get. I had a fleeting moment of worry that this was step one in the aforementioned terrorist threat against LA, but I quickly decided it was too centralized a task to undertake (terrorists tend to prefer distributed methods of just about everything) and, lets face it, any self-respecting terrorist would have attacked this morning, the "true" anniversary of September 11, 2001 (it was a Tuesday) and the day when Bill Gates was in LA and speaking. Wouldn't you go after Bill Gates if you were trying to do some damage and make a statement? I seriously breathed a sigh of relief when my shift ended today and I was able to put some distance between myself and Bill Gates.

I did want to acknowledge the nice notes I got from two other DaVanon fans over the weekend. I get nice notes from time to time, but it was odd to get two in the same day. One was from a sweet Torontonian (well the Toronto area), who became a Jeff fan upon witnessing his classy behavior during a game when he was being heavily heckled. Jeff made the last out, went over and tossed them the ball! Jeff doesn't really throw balls to fans in general, so that was a noteworthy event. The other was from Karissa, another sweet Jeff fan who has written me nice notes before. Why two notes in one day? Perhaps all DaVanon fans are doing what I'm doing-- looking at the calendar, and looking at the team and Jeff's current place on it, and looking back at the calendar, and looking at Jeff's contract-- and then preparing ourselves for the real possibility of a Jeff-free future. I'm not sure where Jeff ranks in the field of 4th outfielders, but I can't really imagine there is a bright future in being a middling-to-good 4th outfielder who has enough service days to command a real salary and not that pin money they pay the young'ens.

I've even, um, contemplated doing a site re-design and name change during the off-season, not because my devotion will ever wane, but because I've moved beyond the name, and it now bugs me that the name of a little blog that I never expected anyone to see is so-- I don't know how to properly put this-- easy to mock? Lightweight? Stalkerish and difficult to discuss in polite company? And having the blog named after a player no longer on the team would be all those things to an even greater degree. I do sort of have my pride... I was a columnist for the Daily Northwestern, one of the best college papers in the country. I've won awards for my writing. I've been paid actual money in exchange for things I've written. And now people will ask what I've been up to and I'm like "I have a little baseball blog, it's sort of TWOP does sports..." and then I change the subject before they ask for the url or anything.

Maybe I'll start up "Finley Sucks" or something like that.

So thanks to yet another "jeff davanon wife" search in my stats log (I still get at least 1 hit a week from people googling that. Why? And why me?) I bring you the oddly-recent, rather exhaustive-

Jerry DaVanon interview at Astros Daily

enjoy.

Jeff has had something like 1 at-bat in the last 14 games.

I'd like to think it isn't just my status as jeff-obsessed that makes this weird.

Is he being punished for being tossed out of that Oakland game?

Is he too close to having to be paid more money due to the additional incentives for games/plate appearances in his contract?

Did he make a pass at Soscia's sister?

Did he publicly accuse Finley of sucking?

Not only does it not look good for my guy's future presence on the team, it doesn't look good for the rest of the season. I'm not blind, I know the writing's on the wall. But he isn't a worthless drain, and he's a better outfielder than Figgins, a better hitter than Finley, and a better baserunner than 80% of the team. The way Figgins has been hitting lately, he might even be a better lead-off candidate (sacrilege, I know!) It seems like any of those things would be useful in this stretch. I just don't get it.

I'm just saying, that the team hasn't been playing so well those last 14 games. Just sayin'...