This Mets-Dodgers series is really vexing me. I find it completely impossible to root for either team, which just doesn’t happen very often in baseball. I’m an American League girl for life, so my usual reaction to the first round of the NL playoffs is one of the following:

1. Root passionately for one team. (This only happens when the Cardinals are in the playoffs—i.e., frequently—because the Cards have long been the only NL team I care about. I love the Cardinals. Even this season, when they’ve been exceedingly hard to love.)

2. Root passionately against one team, and therefore root with temporary passion for whoever is playing them. (This has happened nearly every year in recent memory, because I consider it a solemn obligation to root against the Braves. So does God. That’s right, God hates the Braves. If He doesn’t, how do you explain their World Series record in the ’90s?)

3. Mostly ignore the games and root with mild indifference for whichever team will make an easier NLCS opponent for the Cards and/or World Series opponent for the AL team. (This usually involves the NL West. There are no teams in the NL West that I actually like.)

This time around, option 1 is going strong, option 2 isn’t applicable (because the Braves missed the playoffs for the first time in, what, 20,000 years? Okay, actually 16 years. I just checked). And option 3 is no longer an option, because I utterly friggin’ hate both teams. The Mets: pretenders, wannabes, and pathetic for a significant percentage of their forty or so years of existence. The Dodgers: betrayed Brooklyn (the place of my birth), kept Tommy Lasorda employed, have all the arrogance of the Yankees but little of the glory. It’s really, really difficult to decide who I hate more.

Further complicating matters, the Dodgers now have an edge: Nomar. I adore Nomar. If he hadn’t a) been injured so often and b) gone to the National League, he’d be my co-favorite player in baseball alongside Bernie Williams. As it is, he’s still in my top five favorite players. So I can’t in good conscience root against Nomar. Nonetheless, I can’t in good conscience root for the Dodgers either. But then again, I sure as hell can’t root for the Mets.

So I suppose the only choice is to just hold my nose and wait for the NLDS to be over (and quietly root for Nomar to have a really good series nonetheless). And after that, I fear I will find myself in the curious and unprecedented position of rooting for the Padres, a team whose very existence I routinely forget. But at least they aren’t the Mets or the Dodgers.

I moved to Minnesota in October 1986, when the Twins had just ended a season full of promise. I was aware of this even though I hadn’t been a baseball fan for years, because I had just started watching the game again while I was still living in Austin; one of my roommates (on whom I had a sort-of crush, and on whom my cat Tim had a major crush) would watch Rangers games on nights when he was home, and Tim would follow him into the bedroom where the TV was, and I would eventually follow Tim and get drawn into the game as well as the company. It was a good time to move to Mpls. as a reborn baseball fan: the following year, the Twins overcame their mediocre road record to clinch the division, and then the pennant (in an exciting series with the tough-as-nails old guys from Detroit that we interrupted work to watch), and finally the World Series. I was a Twins fan, and a Minnesotan, for both of the team’s Series victories, and the 1991 Series was an amazing one from a baseball perspective…but from a great-story perspective, the ‘87 Series was even better. And though Kirby wasn’t my favorite Twin (that would be Kent Hrbek, who always took the game just seriously enough, never too seriously, and played with the same sense of joy that a little kid does), he was clearly the hero nonetheless, and the most reliable player on the team for years, and I loved him just like everyone else in Minnesota did. It’s hard to describe how wonderful it was to experience that ‘87 Series as a fan, and Kirby was the symbol of everything that was great about it. Even people who had never paid attention to sports before got caught up in it.

I loved his public persona, too. For a year or so, I did a radio show on the cable radio station (remember cable radio? No? That’s okay, neither does anyone else) in Mpls.’s Warehouse District with one of my co-workers, and we used to have lunch afterwards at the Loon Cafe, a favorite hangout of Kirby’s. We’d see him there more often than not, and though I never had the nerve (or the desire, really; I’m big on leaving celebrities alone) to approach him, lots of others did, and he was always gracious and accommodating and easygoing. The staff loved him too. He still lived in the city at that point (though not for long; he moved to the ‘burbs shortly thereafter), and there was even talk of him running for mayor, though nothing ever came of it and who knows if it was ever even a real possibility. But just the idea of it fit in with Kirby’s overall image: he was salt of the earth, a true class act. It was impossible not to love him. It still is, really.

All of which, of course, made it harder to accept the awful stories that came out after he was forced to stop playing baseball. Not just the sexual assault charges, of which he was acquitted, but the horrifying, and apparently accurate, accounts published in Sports Illustrated of his physical and sexual violence and abusiveness. For the longest time, I just refused to accept those stories, and when it finally became impossible to ignore them, I simply stopped thinking about the subject at all; my mind would sort of close up when Kirby’s name was mentioned. We don’t get to have many heroes in sports anymore, and seeing one who had so thoroughly seemed to be the genuine article was crushing.

So maybe now I should feel worse than I do about allowing myself to have rose-colored memories of Kirby. But he’s gone, and it feels like a little bit of my own history is gone with him, and I will mourn him in spite of everything. It’s not quite the same as “trust the art, not the artist,” because whereas it’s possible to divorce an artist’s abhorrent personal traits from the work they produced, with Kirby, part of what made him a great baseball player was the stuff beyond the stats: the enthusiasm that he brought to every game, his graciousness off the field (with fans and other players, at least), the way he mentored younger players, his fidelity to the Twins when he could have commanded more money elsewhere, the way he served as a spokesman and a role model for so long. All of those things gave extra impact to his brilliance at the plate and in the field. (There was no sight on earth quite like seeing that short-legged, pot-bellied little guy leap halfway to the sky to make a catch at the centerfield wall.) And if beneath all of that was a man of much poorer character, then the public character becomes tainted, inevitably. But then again, I didn’t experience Kirby the person; like thousands and thousands of other Minnesota fans, I experienced Kirby the Hall of Fame-bound baseball player. And that’s who I’m mourning tonight, with all my heart. So rest in peace, Kirby, and thanks.

The Yankees have been infuriating to root for this year, so I wasn’t following their ups and downs all that closely. In fact, I wasn’t following baseball all that closely, because the three AL teams I root for (in order: Yanks, Twins, Royals, due to birthright and geography) weren’t doing so hot, and the one NL team I root for (that would be the Cardinals) were so far ahead so early on that I didn’t even need to worry about them. The Yankees were frustrating, the Twins possibly even more so, and whereas last year’s record-settingly awful Royals season was somehow watchable, this year’s potentially even worse one has been beyond laughable; as far as I’m concerned, they’re not even a real baseball team.

But it’s September now, and true to form, the Yankees have pulled their thumbs out and started to play like they’d actually like to win. So I’m glued to the division race, of course. And Boston are thrashing the Orioles today (9-2, top of the sixth, right this minute according to ESPN’s online scoreboard), so I was miserable when Toronto took the lead, delighted when the Yanks took it back, terrified when things got tight again in the top of the eighth, and massively relieved when Mariano got out of trouble in that same inning. Right now it’s bottom of the eighth, two on, nobody out, edge of seat. Sheffield batting, 2-0. I hardly dare to hope for a win, so I won’t even say it’s looking good, although it is, especially with Mariano (can I just say “God bless Mariano Rivera”? Thank you) coming back in the…OOH, three-run homer, Gary Sheffield. So much for whether he should have come back this soon or not.

I love this time of year.

The good news: the spelling bee ended early (we lost, which is less good news, but not a big deal either), so I got back to my desk just a few minutes in to the second half.

The bad news: I think the Gophers are going down. It’s not hopeless; they’re down by 7 right now with just under 10 minutes to go. But looking over the game stats, I’m not sure the Gophers can pull it out Sigh.

Oh, and before I forget it completely, the quote of the day yesterday came from Rick Majerus talking to the local doofuses on our ESPN radio affiliate in between games about Washington’s relatively unimpressive first-round game: “I don’t know, the [Washington] Huskies, Pittsburgh, Alabama…they all looked to me like a bunch of Catholic guys who gave up defense for Lent.” Heh.

Update: Yeah, the Gophers lost. So I missed my opportunity to see my favorite team in their first and now only tournament game in the last six years. Sigh.

My Gophers are playing at 12:30 ET today, but instead of being glued to my computer watching the scoreboard refresh every 30 seconds, I’ll be competing in the company spelling bee—something I do every year, and something to which I committed long before I knew if the Gophers would even make the tournament. (I are a gud speler. My team has won the company bee twice in the last three years and gone on to the citywide corporate spelling bee—it’s a benefit for a local literacy organization—where we won once and came in second the other time, the latter due to my misspelling “diaphanous.” I spelled it “diaphonous.” It was a last-minute choke, and I still feel deeply guilty about it.)

If I’m lucky, I’ll make it back to my desk for the last few minutes of the game. I’m incredibly nervous about the game, because Iowa State had some really big wins this year, and as I’ve said before, this Gophers team has been playing beyond its natural abilities, and that’s the sort of thing that tends to disintegrate in the tournament. It’s hard to describe how much the Gophers matter to me; in a way, I’m more passionate about them than any other sports team, even my adored Yankees. The Timberwolves are probably just as important to me–they started up shortly after I moved to Mpls., and I patiently endured their years of suckage before KG came along. But the Gophers, well…t’s just that my years in Mpls. coincided with some very good and hugely likable Gopher teams, and my ex and I went to at least a few games every year, and I developed a strong emotional attachment to the team that’s never changed, even through their last six years of turmoil and disappointing play.

My last year in Mpls. included their wonderful run to the Final Four led by Bobby Jackson and his backcourt mate Eric Harris, whose failure to be drafted after graduation absolutely astonished me; he was small and not the world’s greatest shooter, especially for a guard, but he was the top defensive player in the country coming out of high school (Christ the King, I think, in the Bronx), and I’d have thought some NBA team would have snapped him up for his defensive skiills alone. But no. I think he played in Europe for a while; not sure where he is now, but I don’t think he’s playing anywhere.

But I digress. That Gopher team was so great, such an unmitigated joy to watch, that we actually sat for over four hours in Williams Arena (better known as the Barn, and one of the weirdest but best college basketball venues in the country), not waiting to see a game, just waiting to welcome them home between their Elite Eight win and their trip to the Final Four. Their flight was delayed, and it was a weeknight and we were tired, but we sat there with the other thousand or so Minnesotans patiently waiting to cheer the Gophers when they walked into the Barn and listen to them thank their fans. That’s how much I loved that team.

Then the scandals came and Clem was disgraced and the team lost a ton of scholarships and Dan “Remind Me Again: Why Haven’t I Been Fired Yet?” Monson came in and gave us five years of mediocrity and disappointment. He’s finally doing something right. though, because the team has played better than it should have for most of the season. They’re facing a really tough opponent today, though, and 8-9 pairings are usually toss-ups anyway, so I’m excited and nervous and mostly pretty devastated that I won’t get to follow most (or possibly any) of the game. It’s no fair, I tells ya…

…is what I’d say to the experts who were pointing to Iowa as a hot pick during the last week or so. I can say it safely now, since Cincinnati just trounced them, 76-64.

Leaving aside my non-hatred of Cincinnati, which many people seem to find inexplicable, I’ll just note that as a devout fan of the Gophers, I am sworn to hate their most reviled rivals, the Wisconsin Badgers and the Iowa Hawkeyes. That doesn’t keep me from being able to evaluate those teams semi-objectively, though, and Iowa just wasn’t a very good team this year. A nice little run at the end of the season propelled them into an undeserved NCAA berth (I don’t think Indiana deserved to go to the tournament either, but to pick Iowa ahead of them was just an insult by the committee), but anyone who’d really been paying attention could see that their brief momentum wasn’t going to last. And it didn’t. Therefore, ha!

(Warning: Expect multiple and frequent posts about the NCAA men’s basketball tournament over the next few days…)

I have a total of four different brackets, but only one of them involves money; the rest are for bragging rights.

Right now, with the first games underway but none completed yet, I’m feeling pretty good about picking Wisconsin-Milwaukee over Alabama in the money pool. I’m feeling significantly less good about picking Pittsburgh over Pacific, though, especially since most of the experts were calling that a near-certain upset. I went with Pacific in at least a couple of my brackets…but not in the one that could make me a few bucks. At least Pitt isn’t as far behind as they were at halftime.

And is anyone else surprised at how close Niagara was playing Oklahoma for a while there? They’re down 13 now, but they were within 4 points at a couple of different times in the game. That would have been quite the bracket-buster.

It’s been an intriguing week in the world of basketball. (It’s been an interesting-in-a-good-way week in my world too—it’s amazing how much better I’m feeling, though I’m not sure that’s meds or therapy or my own conscious efforts at attitude adjustment or just the black fog of a severe depressive episode dissipating, as it always eventually does, or all of the above—but that’s a story for another day.) First, there was all-star weekend, the best one I’ve witnessed in at least four or five years. A great, close-until-it-wasn’t rookie-sophomore game, highlighted by the fearlessness of Josh Smith, Ben Gordon, and Dwight Howard in the face of the obvious greatness of LeBron, Melo, and company, made up for the disappointment of Emeka Okafor (my favorite rookie) not being able to play, and even the all-star game itself was exciting and competitive, relatively speaking (though CWebb and Brad Miller should have started, dammit).

And then the fun stuff:* Steve Nash (MVP of the season so far, for sure) squeaking by in the first round of the skills contest and then nailing the second round; a sloppy (and disappointingly, Peja-less) but suspenseful three-point contest; and of course, the return of the dunk. Nearly a week later, I’m still talking about those dunks. I love a good windmill slam more than any other kind of dunk, I think, and Josh Smith did those beautifully (and did Dominique proud), but his trick with Kenyon Martin was even better than the ‘Nique slam. I hope Smith gets traded to a real team rather than being doomed to near-invisibility on the Team That Time Forgot for the next few seasons; he’s showing all the signs of being a superstar in the making, but there hasn’t been a superstar to come out of Atlanta since…well, since ‘Nique, probably. (Someone feel free to correct me on that.) And Amare Stoudemire’s soccer slams, ably abetted by Steve Nash, were a delight; I wish the second one had worked the first time, but when it finally did work, it was almost as much fun as the first. Stoudemire and Nash are favorites of mine, and Phoenix has been such a pleasure to watch this year. They remind of the Kings teams of just a few years ago: fast, high-scoring, and fun, with a camaraderie that’s obvious. In fact, with the Kings playing unevenly and having now essentiallly given up on the season (more on that in a second) and the Wolves being too depressing to watch half the time, Phoenix are practically my favorite team this season. I’ll still root for the Wolves, but I don’t feel very optimistic about their playoff hopes unless they make some kind of smart trade today. (And I can’t help rooting for the Knicks, but let’s not talk about that; if questioned directly about it, I will deny all knowledge of any such team.) There are other teams I’m enjoying this year, but I think I’m going to be pulling for Phoenix when we get deep into the postseason.

Except that maybe now I’m going to be rooting for Philly. I’m still reeling from last night’s SportsCenter scoop—now confirmed, I guess—that Chris Webber is going to Philadelphia in exchange for, well, hardly anything. “Gobsmacked” may be the only word that can adequately describe my reaction, although “stunned” would do the trick too. My initial response, I admit, wasn’t, “Wow, it’s going to be exciting to see how (or if) CWebb and Iverson mesh,” but “What were the Kings thinking?” Why trade Webber now, when he’s finally playing up to his potential on a consistent basis? Is it the Peja thing? I dunno, Geoff Petrie’s always struck me as a smart exec, and I love love love Stojakovic, but he’s not the player you build the franchise around (especially since he’s going to be a free agent after this season). And yeah, Cuttino Mobley was a fantastic pickup, and yeah, Bibby’s improving all the time and will likely continue to do so for a while, and yeah, CWebb isn’t getting any younger and who knows how long he’ll stay healthy…but he’s healthy right now, and I can’t help thinking that this move scuttles any faint hopes the Kings might have had of advancing in the playoffs. Corliss “Bobby Jackson should have won the sixth man award instead of me the year I won it” Williamson and Kenny Thomas sure as hell ain’t going to make a serious difference in getting them there. And geez, way to dispel any remaining illusion of the Kings as the ultimate team-y team; I think the magic of the Kings’ camaraderie left with Vlade last year, but it’s beyond gone now, and I don’t see it coming back.

I was so baffled by the trade that I stayed up way later than I meant to waiting in vain for SportsCenter to provide some sort of analysis beyond, “Wow!” It wasn’t until this morning that I started to think about the upside. Iverson’s never had a true superstar alongside him, and it’s going to be really interesting to see how that works out. Webber and AI could be an incredibly exciting combination to watch. I’ve always liked Iverson (since he was a freshman at Georgetown, in fact) and I think he gets an unfairly bad rap both on and off the court; he is a ballhog, but I suspect a lot of that is because he’s had to be…and now he won’t have to be. The move could be great for him and—more important, to me at least—great for CWebb too.

Webber is maybe my second-favorite player in the NBA (okay, third, but with my beloved former Gopher Bobby Jackson out for the season, I’ll cede the #2 spot to Webber; #1 is KG, of course, and will be till the day he retires). I’ve admired him since he was the fabbest of the Fab Five. My college hoops rooting habits are kind of all over the map; I’ve rooted for Kansas for years, long before I ever set foot or even contemplated setting foot in the state, and I still root for them except when they play Mizzou, since I kind of have to be a Tigers fan by geography. The hometown team I’ve always cared most about is St. John’s, though I’ve been known to root for Seton Hall on occasion too, and nowadays I root for Manhattan, not only because their nickname is the Jaspers and my big blue-point Siamese mix boy is named Jasper but also because they’ve been improbably good for a couple of seasons now. But mostly, I’m a Big Ten girl; the height of my college hoops fandom came when I lived in Minneapolis, and the Gophers were competitive for most of the time that I lived there, so the Big Ten became my conference of choice. There are Big Ten rivals that I hate (Wisconsin and Iowa, of course; I couldn’t call myself a Gophers fan if I didn’t hate those teams with a deep and abiding passion, but also Ohio State and Purdue; I can’t hate Illinois anymore because a) I’m about to become an Illini alum, and b) their streak has been so amazing that it would be churlish to want it to end, but deep down I still hate them anyway). And there are Big Ten teams that I like in spite of their being rivals: Michigan and Michigan State. So I was crazy about the Fab Five, who were thrilling in their freshman year and continued to be likeable and admirable even though they never quite achieved what they were supposed to. And I’ve stayed loyal to Jalen “Handsomest Man in Basketball” Rose and Juwan Howard throughout their somewhat checkered NBA careers. But most of all, I love CWebb. I remember seeing him interviewed as a freshman, and even then, it was clear that he was a remarkably mature and introspective young man, not only more articulate than the average college athlete but also more poised and pensive. I always wondered if his head would get in his way, and I still wonder sometimes if it does. As an NBA player, he’s had his growing pains and moments of brattiness, and he hasn’t achieved quite as much as fans like me might have hoped. But I’ve remained a fan and an admirer, and I’ll always cheer for him, in Philly or wherever. I’m looking forward to seeing how this trade plays out for him and Iverson both.

(And in the midst of all this, my Gophers quietly won both their games this week. I think they might be officially off the bubble now. A win tomorrow would be the perfect end to a memorable basketball week.)

*I heard Stefan Fatsis, usually one of my favorite sports commentators, on NPR talking about how all-star weekend had become too much of a show, and suggesting that the NBA should follow the lead of baseball and the NHL (that’s the No Hockey League, of course) by finding a way to make the game mean something. I couldn’t disagree more. The “show” aspect of NBA all-star weekend is precisely what draws me in; the NBA is better than some other leagues at combining sports with entertainment, and all-star weekend is usually massively entertaining, even when the quality of play isn’t anywhere near as high as it was this year. I love to see the veterans turn out, see the players laughing and having a good time, see the seasoned players rooting their hearts out for their younger teammates in the various competitions…and of course, listen to my favorite sports analysts in the world, Ernie Johnson, Kenny Smith, and Charles Barkley, riffing endlessly on the whole thing. I watch the MLB all-star game because it’s there, but I don’t give it my full attention, because it’s basically a boring game unless there’s some young player who I’m particularly happy to see in his first all-star game. Mostly I just pay attention to make sure the American League wins, now that that determines home-field advantage in the Series. I watch the NBA all-star stuff because it makes me smile.