Rick Kaplan
Staff Writer

Why couldn’t I just like sixteenth century German poetry? Or worry about the Environmental Protection Agency losing its funding? How about brushing up on Kabuki theater in my spare time? If only I could enjoy dropping by Cal, and while away the afternoon listening to a lecture on invertebrate DNA.

But instead of DNA, for me it’s always been about Steve McCatty’s ERA. The EPA may mean more to the future of the world, but I was always more concerned about Tony Phillips’ BA and OBP.

Click below for more!Sometimes it seems like I even care more about Mark Kotsay’s bad back than my own (which, I’m sure, is even worse than his after driving a bus for twenty years).

And if Joe Blanton can’t get anybody out, I can’t go to sleep.

Why do I have to love the A’s?

When they win, life is simple. Want me to cook dinner? What do you want, Italian, Thai, Mexican? Just let me know. Chavy hit a pair? I’ll make tortillas from scratch. Mark Ellis tied it up? Let me wash all the dishes. And sweep the floor.

But when they lose, oy vey. And to think I could have been reading “The Twelth Night.” Or watching Animal Planet.

Shakespeare doesn’t disappoint you when we have the bases loaded with nobody out and we are down by a run in the bottom of the ninth.

But Erubiel Durazo does.

Cheetahs don’t stop running with no explanation when they have rounded third and can coast home with the tying run in the ALDS.

That’s what Miguel Tejada did.

I should have listened when my mother told me to go to graduate school for eleven years at night and get a doctorate.

It would have been a lot easier than being a baseball fan.

I was about to drive my San Francisco subway train into the Twin Peaks tunnel on the evening of October 15, 1988. I hesitated at the platform – oblivious to the time or the passengers’ restlessness – as La Russa lifted the Bulldog. Confidently – no, cockily – I entered the underground with the bubbly euphoria of a 4-3 lead and the certainty of another Eckersley ninth inning shutdown.

Looking back, it’s true, I had a little restlessness about Kirk Gibson grabbing a bat but, not to worry, the Eck had performed this routine a hundred times. My squawking little transistor radio went silent in the tube as it always did. Everything was normal. Everything was good in the world.

I waited patiently for my radio to begin the celebration at the other end of the tunnel as my train clickety-clacked its way through the darkness.

I had gone into that dark hole a winner. But I came out into the city lights a loser, just as Bill King finished his fourteenth “I don’t believe it.”

So much for a fourth dynasty – 1911, 1929, and 1974, those heady years now seemed forever unreachable.

Before the 2004 World Series there was an unbearably inflated myth circulating throughout baseball, that the Red Sox and their fans had suffered greater disappointment than all others since their last Series victory in 1918.

To this I ask: What is more painful, to have been a fair-to-middling franchise whose greatest achievements during that eighty-eight year interlude were occasionally challenging the Yankees for the AL pennant, having won their last flag in 1986 prior to 2004?

Or, as has befallen the truly cursed Athletics, to have been flirting with immortality nearly constantly since the inception of the American League? All the while continuing to virtually anonymously challenge the Yankees for baseball supremacy (see “A Secret War”) yet never being able to permanently unseat the mighty Bombers.

Then more recently, and this is real frustration, only winning one more Series title, despite regular post-season appearances, since that dastardly one-legged home run, and nearly being robbed of even that 1989 triumph by the goddess Loma Prieta.

By comparison, how can Red Sox fans kvetch about anything but Bill Buckner -especially since 1986? While the Bosox won nothing, the A’s were capturing eight divisional titles in this period and, woe is me, went to the final game in four consecutive ALDS from 2000-2003. Who really suffered, the also-rans from Beantown, or the not-quite-great-enoughs of Oaktown?.

What did the Red Sox have to cry about? They just weren’t ever very good, nor tragic, when compared to the Athletics.

They don’t have nine (9) World Series titles. And 13 divisional crowns. They didn’t bury the 1927-28 Yankees, “The Best Team in History,” by eighteen games in 1929. The Red Sox did give the Yankees the Babe (after the A’s had turned down a young Ruth as a minor leaguer due to a lack of funds). But the A’s have painfully and constantly supplied the Yankees with a steady stream of gems for their numerous crowns over the course of nearly 100 years.

Roger, Reggie, Catfish . . . stop, it hurts!

Maybe my mother was right.