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• Baseball season in full swing

I guess there was some sort of car race this past weekend. Honestly, I couldn't tell you who won or anything like that. I still don't understand any of it. The only time you should celebrate a victory by pouring milk on your head is when it's some sort of milking or possibly butter-churning contest. So rather than making fun of something I don't understand like usual, I thought it'd be nice to take a look at the baseball season so far. We're almost a third of the way through the season and it's already been a little strange.

First of all, when Cardinal fans actually feel a degree of pity for Cub fans, you know something isn't right. I know guys who love baseball and love the Cubs and it's getting hard to even make a joke about that being a conflict of interest. What can you say, maybe they are actually cursed.

I'm not sure if Dusty Baker really is a clown or not, but if he is, there's no question that he's found his three-ring circus. Every tiny little thing that can go wrong or at least can be blamed for going wrong has pretty much went wrong. I'm almost impressed they're still playing .500 baseball. Their players are going down like a drunken date in the backseat of a souped up Monte Carlo on prom night.

For shit's sake, last week they said pitcher Carlos Zambrano may have got tennis elbow from using his computer too much. Um, Carlos, I bet I know what you're looking at on that computer and I'm guessing your arm isn't hurting from pushing buttons on the keyboard. Trust me, I've been there, brother. Put down the hand lotion and step away from the pornformation super highway. There's still a lot of games to play this year and you don't want to end up with some sort of claw hand for the rest of your life.

Maybe Carlos is just jealous of all the other guys on his team getting so much time off. I can't even name them all: Todd Walker, Kerry Wood, now Mark Prior, Nomar, Borowski, the list goes on and on. Hell, LaTroy Hawkins would have been on the list had the league recognized mental illness as an injury. Since they didn't, the Cubs traded him to San Francisco where everyone appears somewhat normal standing next to Barry Bonds. The Cubs are having a stretch of bad luck, no question about it. It just seems like it's lasted forever. 1908? Geez Louise, I've had sex since then.

On the brighter side, or in this case, the um, souther side, the White Sox have been a pleasant surprise this year. No prognosticator would have predicted they would have the best pitching staff in town. I haven't seen five men with ball control like that this side of a Jenna Jameson orgy scene. The games usually go pretty fast, at least for baseball, and afterwards I still listen to manager Ozzie Guillen talk about the game, even though I have yet to understand the first freaking word coming out of his mouth.

The previous face of the team, slugger Frank Thomas, apparently didn't know what to think of all the winning. He came back from an injury and then promptly got hurt again. I can hear him in the clubhouse already. "Um, seriously, guys, if you win the World Series, I still get a ring, right?" You know the Sox are good this year. They actually had more than 10,000 fans at a home game once or twice.

My favorite team, the St. Louis Cardinals, are also cruising along just fine so far, but this season has still been a little tough for me. Last season, we went to the World Series only to be pummeled in four games by the Boston Red Sox. That wound had almost healed, but someone keeps picking the scab and opening it up again. His name is Edgar Renteria.

Edgar was a Cardinal for several years and my favorite player to watch. He was a quiet sort of guy who played the game hard every day and was the king of getting clutch hits. Then, after last season, he left St. Louis and went to, God forbid, Boston. I still want to root for the guy, and I still do, but seeing him in that uniform is almost too much sometimes. I mean, I feel a little betrayed. It's like Superman catching Lois Lane banging Lex Luthor, except I actually look more like Lex than Superman, but you get the idea.

Fortunately, even though I miss him, the team doesn't so much and they keep winning like it's their birthright.

See, all of a sudden I just got all excited again. That's baseball. 162 games makes for a long season, and yet I never get tired of it. It's only a third of the way through, so all the stuff I wrote above could change by the time October gets here. The Sox and Cards could falter and miss the playoffs and the Cubs could rebound and make the World Series. Well, OK, that's maybe a little far fetched, but it really is a long season.