Here's todays sports news...

Here's todays sports news...

Here's todays sports wrapup...

A's 7, Indians 4- Rich Harden looked sharp in his first start in 3 1/2 months and Jason Kendall had three hits as the A's beat the Indians again. Your magic number is 4 with the Angels coming to town for a three game series. It's pretty simple, actually-- all the A's have to do is take two and champagne will be spilled at home. No scoreboard watching, no waiting around. Destiny, as they say, is for the taking. Oh yeah, Oaktown, get ready with some Montel Jordan cause you better be ready to party. ...

Sometimes a loss can be a victory and this is one of those losses that looks like a victory. Except in the win column where it really counts. The Niners came out right from the start loaded for bear and scored a TD with Alex Smith hooking up with Vernon Davis on their very first drive. The Cards then went on to take a 21-7 lead but the Niners kept coming and coming and coming, only to finally go down in defeat when Smith's Hail Mary pass fell incomplete. In fact, the Niners could claim they won all the big things but lost due to the small things, like penalties and missed passes and one missed field goal. Which sounds pretty bad if you're a contending team but really good if you're pretty much not. Oh, and Frank Gore is the man. His two-yard TD run where he basically just pushed himself into the end zone was the kind of football that would have made Vince Lombardi smile. ...

Soy es parados, your Bay Area baseball teams are losers, baby... ...

You know how sometimes you get bored at work and for maybe half-an-hour or so you start daydreaming about what you're going to have to eat, about checking e-mail, or about doing certain things to a coworker that they wouldn’t dare show on Skinemax? Now imagine you're a starting pitcher and can't just surf the Web to take a mental break. What do you do? Well, if you're Matt Morris, you take a perfectly pitched game and start giving up runs. Which is what he did, almost blowing a 7-1 lead to let the Braves get back into the game. Morris seems to do that a lot-- pitch well except for one inning in which he throws batting practice out there. ...

Well, that wasn't what we were hoping for. Yes, the Giants did indeed lose their first game of the big road trip, 8-6 to the Washington Nationals. We haven't seen a road trip start off so badly since a camping trip we took years ago in which on the first night of the trip, we hit a deer (true story. The deer, luckily, was only dazed). And after being in first place a mere seventy-two......

Jon was going to write up a blurb about the Giants taking 2 out of 3 from the D-Backs, but he was way-laid by a prawn quesidilla at Taco Bell. And yes, you might be thinking to yourself that Taco Bell doesn't serve prawn quesidillas but Jon forgot. He still isn't sure what he ate. Since the Giants' keys to victory were so easy to figure out, in his place and writing up today's Giants blurb will be the President of the United States of America, George W. Bush. See, what the Giants need to do is to win. You have to win to make it to the playoffs. And the Giants? They won. They beat the Arizona Diamondboys 8-2. They have now won two in a row. That's better than losing two in a row. ...

A large portion of Western literature doesn't make sense to California kids. Specifically, we don't get all those poems about springtime, because it just doesn't feel like that big a deal. This is not to say that "there are no seasons in California." Rather, we mean that spring is nice, sure, but so are summer and fall, and Indian summer, and hey, winter isn't really that bad, either. There seem to be more poems......

And the Giants got their man. Monday it was announced that Matt Morris, formerly of the Cardinals, is now a member in proud standing of the Black & Orange. As we said earlier, Morris is the proto-typical Sabaen pick-up: a gritty veteran just beginning the downside of their career and coming off a few injury-laden down years. When he was good, which was several years ago, he was the anchor of a pretty good Cardinal pitching staff. In 2001, he won 22 games and is 101-62 with a 3.62 ERA over his career. He is also known as both a "gamer" and an inning eater. Considering the chinese fire drill that was last year's pitching staff, that's a good thing. Last year, however, he was 14-10 with a 4.11 ERA, but he was 10-2 with a 3.10 ERA before the All-Star break last season and 4-8 with a 5.32 ERA after it. That could either mean he lost his stuff and r'uh oh or it could also mean he was simply fatigued after having shoulder surgery at the end of the 2004 season. The Giants hope it was the later. ...

There's good news and there's bad news in Giants-land today. Let's start with the bad news: so far the only Hot Stove action the Giants have pulled off is trading one relieving re-tread for another relieving re-tread for yesterday they traded LaTroy Hawkins for Steve Kline. Kline, who gained a measure of infamy for giving his then-manager Tony LaRussa (ha!) the finger, is considered a get for the Giants because he’s left handed and they lost their only left-handed setup man when Scott Eyre left for the Cubs. Or maybe not. ...

The Giants said hello to a new friend yesterday and resigned relief pitcher Tim Worrell. Worrell was with the team in the Glory Days between 2001-2003 and was involved in two of the most gut wrenching moments of SFist's life-- Game 3 against the Marlins in 2003 and Game 6 of the Series. Which, actually, isn't that fair as we like Worrell. He was always a steady setup man and performed nobly as a reliever when Nenn went down in 2003 (and helped our fantasy team come in 2nd place) and we never really blamed him for the collapses. We blame Felix Rodriguez. We'll always remember his goalie like stop in the eleventh inning (we think) of that climatic game against the Fish which made us think for just a second, a smidgeon of a second, that everything will be allright. Or something like that. We've been blocking most of that game for years now. ...