Chicken in the Car: The Car, She Go

Chicken in the Car: The Car, She Go

As improbable as it sounds, I have become a regular guest on a sports-talk-radio show in-of all places-Chicago. This post is not a piece of writing about baseball, so much as an exploration into my own complex personality, one which shuns the unexpected and is generally content to function from the background.

Face/book works superbly for me for the obvious reason that I can view all of the action from behind the scenes, and I always have time to think things out before I start pontificating. I can post or I can scroll, all from the safety and security of my kitchen table.

Now that my blog has been miraculously returned to me, I have resumed my writing on the matters of the farm, of the wonders of technology and anything else that blows air up my skirt, all once again from behind my safety zone of cyber space. 

So having established that my comfort zone rarely extends beyond the friendly confines of the ‘Ville, how did I end up answering questions about the minutia that governs Giants baseball, on a radio show in Chicago? I might have thought the Mid-West was as unlikely a place to talk Giants baseball, as ever there were.

That would certainly be a narrow vision of the sports world, as though the only place in the country that Giants fans live was the Bay Area. Because Chicago is the third most populated city in the United States, with more than 2.7 million people, it is logical to assume that there might be a Giants fan or two among them.

So in the fall of 2014, just after the San Francisco Giants won their third world series title in five years, I wrote a piece about the premature use of the word “dynasty,” as it applied to the Orange and Black. By definition a sports dynasty encompasses a ten-year period; the Giants were halfway there.

I posted the piece on that Giants blog for which I used to write, the one that liked to feature articles on March Madness, "Game of Thrones" and the Kardashians. OK, the last maybe not, but who knows? I don’t work there anymore.

One day I received an email from Dan the Man, a radio personality from the Chicago area, telling me that he had read the piece on the Giants Dynasty, or lack thereof. Intrigued, he had contacted my editor about my coming on his radio talk-show, and was I interested in doing an interview and talking some Giants baseball?

Had I been on the telephone, I most certainly would have declined, the fight or flight principle clearly dominated by my inclination to run and hide. I don’t live on a mountaintop, up a five-mile dirt road, off the grid, for nothing. 

Annie, however, had an opinion on the subject. She thought it would be good for me because it didn’t matter where I lived when it came to simply talking about a subject that I knew more about, than was probably healthy.

As my sister JT asked me the other day, “How do you remember all that stuff about Buster Posey? And all those numbers? There isn’t anything in my life that I feel I am as knowledgable about as you are when it comes to the Giants…”

“Well, you know what they say,” I responded, giving her the company line. “Small minds, small pleasures. Whatcha gonna do?”

As for how all that stuff does stick in my little pea-brain, all I can say is that I glance at a boxscore, and it’s just there: how many hits, who had them, who had extra base hits, who knocked in the runs, how long the starting pitcher went, his stats, et al. 

I never really thought about it before. It's been that way all my life. Of course, there is a limited shelf- life to the knowledge, but it hangs out long enough for me to write a recap, or even long enough for me to talk some Giants baseball on the radio-in Chicago.

So even though the date and time for the impending show weighs heavily on my mind, once the questions start, I find it is absolutely no different than it ever was talking baseball with Davy Therens for eight hours non-stop, while we worked in construction together.

There was that rush, however, of knowing that I was being asked questions about the Giants, the answers to which many people in Chicago were genuinely interested. That rush was enough to counter the anxiety I naturally felt. What would I do if I were asked something, about which I knew nothing?

I eliminated “What if?” questions from my repertoire six years ago when I eliminated negative self-talk from my consciousness. It has been a great relief. What-if questions and catastrophizing. I gave them the boot.

Dan the Man is actually going to be in San Francisco this weekend and is going to take in the Giants/Colorado Rockies game this Saturday. I have not yet informed Dan that I do not actually attend games. A well-meaning friend once told me that I would lose credibility with my readers if I let that cat out of the bag.

But if I am going to adhere to the no-catastrophising principle, I’m certainly not going to worry about credibility. My sanity, maybe, but not my credibility.

Besides, watching the Giants from the stands affords a far more limited view of the action, than I get on CSN-BA. 

Plus, I get Kruk and Kuip.

Here is the link to Tuesday, May 3rd's radio show: http://www.blogtalkradio.com/sportstime-radio/2016/05/03/today-is-tuesday-may-3rd-2016