'Bred Crumbs

12:58 AM It's spring, and you know what I need? A "powerful young backstop."

Ah, the language of baseball, conveying on the official page of my major-league top prospect, Bobby Estalella, what the mugshot there does not. This photo, an original by the fine folks at Outsports, more accurately explains his visual appeal -- and, especially in the context of the evocative phrase above, this one really nails it.

Rivaling Estalella for my attention last season (discounting the intensely problematic John Rocker thing), and a leading candidate as we approach the new year, is Ivan Rodriguez. This should lead you to a not-unpredictable conclusion -- my favorite position is catcher. Please, pause to enjoy any double entendre now entering your head. And sure, there are features of note elsewhere in the field -- the eyes and smile of Caminiti, the legs of El Duque. But from bulldog-y Joe Girardi to the man with the sexiest batting stance in baseball, Jim Leyritz, to Brian Johnson, wherever he is now -- give me the stockiness, the squatting, the gear.*

Screw rotissirie. This is fantasy baseball.

(My apologies if this entry was a little too Frank DeCaro.)

* But don't worry, Dan, Javy's all yours.

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11:42 PM <profundity class="cheesy">

I reach into the to-go bag to grab the fortune cookie and find that there are two. I get them both. One winds up caught lightly between just the tips of my fingers; the other sits solidly in the palm of my hand.

<span class="epiphany">Resisting habit, I choose the one least in my grasp.</span>

The fortune says, Good things are coming to you in due course of time.

I discard the other cookie, its fortune unread.

</profundity>

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10:18 PM Seen in an SUV yesterday: a small Asian child holding a green balloon with white shamrocks printed on it. I know the date, but it still strikes me as odd. And, The City's St. Pat's parade was a week earlier, which strikes me as odder.

Perhaps oddest: in Guerneville, there was a house displaying a banner with Snoopy in a green Pilgrim-style hat dancing on a pot o' gold. Against a rainbow background. I guess the beagle couldn't have come out, as gay or Irish, while Schulz was still alive.

(This was my first visit of substantial length to Guerneville, which basks not just in its Fire Island of the Redwoods status, but also in its Northern Exposure-ness. Near the gay Snoopy house was a tiny, tiny hotel named the New Dynamic Inn. Ohhhhh-K.)

Posing on the sidewalk outside a Guerneville bar were a middle-aged gay couple in neon-green tank tops. Me, I wore solid blue all day, because, you see, I'm not Irish. Though I did enjoy rum-and-Cokes in plastic mugs with glowing green bottoms in the sadly empty Guerneville dance club Fab.

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Strange sentences that have come out of my mouth in conversation the past few days:

"I almost bought you disco beads in Milpitas Saturday."

"Well, we don't know what the age-of-consent laws are in that region of space."

The latter referred to the third-season premiere of Farscape, which utterly kicked ass. Now that I know how original, complex, well-written and twisted the show is, I love it for more than just Ben Browder.

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