This one stings, but it's good for baseball.

Let's face it: there's no curse, the fan interference is just a good story, and the Cubs plain got beat. I blame it ALL on Dusty and the inability of the Cubs to throw a knockout punch. Dusty was outmanaged by a guy with big swaths of senility and a team that rode it's horses better than he did. I can accept that and I don't hate the Marlins.

Being at the game was both blessing and curse. I'll figure out how to attach pictures and share soon, but it was amazing. I stood down on the field during warmups and at one point, while talking to a group that included Al Leiter, a man came up to join the conversation and was standing just to my right. I turned to see who it was and it was Ryne Sandberg.

Now, I don't hero worship so much in print, but I about wet myself. Sandberg to me is what Mickey Mantle was to my dad. He's the first player I ever followed and while his quiet excellence may be underappreciated and sabermetrics might not support my argument that he's the greatest second baseman ever, I don't give a shit and keep on saying it. If I had a son, he'd likely be named Ryne S. Carroll. I could barely talk, said nothing intelligent, and was told I looked like a deer in headlights for the five minutes he stood talking with us. It was cool.

I had good seats, up in the "auxiliary press area" - which was basically the section just to the right of the press box. I sat with MLB.com's people, near the NY Times and a couple rows behind Jayson Stark. I didn't feel so bad when I saw Stark was outside with me. There was a notice that killed me - "No drinking or cheering in the press area." Man, talk about something hard to do. The drinking, ok, that's fine, but imagine me sitting on my hands as great play after great play happened.

I'll write a longer piece about this, but I wanted to get back to blogging. There was actually a time in the third inning of Game 7 when I started making notes on my scorecard, kind of blogging with a fountain pen. It does'nt work as well.

Thanks for all the notes on the outline. I caught some mistakes and am making some adjustments as I prep the data. I almost lost most of it when my laptop croaked yesterday - it's now on it's way to Apple to be fixed - but I was able to back it up, so no harm done.