Whilst I try not to think about the coming up World Series I will graciously answer a number of your burning questions.

NOTE: Some of them actually have been asked while others I am fairly sure somebody will ask me eventually.

Q: You are from Knoxville.  How did it come to pass that the Giants are your team?  Shouldn’t the Braves or the Reds be your favorite team?

A:  First off, the imaginary rules CLEARLY state that if you have no MLB team in your hometown then you can choose ANY team, past or present.  Furthermore, imaginary clause 8b indicates that a fan is not bound to like the team in closest proximity.

Q: Isn’t that not answering the question?

A: I am the last of five kids in my family.  By the time I was born, my two older brothers had already picked over the proximity teams. Plus, being the classic youngest child I wanted to defiantly proclaim my difference by choosing the most exotic team I could find- other than the Expos, who weren’t even real yet. All that and … Willie Mays.  Once I saw him play on TV, it was all over. Scoring his baseball card right off the bat (accidental baseball metaphor!) further sealed the deal.The fact I did not go to San Francisco until 2013 is irrelevant.

Need other reasons? Orange is also the color of the UT Vols.

Q: But don’t you love the Braves? The Reds?

A: I do love the Braves, they were my dad’s and oldest brother’s favorite team.  I will always support them on their behalf- unless they are playing the Giants in which case I will have an existential crisis.

We weren’t very good at geography in my family, so ‘no’ on the Reds love. I had no idea they were so close.  I thought they were in Ohio. But hey, I love baseball.  So if the Reds are playing someone like the Rangers, I’ll root for the Reds.  I also dig the Tennessee Smokies, the Oakland A’s (the hippie marketing worked on me in the 70’s) and any UT team that has balls.

Q: Why is your baseball obsession so pronounced all of a sudden?

A:  It’s returning to form, now with newly acquired reading and listening skills.  I was way into baseball as a kid- from playing to watching to listening to collecting.  When I got what turned out to be a very jealous guitar at the age of 15, I was forced to dump sports for a while.  Baseball definitely played second fiddle (an accidental music metaphor!) for decades.  I still enjoyed going to various sporting matches and watching the better parts of the post season. I LOVED going to watch the Knoxville AA team until it left for the next county over.  But that devotion to any particular team was not there. The steroid era further allowed me to push MLB away while I focused on home, music and career.

But everything changes, for better and for worse, and occasionally for the heartbreakingly disastrous.

I lost my mom in 2008 and that very same day my dad lost his wife of 60 years. Though very little helps in that situation,  he took comfort in watching baseball. I took  comfort in watching it with him.

I was a bit bored, but at that point if he would have asked me to sleep on the roof every night in a gingham dress, I would have done it. I had lost a lot of my knowledge of the game and certainly didn’t know many of the players. But I watched.  We often sat there, in silence, watching Chipper Jones knock the crap out of the baseball.

Night after night, would would watch the little screen, talking here and there and not talking here and there. I slowly…. started…..getting….interested. When the Braves played the Giants, my ten year old self elbowed my current self. “Remember how fun this was?”  My dad, who pitched semi-pro in his youth, pointed out that Tim Lincecum was a fabulous pitcher and I should pay attention to his throwing.  He explained things to me in a way that was not a sales job about baseball, but an explanation of skill and beauty. And sometimes he would just say: I really like this guy.

A few months of this and I was almost hooked.  And then, like a pop fly ball out of the blue, he got cancer.  Fortunately, the kind of cancer he got was not the sort that kills the love of baseball. So we watched some more.  And some more.  One night I noticed that I could, finally, almost talk intelligently about it.

We didn’t talk about predictable, boring cancer. We talked about curve balls.  Double plays.  Great announcers.  Lousy announcers.

And then like the last unwatchable strike in the last inning of an extra innings game you thought would go on forever, he was gone.  And there I was staring at an unplugged TV.  Not wanting to do much of anything, especially watch baseball.  The new, empty arrangement didn’t suit me much. The 2009 season was about over, anyway. I took up sitting around the house. On alternate days I took up staring.

Fast forward to 2010. I still missed him. More than I thought possible.

Somewhere in the cloudy mist of all that loss, I finally began to feel the feeling of missing baseball. Towards the end of the 2010 season I started paying attention to the Giants…maybe this could be a good year for them, and, maybe, if luck would have it, a better one for me.

This isn’t a FAQ anymore, is it?