Priorities: Baseball vs Work

This seems to be an annual thing for me during the postseason. With the knowledge that I soon won't have new baseball games for about 6 months and the most important games of the season, I find this time of the year to be my least productive. I do end up listening to some games on the radio (via mlb.com) rather than watching them on tv (especially if it's during the day and I'm at work, where national broadcast rights prevent my access to telecasts), although I have been known to skip out on going to work if the games are truly important (say, if the Dodgers are in the postseason, which hasn't occurred all the much for several years now). There's a wider range of games for which I'll leave work early, which includes many regular-season Dodger games and postseason games that prove to be very interesting based on some combination of teams/announcers/which game it is/how deep into the postseason it is/other things I am forgetting at the moment.

OK, so why do I bring all this up? Well, today we had an 18 inning game between the Astros and the Braves. (I was going to post something on this anyway, although JSpur has now requested it as well.) This was the "longest" game in terms of innings in postseason history. [There was a 16 inning NLCS game between the Astros and Mets in 1986, which was the year of Mike Scott (among others).] It was the longest game in NLDS history in terms of time (5:50). Fittingly, the recap on ESPN.com is brought to you by Viagra. I tried to see where it ranks in game length among all postseason games, but I couldn't find that quickly and I want to pay attention to the Angels-Yankees game (and hopefully watch the Yankees die). [Postscript added later: The Fox broadcast indicates that this is indeed the longest postseason game ever.]

I got up this morning at 10am and missed the 1st inning during my bath. I decided to get some coffee and get back (instead of getting coffee and listening to the game on the radio at work) and then go to work after the game (or see Serenity after the game and go to work after the Angels-Yankees game, since I only needed an hour or so in the office), and it was 4-0 Braves in the top of the 5th when I returned. (I thought I'd only miss another 1.5 innings or so, but Peet's was really busy this morning.) It was about 11:20 when I got back, so the game had been pretty quick up to that time. I didn't expect it to go 18 innings, obviously. It was quite an exciting game. I should also mention that this game one again revealed the Braves' achilles heal, which is their bullpen (good extra inning pitching notwithstanding), as it has been all year. Of course, in a short series, who the stochastic component determines who wins far more than the deterministic component, but when the Astros can have an element of {Pettitte,Clemens,Oswalt} start 4 of 5 games, that's a pretty tough order for the opponents. Granted, the Bills' (I mean Braves') vaunted rotation (containing at least 2 and maybe 3 Hall-of-Famers) that dominated baseball for well over a decade didn't keep them from choking repeatedly over the years... (Again, it's the stochastic component, but after dealing with local obnoxious Braves fans for 2.5 years, I do enjoy seeing them fall. The tomahawk chop is insidious.)

[Postscript: I forgot to mention that in choosing which game I would miss a bit to get some work done, the ESPN versus Fox broadcast and, more particularly, the no Tim McCarver vs Tim McCarver factor was the deciding factor. Given how great the last 13 innings of the Braves-Astros game were, I clearly made the right decision. Of course, I am seeing the last few innings of this second game as well and my Tim McCarver filters have been working pretty well so far.]