Little Howie

Tonight during dinner I had a chance to watch my first Giants game of the season. Sometime around the 7th inning stretch, baseball's best announcing team - Kruk and Kuip - went to perhaps baseball's worst roving reporter for an interview with Raider middle linebacker Kirk Morrison.

He was attending the game with Chris Long.

The open ended questions were answered predictably: Morrison hopes he drops to #4 so the Raiders can draft him, while Long will be happy to play anywhere and was impressed by the Raiders he's met. Unfortunately, the reporter kept talking and eventually asked Chris if he might just be a Giants fan given all the years his father played in the Bay Area. Oops.

I am in favor of using pick #4 on a defensive lineman, but I doubt Chris Long drops that far.

Meanwhile, the Giants managed to win the ballgame with a walk-off double with 2 outs in the bottom of the ninth. The score? 1-0, of course. And that's with Jonathan Sanchez pitching. My favorite headline of the year was the Chronicle's after an opening day 5-0 blanking at the hands of the Dodgers: "Giants Meet Expectations."

The earlier McCovey Cove entertainment, San Francisco's torch shell game, was terrific drama. I was glued to the screen during an extended lunch. Would they circumvent the Third Street Bridge via boat? What would the Free Tibet gang do as a follow-up to the Golden Gate banner stunt? Why is the lead vehicle in the procession one of those amphibious Duck buses?

Best of all, as the torch turned off of Bay and North onto Laguna, there was Little Howie herself: my wife. While trying to avoid the Embarcadero route she had stumbled onto the revised route and had a front-row seat for a torch hand-off. And she looked great on the Chopper cam.

Great day. And another hysterical quote from a San Francisco Supervisor was just icing on the cake.