ADVENTURES IN FRESNO

Yes! The time is now for radical inroads and competition killers.

Today, I gave a presentation to a client in hoppin' Clovis, California, a city next to equally hoppin' Fresno. My cell phone was out of web range, my laptop stripped of even wireless connectivity. I experienced the most alarming case of MLB delirium tremens.

The inconvenience was maddening. Instead of picturing my audience nude, I pictured them in baseball uniforms. The head of marketing -- a vile, insidious man -- wore Yankees pinstripes. Members of the beleaguered engineering team wore a variety of uniforms: Rangers, Phillies, Pirates, Rockies, but their strong, silent Vice President, he wore Dusty Baker blues. I think he was even gnawing on a flat toothpick. That gal in the back of the room? The one with the quiet voice and searing-good ideas? She was the Marlin's own Miguel Cabrera, although not as cute. And his uniform hung like a sack on her lanky frame.

Late in the presentation, when one of the vile marketers -- I'm sure he wore Pierzynski's new White Sox stripes -- started barking about some economically viable, demographically sustainable, industry portable thing, I politely stood, brushed the peanut shells off my lap, and headed for my laptop as if to record his Powerpoint-y genius. But what I really planned to do was fire up a browser, hop on an unsecure wireless beam (security be damned!), and check MLB.com for scores.

I nodded sagely as he went on, moved by my new interest in typing into a doc what he had to say. "Dan," I said, "that's a tenable paradigm in a contextual sort of way," which clients love to hear. (Nationals were ahead in their game against the poor, pathetic Phillies -- Yay!) "I mean, 'yay be unto your ideas and the schooling that helped you realize them.'" He blinked at me, decided I was complimenting him, and continued talking about resizing parameters and animated menus. (The Cubs and Reds were in the 6th; Cubs led 8-7, which sounded like a game I needed to be watching right now!). "Yes," Dan shouted, and pointed both index fingers at me, "The time is now for radical inroads and competition killers." Aye, teams were competing, and I'm sure that somewhere someone was being killed, but nothing so exciting was going on in meeting room B.

After the meeting, I demanded for reasons that escape me that our hosts march us to the [client name] gift shop. There, lo and behold, was a framed poster touting the Fresno Grizzlies, the Giants' AAA minor-league affiliate. That beautiful sight flushed all the marketing/engineering noise from my noggin'. I asked my hosts about the Grizzlies. They knew nothing. I asked my colleagues about the Grizzlies. They knew nothing. About the Grizzlies, I knew nothing. Ask yourself...what do you know about your favorite team's AAA affiliate? That's where most of the players bide their time, waiting to be called. You view their roster and instantly recognize their names, because you've seen them on TV or heard their names on radio. Who'd have thought I'd spend the afternoon down the road from the Grizzlies' stadium on Tulare street. Bet the tickets are way cheap and the games no less fun than spring training.

On the three hour ride home, I fussed and fumed in the back seat, played endless rounds of Yahtzee and Backgammon on my phone, cleared all the porn off my laptop, chewed seven pieces of spearmint gum (not all at once), and tried to recall how to conjugate "Are we there yet?" in Italian.

At 9:40pm, we crossed the Bay Bridge and spotted SBC Park, lit with googlewatts of night light like some star freighter squatting on the edge of the bay. We were dropping off one of my colleagues at 2nd and Bryant, which is two blocks from the park. I warned her that we had to hurry because once the game let out, the crush of cars and people would bring reality to a complete stop for about thirty minutes. Little did I know that at 9:40pm, the Padres in the top of the 8th had tied the game at 5. If I had known, I would have demanded that they turn the radio to KNBR 680. Or, at the very least, stop at the corner where Willie Mays' statue looms while I gawked with teary eyes at the park's locked front gates.

Once home, I kicked off my shoes, popped open a beer, and sat down at my PC, there to learn that the Nats won their game, the Cubs had blown their lead, and the Giants eked out one more run to beat the Padres 6-5.