Languishing here at the tail end of two straight weeks of football oversaturation, my frustration was originally driving me to title this column, “99 Reasons Why WWE’s Royal Rumble is Like a Kajillion Times Better than the Super Bowl.”  Logistical considerations changed my plans, but I’m willing to offer just a sampling here: #82 – No hypocritical prohibition of the figure-four leglock,  #37 – Tom Brady has never won a Royal Rumble, and #16 – Ric Flair.  

Maybe next year.  For now, I’m going to stick with what I said I would do and finish up my list of the Ten Happiest Moments in Athletics History . . . or whatever title it was I ended up settling on (and yes, I am too lazy to go look at my own website to doublecheck this.  That’s just the way I am, and there’s no changing it, so if you’ve got a problem with that maybe it’s best if we just end this right now . . . still here?  Good.  Let’s just move on and pretend this never happened, okay?)

But before I get there, I just want to say a few words about exactly what’s making me so happy these days.  It’s simple, really.  Can you remember another offseason like the one we’re having?  Can you remember a time when the A’s started a season as anything but scrappy underdogs?  A time when you could talk about the team without adding a “But what I’m really worried about is . . .”?  This year’s team will not be perfect, of course, but for the first time in over a decade the A’s are starting a season in which their only glaring, obvious defects are the consistently horrifying trough-style urinals in the bathrooms.

And in perhaps even more shocking news, the A’s are finally favored by someone outside of Oakland fans and Rob Neyer to actually win the division.  It’s bizarre, almost like I woke up one morning and realized I was rooting for the Yankees, but without all the evil connotations.  Sure, Oakland has had a pretty good measure of success the last few years, but can you remember the last time the team was expected  to succeed?  Just bizarre.

But bizarre as it is, there’s a very simple explanation for it all: ego.  Specifically, Billy Beane’s ego.  See, my theory is that Billy got used to being famous.  In the beginning it was no big deal; Billy was more than happy to toil in obscurity and collect his modest-sized paycheck while making his way to the playoffs every twelve months.  Then came Moneyball.  Suddenly Billy was famous.  Suddenly Billy media outlets weren’t allowed to mention his name without the word “genius” in close conjunction.  And he liked it.  He liked it a lot.

But glory is fleeting, and books can only stay on bestseller lists for so long.  Billy Beane and Moneyball ushered in the era of the superstar GM, and Billy wouldn’t stay on the top of that list for long.  Before 2002, could you have named a single major league general manager without at least three gimme syllables to help you along?  Suddenly it was all the rage to talk about general managers, discuss their strategy at every opportunity, and lay 99% of the blame or praise for their teams’ success squarely at their doorsteps. 

is.  But not Billy.  He can’t even get out of the first round, for crying out loud! 

Billly’s just plain sick of it.  His geomanagerial blood is boiling.  He got real used to being The Original Genius GM, and he’s furious that Epstein and Williams have made it to the Ivory Tower thanks to one lucky season and a nine-figure budget.  It’s time to make his way back to the Promised Land, and Billy knows the only path there leads straight through the World Series.

Hence this offseason.  Billy’s ego is running wild, and we’re reaping the benefits.  Because make no mistake, Esteban Loaiza, Milton Bradley, Frank Thomas, and probably even Barry Zito would not be hanging up green and gold long johns in their closets right now if Billy weren’t the egomaniacal, winning-obsessed genius we’ve all come to know and love over the years.  Billy wants a ring, and he wants it now.  He wants to be King of the GM Mountain again, and he wants it now.  The results?  One awesome offseason, and one happy Sean.

Of course, the mad dreams of one raging egomaniac probably aren’t the only fuel feeding the Oakland fire this offseason, and in fact I have a similar theory about Lewis Wolff tying his personal fortunes and self-esteem to obtaining a new stadium in the East Bay, not to mention the benefits of having a silent owner with $80 trillion worth of Gap stock in his back pocket, but those may be topics better left for another time.  For now, on with the list!

5) September, 2000.  I was toiling as a Mormon missionary in the rural outskirts of Mexico City.  The A’s, meanwhile, were toiling their way out of an eight-year ditch of postseaon-less mediocrity.  My father was not the best writer for the two years I was away (in fact, if you compiled every word he wrote to me over those two years – most of which came in the form of a couple of lines scrawled on the bottom of my mom’s weekly letters and contained such tender missives as “We got a bigscreen for the living room” – and put them all together into one single letter, you’d probably look at said letter and say, to yourself, “What?  That’s all?  Pretty lame, Dad.  Pret-ty lame.”), but regardless, I could always count on Dad to come through in the clutch.  And come through he did this time, in spades.  Because at the bottom of Mom’s letter were two lines, typed all in caps, saying simple , “THE A’S BEAT TEXAS YESTERDAY TO CLINCH THE DIVISION.  GIAMBI IS THE MVP.  OAKLAND IS GOING TO THE PLAYOFFS.”  I imagine more than a few Mexicans glanced out their window that day and wondered why there was a funny-looking white guy in a tie and a nametag sprinting up and down their street while periodically leaping in the air, pumping his fist and shouting “Sí!” at the top of his lungs.  They’re probably still wondering.

4) May 1, 1991: Rickey becomes the Greatest of all Time.  Rickey Henderson breaking the all-time steals record was almost a given from the moment he hit set a single-season AL record for steals in only his second season as a professional.  We all knew it was coming, Rickey knew it was coming, Lou Brock knew it was coming, but #939 was still something I’ll be remembering for quite some time.  Every Rickey steal was a joy to watch, but this was an Event.  Not so much for the steal itself, which wasn’t all that different from the 938 that preceded it, but more for the way he picked that base up and gave it a filthy, dirt-ridden smooch before hoisting it high over his head grinning like the Pope of Chilitown soaking in the adulating screams of 40,000 Rickey-philes.  And it goes without saying that his speech was one for the ages, and I for one am lobbying to get it engraved on his tombstone: “Today (today today today), I am (am am am) the greates t(est est est) of all time.”  It still gives me chills.  Still, #939 might be lower on the list were it not for a) Rickey still gettin’ it done out there with the Surf Dawgs, and b) let’s face it, until the inevitable melding of baseball and virtual reality leads to the Yankees signing DC Comics superhero The Flash, nobody’s breaking that record.  

I had originally planned to cover numbers 5 through 1 on the list today, but time constraints and the sudden realization that I could drag this out for as long as I wanted convinced me otherwise.  To tell you the truth, I’m kind of mad at myself for putting 10 through 6 in last week’s column – if I had planned this right, I’d have been good on column ideas for another two months. 

So I’ll return to the list next week, but before I wrap things up I wanted to say this: Reason #4 why the Royal Rumble Owns the Super Bowl?  Five foot three guys wearing Mexican wrestling masks actually have a chance of winning the dang thing.  Congratulations are due to Rey Misterio, who went the distance last Sunday and beat out 29 other men, including two former World Champions in Triple H and Randy Orton in the final minutes, to win the Royal Rumble, in the process setting a new record for longevity and becoming by far the smallest man to ever win the Rumble.  So congrats, Rey: you’re an inspiration to little Mexican guys everywhere.

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