It's Got to Be the Morning After

Warriors 111 Mavericks 82- In baseball they call it the Magic Number, the amount of games that it would take for a team to clinch a playoff spot. The Warriors Magic Number? One. Here's how it works: if the Warriors win or the Clippers lose, the Warriors are in. It's that easy.

As for the game, the Warriors clobbered the Mavs but the Mavs sat all of their big guns (what happened to giving it your all for the sake of keeping the integrity of the pennant race?). All of which means any discussion of the game is kind of moot as whatever the Warriors did, it wasn't really that difficult to do.

Their next game is tonight against the Trailblazers.

A's 4 Angels 1- In a shocker, the A's actually won a game that wasn't decided by one run and didn't end with some sort of last inning come back. Instead, this game was pretty much over in the 4th when recently shorn Eric Chavez Bobby Crosby hit a three run homer against Jered Weaver. The other big story out of the game was the pitching effort by Chad Gaudin. Gaudin, who started in place of Esteban Loiza, pitched 7 2/3 innings of shutout ball before leaving when the Angels scored their first run of the night.

Rockies 5 Giants 3- We went out for the night with the game 3-0 Giants and for the first time this season, started thinking this season might not be so bad. They were on their way to their third straight victory, their offense was coming to life, and their starting pitching was looking really good. But we forgot one thing- their bullpen. Matt Cain continued the streak of Giants pitchers throwing doughnuts (it would have been the first time a team had pitched back-to-back shutouts against the Rockies at Coors) and handed a 3-0 lead to the Giants bullpen in the 8th. An inning later, it was 5-3. The inning in question included a lead off homer by Steve Finley, a ball that bounced off of Pedro Feliz's glove, a dribbler to the mound that Kevin Correia couldn't field properly, a bases loaded walk, and then a three-run double by good ole Yorvit Torrealban that went off the glove of Todd Linden. Linden, by the way, was in the game as a defensive replacement.

Ugh.