Nelson

OK, OK. Sheesh. We go away to San Diego to work four more long days at the World Baseball Classic and we get blistered by anonymous comments . . . Wow!

As Sally Field once said at an awards presentation, "You love (us). You really do!"

Last week, Bruce "The Moose" Tenen from Perelman Pioneer, the firm handling all of the press operations for the World Baseball Classic, called me and said that I'd done such a great job at the games in Phoenix and Scottsdale that he wanted me to come work the semifinals and final in San Diego.

It truly did mean four more long days . . . starting with the five hour drive from LA to San Diego on Friday. It normally only takes about 2 hours to make that drive -- except for all the traffic in LA.

Anyway, long story short, I worked 17 hours for the semifinals on Saturday, then went to the train station to pick up my sweetie, who stayed Friday and Saturday with Brooke in LA (by the way . . . thanks for taking care of Lucy and Molly while we were gone, Brookie). Saturday probably would have been about another hour shorter if it weren't for a 45-minute rain delay during the semifinal between Japan and Korea. Hey Neil Diamond . . . What ever happened to "It never rains in California"!?

Sunday, the offday, was another long one that was filled with working on notes and stats with Rich Perelman, the venue press chief, who assigned me to be the press box manager during the championship round, and left all of the decisions and "firefighting" to me, as he trusted my expertise and knowledge. Throughout the entire weekend, I'm proud to report, thinks went very smoothly and we were able to serve the media in a manner that made them happy.

It was a great weekend.