Yankees 9, Mariners 5

We couple a game the Yankees should have lost but didn't . . . with a game the Rays should have lost but didn't.

The real charmer was Tampa. I just looked up the name of the A's losing pitcher; it took me 20 seconds to forget his name, which is just as well, considering the game-losing homer he served up to Craig Suzuki climbed halfway to Al Davis Pavilion, the portion of the football seating that is tarped over to give what used to be called Oakland-Alameda Coliseum the illusion of a crowd.

A few years ago, in response to Deadspin's continuing series "Your Ballpark Sucks!", some A's fans wrote in and complained that the tarping had closed off the best feature of the ballpark: namely, the ability to sit in solitude, surrounded by acres of empty bleachers on a weekday afternoon, and spot an advancing usher from hundreds of yards away, plenty of time to snuff out the joint one's group was sharing.

Two thoughts:

1. When I was in high school, we did the same thing with our beer a few hundred yards up Squaw Peak on a Friday night, as any police car could be spotted from at least a mile away; and

2. If you lived in Oakland, how would you make it through the season?

One game up.