Freeway series?

Right now the Anaheim Angels (I'll start calling them the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim when they start referring to that team an hour up the Santa Ana Freeway as the Orange County Dodgers of Los Angeles) are playing Boston for a chance to go to the American League Championship Series. 

The Dodgers just cinched their chance to go to the National League Penant, and there are high hopes in SoCal (that's the way we write Southern California in Southern California) that we may actually have a "freeway World Series." This is the furthest the Dodgers have gone since 1988, so people are excited. The Anaheim Angels, of course, the home team in my hometown of Orange County, won the World Series in 2002. (Repeat after me: OC is not L.A.!)

The game's going on right now, and it's do-or-die time for the Angels, who are up by one run in early innings, according to ticker at the top of the OC Register home page.

As much as I'd like to watch it, the forces of weevil are aligned against me. First, there's that jinx against my favorite sporting teams if I watch the games they're playing. Second, I have no idea which station here in Honolulu is playing it, and if it's NBC, fat chance I'll be able to see it at all (ironic that local NBC affiliate KHNL keeps advertising how we need to make sure our televisions are ready for the "big switch" to digital come February but they have no digital signal whatsoever, at least none that my EyeTV or my government-subsidized decoder box can find). 

I still get an analog signal, but it's full of snow and getting snowier by the minute. All the over-the-air stations in Honolulu are fuzzy. I've stopped recording favorite shows The Office, My Name Is Earl, Saturday Night Live, and have taken to watching them on Hulu.com or the NBC.com site. Sheesh. 

[Kushibo turns on TV to see if the Angel game is playing on KHNL]

They've got the Pittsburgh-Jacksonville game on instead. Hey, it's Hines Ward!  

Actually, football doesn't interest me much ever since all the NFL teams vacated Orange County and even Los Angeles. Except for last year, when the University of Hawaii Warriors went undefeated! That was killer! 

Okay, anyway, back to baseball. By the time most people read this, the Angels will have lost or won, and it will all be moot. 

Anyway, the third thing is that I should be preparing for a major exam and an equally major essay. Kushibo out!

UPDATE 1 (Sunday, October 5, 8:32 p.m., HST): 

The Angels won 5-4 in the 12th inning (the last time I'd checked the score it was the top of the 9th and the game was tied at four runs). The nail-biter lasted 5 hours and 19 minutes. Boston sucks! My jinx-related avoidance of the game pays off again!

The OC Register says the Angels finally snapped their losing streak in the post-season (nine games) and in playoff games against the Red Sox (eleven games, the longest post-season run of domination by one team over another in baseball history). 

Of course, now they have to win the next two. 

UPDATE 2 (Monday, October 6, 6:49 p.m., HST):

Crap! My cockiness caused the Angels to be eliminated! Boston won, 3-2, scoring a winning run with two outs in the ninth inning. This is the third time in five seasons that the Angels were eliminated in a division series by the Red Sox. Boston sucks!