I have to say, if you’re thinking about setting up a blog, I heartily recommend you try Wordpress as a means to do so. After toiling away with Post-Nuke software (and it’s never-ending lineup of spam comments) for a year, and dealing with Blogger.com’s many downsides for a year before that, I’m astounded at just how well the new set-up is handling things.

 Of course, much of what’s great about it is behind the scenes – I’m loving how easy it is to wipe out spammers before they even get started (back to the Ukraine for you, Henry 2332!), and the simple categorization of posts will make it much easier for folks to browse the archives than it was previously, and the image handling is just aces.

But hey, you guys don’t care about that stuff – you want content, and plenty of it, so I’m going to be blogging the heck out of the Oakland playoffs run, in the way that only Notes From The Nat can.

Last night’s dead rubber for Oakland against the Seattle Mariners was an interesting occasion for vancouver Canadians fans, being as the Athletics sent out what amounted to a second-string team – and STILL beat the M’s in extra innings. Jason Windsor started, and though he went clean through two innings to open proceedings, he did look shaky at times (he ended his night with 5 earned runs over 5 innings). For a control pitcher, he does tend to second-guess himself when facing big names. Fair enough though – the kid was throwing at Nat Bailey Stadium in 2004, and now he has to face down against Ichiro – but for a guy that went 17-2 in the minors this season, any chance to throw in the bigs should be a fire and brimstone affair. And it will. In time.

Fronting up with the bat was new recruit D’Angelo Jimenez, the underused Antonio Perez, the criminally underused Adam Melhuse, the perennial bridesmaid Jeremy Brown, and the unlucky oft-injured but capable of big things Hiram Bocachica (whose name I simply can’t say without adding a ‘wow-wow’ to the end of it, in the best porno soundtrack fashion).

Of those guys, only Jeremy Brown played in Vancouver, and even then, only he only took 28 at bats in the red and blue, but Oakland regulars Rich Harden, Joe Blanton, Nick Swisher, Dan Johnson, and Ron Flores all got their first licks of pro baseball in V-Town, so Vancouverites should be paying plenty of attention – and we were finally able to, as Sportsnet actually showed the entire Seattle-Oakland series on TV.

Just a shame that, instead of showing the next Oakland series at 2nd place Anaheim, they’ll be showing the 3rd vs 4th match-up of Seattle and Texas.

A’s fans get no respect.

PS: One unexpected side effect of the software upgrade has been the loss of formatting of some posts. Sorry about that – we certainly don’t anticipate that being a permanent part of the site and will be working to fix it, but it might take a while.