Now playing the team from the city that's home to The Wire

The season's second series against Baltimore provides us a second opportunity to recognize The Wire, an audacious, breathtakingly ambitious show that plays out like a rough game of stickball, of splintered bats, black bruises, dirt and blood (sort of appropriate, as "blood" and "bleeding" have been mentioned a lot recently, including, incidentally -- though unrelated to the others -- by IDWT).

A simple search on Google or Technorati will turn up something like this, your standard panegyric that's wholly deserved ("Hands down, this is the best show on television. Period. End of discussion. Nothing else even comes close"). You can also check out IDWT's previous Wire post (first link in this post), which links to a bunch of other articles, like this primer from Salon.

Assuming you care about any of this, of course... I mean, why would anyone care about "A Greek tragedy on the streets of Baltimore"? (!)

I wish there was some way of connecting all this with tonight's game or baseball in general (McNulty and Bunk did take their kids to Camden Yards in one of the episodes, and one of the characters threw out a first pitch earlier this season), but unlike the NBA, which has given the folks over at Slam plenty of material, baseball just doesn't evoke as many parallels. Maybe it's sociological -- the NBA is about 80 percent black, whereas MLB is only 8 percent -- and then again... stay tuned.

Scott Elarton faces Steve Trachsel tonight. The offense showed signs of life late yesterday against the Mariners, so we'll see if that continues. Patience at the plate and smart base-running, that's all we need against Trachsel, who has a strikeout-to-walk ratio of worse than 2 to 3. Then again, Trachsel's crafty enough to throw seven innings of nine-hit-but-no-run ball, so I'm taking nothing for granted. I might go haywire if that happens though.

POSTSCRIPT: From the Baseball Think Factory: we know Yankees fans are generally bad (I'll elaborate when the Royals play in New York), but this is all the proof I need that people who call for Joe Torre's firing are crazy. How many managers could so shrewdly yet thoroughly attack an umpire in the post-game interview?

UPDATE: 6-0 Orioles at time of posting.