Sometimes bed wins over baseball

“What inning is it?” I asked as I lifted my eyelids and attempted to drag myself from the warm embrace of the family room sofa where I had been dozing.

Truth to tell, I may as well have asked, “Who is playing?”

It’s been Major League Baseball immersion the past 10 days or so, and my wife and I have been up to our necks, trying to keep track of scores and sometimes trying to stay awake.

Things started to get crazy as the American League regular season rolled to a close.

So many teams — Boston, the Yankees, the Blue Jays and the Mariners — were in the mix for a wild card spot that you needed a spreadsheet to keep track of them. At one point, a four-way tie was theoretically possible.

We did our best to keep track of things, pulling for the Red Sox since two of our daughters and three of our grandchildren live in metropolitan Boston and for the Blue Jays because of Bo Bichette. Bo, who has all the hallmarks of a truly great young player, is related to our friend Michele Bichette Goldman, so we gave out a cheer when Bo homered twice in one of the final games.

In the end, it shook out that the Red Sox and Yankees would face off in a single-game, win-or-go-home match-up. The Sox won, and the Yankees went home.

Then our loyalties became conflicted.

Our attachment to the Red Sox doesn’t run very deep, and when they faced the Tampa Bay Rays an old friendship entered the picture.

My neighborhood buddy Jim Klopfenstein is a Rays fan and lives in Florida. He is also rather deep into what the announcers call “the analytics.” He can probably sort player performance at the plate by zip code. To say he knows more than the team manager would be an understatement.

So when the Rays and the Red Sox faced off, the texting began.

This Rays pitcher, he advised, tends to get complacent after the first two outs and might get in trouble.

I mentioned that Boston’s Kyle Schwarber is an Indiana University graduate, but Klop immediately reminded me that he’s not originally from Indiana.

About the time he started to tell me about an app he’s developed that keeps track of each team’s probability to win the game based upon individual batter performance my eyes glazed over.

And then there’s the fact that neither Connie nor I are truly American League fans.

She grew up with her dad listening to the St. Louis Cardinals on the radio. I grew up with the Reds on WLW.

Trouble is, the most exciting National League action has been on the West Coast.

We saw Fernando Tatis Jr. during his brief stint with the TinCaps in Fort Wayne and were rooting for him in San Diego, but it finally came down to the old rivals: The Dodgers and the Giants.

I’ve had the privilege of seeing the Giants twice at what is now Oracle Field in San Francisco, so I was in their corner.

Just the same, it’s a little hard to keep track of who I’m rooting for.

As I write this, there are still eight teams battling it out: The Red Sox and Rays, the Astros and White Sox (another childhood favorite), the Braves and the Brewers, and the Dodgers and the Giants.

Eight teams. That’s an awful lot for an old guy to keep track of. Inevitably I would forget one or more of the teams involved.

And then there was the sheer volume of baseball. One day last week had four critical games.

My eyes glazed over yet again. My eyelids grew heavier. The warm embrace of the sofa became more inviting.

When I stumbled back into consciousness, my wife said the best words since “Play ball.”

“It’s time for bed,” she said.