McCarthy writes back page column for SI

If you haven’t made your way to the back page of this week’s issue (Oct. 15) of “Sports Illustrated,” I’m suggesting you do so immediately. And if it’s not accessible to you, I hope you have great vision, because the online version can only be viewed by slightly zooming in on THIS picture.

You’ll see that A’s hurler Brandon McCarthy is a guest writer for the column, in which he shares his thoughts about his surgery and the support the A’s lent him and and his family during and after it all, among other things.

McCarthy writes, “After day two or three I was able to start watching A’s games on TV. During that time I heard from a lot of my teammates, and that was huge for my psyche. It helped me not feel so distant from the team. It was nice of them to hang my jersey up in the dugout, but after the third day I wanted them to take it down. I didn’t die, and I wasn’t suffering. All I was doing was lying in bed, eating grilled cheese sandwich and soup, with a cup of tea.

And, “My teammate Yoenis Cespedes — I call him our Jim Brown because he’s just way more gifted than everybody else — defected from Cuba and had never played in the U.S. before. I kept trying to tell him that a team like this might happen once in a career.”