The Mag's Alan Schwarz faces down Jason Giambi and his brand new piece of lumber. Rack 'em up.

"You break," Jason Giambi tells me. The new pool table arrived in his parents' home only a few hours ago -- the cues don't even have tips yet -- and the reigning AL MVP is inviting me to make the virgin whack. I graciously refuse several times before I realize that my gregarious host -- a few inches and several dozen pounds larger -- might break an altogether different set of balls if I don't shut up and smack 'em.

I have done this before. A few years back I played Larry Walker at his dearly departed Denver sports bar -- where he once started a peanut fight -- and beat him one game out of two. (He strained his calf and cracked a rib making a few difficult shots, but that was a fair, regulation win.) Once I challenged Kenny Lofton to a ping-pong game. He refused, suggesting I take on Albert Belle; I decided that winning that one would be the equivalent of taking gold in the Olympic skyscraper dive.

Giambi proves far more hospitable. The shaggy-haired slugger is one of the most down-to-earth fellows in the big leagues -- a jeans-and-T-shirt, shoot-some-stick kind of guy who, it turns out, supplemented his $1,000-a-month salary in A-ball by whipping locals in various California League bars. "A teammate was the real shark -- I just sat back and watched," Giambi laughs. Soon, I'm not. I make several straight shots, including a nifty bank, but muff some easy ones, leaving the door open for Giambi to run four straight for the win. "Lucky," he coughs, before uncorking a break so fierce the crack! echoes off the nearby mountains.

Thankfully, Giambi soon blows a few, too. "Brutal!" he yelps after rattling an easy cut. "These pockets aren't broken in yet." His brother Jeremy, an A's teammate, looks on and shakes his head: "We're gonna have to practice for the Pepsi Challenge." Indeed, the Giambis almost won last year's informal pre-softball pool tournament. The winner? Larry Walker. I drop three close games to Giambi, though, and decide this postcard will go unwritten. But we play one more. I make a bank here, a cut there, and after a few runs on Giambi's part there's only one ball left. We each choke a few times on the 8 -- clunking it about the table like a couple of drunken duffers -- before I end our misery and sink it first.

Giambi gives me a forearm bash and we call it a day. "I'll see you in spring training," he tells me. I'll pack my two-piece.

Alan Schwarz is a contributing writer to ESPN The Magazine. E-mail him at als1492@aol.com.