One For The Ages

Okay, yes we called these two teams out for leaving us a little empty in our baseball viewing, but Game 5 of this NLDS was one of the best contests of any sport we have ever seen.  Chris Carpenter, another source of eye rolls when the Cards come up in the TV Guide, was a monster through every pitch of a 1-0 grinder, outdueling Roy Halladay who went eight and gave up the only run in the first inning. 

It was brilliant baseball and to our satisfaction, only one of these teams could move on. 

Oh Brother...

It's Victor Rojas and Joe Simpson calling the Diamondbacks - Brewers game on TBS, and Chris Berman and Buck Martinez on ESPN radio. 

It's better than anyone on the Fox network, but gee whiz...




image:  the great charles schulz

But What About Moose?

St. Louis Cardinals fans reach for a souvenir squirrel at Tuesday's NL playoff game against the Philadelphia Phillies.




image:  chicago tribune

Hold That Tiger!

Well, Yankees fans, it's time to say goodbye to your $200,000,000 boys of summer.  They're dead meat.  They were eaten by Tigers.

Those bad boys from Detroit got you.  It happens. 

Any given week, any team could take three games from another team in a five game series.  A win here, a loss there, maybe a bad game, followed by a pitching duel, then one half-inning in a tie game, bam, all of a sudden you've won two, lost three.  Happenstance and bad luck aside, this still looks like Boss Tweed getting his wallet lifted on 14th Street at lunchtime. 

Let's not sneer at what $105 million buys you these days -- for Detroit it's a trip to the ALCS and a debate on whether a pitcher can win the season MVP trophy.  New York's payroll has bought them a rubik's cube of hard questions and sobering facts, among them that Jorge Posada and Brett Gardner and Robinson Cano outhit all Yankees, including Alex Rodriguez, Mark Texeira, Derek Jeter, and Curtis Granderson, four names costing $77 million this year who each failed to hit .300 in this series against the Tigers.  In fact Posada, el caballo viejo who spend an agonizing year being prepped for the pasture, had a phenomenal series by going 6 for 14 with 4 walks. 

Among the many question are what to do with Posada, what to do with General Manager Brian Cashman, whose contract expires this year, and how to deal with CC Sabathia who may parlay his option into another round of negotations for a price adjustment, and you can guess he won't be asking for less.  Cashman and the Yankees went through this before with their most expensive player Rodriguez a few seasons ago and ask any fan in the Bronx today what they think of that deal.  O Capitan!

Questions for the Detroit Tigers right now are limited to what time is the bus and what time to we play?

Get These Camera Guys Off The Field

Now that this guy has face-planted on national television, we'd like to address the whole issue of what we feel is an excessive amount of media people on the field.

One of the great things about being a player is owning the space you play on.  Four umpires, two coaches on the baselines, and that's it.  It's your mound.  You roam center field.  Fans stay in the stands, and it's great to be you.

Ask the Stanford marching band about the proprieties of entering the playing field.

Unfortunately nowadays there are more and more media people on the field.  When a team wins a playoff series and celebrates on the field, there are as many camera operators as pitchers.  You watch and you can see players having to weave through photographers and video crew holding shooting overhead or close-up, standing or mindlessly stumbling , bouncing off one player or coach or another and clogging up this 40-man happy dance.  Watching on tv, we see them getting jostled around and knocked aside and wonder, what the hell are you doing, get out of the way! 


One venerable handheld camera shot is from third base to home plate during a home run trot.  The angle is low to the ground and at a sharp upward angle and rattles alongside the runner all the way to the plate, and then tracks backwards as it follows the player(s) to the dugout.  It's an annoyingly useless shot but tv directors seem to love it, who apparently think their audience loves it.  Or should love it.

We here do not love it.  On our screen, it's irritating.  At the game the whole media circus looks more like a taping of "Pet Star"than a sporting event with cameras in the stands, wandering around the sidelines, interviewing whoever before and after the game, even going out to the mound with the poor schlep throwing the first pitch.  We get that's the way it is, but during the game, that is a crime.  We cringe at the sight of police and security that pops out onto the field between innings, standing still with their hands behind their backs, staring down the crowd, reminding us we're not having fun, we're a step closer to the real world.  But while there's live play, it's better when tv broadcasts a baseball game, not produces a baseball game. 

There's nothing like snapping a picture from your front row seats at third base of Adrian Beltre taking a historic home run trot, and having some camera guy in your shot.  Unless it was this camera guy, then you both took a good shot.

Please, all media people leave the field.  You're not needed.  Leave it to the players.

We'll See You Next Year

"...and here's one for Christmas..."

Finally, we must sadly bid adieu to Joe Maddon and the Tampa Bay Rays who left our playoff grid today with a 4-3 loss to the Texas Rangers in game four of the first-round playoffs. 

At least we think the Rays are done...

They've been run over and come back more often than the Terminator.  Cats only get nine lives.  Zombies get one reawakening.  A Rays season ends like the movie "Carrie"  --  you look at the grave and you wait for a hand to reach through the dirt.  The Tampa Bay Rays have made reappearing from the dead and raising hell not just an art, but a livelihood, and it's getting to be a year-end tradition.

"You talkin' to me?"

They raised the bar on themselves this year with their season finale, just one movement in an incredible four-game symphony that the MLB Serendipity Orchestra could never have written on their own.  Yet beyond the dramatics of game 162 lies a season that started 0-6 and stayed thereafter a series of scrambles within one big long climb.  Like the squirrel that fell down a well and made its way back clawing up three feet and dropping down two, up and down like that for an entire schedule.  After 2010's last pitch the script said the Rays would stay at the bottom of the well in 2011, that without Carl Crawford, with no payroll, they had no chance.  It would be a terribly painful rebuilding year, a suicide mission for any manager trying to make that franchise viable.

Joe would probably have asked for it no other way.  When the Rays won the American League pennant in 2008, they spent 2009 as the returning champions, the defender of their crown, the team to beat, which conflicted with their growing image as the anti-Yankees  --  "they're not lowly, they went to the World Series."  They would wind up 19 games out of first place behind the Yankees and Red Sox, yet their winning record was only the second of their existence.  In 2010 they won 96 games and the AL East crown and took the Rangers to five games in the ALCS before becoming resume material for Cliff Lee, and no sooner than that game was over the Rays were declared dead for 2011.

"Just ask us to stay, and we'll go..."

The changes in personnel are part of why Joe Maddon's name comes up for Manager of the Year, but perhaps it is not despite those changes, but because of those changes.  Maddon loves redemption, extracting the good out of the negative, focusing on the essential and not the distractional -- all the classic elements of the true underdog, one who is not unknown, but once forgotten or disregarded.  While nobody considers Johnny Damon a down-and-outer considering his solid years in Detroit, his value is annually questioned while a clock ticks in the background, yet he grinds to play another day.  Casey Kotchman and Sean Rodriguez, cast-offs from his alma mater Anaheim Angels, are both products of the same philosophy he was brought to Tampa Bay to instill.  Can anyone imagine a bigger, more monstrous reclamation project than Manny Ramirez?  Joe Maddon actually had him on board for maybe fifteen minutes before the drug results came back and Manny resigned rather than serve a 100-day suspension.  Maddon actually sounded saddened by the situation, no anger, no judgement, no lesson for the kids.  Strange to think what the final 62 games would have been like for that team with a viable Manny Ramirez.

"It's 'Evan,' not 'Eva.'"

What they were like was a march to the sea, torches and flags carried night and day, feet on the ground game after game, moving forward because that's what they did and that's what they would do until they could not.  On game 162 in front of a home crowd of 29,518, and a national audience of millions, they made their mark again as the comeback kids, rallying not only over a season, but from another seven-run deficit made good in the ninth inning and golden in the thirteenth with a home run from Evan Langoria, himself to the brink and back with injuries.  Again, redemption.  Circles of life. 


Thanks, Joe Maddon and Tampa Bay Rays, it was fun.  We can't wait to see you run circles around them all come next spring.

Until then we'll have our Snuggie to keep us warm.

Adrian Belts Trey, Sends Rays Home

Adrian Beltre's three solo home runs helped the Texas Rangers beat the Tampa Bay Rays 4-3 and advance to the American League championship series.  Matt Harrison scored the win, Neftali Perez chalked up his third save while starter Jeremy Hellickson took the loss for Tampa Bay, who were closed out of the playoffs in four games of a five-game series.

Bloggers and sports hacks everywhere celebrated the chance for a once-in-a-lifetime headline pun.

Nolan Ryan says "good job"

Beltre became just the sixth player to hit three home runs in a playoff game and just one of four to hit them in a series-clinching game.  We couldn't care less about playoff record-keeping since the post-season now takes up an entire month of baseball, but we tip our hat to a guy who had a helluva day.

Nolan Ryan says "do better"

Ian Kinsler homered the second pitch of a game in which the Rangers would never trail.  Overall six Rangers were held hitless and the rest were held to one hit, leaving Beltre to carry the day.

Beltre's success depended primarily on two factors, the first being young Tampa Bay throwers who left pitches out over the plate and up in the zone too often for the Texas slugging staff to overlook.  The second factor was the unconsciously clutch Mike Napoli giving it a rest, going only 1 for 4 for the day. 

"I thought they said he was 1 for 11"

The game for Tampa Bay looked better on paper as they outhit the Rangers 7-6 and were 2 for 4 with RISP but left six men on base, one less than the Rangers, and never led in the game.  The lack of long ball and failure to move runners were sorely evident as Texas's advantage rested solidly in the bat of their third baseman, who came in to Tuesday's game 1 for 11 in the playoffs.

Hellickson was tagged for three homers, lasted four innings with a walk and a strikeout.  He was replaced by Matt Moore who struck out two and walked one in his three innings but also served up Beltre's third big fly in the seventh.  The Rays scored in the bottom of the ninth inning with a man on second but ran out of outs and sensed deja vu as they exited the playoffs in the same round and to the same team as last year.

Johnny Damon, Evan Longoria, and B.J. Upton all went 0 for 4.  Angel alums Sean Rodriguez and Casey Kotchman did well, Rodriguez scoring three runs and Kotchman knocking in three RBI's. 

Those guys are pretty good...

The Rangers now await the winner of the Yankees-Tigers series to decide the American League entrant into the World Series.