Quick Idiotic Thoughts on Bases-ball

So, the LCSseses start tonight, with the Southern California Angels travelling to the Windy City to take on The Other Chicago Team, the White Sox. I'm here for no reason.

But I am gonna give you my idiotic knee-jerk thoughts on the first round of the playoffs, the LDSseses.

First Enormous Caveat: I watched maybe fifteen minutes of baseball in the first round. Maybe.

Enormous Caveat the Second: Nobody cares about baseball. Yes, I know.

Anywho...

BRAVES/ASTROS
SAT time!

"The Braves are to losing in October what ... the Braves are to winning in the regular season!" I knew it! Yes, the Bravos have won their division 17,492 years in a row. But they have lost their last five postseason series. It's like they've become the Kansas State of baseball (if Kansas State was still good at football) in that everybody's like "Aw, look at that cute little Braves team, winning all those games! It's kind of a shame that they don't have a shot in hell at making any real noise on a national scale." Keep doing what you're doing, Braves. I'll be over here, not caring.

And can the Astros' bandwagon get any fuller? Is it in danger of overcrowding, or breaking a tire (or wheel, or whatever)? Now that Chris Carpenter has remembered that he's Chris Carpenter, doesn't the Houston pitching staff look uber-dominant compared to St. Louis? So, of course, I'm picking ... the Cardinals to win, under the oft-used "seek out the popular opinion and go the other way" paradigm. Huzzah.

CARDS/PADRES

Blah.

SOX/SOX
I actually listened to quite a bit of Game 3 while in my car on Friday, driving home from work. Am I crazy, or did Orlando Hernandez Duque turn, like, 40 overnight? I mean, he had a fantastic outing in relief that night, and it was legitimately inspiring to, uh, listen to, but that fucker has aged in dog years since, oh, say, 2000. Nice to see him back on the mound in such a prominent role: I, like many others, was worried that Hideki Irabu had eaten him before getting killed while trying to take over Tokyo. Say it with me, people: Ira-BOOYAH!!!

And yes, I loved watching Bahston lose. Only downside: I didn't hear the word "hose" over the last week nearly enough times.

YANKS/ANGELS OF ANAHEIM
So A-Job batted like .133 in the series. That's adorable. Combine that with David Ortiz's quasi-adequate performance in the other AL series, and Christ, I mean, can't we just keep giving AL MVP to Vlad The Guerrero until we have a really, really good reason not to? You gotta love Vlad. I have a hot sticky man-love for the guy, and every year that I don't have him on my fantasy team just drives up the price I'm gonna pay for him whenever he reaches Year 1 of his inexplicable decline. I know you're all looking forward to that. And yes, I couldn't possibly be happier that the Evil Empire and the Evil Empire, Jr. are both out of the playoffs. If only the Bluejs had won the East and Cleveland had gotten the wild card. That would have been HOTT.


Oh yeah, and I'm including this paragraph from King Kaufman's column today, just for shits and giggles:


"Eighteen million books have been written about the 2003 and especially 2004 Yankees and Red Sox. If anybody ever wrote a book about the Twins vs. the Angels in 2002, I never heard about it, though a Google search did turn up an anime porn movie called 'Twin Angels.' Let's see the BoSox and Yanks match that."


Indeed, good sir. Indeed.


Dids, we gonna get any bases-ball analcysting from our resident baseball guru? You 'mo.