Monday 10/7/24
There was plenty of exciting baseball over the weekend. Nothing in sports beats baseball in October.
Padres-Dodgers has aspects of a throwback rivalry. I started writing here the other day--though I didn't finish it--that I was expecting a big postseason from Shohei Ohtani. He's having one of those years. The storybook year. Storybook years often end in World Series titles. They don't always. Bob Gibson had a storybook year in 1968 and the Tigers and Mickey Lolich prevented the Cardinals from repeating. No moment seems too big for Ohtani.
I had also started writing that I think the Royals have a pretty good shot against the Yankees, but I can also see the Yankees and Dodgers on this collision course for the World Series. The Royals will need this game today in the Bronx.
The Mets are something else. They have belief--the belief that they're never out of it. Down two in the top of the ninth yesterday, they get a great at-bat from Lindor, and then a tying two-run jack, before falling in the bottom of the ninth. Bryce Harper and Nick Castellanos were the difference. They each had a hell of a game. You can't ask more from your boppers.
Castellanos is a big man. Intimidating-looking at the plate. He's one of those guys--kind of like Greg Luzinski, but totally different body type--that you expect to put up huge home run numbers, but he doesn't. Good home run numbers. Upper twenties. He got the game-winning hit, went nuts, then ran over to his son to celebrate. The interviewed him on the broadcast right after and he was all business, already focused on Game 3. That's what I like. Passionate and professional.
You know who I love as a ballplayer and have for years? Julio Iglesias. Winner. Makes your team win. He helped the Red Sox get into the playoffs in 2021 but wasn't eligible for the postseason roster because they acquired him after September 1. I really wanted them to resign him. He's had a strange career. He wasn't even in the Majors last year. Strong defender at second who can still play shortstop, battles in his at-bats--he had an awesome one on Saturday that was a key to the Mets' victory in Game 1--and makes heady plays in every phase of the game. This is a ballplayer. An October ballplayer, too.
MLB doesn't help itself out. There were no games on Friday. It's October, it's Friday, you're not competing with the NFL, there's only some random college football game, and you have no game scheduled but in the prior few days you had games during the day? What are you doing!
The dreadful Patriots were especially dreadful yesterday in Foxborough to a bad Dolphins with a back-up QB. As I wrote, Jacoby Brissett is not an NFL quarterback. He's certainly not an NFL starting quarterback. He was at something like 70 passing yards in the fourth quarter before adding on with a final drive that turned the ball over on downs inside the red zone. What is the team asking of its fans? That's what I want to know. What's the expectation? To watch a terrible team with a quarterback who can't play...and just sit through it because...later it will be better?
First of all, there's no guarantee that the latter is true. It'll probably be somewhat better, but enough to matter? But basically saying, "Just try and withstand what we're doing right now," doesn't seem to me like a way you should ever go. You can't play a quarterback like this and just keep him in there no matter the result. They brought in the wrong guy in Brissett and now they don't have another option if they're serious about not playing Drake Maye, but there are essentially three months left to go. Can you really just run Brissett out there--allowing that he's healthy--for all of that time with it looking like this?
Alabama thrashed Georgia and then turned around and lost to Vanderbilt. Pretty cool. Nothing like a big upset after a team has a huge win that establishes them in people's minds as the best team in the country. Somewhat like Notre Dame falling to Boston College in 1993 after defeating Florida State on the so-called "Game of the Century," but that was later in the year and the stakes were higher. With the twelve-team playoff format you can blow a game now and be fine. Each week matters less.
Speaking of Boston College: Complete collapse against Virginia in Charlottesville. They were up 14-0 and then surrendered twenty-four unanswered points. Lead in the fourth quarter, too. The defense was on the field much too long, and the quarterback isn't very good. Virginia went up one in the fourth, then got the two-point conversion, putting BC behind by a field goal. Still manageable. But the ball slipped out of the quarterback's hand--he was trying to do way too much--and Virginia scooped it up and ran it in and that was essentially that.
Fans are strange creatures. Things for them are so often an extreme in one direction or the other. BC could be 5-1 instead of 4-2. If they were the former, they'd be ranked, and that'd be great. This is BC, not Alabama. It's a coach in his first year with the team with the last coach's players. You take over a program and you have to make do with someone else's guys. They can be guys you don't want, or wouldn't have wanted. But they're your guys now.
I see these BC fans--and there aren't many, but I monitor this one discussion forum--saying that the team could very well go winless in their last six. You don't know! These games are so unpredictable. A bunch of them will be winnable. They'll be right there was wins if the team makes a few more plays than the other team. Look how even so many of these football teams are.
Then the BC fans start looking at the earlier games and saying they don't mean anything. The victories over Florida State and Michigan State are empty wins because Florida State is bad and Michigan State keeps giving up 30 plus points a game. The close loss to Mizzou doesn't mean anything because they just got drilled by Texas A&M.
Well, it doesn't work like that. If the outcome of a given game was different, that means what happened next might have been different. A lot of things can affect a team and performance. Sometimes people check out. Other times, people buy in. I don't like taking that in-a-vacuum approach. Alabama might still win it all, and they lost to Vanderbilt. I think what BC and Bill O'Brien should prioritize is finding a QB through the transfer portal. BC is never going to attract high-profile quarterbacks who can go to the big programs, but there are guys at those programs who aren't getting the playing time, who are buried down the depth chart, who want to play, and whom a school such as BC has something to offer and can help that player get to the next level. Look at Pittsburgh's quarterback right now and the success that team is having.
I was surprised that Terry Francona came out of retirement to manage the Reds. He seems to me like someone who wants it both ways. He talks a lot about his health and I feel like people use that as an excuse for him. But then he retires--and that was presented like his health was a big reason--and come back? I always thought he was overrated as a manager. I know he won the two titles in Boston, obviously. He was too laid back for my taste, though, in the regular season. I felt like he made things harder in the end than they needed to be. He didn't strike the right balance between having urgency while also playing for the long haul.
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