What shall we learn from our new baseball overlords

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I had an extremely cynical idea for a post-World Series post, where I would pretend to have filed before the game started so I could freely watch and enjoy, and write up a list of lessons that the winning team had taught us about how to build a winner...and write up the wrong team.

Get it? The constant affirmation of the Royals approach would suddenly ring hollow as positive results. 

Somewhere around the Royals losing in Game 7 with the tying run on third base in the bottom of the ninth, did this start to feel like an unduly cruel treatment for a miracle run that was instructive.

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World Series: Is this what we want?

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By and large, we want two mutually exclusive things from the playoffs: high-stakes drama, and a process that bears out the best team in the sport. Drama is usually only interpreted as the top teams being threatened and challenged, but if they never truly have an advantage because the process is chaos, the premise of the drama starts to erode. A random team emerging from a chaotic churn is dramatic if a lottery drawing is dramatic.

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Important stuff from a 7-1 LOLcopter crash in San Francisco

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That was something. And then it wasn't! And then it was something else entirely, and it became that new thing with an intensity entirely ill-fitting of a Wednesday afternoon game. After around 10 minutes of review of a new rule that no one has a clue how to interpret, Jose Quintana went from one out away from seven shutout frames in San Francisco--kinda as impressive as kicking over an empty trash can, but still an important task--to watching Ronald Belisario lay waste to rational disorder. Again.

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A Chris Sale Day that barely needed its namesake

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It takes a lot to take the focus of a Chris Sale Day--now a branded event---off of Chris Sale. In this case, Jose Abreu and Adam Dunn wrested the focus way with over 770 feet of damage and five RBI generated from their two home runs, both on 0-2 counts to power the Sox to a 7-6 victory, and a two-game sweep from the team hosting the best record in baseball.

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Woebegone, last-place White Sox wallop best team in baseball

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The scuffling White Sox, losers of four-straight and seven of nine, welcomed the best team in baseball Tuesday, who would start former NL Cy Young winner Matt Cain against surgically-repaired John Danks. Hunter Pence clobbered the fourth pitch of the night for a home run, and he sense of an oncoming butt-whupping was palpable, we got one.

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A Visit From the Giants - Game Preview & Lineups 6/17

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The Giants don’t come to US Cellular Field very often. In fact it’s been over a decade. In 2003 in their only trip to the Southside the Giants handled the White Sox with relative ease, scoring 22 runs in 3 games off the likes of Jon Garland, Bartolo Colon and Mark Buehrle. Barry Bonds hit a HR in each game, making for a pretty clean HR/Game ratio in our humble home park. Only one player remains on either team from those games, and the White Sox captain is not in the lineup the evening.

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