May God send the St. Louis Cardinals to the deepest pit of hell and there may they roast for next century.* I never liked the Cardinals. They are not in the same class as the Yankees, but they have been in more post-seasons than any other National League team. And of course they are in this year as a result of a change in the rules this season that allows not one but two so-called Wild Card teams into the post season. I've read a bunch of commentators on what a great thing this new system is for baseball.
Well, say I, it sucks. Now instead of just one pretender team in the post-season with a chance to go to the World Series, there are four, two from each league. And the Cardinals are the pretender team par excellence. They finished 9 games--
9 games!--behind the division winning Cincinnati Reds. They had the worst W-L record among all the playoff teams--I should say it was the same as the Detroit Tigers, but the Tigers won their division. And now here they are again winning a chance to go to the World Series in a fashion so eerily familiar to
the disaster of Game 6 last year in the World Series, it's creepy. Down six runs, they chip away but going into the top of the ninth, they are down by two runs. With two out, one on, and two strikes on the batter, this frigging team manages to score four runs. Four frigging runs! Naturally, the Washington Nationals, truly a storybook franchise in the post-season for the first time representing the nation's capital in post-season for the first time
since 1933, cannot overcome this.
The whole sorry story is below . . .
*
If you suspect my vehemence may have something to do with the way the Cardinals stole the World Series from the Texas Rangers last October, you would be correct.
=====================================================================
Final
49°
No comments:
Post a Comment