Back-Story on Wednesday Night Baseball Games

My wife likes to razz me whenever I tell her about something exciting happening in a baseball game: "Do you mean there was 2 minutes of excitement in 2 hours of boredom?" is her usual rebuttal to my enthusiasm. Well, the Rays v. the Yankees, the Orioles v. the Red Sox and the Braves v the Phillies games were all surprisingly exciting, especially the endings, but of course, it was only a few minutes or less.

That is two historic September swoons, one by the Atlanta Braves—whose fans are perhaps not used to this sort of thing—in the National League, and the other by the Boston Red Sox—whose fans are used to it—in the American League. And the Tampa Bay Rays beating the overdogs of both leagues to get to the playoffs. Amazing.

Papelbon looked silly with his ominous stare and fast ball being whacked for two doubles to tie the score followed by an unusually poor play by left-fielder Carl Crawford to allow the winning run to score: he should have either caught the ball on the fly or let it bounce and make a decent throw to the plate. Either would have resulted in an out and the game goes on, but neither happened.

Maybe the Red Sox and the Braves should take up the cause of Ted Williams who reckoned the season was too long, and there were too many teams. Not only did it screw up a lot of comparative records, going from 154 games to 162 games that is, but it also produced games in early April when it was too cold to play, and even worse, extending the post-season often 'til November when it is also too cold and everybody is tired on top of everything else.

I am looking forward to the start of the Playoffs.