Baseball's 2013 postseason begins
Increasingly, we're hearing that the one-game "play-in," sudden-death Wild Card game is unfair. Baseball, some argue, is a competition that can't be decided in just nine innings. I agree. The system is not fair. The St. Louis Cardinals, with a mad September dash, beat out the Pittsburgh Pirates to win the National League Central Division after both teams competed over six full months and 162 games. Now the Pirates earn a head-to-head, best-of-five-games meeting with the Cardinals simply by winning a game against the division's third-place team? It's ridiculous.---
I don't understand the impulse for fans to root for the Pittsburgh Pirates. Yes, they have endured two decades-plus of historic futility, but it's not as if they've been playing under any sort of competitive disadvantage. They play in the same size TV market as St. Louis, yet they claim higher draft picks every year and, unlike St. Louis, have pocketed millions in luxury tax money.
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The Pirates' streak of 21 seasons finishing below .500 has come to an end, but their streak of finishing below the Cardinals in the Central continues. That one's up to 14 years.
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As new "hot" teams go, at least I'll credit them for having their own colors. During the last generation, we've seen the Angels, Rangers, Astros, Diamondbacks, and Expos all go "red." Sure, it's flattering, but please.
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As this is the year to remember Stan Musial, it's nice that his hometown team will meet the Cardinals in the Division Series.
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You might remember from a year ago that when the Mets' Johann Santana no-hit the Cardinals, the second-division Madoff Mets had the audacity to sell, after the fact, the remaining, unsold tickets to the game as commemorative keepsakes. What an insult this gesture was-- and still is-- to the fans-- their fans-- that actually paid for tickets before the game was played.
Well, the Miami Marlins demonstrated the same level of audacity this week when they announced they would be selling, for $15 each, the 9,100 unpurchased tickets to the season-ending game on Sunday in which Henderson Alvarez no-hit the Tigers. But here's the kicker: They printed the wrong date on the tickets.
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The National Hockey League season begins tonight? Really? Climate change is hardly calling for an earlier start to the hockey season. Why can't they just wait their turn?
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"Breaking Bad" Spoiler alert: I feel like the creative team behind the show is selling us on the idea of a clear ending to the series as a point of contrast to the rather-unpopular finale of “The Sopranos,” yet I still have plenty of questions unanswered about the narrative of the popular AMC show. Was the last episode a dream sequence? It felt like one from the early moment when Walt asked the Omniscient to get his frozen car to start and then the keys to the ignition dropped from the sun visor. Everything that followed was so unrealistic and fantastic, and could have served alternately as total wish fulfillment on behalf of the Walt character. The fate of Jessie is actually still entirely up in the air at series end, at least as far as his legal entanglements go, same with Skyler, while the fate of Walt Junior’s inheritance is still more than a little in doubt, and even though creator Vince Gilligan declared Walt dead of his own gunshot wound on the AMC discussion program “Talking Bad” only moments after the final episode ended, I didn’t find that interpretation to be abundantly clear from the episode itself. He was only gut shot, with the police and presumably some members of a law enforcement medical team moving in around him. He hadn't even passed out yet. Maybe if David Chase had appeared on HBO only seconds after “The Sopranos” ended and declared that his lead character had been shot by an assailant walking out of the diner bathroom, he would have saved himself some hassle with critics and fans.
I always thought that “The Sopranos”’ brilliant ending was less inconclusive than people believe it to be. If creator David Chase had simply ended his seven-year series only one scene earlier, with Tony paying that final poignant and bittersweet visit to his Uncle Junior in the psychiatric hospital, the public debate over the episode's merits would have been almost non-existent.
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There's not much to say about the government shutdown except to say that we're now pretty much living in a failed state.
posted by CM @ 10:41 PM
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