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Congratulations to the L.A. Dodgers for Beating the N.Y. Yankees, in Yankee Stadium, Crushing the Souls of Millions of Yankee Fans Everywhere
AP, with a heart-of-the-matter headline:
Yankees blow 5-run lead with epic defensive meltdown as Dodgers rally to clinch World Series
Mike Fitzpatrick, writing the story for AP:
Just when it appeared Aaron Judge and the New York Yankees were right back in this World Series, they all but gave away the trophy.
An epic meltdown of defensive miscues, beginning with Judge's embarrassing error in center field, helped the Los Angeles Dodgers rally in a five-run fifth inning that tied the score at 5.
As much as I detest watching the Dodgers win, I very much enjoy seeing the Yankees lose, especially in their own house, in front of their awful fans[1], and in come-from-behind fashion.
Pinstripe Alley has a good recap of that disastrous fifth inning, calling it
one of the worst innings in the Yankees’ long, storied history.
Thomas Carannante writing for FanSided:
Care to know how many teams facing World Series elimination blew a five-run lead and lost? Zero! Care to know how many times in World Series history a team blew a five-run lead and lost? Six ... out of 233. It was an historic choke job that takes this franchise's modern day failures to new heights.
I didn’t watch the game, but I’ll definitely do so now, so I can delight in this Yankees disaster.
Yes, I’m a petty, petty man.
The Yankees should cancel the season tickets of these two “fans.” I hope they banned from visiting every MLB ballpark in the country. Heck, they should be banned from attending Little League games. What they did was egregious and could have resulted in a sprained or broken wrist. If I were Mookie Betts, I’d sue for assault. ↩︎
Yankees and Dodgers in the World Series—Yawn
A few days ago—after a brutal Mets loss to the Dodgers—I snarked on Mastodon:
A Dodgers/Yankees matchup would be my worst nightmare.
Zero rooting interest. Turn off the television.
Welp, here we are.
Growing up a New York Mets fan, I’m vehemently anti-Yankees. As a San Francisco resident and Giants fan for the last quarter century, I unconditionally detest the Dodgers.
As storied as Yankees/Dodgers World Series matchups have been historically—11 of them going back to 1941, including Don Larsen’s perfect game in 1956 (still the only one pitched), Sandy Koufax’s 15-strikeout complete game in 1963, and Reggie Jackson’s 3-home runs on three consecutive pitches from three different pitchers in 1977—the idea of supporting either team makes me violently ill.
My rooting rules are uncomplicated [1] :
- Mets and Giants over anyone
- Eastern/Western Divisions over the others
- National League over American League
- Anyone over Yankees/Dodgers
Yes, that sometimes meant rooting for a Central Division or American League team if they were up against the Yankees or Dodgers, but it was always worth it. Nothing was more important than those two teams losing.
But facing each other? Sometimes the rules, much like Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics, result in an untenable situation which, if left unresolved, may end with a catastrophic core meltdown.
So my solution is easy: Don’t watch the games.
I’m probably not the only one.
Sure, some won’t watch because this is a “coastal elites” match up of Evil New York against Hollywood Los Angeles, both with their big money, big name players—the middle of the country naturally roots against both as easily as I do—there’s a bigger reason this Series is likely to be ignored by the masses.
Keith Olbermann explains on his mosty-politics-but-somtimes-sports Countdown podcast:
The famous Yankees and Dodgers are actually two of the most disastrously underperforming franchises in sports. If you consider the year 2000 as the last year of the 20th century, the Yankees have won one World Series in this century. Even if you don’t, they’ve won one World Series since 2000. The Dodgers have won one World Series in a full season since 1965.
Nobody cares about these teams because they’ve basically sucked for a generation. On top of that, baseball itself has changed—for the worse—since the turn of the century[2].
Olbermann again:
The long regular season and the quick playoffs were designed to establish which team was best that year. You played and you played and you played from Spring to Summer into Fall and you beat everybody in your league. And then you faced the team that had played and beaten everybody in their league.
And the result was a Series that was always novel and fresh and exciting and faced pitchers against hitters they’d never seen before.
Today, with Interleague play, “balanced” schedules, the extended Wild Card playoffs, and the National League adoption of the Designated Hitter rule (barf), the regular season is boring, the playoffs are boring, and—because the World Series teams already faced each other during the regular season, as the Yankees and Dodgers did in June—the World Series matchups end up being... boring.
Olbermann, once again:
It is believed about 60 million people watched game 7 of the 1986 World Series[3] on television.
If 60 million people watch the entirety of this World Series on television, if that’s the total audience for seven games, they will hold two parades afterward: One for the winning team and one for all the TV and advertising executives.
And by the away, if they get sixty million total audience on TV, the ad executives and the TV executives will get drunker than the winning players do.
And his coup de grâce:
We’re just amazed that the two best teams on paper are actually in the World Series, and how did they get there? They beat the wildcard teams.
Winning against the fourth place team. Congrats?
Mets/Giants and Eastern/Western is usually determined by which team gets into the playoffs, and which Division goes the furthest. If the Mets and Giants meet, I default to my ancestral team, the Mets. ↩︎
There’s phrase to make you feel old. ↩︎
The New York Mets vs. the Boston Red Sox, the series that cemented my baseball fandom. Most fans remember Game 6 for the Mookie Wilson/Bill Buckner Incident. I remember nearly having a panic attack watching that game. ↩︎
Danny Jansen Plays for Both Teams in One MLB Game, Becoming the Answer to One of Baseball’s Wackiest Trivia Questions
Jayson Stark, writing last week for The Athletic (News+):
Everyone knows you can’t be in two places at the same time. Those are the rules — the immutable rules of physics.
Ah, but who knew you can play for two teams in the same baseball game? Those are also the rules — the wacky suspended-game rules of baseball.
So next Monday, if all the forces in the universe line up right, Boston Red Sox catcher Danny Jansen will go where no baseball-playing human has ever gone before.…
In a week, he could become the first player in major-league history to appear in a box score for both teams in the same game.
The Athletic Staff, a week later (News+):
Danny Jansen had been at the plate for the Toronto Blue Jays on June 26 in a game against the Boston Red Sox with one on and one out in an 0-1 count, when the skies opened up and the game was suspended for severe weather.
Fast forward two months and the game resumed Monday, but with Jansen now playing for the Red Sox. The Red Sox traded for Jansen on July 27, setting up the possibility of one player appearing in the same game for both teams.
The possibility became reality on Monday.
With Jansen substituted into the game to catch for the Red Sox, he settled in behind the plate, for an at-bat in which he’d started as the batter.
Baseball is beautiful and sometimes,
“This game,” said Danny Jansen, “is nuts.”
It’s these beautiful oddities that make this game so delightful for fans—like me!—who love the history and stories of the game as much as the stats and outcomes. Both pieces are worth reading to understand the full extent of the nuttiness.
Thanks to the MLB app, I was able to watch the opening minutes of the game, so I could say I witnessed baseball history.
I expect the box score will one day make it to Cooperstown.
(Via Steve Hayman, who astutely notes “This must really test the referential integrity of sports databases. The same guy, playing for both teams in the same game? Surely THAT will never happen.”)
Mets Top ‘Best Baseball Announcers’, Giants Second
Joe Lucia at Awful Announcing:
The dust has settled, the votes have been counted, and Awful Announcing’s readers have voted on their favorite (and least favorite) local MLB broadcast teams for the 2024 season.
Any ranking of “best baseball announcers” will necessarily be partisan, driven as much by fan interest as by any objective quality.
No surprise, then, that I disagree with the results. San Francisco should have taken this, as they did in four of the six previous contests—including last year's. Duane Kuiper, Mike Krukow, Dave Flemming, and Jon Miller are—individually and collectively—the best broadcasters in the game. The new guys—Shawn Estes, Javier Lopez, Hunter Pence—are solid up-and-comers. I enjoy them enough that I’ll turn on the radio and mute the TV if the game is nationally televised.
Of course, the last time I regularly listened to Mets baseball was the late ’90s, when their announcers were Bob Cohen, Gary Thorne, Ralph Kiner, and Tim McCarver. I have no idea if their current team of Gary Cohen, Ron Darling, and Keith Hernandez is actually good.
Like I said, partisan.
More important than any of that, though: the Giants and Mets beat out both the Dodgers (5) and the Yankees (22).
I do feel awful for Oakland (29), though. And someone had to be last, White Sox fans.