It's Over...

...for this year. In what I'll just call "something of any upset", the St. Louis Cardinals defeated the Detroit Tigers 4 games to 1 to win the World Series. When asked for a comment Detroit Tiger's manager Jim Leyland said "I suppose it is odd that I smoke and manage a professional sports team, but I don't like chewing tobacco".

What a lot of people in the sports community seem to be latching onto is the fact that the Cardinals were 83-78 in the regular season. Just two games over .500. Fans in Philadelphia were so angered by this they coughed cheesesteak out of their nose. Why? Because the only other Philadelphia joke I can come up with involves the Rocky statue, but I can't make it work. Also because the Philadelphia Phillies had a better regular season record than the St. Louis Cardinals, but did not make the playoffs.

(Note to the Philadelphia Phillies:"The Philadelphia Phillies" is the best you could come up with? Why not just the "Philadelphia Philadelphians"? Nothing else noteworthy happens in Philadelphia? Milwaukee has The Brewers, a reference to the fact that they make quite a bit of beer in Milwaukee (this will end when some genius decides its a bad influence on our children), L.A. has The Dodgers, an obvious reference to avoiding gunfire, and Chicago has the Cubs - which I frankly don't understand, but at least its not the "Chicago ChiGuys". They almost have a theme going with The Bears, but then they also have The Bulls which doesn't make any sense... but at least they could pick an animal. Also [owner of Philadelphia Phillies name goes here], if you picked another team name, you could have a real mascot instead of whatever the hell the Philly Phanatic is. Maybe you could work in that bell with the crack in it)

So the good phans in the great sport city of Philadelphia are probably upset. And I really share the pain of the Detroit Tiger fans. We all thought they had it in the bag, but I like to say "that's why they play the games" (If they didn't "play the games" the Stanley Cup wouldn't have spent so much time in the Southeast lately, they'd leave it in Canada, or maybe occasionally New York. But it turns out you can have a winning hockey team anywhere you can manufacture ice and import Canadians - you can't raise a winning hockey team in the Southeast, but you can have a winning hockey team in the Southeast).

In the end a life long Cubs fan is left with this: "83-78, we could get there from here".

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The Darn Chicago Cubs

Keep a couple of things in mind:

1. Bill Daniels is my pseudonym and alter ego. He's nicer than I am, uses nicer language, he's a nice guy.
2. I guess that's it... it seemed like I was going to need a list.

This weekend Bill Daniels and I - who are really the same person - flew from what we put in our profile as "Averagetown, Southeast, USA" to Atlanta, GA to visit my friend who I'll call "Strom". Besides visiting, I did this to see the Chicago Cubs play the Atlanta Braves, a baseball team I hate with every portion of my being. This brought up a number of issues for me:

1. Strom is a huge Braves fan, and a nice guy. He got us free tickets that were so good, I couldn't even manage to crack jokes about the seats being lousy.
2. I like Strom, so I almost felt a little guilty about hating the Braves so much.
3. Even though I have a wife and two children, I went alone.
4. I took an airline that once parked a DC-9 in the everglades. This isn't meant to be funny, just matter of fact. To be fair, they have changed names since then, and hopefully maintenance habits.
5. The only hope the Cubs have this season is a strike that lasts well into the winter months. Where are Gary Bettman and Bob Goodenow when you really need them?

So I went. And the Cubs lost. I got to see Matt Murton's home run, and things looked promising until the bottom of the third inning. Kinda like all those times you blew a 300 game in the second frame, y'know? I'm not nearly as nice as Bill Daniels, so the stream of obscenities, sometimes yelled at the umpire, rarely included the word "Darn". At least Strom got us good enough seats that the umpires may have heard me.

(actually I didn't use obscenities while yelling at the umpire, there were children in front of me. I find yelling at umpires therapeutic, I recommend it)