Wednesday, October 26, 2005

How bad is the NL?

Tired this morning. Watched all 14 innings last night and didn’t get to sleep until well after 2. I suppose if I were a Sox fan, I wouldn’t have slept all night and would be all nerves until the first pitch tonight. I don’t think that the Sox or their fans will have to worry.

The Astros are done. I said last night that Oswalt would have to pitch his ass off for the Stros to win the game. In the 6th inning, the 20 game winner threw 46 pitches, crapped his pants and gave up the lead. If I had been drinking, I would have sworn that there was a Cub pitcher on the mound.

The Stros did come back to tie up the game at 5 in the 8th, but lost the game on a solo HR to Geoff Blum in the 14th inning and a walked in run. I thought that only the Cubs had miserable relievers that walked in runs in winnable games.

Going into this series, I thought that Houston would have trouble scoring runs. They struggled against the team from St. Louis, but got great pitching to keep them in games while they struggled to push 4 runs across the plate. Last night there were 15 runners stranded on base and Houston’s closest chance to win the game in the bottom of the 9th faded away with El Duque getting two key strike outs with the winning run 90 feet away. I almost turned the game off to get some sleep, but kind of knew that the Sox would once again pull it off.

A couple other thoughts from the game:

Why did Fox keep showing the Quaker Oats guy?

I think I finally tuned out all of the endless Fox promotion for television shows that I will never watch.

I don’t ever want to see instant replay in any form in MLB. Judgment calls by umpires go both ways from dropped third strikes and phantom hit by pitch to wrong HR ball calls. This would just give Fox more fuel to ruin the broadcast.

Joe Buck was offended by Randy Moss simulating pulling down his pants in a game, but was completely mute when you could clearly read the lips of Crazy Carl and Scrap Iron after the Crede HBP. Where's the moral outrage Joe? Jackass.

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