Monday, September 26, 2005
Warning: Rocky Roads Ahead.
That's probably not exactly what this sign means (it's probably something more like 'Warning: Paved Road Ends Ahead'), but it's close enough. Either way, appropriate, no?
I mean, the Sox are winning, finally, and I'm certainly not about to complain about a sweep of the Birds, but because we had been busy sucking so badly before this, we're no longer winning to retain a snug lead. We're winning to keep pace with the goddamn motherfucking overpaid overhyped utterly despicable and suddenly, sadly resurgent Yankees. And yes, I know that the Sox are also at least two of those things (overpaid, probably, and overhyped, according to everyone in the universe who is not a Sox fan), but I hate the Yankees and I will be irrational about it if I bloody well please.
So, yes, we slugged the rosin out of the Baltimore pitching. I'm still pleasantly terrified about any number of things. I hate that we've lost Kapler at a time when we desperately need more depth... hell, defensive depth helped us win the Series in a big way last year. Of course, so did pitching, and I could tell you that with this series I've regained confidence in our pitching but that would be a big fat honking lie because I haven't. The pitching on the Sox baffles and terrifies me.
Matt Clement? Good kid. Really, I love him to bits. I want to hold him down and uproot the small elderberry bush that's taken up residence on his chin, and I want to take him before every game and make him receive at least 10 David Ortiz hugs in a row to get his self esteem up, and I want to buy him a humidifier so his asthma won't make him wheeze at night. And I really, really want him to get to the postseason, and I really want him to step it up big once he's there. But I just don't know. The closer we get to October, the more nervously I'm awaiting the giant tearful breakdown.
Same with Bronson. I know that he can, but I just have The Fear that he will not. It's still better than cruising into the late stages of the season with, say, Derek Lowe on your roster, because if it's not actually the postseason DLowe will be much more concerned with getting the ballgirl's phone number than how well his sinker is sinking, whereas with Bronson you at least know he's capable of pitching well, sometimes.
David Wells is awesome except when he occasionally forgets to eat an entire 5-course meal before one of his starts, in which case he spends the entire game thinking about Twinkies, and the cream inside the Twinkies, and the possibility of deep-frying said Twinkies, and he just doesn't pay attention at all to his curve, and he gets slammed.
Don't even ask me about Curt. It's possible he'll have some kind of insane adrenaline rush and reel off 18 innings of perfect work over the next couple of weeks, but it's likely that we used him all up last season. He's got the heart to get us there, no one can dispute that, but the season is dragging on, and you don't pitch with your aorta.
Wake is probably the pitcher I feel most comfortable about, and that's not because I have overwhelming confidence that he's going to be lights-out every time he's up, although he's certainly been doing that lately (fat lot of good it's done, what with the offense deciding to not show up on those days and all). It's just that you know what you're going to get with him. The knuckler will knuckle, and he'll be untouchable, or the knuckler will be flat, and he'll get tattooed worse than Dennis Rodman.
As for the bullpen...
No, you know what, I won't even get into the bullpen. I'm not quite that masochistic this late at night.
So we've been winning, lately, because David Ortiz has been doing what he does, and Manny's been hitting, and Johnny's been tying twine around his shoulder and going out to play anyhow, and Baltimore's pitching was just inept enough to let it all happen.
A real confidence-booster for the end of the season, huh?
Rocky roads ahead!
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Football!
I am not sure I could have dealt with life if the Patriots had lost to the Steelers. I mean, I hate the Steelers. Hate them. So hard. And when Rodney Harrison went down... hoo boy. It wasn't a dirty play or anything, but I'm going to be furious and hold it against the TowelBoys anyways. Obviously, for the safety of all future Patriots players, that entire stadium needs to be blown into little teeny tiny bits, set aflame, and paved over. Can we ever go in there and not have a valuable member of the team get injured?
And the towels. Seriously, guys, your fans wave towels. Rally monkeys, hard as it is for me to say this, are better than the Terrible Towels. Nasty black and yellow, ugh, such Hawkeye colors.
But, yeah, life without Rodney Harrison? Possibly without Matt Light (cause yeah, it was fun watching them immediately run over the rook who got stuck in his place)? Rocky roads ahead!
As for the Lions... well, they didn't play this week. Rocky roads ahead? Probably. Knowing the Lions, almost certainly. I'm still in denial and thinking that Game 1 was the true Lions, and Game 2 was some kind of hideous fluke.
The Wolverines...
Well.
If someone can think of a way we can realistically win the Big 10 title with two losses, one against a Big 10 rival, please, go right ahead and share. I've been trying to think of how this can happen, given how everyone else in the conference is playing, and all my brain keeps coming up with is, "Ohmygod we're playing the Spartans in their own stinking stadium next week WHY MUST THE NEEDLES KEEP STABBING INTO MY BRAIN WHY WHY OH GOD WHY."
Rocky roads ahead? *sob* God. More like GIANT RAGGED JABBY ROCKS THAT RIP UP YOUR TIRES AND MAKE YOU WALK BAREFOOT AND SCREAMING ACROSS THEM in the road ahead!
And just for fun, the Dolphins! What the hell! They're good? Gus Frerrotte (I misspelled that, in all likelihood) can throw the ball! He can! Honest! In the proper direction and everything! And the defense is just as good as they've always been, and we have guys making spectacular catches, and it's all very foreign and strange. And Jay Fiedler got into the game for the Jets today and had to leave with a hurt somethingorother.
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A side story.
What's the deal with the sign? Well, a couple of my friends and I took a little roadtrip up to Lansing on Saturday to throw around flyers for the Clemency Rally we have to put on for one of our classes (October 7, noon, on the steps of the statehouse, if any of you kids are in the Lansing area and want to come laugh at my misery-- or, you know, if you care about the wrongful imprisonment of battered women who killed in self defense). Along the way, we saw this sign. None of us had ever seen it before, so naturally I had to leap out of the car and take a picture.
We hit up a bunch of coffeehouses with flyers, and one had this bulletin board where people took cups with the coffeehouses' logo on it (Beaners, for the Michiganders) and took photos of the cups in various crazy places. Someone had a photo of a Beaners cup in front of the Eiffel Tower, someone had the Beaners cup being held by a windsurfer, etc. Someone had put a Beaners cup at the foot of a statue... specifically, this statue. Heh. Awesome.
Also on this trip we ventured into ENEMY TERRITORY (i.e. East Lansing). I'd never been before. It's nice enough, I guess, even if the entire time we were there I kept wanting to wash my hands, because I just felt so dirty. Also, numerous vacant storefronts right in the center of campus... heck, right across from their Union? You fail at life, Michigan State.
Proof that I was there. Long before you get to campus, really, long before you get to East Lansing, you start running into Spartan Country. Much of the state roots for U of M, but much of the state roots for the Spartans, and it's often regionally-based, so once you get into a certain region you start seeing Spartan helmets painted on store sides and such. It's terrifying and I thought I was going to have a panic attack. That much green and white just is not natural.
Lansing was depressingly vacant, although not quite as rundown as Detroit, obviously... not really derelict, just very blah. We did see the Lansing Lugnuts ballpark, though, and that was cool. It looks like a nice park. They've got a little smokestack thing across the street with a giant lugnut 'round the top, so that was nice. We also hit up Lansing Community College with a few flyers, and on our way out we ran into this fellow making an unholy racket.
So, uh, yeah. I visited the state capitol and the best thing I came out of the trip with was an encounter with a chipmunk. Way to go, Michigan. Rock on.
3:47 AM
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