Hollywood Pitch Room–To borrow a football metaphor, baseball’s regular season took a knee and ran out the clock yesterday. Since the addition of the second Wild Card has there been a year that ended so anticlimactically, with the playoffs pretty much set and so many teams backing in with losses? It’s a pretty underwhelming group this year, but that doesn’t mean we can’t still get the publicity team rolling and find some good storylines to follow!
Only the Angels still held out some hope yesterday to force a one game playoff before the one game playoff, thanks to a karma-draining miracle win the night before, but their game got out of hand by the seventh inning and in Phoenix the Astros celebrated with champagne after their own lackluster loss to the Diamondbacks. They’ll face a Yankee team that’s lost seven of their last ten and ride a three game losing streak.
Storyline: Keuchel, on three days rest, arrives in New York and is lost amongst the big bearded hipsters. He’ll be late to the game because he paused to vape while riding his fixie bike from the vinyl shop. This is why the Yankees keep their strict facial hair ban.
The Mets won 90 games this year, got contributions from everyone, and have a stable of great young arms, it’s all enough to make even Fake Sandy Alderson take a fake bow. They also got no-hit two days ago and are on one of their patented we-can’t-score streaks to finish the season when grasping home field for the first round was within reach.
Storyline: Facing Kershaw and Grienke, the Mets get no hits over the first two games, but still manage to win them thanks to Don Mattingly’s brainfart coaching decisions.
The Cubs haven’t won the World Series since Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid were still alive (they were “allegedly” killed in November of 1908). The Pirates haven’t won it all since before the Iran Hostage Crisis (which started in November of 1979).
Storyline: Who cares who wins as long as one of them beats the Cardinals.
The Toronto Blue Jays made the biggest trade deadline waves and rode them past the Yankees to win the AL East without much trouble. Meanwhile, the Texas Rangers were not only coming off a 100 loss season, but they started the spring with a rookie manager and without their ace pitcher. They hung around all year, and when the Angels and Astros decided they didn’t really want the pennant, took it for themselves rather decisively. Both Texas teams now have a slim chance of meeting in these playoffs if they can get by their first opponents…while their State’s governor Greg Abbott took to the Twittersphere last night to lament the Cowboys’ defense being “more porous than the Texas Border.”
Storyline: Gregg Abbott is detained at the Canadian Border trying to get through for Game One, and later tries tunneling under, only to be beaten mercilessly by unauthorized Mountie Militias patrolling the other side.
