IdahoBert

Five syllables, seven syllables, five syllables

Our pain is over The cruel days are ending And Glory is near

I don’t know if this is true but I want it to be true. It makes more sense than assuming that ownership doesn’t care about ever having a team that could do more than play 83-79 ball in perpetuity. AJ has indicated that his expectation is that they must spend. Period. It’s not like he and his crew don’t have other options now.

I’m glad someone other than the Red Sox or Yankees won the AL crown. Since I have no skin in the game I perversely seek the most anguish possible for teams I don’t like. The Astros beating the Red Sox did that for me.

I remember driving with my dad in his truck in the pre-seatbelt era and if he had to slam on the brakes his big right arm would reach across the cab and save tiny me from crashing into the dashboard. He had long arms and a good reach. If he was Canadian he might’ve made a good hockey player.

Kids these days. Back in my day our parents didn’t panic until it was 11 PM and we 11-year-olds weren’t yet safely home, we didn’t have seatbelts, or safety helmets for bikes, and we sniffed glue and did acid hundreds of times and nothing bad ever happened, but these guys can’t play a little stickball in Phoenix without getting boo-boo’s and missing out on playing time.

Don’t even mention that team. My grandmother used to say that by even mentioning the d**** you’re opening the door to him.

Speaking of Jim’s, I missed this tweet from #FakeJimLeyland on Miggy Day.

Irregardless of where he went to school his unheedless dereconstruction of the English language is appellant.

I’m not watching this game five Atlanta LA contest but I am listening on the radio and the Braves announcers said that the Dodgers are so analytic oriented that when their starting pitcher was pulled in the first inning the bat boy had to run out to the field and go to every individual player to give them an update for the Apple watches or something like that. They referred to it ANALytic. As in going too far.

This is a justifiable take on things. The upswing this year was anomalous in comparison to our expectations. Perhaps our expectations were unrealistically low and the club merely could not continue to trip over its own feet ad infinitum. I remember how the additions of Gary Sheffield or Prince Fielder were supposed to change the curvature of space-time itself if everything else remained the same which, of course, it did not. No doubt other teams too will improve, they will not remain the same, and regardless of all the deserved optimism about how this team performed this season, they were incapable of competing within the Central Division itself. Finally figuring out — and perhaps only temporarily — how to defeat the Seattle Mariners the Astros or teams in the AL East pales in comparison to the monotony of constantly losing to the Royals the Twins the Guardians and the White Sox. It might be a longer time before the dawn than we suspect.

Sort of like how Trotsky was touched out of photos where he was standing with Lenin.

Torkelson injured his ankle in a game today and was euthanized by the horse doctor 20 minutes ago. RIP.

Luke Jackson was pitching to AJ Pollock. Yes. A Jackson/Pollock matchup.

I don’t want anyone to think I’m following baseball in the postseason because I’m not, but I just want to paraphrase Ice-T’s rejoinder to Aimee Mann regarding his acting talents to say that the Red Sox can eat a hot bowl of whatever it was suggested to her as a main course.

My fantasy is for two 80-82 teams to eventually meet in the World Series and for MLB and the media to try to make it seem as epic as Stalingrad or D-Day. I think this substantiates my claim to be the grumpiest of the old men on this site. You are welcome.

I just want the postseason to be over so the wheeling and dealing can begin. The postseason for me is an unwanted interruption of our Sherman‘s march to the sea.

You know I'm still standing better than I ever did Looking like a true survivor, feeling like a little kid I'm still standing after all this time Picking up the pieces of my life without you on my mind I'm still standing (Yeah, yeah, yeah) I'm still standing (Yeah, yeah, yeah)

And as the flames climbed high into the night To light the sacrificial rite I saw Satan laughing with delight The day the music died

I am pretty simple. No matter what happens, my postseason needs have been satisfied by the defeat of the Chicago White Sox. I don’t have any more at stake in this post-season than I do in the 30 Years War that decimated Europe from 1618 to 1648. To me, both are equally remote.

How will we be able to follow our guys in the AFL? When the season begins October 13 will there at least be box scores or stats of some kind to follow? Is there any real reporting on these games? I’ve never been interested enough to follow it so I personally have no idea.

The Mr. I Era is the context; it’s elephant in the living room; it’s the dog barking outside your window that keeps you awake at night that eventually becomes white noise; it’s the sound of footsteps coming from the inaccessible attic of the rental cottage in the woods where you’d hoped to get away from it all. It’s the slip of the tongue where you say what you really mean instead of what you intended to say. When I first heard the “drunken sailor“ comment I thought “wow that’s bold.” Then I thought “this is not a good choice of words in this situation. He should know better.”

Because I am interested in Sigmund Freud as well as in your mother Trabek.

All joking aside, framing the Mike Ilitch era in relation to the deportment of a “drunken sailor” is an extremely disrespectful and impolitic thing to do, regardless of how accurate this description may be in an off the cuff sort of way. Being off the cuff in this manner about Mr. I seems unprofessional. Al Avila should be capable of a less caustic, less derisive way of framing the Mr. I era. The fact that he didn't speaks volumes, presumably, about the way he and Chris Ilitch view that era. We have all been gnashing our teeth about it for years but most of us aren’t managing an asset of the magnitude of the Detroit Tigers and I would expect a more circumspect manner of phrasing things than a low blow about a “drunken sailor” would imply.