HumpLinks: Nats Avoid Expected Sweep, Take Game One 5-4

PLAYOFFS

This sucks. The Internet waited until the morning of Game 1, hours too late for me to exploit all of it, before coming in hard on great previews of the historic pitching match ups. Now I have all these great links and the top two guys on these staffs go out and give up a combined 13 total hits and 7 total earned runs over 12 innings of work. Hell, even Tanner Rainey gave up a base on balls. But for a while there it was gonna be great. The Best Collection of World Series Pitching Talent Ever.....A World Series Is A Historic Battle Of Starting Rotations.....A Spectacular Free-Agent Showcase.....($$) - A pitching nerd’s dream World Series.....The Rotations: The Best Ever..........

And there we have it. The Nationals take the opener 5-4, and with it home field advantage. 9 total runs, 19 total hits. A kid under 21 years of age hits a World Series home run off the future AL Cy Young winner....Another guy hits a home run in a new record 5th straight World Series game.....And another guy, after 15 years in MLB and 1,689 regular season games and 28 post-season games hits a World Series home run on the second World Series pitch he ever sees, also off the future AL Cy Young Award winner.....And Howie Kendrick went 0 for 4. Game 2 tonight.

Does this factoid mean that Mike Trout was wasting Joe Smith’s career?............

ANGELS - THE HAPPY STUFF (mostly)

That annual thing that Angels Stadium does with bulldozing the shit out of the playing field so that mother nature can rain all over it before millions of horsepower can grind and shred it all to pieces is coming back again. Here is your suite rental schedule............

Mickey Callaway might be your next pitching coach. It’s merely reporter conjecture, but sometimes the obvious actually does happen...........

Soon I will have to devote more time to signing and trade rumors, but for all those drooling over Free Agent pitching options, here is where we stand so far............

MANAGERIAL MUSICAL CHAIRS

If any of the Mets publicly named manager candidates don’t work out, they have a pop-secret surprise candidate to roll out on our asses. Who would be your guess? Let me help a bit. It won’t be Wally Backman............

BASEBALL

Somebody needs to take the shovel out of the hands of the Abusetros. Or maybe not. It’s keeping the Angels out of the post-season dog house......There is a huge amount of links here so grab a coffee. Recall that it begins with SportsIllustrated reporting gross behavior by the Astros Assistant GM. Caught off guard, the franchise issued a statement claiming out of context......This response was not getting the traction that they desired, especially once other witnesses started coming forward and calling bullshit on the excuse making.....So Houston came back again yesterday. The owner, Jim Crane, came out to tell everybody what great guys they are because they convinced other people to give money to noble causes. $300K. That’s less than the amount they saved by trading for Osuna below market value in the first place. And they got the Ass GM to make a replacement statement. His story? He’s real real sorry that everybody took his shouting out of context.....Now the Abusetros are just throwing chum into the waters of hungry media sharks. And the sharks are rushing in to feed. (Like, really, chum... chum... chum... chum.... MAJOR EFFING CHUM.... and nobody is buying it...... And, yeah, a real pissed off because of nothing beyond Abusetros.)....It’s so bad that MLB is now forced to remove some legal interns from their choice field level World Series seats and go have a beer with the Houston Front Office types so that they can create the theater of responsible social sensitivity.....Of course, the MLB response came out at the same time as the Houston do-over so don’t think that there isn’t some major league legal/PR coordination going on....This Taubman guy? The Abusetros can’t hide all of his history here....The Baseball Writers Union wants a real real real apology.......AJ Hinch ain’t happy at all that he has to deal with this as the 2019 World Series kicks off............But this one, blaming sports in general, is one net cast way too broad...........

Baseball is dying? It depends on how you look at things. If you look at it based on the selling of sport tickets to attend the sporting event in person, the only sport even close to the popularity of Major League Baseball would be...Minor League Baseball.............

Your drooling over the pitching Free Agent list above must be done by now. You are thinking that this is finally the time that Arte needs to blow it out and fix things while there is still time. And you are forgetting all the warning signs............

($$) - Maybe when I retire and have more spare time for the mad scientist workshop that I occupy, I can use my odd skill combination of baseball, computer tech, power tools, physics, and coloring pencils and invent an all-new method for MLB teams to steal signs..............

Solving the post-season unjuicing of baseballs problem by randomly mixing post-season and regular-seasons balls for the World Series so that we get to play baseball bingo? Yeah, stupid............

Are you really good using Baseball Reference? Think so? Ok, here is your challenge: find any game where Billy Wagner was pitching, Paul Lo Duca was catching, and Joe West was the plate umpire. We don’t care which teams were involved, or what seasons they happened. For extra credit, among any such games, find which one(s) ended on three called strikeouts, if any. Report back here. Why the fuss? Because West is now suing Lo Duca for slander, as Lo Duca claimed that West was taking bribes from Wagner. (A word of encouragement: it’s pretty easy to quickly narrow things down.).............

Note to self (well, note to any future self who ends up becoming a TV broadcast producer): it is better to interrupt a live sports event to warn people of three incoming tornadoes and let the world bitch at you forever, than it is to not interrupt a live sports event to warn people of three incoming tornadoes and let the world bitch at you forever............

STUFF

Before we get to the offseason, which would normally happen immediately after this World Series, we have one more baseball thing to settle...........Here I was thinking that franchise announcements during off days in the post-season was more of a common courtesy, and not an actual MLB mother-may-I? kind of thing............Thanks for the free taco, Trea Turner. Can I get mine at Jack In The Box?.............The Houston Abusetros. And a perfect time for this T-Shirt..............