After missing two consecutive Mondays due to an extended hospital stay, I’ve returned to cover the only thing more boring than potassium pills and intestinal blockage: Major League Baseball! Things happen over the weekend, and I’m here to bundle up the important stories and sort of pool the one-to-zero comments we’d get per baseball article into one mega gallery with six-to-zero comments.
The Indians are Still in First Place
They’ve lost three straight and had a game postponed, but we’re 21 games into the season and the Cleveland Indians are still sitting atop the AL Central. I refuse to believe this is an April streak anomaly, and will continue to explain how this is simply the coming-together of young, blossoming talent and healed up veterans looking to recapture the spotlight. It’s about guts, people, and I’m positive the 141 or so more games in the season will prove me right. Who cares if our most marketable star is named “Jeanmar?” Who cares if Fausto Carmona finishes the season 1-22? The Indians are winning the World Series, and I don’t care if me and manager Lou Brown are the only ones who believe it.
The Tribe heads back home on Tuesday to start a three game series against Upstart Nobody Flukes the Kansas City Royals. Monster ace and carnival showman Jeanmar Gomez gets his next start on Saturday against something called the “Detroit Tigers.”
Where Have You Gone, Andre Ethier? Our Nation Turns Its Lonely Eyes … Oh, Wait, There You Are
Andre Ethier, Los Angeles Dodger and “Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” enthusiast, pushed his hitting streak to 21 games over the weekend, so of course every possible recap of this has to mention that he’s got 35 games to go before he breaks Joe DiMaggio’s record. If I ever get to manage a big league ball club (and I’m still young, so who knows), that’s how I’m going to coach my hitters. Every time they get a hit, I’m going to tell them they’ve got 55 more games to go if they want to break Joe DiMaggio’s record. Just get them all bent out of shape and obsessed about it. Make them feel bad when they only hit in like 45 straight games. “Joe DiMaggio hit in 56 straight and he was on PILLS. You’re perfectly healthy, WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU.”
To further the DiMaggio/Ethier comparison, they both have/had hot wives. DiMaggio was married to famed screen icon Marilyn Monroe, and Ethier is married to four-year All American gymnast Maggie Germaine. DiMaggio and Monroe were divorced on the grounds of “mental cruelty.” Ethier and Germaine both went to Arizona State, which is grounds for some kind of cruelty.
Ryan Braun’s New Wife Has Many Suitors
On Friday night, a Milwaukee Brewers fan brought a sign to Miller Park reading “Marry Me Ryan” with her cell phone number over it. You have one guess to figure out what happened next, and the first three don’t count. The sign popped up on FOX Sports Wisconsin (which only shows Brewers games and reruns of “Step By Step”), and the poor lady got more than 200 calls and 600 text messages within the hour. If you watch the video above, you can learn slightly more information, and unlike literally everywhere else on the internet, I’m not going to spend a paragraph talking about how ugly she is.
The worst part of the story is that Ryan Bruan felt sorry for her and actually tried to call her, hoping to send her an autographed ball for her support, but she didn’t answer and her voice mail was full. Braun’s comment: “It wasn’t meant to be.” The comment made the Brewers front office laugh, so they signed Braun for additional 14 years.
Albert Pujols to Lose for Next 103 Years
In other hilariously unfortunate Ryan Braun news, Kris Hughes of the Fan Attic (fan attic… wait, I get it now) wrote an article suggesting that because of Braun’s monstrous extension, Albert Pujols is now the number one option for the Chicago Cubs. This would move Albert’s inevitable “Willie Mays playing for the Mets/Hank Greenberg playing for the Pirates” thing up by like nine years. Does it make sense for the Cubs to offer Pujols more than $30 million a year? They already had a guy who could hit 64 home runs in a season and it didn’t really help them. Would Pujols even play at Wrigley Field, where he looks like he’d rather be playing in a pile of horse sh:t?
It seems like the best option is for the Cardinals to just hand over that money, and for the Cubs to collectively jump off that bridge from Mortal Kombat and kill themselves on spikes.
Also in Milwaukee: FALCONS
I guess this week’s Baseball is Boring is All Brewers All The Time. The next entry is about how Robin Yount has returned from the grave with a harrowing curse about mobile sausages. In Sunday’s 4-1 win over the Astros, a peregrine falcon flew into the stadium, killed a pigeon mid-flight, and settled into the grass about fifty feet away from Houston right fielder Hunter Pence, giving new meaning to Hunter’s Dugout screen name i_just_crapped_my_hunterpence.
Apparently the bird would only be aggressive if somebody went after it, so they just let it hang around while they played the game. Brewers relievers started spotting other, larger birds circling outside the ballpark’s windows. Randy Wolf, whose name is also a sexually charged animal, put the situation into context.
“Whatever it was, it looked scared,” pitcher Randy Wolf said. “It looked at me like, ‘Why is the roof closed? I can’t get out of here, man!'”
You can watch the video on MLB.com, but be warned, it’s MLB.com, and there are quotes in the article like “It didn’t spook me. It was cool” by people like Garth Iorg, I mean, I don’t know if you want to read that. And yes, I know Robin Yount isn’t actually dead.
The Philles are Playing Video Game Baseball
You know when you get a new baseball game, and you start off playing on easy, and do that season mode where you get a fantasy draft? You get all these awesome players and everything seems great, but you kinda suck because you’re learning how to play, so you spend April in these 8-7 wins where you mostly hit home runs and get picked off like 400 times? Right, so then you play for a little while and figure things out, and you just start MURDERING the computer, and you lead the league in everything and you bump up the difficulty?
The Phillies are in that spot right now where they need to bump up the difficulty, because Roy Halladay struck out 14 Padres on Sunday and “Sportsman No. 1” star Shane Victorino scored an inside-the-park home run. Victorino was hauling ass, too. How many times do I type that sentence? All I need now is for them to pull the old NES Baseball Stars trick and skirt the infield fly rule for some cheap ass double plays.
