Revenge of the Flyover States, Game 4

I like watching David Eckstein play. I always have, even when he was on the Angels, a team I viscerally loath. But - and this has been bothering me for a few days now – as much as we can all agree that hustle is a good thing… very admirable in general, certainly nothing wrong with it … is it really necessary to sprint to first base on a walk? Really? We’re not talking about a grounder or a popup, a play on which there could possibly be an error by the defense, allowing a heads-up baserunner to reach safely. We’re talking about a walk. One base. Automatically. You can’t stretch a walk. I mean, there’s hustle and then there’s Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder.

Meanwhile, we might as well all go home, because God is obviously rooting for the Cardinals -- they got roughly an entire season's worth of breaks all in one night in Game 4, while the Tigers stumbled, tripped, and threw balls away left and right. Literally. This game could hardly have been uglier for Tigers fans (or Yankees fans who couldn’t stop thinking “THESE schmucks shut down one of the greatest offenses of all time?”), and although it was exciting in the sense that it was decided in the late innings, this was not what you’d call good baseball. It looks like the 83-game winners are on the brink; take deep breaths and repeat the helpful mantra “small sample size, small sample size, small sample size, small sample size.”

And speaking of God and the Cardinals, Jeff Suppan appeared in a Missouri TV ad during the game last night for an anti-stem-cell group called Missourians Against Human Cloning. I don’t want to get political here – I don’t like politics in my sports -- but come on: it should be possible to oppose stem cell research on moral or religious grounds, without trying to scare dumb people into thinking allowing it would “make cloning a Constitutional right.” Besides, I think maybe they're being too hard on cloning. Who doesn’t like the idea of a pitching rotation full of Chien-Ming Wangs? I'd say the Yankees should look into this, but I suspect they already have.