Do you do this? Something goes badly wrong for your team, and you spend a minute or five replaying the events in your head, and settle on what you believe led to your team’s destruction.
I do that. Especially in regard to baseball, which is a start-and-stop game chock-full of decisions, choices, options.
And the Dodgers’ crushing, 9-6 defeat in Game 4 of the World Series, after holding a 4-0 lead through six innings, is ripe for a session of “whom to blame”?
We start with the least blameworthy events, and end with the most.
–Rich Hill’s walk of Xander Bogaerts to open the seventh inning. With the Dodgers giddy after Yasiel Puig’s homer capped the bottom-of-the-sixth eruption. Hill was, of course, a huge plus for the club, throwing six scoreless, but whatever chance he had of going another inning or two may have ended when he put the leadoff man on. Not even striking out the next batter, Eduardo Nunez, taking Hill to 91 pitches, kept him in the game. If he opens the inning with two outs, maybe manager Dave Roberts lets him finish the seventh and two guys mentioned below never enter the game.
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If this thing goes seven, we may be zombies. Or vampires. Undead creatures of the night.
We certainly will suspect we have shifted into a new time zone, one where our “days” dissolve into evenings.
Over in France, I woke at about 6 a.m. Saturday, local time. Looked at my watch. Feared World Series Game 3 might be over. Since it began at 2:09 a.m., in France.
Ha.
Ha-ha.
It was 1-1 in the middle of the ninth, and late-arriving viewers (such as moi) were not going to watch a few outs made in an inning or two.
This one had another nine innings to go in a game that lasted a postseason record 7 hours and 20 minutes.
And for Dodgers fans just tuning in, it meant three-plus extra hours of unexpected, on-the-precipice baseball that ended with the home team winning on a home run by Max Muncy — at 1230 a.m. in Los Angeles, 3:30 a.m. in Boston and 9:30 a.m. in France.
By which time those of us who were awake and interested were emotionally drained.
I met the day already exhausted.
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This is a list of reasons why regular folks around the baseball world should support the Los Angeles Dodgers over the Boston Red Sox in the World Series, which begins tonight in Beantown.
First and foremost?
–The Dodgers have not won the World Series in 30 years. The Red Sox have won it three times since 2004, and expect the rest of you to join them in their selfish pursuit of a fourth championship in 15 years. Hey, it’s L.A.’s turn! There are Dodgers fans 35 years old who have no recollection of Kirk Gibson and the 1988 World Series.
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The Los Angeles Dodgers and the Boston Red Sox are two of the half-dozen most prominent Major League Baseball teams. In theory, then, they should be rivals of some sort. Perhaps bitter rivals.
But they are not. And have not been for a century. A time frame that does much to explain why they enter the 2018 World Series on Tuesday as polite and respectful opponents.
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A sample size too small even to call a sample size, but that never stops us from expressing enthusiasm — or confessing alarm — about a team we have been studying.
In this case, the Los Angeles Lakers. The Lakers of LeBron James. The Lakers who Are Back. Relevant Again. In Theory.
The Lakers who are 0-1 in an 82-game season after a 128-119 defeat at Portland on Thursday night.
And here is what we found worrisome.
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The Dodgers defeated the Milwaukee Brewers 2-1 in 13 innings to even the National League Championship Series at two games apiece.
The game lasted 5 hours and 15 minutes.
It only seemed like it went on for 10 hours and 15 minutes.
It has been three decades since the Dodgers won a World Series, and most of their fans would like to see the end of that drought …
But do the boys in blue really plan to give us more of what we saw Tuesday night/Wednesday morning?
Wouldn’t that just encourage other teams to play the same way?
This was a brutal game to watch, and I saw every moment of it. All 315 minutes, which is 18,900 seconds, if a moment constitutes a second.
The biggest problem?
The 11-plus innings that Dodgers hitters turned into a whiff-fest, at the hands of the Milwaukee bullpen.
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I was as badly wrong about Jared Goff as … well, just about anyone or anything over a long stretch of time.
Back in 2016, his rookie season, I was suggesting the Los Angeles Rams quarterback was in big trouble even before the season began, and then declared him a top-of-the-draft disaster. Or nearly did. (“Goff … may be a bust.”)
He started the final seven games of a 4-12 season, and lost them all, and looked awful. Clueless, hapless, scared, lost.
Rams fans, and I, were cringing over the cost of the team trading up to get the top pick from the Tennessee Titans. Which led to Goff. Two first-round picks, two seconds and two thirds, in the 2016 and 2017 drafts.
After making his debut in the 10th game of the season, Goff suffered those seven defeats, as well as seven interceptions, five TD passes and a disastrous 63.6 quarterback rating for the worst offense in the NFL.
The team’s greatest hope, I suggested at the end of the 2016 season, was the Rams finding a coach ready to “take on the Jared Goff Project — personally, or with a fantastic QB coach”.
Which is exactly what they did, in hiring Sean McVay. Since that inspired move, the Rams are 16-5 in regular-season games, including 5-0 this season.
And today?
Goff pretty much has a final test to demonstrate he is one of the league’s top quarterbacks by winning in bad weather, and at altitude.
In snow, that is. In Denver.
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Los Angeles Dodgers and Milwaukee Brewers. Boston Red Sox and Houston Astros.
Two teams that played in last year’s World Series.
Two teams that led their league in victories.
Four teams that are rolling. Two best-of-seven series to decide who plays in the 2018 World Series.
Baseball has reached its version of the Final Four, with the Brewers and Dodgers playing for the National League pennant, and the Red Sox and Astros vying for the American League pennant.
It could be, should be interesting, given that these seem to be the four best teams in baseball. Nobody fluky has sneaked into this party.
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Much has been made this week of the moments of madness after Khabib Nurmagodemov defeated Conor McGregor in a highly anticipated Ultimate Fighting Championship event in Las Vegas.
People rushed into the ring, punches were thrown.
Some people who were at the event feared that the situation could devolve into a riot in the sold-out MGM Grand arena.
Two of those alarmists did a podcast for theringer.com, a site mostly concerned with sports topics, and they seemed to agree that the risk of general violence and the threat to civilians in the stands was high.
One described it as “the craziest event I’ve ever been to.”
No doubt things looked dangerous for a moment, but then that moment was gone –which enables us to demonstrate that Khabib-MGregor was a long, long way down the list of crazy or, more, lethal sports events.
Let’s cite a few.
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Chris Davis is a bug lug of a Texan who made his way in baseball by hitting home runs.
That is why the slugger was, in years past, referred to as “Crush” Davis — a play on the name of the Kevin Costner character “Crash Davis“) in the movie “Bull Durham”.
Chris Davis, now 32, had some halcyon days. In 2013, he led the major leagues in home runs (53) and runs batted in (139). In 2015, he led baseball in homers again, with 47.
But he never was a guy who was going to reach base a lot. He is not a guy who will lay down a bunt or hit behind the runner or cut down on his swing when he is behind in the count.
It’s all or nothing … and in the 2018 season Chris Davis experienced “nothing” so often he pushed one historically relevant statistic to a new low.
With a .166 (qualified) batting average. An MLB record.
And, really, if we are going to attach a name to guys who can’t get hits, whose batting averages are plummeting below .200 … we ought to rename the Mendoza Line for Chris Davis.
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