As a Dodgers fan (for the six weeks of the season in which Joe Kelly was a member of the Dodgers’ active roster—six nonconsecutive weeks, to be clear), today has obviously been a little hard on me. It’s tough seeing your favorite (player’s current) team lose. The sky’s a little grayer the next morning, and the air’s a little colder, and you’re a little more mindful of the everpresent creep of death, a doomful march which will ultimately end with every proton and electron in the universe slowing to eternal stillness, darkness, and rest.
Even more than that, though, I’m bummed about the ballparks.
And the uniforms.
There are a number of baseball teams who just feel like baseball teams, teams whose parks and uniforms and history combine to make you feel like you’re eating a hot dog as the sunset turns the warning track to a summer gold or sipping hot chocolate as lightning crackles through the postseason crowd. The Yankees are among these teams. The Cubs are among these teams. The Red Sox and Giants and Tigers and Pirates are among these teams—teams whose ballpark or uniform or history makes you exhale with satisfaction. “Yes, dammit, yes,” you say. “That is a baseball team.”
This postseason is a little lacking of those teams, and it was from the beginning. The Marlins and Rays are not the most baseball-y of baseball teams. The Rangers are not a terrifically traditional baseball team. The Blue Jays and Twins do their best, and the Brewers have fun piping on their home whites, but none of those three embodies the essence of baseball.
For this reason, beyond even the Joe Kelly stuff, I told a friend before the postseason started that I was cheering for the Orioles, Dodgers, and Phillies. For how fun the Diamondbacks are, they still feel very much like an expansion gimmick. The Astros have some good cases, but I hate them. The Braves’ new park is a soulless blemish on the region which supports baseball better than any across all levels, an insult to tradition that feels like someone let Chick-Fil-A build a stadium (also, I’m still ready to revenge–meme certain Braves bloggers tonight in retaliation for the Cubs–Braves spat two weeks ago). Even with the Phillies: While the atmosphere is incredible for their postseason games and they’re full of stars and the red pinstripes are an iconic look, the park just isn’t Dodger Stadium in its history, and it’s not Camden Yards in its magical charm.
We’re heading into a remainder of the postseason, then, where it just isn’t going to feel magical. There is no Wrigley Field or Fenway Park or Yankee Stadium. A maximum of one of the original 16 teams is going to be playing in an LCS. It’s a little sad. It’s a little bit of a video game simulated season too many years down the line.
So, what do we hope for?
We hope for the feuds to take center stage.
The Phillies and Braves have done wonders with this, and the Astros and Rangers are set up for the nastiest ALCS in recent memory. We need more, though. Whoever faces the Diamondbacks needs to enter a spat with Tommy Pham. If the World Series goes Phillies vs. Astros, the trash talk after last year has to be vile. Mystique is not going to carry baseball through the rest of this month. We need blood so bad even Elizabeth Holmes’s machines can tell there’s something wrong.
Take That, FIU
I don’t know why I think it’s so funny that FIU got punked on its Miami Vice Night. I have no hate for FIU. I have little feeling about FIU at all! I certainly don’t want to discourage mid-major football programs from taking advantage of Wednesday nights on national television. But UTEP stunted on FIU, on FIU’s one night, and I laughed and I laughed and I laughed a little more.
The more I think about this internal reaction, the more I think it came out this way due to an instinctive desire to defend UTEP. It felt like FIU targeted UTEP as its opponent for this game.
When I was in middle school, my high school’s football team was terrible, and their performance was made all the worse because the conference hadn’t split into enrollment-based divisions yet, something which allowed Crystal Lake Central to pile on Woodstock and Woodstock North and Johnsburg in all sorts of sports for a stretch of years around 2010. During this terrible football period (the early and mid-2000s), a running joke was that my school would always play the worst team in the conference for Homecoming, trying desperately to align the team’s biggest crowd turnout with a game the team might have some chance to win. I know it probably didn’t work this way last night in Florida—I’m guessing FIU made it Miami Vice Night based on ESPN’s schedule, not their own perception of UTEP—but it felt like FIU had a meeting and asked, “Who should we play on the night we give ESPN’s commentators commemorative FIU/Miami Vice t-shirts?” and the answer was, “UTEP.” Then their chosen victim came to town, beat them silly, and posed with their Lamborghini. This is the kind of comeuppance only Conference USA can deliver right now.
The Sens
The Sens lost, and even good nights from Mathieu Joseph and Parker Kelly (that’s Joseph and Kelly, or shortened, Joseph Kelly) weren’t enough to convince the universe to give my favorite relief pitcher one more postseason outing before next year. But Joseph and his brother, as well as Brady Tkachuk and his brother, have made the bigtime, appearing in a pair of Hyundai commercials all of us who grew up with siblings and minivans (or SUV’s) should show our mothers. Also? Auston Matthews had a hat trick and the lower bowl of Leafs fans failed to throw any hats on the ice, because the Leafs fanbase is too soft and Toronto is therefore a bad hockey town. Thank you to Pete Blackburn for calling attention to this. I never know what’s going on in hockey.
Taylor Swift, Flavor Flav, and More Content for Moms
Flavor Flav, part of the NIT Cinematic Universe thanks to his relation to Shep Garner, was a major player at the premier of Taylor Swift’s Eras movie, because Flavor Flav is a major player wherever he goes. Look at this man. We watched an NIT Championship with this man. He was a major player there as well.
Anyway, the NIT and Taylor Swift are on the same plane, and I think that’s a good thing. I think we can work with that.
Elsewhere in the Taylor Swift Cinematic Universe, the Kelce Brothers produced another clip to show our moms. I know, I know. I spent way too much time on Twitter last night.
