Assorted MLB thoughts (we’ll cover Burnley’s big win and the Sens’ whatever-the-Sens-do tomorrow or Monday):
- Myles Straw getting continuously booed by Yankees fans is funny on two levels. The first is that Yankees fans were very obviously in the wrong with that incident back in April. They were heckling a guy who just got hurt, and their may have been a racial slur involved (unproven, widely speculated). Second, he’s Myles Straw, guys. No offense to him, but Yankees fans should not let Myles Straw be this far in their heads. This isn’t Manny Machado.
- Speaking of Manny Machado: Watching his teammates interact with him last night, I realized something: They seem to like this guy a lot. The stepping-on-people thing was bizarre, and looked bad, and doesn’t need to go away, but Machado’s not a straight-up villain. There is nuance with Manny Machado. Looking at what we know now about Fernando Tatís Jr., too, that dugout screaming last summer looks more and more like something where Machado was in the right, which I suppose is something widely speculated at the time, but feels like it bears mentioning.
- The Athletic published a glowing profile of Spencer Strider yesterday, fawning over various things but most notably that he’s a Bernie Bro. This made a lot of things click when hours later, Strider embraced racism, ignored science, and got his ass kicked on the second-biggest stage in his industry. He means well, though. And those principles!
- I don’t need the Mariners to win today, but I need that game to be wild. Anything less than wild would sell these two Seattle seasons short. If they lose and it’s not a game with four or more lead changes, it’ll leave a bad taste in the mouth. This can’t be a team that withers. It needs to flame out spectacularly.
Funniest college football games today (with the benefit of seeing the first quarter of Iowa State/Texas, which good God I was going to go I wish I went):
- Iowa State at Texas
- Minnesota at Illinois
- Kansas at Oklahoma
- Miami at Virginia Tech (I giggled)
- UConn at Ball State (soulmates find each other in the end)
- Arkansas at BYU (think they’ll talk gun control?)
- NC State at Syracuse (a pigpen of a game)
- Wisconsin at Michigan State/Nebraska at Purdue (let MSU into the Big Ten West already)
- UNC at Duke
- Nevada at Hawaii (inexplicably not on television, just like every week, this must be an FCC thing)
Most fun college football game today:
- Washington State at Oregon State, which is two allies who desperately need one another engaging in a petty feud. We all have uncles who did this once.
