This is the time of the year when life gets busy. College football, NFL and fantasy football is already keeping us busy and occupied and then MLB playoffs start. This is pretty much the only time of the year when anybody really needs to care about baseball. My dream playoff lineup almost happened this year. I have always wondered how baseball will do if it goes all small market - specifically if you take out NY and Boston. I am probably never going to be that lucky, but this year came close. No RedSox, no Dodgers, no NY Mets, no Chi Cubs or Whitesox, no Anaheim Angels and just for added effect, no St. Louis Cardinals either. Of course, I didn't expect the NY Yankees to be kept out, but they crashed my playoff party and are still fighting for a division title with the Rays. Rays have been great this season and they gave away 20,000 tickets for free to fill up their 37,00 seat stadium. Sometimes I feel Baseball is in big trouble.
Anyways, the other party-pooper team for me are the hated SF Giants. They are now guaranteed a tie for NL West and are probably going to win it easily given their pitching and the fact that both Colorado and San Diego have choked away their season. The Giants have a September ERA as of today of 1.78. Thats just offensive ! Lincecum, Cain and now this kid Bumgarner are all killing me. If Lincecum looks like he is from high-school, Bumgarner looks like he is from the little league! I was hoping the Giants will do what they have been doing the last few years - pitch well, hit nothing, be mediocre overall, show some life on and off, but eventually fade into oblivion. But this year has been different. They showed some life and sudenly one thing lead to another, and here they are winning the division. Rookie Buster Posey was the catalyst who took this team to the next level. They better build a statue for this kid outside the AT&T park.
The Giants may be the biggest beneficiary of the divorce of the McCourts. The team that lost to the Phillies in the last 2 NLCS just disappeared with the ownership fiddling away. Of course the DBacks did nothing this year either, but thats neither here nor there. At least nobody expected the DBacks to do well this year. Speaking of teams that were not expected to do anything, The Cincinnati Reds are in the playoffs after many years and they took the division away from the Cardinals. The Reds are an interesting team and America will learn about some of their young stars like first baseman Joey Votto and relief pitcher Aroldis Chapman during this year's playoffs. It is fun to watch Aroldis Chapman pump in fastballs at 105 MPH. Texas Rangers have finally made the playoffs too after 11 years or so . Bad Vlad goes from the Angels to the Rangers and now the Rangers are in the playoffs and Angels are out after 3 good years. If I were him, I will hire LeBron James' manager and try to get all the credit I can for this reversal.
Thats a good segway to ex-king LeBron James. The hype continues. ESPN has put 3 fools plus Rachel Nchols full-time on the Miami Heat beat. I have never seen anything like this. Usually people don't even get know when the NBA training camps start, but this year it's not only news, it's tracked continuously. Rachel Nichols is interviewing the 3 dudes - Wade, LeBron and Bosh EVERYDAY! Leave it to ESPN to make a mountain out of a mole-hill and then sell that mountain to us as Mount Everest erected on top of Mount Whitney. Starting Oct 11-Th, they are going to have a special section called Heat Index tracking this team on ESPN.com. This is insane. I like it and hate it at the same time. I like the fact that there is focus on the NBA pre-season much like the NFL pre-season or even the spring training. But at the same time, this super team reminds me of the notorious Yankees in Baseball. I am afraid the NBA will be just about this team for the next 5 years.
The big 3 might have set a bad precedent for others to follow. For example, there is talk of how Amare, Melo and CP3 or Tony Parker will join forces in NYC. Multiple top money guys in the NBA could never play for the same team at the peak of their careers due to financial constraints. But LeBron, Wade and Bosh might have given the blueprint for everybody and this is not a good blueprint for the league in the long term. You could argue that Lakers were always that top team, but this is different. Even the Lakers had to grow their team organically due to NBA's economic rules, though it is true that success does seem to come easier for them than the other teams. They had Kobe and Shaq, but Kobe was drafted. They now have Kobe and Pau, but they traded for Pau. This is different from 3 of the top 5 picks in the same year coming together via free agency at the top of their game. This is the Heat "model".
The Heat are the most hated and the most intriguing NBA team right now. LeBron came out and said that race was part of the backlash against him. That ridiculous. You can't blame the white race for you going on a stupid "decision" show on ESPN and saying "I am taking my skills to South Beach". It's amazing that this once beloved home-town kid has become one of the top 6 most-hated sports personalities in the US. And he is now blaming others for his predicament. You left Cleveland, you went on TV and got all the attention you possibly can. Don't blame that on the white race. If you didn't milk your free agency like a poor third world cow farmer would milk his cow for the last drop of milk, the backlash wouldn't be this bad. And if you didn't have a bunch of high-school dropouts running your "global brand", you wouldn't have to learn that fact from this blog either! Your manager would have warned you so 24 months back when the attention started accumulating around your free agency.
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