More Baseball

By Heraclitus

Bill Simmons of ESPN kept a running diary of last night's game. Here are two of the highlights:

6:44 -- Suppan bounces a pitch in front of home plate that hits Valentin in the face. That's quickly followed by Endy Chavez stranding two runners to end the inning. This is terrible. I feel like I'm sitting in the stands watching one of my neighbor's kids play in a Babe Ruth game. Can we all agree that this game can never be shown on ESPN Classic, no matter how it ends?

8:57 -- Our NLCS MVP: Jeff Suppan. Never have five words summed up the quality of a league that perfectly.

Not all of it is hilarious, but it's worth reading for his inventory of Tim McCarver's various howlers. Incidentally, he backed down from the claim that it could never be shown on ESPN Classic.

I am a little disappointed that he didn't get the irony when Fox played Abba's "Take a Chance on Me" to a montage of Oliver Perez moments. Simmons refered to it as "gay." He can be very funny and has a wide range of pop-cultural references, but irony really seems to be beyond his grasp.