Monday Fungos: A Cardinal Case of Bird-Foot-in-Mouth Disease
The Cubs went 4-1 over the past seven days, but the week really belonged to St Louis. Actually, can the Cubs award schadenfreude the honorary number 99 and immediately retire it in the Cardinals’ honor?
It was so much fun listening to Cardinals president of baseball operations John Mozeliak basically take the comments from the fan suggestion box outside his office and read aloud from it on a podcast. I know Mozeliak disagrees with the notion that he threw Dexter Fowler under the team bus for lollygagging, but privately he’s still steamed at the outfielder’s lack of effort in helping to deliver his newborn daughter.
Either way, it all played out like something Michael Scott would have done in The Office. In other funny news:
- Big tip of the hat to the schedulers for giving the Cubs a day off before and after that grueling two-game Detroit series. Kind of like scoring break periods before and after high school gym class.
- Whenever the Cubs feature a videotape of Harry Caray singing the 7th Inning Stretch, you can pretty much assume the invited celebrity is behind the press box slumped over a toilet.
- If you were Minnesota and Detroit, those five straight losses to the Cubs had to feel like Groundhog Day. No matter how hard you change things up, you will always score first and end the day totally defeated.
- I’d love to see Detroit home games feature a live tiger chained in the outfield. When a ball stops within its radius, the nearest outfielder can raise his arms to call for a ground-rule double. But if the outfielder loses an arm to the tiger and can only raise one, play continues.
- Kris Bryant is out with a non-contact over-swinging injury, Brandon Morrow goes down pantsing himself, and Yu Darvish has a vague elbow “impingement.” With alibis like this, they better hope their wives don’t already have private investigators on retainer.
- On his birth certificate, Addison Russell’s official name is Geoffreye O’Neal Addison Robert Watts Jr. III. But he quite prefers his scientific name Addisonus vacuumallballus.
- Roving instructors are the hobos of the coaching world. And by that, I just mean their odor.
- For the 12th consecutive year, EA Sports has rejected Joe Maddon’s pitch for a “Maddon MLB” video game featuring himself. EA explained that aside from “Try not to suck,” Joe just doesn’t have enough byte-sized catch phrases. (Maddon’s “I like funk” did tempt, but for a very different genre.)
- This Reds team is so boring to watch. If not for their 7-5 record against the Cubs, they would be demoted to the NBA Summer League.
- Thanks to Reds reliever Kyle Crockett for providing this 80’s Flashback: “Crockett & Stubs(Hub)”…
