Now THAT was entertaining baseball, people. Finally the 2010 season has started!
- Watch ‘The Brawl’ LINK HERE
In case you missed the start of the Cards/Reds game on Tuesday night, the bottom of the 1st inning was marked by a bench clearing scuffle before one pitch was thrown by Jamie Garcia. Carpenter then got tossed into a fence while Johnny Cueto somehow thought kicking wildly would help the fracas. Dusty Baker and Tony LaRussa were ejected. Fines are expected today from the MLB front office for players heavily brandishing slaps.
And we haven’t even talked about the game… which happened to be damn fun for pretty much the whole 9 innings.
Of course the leade will be Brandon Phillips and his incendiary comments (see below) about the Cardinals manhood. In the biggest series the Reds have played in years, Phillips has awoken a passion in the Cardinals and their fans that hasn’t been seen since Holliday took one off the apple bag in LA last October. We applauded Phillips in this space yesterday and we have to reiterate- his mini-tirade has been nothing but good news for St. Louis. Good job, bub.
And now, if this was a high stakes poker game, the Cardinals are in a dominant position. Sitting on a big stack with the big river card about to come out and take the bump in Wednesday’s day game. Even if the Cards take the loss and fall one back of the Reds in the NL Central, I think that everyone is going to be satisfied with 2 out of three. Not happy, mind you. But willing to at least admit that this team does have some passion and will most likely fight their way into the playoffs one way or another.
Before Monday, I don’t think we really knew that to be absolutely true.
Let’s not forget that the Cardinals are a really good team. They’ve got the talent to win a World Series on this roster RIGHT NOW. Every team has flaws, but the most frustrating thing about the Cardinals is that their flaws seem to be completely self-created; bad base running, lack of focus, laying down for games at a time, not taking pitches? All very correctable and infinitely avoidable flaws.
Hence the apathy from Cardinal Nation. For fucks sake, this is the same town that will eventually build a statue for Lil Lil Davey Eckstein as a monument to scrappiness, so they’ll tolerate losing games as long it looks like your mom got shot when they cut to the locker room later that night. 120 million dollar guys just kind of meh about it? MUTINY!
Personally, I’m just stoked that baseball is something that I’m counting down the hours to in the afternoon, as opposed to something that’s better than most of the other crap on TV. When baseball is played like it was tonight, it’s a trucking blast.
So maybe the Cardinals have been rope-a-doping the Reds all season long so we can get fired up in August as opposed to shooting our load in June? Probably not.
But it doesn’t matter. Since we’re all figuring out ways to get to a TV at lunch.
Photo via @Rinawear (Go buy shirts)
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