The Good, The Bad and the Very Ugly
The Good: The Mets won the NLDS! Hurrah! There is great rejoicing in Casa Base10. The 'Boys did in the Dodgers on Saturday night 9-3, sweeping the series. The ghosts of Brooklyn Dodger fans are resting easy tonight. They face the Cardinals in the NLCS on Wednesday. Click here for a preview. The only thing marring the event was an injury to Cliff Floyd whose status is still undetermined.

The Bad: Is it wrong to take pleasure in the Yankee's loss? Maybe. But we'll do it anyway. The team with the $200 million dollar payroll is out. The team that has an All-Star at every position in the lineup is gone. No! Not the Yankees. Surely this is some alternate universe. How could the team that outspent the next highest team by 50% be out? They shouldn't have even had play that creepy little five-game series. They should have just been elevated to the AL Championship simply by virtue of their massive payroll. Anyway, Yanks lose 8-3 and head to the golf course. The loss was right before the start of the Met game on Saturday night, so it was like the maraschino cherry on top of the Mets NLDS victory.

What went wrong? Paying big bucks for aging baseball divas doesn't seem to be a winning strategy. Everyone in the NY sports media is speculating about when--not if--Joe Torre will be fired. But how could you fire a manager that brought you to the post-season every single year in his eleven-year tenure? Base10 thinks he will indeed go, for two reasons. First, you can't fire the players. As much as Steinbrenner would love to get rid of them (and may indeed try to dump A-Rod) aside from delivering some choice words, there's little that he can do to them monetarily. Second, since Lou Pinella is available, this might be the optimal time to change regimes. As a casual observer of the Yanks, it will be interesting next year watching Pinella verbally berate those self-same divas in the press for sub-standard performance. And that's about all I'm going to write about the Yankees until next year.

The Very, Very Ugly: Hey, sometimes you win a football game and sometimes you lose. Sometimes, when you lose, you lose close and you're fighting until the end. Sometimes you play a back-and-forth game and it just goes the other team's way at the two-minute warning. Sometimes you get outclassed by a better team. And sometimes you get smashed in the teeth, kicked in the groin and pummelled over the head repreatedly for four entire quarters of football. The latter was what happened to the Jets yesterday as they played the Jaguars. Jax shut us out 41-0 in one of the most unbearable games I've ever had the displeasure to watch. It was the worse loss for he Jets since 1986 and, as mark Cannizzaro, the NY Post's beat reporter for the team pointed out, the team was never blown out this badly even during the Rich Kotite era. Ouch!

There's very little to take away from the loss. The Jets were victimized by a couple of obviously bad call, but these calls could not have possibly changed the outcome of the game. They got beat at every level. The only good thing that may come from this is that the team might possibly mature as a result. Can they come together as a team and deal with this? If they do, they have the potential to become a great team down the stretch and into next season. If they do not--well see the above item about the Kotite era. The shame of it is that a win over Jacksonville would have given the Jets a winning record going into what is perhaps the softest part of their schedule. The next three weeks they face, in order, Miami, Detroit and Cleveland and then a bye. An eight win season is still entirely possible this year, but yesterday's game was certainly not the start down that road. We'll see.
- posted by Base10 @ 1:52 PM