Idiots Write About Sports

It’s been a long time since we’ve made fun of our ol’ whipping boy Jim Caple. Let’s remedy that, using today’s column as fodder for our insatiable mean streak.

Astros fans must have really loved listening to the final inning of that game … during their morning rush-hour commutes.

The game ended around 1:20 a.m., Central time, give or take a couple minutes. So you’re suggesting that people drive to work at 1 in the monring in Houston. If that truly is the case, I must take pains never to work there.

Houston waits 43 years for a World Series game and this is what the fans get?

Promising start. Please continue.

They endure four decades of painful seasons, heart-stopping playoff losses and some of the ugliest uniforms ever worn — and this is their reward?

Uh… didn’t you just ask that question?

They enter the ballpark for the first World Series game ever played in Texas, wearing all manner of retro-jerseys, killer bee costumes and 10-gallon hats with expectations so high that only NASA could measure them — and this is the payoff?

Echo… echo…. echo…

Sheesh. And fans thought it was bad when the Astros appeared in “The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training.” At least Ezequiel Astacio didn’t pitch for the Bears in that one.

In The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training, the Bears — a California-based team — travel to Houston to play the Toros, who are the local champs. So I would think the hometown crowd would have preferred Ezequiel Astacio pitching for the Bears rather than the local nine, if, in fact, the point you were laboring to make was that Astacio is a substandard pitcher whose appearances will likely end in tears.

Why, yes, I am overthinking this.

The Astros now are one loss from a sweep and if they lose tonight — and only a handful of teams down 3-0 have even forced a fifth game —

I’m not quite up on my vague wording-to-actual-number conversions… could you please tell me how much a “handful” is? One team? Two teams? Five? Eleventy kajillion? I can wait while you look it up.

Tap… tap… tap…

OK. I got tired of waiting. Three. The answer is three. The 1910 World Series between the Philadelphia A’s and the Chicago Cubs, the 1937 Fall Classic featuring the Yankees and Giants, and the 1970 edition with the Reds and the Orioles.

I realize it’s no fun writing things on deadline. But it didn’t even take me 10 minutes to look up that figure, and it only took that long because I had to scroll through Baseball-Reference.com’s Postseason Index. (Which is a tacit admission that I may have under-counted, so I welcome corrections from any readers out there.) I imagine that if I was employed by a company billing itself as The Worldwide Leader in Sports I might have some more sophisticated research tools at my disposal than a Web browser.

Which makes you lazy, is what I’m suggesting.

…this was about as bad as it gets in a non-elimination game. The Astros went through so many arms that even Nolan Ryan threw a pitch.

Which, as the ceremonial first pitch-tosser, he would have done had the game gone nine innings, 10 innings, or been called off in the third on account of a plague of locusts. I realize that it’s supposed to be a joke, but that doesn’t make it any less forced.

Think of it this way: The defeat gives the Astros the rare chance to lose two World Series games in one day.

Now that is funny. Kudos.

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