Not that either one of these items is directly related to Pitt Athletics (if you want to read our takes on the Pitt-Notre Dame debacle or the sinking Big East, see here, here, here, especially here, especially here, and here), but I wanted to briefly deviate from our main focus.
First, I couldn’t help but notice that this morning (Thursday, October 16) Pitt Sports Blather (or PSB) finally surpassed its parent blog, SardonicViews, in average number of visitors per day (click on the Site Meter buttons of each blog). Of course, it took a debacle of a football game to achieve 23 visitors per day, and I doubt that our readership will continue past the bowl game. But still, PSB beat SardonicViews if only for one day.
Of course, our total number of visitors (1,201) is still well behind SardonicViews’s (1,574).
Second, I’ll go ahead and broach the topic of major league baseball. Remember how only Nixon could visit China? Likewise, only I could bring up baseball. If Chas — the true baseball fan of our group — had brought it up, the rest of us would have jumped all over him.
Like most Americans, I’m very disappointed in the outcome of the National League Championship Series. I had been rooting for the poor Chicago Cubs to make it back to the World Series for the first time in 58 years. My new wife and I even stayed up late to watch Game 7 last night. We never watch any television baseball, and only occasionally go out to see the Altoona Curve (the Pirates’s AA team) in person.
However, I am more interested in the American League Championship Series for three reasons. First, the NLCS is over, moron. Second, I — like all God-fearing, apple-pie eatin’, non-bandwagoning Americans — hate the New York Yankees. Third, I believe that the Boston Red Sox are even more pitiable than the Chicago Cubs — even though the Sox’s last World Championship came nearly a decade after the Cubs’s last. Here’s why…
Over the past century, the Red Sox organization has actually tried to compete for a World Championship far more regularly and with far more sincerity (i.e., dollars) than the Cubs organization has. Furthermore, the Red Sox have a far cooler curse on them (Bambino) than the Cubs have (why the hell was that clod trying to get a goat into Wrigley Field in the first place?). But perhaps ESPN’s Jayson Stark puts it best…
As 8 billion New Englanders could tell you, the Cubs don’t hold the patent on Not Winning The World Series. But somehow, there’s a difference between Cubs fans and Red Sox fans. We’ve spent enough time around both of them to see it, to feel it.
Red Sox fans are somehow resigned to their fate. They know the next Bill Buckner fiasco, the next Bob Stanley wild pitch, the next gigantic black cloud is right over the horizon. But for some reason, Cubs fans allow themselves to dream.
Post-Buckner New England has largely given up hope of ever winning the World Series again. And I’d love to see that entire corner of the country lose its prime reason for acting miserable. Plus, I’d love to see the party in Boston if they won. If the Cubs would have won it all, Chicago would have merely rioted.
Tune in to Fox at 8:00 PM tonight. Pedro Martinez will face Rodger Clemens (oh Jesus, if they get to the Series by beating Clemens…).
Incidentally, Chas is the biggest Yankees fan I have ever met. There you go buddy. I broached the topic for you. Let her rip.
Hail to the Red Sox
