So...I read David Schoenfeld's article about the Indians winning Game 1 of the Tigers series, and for some reason, found myself drifting down into the comments, which I never do, what with them being a cesspool of idiocy and all. But I found myself entranced with many of the comments, so here you go:
jim_cash1021
when i saw schlereth throwing 90% 78mph curve balls, i had a gut feeling we were going to squeeze. I told my wife the right before he threw the wild miss by brantley that Acta was going to squeeze. Brantley hadnt done jack at the plate and the pitcher threw slow. 7/10 times that play works in that scenario.
90%? 7/10? I don't know what's more entertaining, this guy's random number generation or his seer-like powers of prediction.
Sacfly69
I can't believe I watched that terrible game last night. Neither of those teams deserved to win that. They should have just given away the win to KC.
Great plan. Are you sure you thought that one through, Sacfly69? They don't typically award wins to non-participating teams in American baseball. And the Indians did in fact deserve to win, by virtue of having scored more runs than Detroit. And could a game that went 14 innings with zero errors really have been so poorly-played?
Here we've got a goofy series of comments:
PilotAn-225
"Psychologically, the Indians entered the game with a 54-54 record."
-It was a 56-56 record, actually, but close enough, Mr. Schoenfield
IndianaAce
Yeah, well this is a major sports company. All they do is sports. I don't care if this was written at 2 AM or not. Get the darn record right. All that aside, the Indians should be favorites to win this division next year, with the experience from this year and a healthy Choo posting normal numbers to help the lineup. He's been missed.
Gothica639
Can you people possibly cry a bit harder? Or are your lives so miserable that you have to nitpick and whine about every little thing?
Thanks for the haranguing and life perspective there, guy who's commenting about someone else commenting about a story written about a baseball game! Granted, I'm doing a meta-comment piece myself, but I'm not accusing people of having miserable lives because they pointed out a fairly indefensible error in a story by the Worldwide Leader. This is a weird thing done by Internet elitists everywhere, from LeBron to Gothica639, going all ad hoc on someone and assuming that their entire life is sad based on a piece of sports criticism.
andrewjbates
i'm a huge indians fan and as much as i hate everything about the state of michigan (detroit, the tigers, the university of michigan and so on)
By the way, great start from AJ. I already like this kid.
neither team is gonna be winning the world series this year. until a firm salary cap is placed in baseball teams like detroit and cleveland will be fighting for division titles and not much else.
Says who? One of them is going to get in, and we've seen countless times what a free-for-all the MLB playoffs are. The Cardinals won all of 83 games in '06 and took the title.
detroit is a HOCKEY town for christ's sake. not baseball, not football.... hockey. i do like the red wings though.
Wow, should have stopped after that first clause - this comment just got worse and worse. Why does a city have to be a "____" town? Can't a city have devoted fans of more than one sports franchise?
Ihatebandwagons
Hold up... It's not like these teams have always been in trouble. Tigers WS run in 2006... Indians were hands down the second best team in the league and was one game away from the WS in 2007. There was no cap then. The system works fine... What baseball needs to try and do is curb bandwagon fans. Support the teams you live by don't just buy Gonzo red sox jerseys and sit around and never go to a game.
"Hands down the second best team" is a weird phrase. They won 99 games that year, most in the majors. Though I share this fellow's distaste for fair-weather fans, I'm not clear on how he wants to implement this Bandwagon Blockade.
johngrove09
This comment [Ed: andrewjbates'] is just factually incorrect. Teams with lower payrolls (including the Indians as well as the Rays, Rockies, Marlins, Rangers and others) have made serious runs at World Series titles just in the last few years. Beyond that, Detroit spends a lot of money - top 10 in payroll. If the Tigers are somehow disqualified from the WS because they don't spend enough, then you're basically saying that only NY, Bos, or Philly could win a title, which is clearly not true.
Paul Cousineau at the DiaTribe has covered this topic far more in-depth than me, but suffice it to say Mr Grove isn't making the right argument here, though he does effectively shoot down Bates' position that the Tribe or Tigers couldn't get out of the first round.
Unfortunately, he puts a lot of words in other people's mouths, and the fact that low-payroll teams occasionally seize on their windows of opportunity doesn't mean that baseball's payroll imbalance is a good thing or that the game is fair. Grove's comment here has some truth, but it's buried in some misconceptions about baseball's competitiveness and some weird quasi-logic.
It's no wonder these comment threads become such dungeons of inanity - who could possibly police all this madness?
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