Strategy gets lucky

Love this series. The media conglomerates hate it. But most of all, with all due respect to A’s GM Billy Beane and Mets Manager Willie Randolph, I like to see intelligence prevail over stupidity. The Mets almost spent enough to cover for all the personnel mistakes they made, but money can’t cover for all that idiocy. On the other hand, Cards GM Walt Jocketty has aced almost all his trades with a much smaller budget and LaRussa revolutionizes his craft.

But after watching my beloved Phils pass over Jim Leyland for Charlie Manuel, an organization shill who still doesn’t understand the double switch, after well-publicized interviews with Leyland, clearly because of the irrational fear that Leyland may quit at some point taking public issue at longstanding organizational problems, and after watching my beloved Baseball Prospectus say that the hiatus would keep Leyland from being effective, I have enjoyed watching Leyland and Dombrowski make a winner out of the parts they had to start with. I’m one who believes that taking time out to think makes you better.

As much as two posts here were about St. Louis and another mentioned Pujols and Rolen (I was afraid there was a Piri Miri Muli jinx after Rolen’s error and Pujols’ injury-induced slump), I’m rooting for Detroit of course: ‘Detroit’ being the text of the poem below Ken Mikolowski’s title ‘Homage to Frank O’Hara: Why I Am Not A New York School Poet.’ Didn’t drive by the lakes but in the Midwestern cities I rotated back and forth between the brief ‘What’s Going On’ by Marvin Gaye and the more extended ‘Donuts’ by recently deceased J. Dilla, which is a great before and after the game selection as it is a capsule of the modern history of Detroit music and it has the Tigers logo on the disc.

Rolen said after the game that ‘a lot of people sold us short’ or something to that effect, like, the guy who types the regular season win loss records really doesn’t build up this ballclub. If the media would let baseball do away with the divisional and league championships and let the top teams of each league’s regular season play, they’d have their Subway Series, but as often happens they got greedy.