Cubs get flags, A’s remove tarps and Yadier Molina is sticky
By John Buhler
The Chicago Cubs got their World Series rings and some new championship banners. Thankfully, the world didn’t end. Here’s what made baseball fun this week.
It’s the middle of April and nobody in MLB has been eliminated from the postseason yet. Therefore, baseball is still fun. Then again, it wasn’t a great week for Canada. The Blue Jays have the worst record in baseball, but that doesn’t matter right now because the Leafs made the Stanley Cup Playoffs!
It should be noted that famous Canadian pitcher Ferguson Jenkins nearly messed the whole thing up in Wrigley Field on Monday. He had one job. Get his championship flag up. It kind of unfolded at the end, so he didn’t go full Steve Harvey, La La Land or Falcons, so that’s cool.
Baseball continues to amaze us with quirky things almost every day. The more, the merrier. We have to believe whole-heartedly that 2017 is going to be great. It will be a year that the late Bill Veeck would have been proud of. Then again, he would have put Tony Romo in the outfield for the Texas Rangers to sell tickets. The Dallas Mavericks beat you to the punch. Come on!
Let’s refocus and try to maintain our fleeting attention spans for more than eight seconds. If that’s all I’ve got from you, well, then that’s all I’ve got from you. So here are some pictures, and I’m going to tell you what made baseball fun this week.
The Chicago Cubs got their championship things and we survived the apocalypse.
It happened. People in Chicago got to see their beloved Cubbies raise their 2016 World Series banner at Wrigley Field on Monday night. Even if you don’t root for the Cubbies, it was a cool, but long ceremony. They got their World Series rings on Tuesday night, too. Those rings had all the diamonds, 108 of them if you can count that high.
The Friendly Confines flexed a tremendous power move by having these championship ceremonies against the team they beat to get to the World Series: the Los Angeles Dodgers. If Clayton Kershaw doesn’t feel like a loser, that 78-hour ceremony in the freezing rain would certainly do that.
On Monday night, it was all about the championship banners. Chicago raised four of them: the 1907 World Series Championship, the 1908 World Series Championship, the 2016 National League Championship and the 2016 World Series Championship.
Ryne Sandberg went first and dominated the raising of that 1907 banner. Fergie Jenkins, not so much on that 1908 banner. Things were starting to take a turn for the worse. That flag was not cooperating and the Cubs faithful may not have been sure that it was meant to be. For a split second there, many though the Heavens would open and all sorts of bad things would come out of it like heat-seeking missiles, bloodhounds, foxes and barracudas. Better Call Saul?
That could have happened because the Cubs won the World Series. Billy Williams raised that 2016 NL Pennant like the power hitter he once was. Then the entire 2017 Cubs team, including Brett Anderson, raised that 2016 World Series Championship banner. Wrigley went nuts!
Yadier Molina is ALWAYS about the ball.
St. Louis Cardinals backstop Yadier Molina loves the baseball more than you do. He is a well-paid catcher and that’s part of his job to throw it back to the pitcher or one of his four infielders. However, sometimes baseballs get separation anxiety. Molina knows first hand.
During last Thursday’s game against the Cubs, the baseball got stuck to his chest protector. Molina one-upped that Isaac Newton guy about that whole gravity thing by virtue of baseball’s favorite substance: pine tar.
MLB was cool with the incident, shocker. When has baseball been cool about that sort of thing? George Brett and Micheal Pineda should be up in arms about this. Could you blame them? The truth is baseball doesn’t want to mess with the relationship it has with its favorite city. It was fun to see that baseball beat science that day.
The Oakland A’s don’t believe in tarps, they believe in educating America.
Mt. Davis has been a perpetual eyesore at Boaty McBoatface Stadium, home of the American League’s Oakland A’s and NFL’s Oakland Raiders. Late Raiders owner Al Davis demanded an extra level of seats he wasn’t going to be able to sell to bring his team back to the Bay Area.
The Raiders are going to Sin City in a few years and that’s sad, but new A’s President Dave Kaval is getting rid of those gross tarps and making Oakland smarter. Kaval is opening up the upper level of the coliseum to any A’s fan that wants to sit there for $15. Half the proceeds will go to Oakland Promise, a charity set in place to help underprivileged kids from the Bay Area go to college.
A’s fans, if you do go up to the top deck (however, not to Mt. Davis, those stay. Boo!) to support a great cause, can you tell us at FanSided if any yetis are up there? Everest says its his favorite place to catch a ball game. He believes in Billy Beane, Moneyball, Kaval, and educating Oakland/America. Also, Marshawn Lynch wants to know if you can grow Skittles up there. Just say yes and we’ll move on!…………Hey!
Don’t mess with the Texas Rangers, unless you want to play Topgolf. Then that’s maybe okay?
We’re going there. Where messing with Texas. Why? Because it decided to make the Rangers’ stadium into a TopGolf bonanza this fall and now the grass looks like something Mulder and Scully would need to investigate on The X-Files.
Didn’t think that one through now did you, Arlington? You’ve got Jerryworld right next to you trying to show you how to be excellent and you do this? Come on, man! We get it. The Rangers are getting a new stadium in a few years. That’s awesome and more power to them, but don’t actively try to confuse the umpires with how the infield fly rule works in your ballpark.
Science tells us that grass grows at different rates. Eventually, it will all look the same because that’s what grounds people do professionally. Either way, the same baseball gods that saved the Cubbies from aerial barracudas on Monday night have definitely punished the Rangers at home.
Congratulations, you got the American League beasts that are the Cleveland Indians to start the year and now you went 2-4 in your first six games at TopGolf Stadium. Just win on the road, baby, and you’ll make the postseason for sure.
The Atlanta Braves can’t even get the tomahawks right.
Atlanta traffic is already the bane of many transplants existence. Whether it’s I-75, I-85, or that lovely circle we know as I-285, Atlantans lose a bit of their soul every time they get behind the wheel Monday through Friday to try to go home and watch NetFlix.
I-285 looked a forsaken war zone that one time it snowed in February 2014. Not even two months after the Atlanta Falcons blew a 25-point lead in Super Bowl LI, I-85 randomly caught on fire and collapsed. Now we’ve got to deal with the Atlanta Braves inability to move tomahawks.
Yes, the famous foam red tomahawks everywhere on I-75 Southbound. If that didn’t foreshadow what should be an excellent first year at SunTrust Park in Cobb County, what will? The Braves haven’t even played a game that matters at SunTrust and they can’t even get the tomahawks right.
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Parking issues, leaky bullpens, and now apparently red foam tomahawks can’t be trusted in Braves Country. When attempting to make the Braves great again goes totally wrong, this is what you get. If you think really hard, you technically always have a tomahawk: your dominant hand. It won’t be red, unless feel like getting sunburnt. Disclaimer: don’t do that. It’s bad for your skin and it hurts a lot.