Collin Vs. Blog

Never in my wildest dreams, given their strong showing a couple years back, did I think an entry with that title wouldn't be about the Cubs, and would instead be praising their South Side brethren.

One of the reasons that I've never gotten all that much into hockey is that it never really crossed the line into comprehensibility for me. In other words, and I'm fully willing to admit my own ignorance here, I just don't understand what makes one squad good and another bad. I've been to a few games, and I've enjoyed them, but I don't really understand the sport in the way I do most others.

And while I'm happy for the Sahx, almost as happy as I was last year for the Sawx, I must admit that I really don't understand how a team with pretty good pitching and average hitting managed to lose only a single game in the playoffs. Granted, their pitchers pitched above themselves (Garland and Buerhle couldn't pitch out a paper sack for much of the 2nd half of the season), and granted, they're a very solid team, but position by position, they're not that much better than the Red Sox, Angels, or even Astros (who got there with very good pitching and below average hitting). Are they?

Maybe the answer is consistency, top to bottom. The Cardinals last year had a staff that was comparable, certainly, but lost to a team with a couple of serious stoppers in Schilling & Martinez (and Lowe pitched out of his mind). The Astros' stoppers didn't. Bakke turned out their best pitching performance of the Series, and the 'Stros didn't support him.

Hmm. Still, I would have liked to see the one matchup that didn't happen, and that would have been White Sox-Yankees. The Red Sox had to play the Yanks to get in, and the Angels had to play them in the first round, but the WSox got through without having to face them. I would have probably preferred to see the Sox face the Cardinals, who seemed to age before our eyes in the NLCS. (You have no idea how hard it is for me as a Cub fan to type the first part of that sentence.)

In the end, though, however it happened, the Sox buzzsawed through the other teams, and did it in a way that all the big budgets and moneyballers couldn't have predicted. Good for them.

And a razz to all of the sports twits who think that the quality of a series is measured by its TV ratings, and only national TV ratings at that. I can't tell you how tired I get of the idiots who honestly believe, in our ESPN-saturated sports culture, that they don't have any influence over perception, that they're just "reporting" the "facts." Every time one of the talking heads asks whether people will be interested, they're raising the possibility that it won't be interesting. And the fact of the matter was that, for all that it only lasted four games, this was a fun series to watch.

Even if the Cubs weren't in it...