So if the Beers beat Detroit and Denver beats Atlanta in the American Southwestern Division East Northern, then Milwaukee goes to the Denslow Cup. Unless Baltimore can upset Buffalo and Charlotte ties Toronto, then Oakland would play L.A. and Pittsburgh in a blind choice Round Robin. And if no clear winner emerges from all this, a two-man sack race will be held on consecutive Sundays until a champion is crowned.
Baseball used to be simple. Whoever had the best record at the end of the regular season won the League. Whoever won four out of seven games in the World Series was World Champion until next year. Now we’ve got wild cards, three levels of playoffs for League Champion and still the occasional one-game playoff.
And then you have the World Baseball Classic.
Has anyone actually seen one of these games? Have you noticed the broadcast schedule? If baseball wanted people to get excited about this they probably could have done better than scheduling a tournament in the middle of March Madness. 24-7, every goddamned TV station in the world is broadcasting a bunch of hoodlums tossing a rubber ball into an updated fruit basket instead of beaming the antics of whiny, overpaid drug abusers to fans the world over.
And then we come to the bizarre tournament play. I wish I could quote what is required for the United States – thrice-damned for losing to the bleeping Canadians – to go on to the second round of play. It sounds identical to the quote from BASEketball above. If so-and-so loses or if this-or-that wins by less than three runs in between beer runs and piss stops then there’s a three-fifths chance of the Americans scoring eighty-two baskets in the half-third of the eleventy-ith game and hurtling into the secondy-twelfth round.
I tell you, it’s enough to make a man want to watch a different bunch of wealthy bitches play childrens’ games.