Saturday, October 29, 2011

World Champion Cardinals everything the Rockies are not

When the Colorado Rockies and St. Louis Cardinals arrived to their respective spring training facilities back in mid-February, there was nothing you could have said that would have convinced me St. Louis had the better baseball team. 

Nothing. 

And that was before Adam Wainwright went down for the season.

I would have told you the Cardinals were a solid team with a chance to maybe reach the higher 80s in wins, which would position them to contend in the NL Central. I also would have told you the Rockies looked like a 92-93 win team with Ubaldo Jimenez established, Jorge De La Rosa back, and a lot of really nice pieces in place offensively.

Didn't work out that way. Which is strange, because both teams faced similar challenges with injuries, players not performing up to standard, stretches of poor bullpen work, more injuries, desperate searches for band-aids. Basically, both teams took a step backwards on several levels from where they were to begin the season.

Yet the Cardinals are celebrating their 11th world championship, and the Rockies are coming off their most disappointing season to date.

How the hell did the Cardinals overcome all of that, while the Rockies collapsed underneath it?

Well, to me it boils down to three things.

Monday, October 10, 2011

My now annual Tim Tebow post

Yes, this is a baseball blog... 99.7% of the time. It's also just my blog, so every now and then I like posting about something else. You'll surely understand.

Before I get into Tim Tebow, I think it's always important I point out that I'm in no way a Denver Broncos fan despite my love for the Colorado Rockies. I'm not from Denver myself, I have no emotional connection to other Colorado sports teams, I just had an uncle in the Denver area at the time the Rockies were born that thought it would be cool to send me Rockies gear for my 10th birthday. I thought it was awesome. I loved baseball, but had no loyalty to the Cubs, White Sox, whoever. So I adopted them in 1991, two years before they ever stepped on a big league field.

Anyway, there's that. Now on to this Tebow character.

You think you can get a word in edge wise on Twitter when the Denver Broncos are playing?

Hell no!

Wait, sorry Tim.

Heck no!

My timeline just explodes with positive and negative thoughts on Tebow's performance and his future in the NFL. And that's before he takes the field. When he's actually out there running around, tossing a football, the Tebow spin becomes so relentlessly over-the-top in both directions that I don't think it leaves room for an unbiased opinion.