overheard at breakfast table that may have been my own
parent: “What’s the difference between Abby and Zoe?”
other parent: “Abby’s a princess and Zoe is orange.”
The kid stays in the picture.
“That was me playing the dad.” So thrilled and surprised to find this on a whim.
Highbrow trolling is still trolling.
Two stores, two hours apart. This is 2013. Merchandising is not the exacting art its practitioners make it out to be.
"Poor Larry isn't looking too good. He's pale and clammy and he's been projectile vomiting over and over again while his carers just stand by and watch."
That’s the first paragraph of a science-y story, by the way, not a clinical encapsulation of 82.5% of my freshman-year mornings at college.
"the next ass that touches my shoulder will be the last"
I write as many I-didn’t-like-your-service/product/attitude-and-I-expect-nay-I-DEMAND-immediate-redress notes as the average aging crank. I’ve never written one quite this detailed and creative.
every person who has ever created anything that lives on the Internet is nodding in agreement
Long Live The Oatmeal.
Local farmer’s markets = lo-fi comedy gold
thrilled that this is finally online
Can’t find the original photo used with the story, but apparently there was a not-quite-as-awesome video update a few years ago.
Yanks In (More Than) A Sentence: Tigers 8, Yankees 1 (Tigers win series, 4-0)
1. A-Rod just didn’t have it yesterday. He couldn’t locate his fastball and his curve was flat and eminently whackable. We’re not going to believe that his elbow is healthy unless/until he publishes the unexpurgated MRI results on the Internet.
2. As on Tuesday, A-Rod didn’t do the team any favors with personnel deployment. Brett Gardner catches everything in his zip code and runs out grounders with great and furious pluck, but not starting Curtis Granderson against a righty pitcher is the worst kind of short-sightedness. And basically conceding yesterday’s game by using Lowe in the seventh… but then coming back with Robertson in the eighth? For that matter, using Soriano and Robertson three innings combined during the ALCS? A-Rod’s panic-managing and gut-versus-binder travails should give Yankee fans more pause than the flailing at fastballs.
3. How about those two inning-extending misplays by A-Rod in the third? A-Rod was laboring on the mound before them, but those pushed him meltdown-ward.
4. Etc.
5. So much for “veteran leadership,” eh?
6. The Tigers were the better team in this series, obviously. The Tigers were also the American League’s seventh-best team during the 162-game regular season; even after the sweep, they’re three games behind the Yankees in the win column. The MLB playoffs have basically become The Race To The Chase Cup, or whatever NASCAR calls its standings-reset stretch run.
7. Actual line from an actual column in the New York Times: “Derek Jeter had to have suffered a broken captain’s heart to go along with the fractured ankle that deleted him from the series.” Somebody wrote that, in the New York Times.
8. The Yankees won 98 games (including the ALDS, against a team other than the Twins!!!) despite losing their closer, number-two starter and left fielder for most of the season. They lost their ace, number-three starter, first baseman and third baseman for chunks of it. This is not a tear-it-down-and-build-it-back-up situation.
9. Hitting home runs is an awesomely efficient way to score runs, regardless of what the TBS crew seems to think. An analogy: Home runs:small ball :: Email:regular mail. Please, Yankees, continue to base your offensive philosophy around hitting the ball very far very often.
10. Oh no! Many fans chose not to pay gadzullions of dollars for playoff tickets and the ones who showed up booed! Better appease them with a public apology or via ritualistic sacrifice (Joe Girardi’s kids into a volcano? Swisher to a land where “dude” is not an accepted part of the lexicon?).
10a. Or just give them a Metrocard and instructions to Citi Field. Whichever.
11. Again, for emphasis: the Yankees played 171 games this season. Everyone was pretty OK with the results of the first 167. If they base their decisions on what happened in the final four (or nine, if you include the offensive plague that started against the Orioles), they deserve the shame and loss of corporate patronage that comes with - gasp! - an 85-77 season.
Yanks In (More Than) A Sentence: Tigers 2, Yankees 1 (Tigers lead series, 3-0)
1. There’s no shame in being whitewashed by Justin Verlander.
2. But Justin Verlander wasn’t JUSTIN VERLANDER last night. He went to a whole bunch of three-ball counts and only struck out three guys. He coulda been got.
3. …by a better-prepared team, anyway. I understand that Girardi is in an impossible place right now. If he doesn’t shake up the lineup, he’s being too passive; if he shakes up the lineup too much, he’s OMG the sky is falling. To that end, I liked the fly-ball-pitcher-on-the-mound/fly-ball-retrievers-in-the-outfield alignment of Gardner/Granderson/Ichiro, which was justifiable even before Gardner resumed being his pesky li’l self at the plate.
4. That said, how do you bat Russell Martin sixth against an elite righty pitcher?
4a. And keeping Logan in the game to face Miguel Cabrera, when a two-run lead was already feeling like five? (Cabrera hit into a double play; that isn’t the point.)
4b. And not pinch-hitting for Ichiro with either A-Rod or Swisher against Phil Coke, whose OPS-against for righty hitters this season was something like 28?
4c. And then not pinch-hitting for Ibanez, whose one miracle at-bat against Brian Matusz doesn’t override his futility against lefties for the last half-decade?
4d. Is the Binder missing? Has the BBWAA and the pro-bunt lobby banned it as blasphemous?
4e. You have a manager who’s religious about playing matchups all career long, then he abandons the practice in mid-October? Really?
4f. So many rhetorical questions.
4g. Yeah, Girardi stunk up the place last night. He didn’t flail at changeups outside the strike zone or punt any grounders, but he inflicted some damage with his (non-) moves.
5. It hurts my head that a player as lousy as Delmon Young has played a major role in taking down the Yankees each of the last two postseasons. The Yankees intentionally walked him last night. That was the moment I excused myself and took a few laps around the house.
6. Detroit kinda tried to give that game away. They left a bunch of guys on base and Infante inexplicably didn’t try to score on a play where he’d have been safe at home without a throw. If the Yankees had somehow pulled another comeback out of their collective ass, the Tigers would’ve been left with a serious case of the morning-afters.
7. Even with Hughes departing early, the Yankees pitched well. Again. Anyone have the full postseason numbers handy? Oh - here. Only 21 runs allowed in eight games, two of which went 12 innings and one of which went 13. That’s nutzo-good.
8. That loss smarted. It’s CC tonight, then hope for an outbreak of the batsie-hitsies against Fister and Sanchez. Stranger things have happened and it’s not like this series has been a massacre. With a few well-timed swings, the Yankees could be the team leading three games to none.
9. But they’re not.
Yanks In (More Than) A Sentence: Tigers 3, Yankees 0 (Tigers lead series, 2-0)
1. Ah, so this is what it feels like to be a fan of pretty much every other team in baseball. The frustration, the disbelief, the despair - man, it sucks being among the 99 percent.
2. The Yankees have scored in precisely one of 21 ALCS innings played so far. Somehow, they’ve managed to do this - or, more accurately, not do this - despite having the leadoff hitter on base seven or eight times. That’s actually challenging. I spent most of yesterday’s disaster brainstorming new and creative ways they could short-circuit potential rallies. There haven’t been any pickoffs yet, have there? Has anyone forgotten to touch a base? Somebody could rupture an Achilles as the lead runner in what would otherwise be a bases-clearing double. What I’m saying, I guess, is that they haven’t even begun to plumb the depths of either random or self-induced misfortune.
3. Ump Jeff Nelson missed the call at second base. He did. It’s right there on the tape and, truly, it ranks right up there with the O.J. trial and rain on a picnic Sunday in the annals of human injustice. You know who else missed calls? Richie Garcia and Phil Cuzzi. The umps giveth and the umps taketh away. Yankee fans have less to whine about in this regard than fans of most other franchises.
3a. Of course there should be more instant replay. We have the technology; there’s no reason not to use it. Arguing in favor of the “human element” is silly because human beings are fallible and frequently need a nap.
4. What bugs me the most is Girardi’s panic-managing. There’s not much to say about a batting order that places Ibanez and Martin ahead of Swisher, A-Rod and Granderson, other than that it assumes that slumps cannot be shaken and that hot streaks will burn for weeks on end. And that hit-and-run with Ibanez (one of the slowest runners in the game) and Martin (not exactly a poster boy for reliable contact)? Oh dear.
5. My baseball career ended when it became evident that I could not hit a curveball, even when I was told it was coming, so I don’t pretend to understand the psyche of elite athletes. At the same time, I wonder how anybody who is very, very good at something might respond when, after being very, very bad at that same something for a week or two, he finds the rug yanked out from under him. Imagine the psychic whiplash that the Poor Four (Cano, Swisher, Granderson and A-Rod) are feeling about now? At least A-Rod has some experience as a whipping boy; poor Swisher’s post-game comments read like a Facebook screed from a junior-high girl newly expelled from her social clique.
6. The shithead fan who obstructed Tex’s reach into the stands for a catchable pop-up was wearing an A-Rod t-shirt. Of course he was.
7. When the Yankees last played a playoff game without Jeter, I was… not as old as I am now. Seeing someone else out there at short felt odd, even if it meant that certain ground-ball hits might now be converted into outs. Get well soon, guy.
8. It’s two games. While there is reason to be the polar, double-diametric opposite of optimistic about how the Yankees will fare against right-handed strikeout pitchers the next two nights - the way they’re swinging the bats, a possible final score against Justin Verlander is Tigers 4, Yankees -3 - the Yankees were a very, very good offensive team this season: .337 OBP and .453 SLG, both best in the American League, and 804 runs scored, which ranked second. I understand the impulse to focus on the last thing we saw, especially when the last thing we saw was a fortnight of flailing, but perhaps a bigger-picture perspective is in order. Two games doesn’t mean the organization has gone helplessly astray, that Granderson/Cano/A-Rod/Swisher are beyond repair or that the fans have soured on both this particular set of players and the notion of manifest Yankee destiny, my overreaction yesterday on that count notwithstanding.
8a. For that matter, it also doesn’t mean that the Yankees are going to continue to pitch as well as they have.
8b. There’s still some ball left to play.
