Hopeless Joe Previews The Wild Card Games

A’s
vs. Royals

Giants
vs. Pirates

Ending with two teams who may as well not have even made the postseason at all, and whose dreams of World Series victory were able to last about as long as my average session on the toilet (not enough fiber). I don’t like this new wild card setup and I doubt I ever will. Teams spend all season fighting for a spot and then it all comes down to one game. At least a best-of-three series leaves some room to say it isn’t all luck. A short series is going to be some amount of luck no matter what, but one game can turn on anything, really. An errant gust of wind, a fan interfering with the play, the sun (always an enemy, no matter the context), a momentary mental lapse where for no particular reason your heart starts to race, you feel dizzy and faint, you can’t catch your breath, and you realize you’re out of all six of your anti-anxiety medications, only exacerbating the problem. An entire season should not come down to a one-game sudden death playoff. Just like an entire doctorate should not depend on one silly dissertation and whether or not you ever finished it. Oy.

So… A’s vs. Royals. Part of me wants to see the A’s lose because it would be a perfect capper to their ridiculous August-September collapse. But I think that’s outweighed by the idea that Royals fans have waited 29 years for the postseason and might now have that slip away after two days to enjoy it. I think that’s probably the better story. Go A’s.

And… Giants vs. Pirates. Hard to want the Pirates to win after Clint Hurdle wasted Gerrit Cole on yesterday’s game. Hard to want the Giants to win because calling a team the Giants makes us non-giant humans feel extra-small and insignificant. So it’s a toss-up, but since I think Pittsburgh deserves something good to happen there for the first time since the invention of steel, I’ll go with the Pirates.

And now it’s time to wiggle the antenna just right so I can pick up TBS over the air tomorrow.