Mas Beisbol

While the Tigers continue their freefall out of the playoffs (leaving me to root for the Mariners to keep the Yankees out) other things happen:

Wednesday night the Rangers pummeled, mauled, destroyed, clobbered, etc the Orioles, 30-3. The Orioles were actually winning 3-0 after three innings, and then gave up 30 unanswered runs (16 of them in the 8th and 9th innings). It's really the worst loss of all time - teams scored more runs in the late 1800s, but baseball then is not like baseball now. In honor of the game, ESPN presented the Top 100 Beatdowns of All Time, complete with links to YouTube clips and game summaries. I especially liked watching Mike Tyson take 90 seconds to defeat Michael Spinks. First Tyson knocks Spinks down, and right after the announcer mentions that Spinks had never been knocked down in his entire career, Tyson just wallops him and finishes the fight. Oh, and you've never seen Secretariat win the Belmont Stakes by 31 lengths? That's there too. It goes beyond single games and also encompasses movies, books, entire competitions and individual moments. Yay for sports!

Baseball

If you haven't heard, Barry Bonds broke Hank Aaron's career home run record a few days ago. It's mostly disappointing to me, with all the controversy surrounding it (steroids and such). It's very different from 1998, when Mark McGwire broke Roger Maris' single season record. That was exciting and I was paying close attention to it, and I even have home runs 60, 61 and 62 on videotape yet. Looking back, everyone was pretty blind to the steroid thing then and we were enjoying the comeback of baseball after the 1994 strike. This year, I made no effort to watch Barry Bonds, although I'll admit that part of the reason why is that we don't have ESPN.

Meanwhile, the Tigers are quickly going down the toilet, although they're still in it. If the season ended today, they'd be out of the playoffs. Meanwhile, the yucky, disgusting Yankees have surged back and would just barely miss the playoffs today. They're only 5 games back of Boston and percentage points behind Seattle for the wildcard spot. All my dreams of a Yankeeless postseason may be dashed. Sigh. No team is all that great this year, actually - based on today's records, no team will win 100 games.

We'll see what happens. And there's only three weeks until Notre Dame plays Georgia Tech!