Monday, October 05, 2015

Five Days Until NLDS: Start Getting Psyched

GIF from Sept 10, 2015 (hat tip, The Big Lead). Sure, we lost that game,...BUT ONLY ONE OF US IS IN THE POSTSEASON, BABY!!!

Don't you worry, we Sons over at SoSG world headquarters are already bouncing off the frickin' walls in anticipation of NLDS Game 1 on Friday. The Dodgers' securing of home-field advantage actually made a huge difference for SoSG AC, who was on the precipice of missing games had Games 1 and 2 been on the road...so we are quite thankful (not to mention for getting home-field advantage in the first place).

But just in case you're not overly excited just yet, Deadspin has scribed some reasons why the Dodgers merit our barracking, and we fully agree:

Really, though, your guys are the Dodgers’ pair of ace pitchers, lefty Clayton Kershaw and righty Zack Greinke. I love a good curveball, and these two are curveball artists. Kershaw throws a downright sickening 12-to-6 number and will do a really cruel thing in two-strike counts where, instead of burying the curve in the dirt like pitchers do, he’ll throw it up high; because his delivery looks exactly the same no matter what he’s throwing, the batter will see a high fastball and reflexively bend his knees to frame it as a ball, then freeze and slump like his strings got cut an instant later as the pitch dives back into the strike zone. [...]

Mean. That is just mean.

Greinke, for his part, throws two curves, one noticeably slower and loopier than the other. He’s got a handful of other nasty pitches—he’ll trash a righty with a two-strike slider—but the curves are where it’s at, man.

Both have been great this year. Kershaw hasn’t been quite as dominant as he was in 2014, when he won the NL Cy Young Award and was the first pitcher named that league’s Most Valuable Player since 1968, but still, c’mon. Dude deals, man. He struggled a bit in the postseason last year, leading to a certain amount of smarming about how Madison Bumgarner does it when it counts, man, which is another reason to root for the Dodgers this year. A pitcher as good as Kershaw—he’s historically good!—doesn’t deserve to be used by shithead hot-takers to buttress some other guy’s Magical Baseball Unicorn credentials. Plus he looks like a guileless Amish lad out on rumspringa, and I want to send him back to the gmay feeling good about himself. Also, you should know about Vin Scully, the national treasure who has been calling Dodgers home games since their home was in Brooklyn. Probably you already know about Vin Scully. I don’t know how this shit works, and am guessing we probably won’t get to hear him call Dodgers games in the playoffs—but, if the Dodgers win the World Series, it will make this wonderful old dude very happy, here in the closing years of the long life he has spent making baseball more enjoyable for people. Rooting against that is objectively evil.

And of course, we love how the article ends:

Why you should root for the Dodgers

You should root for the Dodgers because their best path to a World Series championship involves Kershaw and Greinke pitching out of their minds, Puig returning to health and becoming the Puig of 2013 again, the middle infield of the 2005 Phillies getting a last moment in the sun, a guy named Joc maybe doing some fun shit, and Turner having to tie his repulsive beard around his torso like a bandolier so he won’t trip over it. You should root for the Dodgers because the most ridiculous possible outcome is always the most fun one, and the Dodgers winning the World Series would be incredibly ridiculous. And you should root for the Dodgers because it will force Kevin Draper to do the gross Bay Area passive-aggressive thing where he takes solace in the cold mathematical comprehensibility of it and pretends it isn’t burning him up inside.

You should root for the Dodgers.

7 comments:

Fred's Brim said...

Deadspin, you've convinced me. I'll root for the Dodgers

QuadSevens said...

That article has a lot of hateHateHATE for the gnats. Very cool.

spank said...

best gif ever!

Steve Sax said...

It's at least tied with this gif.

spank said...

Panda fail is definitely an all time favorite gif,saxy. this one here is just more my style. the guys face cracks me up.

Steve Sax said...

I also like the guy in the back who at first is smiling, and then flicks the Dodger fan off aggressively.

Those OC folks and their steroid abuse!

spank said...

haha. that's rich.