Opinion

Like many baseball fans, I have spent a good number of hours watching TBS over the past couple weeks. TBS' coverage has been jam-packed with colorful commentary and insight from the brightest baseball minds in the world. Given that the next game TBS will air could be their last of the season, I thought it would be nice to reflect on some of the most memorable things that I have learned.

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Right now Yankees and Phillies fans are feeling good about their World Series chances. As for Dodgers and Angels fans, they’re slightly less hopeful.

In any case, one of those four teams will be the 2009 World Series champion, and players and fans alike will feel like champions—but only for a few months.

In honor of the recent birthday of one of the greatest men every to be affiliated with sports, John Wooden, it seems appropriate to use his words to start off a piece about myth and reality.

Be more concerned with your character than your reputation, because your character is what you really are, while your reputation is merely what others think you are.

That’s good advice, for anyone at anytime, but especially for the Minnesota Twins this offseason.

What does the phrase “baseball’s best hitter” mean?

Is it simply defined by comparing batting averages of current players? Or do we analyze how each candidate hits in certain situations: with runners in scoring position, behind in the batting count or when his team is trailing in a game.

In a season full of dramatic ballgames, the context of the drama of Game Two of the American League Championship Series can only be described as What We Have Come to Expect.

"One relief pitcher left in the bullpen, one position player left on the bench, in a five-hour affair featuring pitchers getting into and out of jam after jam..." kind of sounds like the conclusion to the fifteen-inning epic the Yankees played against Boston at the beginning of August.

Alex Rodriguez has become the new Yankee October hero this postseason with unbelievably timed hits and home runs. In Game Two of the ALCS versus the Angels, A-Rod did it again. Leading off the inning against Angels closer Brian Fuentes, who saved 48 games this season*, the Yanks' chances didn't look so hot.

An objective observer of our two-party political system would be shocked by the exclusionary nature of the United States government.

Many liberals are quite disappointed with the way President Obama has governed so far. They are frustrated by his perpetuation of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, his lackluster environmental policies, and his complete abandonment of Single-Payer health insurance, and rightfully so (though if they had read the fine print during the campaign, this would not have come as a surprise).

It’s too bad this isn’t golf, where a weaker player gets a handicap, because the Angels are playing every game with one less player.

The clean-up hitter.

It’s a vacuum, a non-existent, game-sucking, anchor-dropping, win-defying, gut- wrenching, can’t-stand-to-watch-anymore shadow of a once great player.

Vladimir Guerrero has left the building.

And unfortunately, he’s taking the entire Angels team with him.