Burning the Midnight Oil

The Playoff baseball games this past week, culminating in the Cards-Nats game on Friday and the Tigers-Yankees game last night, have been nothing short of fantastic.  I am dying to go to bed each night, but simply cannot tear myself away form the TV set until the games end.

As for the Derek Jeter injury...an awful thing to have happen to anyone, let alone one of the Good Guys in the game.  And when you watched it happen, it really didn't look like anything bad happened, did it?  After watching Joe Girardi's press conference after the game, I really came away with a lot of respect for the Yankee manager in seeing how he handled the whole thing.

One unintended consequence of the Jeter injury is that should the Tigers go on to win the ALCS, the Buster Olneys and Mike Lupicas of the world will attach an asterisk to their victory.  Can't you just hear Yankee mouthpiece Michael Kaye saying "yeah, the Tigers won, but Derek wasn't playing..."

Some other quickie observations:

• I loved watching Doug Fister pitch last night.  Catch the ball, get the sign, throw the pitch.  All within the space of about five seconds.  He is the Anti-Eric Bedard (in more ways than one).  Why can't EVERY pitcher operate like this?
• Do we really need to see the "pitch tracker" on the screen all the time?
• Three men in a baseball booth is one too many.  In fact, if you have the right guy doing play-by-play, it's actually two too many.
• That said, I really like Ron Darling as a color guy.
• The NLCS is on Fox, and you know what that means, don't you?  Tim McCarver is back!! Oh, baby, I love it!
• Jim Leyland is ONLY 68 years old! He looks at least ten years older.  Stay away from the cigarettes, kids.
• I'm thinking that Bruce Springsteen has made more in royalties from the TBS promos in the past week than he did for the entire life of the "Born in the USA" album.