Face It ...

I'm not going to lie. My Muse has crawled into a hole somewhere and died. I haven't been able to motivate myself to take enough of an opinion on anything lately to show up here and talk about it. My guess is that it's related to the late summer melancholia when you realize that Memorial Day felt like yesterday but in reality, the 4th of July was almost 2 weeks ago, and you're staring down the barrel of possibly heading back to school or not getting to watch the sun go down after 9 o'clock, which of course allows you to tee off for 18 holes at 4, or hell, whatever it is that makes you enjoy summer. Point is, it's slipping away and you don't know where it went. Of course, that also means that college football is back within spitting distance, so all is not lost.

I will say this though, TJ has gone and drawn attention to a fact that really needed serious hiding, that somehow, the Braves, owner of a 6-21 June are right around 6 games out of the Wild Card at the moment. Frankly, everyone needs to shut the hell up about this for another month at least. I could address a lot of things. I could draw attention to the fact that, based on his new found youth at the plate, one might assume that Chipper Jones has discovered a new Hooters near his place. I could point out that Renteria is waking up after a June where he probably hit around .200. I could point that even though Giles has now reached the point where he'll publicly proclaim his hatred for the leadoff spot, he is slowing crawling back towards respectability at the plate after someone finally reminded him that getting on base is in fact the ultimate goal of an at bat. And I could sing the praises of a proud young man named Chuck James, who actually brought the art of pitching back to the staff for a game or two. And after addressing all those issues, I could talk about the whole scale turn over from the opening day bullpen til today. I could throw out names of a half dozen identical slightly overweight sclubs like Yates or Paronto or Barry or Stockman, who have somehow moved the pen from roughly 25% effectiveness up to maybe 70 or 80% effective.

Of course, if I address all those things, we'll still come back around to the dearth or production in left field and at first base. And I'll be forced to realize that we're still trying to turn Jorge Sosa into a closer even though some of his key ratios might look something like 2BB/inning and 1HR/3 inning. I'm estimating, but hell, they feel worse than that. And then I'll be even more disappointed when I realize that he's probably our best option in spite of that. And then after all that, I'll look at June and say, if those happy assholes could have just played .500 ball for the month of June, we'd be winning the Wild Card right now and roughly 6 games back of a Mets team whose 2nd half pitching staff may well devolve into Glavine (who god knows is due to start to fall apart, you people in New York know it too), Trachsel, and um ..... yeah.

And the point of all this was? I'm not sure, I guess it was to highlight the fact here we are in striking distance of the playoffs, beginning to look better in most facets of the game, after the worst month of all time and the biggest bullpen implosion ever. And then to further point out that everyone needs to do me the favor of keeping any positive prospects under wraps for about another month.

The most important news I have though is that I've recently discovered the existence of a channel called the Sleuth channel which appears to be entirely devoted to showing the A-Team, Knight Rider, and the occasional Miami Vice. So yes, I picked an excellent month to take off between working and heading back to school.