Baseball and Football Over the Weekend

Yesterday I enjoyed sitting back and watching the Major League Baseball divisional playoffs on TV.  First the Washington Nationals, on the road in their second game against the St. Louis Cardinals, delivered another exemplary pitching performance, this one from standout starter Max Schermer, as they prevailed again, 3-1.  Then in the evening the New York Yankees got their own great pitching from Masahiro Tanaka against the home team Houston Astros in their American League series opener...young second baseman Gleyber Torres stunned the home crowd with 5 RBIs as the Yanks won, 7-0...

Although during the afternoon I would often check in on various college football games...including that shocking 20-17 South Carolina road upset over Georgia in overtime...I had already decided to deliberately avoid the Florida-at-LSU evening contest.  My reason is that last week, while asked to work on my off day, right near my work station they had a radio blaring out the play-by-play of the Florida-Auburn game and I couldn't get away from the decibel attack...even with my own headphones and music.  I didn't even know how the LSU game turned out until this morning, when I saw on my newsfeed that the Tigers beat the Gators 42-28 after a mostly close and competitive game.  That loss really doesn't matter too much since Florida would have to beat Georgia on November 2nd anyway to win the SEC East and can still make it to the championship playoffs if they win out the rest of the year..  But just winning the division title by itself isn't that big a deal anymore for Gator fans: former coach Jim McElwain accomplished the feat in each of his first two seasons, but had a completely depleted and ineffectual offense at the end of both of them...

Let's see, the Yankees play the Astros again today and the National League playoffs resume tomorrow in Washington.  As for the National Football League, the pitiful Dolphins are up against another winless team...albeit one whose management actually wants them to win: the Washington Redskins.  They just fired their head coach Jay Gruden...let's see how their players respond to his ouster. If I were a Miami Dolphins player, though, in this tanking environment, I would know that rising in stature through effective and skillful play would probably result in me being traded off the team: excellence will not be tolerated by Dolphins management...