The Roundup

Must... resisit... temptation... to... shit... on... Royals...

We've got a getaway day game this afternoon at 12:30-ish on your Rogers Cable box at channel 399 or you can go all pre-war and listen to it on the radio (if you live in Toronto).

Four-game sweeps fascinate me; they're a rough equivilant to the bases loaded 3-run double, which is undoubtedly the classiest hit in baseball. There are two schools of thought on today's game. First, it takes a great deal of crappiness and bad luck to lose an entire four game series, thus the baseball gods will take pity on the hitherto hapless Royals and let them leave town with one solitary win. This makes especially good sense considering that they're throwing their worst starter (Brett Tomko) against our best (Shaun Marcum). The second perspective is that the Royals just plain suck and have no business even attempting to beat a top tier starter on the road with their pop gun offense and wacky base-running.

It would be facetious of me to say that the Jays are about to enter a soft and mushy part of the schedule starting in June, but were getting to the point in the season where it's time to make traction and catch up with the big boys. Next month we've got alot of weak opposition: BAL (3), SEA (3 + another road series starting June 30), MIL (3), PIT (3), and CIN (3). On the other side of the ledger, we've got one against the Angels to wrap up a series that starts this weekend, the Yankees in New York (3), and the Cubs (3) and Braves (3) at home. If ever there was a time for a 17-9 month, this is it. And the best part is that there are off days, 3 of them!

I could've done this earlier, but in any event felicitations to Lyle Overbay for breaking Tony Fernandez's team record by reaching base in 12 consecutive plate appearances. McLeod notes that L.overbay's OBP now stands at a robust .453, 4th best in the AL. I'm starting to wonder if I can actually start wearing my powder blue Overbay t-shirt again and, more importantly, if he has fantasy value. (I'm officially putting a voodoo curse on Lance Berkman, Jay. You knew it had to come down to this.)

Several years ago I took some time off from my studies to guzzle Zywiec, party in Krakow and teach English in a Londony-ish city in Southern Poland. I had no family ties there and spoke no Polish, but the run-down former industrial heartland of an old Eastern Bloc country soon felt like home for this transplanted Sarnian. And the country isn't half as grey as German tourist board officials would want you to believe...

In any event, whenever I started teaching a new class, the first lesson had to begin with the inevitable "getting to know you" bit where everyone shares some biographical info. I had a line for hobbies on my little one-page questionaire and had to do my utmost not to burst out laughing when one comely young lass wrote "eating hot dogs". Well, it's because of people like her that the Jays brass have come up with this hackneyed promotion. Some people just really enjoy processed cow and pig parts. I would think that pulling out all the stops to get a winning team on the field is probably the best means of filling your stadium, but I'm just some random guy and don't have a marketing degree or nothing.

No blogaggeness from The Oracle? Sadness! Wilner has been 2 for 2 calling bullshit on those who said Overbay was done and that Reeder (haha, that one annoyed him so damn much) was a better player than Shannon Stewart, but his triumphalism on Jesse Litsch is somewhat... irksome? Not to take anything away from what he did on Saturday (and now taking everything away from what he did Saturday...), but the Royals aren't a real Major League offense and I asterisk that shutout. And I said the same last week when Jon Lester no-hit them.

Fine, Litsch might not be Gustavo Chacin 2.0. He's probably better described as a Chacin-Towers hybrid, combining the best of both and getting by well because of it. But did someone seriously leave a comment on Wilner's blog asking if Litsch would win 20 games and finish the season a Cy Young front runner? Say he could become the next Paul Byrd if you must, but this? Fucking hell! I'm just waiting for someone to say they're glad Janssen got hurt so Litsch got a shot at the rotation this year. Yeah, he's chugging along very nicely for a 5th starter and I'll take that to the money bank, but let's not get too far ahead of ourselves people.

ELSEWHERE:

* It's hard to say what I want to say about this without coming off the wrong way. Jon Lester has confronted some serious challenges in life with a certain quiet dignity that has earned him a great deal of respect across partisan lines. I too admire his humility in the face of adversity. That said, they way the Boston press twists every detail of his personal life and absorbs it into some meta-narrative about how the Red Sox can take any comer makes me want to fucking wretch. God, you're so fucking self-absorbed, Bosox fans; do we really need this? Please, just let the man go about his business without the agonizing constant health updates on his family members.

* CM Wang says there's nothing wrong with his calf and his wildness yesterday was totally unrelated to any health issues.

* Oh, him? Guess who had game-winning RsBI in extra innings in consecutive games on the weekend? That Jason Bay guy, who's "not exactly tearing it up" according to JP.

-- Johnny Was