A Hater's Guide To The 2019 MLB Playoffs

Baseball is good when it’s good, and sometimes even more powerful when it’s bad, and maybe especially when it doesn’t matter, which makes it more concerning that we are running out of it at an alarming rate. This is normal seasonal stuff, but it’s upsetting nonetheless. Teams’ seasons are dying out an alarming rate, and most who follow the sport predict this trend to continue, to the point where only one team may survive this very month of October. It was with this incipient crisis in mind that Drew and I invited baseball-carer and my longtime nemesis Lauren Theisen onto the podcast to discuss all of the many things that could go wrong between now and the end of the World Series.

It was not all bad news, though! To be fair a lot of it was bad news, or just some real stinkin’ thinkin’ conjecturing on the most cursed World Series matchup—some consensus formed by the end around Rays/Cardinals but there are a lot of right answers here—but with most of baseball’s lamest teams and all of its most depressing ones now out of the picture, we were free to talk about what is good and weird in baseball and, in my case, force a Brett Kavanaugh imitation into a discussion of the otherwise ( if not entirely) blameless Washington Nationals. So that was good.

Better still was the Funbag, for which the three of us were joined by Victor Jeffreys II, a gifted polymath whose skills are honestly not shown to their best advantage in voiceovers flogging dick pills but who really showed out when it was time to assess the vital question of how many people on earth are pooping at any given moment. The Trump Question of the Week slid into forbidden realms of Cronenbergian body horror so quickly that I hesitate even to mention it. Hair is involved. Hair growing from things it shouldn’t grow from. This image is invoked:

And yet is not even the most unsettling thing about it. You wouldn’t think it could get more unsettling than the idea of the Rays and the Cardinals battling it out deep into October, but that’s what’s so amazing about this month. There’s always something unexpected waiting out there in the future, eager to do you harm.

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