Well, I feel like I haven’t been here in a hot minute. In fact, it looks like I haven’t written anything since late July. Tsk, Tsk! What can I say? July is only a few weeks into when I got hired on at my new position and I’ve been sucking up as many hours as I can there. I’ve been working admin and test proctoring at a local medical school for nurses. I have zero knowledge of medicines or nursing outside of what I’ve learned in life itself and what my friend’s wife has brought up in stories (she’s a registered nurse).
The work is super easy and, honestly, the hardest part is getting there and back. I live clear on the other side of town from where I work, and while that’s not generally a terrible thing, the drivers in ABQ are fucking awful. I come closer to death more times each day than most people do their entire lives. The easiest part of most days is just dealing with students. These are a bunch of early-20’s to mid-40’s people looking to break into a lucrative career, and if the hardest thing I have to deal with is them not being able to access the right materials or one of the foreign students not knowing what the word “prone” means, then I’m having a good day.
So that’s kept me busy in the daytime, but what has kept me from writing at night?
Baseball, baby!
Major League Baseball’s Postseason is back, and who is the front runner for a championship title? None other than your Milwaukee Brewers! Nothing has made me happier this year than to see the Brewers win 103 (one hundred fucking THREE) regular season games and clinch the first-round bye with a homefield advantage throughout their entire playoffs and – if they make it – World Series. These guys are unreal right now.
That first series against the San Diego Padres had me clenching my ass cheeks through every game. The first game was wild with a call you don’t hear too often: Ty France, with one on and San Diego behind by one, launches one into orbit. From the television, it looks like it’s got the distance and my stomach begins to churn a little bit. But something magical happens. It bounces off one of the structural pieces of the closed roof! Now, in most parks, this is a dead ball, as if it hit a wall, and therefore cannot be played. But when Miller Park was built, they made the rule that balls hit off the roof, when closed, are considered in play, so long as the ball hits the roof in fair territory.
Jackson Chourio, one of our two dynamos from Venezuela (William Contreras being the other), gets a beat on it and catches it. Ty France is out and the go-ahead runner is stranded!
Brewers win it in 9 by a single run and we’re off to game 2. Padres fans are pissed.
Game two is also a nail-biter. Brewers bats seem like they haven’t showed up and we’re behind by 1. But again, something magical happens. The Padres put their closer in during the 8th inning and kept him in through the 9th. Their closer, a fireballer named Mason Miller, is looking fatigued. He got one easy out, walked a couple, and worked a second out before a stellar at bat by Gary Sanchez, resulting in another walk. Up comes Jackson Chourio, hero of game 1. With one out left and the bases loaded, Jackson swings and misses at one, fouls off one, looks at 2 balls, and fouls off a 104 mph fastball. One strike left and Chourio has the measure of Mason Miller. The pitch comes in and Jackson crushes it past the pitcher’s glove, then past the diving second baseman, Cronenworth, and into the outfield. One run scores easily and another is on the way. The throw from the outfield is offline and Frelick slides in for the walk-off!
My butthole could finally rest!
There was no game 3, so the Brewers went right into game 4. I won’t bore you with the details, but we won it and went on to the NLCS to, of course, face LA. The banes of our existence and crushers of our souls last season.
But Brewers devil magic, and a homefield advantage, have allowed us victory in the first two games. In the first game, we won by a single run, and it was down to the wire. Our pitching staff has been phenomenal, and while the Dodgers chased off our own fireballer, Misiorowski, in a meager 4.3 innings, our bullpen and our defense had his back enough to salvage the game.
Logan Henderson had a great showing in last night’s game, but errors on his part led to the Dodgers getting up to 3 runs. But fret not! O Captain, my captain, Christian Yelich – freshly minted Brewers Team Captain, the first in our team’s history – came up clutch. Coming off a slumping year, Yelich has earned his title being clutch in this series and driving in 3 runs on his own. Following another stellar walk by Jake Bauers, who forced LA’s ace Yoshi Yammamoto to pitch 17 pitches to him alone, we were able to bring in tying runs and eventually run up our own score to 7 before the end.
I’m so proud of our boys and I can’t wait to stick the bat up the Dodgers’ asses in LA to show that you can’t always buy a championship!
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