Strange days, indeed.
Being a fan of Central Florida sports franchises in the last week or so has been like riding on a rollercoaster inside a gyroscope inside a paint mixer.
Let's set aside the Bucs — the team with more question marks than an midterm exam — and concentrate on teams that are playing. The Tampa Bay Rays, yeesh. It seems whenever the ballclub reaches the .500 mark, it feels the need to open the gun cabinet, extract a Tech 9 and promptly shoot itself in the foot. Last night, the perfect case in point.
Vaunted pitcher David Price made his season debut, and the Rays staked him to a 10-0 lead. But he could not pitch with enough command, even though he threw as fast as 98 mph, to last the requisite five innings to notch his first regular season win.
My wife knows very little about baseball, but when she saw that the Rays were ahead 10-4 in the 9th, she said, "It's impossible to come back from six runs with only one inning left." We (actually, I) switched our attention to the Nuggets/Lakers game in hopes that Satan's spawn, Kobe Bryant, would go down.
Obviously my wife's prediction was wrong. At halftime of the NBA game, a crawl on ESPN told that the Indians had come back and won the game in the bottom of the 9th, 11-10. Just like that: a laugher to a heartbreaker, the biggest collapse in team history.
Me? I'm glad I put a Rays win in the books prematurely 'cause I spared myself the anguish of watching them implode. And I also got to focus my mojo on a Lakers loss, which happened: 120-101.
For weeks it's been frustrating to watch the Rays score 12, 13, 15 runs in blowouts and then the next day score 2 or 3 and often lose. I will say that it goes from frustrating to jarring when the team reaches double figures in runs — and loses on a walkoff single.
But let's turn to more pleasant matters: The Orlando Magic/Cleveland Cavaliers series.
