Dear Reader, I beg your forgiveness. The results in this 24×24 league have been so disheartening, I practically wanted to scrap this project. Or at least stop narrating this seemingly doomed season and focus on any other one. Literally any of my other ones would be better, as this is the worst team I have going out of 18. Aren’t you lucky, Dear Reader?
But let’s soldier on, as we aren’t even a quarter of the way there and a run of luck could still even the tables for us.
We have two home-and-home interleague sets to catch up on, and the highlights have been few. We started off with the animals of The Hawk, the Bird, Simba and a Moose, and they mauled poor Teddy Higuera with a pair of three-run homers in the early going to take a huge lead.
We did flex some of our own power with a three-run homer by Carlos Delgado and a two-run shot by Bobby Bonilla, but there wasn’t enough to come back as we lost 8-5.
The second game marked our lone trip to Oriole Park at Camden Yards (fitting home for a team of that name, too). This time it was our turn to take a big early lead, as we chased Mark “The Bird” Fidrych after 4 innings.
Mike Cuellar pitched well enough to earn his 2nd win, giving up “only” 4 runs in 7 innings, and Bob Woodward kept his ERA at 0.00 by earning his 10th save in the 6-4 victory. This marked the 4th straight time we followed a loss with a win, so our recent history looked like this: L-W-L-W-L-W-L-W.
Our second interleague series of this set against 24 Lines About 24 Players (still in awe of the genius of the team name, I must confess) went a lot like much of the early season. Stop me if you’ve heard this before, but we lost twice by one run. We fell to 4-11 in such games, and it’s taking a lot of wind out my sails and variety out of my prose. There are only so many ways to say that your team fell just short, again.
Rickey Henderson led off the opener with a home run, something he did far more than anyone else in MLB history, 81 times. This is seemingly true of Rickey’s records, where he put huge gaps ahead of second place in the books. He hit 50% more leadoff homers than the next closest (Alfonso Soriano with 54). Rickey stole 1406 bases, and second place still belongs to Lou Brock with 938.
I digress, but since this is our only series facing Rickey I might as well indulge in some appreciation. After all, he helped beat us the way he famously did. He stole two bases, scored three runs, and 24 Lines beat us 3-2.
Our L-W streak ended in the second game, as our trip to Sicks’ Stadium ended in a 10-9 defeat. Bobby Bonilla hit a grand slam, but the Jack Bauer Squared pitching gave up runs in six different innings. We had the tying and go-ahead runs on in the 9th with one out, but a pair of strikeouts ended the threat.
So it’s a 15-24 mark we carry limping back home in hopes of turning the tide soon. But hope is not a word well associated with this team much any more.
