Stop me if you’ve heard this one. Jack Bauer Squared is playing one of the league’s worst teams and has a chance to do something helpful toward trying to get into the playoffs. And after going 4-2 against two division leaders, surely we could at least do the same against the league’s weakest teams.
Uh, no.
Things started out well enough. Burt Hooton carried a no-hitter and a 1-0 lead through 5 innings, but it all fell apart in the 6th. Todd Helton??? put up 4 runs and chased Hooton, and then they roughed up the bullpen to cruise to an 8-1 win.
Fortunately we stayed tied for the division lead with Steroids Make You Faster, but it was definitely a missed opportunity to move in front while they lost to the wild-card leader 24 Hours at Wrigley.
JBS came out strong in the second game, racking up 3 in the 1st and 7 more in the 3rd to coast to a 13-5 victory. Steroids lost again, so we moved a game in front in the division race but still 3 games under .500.
The recently-maligned-in-this-space Ryne Sandberg drove in 3 runs, and Bobby Murcer’s 3 RBI pushed him to 102, the first to get to 100 on the team this season. The 102 puts him 25th in the league. We have two hitters leading the league in anything: Sandberg is tops in at-bats at 670 (also second in triples at 14), and Carlos Delgado leads in doubles at 46. Kal Daniels and Delgado are in the top six in on-base percentage.
One of my league mates corrected me on something I said about Sandberg in a previous post, too. Though I said he was putting up numbers that would be the worst in the sim history, the records I cited only applied to a particular group of leagues all played at the same salary cap. And because this league is a higher cap than that, it’s reasonable to expect better pitching and therefore lower performance.
On to the rubber game of our series, and once again we led early. This time Teddy Higuera had a shutout going through 5 and we led 2-0. Again the 6th inning turned the tide, as Todd Helton??? smacked a pair of homers to take the lead and went on to win, 5-2.
The two losses in the series were definitely a missed opportunity, as Steroids Make You Faster got swept. So we emerged a game ahead with 12 to go, but we could have opened up a little space that would have been nice.
And coming up next: four games head-to-head with Steroids at Dodger Stadium as we begin the final three series of the year, all in the division. With teams only 3 and 5 games out behind us, it’s still possible for any of these four teams to win it. It’s also quite likely someone will win with a sub-.500 record too, since we’d have to go 8-4 just to get to 81-81.
