Backlash backfire

 I don't know why the New York Mets do what they do. Maybe it just takes awhile for some things to get to Queens these days.

For instance: Apparently no one's ever told 'em the won-loss record for players who whine about being booed is, like, 0-Infnity.

Seems the Mets aren't happy about the way they're being booed by their fans these days, and they've decided to give it back to them. So when one of them does something good, a few have taken to flashing the thumbs-down sign at the fans.  

Javy Baez, late of the Chicago Cubs, seems to be the main instigator in this, and you can argue that he more than anyone is justified in thumbing-off the fans. After all, he's only been a Met for a month. You'd think even New York fans should have accorded him a more respectful honeymoon period.

But, nah. It's New York, the Mets are crud, Baez is a Met now. So they boo. 

And they're completely justified in doing so.

I mean, if you're a Mets fan, how many times do you have to watch your team crap the bed before the words "You suck!" cross your lips? Yeah, the Metropolitans got to the World Series back in 2015 because they had a squadron of flamethrowers on the bump, but they haven't been back to the playoffs since 2016. And in the almost five years since, they're 32 games below .500. 

This season?

As August winds up, they're 63-67 and in third place in the NL East, seven games back of front-running Atlanta and 3 1/2  behind the Phillies for second. Another "Meh"-ts season, in other words.

So, yeah, you're gonna get booed, Javy, no matter how much you feel like you're collateral damage at this point. Your backlash is and always was doomed to backfire. You and your fellow thumbs-downers were never gonna win this one.

As if you ever do.

Daylight Unnecessary Risk Time, Part Deux

 The Ravens lost running back JK Dobbins for the season the other day in a nothing preseason game, and what did the Blob tell you about this JUST THE OTHER DAY?? 

Here it is, in case if you've forgotten. Consider it a great big ol' "I told you so."

Yeesh. When is the NFL going to drop these silly out-of-their-time relics once and for all?

Yeah, I know, probably never, because MONEY. NFL teams make coin off these games, because they strong-arm their season ticketholders into purchasing preseason games as part of the package. And the players get paid for these games, so they might be reluctant to give them up as well.

But for the love of all that's holy, people. Preseason games are a 1961 thing, not a 2021 thing. They're the single wing formation of scheduling.

The Blob says it's time to bury 'em with Sammy Baugh and Don Hutson 'n' them. But if you don't (because MONEY), at least don't risk your front-line vets in them.

Seriously, does Bruce Arians really need a look at Tom Brady against a bunch of scrubs to know if he's ready or not? Does Andy Reid need to put Patrick Mahomes out there against next week's roster cuts to reassure himself that, yep, he can still play?

If you're going to have preseason games, limit them to rookies and down-roster players on whom you haven't made up your mind. Why risk a JK Dobbins in a game that doesn't count? Especially in an age of minicamps and OTAs and interteam scrimmages?

I guess that would be a good thing to ask Ravens coach John Harbaugh this morning.

Hope someone does.

Looking the part

 You know how it is with these Little League World Series kids. Half of  'em look like they've been driving for five years.

And it kinda ruins the effect when the kid walking up to the plate is six feet tall and has a goatee.

But you know what was fun about the LLWS championship game yesterday, besides that it was Michigan against Ohio and Bo and Woody were probably arm-wrestling over the outcome?

The Michigan pitcher. That's what was fun.

His name was Ethan Van Belle and he struck out eight Ohioans as Michigan won the title, 5-2, and he looked like a Little Leaguer. He wasn't very tall and he didn't have a goatee, and you couldn't imagine him driving his buds down to the Dairy Queen to celebrate. He was a 12-year-old who looked like a 12-year-old. And there were a bunch of other 12-year-olds on the Michigan team -- on both teams, really -- who looked like 12-year-olds, too.

Now, I don't know what will become of any of them. Maybe some of them will grow up to wear goatees and drive cars and play in the big leagues, or at least for my Cruds in Pittsburgh. Maybe others will hit a growth spurt and wind up quarterbacking their teams in the Super Bowl against 59-year-old Tom Brady.

All I know is, they look for now like the kids they are. And the Blob finds that refreshing.

It also wonders if Ohio has to give back Toledo now.

A little weekend horsing around

 Most days very little surprises you. After all, we live in an exceptionally weird time -- for heaven's sake, a reality-show goof was President of the United States for four years -- and so weirdness has to get pretty darn weird for any of us to notice.

But come on now. Tell me you've seen this before.

A racehorse biting another racehorse in mid-race?

What was the announcer's call here? "And down the stretch they gum"?

And did Evander Holyfield watch this and think "Yup. Been there, done that"?

And in conjunction with that ...

Your immediate first thought: Mike Tyson trains horses now??

And here we thought he was only into white tigers.

Tee it up

 It's still Rangoon here in northeast Indiana, that charming part of late summer when you can break a sweat just thinking about breaking a sweat, and the outdoors feels like God's dryer vent. But, hey, college football!

Which begins again today, kinda-sorta, and the Blob cannot wait. It has never been shy about its preference for Saturdays in the fall (or today, in the dryer vent) over Sundays in the fall, on account of Sundays in the fall are mainly about fantasy football these days. The college game is just better in every way.

For one thing, it has Army-Navy, Harvard-Yale, Alabama-Auburn, Texas-Oklahoma.

The NFL has Jacksonville-Carolina.

College football has rivalries that go back to the halcyon days of Chester A. Arthur; pro football, with a few exceptions, has rivalries that go back to the halcyon days of George W. Bush. No one's stealing the other team's mascot in the days leading up to the Colts vs. the Titans; no one's sabotaging a rival's flip-card section during that venerable Bengals-Seahawks donnybrook. There's romance in Saturdays that doesn't exist in Sundays, even if the romance attaches to an ugly crockery jug or a beat-up old water bucket.

So ... yeah. I'll be watching today, even if there's not a whole lot to watch.

The big show doesn't begin until next weekend, but at least we've got Illinois-Nebraska this afternoon, speaking of rivalries that go back to, like, yesterday. We've got the 16th annual MEAC/SWAC Challenge, Alcorn State vs. North Carolina Central. And who doesn't want to check out Hawaii-UCLA or UConn-Fresno State?

Look. I know we're fast approaching a time when college football becomes one soulless corporate entity, virtually indistinguishable from the NFL. And it's no fun any more when you already know, or can reasonably assume, who's going to be in the College Football Playoff Final Four in five months.

Alabama Inc., Ohio State Inc., Clemson Inc., Oklahoma Inc. There's your four, same-old, same-old. Oh, maybe Notre Dame Inc. sneaks in there, or a rogue Georgia Inc. or LSU Inc. But there's not a whole lot of suspense that attaches to the CFP anymore.

And that's not why I like college football, anyway.

I like it for all those late nights driving back from South Bend after covering another four-hour Notre Dame game, a prime-time matchup muttering softly from the radio to keep me awake. Maybe it's Iowa, coming at me from WHO in Des Moines. Maybe it's some SEC game -- Arkansas vs. Ole Miss -- that goes seven overtimes, a marathon so long I get to watch the last hour on TV after I get home.

Or, like one night, maybe it's Bethune-Cookman vs. South Carolina State -- an HBCU game riding the quirky late-night airwaves from someplace down south.

Best times of the best time of my life, those drives home with the Hawkeyes or the Razorbacks or the Wildcats riding shotgun.

So, yeah. Tee it up, baby. Let's go.

Bastard Plague update

 Time now to check in on how Sportsball World, and the nation it serves, is handling the latest Bastard Plague counterattack, which has gotten plenty of support from the dimmer bulbs among our elected representatives/citizenry in general:

* In Tennessee, rapidly gaining on Florida and Texas as the national headquarters for crazy, a halfwit named Jason Zachary mocked fellow SEC member LSU for deciding anyone over the age of 12 must provide proof of vaccination or negative Bastard Plague test to gain entry to an LSU football game.

Most rational people would consider this a reasonable precaution, given the delta variant's  unchecked spread. Yet Zachary, who you will not be surprised to learn is a state rep, bragged they don't  hold with such notions in Tennessee, where Freedom and Personal Choice are the twin pillars of a free and choice-y state. "It's our right as Americans and Tennesseans to make sure Grandma winds up on a ventilator!" he said. "If we want to turn our state into a pesthouse, BY GOD WE'LL DO IT! 'Murica!"

OK. So he didn't say that.

But he might as well have.

* Moving on to the NFL, the league has announced that 93 percent of its players and personnel are at least partially vaccinated. Both the league and the players' association want to ramp up testing again in the face of the delta variant of the Plague that has driven yet another surge and overwhelmed the nation's hospitals again.

Most of whose Plague beds are now occupied by those who don't hold with them vaccination shots, on account of they cause autism and really bad acne and lizards with razor-sharp teeth that burst out of your stomach and go scurrying off (like in "Alien"!). No, sir. Livestock de-wormer from the friendly neighborhood vet is all those well-informed folks need for this, thanks!

Meanwhile, the NFL also reports that, of the 68 players who have shown red for the Plague since training camps opened, seven times as many unvaccinated players as vaccinated players have been among them. 

No doubt this will just boost de-wormer sales among the anti-vaxxer crowd.

* Closer to home, the "You Ain't Gonna Make MY Kid Wear No Mask!" forces scored their first victories this week. Less than two weeks into the new school year, Smith-Green schools up in Churubusco announced it was going to two weeks of e-learning after some 30 percent of elementary students and 20 percent of high school students showed red and went into quarantine.

A couple of days later, East Noble's school system announced it was also going to e-learning, and canceling all sports for the rest of the month. This means East Noble will not be playing football tonight, the first Bastard Plague football casualty of 2021.

One hopes it will be the last, but logic suggests otherwise. Both Smith-Green and East Noble school systems  are "mask-optional" (i.e., "no one's wearing a mask"). So are East Allen and Northwest Allen and Southwest Allen, having gotten an earful from parents who howled that making kids wear a mask in the face of a rebounding pandemic was like waterboarding or herding them into cattle cars bound for Auschwitz or some such thing.

In other words: There are gonna be some more open dates on Friday nights this fall. Count on it.

And enjoy.

Mascot news!

 Because who doesn't love mascot news? Especially here on the Blob, your official Mascot News You Can Use website?

 First, though, here's a quote from "Jaws":

The thing about a shark ... he's got lifeless eyes. Black eyes. Like a doll's eyes. 

Or, you know, like PURDUE PETE'S EYES.

Which would have scared ol' Quint green, because, geez, just look at 'em. A shark's eyes are NOTHING compared to Purdue Pete's eyes. A shark's eyes, by comparison, are merry orbs of merry merriment. They're perfectly lovely eyes.

Purdue Pete's eyes?

Gah. Tell me these aren't the eyes HAL from "2001: A Space Odyssey" would have if you gave him human form.

Soulless, horror-stricken and HOLY CRAP THOSE THINGS ARE CREEPY would be some ways to describe Purdue Pete's eyes. Add in the hardhat he wears and the sledgehammer he lugs around like Jason Voorhees lugs around a machete, and I guess you can see why Purdue Pete was just named the Creepiest College Mascot in America beating out Oklahoma State's Pistol Pete, Stanford's Tree and Lousiana-Lafayette's Cayenne.

Which looks like this, in case you were wondering.

Personally I don't see how this mascot didn't make the podium, or this mascot, or this mascot.

All of them are way creepier than Pistol Pete or the Stanford Tree, the latter of which is just weird, and therefore sort of cool. Cayenne has the demonic smile going for it, but it doesn't quite follow you down into your dreams the way the Wichita State Shocker does, or the Providence Friar, or whatever the hell the Western Kentucky mascot is.

Or the way Purdue Pete and his soulless eyes do.

Of course, we're used to Purdue Pete in Indiana, the eyes and the hardhat and the hammer. So he's not nearly as creepy to us as he is to the rest of the country, probably.

Especially when you know the story one of my sportswriting buds once told me.

Seems he was down in Bloomington covering the Old Oaken Bucket game during one of the many years when the Hoosiers looked like they'd never seen a football before, and Purdue had roundly thrashed them the way the Boilermakers tended to do in those years. And here came Purdue Pete marching triumphantly around Memorial Stadium, until ...

Until a bunch of IU fans surrounded him, took his hammer away and started chasing him with it. 

Purdue Pete didn't look very scary then. In fact, according to my friend (who may or may not have been embellishing this tale), he looked pretty comical running around with his big ol' head wobbling to and fro.

From that day on, I thought about that whenever Purdue Pete's eyes lit on me during one of my many trips to Ross-Ade or Mackey Arena through the years. 

Kept me from being, you know, creeped out.