This one hurts as a Dodger fan.

The Dodgers had the 6-2 lead heading into the seventh inning in this revenge match against the St. Louis Cardinals from last year’s NLCS. A four-run lead with Clayton Kershaw on the mound? The win is a cinch.

Then, as Vin Scully noted on the radio broadcast, it seemed Kershaw lost the movement on his fastball. The velocity was there, but the movement that made hitters look silly was all gone. Then we saw it — single single single single by Matt Holliday, Jhonny Peralta, Yadier Molina and Matt Adams that cut the lead to 6-3. A strikeout of Pete Kozma, and all Kershaw needed was a double-play ball to get out of the mess.

But Jon Jay singled bringing another run home. A strikeout of a clearly overmatched pinch-hitter Oscar Taveras settled things down for a second until the realization of who was coming up to the plate. Matt Carpenter, the man who just homered off of Kershaw in the sixth inning to break the streak of 16 consecutive batters retired, the man who had an 11-pitch at-bat in Game 6 of last year’s NLCS in the third inning of a scoreless game that ended with a double. The Cardinals ended the inning with a 4-0 lead and a trip to the World Series in hand.

Back to the bases loaded in the seventh inning with two outs. There was Kershaw on the mound trying to get out of the inning with the lead. There was Carpenter thin as a rail which belies his postseason success over Kershaw. This time it didn’t take 11 pitches. It was only 8 pitches when Carpenter lined a pitch that landed at the base of the right field wall. The bases cleared, and the Cardinals had the 8-6 lead.

Normally one could point fingers to the manager wondering why he didn’t go to the bullpen before this exploded. But this is Kershaw, the presumed Cy Young winner and National League MVP. And have you seen the Dodger bullpen? In fact Pedro Baez gave up three more runs thanks to a walk to Randal Grichuk and a homer to Matt Holliday.

Even though we saw this happen last year, it’s still shocking to see Kershaw in the dugout watching what was a 6-2 victory turn into a 10-6 loss. It seemed a lot worse to see the Dodgers cough up eight than when the Tigers did it against the Orioles on Thursday. All eight of those runs came off of the deservedly maligned bullpen. This one came against Kershaw of all people.

Sure the Dodgers did good things on Friday. They had some great at-bats against Adam Wainwright knocking him out of the game in the fifth inning scoring six runs against the Cardinals ace. A.J. Ellis who had a season to forget went 3-for-3 against Wainwright with a home run, two RBIs and two runs scored. It’s also not like the Dodgers gave up after that inning. Adrian Gonzalez hit a two-run homer to cut the Cards lead to 10-8. The Dodgers scored one more in the ninth with the tying run in Andre Ethier on third base.

But all of that is a mere consolation after looking a victory in the mouth.

I don’t want to hear it. “It’s autumn! Why does it feel like summer?”

Anyone who has spent any amount of time in Los Angeles knows that out hottest temperatures can be experienced in October. If you don’t know this, then you’re fucking stupid or in hardcore denial. But the proof is in the pudding.

Here are the some selected October high temperatures for Downtown Los Angeles over the last several years:

2013: 93F – 10/6
2012: 99F – 10/15
2011: 99F – 10/12
2010: 93F – 10/10
2009: 98F – 10/16
2008: 100F – 10/1, 97F – 10/8, 98F – 10/22
2007: 95F – 10/24
2006: 92F – 10/22

Etc. Etc. Of course it gets much hotter than this in the Valleys, and the beaches aren’t that much of a relief because the offshore winds tends to heat things up.

So I don’t want to hear it. If I hear one person exclaim to me in shock that it can get this hot this time of the year, I’m punch you in the titty.

It was interesting watching last night’s AL Wild Card game. Pitting the Oakland Athletics against the Kansas City Royals, it was hard to root against either team.

On the one hand there were the Athletics who went from World Series favorites to potential worst-collapse victims in a blink of an eye. This is a group of seeming misfits assembled from rejected parts from other teams and brought together to confound most experts.

Then there are the Royals who haven’t seen October baseball since winning the World Series in 1985.

In all honesty I wanted both teams to win, but if forced to pick a winner I chose the Athletics by the score of 4-1. It had nothing to do with Jon Lester pitching for Oakland, the so-called “Big Game” James Shield pitching for the Royals who tends to shrink in the playoffs, you know when the games tend to be big. It didn’t have anything to do with Royals manager Ned Yost’s tendency to bunt and mismanage his bullpen and pitching staff.

It mostly had to do with this:

This was the Athletics celebrating their playoff berth on Sunday. And in the superhero chonies spread eagle in the middle of the Rangers visitors’ clubhouse was rightfielder Josh Reddick giving the world a peek-a-boo of his nutsack. Yes, I picked the A’s because of balls.

And of course they lost. They had a 2-0 lead after the first inning thanks to a Brandon Moss homer and blew that. They took a 7-3 lead in the sixth inning thanks to another Brandon Moss homer and a bunch of singles (and Ned Yost’s incompetence) and blew that in the final two innings that sent the game to extra innings.

And in spite of Yost and his bunting tactics and his complete flubbing of the game, there was Salvador Perez at the plate in the 12th inning just getting his bat to a Dan Otero 2-2 slider down and away down the third base line and under the diving Josh Donaldson to drive in the winning run.

A couple of things stand out from this game:

1. The Royals did not bunt in the 12th inning. They scored two runs. See what happens when you ditch the antiquated notion of bunts = good?
2. I’m a gay pervert menace. That should really come as no surprise. But the fact that I will root for your team if you show even the tiniest glimmer of skin should prove once and for all I am an amoral hedonist who should burn in Babylon.
3. TBS is quite boring. I like Ernie Johnson and thinks he does a great job as the host and moderator of Inside the NBA. But man did his play-by-play last night leave a lot to be desired. His call of Brandon Moss’s second homer had all of the excitement of a eulogy. Ron Darling was serviceable as a color commentator, and Cal Ripken was out of his league. These three, I presume, did work together on Sundays during the season and had time to gel. What the hell happened?
4. He’s NOT a Big Game James. Throughout the broadcast, whenever they mentioned James Shields they prefaced it with “Big Game” as if trying to brainwash us into believing that James Shields is clutch in the playoffs. In his seven starts in the postseason, Shields only has two quality starts. He now owns a 5.26 ERA in the postseason when the games are arguably the biggest. Yeah. Let’s put that nickname to bed.
5. The Royals are still alive making my preseason prediction of a Royals-Pirates World Series appallingly possible. /nuff said.

I guess we’ll see if the Giants and Pirates can match the drama tonight that this game provided.

Ever since I learned the second law of thermodynamics, I’ve been a bit obsessed with it. It states that entropy of an isolated system can never decrease. Of course the question of what the fuck entropy is remains.

en·tro·py
noun \ˈen-trə-pē\
plural en·tro·pies
Definition of ENTROPY
1
: a measure of the unavailable energy in a closed thermodynamic system that is also usually considered to be a measure of the system’s disorder, that is a property of the system’s state, and that varies directly with any reversible change in heat in the system and inversely with the temperature of the system; broadly : the degree of disorder or uncertainty in a system
2
a : the degradation of the matter and energy in the universe to an ultimate state of inert uniformity
b : a process of degradation or running down or a trend to disorder
3
: chaos, disorganization, randomness
— en·tro·pic adjective
— en·tro·pi·cal·ly adverb

If we can get a bit philosophical about it, if left to its own devices the world tends towards chaos and disorder. It takes energy to keep atoms together. Once bonds are broken, it’s really hard to put them back together.

Take, for example, a glass. Once you drop it and break it into pieces, they don’t come back together. Unless you melt the glass back down and reform it into shape and yadda yadda yadda, it stays in pieces. It’s more than happy to stay in pieces.

It is in our nature to control things, to bring things into order. Take how we have a tendency to name things. How, instead of actual democracy where one person gets one vote, we have turned it into a republic just to cut down on the chaos. How we have legal codes to avoid pure anarchy.

So, as someone who would like to fashion himself a rebel, I root for chaos. Who am I to deny the world its entropy? I love chaos and revel when those in authority get pie on their face.

This is a very long-winded way of me saying that I was rooting for a four-team tiebreak in the American League. Jon Morosi wrote about the possibility a week or two ago. Can you imagine if we were sitting here today awaiting the Royals-Tigers Game 163 for the AL Central crown?

I’ll admit I was disappointed when the possibility for this four-way tie evaporated. I’m still disappointed that we’re not sitting here waiting for some Game 163s.

But I’m excited for this postseason nonetheless. I don’t know if I have a rooting interest in any of the teams. I guess I do lean towards the Dodgers mostly because I am familiar with them. Perhaps the Royals and Pirates since I predicted they would make the World Series (which I do feel simultaneously overjoyed and appalled that this is still a possibility.)

Since 2007 I covered and/or wrote about baseball and the Dodgers (both in-person and afar) for LAist, and I wondered how I would respond this season. It turned out I didn’t watch much of any baseball.

Like, I can’t tell you who should be win the AL Cy Young, MVP, Rookie of the Year awards. Beyond a boxscore and taking a look at the standings now and again, I really haven’t been keeping track aside from the odd game I wrote about here.

I guess I can blame part of this on fatigue. I could also blame part of this on Time Warner Cable. They are my cable provider, but certain channels throughout the year had so much noise that some channels including the Dodgers channel were unwatchable. But if I really needed to, I could have watched it.

This is a long way of saying I watched the Dodgers win the National League West last night on the back of Clayton Kershaw, the best pitcher since Pedro Martinez. He went 8 innings giving up only 1 run that was aided by his balk in the third inning. As the game progressed with the Giants still leading 1-0, he took matters into his own hands. With Carl Crawford on third base and two outs in the fifth inning, Kershaw hit a triple to tie the game: only the third triple hit by a pitcher this season and his first of his career.

As Vin Scully noted on the broadcast, all thoughts went back to opening day last year against the Giants. It was a scoreless tie in the bottom of the eighth inning, when Clayton came up and hit a solo shot to centerfield to settle the game. The Dodgers would score three more runs in the inning to win 4-0, the first sign of what a special season Clayton would have last year.

Then the Giants pitchers couldn’t find a strike zone to save their lives, and the Dodgers went on to the 9-1 romp.

One thing about the postgame celebration. The first one I covered was when they clinched the division in 2009. The champagne and beer were flying, my eyes stung and my clothes stunk. It was fun and thrilling, but in the end it was annoying. My notes were wet, the audio was unusable because of how loud it was in the clubhouse. And the smell of the clubhouse for weeks was awful.

All of this to say that I’m happy the Dodgers won, and dare I say that I will be rooting for them this postseason? I’m skeptical though. Like I said in the podcast, their hitting is streaky and outside of Kershaw and Zack Greinke the pitching leaves a lot left to be desired. Also, we have witnessed both get lit up in the playoffs.

So I guess I’ll keep my fingers crossed and hope this is the year they can take the weight of 1988 and Tom Lasorda off of their shoulders.

Yesterday the starter in my car died. One minute I’m putt-putting around town. The next minute I’m trying to start my car in a parking lot and nothing. Initially I think my battery mysteriously died, so I asked for a jump. I turned the key, still nothing. Fuck.

I called my cousin for his AAA card services, and an hour later the car was towed to my auto mechanic who agreed with me that my starter was dead. I might be good with fixing cars and stuff, but I can sure diagnose the sons of bitches. It turned out my battery needed to be replace which sounded right since it was quite a few years old. A lot poorer, here I am.

I have this fantasy, even back to when I was driving my Honda, that when a car of mine dies, I drive it off the cliffs here in Pedro for a proper sendoff. I didn’t do it with my Honda, but I was very tempted to do it yesterday to this shitty Camry.

While waiting for the tow, my cousin and I talked about his Manchester United, how they suck, and how they spend the pretty pretty money for attackers and forwards but neglected their backline. I mean, one look at their 5-3 loss at Leicester City was evident. With my increased interest in the Premier League, I’m quite happy to see that ability to talk about it is getting better.

Here’s an interesting bit on the African termite and how its guts are on the outside(?)

The last thing I told Brendan yesterday was, “This is the most socialization I’ve done in a long time. I’m going to be sore tomorrow.” I am.

Of course, yesterday, Brendan and I recorded the latest podcast. I was already feeling a like my nodes or whatever were a bit achy in my throat as if the first signs of a sickness were about to rear its ugly head.

When I got to his apartment, he mentioned that Yuko wanted to meet up with us for some beers and what not, so why not? It’s been years since I’ve seen Yuko, and I forget how dirty she is. It’s funny because we met when I needed to hire a part time helper for the post-production company I worked for in Burbank. I put an post out on Tribe.net, and she was one of several who replied. I hired her, and history. Who knew that she was a part of an extended set of friends from UCSB?

Anyhow yesterday Brendan, Yuko and I had beers, played shuffleboard and shot the shit about her vacation in France, her lost luggage and how she learned how to live life as a gay man. Of course if I had recorded all of this, it probably would have been more entertaining than the podcast. But whatever.

I’ve been going so retro lately. I’m taking it even further. I want to redesign all of this from scratch. Not tinker around with already-made WordPress themes. From each { to div command to php markup, mine mine MINE!

California was taking it to Arizona in Tuscon last night. The air-raid offense seems to have finally taken hold, and they took a 28-6 lead going into the half. It was shots fired by Cal to the rest of the Pac-12 trying to stake their claim for respect and relevance.

After three quarters it was a 31-13 lead for the Golden Bears making the Wildcats look like they couldn’t “bear down” on anything much less this game. But, of course, there are four quarters played in a football game at a minimum, and to borrow from Kings head coach Darryl Sutter, you don’t win anything for three quarters.

I was busy paying attention to Oregon and their struggles at Wazzu, and I glanced at the scores and realized that Arizona made a game of it! All of a sudden they were down 45-42 with the ball on Cal’s 47-yard line with a chance to win on the Hail Mary. These plays rarely work, but when they do they’re unbelievable.

Holy shit. It worked!

The Wildcats completed their comeback thanks to a field goal and FIVE touchdowns they scored in the fourth quarter alone. I guess Cal isn’t experienced enough to realize that when you have an opponent down, make sure they stay down. And Arizona won’t give up.

And this is why I love the Pac-12. Here are the Napkin Rankings this week:

1. BYU (9 points)
2. MISSISSIPPI STATE (8 points)
OKLAHOMA
4. TEXAS A&M (7 points)
5. PENN STATE (6.5 points)
UCLA
7. ARIZONA (6 points)
AUBURN
EAST CAROLINA
GEORGIA TECH
NOTRE DAME
OREGON

Slowly yet surely they’re starting to look accurate.

After about a week of stewing in the heatwave, things cleared up yesterday in which I immediately took off for Portuguese Bend to get some form of physical activity. I ended up taking less than two hours for a five-mile jaunt which I guess isn’t bad considering I had to wring out the sweat from my shirt when I was done.

Tonight I’ve been going retro in my music listening. Started out with some DJ Shadow, then veered over to Aphex Twin to Orbital to UNKLE’s Psyence Fiction. Yeah. I went late 90s tonight. Listening to UNKLE took me back to driving in the dead of winter 98/99 (I don’t remember, really) from Atascadero to Santa Barbara going back to school after New Years with friends. There is something of being caught in a David Lynch driving scene going down the 101 while blasting “Rabbit In Your Headlights” in my 87 Honda Accord hatchback. Damn, I miss that car.

Think back, I wonder what happened to the blogs I wrote then. Of course those were days before they were called blogs. It was before I could just type text into a box, hit publish and voila it looks all pretty. No. I had to write things in a text editor, make sure all the formatting looked all right, upload, check in both Internet Explorer and Netscape. When I had to design stylesheets myself or cheat by using tables. Actually, I should know better than to be wistful about that shit. I can read the old LiveJournal entries I exported onto this thing.

* This is the temperature reading at 10 a.m. i live about a mile away from the port of la waters and about 2.5 miles from an actual beach. And yes, that is a heat index you see. In motherfucking Southern California. Look, I’m a huge fan of hot weather. But when humidity enters into the equation, that’s where I have to draw the line.

Last night I was up late trying to deal with the heat. Nothing is worse than turning in the bed and feeling a cooled pool of your own sweat on top of the duvet. As unsexy and uncomfortable as I was feeling, I get a message from one of the hookup sites I’m on.

“will love to play with your ass sexy.”

Isn’t that sweet? Of course, the picture that accompanies this particular profile is me in doggy-style clad only in a jock. So maybe he’s turned on by me “winking” at the camera. Don’t worry, I won’t post any nudie pics of me on here quite yet. But you probably won’t have to look that hard in order to find them.

Anyhow, I’m sure nothing will come of this, but I think it’s awfully nice that this person was so moved as to message me. It really does wonders for one’s self esteem at 2 a.m. as I can’t fall asleep and just want to fill my bathtub with ice water and just lie in it.

* Around 12:30 I tweeted that it had been a bit quiet, but that it was time to FIRE ROGER GOODELL. Minutes later Brendan tweeted me this statement from Anheuser-Busch:

We are disappointed and increasingly concerned by the recent incidents that have overshadowed this NFL season. We are not yet satisfied with the league’s handling of behaviors that so clearly go against our own company culture and moral code. We have shared our concerns and expectations with the league.

I guess that’s something, right?

* On Thursday, Marlins slugger Mike “Call-Me-Giancarlo” Stanton got in the face by an errant pitch by Milwaukee Brewers starter Mike Fiers. He dropped like a sack of potatoes with blood pouring out of his face. He took to Instagram to update his progress.

I have to say, the first time I encountered him in person was as he was walking towards the Dodgers clubhouse to use the weight room as I was leaving to head onto the field. Back then, the only weight room was by the Dodgers clubhouse, and per MLB rules it has to be open for both teams if the visitor’s clubhouse doesn’t have the facilities.

Anyhow, I see him approaching but didn’t recognize him. I just saw this towering hulk of a man striding towards me. As he past me I got a look at his face and did a gasp. Holy shit. Mike Stanton is motherfucking huge. I could feel my knees start to shake a little as they instinctively tried to get to the ground like a good little gayboy. I could also feel my jaw start to open all by itself, as if Stanton had uttered the phrase “Open Sesame”.

* This June bug is not happy: