Ladies and gentlemen, your World Series Champion, Rob Manfred!

FUCK ROB MANFRED

The Barfs and the Assholes.

If there is a World Series out there designed to turn off and anger more people than that, I'm open to suggestions as to what it is.

Tonight, the Los Angeles Dodgers were fucked in the ass without lube again, as the Barfs of Cobb County advance to face the Assholes of Houston, bringing to success probably THE most orchestrated season destruction in the history of American professional sports.

Because, let's make no secret about this off the rip:  Everyone knew the Dodgers were the best team, not just on paper, but on the field as well.

So, when San Diego completely fizzles out, what happens?

Under normal circumstances, I would probably state that the Trevor Bauer situation would be sufficient -- except for one thing.

Last year taught Major League Baseball one very important thing:  You leave these Dodgers to their own devices, and they will turn this league and it's World Series into their own personal playground.

Want proof?  Even as the M*A*S*H Unit they turned out to be, the team won 106 regular-season games this year.  They easily could've won north of 110, perhaps even 120, with even a normal spate of injuries.

But injuries happen...  Anyone who watches sports gets that.

What usually does NOT happen, though, is an incident like this.

Game 162, Milwaukee Brewers.  If the Giants lose and Dodgers win, it's a one-game playoff.  And the Brewers are the #3 seed in the National League.

So if the Brewers somehow were scared of the LA Dodgers, why not get Jace Peterson to do THIS:

Max Muncy leaves game with an apparent arm injury.

Positive vibes only for Max. #Dodgers

pic.twitter.com/vwL2o7Dc4c

— Dodgers Nation (@DodgersNation) October 3, 2021

Yeah, I'll say it.  Welcome to Kelly Olynyk, and you might as well be given a World Series share and ring, regardless of who wins.  That was an intent to injure situation on his part, as he alters his arm to make contact and injure Muncy.

Why?  Take a look at these playoffs for a team which, even with all their injures, averaged 5.2 runs a game:

• Wild Card Game:  Three runs.  (The third being the walkoff in the ninth to win it.)
• Their two losses in the DS to the Giants:  Both shutouts.
• They did score 9 and 7 runs in two of their wins, but the clinching win:  Just two.
• Six and 11 runs in the two wins over the Barfs.  The four losses?  2, 4, 2 and 2.

48 runs in 12 games.  And 33 of them in four of their six wins.  Meaning that, in 8 playoff games, they scored only 15 runs.  In five of their six losses and in two of their six wins, three runs or less each.

And, as was evidenced all season, injuries took their toll.

But that wasn't enough.  You had the rest of the National League West openly cheering on, supporting, and probably taking a dive for the San Francisco Giants.

Between the injuries, the Trevor Bauer situation, and a push unprecedented in baseball history (at least going back to the Mazin' Mets) of a team believed to do NOTHING in the season beforehand, the pitching staff finally broke late season -- losing Kershaw before the playoffs started, losing Scherzer to a tired arm, and losing Joe Kelly during the playoffs as well.

That's another two things people have to start asking about this manifestation of the fix:  How many careers have been shortened or ended by this manipulation of the 2021 MLB season?  That, in the name of "FUCK THE DODGERS!" and, knowing that the Dodgers were, on paper (and being proven on the field), the best team in baseball and by quite a difference, you decided, as a league, to push things so hard that there is real word that Kershaw will never make it back this time -- and who knows about many of the others?  (Justin Turner?  Bellinger??  Muncy????)

And that's just one dimension of it.

The second is the abject hatred of Major League Baseball for the liberal West Coast.  MLB has made no secret (on and off the field) that, if it's not the most right-wing sports league in the land, it's second to NECKCAR in that regard.  So not only do you basically beat the Dodgers into utter submission, you now have a Southern-fried World Series of the cheatingest franchise in Major League Baseball (someone needs to keep reminding people that there have now been allegations of cheating in BOTH SERIES of the Assholes) vs. the most racist franchise in Major League Baseball (who someone needs to keep reminding people moved their stadium because their audience was too Black!!!).

And, keep in mind, since the sign stealing started with these fuckers in Houston:  That's five American Championship Series and three American League titles for the Assholes.

Rob Manfred has made his contempt for the West Coast and California baseball obvious.  Not only in "FUCK THE DODGERS!", but in a blatant PR move to try to get Indisputable Best Player in the Game Mike Trout to one of his Super Six (the only six franchises who matter to him:  The Barfs, Assholes, Scrubs, KKKardinals, Yanks, and Red Sawx) -- probably with New and Upcoming Best Player in the Game Shohei Ohtani right behind him!

His contempt knows few bounds.  Hell, many of us remember the night that the Dodgers won the title last year, and the interview FOX conducted with Manfred, and you could see it on his face:  That "OH SHIT!" moment where he openly realized just how good this team is -- and they kept adding over the course of the next season.

So you couldn't do this one with simply the umpires (though, in a more league-general sense, it's clear the umpires are, even more flagrantly than usual, fucking the strike zone bad).  It had to be a far deeper and far more comprehensive argument.

Which leads into the third dimension of this fuckery this season:  The end of the current Collective Bargaining Agreement and an all-but-certain walkout or strike.

The owners have been in legal violation of this CBA the better part of a decade by colluding to keep salaries down.

No one, especially not media partners like ESPN and their almost-weekly Sunday Night Game of the Week, Yankees-Red Sox, seems to have a problem with the Yanks and Red Sox spending -- though the Red Sox went cheap after winning their rigged and corrupt 2018 title...

And, as people who've talked to me about this point out, every time there's been one of these, there's been calls for a salary cap.  (And usually without a salary floor, which is why the players have never agreed to one.)

You can bet that about three-quarters of the owners are going to be solidly behind Manfred that, to Save Baseball (/s), there will be no agreement this time without a hard salary cap.

Why?  We Must Break Up The Dodgers In The Name of "Competitive Balance".  The LA owners will pay the good players handsomely to come in, and, if Mookie Betts (and I'm almost sure of others, but he's the most definitive case I can find of the current Dodgers) is any indication, people want to come, play for, and win with this team.

And that does not sit well it Der Kommissar Manfred (thank you to my anonymous baseball-historian friend for the 80's music reference, and a lot of backing material), nor the owners who have gutted several recent free-agent classes to set up this work stoppage.

(Never mind that this will almost all-but-certainly rack up players on the Super Six who will be given sweetheart "side deals" for promotion and endorsement of sponsors in the given cities...)

And then there's a fourth dimension to all this.

It's a changing of American ethos.  Whereas a lot of people, back in the day, would use graduation speeches and other motivational tools to (falsely, we would find out) equate hard work and success, you are actually now, in the last several years, seeing speakers come out and publicly tell people:

"Life is not fair."

I could probably do a litany on the ramifications of that in a far more general sense, but I will keep this to sports.

Moreover, I am actually almost-certainly (and maybe tonight, if my fatigue does not do me in after this wall of text) going to do a new set of sports axioms, in the vein of Howard Cosell's axioms about sports in I Never Played The Game.

But this is probably going to be one of them:

The best team never wins -- except or one or more of the following conditions:

• The best team is, in fact, politically connected to be rigged the champions (which see at least a couple of the Tom Brady years)...
• The gap between the best team and everyone else is so large, very little can be done to stop it (see college football, many recent years, though not all -- the rigging is often, there, more a function of keeping teams out than putting teams in)...
• One or more outside forces exist to render the season "irrelevant" or put an "asterisk" next to it for no fault of the team involved (which see 2020 MLB)...

That's it.  You don't win championships on the field.  You win them off the field, and I'm not talking about team personnel, players, gameplans, or any of that sort of archaic dis-reality.

What you saw over the last six months was one of the most organized and comprehensive fuck-jobs in the history of American sports.  Knowing that MLB has fucked the Dodgers a decade running now, and seeing the superteam the owners have built over there, Rob Manfred basically played the BIOB Card on them -- that, in the "Best Interests of Baseball", we can't let that happen -- and Manfred invoked the Kazuto Okayasu Defense:

"Stop him at all cost."

Now comes the Southern-Fried MAGA World Series.  (Over-under on the first "Fuck Joe Biden" chant, probably about 2nd inning Game 1.)  The Cheating Assholes vs. The Chopping Barfs and their Lights-Out Chop (which was evidenced at least twice tonight, and should be made illegal for multiple reasons -- not just the racism, but disruption to the pitching change and consultation, especially in the era of the clock on a "mound visit" these days!).

Enjoy it, you racist cuck Manfred.  It'll be the last MLB games you have as Commissioner.