thependulumswings

Greetings.  Did you miss us?  We missed you and your comments.  Glad to be back at it.  We have a lot to catch up on.  Some of the below is a bit less timely than others, but we cannot help our selves.   Warm and some fresh, some not as fresh, here are the tender vittles.

1.  Congrats go to the NBA Raptors and the NHL Blues.   What a parlay that ticket would have been.  We haven’t seen that ticket, but a legit ticket made it’s way around Al Gore’s internet last week that showed a $400 bet, turned winning wager, on the Blues to win the Stanley Cup placed prior to the season.  The odds you ask?  250 to 1.  The payout?  It was 100k.  Kudos.
2. The Golden St. Warriors loss of Kevin Durant and, in game seven, Klay Thompson should in no way dull the finish on the Raptors’ crown.  Injuries happen in sports.  They happen every day.  Next man up.
3. A week ago the Lakers had the shortest odds in Vegas at 4-1 to be the 2020 NBA champions.   Yep, it isn’t a misprint, nor a typo, nor a mistake.  It’s the infatuation with the Lakers.  A week later they acquired a dude named Anthony Davis.  The uni brow heads to Tinseltown.  Maybe 4-1 was good money after all.  Maybe not.
4. LaVar Ball thought it was a bad move.  Shocking.  “I guarantee: Like I say again, it will be the worst move the Lakers ever did in their life and they will never win another championship,” LaVar Ball told ESPN while at the Drew League on Saturday to watch his son LaMelo play. “Guarantee it.”  No word on how good his word is on the guarantee.  Can we get our money back?  And, the Lakers don’t have a life.  The people who run it do.  And, never is a long time.   There are publicity hounds and there is LaVar.
5. If you never watch golf you might still have watched the US Open this weekend.  Pebble Beach is one of the greatest looking places on the entire planet.  Period.  If you did watch you heard the Fox Sports broadcast.  Hopefully you turned the sound down and enjoyed the visual majesty.  Joe Buck is fine.  He’s no Jim Nance, friends.  But the rest of the team is somewhere between bad and horrendous.  Paul Azinger is very bad with spelled with a capital VERY.  When Joe Buck was chatting with Pebble Beach homeowner Jim Nance briefly on Saturday Azinger wondered aloud what he was doing on the set with two legends.  We wondered the same.  Also, Zinger needs to find a new barber.  Any one of them will be way better than his current one.
6. The only one that is worse than Azinger is Curtis Strange.  His facial expressions could be on pharmaceutical commercials for sufferers that need anti depressants or anti constipation medicine.  He said on Saturday about a Brooks Koepka pending approach shot, “this is a hard shot.”  He said no more.  Riveting and ground breaking aren’t words that come to mind with Fox Sports decision to have these two wall flowers on air.  They have the US Open broadcast locked up for 12 years.  It’s never too soon to make changes.  Never.
7. In the MLB AL West the Astros own a 9.5 game lead over the Rangers.  In the NL West the Dodgers own a 10.5 game lead over the Rockies.  The season isn’t half over.  It’s about 45 percent over, actually.  But, these two division races are over.  It’s not that the teams within the two western divisions are that bad.  It’s that the Astros and the Dodgers are that good.  And, we add, the Astros have played the last three weeks without Altuve, Springer, and Correa.  Wowza.
8. Don’t sleep on the Twins either.  Their lead is 10 games over the Cleveland Indians.  Their win percentage is .671, best in all of baseball.  Their run differential is 116 runs, best in all of baseball.  Relax Yankees fans.  The Yankees are good as well.  They lead their division by a half of a game over the very pesky Tampa Bay Rays.  Everyone on the Yankees team has spent time on the DL except Mickey Mantle and Yogi Berra.  When they get healthy they”ll be tough to beat.
9. The NFL Houston Texans will no longer pursue New England Patriots director of player personnel Nick Caserio for their GM position, the team announced Friday.  As a result, the Patriots dropped the tampering charges they filed last week against the Texans for attempting to hire him.  This is according to ESPN, the worldwide leader in sports coverage and anything Lakers or LeBron related.  On Wednesday, sources said the Texans had requested permission to interview Caserio for their GM job, but had not been granted permission.  Owner Robert Kraft still faces charges as well.  He hopes that they will get dropped (like his pants) as well.
10. Way too much has been made of the ugly American’s Women’s World Cup 13-0 romp over Thailand.  “They should have stopped scoring.”  “They should have passed the ball more.”  “They should have subbed more.”  “They should have called off the dogs.”  It’s the World Cup.  How in the world did Thailand qualify?  Sunday’s three nil (as they say) win over Chile is shutout no. 2 for the ugly Americans.  Will anyone score on them?  Probably.  Maybe.  Maybe not.

Like Kotter, welcome back.