I Don't Like Mondays — October 12, 2015

Sometimes Canadians get way too touchy about how Americans view our Frozen Dominion. Snow in August, moose in the back yard, eider yadda. Much of the time it’s a lot of Canuck grievance culture looking for a place to land.

Then there’s FOX baseball analyst Harold Reynolds who has developed a reputation as the Don Cherry of baseball. If Don Cherry were black and younger and twice as culturally tone deaf. During Sunday night’s Blue Jays/ Rangers playoff broadcast, a foul ball went zooming into the stands prompting much scrambling from the fans in Arlington, Texas.

Reynolds took in the scene and informed the Excited States it was lucky the liner wasn’t going into the stands at Rogers Centre. “Not a lot of people grew up playing baseball in Canada… so you're not used to catching a lot of balls in the stands.” We’ll let that sink in a moment… Reynolds apparently thinks Canadians are inert objects who’ve never seen objects in flight. Harold lives on Baseball Mars.

(BTW: We’re still waiting for Harold Reynolds to explain why Texans, who grow up playing baseball, didn’t catch Troy Tulowitzki homer in sixth inning Sunday)

But then Harold summoned his best Grapes as he segued to the broken leg suffered by New York Met Ruben Tejada when he was barrel rolled at second base by Chase Utley of the Dodgers. Trying to explain the two-game suspension for Utley, Reynolds sniffed he didn’t see much wrong with the take-out rule-wise.

Reynolds then cited the classic legal case of Cherry vs. Reality:  The victim Tejada didn't get out of the way quickly enough. Plus he knew who was coming into second base. And... never mind, my head hurts.

So while Harold Reynolds is a maroon, he’s a maroon after our own hearts. Cherry-wise, that is.

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Speaking of baseball’s ancient wisdom, MLB suspended Dodger Utley two playoff games for his brutal slide that broke the fibula of Tejada. There’s no doubting it was brutal and reckless. The problem is that there is a vault full of tape showing similar slides by other players that went unpunished in the past. Some showing Utley himself being flattened,

Why now? Why Utley? MLB suit Joe Torre— who looks like he needs a good sleep— was asked just that by FOX’s Ken Rosenthal. Torre’s reply was, well, he couldn’t do anything about the past, so just bug off Ken before I get security to toss you and your bow ties.

That ignoring-the-past flies in the face of centuries of jurisprudence didn’t seem to faze out mister Reynolds, either. (No doubt he thinks the Magna Carta is a drink at Carl Jr.’s.) Harold declared it Solomonic in its wisdom. No wonder Tejada tweeted a picture of himself in the hospital bed, offering a middle finger to Utley and Torre.

Because, like, it’s his own fault.

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We are getting our first taste of 3 on 3 overtime hockey. The idea behind less-is-more was to reduce the number of games that go to the dreaded shootout to resolve games. Well, dreaded if your memory doesn’t stretch back as far to when the tie was still a feature of NHL hockey. And wasn’t that fun?

It’s still early days for this 3-on-3 experiment, but one thing seems clear. Goalies who are products of a system where shots come from predictable angles are going to be exposed by the free-flowing pace of OT.

Today’s 5-on-5 gridlock is predicated on defencemen delivering pucks to the goalie from predictable lanes. So we’ve been given robotic goalies who square to the shot, go post-to-post to cover the bottom of the net. You can’t do that in the 3 on 3 and survive. If you can’t move and be athletic you’re going to be Melba Toast in extra time.

Saturday’s Calgary/ Vancouver OT was typical as the teams played deliberately in the 3 on 3,  patiently waiting for a matchup that would spring a player for the high-percentage chance. Frankly, it looked a little like soccer out there. Eventually wee Johnny Gaudreau was isolated one-one-one with Ryan Miller after a Vancouver turnover. The little Wizard was good on the chance, giving the Flames a win. Miller didn’t stand a chance.

Which is nice for the making-a-traditional-hockey-move set. And for fans who like to see skill once or twice a gem rather than team work. But it’s poison for goalies acting like brick walls in net.

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Finally, why rugby is the world’s greatest sport. Tonga vs New Zealand. Damn the anthems, it’s Sipi Tau versus the Haka. Imagine if we could get NHL teams with their own war chants. Maybe wearing Don Cherry outfits, too.

Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy @NPBroadcaster