Masterson's Musings: Return of the Jedi

- Thank Elway for the new South Park episode completely validating everyone here at Frost Brewed Baseball's opinions of the new Indiana Jones movie. Though we didn't take our criticisms as far as Trey Parker and Matt Stone did, we agree wholeheartedly nonetheless.

- To everyone who thinks that Ryan Howard should be the NL MVP because he led the NL in HRs and RBIs (but hit .250)......don't watch baseball anymore because you obviously have no idea how the game works or what it takes to be the best player in your league. Go live on an island somewhere where you're unable to follow the game or get internet access (no matter what Bill Curtis tells you) because you're a horrible fan of the game and should be banned from watching the sport altogether. Albert Pujols is the hands-down pick to win the MVP this year (.357, 37, 116 with a .462 obp on a team that has literally no other offensive threat or pitching to speak of.) Anyone who votes against him is un-American and slits the necks of baby seals on top of Old Glory.

- While watching Game 1 of the NLCS tonight (and pouring out a cold one in remembrance of what we were doing at this time last year,) I was marveling at Joe Buck trying to explain how Manny Ramirez had transformed the Dodgers from an also-ran into a playoff team. In one sentence he said that the Dodgers had finished with an 84-78 record, 15th among Major League teams. Maybe two sentences later he made the statement that until Manny arrived on the LA scene, the Dodgers were a .500 team.............last time I checked 84 wins wasn't really that far off from a .500 team. In fact, it's about 3 wins. Yeah, Manny hit a ton when he got to California, but he didn't really make the Dodgers that much better of a team alone. Andre Ethier started hitting everything from here to Kathmandu and you could easily argue that Greg Maddux had a much stronger influence on the pitching staff than Manny had on the Dodger hitters (you really think Jeff Kent would take time off his motorcycle riding, wrist breaking, teammate pushing schedule to listen to a guy with 500 homers?) Maddux, one of the greatest pitchers of all time, has had a calming effect on everyone on that staff. Derek Lowe thinks it's 2004, Chad Billingsley has harnessed his immense talent, hell, even Hiroki Kuroda has stopped doing his Hideki Irabu impression since Maddux joined Los Doyers. Here's what I'm getting at: Manny sucks. Maddux is smart. Joe Buck says contradictory things.

-The Avs had their opening game tonight (yeah, that's right, hockey's back...you had no idea it was gone, did you?) Well, good thing the offense showed up because we might as well have played with an empty net. We still lost 5-4 but at least our O showed some skill. Peter Budaj, however, should be perusing the want ads come tomorrow morning. Here's the deal: We've given this guy a chance, many chances in fact, to be our number 1 goaltender and he has never taken the initiative and ran with it. Hell, even Jose Theodore came around when given the reins last year. Tonight, we outshot the Bruins 39-20, but still came up on the losing end. 5 goals on 20 shots? Couldn't we just stick a fat guy between the pipes and reap the same results? What's Roseanne doing nowadays? I'm sure she's free.

-So the Rockies decided to fire pretty much all of their coaches? Most, but not all. In fact, only pitching coach Bob Apodaca and first base coach Glenallen Hill were spared. I have to wonder why them? With the pitching suffering the way it did this year, why didn't Apodaca get the axe? The hitting slumped and hitting coach Alan Cockrell got canned. Did O'Dowd just throw a bunch of darts at a board with all the coaches names on it? Shouldn't the firings have started with Clint and ended with Hurdle? In any other city he'd have been fired 5 years ago. But not here, we don't seem to care enough to make any major changes. We'll just sit on our laurels of our World Series appearance from a year ago and think that our fans are dumb enough to not notice/care.

-I'm only rooting for my cousin to do well in the Red Sox/Rays series. I can't in good faith root for the Red Sox after what they did to my Rockies and Indians last fall. Though it would be cool to see a World Series ring in person.