High Chaos Quotient
So of course I forgot to set my clocks back last night. I was reminded of this when a friend and cow-orker called me this morning to ask if I could come into work to help him with a problem he was having with a demo system. Since he's going on the road early tomorrow morning, I had to deal with it today. But since it was really 10 am, not 11, when he called, I had time. It turned out of course to be one of those simple-to-fix but hard-to-find things, and took a couple of hours to track down.
And on the drive home it started snowing, and quite hard, making visibility a challenge. We didn't get much accumulation, as it's still pretty warm out, but I guess summer is over. And fall, too, for that matter.
The second game was designed for maximum chaos, and we got it, as I again plunged off the edge of the board on the very second turn and had to race to catch up. But things worked out fairly well as I limped to the first flag just behind a few other people - and those few other people then spent the next several turns going round and round the Coliseum board, having a devil of a time getting out. I was lucky to have some breathing room at the second flag and got across the Cannery Row board - which is very complicated - before other people really caught up to me. Two other people then came hunting after me, but I disposed of one of them, and the other two got in each other's way and allowed me to sneak up to the final flag.
I really love this game, although I think a few of my gaming buddies find it a bit frustrating, as sometimes it takes one or two people a while to program their robot, or they make a mistake and put their cards in the wrong order. Or maybe it's just that sometimes the games take a long time. But I like it; it has a high chaos quotient, but still requires a lot of skill.
In every big game like this, there's always second-guessing of what the managers did. In my judgment, the turning point wasn't Jose Mesa giving up the game-tying run in the 9th innings, but, rather, Cleveland manager Mike Hargrove sending rookie pitcher Jaret Wright out to pitch the 7th. Sure, Wright didn't look like he was tiring, but he's only 21, he'd pitched a great game, and he was working on only 3 days' rest. With his whole pitching staff to work with in a do-or-die game, I think Hargrove should have turned the ball over to Assenmacher or Nagy earlier; instead, Wright goes out and gives up a home run to Bobby Bonilla, putting the Marlins within one run of a tie, and setting up the 9th inning situation.
So, the nightmare for Cleveland continues, as they haven't won a World Series since 1948 (the 4th-longest span, by my count, behind only the two Chicago teams, and my Red Sox). Well, at least they've been to two World Series in the last three years, and have a strong club who may well be back next year. The Red Sox haven't been to a World Series since 1986, and it's been longer than that for the Chicago clubs...
Not all sour grapes, though: Jim Leyland has been waiting for decades to win the Series, and it was nice to see him and Bobby Bonilla - who were together in Pittsburgh six years ago - hugging each other after the victory. And as much as the media moguls were unhappy with a Series that didn't feature big-market teams like the Yankees, it's always nice to see a new team like the Marlins make some history of their own.
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