Grey Cup 2017

Live from the city of Ottawa Ontario (which lazy broadcasters refuse to ever say, going with the hackney and cliched and makes-you-hate-the-city-even-more term "nation's capital") tonight is the 105th Grey Cup, and the end of the Grey Cup's lengthy eastern road trip.

Next year the big game returns to Edmonton...it should have been our turn this year but the Canada150 celebrations mandated a game in Ottawa instead. Of course, the Esksimos should have playing in the game but you're already sick of Eskimos fans complaining about this. Instead we have the despicable Calgary Stampeders playing against the detestable Argonauts of Toronto the most evil city in the world that deserves to be destroyed by nuclear weapons. Oh yeah, and a squaw lady playing the halftime show.

I guess if I need to cheer on anybody in this game it needs to be Ricky Ray: it's rumoured the former Eskimo will retire after this season if he leads Toronto to a Grey Cup. And because the only thing worse than the Stampeders playing a Grey Cup game in Edmonton is having them do it as the reigning champions.

Prediction is Toronto 34, Stampeders 27.

Oilers pencilled in another playoff run for 2028

As I write this the Oilers are losing 7-2 to St. Louis. If this score holds it will be the second Blues win in a week against Edmonton, and the Oilers third consecutive loss. As a result, the Oilers will have 16 points in 21 games, and be on-pace for a 62 point season. Three times over this past decade the Oilers have finished with exactly 62 points (their lowest ever in a full season), so why not a fourth?

Don't forget too that the ArizonaPhoenix Coyotes beat Toronto last night and the NHL's worst team now sits with 13 points. The Vancouver Canucks (no, seriously!) are holding onto the last wildcard spot with 23 points, meaning the Oilers are twice as far away from a wildcard spot as they are from being the worst team in the league. Yes, last season and the playoff run were fun, but it looks like it will be a once-in-a-lifetime aberration.

So it's time now to do what Oilers fans traditionally do in mid-to-late November...start fantasizing about getting a #1 overall draft pick who will completely turn the team around.^† Also part of the tradition is coming up with a slogan to chant as the Oilers continue to fall to the bottom.

^† It's worth noting that the infamous Oilers H.O.P.E. line (Hall, Omark, Paajarvi, Eberle) has now officially and entirely been given/traded away

It was four years ago that I coined Stay Bad for Ekblad which didn't work. Fall for Hall did. Fail for Nail did. Lose All Honour for Connor did. So now it's time to try again. Here are the top prospects for 2018 according to Rogers Sportsnet:

1. Rasmus Dahlin, D
2. Andrei Svechnikov, RW
3. Adam Boqvist, D
4. Brady Tkachuk, C
5. Quinn Hughes, D
6. Filip Zadina, RW
7. Jack McBain, C
8. Joel Farabee, LW
9. Rasmus Kupari, C
10. Jared McIsaac, D

Svechnikov is an awfully long name to try and chant. "Be sov(ft) for Svechnikov?" Tonight I could accept "Lose to the Blues for Hughes" as a decent chant. "Disdain for McBain" seems to be stretching it. However you'll notice I deliberately skipped number one. Why? Simple: he's the best and most obvious choice.

So let's do it Oilers fans. Let's start practicing now, we'll have lots of chances to use it if the season continues like this:

KEEP FALLIN' FOR DAHLIN!

Lest We Forget

To my mind Remembrance Day should be commemorated at 11:11 on the 11th day of the 11th month. But nobody seems to agree.

Six Myths About the Trump Election Win (that both the left and the right believe)

A year ago today, Donald Trump became the 45th President of the United States of America. The left has been alternating between rioting, crying, and declaring war ever since. The right is alternating between celebrating and...declaring war.

So already there is some common ground between the two sides who usually disagree on everything. However, there is lots of common ground available, isn't there? There are lots of lessons we had learned on November 9th, and we all agree what they are. It's heartwarming, it's comforting, and it's inspirational.

Unfortunately, it's all totally bogus. Here are six things that aren't true about last year's election that both the right and the left have fallen for.

#6 - Undecideds won Trump the election: This comes up in every election in every country, and it never holds any water. Please stop, take a deep breath. Cosmopolitan very very very thinly disguised their contempt for non-voters, essentially accusing them of putting Trump in the White House. It doesn't matter, frankly, what the percentage of eligible voters who didn't vote was: they didn't cast a vote, and you can't assume that if you strong-armed all of them into a polling booth that they would pull the level you wanted them to pull. Maybe every one of them would have chosen Hillary and put her in the White House. Or maybe every one of them would have picked The Donald and he would have swept the entire country. After all, Trump did well with undecided voters in the third debate, but poorly in the first debate. The ultimate answer is that you don't know how they would have voted. In fact, they may not know either. They don't count, they never count. Never count voters who didn't vote.



#5 - The results are a major cultural shift: Remember what I said above? Ignore it. Now we need to count the undecided voters who didn't vote. As a percentage of the general population, in 2016 the Republican candidate won 26.07% of the potential votes. In 2012 the Republican candidate won 27.83% of the popular vote, and in 2008 the Republican candidate won 26.58% of the popular vote. Conversely, the Democratic candidate in 2008 won 30.82% of the popular vote, in 2012 the Democratic candidate won 30.1% of the popular vote, and in 2016 won 26.36% of the popular vote. Now look at this on a graph:



If you're looking at this image on a small enough screen and/or squinting, you might not even realize that these bars aren't all the same size. The distribution of votes looks pretty much identical. Any real discrepancies are probably from the estimates of eligible voters anyways: all of these figures are from Wikipedia, however estimates vary widely. StatisticsBrain.com repored 231,556,622 eligible voters in 2016, Wikipedia claims 251,107,000. In 2012 the Bipartison Policy Center says there were 218,959,000 eligible voters while Wikipedia says 235,248,000. That's a 9% gap in both cases, meaning the margin of error for the size of the bars far exceeds the actual gap between the parties (though the number of votes, unlike the number of eligible voters, is a firm well-agreed number).



If anything, looking all the way back to 1992, it appears the Democrats have a pretty solid line of support (a slight blip in 2008) with Republicans getting their voters out with a much less consistent rate of production. But there's no real cultural shifts going on here: the tiniest change in the number of vote % can make a wild difference. Look at the Electoral College totals which I included for each party above the graph. The difference between the Democrats in 2004 and 2008 is striking: their seats in the Electoral College increased 45% (from 251 to 365)...by increasing their share of the national vote by 12% (and in real terms only by 3.3%). For those objecting to the Electoral College, that isn't uncommon. The Conservative Party of Canada won 99 seats with 32% of the ballots cast in 2015 while the Liberal Party won 184 seats with 39% of the popular vote...meaning each 1% of vote gained one party 4.71 seats versus 3.09 seats for another. That's just how it goes. -ed]

#4 - Whites voted for Trump: Whites tend to vote Republican. In 2012, 59% of white voters supported Romney. In 2008, 55% of white voters supported McCain. In 2004, 58% of white voters supported Bush. In 2000, 55% of white voters supported Bush. So how many white voters did Trump get? Drumroll please...

...


...


...


...hey, did you ever watch that "House of Cards" show? Doesn't it open up with that faggot Kevin Spacey choking a dog to death? Isn't he the hero of the show, and also a Democrat? Isn't that worse than 2/3rds of what Trump is alleged to have done and probably worse than anything he actually has done? I have no point here (there is a point to the actions of real-Spacey vs Trump), just an open question...


...


...are you ready?...


58%.

That's right. Donald Trump's share of the white vote is slightly less than Mitt Romney in 2012. Some of that is the Utah Mormons supporting Evan McMullin, and some will be going to Gary Johnson tripling his vote share from four years ago. Still, whites voted for the chap with (R) next to his name at a pretty consistent rate from election to election.

What about subdividing whites up? Here there are some notable discrepancies: Trump received the support of 67% of non-college educated whites, versus only 61% for Romney. It's balanced by Romney getting 56% of college educated whites while Trump only secured 49%. Trump also lost Romney's 30% share of (religious, not ethnic!) Jewish voters, going from 30% to 24%. But this is still better than both 2000 and 2008 and comparable to 2004.

#3 - Women voted for Hillary: Similar to the bit about whites, Hillary did well with women, garnishing 54% of the female vote. She certainly can lord that over her predecessor who won in 2012 with...55% of the female vote. Which itself was a dropoff from 2008, where he had support from 56% of women voters. You can't even attribute any of this to Jill Stein: like Gary Johnson, she tripled her share of the national vote from 2012...however the sheer numbers are too small to make a difference. She went from 0.36% to 0.98%.

#2 - Blacks and other minorities voted against Trump: I put all of these as separate issues just to pad the numbers, frankly. It's all the exact same phenomenon. "Hateful racist" Trump received 8% of the black vote. Loving and inclusive Mitt Romney received less of the black vote share than Trump did, getting only 6%. In 2008, McCain received only 4%. In other words, Trump received the highest proportion of black votes for a Republican Presidential nominee since 2004, and almost the same share as in 2000. Trump received 29% of the asian vote, lower than McCain received in 2008 but higher than Romney received in 2012. Trump received 37% of the "other" racial votes, Romney received 38% and McCain only received 31%.

Finally, we come to Hispanics. Trump was infamously going to collapse with Hispanic voters and that alone would cost him the election, pollsters assured us. His comments on Mexican rapists and an end to illegal immigration across the southern border poisoned any possible relationship with American's hispanic population and doomed his candidacy. Now first you have to remember that 2000 & 2004 were huge outliers for the Republicans. George W. Bush (pbuh) was legendary in his relationship with Hispanic voters. In 2004, 44% of them supported him for President and was a major factor in securing his dominant win over John Kerry. In 1996 Dole only received 21% of the Hispanic vote, and in 2008 John McCain received 31%. 2012 saw Mitt Romney's share fall to 27%, shedding three-quarters of the 2004 gains over 1996. Trump again saw an increase of Hispanic voters versus Romney. Not 'yuge' by any means, but 29% of Hispanics (including 33% of Latino men) put a vote down for the guy with (R) next to his name, even though with the exception of "really large wall" his immigration policies were basically identical to the guy who got 27%. In other words, Hispanics voted for Trump at about the same level as they have been since spillover from a President highly regarded by Hispanics.



#1 - Polls are important and the pollsters got it all wrong: Those lying biased pollsters have upset literally everybody. Before the election, Trump supporters took to the internet to claim that organizations running the polls and the media reporting the both are both so biased towards Hillary that you couldn't take any of their claims at face value. Trump, they said, was going to win, and win big, and if the pollsters didn't agree they were lying to you. After the election, it's the left irate at these pollsters. Hillary supporters were under the impression that she had a strong lead going into the polls, and therefore weren't as motivated to get out and vote, thinking their girl had it all sewn up. The Guardian reports that the Democrats didn't devote much money to Wisconsin and Michigan because polls told them their lead was secure. However, the polls said Hillary would win and instead Trump won. I mean, the numbers don't lie, do they? You promise X and when X doesn't happen, you were wrong. What could be more obvious than that?

I suppose the better question is why are you believing polls in the first place? The old adage that the only poll that matters is held on election day carries a lot of weight, frankly. Much like how we never cared about movie box office receipts back in the day, we never used to rely so heavily on polls before either. It's mostly a function of an endless media cycle and our willingness to boil anything complicated down to a simple "who's winning" question. Polls are almost like watching a game, and keeping your eye on the score. It's important, I suppose: at the end of the game, the score is the most important thing. As it goes on, the score can help you understand a lot of what's going on...the question of "why are they bunting" or "why are they playing a neutral zone trap" is often answered by looking at the score. Similarly, polls could have helped you understand why Clinton had been going on about Muslims for the last three days of the campaign (a new poll had showed Trump's support among Muslims was increasing)^†.

But that's in a case where all you care about is whether your side is winning or losing. In sports, that's most of us. But what if you're a professional scout looking at a junior or minor league team? Should our team sign that hot young prospect? If you're an NBA scout who gets asked that question, and your answer is "his team won the game 102-98" you are probably going to be fired within twelve minutes. Who cares? Did this hot young prospect even play in the game? If he did, what was his PER? And how did he look? Did you see things in his game that made you confident when he went up to the next higher levels that he would succeed? Does he have the specific qualities that the team is looking for? Does his nature and personality mean he would be a good fit in your locker room? You can see how for a person wanting to evaluate two candidates these analogies are far more applicable than score-watching. I suppose you could say it's a factor in how polarized we've all become...but then remember that graph about how few voting age Americans actually move their vote from election to election. The undecideds tend to decide all of these races by relatively narrow margins, and therefore how the media covers a campaign and what information the electorate is exposed to are major factors into how that election plays. As a result, poll watching is completely useless to the small sliver of the voting-aged public who will ultimately need to decide what the candidates are all about and decide the actual election.

^† This is just an example.

Now understanding that the polls shouldn't be important, they were still wrong. Here's The Guardian again:

I spent almost two years working for Nate Silver’s website FiveThirtyEight, where I hoped to learn the secrets of political forecasting. I walked away totally disillusioned. It sometimes seemed as though their interpretation of the math wasn’t free from subjective bias. There was also a certain arrogance that comes from being part of an elite that “gets the numbers”, and an entrenched hierarchy meant that predictions weren’t properly scrutinised.

But analysts such as Silver, a man dubbed an oracle, a soothsayer and a savant have an interest in continuing to share these predictions. Where would the man’s career be if he simply replied “don’t know” when asked what Americans would do? It’s not just FiveThirtyEight. The New York Times also got it wrong, along with Reuters, NBC news and countless others. Just about everyone did – because they couldn’t resist the temptation to try to guess human behaviour.

There's a clue in there, for one. As Mona Chalabi writes, humans aren't subjected to Newtonian mechanics, so you can't always treat information gleaned from them reliably. But polls have been highly accurate before, haven't they? Nate Silver didn't come out of nowhere: FiveThirtyEight.com rose to prominence after correctly predicting all 50 states during the 2012 Presidential election. Yet the day before the election Nate Silver assured his liberal audience that Donald Trump was going to slink away on November 9th with his tail between his legs.

Our forecast has Clinton winning the national popular vote by 3.6 percentage points, which is similar to her lead in recent national polls. Her chances of winning the popular vote are 81 percent, according to our forecast.

A 3.6 lead in percentage points looks impressive...until you ask what the error is. 538.com admitted that Hillary's lead wasn't that much more than the margin of error.<sup>‡

‡</sup> Whenever somebody wants to show you an average, you really need to look at two pieces of information. The average itself, and the standard deviation. In a way, that's what the above analysis of white/female/minority voters was. Sure Trump only got 8% of the black vote, but when you consider his range was basically 4-11%, it puts the numbers into better perspective. If you really want to be a pro at this, when you receive an average ask what kind of average it is as well.

To be fair, the polls were consistently biased towards Clinton. It's not like any major polls were predicting a Trump win...but the "shy Tory" concept wasn't new for this election. Pollsters gave a cold hard reading of the results, such as they were. It was when spokesmen for polling firms and their media contacts started interpreting the results that things got hairy. Subconsciously or not, because none of them knew any "shy Tories" they clearly must not exist...and it didn't help that numerous polling firms self-selected their sample size to begin with. Silver himself has to note that statewide polling errors can easily compound for a particular candidate, and no poll can be accurate when the biased left-wing media essentially forces people to lie to pollsters.

People can change their mind, too. In June of 2015 Tom Mulcair was leading in the national polls...by October he the leader of the third place party and by April he was fired. Likewise, particularly in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, Trump scored big in people deciding in the last week of the campaign (similar to how Trudeau became Prime Minister), and in many of the swing states rigorous polls weren't even being conducted. Polls can be right or wrong, but what they should never be is stale.

Finally, swinging back to the Shy Tory question, perhaps if you know about the effect you might break with tradition and look at candidate internal polling. Trump's pollsters called Ohio, Michigan, Iowa, and Wisconsin in the days before the election.

So "the pollsters" didn't necessarily get it wrong. They didn't fail to predict that whites would "vote for Trump in droves" because they didn't, anymore than Hispanics rallied the vote to "stop Trump" anymore than you could have stopped Trump by forcing undecideds into a polling station. They're all myths about the 2016 Presidential Election.

Oh, and here's a bonus truth about the election both sides believe: one of the two candidates colluded with Russians to try and influence the election.

World Series 2017 Game 7 Liveblog: Houston Astros at Los Angeles Dodgers

6:27pm: I just got in from working late and already the Astros are winning 2-0 after a double, and error, and a grounder (with a stolen base in the middle). Houston has scored more this inning than they did all last night. Only one run is earned though. Darvish has been struggling, and it doesn't look to be letting up.

6:30pm: Yuli Gurriel is getting a ton of boos after the incident where he used a racial taunt against Darvish. Or was it the other way around? I forget. Neither of 'em are WASPs.

6:31pm: Also on TV right now is the Edmonton Oilers losing to playing against the Pittsburgh Penguins, a rematch of last week's game. May Connor McDavid get a little bit of Donald Trump's luck and skill...

6:33pm: Gurriel is getting a long at-bat here. 13 pitches later he flies out to right field. This half-inning was only about 10-12 minutes, but it sure felt a lot longer I'm sure to Dodgers fans. 2-0 Houston.

6:35pm: Boeing is really turning up the charm offensive against the Shiny Pony with this "Boeing cares about Canada" commercial aren't they?

6:37pm: The Shocktop is poured into a pint glass, the oven is on, it's pizza and beer and baseball night at Third Edge of the Sword World Headquarters in Sancti Spíritus, Cuba. And just on cue, a commercial for The Pint plays. Last year I watched Game 7 at MKT where it wasn't until the entire bar erupted in the 8th inning of that epic battle that management figured out we wanted to hear the game audio and not shitty Taylor Swift songs. There are definite advantages to watching these games at home.

6:38pm: That asshole Taylor (Chris, not Swift) blasts the Dodgers' first hit of the game and gets a leadoff double.

6:44pm: McCullers takes out the other asshole T (Turner) at the top of the Dodgers lineup. With a hit-batsman though...not a strikeout like I was hoping that sentence would mean.

6:50pm: Puig also gets hit, and now the bases are loaded.

6:52pm: That looked ugly for a second, but Pederson hit to SS and the inning is over.

6:59pm: Beautiful looking shot of the sky was just on. Having been to Dodger stadium I can say it's a decent enough ballpark that's more notable for its amazing parking than anything about the stadium. You can get a Dodger Dog there though. I can't get a Dodger Dog in Edmonton...which suddenly made me think of all those concession snacks you can pick up at Commonwealth Stadium during the Eskimos home game that is hopefully going to be decided on Saturday. (If it's decided on Friday, that's bad)

7:02pm: Darvish throws Gonzalez a slider that acts more like a changeup, and now it's runners on second and third with no outs. Darvish's night is almost over.

7:04pm: A sacrifice RBI by McCullers Jr. makes it a 3-0 game with 2 outs. LA is losing the narrative worse than Harvey Weinstein...

7:08pm: I was just mouthing "homerun" and Springer does it! Astros take a 5-0 lead and Darvish isn't going to last until the end of the second inning.

7:19pm: While I was wolfing down a Bacon Double Cheeseburger Delicio pizza, the Dodgers have come back. That's the big thing about LA I remember from the NLCS: you score on them and the next half-inning they come right back to score on you at least as much and quite often even more. You even saw it in the first inning, where LA loaded the bases (not entirely their doing, to be fair) and could have blown the game away the other way had Pederson hit out of the park.

7:22pm: McCullers gets out of a jam of his own creation again. This can't be sustainable, and A. J. Hinch agrees: just before the double play to end the inning he made the call to his bullpen. The starters aren't going to survive into the fourth inning.

7:27pm: Altuve flies out from a pitch from...CLAYTON MOTHERFUCKING KERSHAW! I would have thought Morrow would have stayed out for at least 2-3 outs. Kershaw can't go more than about 60 pitches tonight and the Dodgers might find themselves out of pitchers by the end of this game.

7:29pm: On the other hand, the Dodgers need 60 quality pitches right here and right now. Kershaw shuts the Astros out for the first inning of this game.

7:34pm: Seager gets a good hit that should be an easy double, but a slip and fall on the basepaths means he barely gets back to first. The Dodgers have been their own worst enemy for much of this game. And McCullers is his own team's worst enemy, hitting Turner again.

7:36pm: Bellanger is up and that's the only reason McCullers is still in this game. He swings wildly on the first pitch to justify Hinch's decision.

7:38pm: Bellanger strikes out again and that's McCullers Jr's night.

7:41pm: Penguins have taken a 1-0 lead in their game against the Oilers tonight. I'll be writing more about the Oilers in an upcoming blog post.

7:43pm: No team that plays this horrible rap/pop music during the World Series deserves to win. I'll be writing more about who deserves to win World Series matches in an upcoming blog post.

7:47pm: After three innings both starters are long-gone but the Astros still lead 5-0 and the Dodgers are leaving 2+ men on base every inning.

7:48pm: Nothing tonight can possibly make me happier than finding out these useless Toronto fans have to deal with a gametime other than 7:30pm ET, which apparently nobody in that evil city can possibly handle.

7:50pm: They just showed a shot of the 1960 World Series which ended with a home run hit past the fence...into the grassy area behind the fence. No seats behind the fences is the MLB version of the "no ads on the boards and no helmets" that you obsess over when watching old NHL footage.

7:53pm: Gonzalez takes second base on a wild pitch, after making it to first because the Dodgers didn't field his hit to third base properly. Houston is getting all the bounces, so let's not pretend this 5-0 score is just them doing amazing or Los Angeles falling apart.

7:59pm: Oilers take a 2-1 lead! Oh, and Kershaw is the third guy up to the plate but the Dodgers look likely to keep him in the game. Like I said, they need those 60 pitches.

8:02pm: 2 outs and nobody on, Kershaw comes out.

8:05pm: Kershaw's .184 batting average just dipped a bit. Inning over.

8:14pm: It's like this it's like that it's like this nigger...another scoreless half-inning in the book. The game is starting to move a litle faster now that Kershaw is controlling the Dodgers pitching and the Houston bats have cooled off a little. The game also feels more like an "anybody can win this" than it looked after the second.

8:20pm: Seager takes a walk after a long at-bat and now Turner is up with 1 out and a runner on first. The crowd is surprisingly involved in the game to this point. God I hope Turner breaks his leg and it gets infected and he never plays again.

8:26pm: A bounce finally goes LA's way: Turner is on-base after a ball dribbles into the left field, and in the fifth inning with a 5-0 score the 5th pitcher of the game is going to the showers.

8:30pm: The second chubbiest negro pitcher in the major leagues (Liriano, first place going to C.C. Sabathia) is on the mound now. He gets an out but Dodgers still have runners on the corners.

8:34pm: Now Chris Devinski is on the mound. Okay Hinch here's the deal: I can liveblog every pitching change you do in this game, but I also have a beer to drink and I have to manage the time a little bit here. Sorry buddy.

8:44pm: Every time Brian McCann is up to the plate I keep thinking about Brian McCabe, the Toronto Maple Leaf who liked to knock up chubby squaws.

8:48pm: Both managers are basically trying to outsmart each other. Hinch is replacing his defensive outfielders with pinch hitters and forcing Dave Roberts to micromanage his pitching plans to compensate. Kershaw has bases loaded with two outs.

8:49pm: Houston got played. 5-0 in the middle of the sixth, two and a half hours after this game started.

9:00pm: Edmonton and Pittsburgh are tied 2-2 halfway through the third period. Dodgers have two baserunners again, the question now will be whether or not they can capitalize on this situation. Barnes pops out for the first out.

9:01pm: Dodgers score a run. Ethier barrels one into the right field gap and Pederson crosses home plate.

9:04pm: Pittsburgh has taken a 3-2 lead with about 7 minutes left on the clock, and a now-thunderous LA crowd is quieted instantly as Chris Taylor swings and misses. 2 outs. 5-1.

9:05pm: Seager shatters his bat in a fashion that befits the phrase "shattered bat" and almost runs out the hit but not quite. LA is on the board but Houston still has the lead.

9:07pm: I think my Labbatt Blue has gone skunky. Being Labbatt Blue (or "Labatt's Blue" as my father would say) it's not easy to tell.

9:10pm: Beautiful sliding catch by Chris Taylor deprives Springer of another hit in the World Series.

9:14pm: I'm disseminating the accounts of this game and I don't have express written consent of the Office of the Commissioner of the Major Leagues of Baseball. Come get me, bro'.

9:17pm: Altuve gets a walk and the Oilers are 40 seconds away from losing yet another game.

9:18pm: Altuve steals second and the clock winds down in Edmonton.

9:25pm: Keuchel is warming up in the Astros bullpen and Turner breaks his bat on an easy popup to first.

9:26pm: It's worth noting that this game has now exceeded three hours.

9:28pm: Houston shuts the Dodgers out again and we move onto the final two innings. 90 minutes ago I bet somebody the game would be over by 9:50pm. Looks like I'm about to be humiliated.

9:32pm: A guy named Wood is pitching in the postseason for an NL team wearing white and blue. Not as fun as the last time that happened.

9:35pm: It's interesting as they go through crowd shots how few celebrities they can find at a Los Angeles Dodgers Game 7. Contrast that with the LA Lakers, or for that matter the Chicago Cubs last year. They can't all be in counseling after being ass-raped by Kevin Spacey, can they?

9:39pm: Joe Buck just mentioned that Dodger Stadium is the third oldest ballpark in the majors (after Fenway and Wrigley). I've been to all three, but I'm wondering who the fourth is. The answer? Angel Stadium in Anaheim (which I've also been too, which is really nice.

9:44pm: Forsythe pops out and now the Dodgers have 4 outs left to go. Can they finish this game is under 6 minutes?

9:45pm: Mavin may not be a defensive specialist but he can catch a ball, and we're into THE NINTH INNING OF GAME 7 OF THE WORLD SERIES. It doesn't get more exciting than this...except of course for when it does. Exciting hasn't described this game since Kershaw first handled the rosin bag.

9:49pm: Verlander is now pitching in the bullpen, just like Greg Zaun predicted. Here's time for your regular reminder that Greg Zaun took steroids. But Jamie Campbell can't say "Cleveland Indians". Man I wish TSN had the rights to more things.

9:51pm: Springer has been quiet in the back half of this game (everybody has, to be fair), but now he's at-bat and wildly swinging at everything.

9:54pm: The good Chase (Utley, not Hedley) is pinch hitting to start the 9th inning. Still 5-1 Houston.

9:55pm: Utley strikes out. Maybe should have gone with Hedley? And how many kids in America got named "Chase" in the past 20-30 years? Did they all become big league ballplayers?

9:58pm: Chris Taylor breaks his bat and is thrown out on his way to 1st base. Cory Seager might be the Dodgers last batter of the 2017 series.

9:59pm: They did it! Seager thrown out at first on an easy play and the Houston Astros have their first ever World Series trophy!

10:00pm: The crowd has been quiet for most of the night but they sound like zombies now...appropriate enough for the day after Halloween.

10:06pm: Some highlights from the box score... Springer hit .379 tonight and Gattis is the only other hitter in this game over .300. Each team used 5 pitchers on the night, and only Kershaw and Morton went longer than 2 1/3 innings. Morton is awarded the win and Darvish the loss, despite them pitching on opposite sides of the game.

10:09pm: Altuve is the worst interviewee. Well, one of the worst. The worst still has to be every negro on the Eskimos during our 2015 Grey Cup win. All Walker or Odel Willis could do is yell tribal woots, meanwhile Reilly and Justin Sorensen were giving thoughtful interviews.

10:13pm: Greg Zaun is a horrible guy and a horrible player on a horrible team. But he hates and doens't understand millennials, so God bless him.

10:15pm: "The Houston Astros are your World Series champions!" The least creative trophy name ("The Commissioner's Trophy") in sport is officially being given to Jim Crane...the owner? Really? You guys give the owner the trophy first? Worst trophy presentation overall, I suppose.

10:19pm: Anyways, the game is over. The Houston Astros are the World Series champs, my cable box just shut off after 3 hours of inactivity and I don't feel like turning it back on. This didn't hold a candle to last year's epic game, and to be fair even if you aren't a Cubs fan you can't say that Houston finally winning a World Series compares to the Cubs ending a drought so long that the previous Cubs WS win wasn't covered in HDTV, or colour TV, or TV, or even radio...it was in newspapers. So this was a decently long drought ended in fairly pedestrian fashion. Good on you, Houston. #HoustonStrong or whatever bullshit that's about. Goodnight.