Off Topic
Hottest Team in Baseball Poses Danger
Curse vs. Curse? Piccoli Rumors Rise From Cabo
Oct 20, 2045: YELLOW SPRINGS – Here’s a fact: Of the twenty-six times the Yellow Springs Nine have been dumped from the post season, exactly zero have been made by the Twin Cities River Monsters.
In fact, the two teams have met in the post season only once, back in that fateful 2031 season when the Nine went on to yank well-deserved victory from the mouth of lady defeat while handing Jacksonville the first of two rings they took from YS9. The Nine prevailed over the River Monsters that year, four games to one.
This year, however, the Twin Cities Juggernaut enters this match as one of the hottest teams in the league, having won 14 of their last 17 games including three-straight from Long Beach. Reliever Shawn Huber has been as lock-down as a reliever has any right to ever be. The offense has pushed 107 runs across the plate in those 17 games. The River Monster’s starting rotation is as balanced as it is under-rated, and David Simpson is the opposite of Horrible and has been lacing line drives like staccato riffs in his hardest-cutting poetry.
In the meantime, the Nine’s ace, three-time Nebraska winner Carlos Valle, has suffered through an “even-year” that has been made even more caustic by his two post-season starts—which have seen him give up 11 ruins in six and two-thirds innings. The Sluggers also made mincemeat of lefty Carlos Pineda in his last outing.
Yes, the victory over the Sluggers brought vinegar to the veins, but the postmortem look forward might well turn that to ice.
There are, after all, the intangibles to take into account, right—the narratives, as they were?
We all know them.
They loom over the series like blankets of fog in a Sherlock Holmes story.
TWC GM Scott Piccoli is back from Cabo and has found a new energy that one is now hearing might well be due to some wicked, wicked voo doo magic that no one seems willing to actually talk about except for the anonymous snippet of a video we received in our offices last night—video of a young lady with eyes rolled back ad hair flayed out in an electro-static discharge that would have made Nikola Tesla jealous.
Yes, perhaps it’s a fake? Perhaps the accusations implied in that video are baseless as one would hope they were—that the image of Piccoli downing a fifth of Teliqua in one huge gulp and then throwing the empty bottle into the vat of pig’s blood—was somehow patched into the screen with some of that advanced digital editing the AI of the world is said to be doing these days.
But how else do you explain it, eh?
The man was seen carousing while the club is winning, after all, and he even admits it in side conversations with the public. Some think maybe he’s down a pint of two of blood, and others note that there’s this sphere of electricity that surrounds him now as he walks down the hallways in Twin Cities’ office suite. People can’t take their eyes off him, they say. Money keeps coming his way. His Stonks keep rising.
And on the flipside, there’s the curse.
Yes. The curse.
Every knows the depths of the curse to such a degree as we need spill no words on it here except to say that the word "choke" is whispered, not stirred, in the hallways of Yellow Springs denizens.
In a year that Mumbai wins the Middle East’s United Cup, and Scott Piccoli’s reportedly nefarious deeds bring Twin Cities to the top of the chart, can anyone doubt the power of the curse?
Now more than ever, one has to take it into account.
So what are we to make of this matchup of Heartland rivals? Will the plucky Nine manage somehow to seep past the Team of Destiny in Twin Cities, or will the River Monsters join the seemingly infinite list of franchises that have sent the Nine home?
We have our guesses, and we’re guessing the results will not be good.
“I don’t know that my heart can take another series,” said YS9 GM Ron Collins, speaking for Nine fans around the world, and a truer statement may never have been spoken in the history of man.
