Split Screens, Spectacles and Stefanski
Your daily dose of postseason baseball—plus a festival of clichés from our guy!
OK, what do we have today? Four tied series! A magical Kansas City day! An old-fashioned ace! Teams that don’t like each other! Yankees confidence! And, as a bonus for Browns and cliché fans, we have perhaps the most Kevin Stefanski press conference in the history of Kevin Stefanski press conferences! Buckle up, everybody!
In honor of all four Division Series being tied at 1-1, we’re going to extend our special JoeBlogs offer for another day.
Let’s get to the baseball!
Royals 4, Yankees 2 (Series tied, 1-1)
I’m not usually a split-screen television watcher. I watch one game at a time. This is one of many ways where I bow to the limitations of my age and processing speed. Video games long ago got too complicated for me—I’m stuck in the time of Tecmo Bowl/NHL 94*. I both marvel and scorn at our daughters’ ability to do homework, listen to music, record a Tik Tok video, watch “Gilmore Girls,” do an Instagram story, text friends, create an Apple TV show, Facetime friends, track friends, and visit with friends all at the same time.
I basically need to mute the television just to eat an apple.
*The last video game breakthrough that made any sense at all to me was the one-timer in NHL 94. After that, video game designers started adding buttons and special maneuvers and I never really caught up.
So, yes, I watch one game at a time. But on Monday night, I had the Royals-Yankees and Chiefs-Saints on split-screen at various times during the evening. It just felt like a really special night for Kansas City sports, and I wanted to experience all of it. All those years when I was in Kansas City, it often felt like the town was invisible from a sports perspective. The Chiefs were good a lot of those years, but they were never great, and, after Joe Montana retired, they never quite felt center-ring. The Royals were not good in any of those years, and they barely felt a part of MLB.
Now, Kansas City is at the very heart of American sports—Pat! Travis! Bobby! Andy! Chris! Taylor!—and having the Royals and Yankees in a playoff game at the exact same time that the undefeated Chiefs were playing Monday Night Football was a crescendo of sorts. The fact they both won was perfect. It was a Paris of the Plains Party, a BBQ Bash, a City of Fountains Soiree.
The Royals’ victory came down to three things, I think.