I'm staying at Chan's in NYC, and tomorrow we hop a train to the capital of the United States. I got to see the end of the Sox game tonight--looked like a nice W.

I also saw the end of the Yanks game and noticed Tony Pena in the dugout acting like the manager. At that point, I knew it was "spark" time--Girardi must've been ejected, and everyone everywhere would soon be talking about how he sparked the team. After the game, I did a news search on Girardi to get the details, and sure enough, MLB.com's headline is

Girardi's ejection sparks Yanks in win
Bombers reenergized in sixth inning to take down Braves

So full of shit as usual. When I brought this topic up recently, I wasn't clear on why this pisses me off so much. People thought I meant that I don't believe there's a mental aspect to the game. Of course I do. I understand baseball isn't played on paper. I hope people who follow this blog are picking up on that. What I'm saying is: If a team is "sparked" by something and goes on to win the World Series, fine. But for a team to see what that team did and try to repeat it by staging the same event that sparked the first team--that doesn't count. And you definitely can't go bragging about it, because anyone can do it at any time. This one was even more obvious than the last one, though. Before this game even happened, I had planned to write about what I heard fans saying on New York sports radio today: "Girardi needs to get ejected or something...." Not "the Yanks need to play better," but that they need to do something they've seen other--winning--teams do. Sure enough, Girardi gets ejected, and he's given credit for having actually done something, when in reality, the trillion dollar team is still five Shwisherific games out. Look, they won for the fifth time in 14 games, they're "re-energized"!

Was it Girardi's "spark" that made Robinson Cano run out of the baseline and not get called for interference? That's the funniest part about this--that the "energy" they got seemed to come in the form of their usual run-scoring dribbler-a-thon of a rally. Fielder's choice fest! Sound the siren!

So you see my point? Getting ejected on purpose, hitting someone with a pitch, starting a fight, getting pizza together....I compare this stuff to whacking the remote control to get it to work when the battery's dying. You're not "lighting a fire under it," you're just doing anything you can to attempt to get it to work. You can do over and over, and it may work every time, but eventually that thing's gonna be completely dead unless you actually replace the battery.