Last night on Sunday Night Baseball on ESPN, the Cliff Lee – Chris Carpenter duel turned out to be an absolute beauty of a game. (I love pitchers’ duels.) Entering the 8th inning, Lee had a no-hitter going and Carpenter had finally settled down and was pitching strong. Now, Lee lost the no-hitter in the top of the 8th to that little piece of sh*t Yadier Molina. Which was fine, because you can never assume a no-hitter, these are major league hitters after all.  Then, in the bottom of the 8th, misanthropic manager Tony Larussa decided to lift Carpenter after only 89 pitches. 89 pitches!! This was an AL park, so he wasn’t lifted for a pinch hitter, and he certainly wasn’t laboring as he had breezed through the 6th and the 7th.  Now, never mind the fact that I owned both of these pitchers in my fantasy league and needed one or both of them to throw complete games to win my matchup (yeah, that’s not contributing to my rage at all).  But it really really bugs me when starting pitchers get pulled early from scintillating pitching duels.  I don’t know if anyone has ever heard me rant about Tony Larussa but this guy is a terrible human being. No one on his team likes him. He’s not even a good manager, he’s just a lucky bastard. His moves make no logical sense, they just happen to work out because he’s a lucky bastard. He’s strange, moody, quirky and friendless. He’s ugly. I hate this son of a bitch. I once bought a book by Buzz Bissinger because it was a baseball book by an author I had heard of, but it turned out to be a disguised Tony Larussa biography and a piss poor one at that. I shit you people not, I actually threw this book away because I was so disgusted by the poor quality of writing and the manifest unlikeability of this horrible human being, Tony Larussa.

Seriously, what is it with the f*cking Cardinals? The worst “good” manager in history in Tony Larussa, the worst World Series “champion” in history in the 2006 Cards (and that is a FACT, I am not kidding or exaggerating, I admit that there is some opinion and bias in this rant but this part is absolutely incontrovertible) and the worst “good” player in the history of the universe in Ozzie F*cking Smith. Burn in hell, all of you.