Wednesday night was another lesson in why you should never, never, never bet on baseball.

Roy Halladay vs. Carl Pavano.  Twins coming off another clunker and patching together a lineup in a place where they have a history of playing poorly.

Every sign I could think of, quite logically, would have pointed toward betting the mortgage on the Jays.

Twins win 4-1.

I had the game on the second monitor at my desk (pretty nice gig, huh?) while following the Obama speech on the main one. I had to check the game log to see just how the score went from 1-1 to 2-1 (Hello, Justin Morneau) and then to 4-1 (a two-run double by Michael Cuddyer, who never gets clutch hits). And before I could get nervous about it, Joe Nathan finished off the Jays with a 15-pitch ninth.

Over the years, there have been a half-dozen times when I have looked at a match-up and thought the outcome was inevitable. I had a gambling friend who used to call those “house-payment games.” And it seems like every time, the team that wasn’t supposed to win manages to do so. I come up with an excuse to tell this story once a year, but a friend of mine once called when he was in Las Vegas and asked me for a sure thing. While telling him there was no such thing as a sure thing, I did point out that a certain B. Blyleven was facing the Rangers in an 11 a.m. game at the Metrodome.

“Can you imagine them trying to hit his curve?” I asked.

This is what happened.

For those of you who don’t click on links, the Rangers hit seven home runs — five off them off Blyleven — and won 14-1.

Put your money to better use, like taking the k-bro pledge. For those of us who are in, the tally is 10 items of food, with the hope that it’ll be 13 by sundown.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 10th, 2009 at 10:19 am and is filed under Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.