Letterman parody of the top 10 reasons why the Red Sox whipped the Rockies. I'll go straight to number one.

Tony Gwynn Jr. of the Brewers hit a two out, two strike triple off Trevor Hoffman to tie the Padres in the ninth inning on September 29th. The Brewers went on to win in 11.

In the season they won 7 of 8, then lost 8 straight to the Blue Jays, Cubs, and Astros, then won 6 of 7.

I got it. The Rockies can sweep the Phillies and D-Backs. Not to mention the Dodgers twice and Padres before that. But it would be impossible for Boston to sweep Colorado without some kind of hocus pocus like a layoff.

I've been doing my normal rounds checking in on blogs and talk radio and tne animosity is racheting up towards Boston College, Kansas, and Arizona State....Again, from everything I encounter, the typical fan scouting report is as follows------Those team names don't sound good enough to me.

1.) In any inter-league game the National league gets to use a DH and the American league not.

2.) For the American League hitter, any foul ball with 2 strikes is a strikeout.

3.) At line-up card presentation time, the National League manager gets to select one player from the American league team who is then not allowed to play in that game. In a series they cannot select the same player each day. Must be different each day.

4.)The loser of the All-Star game gets home field in the World Series.

A good rule of thumb for playoff series would be that you have to win one game before we will entertain excuses. Not accept, mind you, just allow them and politely listen.

Remember everyone dumping on Manny for showing off after clubbing a meaningless homer down 3 games to 1. From that point forward the Red Sox absolutely dominated.

Sounds as good to me as layoffs leastways.

Pujols, Edmonds, Rolen, Eckstein, Spiezio, Molina, and Taguchi had a combined 281 post season games played(just mentioning 28% of their roster) versus the young and less experienced team.

Anyone want to add up the Tigers, or the Red Sox versus Rockies feel free.

Layoffs....LOL.

For the layoff Tigers last year or the layoff Rockies this year I'd opt for something less fuzzy and speculative than the effect of layoffs. Like they got to the big stage, and were face to face with a team who had players with vastly more big stage experience. And therefore it was a classic mismatch.

The Red Sox statistical domination declined a bit in the World Series.

Youkilis came to bat in game 4 against Cleveland in the top of the sixth, Red Sox down 7-0. He started the back to back to back homers. From the top of the 6th of that game through the conclusion of that series the Red Sox as a team batted .367, with an on base of .445 and a .650 slugging for those 3 plus games.

In the days before playing Colorado, Boston beat a better team than the Rockies--the Indians--and beat them worse than they beat the Rockies. And Cleveland was not on a layoff.

The rest of recent sports?

The Spurs anihilate the Cavs in the NBA Finals. The Super Bowl was Peyton Manning versus Rex Grossman. The NHL Stanley Cup was a blowout, although I didn't know that and had to look it up. The First PGA Fed-Ex Cup had 4 guys in contention going into the final and deciding tournament and Tiger beat them all by 15 plus strokes.

The NCAA basketball final was abuse, men and womens. The BCS football championship was embarrassing. Oregon State slaughtered North Carolina back to back by 13 runs to claim the College Baseball World Series.

I can't imagine all the losers had pre ass-whipping layoffs.

If you strip away the fans excuse making after their team loses there is almost nothing left. Other than when their team wins the other teams fans excuses are totally bogus.

Okay. We have you down solid in the layoff excuse camp.

By the way this all ties in with your previous mention of my common critique of the fans. They are ingenius and relentless in their excuse making for others, as mere observers. Can you just imagine the load of crap we'd be getting if they were actually competing.

Be careful of droogoy. He may be an imposter. He's really thought the layoff excuse has been dung all along.

If it's not sarcasm, we have a real problem on our hands.

"I wonder if it would be possible for Not to take eight days of rest - after a thousand posts in six months, the servers could use the break. Of course I have no doubt he would come out of the gate firing bullets at the end of the week."

And thus by demonstration, disproving the layoff excuse.

A.)Not at all. Pronounced rust that really impacts performance is a negative exponential function of performance ratio p and time t in days. Assorted tests disclose once t = 6 days (or more) the p-factor really discloses layoff effects that are substantial. For example, on base averages of 0.400 before the layoff will plummet to less than 50% of their value. ERAs meanwhile will be less affected for certain pitchers, but explode for others (as we saw for Francis).

By this paradigm a five day layoff, while seemingly large, is in fact not insuperable. Particularly as performance indices during the regular season are not as critical as in post-season. Hence, it isn't remarkable the Rockies had five day layoff and came back. But comparing that to 6 days (as for the Tigers last year) or 8 days (Rockies this year) in the post season, is like comparing chalk and cheese.

or

B.) Beckett and Schilling just repeated what they have done a bunch of times to a bunch of teams in their post season careers.

Or did they play scrabble for 8 days?

McCarver's predicting of what pitch is coming. I'm getting suspicious of his calling of a pitch after it's thrown. He confuses sliders and curves sometimes for sure.