Every Thursday, the Getting Blanked crew makes a prop bet of sorts with one another having something to do with baseball games over the weekend. Of the three competitors, whoever wins the prop bet is able to dole out a punishment on the colleague of their choice. This week’s punishment was watching and recapping Monday night’s Boston Red Sox game. #PropHate
Pregame
While the Boston Red Sox of 2012 have continued an underachieving trend that began approximately September first of last year, the Kansas City Royals scoff at such pretensions of futility, already with an 11-game losing streak on the books this year, and coming off 16 sub-.500 seasons in the last seventeen. But that’s not what tonight was about. Tonight was about punishment– a war of attrition among my brain cells as a pair of guys who can’t stop giving away free passes– Boston’s Felix Doubront and KC’s Jonathan Sanchez– set themselves to try to bore their opponents into submission.
The notoriously slow-working Sox provided one element of what looked to– and indeed did– make this contest colossally tiresome, but the real star was Sanchez. Acquired from San Francisco for Melky Cabrera this winter, Sanchez was a kind of upside play for the Royals– a guy who might be alright if he could ever fine tune his command– y’know, despite the fact that he doesn’t throw particularly hard (averaging 89.7 on fastballs in 2011, per FanGraphs), has long exited his prospect years (he’ll turn 30 in November), and couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn with an electromagnetic barn broad side hitting machine (he walked 14.9% of batters faced in 2011). But… shit, it’s Kansas City– they’ve been running Luis Mendoza out there every fifth day. How bad could Sanchez really be?
Pretty bad, actually.



