I saw some ducks practicing their teenage girl faces at the pond today

{Current Mood: Frumpy}

Ayo,

It’s that time again...time for one of Mr. Raymond’s Conspiracy Theories.

This one comes to you from the realm of Major League Beisbol.

This one should’ve also been fairly obvious the moment I saw Cal Ripken Jr. doing color commentary for the Yankees-Orioles series.

But my latest Conspiracy Theory states that the Yankees will not be advancing to the ALCS tonight.

Now my last bold prediction that the Devils would win four straight to take the Stanley Cup after going down three games to zero led to my infamous Conspiracy Theory that the Devils got screwed and that the Stanley Cup Finals (NOT the entire NHL season like everyone seems to think I meant) were fixed. So perhaps I’ll be wrong and my New York Beisbol Yankees will prevail.

And yes I consider them MY New York Beisbol Yankees because I pitch for them in MLB2K12’s My Player Mode… I also am a shortstop and a closer for them in two additional My Player modes. So to anyone who says to me “Oh they’re YOUR Yankees? Do you play for them now?”… actually, yes I do.

Anywhos, as many of you know, I’m an independent professional wrestler. And anyone who knows me knows that I like to relate a lot of things, my Conspiracy Theories especially, back to pro wrestling. It’s like the great Mr. Kennedy Kennedy Anderson says: “pro wrestling is real, people are fake.” I also happen to believe that life and sports mirror wrestling and that most, if not all, professional sporting events are fixed.

I also can’t help but point out that once I realized this, I began to notice a lot more color analysts, sportswriters, and play-by-play guys using words like “storylines” and saying things like “you couldn’t write a better ending” or "you couldn't script this any better." Listen for it. It’s more prevalent than you might think.

Anyhows, I root for the New York Beisbol Yankees who happen to be the biggest heel (bad guy) organization not only in Major League Beisbol, but in all of professional sports.

I heard a stat yesterday saying that if the Orioles won Game 4, all four ALDS matchups would go to a Game 5 for the first time in MLB history. My initial reaction was that the Yankees, being the heels that they are, wouldn’t let this happen.

But then I remembered the argument I made on the most recent “Pondcast” (which I finally won but will probably never see aired :<) for why the wild card games should remain as a one-game playoff instead of a three-game series. We all know we’d be rooting for a three-game series to go to Game 3 and we all love sudden death situations in sports.

So now we have a sudden death Game 5 tonight. This is, I’m sure, what every non-Yankee fan and Yankee hater (which is basically 95% of the universe) wanted to see happen.

I would compare the New York Yankees to “The Nature Boy” Ric Flair in his prime. He was always at his best as a heel and when he was defending his NWA World Heavyweight Championship against the biggest superstar of whatever territory brought him in to defend the championship. He was so good at making people look better than they really were and it’s a common belief in the wrestling world that Flair could have a five-star match with a broom.

And, like the Yankees, everyone wanted to see him lose. He was that good at what he did. 

And he lost his fair share of World Championships. He is, after all, a 16-time Heavyweight Champion of professional wrestling between the NWA, WCW, & the WWE.

Flair was one of the biggest pro wrestling stars of the 80’s and, while he had five-star classics with superstars and wrestling legends like Dusty Rhodes & Ricky Steamboat, he also made you believe that guys like Ted DiBiase (before he became famous in the WWE as The Million Dollar Man) had a chance at becoming World Champion. He also made the careers of guys like Sting, Barry Windham, & Lex Luger just to name a few. He gave guys like Sting, Steamboat, Kerry Von Erich, Ronnie Garvin, etc their first, and sometimes only, NWA World Title runs.

Through it all, the constant has been Ric Flair. Through MLB history, the Yankees have been associated with greatness and people don’t like the fact that they’re perennially successful despite overpaying for pretty much anyone on their roster that's not a homegrown talent and letting homegrown talents walk away and become stars elsewhere.

But over the past ten years or so, there have been a lot of teams, especially in the AL East, that have been making noise at the expense of the Yankees.

I’m sure everyone remembers the Yankees epically collapsing against the Boston Red Sox in ’04 which led to the Red Sox winning the World Series for the first time in a bajillion years. Now, with the exception of this season, they’re a perennial threat to the division title.

The Rays have been a real contender in the AL East since 2008 and, although they had already been to the World Series by this time, I can vividly remember the seven run deficit they overcame on the final day of last year’s regular season when they beat the Yankees in 12 innings and won the AL Wild Card, bouncing the Red Sox from the playoffs in the process.

Moving outside the division, the Texas Rangers went to their first World Series in 2010 by beating the Yankees in six games after failing against them in the playoffs three separate times in the 1990s and coming into that series with a 1-9 postseason record against them.

The Detroit Tigers, who hadn’t been to the postseason since 1987, beat the heavily favored Yankees three games to one in the ALDS in 2006 and went to the World Series for the first time since 1984.

And now the Orioles, who haven’t been to the playoffs since 1997, enter tonight’s Game 5 with 11 wins in 22 games against the Yankees this year and a chance to knock them out of the playoffs in the Bronx.

The fact that the Yankees have come out losers in most of these situations could lead a lot of people to believe that they’re losing their touch. But they’re making the playoffs consistently and winning an occasional World Series to let everyone know they’re still Major League Besibol’s Shelton Benjamin gold standard.

The Orioles are like that one wrestler from “Insert Wrestling Federation Here” that everyone had been predicting to break out for years & who finally gets a chance to fight for the World Championship. Win or lose, and no matter where he goes from here, his career is made because he made it this far.

That being said, the only reason I’m picking the Orioles to win is because of the presence of Ripken in the booth.

This has been another edition of Mr. Raymond’s Conspiracy Theories.

And one of these days I can probably copy, paste, and repost this same piece when we inevitably find ourselves in a similar situation against the Blue Jays because, at this rate, it’s bound to happen sooner rather than later.

Deuces,

-Ray-