Gnats All, Folks

You are absolutely right, it does seem weird to go the entire baseball season writing hardly an article on the topic, then to suddenly do so now, but since God has finally revealed himself as a Yankee-hater, the opportunity was too good to pass up.

The New York Yankees needed a win. Being down 2-0 in a best of five series is never a good place to be. So they turned to — their... ace? — Andy Pettitte, and he delivered. The Yankees, in spite of an inspired performance by Fausto Carmona and the exact opposite from their offense, took a 1-0 lead into the eight inning. Rookie phenom Joba Chamberlain had already pitched one clean inning in relief of Pettitte, and was asked to go out and pitch another inning.

Then they came.

Swarms of little white bugs, apparently (at least to my eye) drawn to the extra sweaty players on the field and the damp infield dirt. They look like little white gnats, but are actually a slightly different bug called a midge.

Chamberlain was affected worst of all. They were crawling everywhere they could find, and the poor boy damn near swallowed a few of them. The apparent (and understandable, for a rookie) loss of concentration led to the following fantastic performance:

Cleveland, Bottom 8th

 
Prior to striking out Peralta, Chamberlain threw 12 of 16 pitches for balls. The Yankees were very lucky to escape that inning with nothing more than a 1-1 score. Both teams offenses continued to sputter, and the bugs continued to linger... until the bottom of the 11th inning, when a breeze came through and helped clear the bugs, and apparently had the opposite affect on Luis Vizcaino, who gave up a walk and a single to start the inning before eventually allowing Travis Hafner to single home the winning run.

Article Author: Geeves

Geeves is mainly a critic of the sports and entertainment arena, recently shifting his time and resources away from his own middling blogs and into the Blogcritics realm at something resembling full time.

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