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Somewhere from four to seven baseball games remain to us in 2016 and one of them will be played tonight as the World Series gets underway. The whole business with the Cubs being back for the first time in forever, with a chance to win for the first time in forever, is taking up quite a lot of oxygen. There are plenty of other stories, some of which may actually be mentioned by the Fox broadcast team over the course of the series.
The craziest one to me is that Kyle Schwarber, who tore his ACL back in April, is returning to the Cubs for the World Series. That's ridiculous. Schwarber isn't being asked to do a whole lot, since he'll be the DH in Cleveland, but still. Tear your ACL in April, play in the World Series in October. That sounds insane.
He's not the only one playing after a recent injury. Cleveland's Jason Kipnis is playing through a Grade 2 ankle sprain which looks like this.
There are also non-injury storylines aplenty. Like Jon Lester never throwing to first base, Jason Heyward being in the first year of a $180+ million contract and he can't even make the starting lineup in the World Series, Dexter Fowler being damnably right about which team he should have signed with, and more. The Cubs had four hitters with an OBP over .380! Just color me green with envy.
Anyway, for the World Series, the games have been promoted to an actual channel, Fox, rather than these lesser cable-only choices. So maybe people will actually want to watch some baseball - although if they choose to do so they'll have to listen to Harold Reynolds so maybe they won't. Well, so that's that. Who ya got?