Mitch Perry
We’ve had Brexit and Donald Trump; now we have the nation of Colombia rejecting a landmark peace agreement between the government and the former rebel group FARC — a deal that took over four years to negotiate and would have formally ended five decades of war.
Who can predict anything with accuracy these days?
Closer to home, for the second straight Sunday night, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers had their game extended more than an hour over lightning strikes.
Coincidentally, it was their second straight 4:05 p.m. game.
Maybe the NFL should start scheduling late September/early October games at the regular 1:05 p.m. kickoff, which might preclude such delays in the future?
The Major League Baseball regular season has ended, and not a day too soon for the Tampa Bay Rays, whose 68-94 record ties them with San Diego and Cincinnati as the second-worst team in the game.
And attendance-wise? Their average home attendance of 15,878 was again the worst in the game, nearly 3,000 fewer fans than in Oakland.
“The losing stings. It burns,” Rays baseball operations manager Matt Silverman was quoted as saying in Sunday’s Tampa Bay Times.
Meanwhile, Rays’ former manager and South Tampa restaurateur Joe Maddon’s Chicago Cubs begin the postseason later this week as the prohibitive favorite to win it all for the first time in more than a century. I get that it will be “America’s story,” but, sorry kids, I ain’t a Cubbies fan. Will the Cubs suffer the same fate of the Golden State Warriors, who set an all-time NBA record for most regular season wins, yet failed to win it all at the end?
There’s big-time pressure on the Cubs to come through this fall.
They could be facing my San Francisco Giants, who will play a one-off against the New York Mets this Wednesday night, with the winner facing the Cubs, starting on Friday. And maybe this is the year the L.A. Dodgers and Clayton Kershaw and their expensive payroll find a way not to choke and go to the Series?
In other news …
In Ybor City on Sunday, Patrick Murphy labeled Marco Rubio a “puppet of the Koch Brothers,” among other unpleasantries expressed about his GOP Senate opponent.
