What Grinds MY Gears

So you heard from Pricing Boy. Now let me tell you what grinds MY gears.

1) Every morning I take the Metro to work. Every morning I read the paper on the Metro. Most people do the exact same thing. When you have thousands upon thousands of people reading newspapers in the morning, obviously there are going to be a lot of papers to discard. Because of this, Metro has normally about six large bins exclusively for newspapers by their exits. These bins are for papers only and are there so that Metro can recycle the papers. Mind you, I am no psychotic greenie, but every day I see TONS of people go right pass these recycle bins and toss their papers in the regular trash. This drives me nuts. How freakin' lazy can a person be?! It is no easier or harder to put the paper in the recycle bin, so why don't they just do that?! Whenever I see people do this I want to punt them. Just put it in the recycle bin! Metro riders who go out of their way to NOT recycle, grind...my...gears.

2) With the Rays now officially in the playoffs, you are going to hear even more about what a "great" worst to first story they are. While I don't want to take anything away from them, I will say that if you finish in last place almost every single year for ten years then you have to get good eventually. Keep in mind that they weren't finishing just last in their division, they were continually the worst team in baseball. Eventually if you pick in the top three every year you have to get good. Well that happened to the Rays. If you want to talk up the Rays, don't talk up them as this great come from behind story. Talk up their GM, Andrew Friedman who has done an outstanding job at locking up his nucleus to long term, team friendly contracts. That is something that deserves commendation, not finally taking advantage of the high draft picks that come with being the worst franchise in baseball pretty much since day one.

3) "Josh Hamilton, what a story!!". Guess what, we already went over this LAST year! Granted the hype has calmed since the Home Run Derby and All Star Break (just 29 RBI since then after racking up 95 in the first half) but I would still like to point out that last year he hit 19 home runs in 298 at-bats with a .922 OPS while playing for the Reds. Those are really good numbers! What's more, he was on everybody's "hot sleeper list" or "breakout potential list" for fantasy heading into the year. I'm not going to editorialize either way on the Josh Hamilton Story, but I just want to say that it's not like he came out of nowhere this year. He was very much on the radar heading into this season and any sappy "what a redemption story!" stories had their place LAST year, not this year.

4) K-Rod. I hate that guy too. Pricing Boy already covered it well, but I can't wait for the Sox to get another walk-off off of him in the playoffs.

That's it.