Saturday Lunch & Baseball: Ocelots, Kung Fu Panda, Booing the Yankees, and Dickey's Injury

So it's down to three. The Tigers had no problems in sweeping the Yankees to advance to the World Series, while the Cardinals and Giants are taking a little more time to settle who will represent the NL this year. I have two quick thoughts regarding the AL, which is the Orioles must be a little frustrated to lose 3-2 in the ALDS to the Yankees only to see that same team manhandled by the Tigers, and it's also interesting that Tigers fans were calling for Jim Leyland to be fired earlier this year only to see him take his team to the World Series. Baseball is a funny game...

• Is Josh Beckett a friend of Mother Nature? That's what it sounded like when he filed a lawsuit against a natural gas pipeline builder for using eminent domain to clear some of Beckett's 7,000-acre hunting ranch in Texas, specifically citing that part of his ranch is a home to ocelots. There are regarded to be only 100 wild ocelots remaining in the U.S., so it makes sense that Beckett would use the Endangered Species Act as a reason to why his land cannot be cleared away. Part of me wonders if Beckett's not using the ocelots as an excuse to keep all of his land, but we shall see as this lawsuit unfolds.
• Pablo Sandoval, a.k.a. Kung Fu Panda looks to be at home around 3rd base.
• You'd think that in a place where the Bronx cheer originated, the players would be used to hostility, but apparently one unnamed Yankee acknowledged that the constant booing from their fans was taxing during the ALCS. An excerpt from the article:

"I really think the booing spooked a lot of guys," the player said. "A lot of guys hadn’t been booed before, and they couldn’t believe how nasty it got in the stands."

That seems... absurd. I wonder if it wasn't the quantity of booing that took place, rather than the act itself, that was "spooking" these Yankee players. Plus, don't forget how awful their offense was in the series against the Tigers. Also, this unfortunately adds more fuel to the fire that booing is productive during games.

• It's hard to believe, but R.A. Dickey had been pitching nearly this entire season with a strained muscle in his abdomen. Why was that hard to believe? Well, Dickey just turned in a Cy Young-caliber season, finishing 20-6 with a 2.73 ERA in 223 2/3 innings. Oh, and that strained abdomen required surgery which was just completed on Thursday. That means that Dickey has now spent his entire career without the ulnar collateral ligament in his throwing arm (the ligament that when torn leads to Tommy John surgery) along with that abdominal strain that required surgery this past season. For his next trick, Dickey plans to pitch all of 2013 while missing his left foot.

Game 6 of the NLCS will be on Sunday in San Francisco. Who are you rooting to win? If you want my opinion, I'm indifferent right now... in fact, I might even say I just want to bet that all the teams have a good time.