Fresh off this site proclaiming him the "Baseball LeBron" — the highest praise we can offer — Joe Mauer played on Sunday night in the Twins’ extra-inning loss to the Rangers and had the first 0-for-6 game of his career. He also lost the AL batting lead to Ichiro Suzuki (.363), dropping to a pitiful .358.
Then Monday night, Mauer had a routine night off and collected a pinch-hit single, but his team blew a 12-2 second-inning lead to the A’s and lost, 14-13, on a horrendous call at home plate in the ninth.
Now, the last thing we want to do in the early stages of SportsAngle Version II is to get a reputation like those Madden video games and Sports Illustrated have. (Is it any wonder that SI is struggling big-time right now?)
Look, let’s just consider this a huge coincidence. Mauer’s having an awesome season, and he’s still going to cash in big-time sometime in the next two years, so it’s not like we could have destroyed him like the Madden Curse does. Besides, he was on the cover of SI just a couple of weeks ago, so if he totally drops off the face of the earth, I think we can just blame them.
Of course, right after this, LeBron’s DunkGate kicked off.
So if we find there’s something to this – Lance Armstrong falls off his bike tomorrow or something like that – we may have to go back on hiatus for the greater good of today’s athletes.
Or even better, we’ll limit ourselves to coverage on guys we don’t like – like Shane Victorino.