Virtual Baseball: Yanks Catch Rays in Kansas City! Cue Burt!

(Posted on behalf of HoraceClarke66, whose machine doesn't like Google.)

Virtual Masahiro Tanaka pitched the Yanks into a first-place tie with the elusive Tampa Bay Tightwads today, winning their getaway day game, 6-4, over the Royals.  

Back-up catcher Kyle Higashioka hit a key, three-run blast for the Bombers, while roundtrippers by Gleyber Torres and Thairo Estrada, in a rare start, nailed down the victory.  A game Tanaka pitched six innings of 3-run baseball until his arm began to bulge and wobble noticeably.

Afterwards, the Yankees all helped the clubhouse crew pack up their equipment, and manager Ma Boone's rocking chair, and  lash it to the top of the team bus.  

Aaron Judge, nursing a sore left shoulder after he was hit by a pitch, was asked by Suzyn Waldman, "Did they hurt ya, son?  Did they hurt ya and make ya mean mad?  Sometimes they do somethin' to ya.  They hurt ya, and ya get mad, and then ya get mean.  Then they hurt ya again, an' ya get meaner an' meaner, until ya ain't no boy or man anymore, just a walkin' chunk a mean mad.  They hurt ya that way, son?"

"It don't matter," Judge told her.  "I'll be all around in the dark.  I'll be everywhere, wherever you can look.  Wherever there's a guy on the Astros, tryna cheat his way to a pennant, I'll be there.  Wherever there's somebody on the Red Sox, tryna steal another game, I'll be there.  I'll be there in the way guys yell when Joe West blows another call.  I'll be there in the way kids laugh, when Brian Cashman tells them what a genius he is again."

"Well, time to go," Suzyn said, backing up uneasily.

The bus started down the old highway, where once the Plains tribes had ridden, and the wagon trains had rolled.  Where the iron horse had once roamed, and now where there was only a long, black ribbon of asphalt.  Just over the border of Io-way, the bus pulled into a gas station where the attendant, looking out at the storm clouds gathering over the plains, along with repeated lightning bolts, several twisters gathering momentum, a swarm of locust, a huge dust cloud, a raging prairie fire, and a giant eye hanging in the sky.

"There's a storm coming," he said.

Ma Boone nodded, and readjusted his sunglasses.  "I know," he said, and the bus rolled on.