Dear Juju Gods, I have one request for this evening

Hi, Juju Gods! It's your old friend - me, again. Just checkin' in to see "wazzup!?"

So... wazzup? 

By the way, you look great. Have you lost weight? Working out, I bet? I can see the improvements. Oh, I've left a carton of Luckies with Miss Bixley at the front desk. Hope you enjoy it. 

By the way... neat move, last night, the rainout? Didn't see that one coming. Obviously, neither did MLB. It left its most loyal fans - Yankee fans - to stand in the cold rain for nearly three hours. Those poor souls. Women and children, too. All for their team. And now, they're waiting to see what you have in mind. 

So... who won last night's rainout? I'd say, TBS: It finally found a use for those Big Bang reruns. Also, the gladiator show, where the guy balanced the balls on a flat plate. That was pretty intense. I watched for more than a minute.

As to which team the rainout helped - the Yankees or the Indians, the Commanders the Guardians... that's your job, eh? 

Apparently, we'll start Nestor today, 4 p.m., just as the shadows begin cutting a canyon between pitchers mound and home plate. He'll need his guile. I figure Nestor goes two, maybe three. Then, we turn their hitters around with Tailion - two innings, maybe three. Then it's pot luck: Loaisiga - one, maybe two? Wandy - one? Holmes - one? That gets us - what? - eight, maybe nine? Somewhere, somehow, somebody's gotta come through. And somewhere out there, a ball is going to take a weird bounce...

That's your department, the weird hops. John Sterling says we cannot predict baseball. What he means is that we cannot predict you - the juju gods, put in charge of fixing games. You are gonna do whatever it is that you're gonna do. 

But I do have one request for this evening. Let the record show that I am now typing this on my knees. 

I'm asking for Aaron Judge to get a hit, maybe two. More importantly, he must not go 0-5 with four strikeouts. No Golden Sombrero. He mustn't. I can accept that 2022 might end tonight - that the Yankiverse might collapse into a micro-dot and then explode into Big Bang reruns and gladiator shows - but please, please, PLEASE... don't let it end with Aaron Judge trudging back to the dugout beneath a blanket of angry silence - or worse, scattered boos. 

Please, juju gods, whatever you do, spare us such an ending. Think of the women and children, sitting out there in the cold. For all our early victories, it's been a surprisingly hard year, a roller-coaster ride that long ago cost me my lunch, my stomach and my dignity. And last night, about 30,000 of our brothers and sisters stood in the rain for three hours, like Linus in the pumpkin patch, hoping for a sign from you, hoping for - well - hope, itself. 

Please... be kind. 

 Oh, and I love that shirt! It's totally you! Say, I just had a thought: Can I buy you a steak?