After 12 meetings this season, the Kansas City Royals and Toronto Blue Jays are as familiar with each other’s approaches, tendencies, strengths and weaknesses as they’re ever going to be.
With one or possibly two games remaining in the American League Championship Series, it basically comes down to the Royals’ killer instinct vs. the Blue Jays instinct for survival.
After Kansas City won the first two games of the series at Kauffman Stadium, the teams headed north to Toronto and both achieved their objective, in a manner of speaking. The Royals maintained home-field advantage with a 14-2 obliteration of R.A. Dickey and the Toronto bullpen in Game 4, and the Blue Jays sandwiched that sorry performance with a pair of wins to bring the series back to the heartland.
So now it comes down to this: David Price, the most decorated starting pitcher in this series, will try to pull Toronto even Friday night and record his first career postseason win as a starter. The Blue Jays hope he resembles the David Price who mesmerized Kansas City in the midafternoon shadows with six shutout innings in Game 2 — and not the guy who went downhill fast after an outfield miscommunication between Ryan Goins and Jose Bautista helped turn a 3-0 Toronto lead into a 6-3 Kansas City victory.
Rodgers is a young player whom we selected as one of our top sleepers this fall, and he showed why last week, when he tied for sixth at the Frys.com Open. He played here at TPC Summerlin last year and missed the cut, but this is a new season. This week we are really targeting scorers because this is an easy course. Rodgers is long off the tee, can score and is among the leaders in par-4 scoring, and birdie-or-better percentage. Watch for Rodgers to be in contention this week and throughout this season.
When it comes to upside potential, few boast as much as Tony Finau. He led the tour in birdies last season, and to win at TPC Summerlin he will have to birdie early and often. Finau is long off the tee and has steadily improved with his putter, making him one of the more intriguing players in the field this week. At $9,800, Finau is no longer in the bargain range among his peers, but with a strong seventh-place showing at this event last season, he offers plenty of upside.
Our new weapons beneath the skins which formed
His three boats stove around him, and oars and men both whirling in the eddies; one captain, seizing the line-knife from his broken prow, had dashed at the whale, as an Arkansas duellist at his foe, blindly seeking with a six inch blade to reach the fathom-deep life of the whale. That captain was Ahab. And then it was, that suddenly sweeping his sickle-shaped lower jaw beneath him, Moby Dick had reaped away Ahab’s leg, as a mower a blade of grass in the field. No turbaned Turk, no hired Venetian or Malay, could have smote him with more seeming malice. Small reason was there to doubt, then, that ever since that almost fatal encounter, Ahab had cherished a wild vindictiveness against the whale, all the more fell for that in his frantic morbidness he at last came to identify with him, not only all his bodily woes, but all his intellectual and spiritual exasperations.
It is not probable that this monomania in him took its instant rise at the precise time of his bodily dismemberment.
Then, in darting at the monster, knife in hand, he had but given loose to a sudden, passionate, corporal animosity; and when he received the stroke that tore him, he probably but felt the agonizing bodily laceration, but nothing more. Yet, when by this collision forced to turn towards home, and for long months of days and weeks, Ahab and anguish lay stretched together in one hammock, rounding in mid winter that dreary, howling Patagonian Cape; then it was, that his torn body and gashed soul bled into one another; and so interfusing, made him mad.
That it was only then, on the homeward voyage, after the encounter, that the final monomania seized him?
Egyptian chest, and was moreover intensified by his delirium, that his mates were forced to lace him fast, even there, as he sailed, raving in his hammock. In a strait-jacket, he swung to the mad rockings of the gales. And, when running into more sufferable latitudes, the ship, with mild stun’sails spread, floated across the tranquil tropics, and, to all appearances.
That it was only then, on the homeward voyage, after the encounter, that the final monomania seized him, seems all but certain from the fact that, at intervals during the passage, he was a raving lunatic; and, though unlimbed of a leg, yet such vital strength yet lurked in his Egyptian chest, and was moreover intensified by his delirium, that his mates were forced to lace him fast, even there, as he sailed, raving in his hammock. In a strait-jacket, he swung to the mad rockings of the gales. And, when running into more sufferable latitudes, the ship, with mild stun’sails spread, floated across the tranquil tropics, and, to all appearances, the old man’s delirium seemed left behind him with the Cape Horn swells.
Human madness is oftentimes a cunning and most feline thing. When you think it fled, it may have but become transfigured into some still subtler form. Ahab’s full lunacy subsided not, but deepeningly contracted; like the unabated Hudson, when that noble Northman flows narrowly, but unfathomably through the Highland gorge.
To that one end, did now possess a thousand fold more potency than ever he had sanely brought to bear upon any one reasonable object.
God the direful madness was now gone; even then, Ahab, in his hidden self, raved on. Human madness is oftentimes a cunning and most feline thing. When you think it fled, it may have but become transfigured into some still subtler form. Ahab’s full lunacy subsided not, but deepeningly contracted; like the unabated Hudson, when that noble Northman flows narrowly, but unfathomably through the Highland gorge.
But, as in his narrow-flowing monomania, not one jot of Ahab’s broad madness had been left behind; so in that broad madness, not one jot of his great natural intellect had perished. That before living agent, now became the living instrument. If such a furious trope may stand, his special lunacy stormed his general sanity, and carried it, and turned all its concentred cannon upon its own mad mark. I knew the Indians would soon discover that they were on the wrong trail and that the search for me would be renewed in the right direction as soon as they located my tracks. I had gone but a short distance further when what seemed to be an excellent trail opened up around the face of a high cliff. The trail was level and quite broad and led upward and in the general direction I wished to go. The cliff arose for several hundred feet on my right, and on my left was an equal and nearly perpendicular drop to the bottom of a rocky ravine.
