ICHIRO: STILL THE BEST

Late season baseball can be a drag fro the vast majority of MLB teams that have no shot at the playoffs, but occasionally there's a moment of pure bliss that emerges from these doldrums.  In yesterday's meaningless Miami Marlins season finale, former Mariners superstar Ichiro Suzuki finally took the field at an atypical spot—the pitchers mound. A high school pitcher in Japan, Ichiro had been begging his managers for a chance to pitch going all the way back to the Lou Piniella days. With yesterday's game already out of hand (the Phillies were leading 6-2 in the 8th inning), his wish was granted. And while position players taking the mound in blowouts happens an handful of times each year, said players tend to just lob up balls and hope the batters hit them at their defenders. Ichiro pitched. While he gave up a run in his lone inning of work, he displayed a fastball that peaked at 87 mph. Even more impressively, he threw a slider. A good slider. A (rather poorly put together) recap of his outing can be seen at MLB.com, but really, just marvel at this short clip of those sliders.

Ichiro has a better slider than you pic.twitter.com/PHkHwWriFB

— ShtBallPlayrsDo (@ShtBallPlayrsDo) October 4, 2015

Dear new Mariners general manager Jerry Dipoto,

Our bullpen was disastrous at times this year, and your rebuilding project with this roster will probably gonna take a season or two. You know what would help tide us over till then? Ichiro coming back as a two-way player—reserve outfielder and middle reliever—and retiring as a Mariner. Give us fans something fun. I mean, it can't end worse than Griffey falling asleep in the clubhouse during games.

Still a fan of this dumb team,
Seth

P.S. Unless he asks for it (which he has every right to do), never, never, never trade Felix Hernandez.

NEWS THAT CUTS TO THE CORE OF THE ISSUES

Cable news often seems like a bad joke, so it's delightful when someone uses the platform to make a superb joke. Last week HLN wanted to discuss Edward Snowden joining Twitter, so they turned to Jon Hendren. One can assume they thought he could serve as a sort of social media expert. Here's the thing about that: Hendren is part of "Weird Twitter" and goes by the handle @fart (which is never mentioned). So naturally, things got weird. While anchor Yasmin Vossoughian ask questions about Edward Snowden, Hendren answers them as if she's talking about Edward Scissorhands. It's brilliant TV trolling of the highest order.

FACEBOOK OVERSHARES

There's a decent chance one of your Facebook friends has recently copy and pasted a silly message with fancy sounding words and posted it as their status in an attempt to prevent Facebook from owning the content they post to the site. Here's John Oliver to tell everyone how this is an utterly moronic endeavor.

KAEP-BURNED-NICK

The Seahawks play the Detroit Lions on Monday Night Football tonight, but Seattle fans already might've experienced their favorite NFL moment of the week. Packers linebacker Clay Matthews added insult to injury during his team's drubbing of the 49ers when he audibly told ultra-loathed quarterback Colin Kaepernick, "You ain't Russell Wilson, bro!" Truly a ", bro" burn of epic proportions.