Whining on wine

First of all, yours truly hates wine. Any wine. I don't care if it's the $2 or $2000 a bottle variety. Keep that stuff away from me.

This can be traced to an escapade in my youth when I was even dumber than I am now -- if that's possible. When I was barely "legal", I think, maybe, a few of my buddies and I wound up in my mom's car on a New Year's Eve driving around town drinking all kinds of stuff we shouldn't have been. Yes, we had a designated driver who was not partaking, the only one with half a brain.

My particular poison on that fateful night was either cherry vodka or sloe gin, I forget which. I drank a whole fifth of it -- and proceeded to get violently ill, as in puking my guts out, right in the car. My friends, with their own choices of doom, did the same.

To this day I don't remember too much of that night, except I woke up freezing and alone, still in the car, in my parents' driveway, then somehow stumbled into the house. Needless to say, the car itself was trashed inside. Imagine four or five guys throwing up repeatedly in an automobile and it doesn't exactly paint a pretty picture. I found that out the next morning when I was rousted off the couch by my dad demanding an explanation. I scrubbed that car all day, but it was never the same. Also needless to say, there were consequences, harsh ones, meted out by my parents for my night of drunken idiocy.

From that time on, I've never touched the stuff. It makes me a bit queasy just to look at it.

What does this have to do with sports? Excellent question.

It involves all the celebrating with wine (champagne) that some teams do after they've won something. This is getting out of control. Let's take the NY Yankees as an example.

Upon clinching a wild card berth for the playoffs, they broke out the bubbly. Pop, pop, pop. Spray, spray, spray. Pour, pour, pour. They might have even drank some of it. Winos the world over witnessing such an incredible waste of perfectly good booze on TV likely groaned.

I grimaced.

But what could or would happen next? After defeating the Minnesota Twins in a one game wild-card showdown, out came more bubbly. Pop, pop, pop. Etc, etc, etc.

If the Yankees were to defeat the Cleveland Indians in one of the American League Divisional Series, it would be round three. Pop, pop, pop.

The same scenario would hold if they went on to defeat either Houston or Boston in the American League Championship Series. Pop, pop, pop. That's four.

A World Series title would be the granddaddy booze fest of them all. Yet a fifth (no pun intended) orgy of alcohol abuse.

How many cases of wine are we up to here? A few hundred? A thousand? All totally, ahem, wasted? Don't they realize there's sober people in China?

If I have my history right, in days of yore when the American and National leagues each had ten teams, whichever came out on top after the regular season went to the World Series. No wild cards, nor divisional playoffs, just one seven game series to decide it all. And that meant there were only two celebrations. One for winning their respective league pennant and a possible second for winning the fall classic.

Nowadays they've gone crazier than I was back in the day on that New Years Eve with the bubbly. As listed above, a wild-card team winning it all, it happens, will have FIVE parties along the way. And they're not breaking out the rot gut cheap stuff. That no doubt drives the winos nuts to watch such an incredible display of debauchery on the air.

I feel your pain, guys. Or at least I did once. I don't think I could survive five of them.

Nope, not going back there. Brrr. It still gives me the, urp, willies just to think back about it.