ATL 4, LAD 2; Atlanta advances

 ...oh, hello. As some of you may have heard, my mom Barbara passed away yesterday evening. Her family was with her, and glad she's now at rest. 

Ma loved a lot of things -- crosswords; cursing; us, usually :) -- and one of those things, Lord help her, was the Mets. She used to go Shea Stadium's Ladies' Days back in the day, when they really couldn't get anyone to come except for free. She and her friends would stash their wedding rings in their bras and let dudes buy them beer all afternoon. She also went on a double date involving Johnny Bench once...but she and Dad were already married? It's possible she was invited along and was like "nah" and Dad was like "oh, you're going" -- I will try to get this intel out of Dave Sr. before my next update. When I was a baby, she would wheel my stroller down to Memorial Field to watch all the scouts watching Willie Wilson. She had crushes on Tom Seaver and Gary Carter. 

When I was a Little League umpire and some jackass parent was arguing balls and strikes -- but really "arguing" that I, the first girl to do the job, had no business doing it on that basis -- she told me, "Nobody else gets to tell you who you are."

She was not perfect. I wrote the infield-fly rule on an index card after explaining it for the 153rd time; she still kept asking. But she mostly knew her baseball and was very proud of how well I knew mine, so: let's keep going, shall we? (And confidential to Aaron Heilman's family: I am sorry she is haunting you. Light a candle and leave out a Thin Mints offering.)

*******

All righty then. For obvious reasons I didn't see much of this game (I did hear the Rosario home run) so I don't have anything in the way of commentary. I can report on the points, however:

Albies 2
Freeman 0
Riley 3
Swanson 1

Bellinger 1
Betts 0
Seager 0
Smith 1
Los Turner 0

...Yeah. That's a lot of names in italics and a bunch of slates are toast, but we'll get to that in a sec. In the meantime, the money remains more or less stable:

73 Yuhan 2
64 Fell 2
53 Cayenne 2

Everyone else...and who's really left, after the jump.

50 Shotwell 1

46 Arbour
44 Shotwell 2 and Stempel

43 Bingham 1
42 Crase

38 Wonsetler and Grove
36 Tormey and Cayenne 1
35 SDB 1

31 Cameron 1

28 Cameron 2
27 Yuhan 1 and Quinn

17 Bingham 2

So that's about half the remaining slates out; a bunch of others are functionally dead, but anyone with picks remaining will show up in updates, because why not. To those of you leaving us, thanks so much for playing, and I hope we'll see you next year -- but of course you're welcome to stick around and kibbitz in the comments.

The World Series starts Tuesday night, and I will see you back here then, if not sooner. Take care of yourselves, and good luck.