Sitting on his porch, rocking away on a cozy glider, Jim Vaughn is taking in a hot summer day. A slight breeze ruffles the hair that can only be described as perfect for TV, but it isn’t enough to cool him off.
Neither is his ice-cold glass of lemonade, which is dripping wet in his right hand on this sweltering mid-summer evening.
The beverage isn’t the only thing sweating.
The Cheese Steaks’ owner is frantically using his left hand to thumb through JLB rosters on his cellphone — there has to be an answer to the moves his division rival has made.
Machado? Nope.
Goldschmidt? Never available.
Mookie? Nope. Quad Eh is still figuring out the exchange rate from Canada to the United States, and all the Google searches say Mookie isn’t worth the gaggle of geese being offered.
Trout? Ha, is Monkey tired of us asking?
Machado? … Wait, we’re back to Machado again? Well, I guess Choo will eventually give him up, but at what cost?
“Dad, you’ve been outside for hours,” says future Cheese Steak shortstop, Robbie Vaughn.
“Ah, I guess I have,” he said, closing the Fantrax app on his phone. “Just prepping for tomorrow’s big 4 o’clock show. Coming in now, bud.”
And another day closes on the Cheese Steaks, the most worried man to hold a 42-game lead.
Yes, it’s at 42 games now. He’s picked up back-to-back 14-6 victories and since a loss in early June, he is 65-33-10 over five straight wins.
Still, he’s a bit worried after that one loss, an 11-8 setback to the Slammers, who have since added Aroldis Chapman, Odubel Herrera, Jose Altuve and Jose Ramirez.
“In all seriousness, you have done some great work the last two weeks,” he said in a text to me yesterday. I assume the text came in before his hours-long roster-searching trance on his porch began.
Others were left staring at their roster last week after some big losses were handed out. Crox, Sex Panthers and Dude were all handed lopsided losses before the All-Star Break.
That leaves the divisions pretty much where we saw them a week ago when I revived the Jargon.
Big Country pushed his division lead out to six games ahead of the Gamblers, meanwhile, Crox continued to hold a 13-game lead over the Panthers for the final playoff spot.
Dude and I flipped positions only because I didn’t lose by as much as he did, and Monkey crept back into the conversation now sitting 6 games out of the playoffs. Even Steroid, now in fifth, and Quad Eh are a big week away from jumping into the conversation, too, as they sit 10 and 11.5 games out, respectively.
So whereas one would think JV with a 42-game lead can sit back and just let the playoffs come to him, he can play a pivotal role here in the final couple weeks, because he can land some crushing blows to playoff hopefuls.
For him, that will start in 10 days, when the final stretch of divisional play begins. It’s five straight weeks where everyone faces all the teams in their division one last time.
And it’s five more weeks for the Cheese Steaks to sweat out a 42-game lead.
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