Albert Pujols's walk-off home run on Sunday—back-to-back days, something only Albert Belle and Ron Santo had ever done—was perhaps the more inexplicable of his two shots, but there's no way Jeff Samardzija could have known that on Saturday, when on national TV he said the words on the lips of every Chicago Cubs fan and a significant minority of St. Louis Cardinals fans: "No f-ing way." (Note: He didn't say effing, really.)
↵Thanks to clank and d-dee of Viva El Birdos, we have a beautiful animated GIF of the FCC-rattling event, which was accompanied by an incredibly timely Fox zoom-in and a perfect shot of manager Mike Quade thinking about the future. (Click for the full-size version.)
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I have a special sympathy for Samardzija because of the situation in which he allowed the home run—on a pitch Albert Pujols wouldn't normally even swing at, in a slump Albert Pujols has never dealt with before. In junior-high bedrooms of the mid-nineties they called this posterizing; in the future, the Alton Listers to Albert Pujols's Shawn Kemp will be animated-giffed for all eternity.
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