Pontificating

This past Sunday, the Philadelphia Eagles lost a close game to the Los Angeles Chargers by the score of 27-24 on a last-drive field goal. The offense continued their good play from the Detroit game, including running the ball quite well, and Jalen Hurts had a pretty consistent game at quarterback. The defense struggled to stop the Chargers just like they struggled against the Las Vegas Raiders two weeks ago, and that is why they lost the game. I don’t know why they stopped being aggressive in pressuring the quarterback. The good news, though, is the Eagles offense continues to make progress. I hope it continues against the Denver Broncos on Sunday.

The 76ers are off to a great start at 8-4 and are in first place even without Ben Simmons, surprising a lot of people. I don’t think he’s going to play for the team for the entire year. Unfortunately, though, the team has had several outbreaks of COVID. The cases among players include Tobias Harris, Joel Embiid and their best defensive player, Matisse Thybulle. I hope they can all recover quickly and don’t have any lasting side effects from the illness.

This has all occurred in the last two weeks, so the good thing is that the season is very long. They should be able to make up for the few losses they just had due to their shortened bench of available players.

There is no break for the front offices in baseball. This week is the winter meetings at some hotel in Florida. All the team executives meet to talk about signing players for the next season. I don’t know how this is going to work this year because the collective bargaining agreement expires so soon. But I am happy so far with the Phillies efforts to make their outfield younger around Bryce Harper. They let two old players, Odubel Herrera and Andrew McCutchen go into free agency.

This might be wishful thinking on my part, but I hope the Phillies attempt to sign pitcher Max Scherzer from the Los Angeles Dodgers. I think he would be perfect to add to our pitching rotation along with Zack Wheeler, Aaron Nola and Ranger Suarez. That would scare the Atlanta Braves and irritate the Washington National fans as well.