Assuming Jose Reyes’ quick exit in Flushing didn’t make you hate baseball or life itself, Wednesday’s late night finales in Atlanta, Baltimore and Tampa were fantastic advertisements for MLB being almost as culturally relevant as injury updates on the condition of Michael Vick’s right hand.— unless you’re a Braves or Red Sox fan, in which case their respective chokes for the ages will make for an awfully long, depressing winter.  Good thing then, that Red Sox first baseman Adrian Gonzalez has already put the disappointment of Boston’s 3rd place finish into a more spiritual context, as the Boston Globe’s Peter Abraham explains ;

“It’s definitely something that didn’t plan for. We were wholly confident that we would make the playoffs but it didn’t happen,” he said. “We didn’t do a better job with the lead. I’m a firm believer that God has a plan and it wasn’t in his plan for us to move forward.”

Asked what he saw from the team this month, Gonzalez stayed on his theme.

“God didn’t have it in the cards for us,” he said.

On Tuesday, when I asked him about the collapse of the team, Gonzalez blamed the schedule, not the Almighty.

“We play too many night games on getaway days and get into places at 4 in the morning,” Gonzalez said. “This has been my toughest season physically because of that. We play a lot of night games on Sunday for television and that those things take a lot out of you.”

I told Gonzalez that teams like the Red Sox and Yankees have long had those challenges, it’s part of playing for a high-profile team.

“Why does it have to be?” he said. “They can put the Padres on ESPN, too. The schedule really hurt us. Nobody is really reporting that.”