Faster Than A Shark

Alex Rodriguez Redeemed by Irrefutable Photographic Evidence.

2008-06-05T13:47:00.002-04:00

Alright so lots of Yankee fans still hate Alex Rodriguez. It is ridiculous, after his two MVPs here and all, and the whole thing about being the best player in baseball. However, I have recently come across better evidence than even this that Alex Rodriguez is, in fact, quite the awesome.

I'm glad we settled that. Aren't you?

Guest Post by Dillon Permian

2008-02-18T18:32:00.003-05:00

This article is coming late, because I just thought of it, so please enjoy this Super Bowl Wrap-Up.

A person who is very important in my life, Liz, is an enormous fan of Peyton Manning and, by extension, the entire Manning clan. Please do not think I am joking when I say that there exists, in my bedroom, a blanket with both Peyton and Eli Manning's faces on it. She was very excited by the turnout of this year's Super Bowl, not just because anyone living in Boston who wasn't born here ought to loathe the Patriots, as well as the Red Sox and any other Boston team I can't think of at the moment. They clog up our streets with their awful parades and often live near me.
What I was saying was, she also was very happy to see Eli, long caught in the shadow of his brother, father, and, arguably, other brother, come into his own on live television. She may stop referring to him as "Baby Eli." This game afforded him the opportunity to show that he is actually a football player, and not a weaker, rap alter-ego of Peyton. The Onion even commented on this.
There is really only one man who can understand what Eli's year has been like. And that man is Casey Affleck.
Note: The following was written with no research: Casey Affleck bust onto the scene with 1997's Good Will Hunting, in which he played the less-popular friend of his two real-life brothers, Ben and Cooper Affleck. Following that movie's and his brothers' successes, Casey failed to get the recognition he deserved, starring in several movies I could not, currently, name.
Then, in 2007, while Eli Manning was securing his team's Super Bowl victory, Casey Affleck starred in two movies: The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford and Gone, Baby, Gone, the latter of which was directed by Casey's older brother, who, for this analogy, has spent the past few years being a little more Tom Brady than Peyton Manning. At this year's Oscars, when they announce Best Supporting Actor, expect to see Ben Affleck, sitting in the audience, quietly cheering on his little mustachioed brother.

I am a partisan.

2008-01-25T18:18:00.000-05:00

But it just seemed noteworthy to me that the Twins spent money today, handing out huge contracts to (sham) 2006 MVP Justin Morneau and OF Michael Cuddyer. The numbers on it are six years, $80 millions for Morneau and three and $23 for Cuddyer. Clearly $100+ million could have been better spent on a Santana extension, especially that considering the two who got paid today both had arbitration years left. For months we've been hearing numbers between $120 and $150 millions being what Santana is looking for, either from the Twins, a possible team involved in a trade, or from his free agency next year.

Six More Years of Ugly
(Canadian jokes are not that funny)

I assume that the front office did not sink this money into the two much less valuable players who are still under their control without trying to get it to Santana first. (It is 2008, not 2000 - I don't believe that any GM could possibly misunderstand the value of his own players enough to prize Morneau over Santana.*) It follows, then, that they offered this cash and more to Johan first, and were rebuked. Therefore, unless the Twins have another $100+ million about (they do - but, well, here's the link) this makes them even less likely to retain their ace beyond this year, or possibly, beyond this offseason. So, you know, the chances of him ending up on my team seem larger to me today.

I can't believe I have just added to this most covered of topics on the overflowing internet. I feel like I just wrote an article condemning a Spears.

(*Aside: This is precisely the misvaluation that earned Morneau his MVP in the first place, over his more worthy teammates Santana and Joe Mauer.) There could also be a Bavasi jab here.

The Glory and The Shame - January 2008

2008-01-18T08:36:00.000-05:00

In my ongoing quest to catalog which sports figures are enjoying the greatest increase and/or decrease in good fortunes, I give you this, from the loving oven of my heart. Let this glorious shame wash over you and cleanse you of your sins.

THE GLORY

1 - Eli Manning

What once was pitiful and filled with remorse has sprung forth from the depths of mediocrity. Behold! The Quarterback! Hushing his many critics for a whole week, Eli has served to prove at last that the Giants totally overpaid for him and still regret it. Sorry, Eli...

2 - Bud Selig

How did he get an extension so soon after the steroids implosion? This man has omega-pimp powers that historians will be struggling to explain for decades to come. Full, double hand slap, pimp powers.

3 - Dwight Howard
Currently enjoying a season of dominance not seen since the movie 'Kazaam' ruled the box office for two years and 3 weeks, Dwight Howard has become the darling of the NBA season. Alas, after the Magic lose to the Rockets in the finals he'll be traded away for a 12 piece KFC bucket. It'll be a fine season in the meantime.

THE SHAME
1 - Mascots

2 - Gilbert Arenas
The sting lies in knowing how much better your team has played without you. Yet another injury in a contract year as well? *tsk tsk* Hopefully his side career of becoming the next Apollo Creed can work out after all.

3 - Mangenius
Manny G, seen here in happier days, has endured perhaps the most difficult year of them all. But he didn't lost to the Dolphins, and that will have to serve as an icy cold comfort.

HONOR GUARD

Jesus Christ
Always know that for every hit you get, you must thank Jesus for allowing this to happen, and be grateful that Jesus hates the pitcher you're facing for having masturbated all through college and a bit during the honeymoon.

NBA Pioneers

2008-01-17T09:52:00.001-05:00

We live in dark and troubling times for the National Basketball Association. Michael Jordan continues to hide his diminishing basketball skills by distracting us with his general managing prowess. The Knicks continue to deny New Yorkers their rightful place upon the throne of glory. The Bulls hope in vain to see a slumbering Ben Wallace emerge and offer up a few points before curling up in his nest of money and spittle. Truly, all things Basketball have been in better shape. Some fear that the NBA, and indeed all of sports writing in general, shall never recover from the continued omnipresence of Bill Simmons and his Celtics.

But let's return to our roots, let us go backwards in time to find a renewed wellspring of hope and purity. Farther back than World B. Free, further back than the 10,oooth woman to feel Wilts loving caress, further back than imagined. Back to a time when all was new in Basketball, when one figure stood tall above every new discovery, the one who started it all...

Harriet Tubman - NBA pioneer.

In the early days of Basketball discovery, black men and women were kept uneducated, in order to ensure white dominance on the courts. In these times stepped Harriet, a leader of men and a wicked three-point shot. Harriet quickly emerged as a civil rights pioneer. Under cloak of night, Tubman would lead the slaves to the free lands where they could perfect their court vision without fear of a southern populace denying them.

Harriet Tubman went on to perfect both the pick and roll and the steal. During the Civil War, Harriet Tubman invented the back door pass, which lead to many crippling southern losses on the court. This morale crushing dominance has been said to help lead to the south surrendering.

In order to ensure a better tomorrow, we cannot discard the past. We must never forget the towering contribution made by this amazing woman.

Harriet Tubman - Legend, Pioneer, Champion.

BBWAA vs. The Academy: This time it's personal

2008-01-13T04:22:00.000-05:00

This latest FJM post has inspired me to take a look at the past decade and see who did a worse job: the BBWAA at voting for MVP, or the Academy at voting for Best Picture? Enjoy.

2000

AL MVP: Jason Giambi
NL MVP: Jeff Kent
Best Picture: Gladiator

All steroid crap aside, Giambi had an insane OBP (.476) and has second-place finisher Frank Thomas beat in almost every category. You could've made a solid argument for A-Rod, who had a similar OPS+ to Thomas (162 vs. 163) and still played SS at the time.
Barry Bonds probably should've won in the NL. He had the better OBP (.440 vs. .424 for Kent) the better OPS+ (188 vs. 162), and leads Kent in most of the major counting stats. On the other hand, Kent played a more demanding position (2B vs. LF). Then there's Mike Piazza, who put up similar numbers to Kent while playing C. We'll call it a draw.

"Gladiator" was exactly the type of testosterone-fueled pointlessness that made me loathe 300. "Traffic" was the better and smarter film, and thus should've won here. Hell, I'd vote for "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" over "Gladiator".

Who did worse: The Academy

2001

AL MVP: Ichiro Suzuki
NL MVP: Barry Bonds
Best Picture: A Beautiful Mind

It's hard for me to be objective about Ichiro, so I won't bother with this. Sure, Giambi led him in nearly every category possible (except SB and BA), but did the A's win 116 games that year, and does Giambi have a cool batting stance? Didn't think so. As for Bonds, I suppose when you hit 73 homers and put up a 1.378 OPS, you're going to get nearly unanimous support for MVP. No real argument there.

2001 was a really weak year for the Oscars. "A Beautiful Mind" wasn't that great (did Akiva Goldsman really win an Oscar for this?), but who else to vote for? "Lord of the Rings"? "Gosford Park"? "Moulin Rouge"? I forgot "In The Bedroom" even existed until I saw the nomination list.

Who did worse: The Academy, I guess.

2002

AL MVP: Miguel Tejada
NL MVP: Barry Bonds
Best Picture: Chicago

I'm calling bullshit on Tejada's win here. A-Rod had more home runs (57 vs. 34), a higher OPS (1.015 vs. .862), a much higher OBP (.392 vs. .354), a better OPS+ (158 vs. 128) and was way, way better at SS. Bull. Shit. I don't have an argument against Bonds, as usual.

The win for "Chicago" wasn't all too surprising, considering the Academy's hard-on for musicals. But how cool would've it been to see "Spirited Away" get a nod here, and possibly win? One can dream...

Who did worse: the BBWAA

2003

AL MVP: Alex Rodriguez
NL MVP: Barry Bonds
Best Picture: The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King

Close call on the AL race. Carlos Delgado has a small advantage in most of the stats, and Jorge Posada gets bonus points for playing C. But A-Rod still has the edge here, if only for one reason: he played amazing SS, while Delgado was a statue at 1B. As for the NL, yawn.

Some people would say LOTR is overrated, that it is style-over-substance, ham fisted, over-the-top tripe whose sole reason for existence is to stroke the ego of Peter Jackson. Those people are communists. Fuck them. In the ass. With an authentic Elvish sword I got off Ebay and hung on my wall.

Who did worse: Push

2004

AL MVP: Vladimir Guerrero
NL MVP: Barry Bonds
Best Picture: Million Dollar Baby

Not much to bitch about here, as both winners pretty clearly had better seasons than their competition.

"Million Dollar Baby" was a fine movie, if a bit melodramatic. That can be attributed to Paul Haggis' script--more on him later. Since Hillary Swank is from Bellingham, I feel compelled to support her; however, she has been trying my patience lately.

Who did worse: Push

2005

AL MVP: Alex Rodriguez
NL MVP: Albert Pujols
Best Picture: Crash

I'm just going to ignore the MVP winners this time. This entire paragraph will be devoted to exorcising my Paul Haggis demon once and for all.

Paul Haggis, if you're reading this: fuck you. You're rich, middle-aged and white; what the fuck do you know about racism, or inner-city urban life? Your obsession with cutting and pasting Hallmark quotes into your screenplays have dragged down otherwise good movies like "Casino Royale" and "Million Dollar Baby". And now we have "Crash", which not only robbed Brokeback Mountain of a much-deserved award, but it had all the subtlety of a sledgehammer to the crotch. We get it! Racism is bad! Now stop bludgeoning us over the head and get off your fucking pulpit. You fucking douchetit.

Who did worse: The Academy, by a mile.

2006

AL MVP: Justin Morneau
NL MVP: Ryan Howard
Best Picture: The Departed

In a way, I'm kinda glad Jeter didn't win, because then it would give ESPN yet another reason to slob his knob. But there's really no way around this: Jeter had the better year, and should've won. A 132 OPS+ is pretty damn good for a shortstop, and he has Morneau beat by a mile in OBP (.417 vs. .375). Howard's 57 homers look pretty on the stat sheet, but consider this: Albert Pujols hit 49, while playing in 16 less games than Howard. He also had the better OBP, SLG, OPS, OPS+, and played a much better glove at 1B than Howard.

"The Departed" was a great film, and deserved its win. However, I'm still pissed that "Little Miss Sunshine" robbed "Children of Men" of a nomination.

Who did worse: the BBWAA

Final Analysis

We can see here that the Academy has done a slightly worse job at picking the best movie of the year than the BBWAA. This wasn't an exhaustive research, of course: the '00s are a small sample size, and was mostly a decade dominated by Barry Bonds and A-Rod, so it's hard to argue those choices. 2007, of course, was a different story with Jimmy Rollins, and I won't rehash what others have said elsewhere. This year's Oscar race should be a tossup between "No Country For Old Men" and "There Will Be Blood". However, if "Atonement" wins, I'm leaving Hollywood. In flames.

NFL Draft Mocking, Part 1

2008-01-04T15:20:00.000-05:00

The regular season is done. 20 of the 32 teams are done (well, 21, once my Seahawks break my heart in a poetic fashion on Saturday.) Most people are likely breaking down the weekend's playoff matchups to see who has the edge, who has more heart, who has the better bedroom skills, to determine which team will ultimately earn the right to get crushed by the Patroits.

But not me. I'm devoting my time to one thing and one thing only: mock drafting.

I have a sick, sick obsession with mock drafts. Every year I tell myself, "self, this is dumb. Who the fuck knows what GMs are going to pick months in advance?" But every year, I get sucked back into the guessing game. It's a force as unstoppable as Eli Manning's Citizen Eco-Drive.

The NFL draft's recent explosion in popularity has certainly been interesting, if a bit stupefying, to witness. Not more than 6-7 years ago, the draft was an afterthought, something you catch up on in the next days' newspaper, discuss your favorite team's picks for a few minutes, then forget it and wait for training camp. Nowadays, it is an all-weekend extravaganza, web sites are popping up that gauge the senior classes years in advance, and the NFL Combine is now a televised event. There has even been talk of moving the first round to a prime-time slot to attract more viewers. Is it oversaturation? Probably. Personally I don't get the entertainment value of watching a bunch of guys run drills while TV analysts sit around, trying not to look bored. If I wanted that I'd just watch 2004 Olympics reruns.

But I digress. I still find it fun to play GM, to bring out my inner Mel Kiper, so here Part 1 of my mock, picks 1-10. A quick note: the 3-5 picks will be determined by a complicated series of coin flips. So I flipped a coin several times, and the result was such: Oakland 3rd, Atlanta 4th, Kansas City 5th. On to the picks:

1. Miami Dolphins: Glenn Dorsey, DT, LSU
Bill Parcells could go in several directions here: he could take Jake Long, Chris Long, Darren McFadden, or he could trade the pick altogether. Assuming none of that happens, Dorsey is the obvious pick. He will bring instant credibility to an otherwise atrocious defense, and will also lower the median age by about 7 years.

2. St. Louis Rams: Jake Long, OT, Michigan
I normally get annoyed when people excuse bad seasons by saying, "we had a lot of injuries." Everyone has injuries, but what separates the good teams from the great ones is good enough depth to overcome those injuries. However, when you lose Marc Bulger, Stephen Jackson, Orlando Pace and half your O-line to injuries, that is probably understandable. Pace is nearing the end of the line, and Long is the perfect pick here to eventually replace him.

3. Oakland Raiders: Chris Long, DE/LB, Virginia
Al Davis is a crazy old bastard who hires guys like Art Shell because of sentimental reasons. What makes you think he won't take Howie Long's son for this same purpose? Of course, Chris is a pretty good player, so it won't be a totally bad pick.

4. Atlanta Falcons: Darren McFadden, RB, Arkansas
I'll let you make your own Ron Mexico/Bobby Petrino joke here. It's obvious the Falcons need a QB, but Matt Ryan, Brian Brohm and Andre Woodson are reaches at #4. So they will settle for what is perhaps the best player in this draft, what with Warrick Dunn aging and Jerious Norwood not #1 back material.

5. Kansas City Chiefs: Sam Baker, OT, USC
Why did Larry Johnson disappear? Why didn't Brodie Croyle show as much promise as hoped? Simple. The O-line blows.

6. New York Jets: Sedrick Ellis, DT, USC
The Jets would love for Chris Long or McFadden to slip here, but if they don't then Ellis is a fine option to anchor the D-line.

7. New England Patriots (from San Francisco): Malcolm Jenkins, CB, Ohio State
When you go 16-0, you obviously don't have many holes on the roster. But one area of concern is the secondary, where Asante Samuel is due to become a free agent. James Laurinaitis is a strong possibility here, but the Pats hate drafting linebackers.

8. Baltimore Ravens: Andre Woodson, QB, Kentucky
And the first QB comes off the board. People love Matt Ryan and his "NFL ready" skills, whatever that means, but Woodson has much more upside, as I believe that Ryan and Brian Brohm have already hit their ceiling. Consider Woodson/Ryan to be this year's Young/Leinart.

9. Cincinnati Bengals: James Laurinaitas, MLB, Ohio Stats
The law of averages says that at least one of the Bengals' first-round picks on defense will pan out someday.

10. New Orleans Saints: Kenny Phillips, S, Miami
Don't blame Reggie Bush or Sean Payton for the Saints' regression this year. Blame a secondary that has been so godawful it redefines the meaning of "godawful."

I will post picks 11-20 soon.

Na na na na na na na na (Hey!)

2008-01-04T14:28:00.000-05:00

I don't know when this picture of Tom Brady started circulating - for all I know, people may have been making fun of his scraggly arms and tiny man-tits (so unlike me) for years, and I'm just catching on now. Whatever the case, in the intervening 8 years since this picture was taken, Brady has turned into the Adonis of Baby-Mamma Drama, and everyone can look at it and say, "look at how cute he used to be! He's all growns up now!" Fun story, cute picture, like showing a baby picture of Will Smith or Hitler or something, so we can all marvel at how someone who is famous used to be young and not-famous (just like us!). But really, the insidious part of this whole affair is, why the fuck does the NFL take semi-naked pictures (or videos, I guess, since this looks like a vidcap) of draft prospects in the first place? I mean, I guess they asked him to strip down to his underwear in order to be weighed, so that all the teams that passed on him can say, "he only weighed 180 pounds (or whatever the fuck), how could we know he'd be good at throwing footballs and reading defenses, two things that are intimately connected to how much a person weighs?" But after they got him on the scales, couldn't they give him some slacks, a shirt, some fucking overalls, something, so he could do his on-spot interview with a modicum of dignity? He's being prodded and looked over like a piece of meat, couldn't you at least pretend that this is a professional process and avoid videotaping him in his underwear too? I have to assume that they have videos like this of all of the players who enter the NFL draft, since Brady wasn't exactly a top-tier prospect coming out of college, so somewhere in the NFL's archives a hard drive is filled with thousands of hours of what basically amounts to soft-core pornography. In the end, perhaps this answers the question of why the NFL is so against allowing players to jump straight from high school to the pros - not because of the level of competition, but because all of a sudden their draft workout videos turn from relatively harmless (yet creepy) documentary evidence of the physiques of 21 year old men to criminally prosecutable child pornography. In any case, I think I know who's running the scouting combine:

Guest Post by Tiggs Hempel

2007-12-16T11:37:00.000-05:00

It is a tough week for illicit activity. This week we saw the release of the Mitchell Report, which states that every single player in the history of baseball has used performance-enhancing drugs at least once per game. Meanwhile, investigations are under way into why the present administration videotaped itself torturing people, and then destroyed the tapes. Honestly, it's like Congress has decided to just shit on everybody's feelings.
To address the latter first, it should seem pretty obvious why these tapes were destroyed. These things get out. It's disconcerting, though, to know that four members of congress, including Nancy Pelosi, were already briefed on the CIA's intorturrogation techniques and raised no objections. Which can serve as a comfort: our lawmakers know what goes on behind these closed doors, and have no problem with it.
But knowing that our tax dollars are going toward the dehumanizing torture of potential Arab-Americans or Muslims of any nationality is not nearly as disturbing as the Mitchell Report's explanation of Roger Clemens' steroid use:

The report describes how Clemens got injections of the steroid Winstrol in Clemens' apartment in Toronto's Skydome in 1998, according to Brian McNamee, named in the report as a possible distributor of steroids.
McNamee "injected Clemens approximately four times in the buttocks over a several week period with needles that Clemens provided," the report states. (CNN.com)

I have, on several occasions, expressed confusion over the male bonding that takes place on sports teams. Honestly, though, there is no friendship closer than the friendship between two men who are willing to inject one another in the rear end four times over a several week period. This is something of an inspiring story--Ass of Dreams, or The Buttural. A story about how two men can get past their differences (one man is a player, another is a strength trainer/drug dealer) to expose their private parts to one another (though the Mitchell Report does not specify if McNamee had Clemens inject him with drugs on his backside, but one can only assume he did--thats' what friendship's all about). It would seem, though, that George Mitchell is intent on turning this beautiful story of friendship into one of drug abuse and cheating, like those people that notice that old Disney movies are racist.
In times like these, it is up to some foremost authorities on baseball to steer us right:

"Like many fans, I've been troubled by the steroid allegations. I think it's best that we not jump to any conclusions on individual players... Steroids have sullied the game, and players and the owners must take the Mitchell report seriously; I'm confident they will, and my hope is that this report is a part of putting the 'steroid era' of baseball behind us."
--George W. Bush

Indeed, it is time to put this era behind us.

Guest Post by Journ Sella

2007-12-04T15:12:00.000-05:00

This is an update of this.

Guest Post by Bud Ware

2007-11-28T10:30:00.000-05:00

I have a concern about the direction in which our nation is going, and I think that sports may solve this concern. This is rare for me.

When I was in high school, I had a couple of classes with a Ms. Dennis, who taught drama and English and directed some plays and was often truly awful to be around. She was the first person I ever heard declaim rap as "not music." The other brief anecdote about her is that she hated me onstage. She apparently thought I was a talented enough actor to cast in a few plays, but was furious every time I performed. This stemmed largely by my occasional desire to improvise in order to improve a script I felt was lacking. Once, I started scratching my belly onstage for about ten minutes. From the stage, I could hear her in the audience, fuming, "This is ridiculous! I don't believe this!"
Regardless, my favorite memory of her was when Smarty Jones was poised to win the Triple Crown in 2004. He had won the Preakness and the Kentucky Derby, and was racing in the Belmont Stakes. I was on my way to a rehearsal of a play directed by Ms. Dennis, when I passed her car parked next to the school. She was inside, listening to the race. She was shouting and panting. If you didn't hear the game, you could easily mistake her for being on the receiving end of some great oral sex. Of course, Smarty Jones lost, and Ms. Dennis was heartbroken.
As she saw it, Smarty Jones was our nation's hope for coming out of this terrible moral depression we'd found ourselves in. She thought the country was steadily getting worse, and we needed an athlete to rally around, even if that athlete was not a human being. It should go without saying that Seabiscuit had come out recently.
Anyway, this is what came to mind when I read this news article. The families of people who were apparently killed for sport by our mercenaries in Iraq are alleging that those proto-Hessians were taking steroids, which could of course cloud their judgment. It would be difficult to convince me to hate Blackwater any more than I already do, so my initial reaction to this article was: Is that sporting?
It seems fairly reasonable to compare our efforts in Iraq to a sporting event. No matter how many times the Red Sox and the Yankees face-off, they'd never want to eliminate the other's team; without the one, the other'd have no one to play. This seems to be why we never took Colin Powell's advice to, you know, set objectives in Iraq and also use the entire might of our fairly significant army to accomplish those objectives and get out (something we did the first time we went to Iraq, precisely because we made all our current mistakes in Vietnam, and the military prefers to learn from mistakes than be led by a man who seems to never have read a history book). We're setting up a ball game.
But when did we lose sight of that goal? I feel compelled to compare the use of mercenary forces on steroids to the use of baseball players on steroids from a few years back (please scroll down to bullet point #14). Certainly there are no rules against it, and it would help us win, but doesn't it suggest we've strayed too far from our original plan, which is to set up an unending war to benefit our business interests? In a way, Halliburton is sort of our New Era.
So maybe it is time for us to look to baseball for our ethical cues. Officially ban steroid use among our by-the-hour soldiers, and put an asterisk next to our name in the history books when we start printing ones that say we won this war. Then, hopefully, we can move on and play the game with dignity.

Manchester City Again

2007-10-26T17:00:00.000-04:00

England is just like America.

Or at least, it is in the small way I've chosen to elucidate today.

When not being invaded by terrifying robotic ambassadors of this country's far inferior version of football, England's national sport is visually plagued by the single-minded adherence to far-too-few team color motifs. Tomorrow, my chosen team, Manchester City, "The Blues", will play London's Chelsea, also "The Blues". Out of twenty teams, there are five teams that are officially called "The Blues" (Birmingham, Evert on, and Portsmouth are the others), and four "Reds" - Liverpool, Arsenal, Middlesbrough, and "The Red Devils", Man chester United. The last World Cup Final featured another permutation of this peculiar prismatic disaster: Italy's Azzurri vs. France's Les bleus.

My normal sport of choice is of course also plagued by the same, let's call it, colorless uniform color uniformity. Baseball's fascination with red is, well, uniform, and encompasses, quickly, the following teams: Atlanta, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Washington, Houston, St. Louis, Boston, Arizona, Cincinnati, Cleveland, and Los Angeles. And as for the NBA.

Have we gained anything, together, by looking through all of those links? I'm not quite sure. But these things can be quite bothersome to watch. (Can you tell that these two are playing for different teams?) And since I'll be watching the Blues-Blues game tape-delayed on Sunday morning at 2 am, I'm worried that I'll just be unable to actually understand what is going on.

I thought I was doing some obscure, barely readable unexpected rooting for Manchester City, until I found this blog by an Italian fan. He has pictures of himself with three of the team's players(!), and much superior production value to "Faster Than a Shark", which boasts a mere two readers who must be notified every time it is updated. And it is nearly certain that one of them is at this very moment high on any number of hallucinogens and is licking a towel somewhere in the forests of Massachusetts.

Guest Post by Track Fellarn

2007-10-14T19:55:00.000-04:00

I have long been confused by the way that people follow sports. It is certainly possible that a person would care about who won what game (I guess), but why would it then be important for this person to follow the specific play-by-plays of this game? Why watch a game when the next day the paper prints the name of the winner (and often the loser! and the score!)? It's often been suggested to me, though, that the reason I cannot understand the relevance of a specific pas de deux by Peyton Manning is that I also don't care about the outcome. That sounds fair.
Except for one thing. I do care about politics. I like following this current general election campaign, and am very interested to see who will be the next president. Actually, I'm more than interested. I'm emotionally invested. I'm fairly confident that sports blogs aren't supposed to be explicitly political, but this blog is unpopular enough for me to comfortably say that if any of the Republican presidential candidates win this election, I will not emerge from my bedroom until mid-August 2010.
Back on point, though, CNN has a thing it calls the "Political Ticker," where it posts short articles about what's happening in politics. For a while, it was interesting ("Oh, look, Elizabeth Edwards says that John Edwards is at a disadvantage as a white man running for president."). But lately, its minute-by-minute minute coverage is exhaustively stupid. Here are some examples of "newsworthy" headlines from CNN's Ticker:

Eventually, there will be an actual election, and Clinton can tell us then why Giuliani would not be a good president, and those of us from New York can be embarrassed to have ever voted in local elections. But until that point, I don't care at all about which candidates are attacking which within their own party. Much in the same way that I don't care if the Red Sox beat the Yankees. Just tell me which is playing in the World Series. Actually, scratch that. Just tell me who won the World Series.
Actually, you really don't have to.

Tomorrow : Manchester City v. Manchester United; Today, Mark E. Smith.

2007-08-19T03:11:00.000-04:00

I support the Philadelphia Phillies, baseball's, America's, and finally sports' all-time losingest team. I chose them as a secondary baseball outlet after the winningest, my hometown New York Yankees. Rooting needs balance, and the Phillies need help. They're often on tv against the Mets, whom I naturally dislike. Perhaps one of these years they'll make the playoffs.

It was only in the last year that I began to follow international soccer beyond the too-rare World Cup. I've been able to get the English Premier League through Fox Soccer Channel, and naturally the time came to pick an English side to get behind. The 'big four', Manchester United, Chelsea, Arsenal, and Liverpool did not interest me, because they could not offer anything in star power, tradition, or economic might to rival the Yankees, broadcast every night through the sycophantic trumpets of John Sterling, Michael Kay or Susyn Waldman. Nor was I inspired by the mid-table Cleveland-like Tottenham, Newcastle, or Everton, teams that would always be slightly short of major success.

It was Manchester City that I chose to support, for several reasons, one Elvis-related, but mostly because of a Phillies parallel. I'm a Yankee fan; I don't need to watch other teams to expect success. Manchester City is the second team of a huge, post-industrial wasteland. They're known for continued failure. Last year I watched them stumble toward a mark in line with the Phillies' quest for 10,000 losses - setting a new Premiership anti-record by scoring a pathetic 10 goals in 19 home games.

Manchester is known for two things - Manchester United and Joy Division. There's just no room for Manchester City or Mark E. Smith in that sentence. That analogy has to end right there, of course, for were they to have brawled in their late 70s heydays, Smith would have mauled Curtis and possibly eaten him or strung him up in his own house and left him for his wife to find.

Oh my god, Mark E. Smith killed Ian Curtis.

Tomorrow, the two teams play. It is perhaps City's best chance in years (they haven't done well in this one) against their rivals. United is stumbling and without their two best scorers, Wayne Rooney and Cristiano Ronaldo. They still have Carlos Tevez (actual picture!) to growl at City's new signings. But the team that plays in light blue while fans belt out Rogers and Hart can take comfort in Mark E. Smith, who is somehow still alive.

Mark E. Smith barges in through the door of Ian Curtis's Manchester home. The family is out; too bad. Curtis takes a punch to the face and goes down, prompting a fit of vicious kicks from Smith. Curtis regains consciousness and finds himself tied to a chair in his own living room. He is forced to watch Strozek and then to listen to Iggy Pop. Ian is groggy, but he can still speak as Smith ties a stout rope securely around his neck.

What did Ian Curtis say, hanging there in his own house, knowing full well he was about to die? Only Mark E. Smith knows for sure.

Guest Post by Journ Sella

2007-08-02T10:40:00.000-04:00

Recently, my friends and I began a mission to watch many of the action movie franchises we otherwise might not touch. It was probably brought on by the recent release of the too-perfect Get Rich or Die Hard Tryin'. We caught up with John McClane quickly, despite the stumbling block that is Die Harder. Next we moved on to the Alien series, which meant that the Predator movies must follow, so that we could see Alien vs. Predator in time to catch Aliens vs. Predator. We haven't gotten around to this epic battle, however, because of one major interruption:
Barry "Buy War" Bonds is on the verge of beating some kind of record, currently held by Hank Aaron. As a result, every game in which he plays is televised, so that no one will miss the stunning moment when he hits that ball over the fence (do they still use fences? or is it walls now?) and jogs around the bases, exciting and disappointing the entire audience. My friends watch this every single night, bathing in anticipation and rage. Hence, no Aliens vs. Predator.
The problem here, though, is that no one wants to see Barry Bonds accomplish this. Hank Aaron was apparently a swell guy, excellent player, longtime humanitarian, cookbook author, and real gentleman. Barry Bonds, on the other hand, is suspected not only of taking steroids, but also feeding them to the children of other players and blackmailing these players into throwing games so that Bonds' team (whom does he play for? the Giants, right?) may clobber all opposition as though instead of baseball bats they wielded Thor's mighty hammer, which is ironic, considering that Hank Aaron's nickname is "The Hammer" (or, alternately, "The Maccabee" - tell me Hank Aaron doesn't sound like a Jewish name). Anyway, Bonds' gall (or chutzpah) in breaking Aaron's record, along with the dick way he's been self-advertising, has many baseball fans furious and glued to their television sets. Frankly, this is the first time in history have so many people have fanatically monitored their televisions in anticipation of something awful since the weeks following 9/11.
It's okay, though. This columnist has a solution.
In 1980, Richard Pryor set a record for endurance by performing a two hour 41 minute set at the Laugh Factory. This stood for more than twenty-five years. Then Dane Cook, the biggest cock in comedy, beat his record with a three hour fifty minute show. For a brief period of time, the world of standup comedy was at a standstill. If Dane Cook could beat a record set by Richard Pryor, what reason was there for anything at all? That's why, in early 2007, Dave Chappelle beat this record with a six hour seven minute show, basically unbeatable, essentially taking the record back for talented, black comedians. Suck it, Dane Cook.
What baseball needs is for the player with the most integrity to beat Barry Bonds' record as soon as possible, and in an unbeatable way. The answer should be clear. Dave Chappelle needs to set this record with, say, 4,000 home runs. How will he accomplish this? With pluck and perseverance, of course. And possibly with the help of some strictly homeopathic nonaddictive supplements.

Sosa Knows the Score.

2007-04-17T01:49:00.000-04:00

So I think most people are looking at this Sosa comeback thing as some kind of sideshow, an unimportant return by a man who is at best ridiculous and at worst a reviled cheater. He seems certain to fail in this comeback, to maybe hit a few more home runs before reverting to something like the .221/.295/.376 line we all thought finished him in Baltimore two years ago. His is a signing that seems oddly to not be about baseball at all, but a chance for a usually anonymous team to get some early headlines. Sammy Sosa's always been really easy to laugh at, and of course his return to the Rangers evokes all of those old easy self-writing articles, bringing up those well-covered Sosa foibles: quitting on his team (he left Wrigley field on the last day of a lost 2004 season), corking his bat (he said he accidently used his special batting practice model), and getting hilariously, metaphorically hit in the head near the end of his Cubs career. Sosa's comeback has also prompted a pile of unfunny print about his legendary ability to change his command of the English language at will.

It is undisputable, however, that the man is hi-larious.

He's hitting .175/.195/.325 with two home runs at the moment, and may not last a full month. But Sammy Sosa's comeback, sure to fail (and clearly failing) at its baseball aspect, is actually his best possible career move. Sosa's Hall of Fame eligibility has now been delayed by two years, and he cannot appear on a ballot until at least 2012. If McGwire, Sosa's partner in 1998 nation-captivating and probable substance culpability is ever to be elected, there will have to be a serious change of purpose by the voting body, who accorded him a mere 23.5% of their support. Sosa's return allows an additional two years for the addled moral circus to die down to something resembling sanity, although he should be careful to avoid retiring within a year of Barry Bonds, whose election is now even more unlikely after being confirmed as the Virginia Tech shooter.

More Adventures in Diction

2007-03-15T14:00:00.000-04:00

This is ESPN broadcaster Jimmy Dykes, with an aura about him; Jimmy Dykes would like to apologize for his odor.

It seems Mr. Dykes has some things he'd like to say to the NIT Selection Committee. Overheard during the waning moments of ESPN2's telecast of the first-round matchup between Georgia and Fresno State:

The NIT has always had a great tradition, and an aroma about it, and it's even bigger today.

Having just watched 40 minutes of what passes for basketball in the municipalities of Athens, Ga. and Fresno, Calif., I can understand Mr. Dykes' desire to aerate the building.

It could have been worse; he could have been covering Stanford-Louisville.

Amaechi-do About Nothing

2007-02-08T22:07:00.000-05:00

John Amaechi. Gay.

According to the Boston Celtics, that's Gay-OK.

Just, uh, make sure you let Al Jefferson know to keep both hands on the soap.

Jefferson was uncertain about how teammates and fans would react if a current player came out. Amaechi, like those in U.S. team sports before him, didn’t do so until after his retirement.
“I don’t know,” Jefferson said. “It’s hard to say. I mean, would his teammates want to play on the same team with him? I don’t know. You’ve got to understand teammates take showers with each other. They’re around each other every day. I don’t know. I can’t speak on that.

Gays, people. In our NBA lockerrooms. Taking showers -- and they're probably using lavender-scented soaps. Explain to me how Mark Blount is going to concentrate on pulling down an offensive rebound if he has to rub bodies with some European named Michel, taut and glistening, his hair like meadowgrass, on the tide...

So John Amaechi is gay. Just like Esera Tuaolo and that guy who wrote Moneyball.*

~~Not that there's anything wrong with that.~~ Ukraine is game to you?! How 'bout I take your board and smash it to pieces?!

= = =

* May not be accurate.

Edit: In the interest of furthering the discourse, and in response to a previous comment, I give my fully articulated opinion on the matter, unsullied by sarcasm and references to Tom Waits:

My objective here was two-fold, and I admit that while writing this in haste, I sacrificed some precision in my analysis. One, comments such as those made by Al Jefferson (and others; Shavlik Randolph said, "As long as you don't bring your gayness on me I'm fine") suggest that NBA players aren't necessarily prepared to deal with an openly-gay teammate. But Amaechi, as a retired player and not one of great import (journeyman role player for five seasons) isn't as impactful as the media would like for us to believe. That he is the first openly-gay former NBA player is mere trivia -- retired athletes in other sports (the NFL's Esera Tuaolo, MLB's Billy Bean) have already as much as confirmed that homosexuality in the locker room or clubhouse is a reality. But a retired player gives players such as Jefferson and Randolph a measure of security, in that they don't need to confront him in their professional capacities. What sport needs to really progress on this issue is the first openly-gay active player. Given some of the attitudes expressed about Amaechi, it will probably take a true star player to overcome the ensuing stigma and scrutiny.

So there it is: 1) professional basketball players aren't necessarily socially enlightened, and 2) Amaechi's announcement does little to alter perceptions beyond what his predecessors have already accomplished.

Guest Post by Stubs McKinley

2007-02-01T15:07:00.000-05:00

Today I had the misfortune of sitting surrounded by athletes. Please allow me to explain.

I am attending a well-ranked University in Boston, MA, and occasionally find myself in class. The problem with attending a well-ranked University in Boston, MA, is that they tend to be sort of popular (everyone hopes to someday be a Kennedy), and as a result several of the classes in which I find myself are huge lectures, the sort of anonymous experience only the military or an orgy can provide. In cases like this, I find my time is best spent by watching silent movies on mute on my laptop computer while some professor discusses the Crusades and their effect on Philip Roth. The best place to do this is the corner in the back of the room, so nobody can see my screen but the sort of person who would sit in the back row. I’m getting to the athletes.
Today, I became surrounded on nearly all sides (think: peninsula) by people wearing baseball caps. I swear this is true. Each and every one of them is wearing a baseball cap. I myself am sporting a stylish bucket hat emblazoned with “Jacob Burns Film Center.” Like Fred Willard in This is Spinal Tap, I do sort of worry that I will be mistaken for one of the band.
Anyway, unless these people are Jay-Z, most of the attendees of this well-ranked University who sport baseball caps on all occasions are members of frats who participate heavily in athletics. I do not attend Duke; the athletes do not have bad reputations. I do attend any University, so the frats do have bad reputations. As a result of the frat-sport correlation, the smell of weekend date-rape has unfortunately rubbed off on the athletes. The point of this is that I recognize men wearing baseball caps as exactly the sort of man my mother told me not to grow up to be. Call me prejudiced if you like; these are not people who are disempowered.
In any event, here I am, surrounded by baseball caps, and one of them is holding a school newspaper, the Daily. Upon seeing it, they begin to clamor.
Before I continue with this story, I will explain that I always turn to the comics section first. I do not pretend to be the sort of person who cares about Bill Richardson. I am interested in seeing whether Anthony and Liz will end up together.
These gentlemen were similarly single-minded. “Are we in there?” They were. Our paper has extensive sports coverage, and these baseball cap-wearers were included. The only time I’ve ever been included is when I’ve actually written an article (my name will then appear on the byline).
Then one of them grew confused. “Stimmy? Sty-my? What does that mean? Stymied?” Indeed, though the man’s team had been recently stymied, he was baffled by the word itself.
If I may briefly drift off-subject, my well-ranked University has recently been the subject of much controversy, and because of affirmative action. We’re not the University of Michigan. Our conservative paper published an item suggesting that my University’s black students are not qualified to attend such a well-ranked University, and the affirmative action program weakens our school by including them. This is not a statement with which I agree.
Of course, here again we have some white students, all wearing baseball caps, who participate in athletics and do not know what the word “stymie” means. I do not resent athletics, except in terms of their sexual magnetism. I do not resent the fact that my acceptance to this school may have been more academic and theirs may have been more athletic. It takes all kinds. But it occurs to me that when people start looking around for someone who doesn’t belong in a well-ranked University in Boston, MA, perhaps they shouldn’t go after black people first.

Guest Post by Butter Harrison

2007-01-31T13:13:00.000-05:00

Recently, I stumbled into a relationship with a woman who is a football fan. You can imagine how this would be troubling to me. I know nothing about football. In fact, I have it on good authority that even some of the name contributors to this blog know very little about the ins and outs of the sport. How can I compete in a market like that?
Apparently, the Super Bowl is coming up. This is a big deal in football—it is sort of the football equivalent of the World Cup. It is a bigger deal for my girlfriend, S., who is a big Colts fan. I mean huge. Her facebook religious affiliation refers to Peyton Manning. She wears a Colts jersey in Boston (she is not popular). I have gotten weeping phone calls from her when the Colts lose. She gets bedroom eyes when they win.
So the fact that they are competing in the Super Bowl is a huge deal. She explained that a victory for the Colts will mean fifteen minutes of sex (about thirteen more than I can handle), and a defeat will mean four hours of tears, so I should be prepared for either event (I have a tissue box next to my bed).
When she mentioned it, I realized that I, too, have an important event coming up. Please don’t mock me. I am a huge fan of the Academy Awards. Please stop mocking me.
Like any football fan, I often feel that the wrong people win. I often throw food at my TV, and I will admit that when I saw certain nominations I was so depressed I didn’t go to class all day.
The problem, though, is that the Academy Awards are not really analogous to the Super Bowl. The Super Bowl is one event, one long, endless event, while there are so many chances for good and bad victories during the Academy Awards. It’s a little bit more like the World Series. Best Picture is Game Seven.
Then again, my favorite team (Children of Men) is playing in Game Three (Best Adapted Screenplay) but for Game Seven, it feels like only the Red Sox and the Indians are playing—I vary between being angry and being indifferent.
There is a feeling going around among fans of the Academy Awards that the Oscar tends to be awarded retroactively to whomever deserved the Oscar last year. Nobody thinks that Return of the King was the Best Picture; people were mostly impressed by Peter Jackson’s work so far. If The Departed wins this year, we’ll know why.
In that sense, the Academy Awards process is less like the actual gaming of a sport and closer to the draft process. When a great team (Children of Men, directed by Alfonso Cuarón) does poorly despite its obvious greatness, it means when the team drafts new players they get first pick. Right after Lost in Translation’s Bill Murray lost Best Actor to Sean Penn (has any man ever better embodied the New York Yankees?), Murray, a free agent, had his pick of teams. He ultimately did a season with Jim Jarmusch and then opened a car dealership.
Despite these obvious flaws in the system, I swear to God I will cry for four hours if Borat wins any awards.

Guest Post by Sheriden Defresne

2007-01-31T11:58:00.000-05:00

My girlfriend, B., is raising twins. They’re not mine. Don’t worry; I’m actually not involved.
She is a nanny for an extremely hippie couple. They dumpster-dive. The only music the twins (Zach and Ariah, I swear) will listen to, other than “The Wheels on the Bus”, is Pete Seeger. Yeah, like that.
The parents, though, have a mean sort of landed gentry streak through them. This was best exemplified when, recently, they commented that they would not allow their sons to play sports. This infuriated B. It got me worried about the day that she and I raise kids, and they want to play sports. I will be severely fucked.
Even in the simplest ways, I will be absolutely no good to a kid trying to learn sports. Imagine light music playing over a comical montage where the kid tosses me a Wiffle ball and it bounces between my legs. I get tangled up in a soccer goal. I keep yelling “Home run!” during basketball games.
And how will my kid even know sports? If one were to spend time with me, the closest to sports he or she would get would be the cheerleader on Heroes (“See, Sheriden, Jr., save her, save the world.”). I admit to not entirely knowing what squash is. Is it like football? Or is it the one like tennis? I also have no competitive spirit. A child raised by me would likely just as soon defect to the other team if his or her object of affection is playing defense.
Then again, that might be where B. comes in. She grew up playing softball, and today is fanatical about certain sports. She has on several occasions accosted name contributors to this blog, explaining how they were wrong and she is right. In every sports-related way, she complements me. Maybe that’s how you know she’s The One.
The above is tangential, as I am guilty of lying by omission. The reason this couple does not want their sons to play sports is because they do not want their sons to interact with “Those sorts of people.” I must admit; thinking of the Duke case, and thinking of Kobe Bryant, and thinking of the Dallas Cowboys, and thinking of Magic Johnson, and thinking of Sammy Sosa, and thinking of the guys who beat me up in middle school, this seems like a reasonable sentiment.
Then again, it would not be unreasonable to consider myself a person who lives exactly opposite athletes. So why don’t we examine my chosen path?
I write. Like William S. Burroughs wrote. Like Ernest Hemingway wrote. Like the Marquis de Sade wrote. Like Sylvia Plath wrote. Like Marcel Proust wrote. This is not great company. And that’s even assuming that my hypothetical children associate with other writers. More likely, they will spend all their time alone and end up committing suicide. And that’s assuming they’re good at writing. They could just sort of be like John Irving, and end up sucking their way through their middle ages.
It’s fair to say that it is up to one’s parents to raise one right in spite of the assholes one will meet in one’s chosen field. Well, parent. I will probably be watching TV.

ESPN really dislikes black people

2007-01-04T13:43:00.000-05:00

Maybe it's just ESPN.com. Or, more precisely, Page 2, that festering wasteland ever since Paul Lukas started his blog, Jason Whitlock got canned and Bill Simmons developed a gigantic crush on Bill Simmons. Page 2 hires black people to write for them but only if they can prove that they're functionally illiterate. From The Year In Lists:

Bomani Jones chose to write about the best James Brown songs. A noble endeavor, and his number 1 song is a spectacular choice: "The Payback", from the album of the same name. But then things go downhill - "Check this lyric. "Don't do me no dern favors/I don't know karate, but I know ka-razor/yes he do!" Nope, James wasn't the one to mess with."

Which would be nice. If it was the right lyric. Except that JB says, "I don't know karate, but I know ka-razy. Which actually makes sense. And is funny. And is an awesome line. And is not what Bomani Jones thinks the line is.

But Bomani, bless his heart, is only one half of this shit sandwich. Scrolling down we find a list by the always-lucid Scoop Jackson. No, not the Democratic Congressman who thought the Vietnam War was a pretty neat idea. The writer, of whom Whitlock once remarked, ""the publishing of [Jackson's] fake ghetto posturing is an insult to black intelligence."

Read his list. Go on, I'll wait. Notice a pattern. Yes, if you couldn't tell, Scoop Jackson is black. Black to the core. Black to the depths of his soul, which is also black, but not in the way that you mean it when you're describing a moustache-twirling villain. Black like Frederick Douglas and Martin Luther King and 50 Cent. And almost to an item, his list describes all the black things he likes. Because he's black, if you forgot. I have nothing against Barack Obama. I like Barack Obama, I may very well vote for him, but to call him the writer of the year, for yet another "uplifting" tome by a politician with big ambitions which will be forgotten in 6 months? A bit of a stretch. But then again, Scoop Jackson is black. So don't forget it.

ESPN.com hates black people because this is the sort of black person they hire. Clowns. I don't blame the writers - they do what they do. I blame those who hire them, who foist them on the public, and who make money out of their shucking and jiving. You're telling me these are the two most qualified black writers that ESPN could find.......

Actually, now that I think about it, what Bill Simmons does is pretty much the white person equivalent of shucking and jiving ("Yes massah, Rocky IV sho' was good, and mah woman done distracted me from 'dat TV jus' when it be gettin' good.") so I guess this is a theme they've explored across races. I stand corrected. But it's still "kah-razy", you illiterate fuck.

Brawls Are Good.

2006-12-21T18:54:00.000-05:00

It hurts me to have to lead with this picture, which is the second most overblown thing about that black year of 2004. Either way, there've been two close Knicks wins since those famous fisticuffs, which besides the unquanitifiable results of pulling the team together, had the immediate effect of removing Nate Robinson from the team. Robinson is a man about whom cliches clash for dominance. The air surrounding the young guard is thick with the sounds of conflicting idioms and overwraught, breathless sportscasting.

Basketball players should be taller than actors.

He is somehow, both a scrappy undersized underdog and a ballhogging malcontent thug, a high-flying dunking sensation and a non-passing point guard wrestling in the stands. This season we've seen him block Yao Ming and also be called for travelling on an egregious showboating dunk attempt. He leaps for unlikely rebounds, and throws up impossible attempts into coverage that clatter off the rim. He's often to be seen arguing calls and screaming at opponents. Somehow his size has turned him into an emotional fan favorite, and he's cheered nearly everytime he touches the ball. This sentiment won him the dunk contest, despite an infamous fourteen misses. We'll see if it survives the brawl, in which he played the largest part and pretty clearly instigated.
I'm in the unfavorable camp on Robinson. He has really poor shot selection, clock skills, and is clearly a shooting guard, not a point guard. (For those without a game-by-game opinion, I can point to his 1.5 apg.) The Knicks are overloaded with guards, and Robinson bleeds playing time from the famous two plus Richardson and Crawford, all of whom are better players. So he's 5-9 and can dunk. I'd prefer if he'd pass.

Great Finds of the Past, Part II: Monday Night Football

2006-12-12T22:47:00.000-05:00

In the first installment of this series (otherwise known as things I quickly scribbled down while failing a sportswriting class a year ago) we examined Erick Dampier. Today, we watch as your bitter, possibly drunken writer watches Monday Night Football, and desperately tries to be Hunter S. Thompson. I hope I don't always sound like this much of an asshole. Pictures added after the fact.

I turn on my television to watch Brett Favre get sacked. Well, that’s kind of what I was expecting. I don’t follow football much, but I do follow sports, and I know enough to remember that the old man’s team is struggling this year. A quick look at the standings shows the Packers at 2-7, and their opponents, the ready made villains of the old-man-against-it-all story line, to be the Minnesota Vikings, an uninspiring 4-5.

But hey, he throws a touchdown, which proves to be a hard-to-explain catch. Donald Driver has his back to Favre as the ball is thrown. A stride or two ahead of his defender, Driver sees the incoming pass over his shoulder and leaves the ground, spinning like some sort of man-ballerina so that the pass hits him square in the chest. ABC then shows ten replays and a graphic with the ‘pass speed’, after which Madden compares it to the speed of a baseball pitch in a way I can’t understand. Driver leaps into the first row of stands where he is repeatedly slapped on the back and ass by screaming fans that appear to be clad entirely in replicas of his uniform and gesture ridiculously at the camera. Forms of lower primate come immediately to mind. Not like I know anything about monkeys – good for them, they’re passionate fans, I’ve heard the stories of the long year’s wait for tickets, I think they won a super bowl recently, I remember watching some half-hour rousing deep-voiced documentation of the legend of the Ice Bowl one boring winter afternoon, bodies flying everywhere in sub-zero temperatures – this is devotion, 2-7 though they may be.

ABC’s next segment is ‘Mic’d Up’, featuring a Viking player named Sharper yelling repeatedly at his teammates, “It gonna be a long day. It gonna be a long day.” It takes me a quarter and a half to realize that Daunte Culpepper, the Vikings franchise player of their own (Daunte Culpepper was Donovan McNabb, i.e., a running quarterback, before Mike Vick was Donovan McNabb, see, I know just enough about this sport to hold my own in casual conversation) is not Daunte Culpepper at all, but someone named Johnson. Apparently Culpepper is injured. Well what do I know, they all look the same in their purple infused white uniforms and shiny purple helmets. With purple socks, purple sleeves, purple numbers, and what looks like a purple fanny-pack/muff hanging from Culpepper neé Johnson’s torso/abdomen/crotch region. Yes, purple. And the Packers wear green and yellow. What a joke.

There comes a point in every football game where you get tired of John Madden. With 3:07 left in the first half, I have reached that point. Screw this, it’s going on mute, I’m worshipping at the feet of the great goddess shuffle for at least a few minutes. With a minute plus left, there’s a Viking interception at midfield returned for a touchdown. But then, and I had to turn the sound back up for this, there occurs that most frustrating element of a football game - a disputed call. We get to see the play another few load of times, and a split screen showing both coaches looking worried (hilariously, the shaved head of Tice, the Viking coach, features a pencil behind his ear. I think he was hired for his resemblance to James Gandolfini more than anything.), before the official in his clown suit dourly addresses the booing crowd. Number Four lives up to the legend I’ve heard of and snaps a long touchdown through the middle to Driver again, who jumps back into the stands again as Madden enthusiastically fellates Favre. “At some point Brett Favre says, I don’t need patience, I need touchdowns,” slobbers Madden. “You can guess against Brett Favre but you better be right, or you’re going to get burned!” he exhorts further. The Vikings interrupt the flowing praise, which makes me imagine Madden and his bouncing, drooling jowls doing things I’d rather not describe, by trying to get to field goal range, even though Al Michaels and a colorful graphic tell us that the last field goal of this length at Lambeau Field came back in 1965. Improbably, the game got interesting as soon as I turned the sound off.

At halftime, Tim McGraw sings a country song with rhyming lyrics about this week’s football highlights. I would relate some of the lyrics but I was too busy slitting my wrists and expiring all-too-slowly in a tortured heap on the floor. As they say where I come from, what a fucking disaster. It makes me wish that Darryl Strawberry had cut off Tug McGraw’s penis and sold it to an underground organ dealer to feed his crack habit back in the depths of the eighties. It makes me wish that Tim had contracted double-syphillis leprous AIDS while experimenting with designer cowboy hats and was hit by a bus, then kept alive intravenously until a hideous slow aching demise after being unplugged. It makes me wish that I was born deaf, mute, and in Pakistan. By the time they play The Stooges’ ‘Raw Power’ over purple and yellow highlights, I’ve had enough. Is nothing sacred anymore? Have even Iggy Pop and the insane Asheton brothers sold out in this dark and ugly age? What was, in 1972, too loud, confrontational, and chaotic to sell at all, when Bart Starr watching brew guzzling reactionaries gave their state to Nixon by 150,000 votes, is now being nodded along to by their drunken, Tim McGraw supporting descendants. Iggy Pop lived on heroin and used to cut himself on stage, and now he is the soundtrack to Middle America’s weekly men-in-tights festival?

“Everybody’s always tryin to tell me what to do
Don’t you try
Don’t you try to tell me what to do,”

he urgently howls, but the song fades out after thirty seconds and Madden welcomes us back to the second half. Which will have to go on without me. One has been quite enough.

Justice!

2006-12-11T21:16:00.000-05:00

Courtesy Lou (and because he's burying the Mariners in their most recent playoff appearence).

During the 3rd quarter of tonight's Knick game, the broadcast came out of a commercial with Al Trautwig announcing he was about to interview one of the most famous soccer players in the world. The spectator turned out to be a delightfully incomprehensible Wayne Rooney, who was attending his first NBA game. As the Knicks were, naturally, down twenty points, he compared the booing he'd been hearing to the booing of his own crazed fans, and his tangled muttering was very Mickey O'Neil.
What made this little minute spot memorable, and blog worthy, was the fact that the worthless, infantile Jimmy Fallon was clearly visible the whole time, sitting a few seats from Rooney. Plainly Fallon did not recognize Rooney, and he grew hilariously irritated at being ignored over the course of the proceedings. It made for a lovely little scene.

Guest Post by Shave Wendell

2006-12-10T15:28:00.000-05:00

As an avid follower of how white America perceives hip-hop, I was certainly made aware of the growing movement to credit Muhammad Ali with creating rap. As a person who never played sports in high school, I think this is completely unfair and generally mean-spirited.
Ali gets no small amount of credit for his numerous accomplishments (didn't he knock a guy out in a fight really quickly? Didn't he defeat Rocky Balboa? Wasn't his biopic better than Balboa's?) His quote about floating and stinging is basically repeated ad infinitum by everyone who has ever been about to punch a guy. His moral and religious anti-war stance really gave a long-needed "fuck you" to the man from athletes, long known to associate with politicians.
When I was in high school, there was a guy who was a star football player. Let's call him Johnny Athlete. He was blond and tall and had blue eyes and muscles bigger than a printout of all the Battlestar Galactica fan fiction you could find. He was dating a certain Jane Beautiful, a girl with whom I'd been in love since kindergarten. She, needless to say, was a shiksa goddess who managed to retain the same set of freckles throughout adolescence. While it was later suggested that they were practitioners of the Cleveland Steamer, at the time they were nothing if not all-American and glorious. This was what Hitler and Nixon were always talking about. For God's sake, she tried to get the National Honor Society to start a schoolwide abstinence program. Are you sort of getting the picture here?
Anyway, the reason I mention this here is that in second grade, we learned to write poetry (by the way: teaching children to write poetry is about 1,000% more dangerous than teaching them about sex, if every awful person who wore all black and listened to Green Day and went to my middle school is any indication). I devoted the class period to a series of rhyming couplets devoted to Jane Beautiful. I can't remember the whole thing, but a couple of the lines were "She is my only one/My love for her weighs a ton," "She is my Juliet/But she think I am 'stupet,'" and "My love for her will never end/But to her I'm just a friend." See what I mean about it being dangerous?
Anyway, skip forward about eight years and she's steaming along with John Athlete. My frustration at being an overtall Jewish kid (the first in my grade to get glasses) with a sense of humor most informed by Robert Benchley led me to music (I abandoned this soon, until I got involved in two abortive musical endeavors in high school: 1) My friend Smocko and I tried to write a screenplay that hinged on the emotional power of a song about virginity, 2) Smocko and I were roped into a band with our friend Zoso [I was assigned bass guitar, an instrument I had never touched; Smocko was drums, same situation]), a path I believe many took. If one really looks at the people who most informed music in this century, they are not an attractive group of people. They are mostly awkward dudes who realized their disadvantage and grabbed guitars and suddenly started getting laid.
This is a lot of work. And it is because of the Ali/Jagger dichotomy that it is unreasonable to credit Ali with creating rap. Ali's already got plenty going for him; would it kill us to give Afrika Bambaataa his due?

As a schoolgirl

2006-12-08T16:57:00.000-05:00

Elitism is a thing of many forms. Elitism stands in line at the supermarket and chuckles at the dime novels and tabloid rags; elitism pauses, irritated, before explaining the background of Cory Lidle. Elitism lurks in a child's rejection of an ill-considered gift by an absentee uncle, judges half-glimpsed shirts on passing teenagers, reaches back and remembers national capitals and names of paintings. You know it's only my opinion, it may be right or wrong, but I think you'll find elitism at the Grand Canyon at sundown.

It is an unusual thing these days to be unabashedly excited about your team's transactions. Certainly some fanbases are unrelentingly bitter, and some others can't even address their team's offseason follies. In an era of instant internet analysis and statistical understanding, intelligent option weighing, usually toward the negative, is the order of the day. Rarely does one throw away his rational skeptism and embrace a trade or signing. But I am incapable of feeling anything but excellent about this recent event.

Today, for once, I can buy into glory-days propaganda and winning attitude bluster. I feel both like an old-timey hack sportswriter in my willingness to embrace any 'makeup' or 'proven' or 'true' cliche about Andy Pettite, and like the little kid I was when he first started pitching for my team in my instant, unquestioning satisfaction. Am I concerned about his 108 ERA+ in a vastly inferior league last year, or his recent injury history, or his $16 million for only one year? Not at all. Suddenly a rotation that was competant is now strong, and a city, to my mind (and no doubt, FJM will have an Eckstein-caliber overload in the next few days) is saved. (I lay claim to that cliche now, 10 minutes after this news item was posted on espn and mlb. I assure you it will not be the last time you'll hear it.)
As for actual baseball impact, Mussina-Wang-Pettite leaves Johnson and Igawa as reasonable back of the rotation questions, and the punchline that is Carl Pavano comfortably rehabbing. And then, of course, there is the awesome, ancient, primeval all-timer force that this signing implies the lingering, possibly until May, possiblity of. I can't help but be gloriously, uncharacteristically estatic. I'm talking, of course, about Jack Torrance.

(If you got the reference at the beginning, why then you, too, are an elitist, and the best kind at that.)

I am sorry that you missed it.

2006-12-08T07:41:00.000-05:00

Unfortunately for most, TNT guessed wrong last night (or, I suppose, sometime this summer) and chose to broadcast what became a standard, down-tempo, defensive struggle Detroit win at Dallas last night, instead of Suns at Nets. Rarely have I so enjoyed the privilege of living near the fetid, Springsteen-producing swamps of New Jersey as I did yesterday, in catching the 4th highest scoring game in the history of the league, Suns over Nets 161-157 in two overtimes.
It is often said that the way to beat the Suns is to slow down the game and try to play post basketball against them, which worked for the Spurs in the 2005 playoffs and almost did for the Clippers last year. Dallas finally took them down playing a hybrid of the Suns' uptempo offense, due largely to an unstoppable Dirk Nowitski. But last night the Nets had clearly decided to match their opponents' speed and creativity for the entire game.

It was a back and forth layup contest between probably the two best point guards of the era, and a look at their statistics doesn't even come close to showing how good this game was. Kidd tied Wilt Chamberlien for third on the career triple doubles list near the end of regulation, but more significant in my eyes he proved a worthy adversary for the endlessly praised Nash. The passing on both sides was absolutely stellar, and the score kept rising as the teams rarely missed after the third quarter.
An entire nerve racking hour passed after the timeouts started coming at the end of the fourth, just before Nash hit a tieing three with four seconds left. By the end of the first overtime, Carter, Stoudamire and Bell had all fouled out. Finally, near 11:30 et, three hours after the start and two and a half after I came in, the game ended in chaotic exhaustion, with Kidd dribbling off his foot and Barbosa missing a pass and having to leap above the sideline to save it. A wonderful game.

#@%&*#! .

2006-12-06T23:53:00.000-05:00

All week, the signal pyres flared up and quickly flickered out.

The Mariners had contacted the Boston Red Sox about acquiring the services of Manny Ramirez. When Boston countered by asking for 21-year-old centerfielder Adam Jones, right-handed closers J.J. Putz or Rafael Soriano and top catching prospect Jeff Clement, general manager Bill Bavasi -- staggeringly -- balked at the offer. Jason Varitek? Derek Lowe?

What?

So Ted Lilly signs with the All Your Low OBP Guys Are Belong To Us Chicago Cubs for $10 million a year. Jesus Christ, his parents actually named him Theodore Fucking Roosevelt Lilly.

So Kelso native -- and Mariners target -- Jason Schmidt took a paycheck from the Los Angeles Dodgers. He's from Kelso. Homecoming spells dinner at Sizzler and the acrid smell of pulp.

So Barry Zito desires a six-year deal. When you are 28 years old and
talk to the seals, you command your own price. Except Bavasi doesn't like six-year deals. Or 28-year-old left-handers. Or seals.

With all other options exhausted, and the instatiable appetite for victory in the American League West that is Jose Guillen in camp, Bavasi's only recourse is to ... overpay for John Thomsen? Miguel Batista? Ship out Richie Sexson and Rafael Soriano as part of a three-team deal that would net Tim Hudson and Adam LaRoche?

No.

But crapping themselves in a deal with the Braves still appears to be on the horizon.

Ladies and gentlemen, 27-year-old Horacio Ramirez -- whose injury history is at least as troubling as his career WHIP (1.402, and never below 1.343 in the "best" (read, most injury-plagued) of circumstances) and whose inability to strike out others (a career-high 100 strikeouts against 72 walks in a sabermetrically underwhelming 12-4 rookie campaign) makes him ... well, at best, one of the most magnanimous of the young guns.

At what cost? Only an equally injury-plagued righty with a K/9 just north of 9.0 and a career WHIP of 1.094 in 171 innings pitched -- who happens to turn 28 in but a few days.

What?

Copious.

2006-11-27T23:47:00.000-05:00

There's been a lot writen about the new massive contracts being handed out around the league. People are now gushing that even Manny Ramirez's contract looks reasonable these days, and he may indeed be traded. But where was all of this money back in July when the Yankees picked up Abreu and his contract, some $30 million over the next two years?
Boston just bid $51 million to speak to Matsuzaka, will sign him to a further hugh deal, and is expected to sign J.D. Drew for gigantic money as well. Houston finished only a few games out, and just spent $100 million on Carlos Lee. Both the Angels and Dodgers, who just paid $50 million each for a pair of overrated centerfielders, were also in close races. Abreu hit .330/.419/.507 over the final two months of the season, and these offseason developments just make that deal look better. As for the Phillies, they tried to use the money saved for a Soriano bid, and today settled on using it on Adam Eaton.

Righteous anger leads to quick disinterest.

2006-11-15T16:25:00.000-05:00

So I was all set to break out the assorted high-horse, pulpit, and soapbox cliches and get all angry about the redeath of punk, via the Dead Schembechlers, who are currently featured afront espn.com after months of deadspin coverage. Of course punk is dead, this is not in question, I planned to begin, and even had some clever links to support it. But it turned out that punk was just too dead for me to get properly angry or verbose, even about such an obvious disaster (see how long you can last before you lunge for mute). Their lead singer's named after the real thing. They know how to mimic old album covers and use Bollocksesque fonts. And, oh yeah, they're fucking obsessed with college football.
But, yeah, try as I might to be relevant, I couldn't help but come off as some asshole defending an ancient and tattered standard. So I'll just post a video mocking that guy, and decide to root for Michigan. Punk - beyond dead since probably the 1890s.

Guest Post by Frut Skeftan

2006-11-15T15:11:00.000-05:00

This weekend I had the unhappy privilege of attending a basketball game at Goucher. If you haven't heard of it, don't worry. Neither have I. It turns out that it's a game played by two teams with an orange ball, and other than that I can't help you. I have no way of making distinctions between basketball and Wiffleball, though I know that they are both the spectator sports of choice for Jack Nicholson and Woody Allen.
Anyway, my Goucher-enrolled friend Cheri was performing with a dance troupe at the basketball game's halftime show, so I felt compelled to see parts of the game, and what I saw I did not like.
I knew, of course, to cheer for the home team (The Goucher Gophers--honestly), which I took to be the players with "Goucher" written on their jerseys. Every time they made a basket, I cheered the loudest, encouraging them to "Fuck 'Em Up!" I began to wonder, though, why so many members of the team were white and balding. Soon my attention was drawn to the scoreboard, where inexplicably points were racked up for "Guest" every time the Goucher team made a basket. Yes, it took a while, but I eventually realized that this was a game of Goucher alumni vs. present Goucher students. This explained the balding, but nothing could explain the white.
More importantly, I had clearly been rooting for the wrong team (the alumni). But it turned out that I had been merely demonstrating a keen eye, as the alumni absolutely clobbered the present students. It was a bloodbath.
So here's the question: What the hell? How bad must your basketball team be if you play yourself and lose? More importantly, why are we made to suffer through these exercises? At that point, it is basically like going to see an improv show: plenty fun for the performers, but embarrassing for friends, family, and spectators.

Scorned

2006-11-13T17:57:00.000-05:00

Fact #1 - I watch "Survivor". This is a difficult thing to admit, but a fundamental truth that is inescapable.
Fact #2 - I root for a college football team that was once in the Big East and is now in the ACC.
Fact #3 - On Thursday night, the same night that "Survivor" comes on, the Big East had its biggest match of the year thus far, with Rutgers matching up with Louisville in New Brunswick. Rutgers emerged undefeated, and has been put forward as a serious national championship contender, an unthinkable development no more than 2 years ago.

I was struck by a similarity between last Thursday's episode of "Survivor" and the Big East showdown. Sorry to go all Bill Simmons on you, but it was too obvious to pass up.

First, a primer. For those who don't watch "Survivor" and don't know the strategic nuances of the show (if you're burdened with antiquated things like "self respect"), the show is essentially divided into two strategic sections, pre-merge and post-merge. In the pre-merge section, the players are divided into two opposing tribes that compete in challenges - the loser of the challenge each week has to vote a player out of the game. In this section of the game, the most important thing is to win those challenges, because the tribe that goes into the merge with greater numbers can, theoretically at least, take down the other tribe's members one at a time. Post-merge the game becomes an every-person-for-themself competition, but usually the members of the tribe with numbers realize to one degree or another that its in their best interest to stick with their tribe as long as possible (this process is known as "Pagonging", after the original tribe that got decimated by Richard Hatch and his army of darkness because they were too stupid to vote in any sort of bloc).

On Thursday's episode the two tribes were gathered together and every person was given a choice that they had to make in 10 seconds - stick with their current tribe, or "mutiny" and join the other. Two members of Aitu stepped off the mat and joined Raro, the first time anyone has actually done this on the show (a couple of previous seasons had given players the same choice, but no one ever actually did it). Pre-mutiny, the tribes were at 6-6, so post-mutiny Raro had a commanding 8-4 advantage. It was lousy strategy (the players who mutineed will forever be branded as traitors, and no matter how much other people in their new tribe like them, suspicion will linger over them) but good TV, because all of a sudden you had one tribe (Aitu) wearing white hats, and the other tribe getting a collective black hat for harboring the traitors. I confess I was rooting for Aitu anyway, because I have a crush that may not be entirely nonsexual on Yul, but now it borders on pathological - I desperately want Aitu to win, despite having no stake in the game, simply because I want to see the good guys win and the bad guys get what's coming to them.

You can probably see where this is going. A few years ago the ACC raided the Big East for 3 of its best football teams - Miami, Virginia Tech and Boston College. All three willingly left what was considered a sinking ship for what would inevitably become a new powerhouse conference. The Big East, left with little choice, raided Conference USA and landed Louisville, Cincinnati and USF (along with Marquette and DePaul, but only the former three play football) and were able to hold on to their BCS Bowl berth by the skin of their teeth.

Everything was going reasonably according to plan until this year. The Big East became a stronger basketball conference but in the sport where the big money is, football, they had become something of an embarrassment to the BCS, a conference of also-rans that was guaranteed an undeserved spot in a big-time January bowl. The ACC, meanwhile, had moved up to the big boy table with traditional powers like the SEC and the Big Ten.

In January, Big East champion West Virginia beat SEC champion Georgia in the Sugar Bowl, a game which was essentially a home game for Georgia in that it was played in Atlanta.

The 2005 Hokies, an enigma all year, lost to the 8-4 Florida State Seminoles, an inferior team, in the ACC championship game. The Seminoles would lose to Penn State in the Orange Bowl.

Which brings us to this season, and Thursday night in particular. The ACC is a mess - a two-loss Georgia Tech team will most likely meet either Wake Forest or Maryland in the conference championship game. There is not a single team in the conference that has been a legitimate contender for the national title this year, the only major conference which can make that claim. Meanwhile the Big East has had, at various times, WVU, Louisville or Rutgers make a serious claim for national championship game respect.

There is no doubt in my mind that, at this moment, the Big East is better than the ACC. That is a fairly inescapable fact, and a remarkable turnaround for a conference left for dead after the defections. The mutineers, the black hats, are losing. The white hats are winning. The ACC got what bad guys deserve - a down year across the board for the big 3 (VT, FSU, Miami) and a conference title holder who will probably be a huge underdog in the Orange Bowl. And the Big East has gotten what the good guys deserve - a spot in the national championship debate, and three strong football teams who can easily rival the ACC's big 3. I might not be able to be all that happy about this, but it certainly makes for a good story.

Bubba would've had it!

2006-11-10T19:51:00.000-05:00

The unlikely collision brothers each found a new team today. Sheffield to the Tigers is big news, but slipping deservedly under the radar was Bubba Crosby signing a one year deal with the Reds. It's tough to trade a hitter like Sheffield, who's as safe a bet for 35-100-.300 as anyone in the game, but I'm told the prospects are quality, and have seen the name Verlander invoked several times for young Humberto Sanchez. As for the disastrous Crosby, he's only one tiny Jr. Griffey injury away from 250 abs.

Oh Ericka.

2006-11-10T00:04:00.000-05:00

In honor of Erick Dampier's vintage performance tonight against the Suns (four minutes, two points, and three personal fouls through halftime) Faster Than A Shark presents a full length feature on Dampier. It is in fact a paper I wrote at the end of last year, just before the NBA Finals. I was trying to make up a sportswriting class I'd failed in the fall. Of course, I didn't pass the class, but, enjoy.

[Note that I actually provided sources since it was for a class. They were preserved when copied onto this.]

Erick Dampier grew to 6-11 and 235 pounds and went to Mississippi State to play basketball. He took his team to the Sweet Sixteen in 1995, and then, in his junior season, he helped his fifth seeded school to the Final Four and declared for the draft. But it was when he strode across the stage, selected tenth overall by the Indiana Pacers ahead of future stars Kobe Bryant, Steve Nash, and Jermaine O’Neal, that the story of Erick Dampier really began. Towering over NBA commissioner David Stern, he appeared in white checkered dress pants, a carefully kept goatee, and red blazer that refined the term unfortunate[i]. It was a disastrous fashion choice that would later come to symbolize his career: in the NBA, Erick Dampier would stand out for all the wrong reasons.

As a center due to his tremendous size, Dampier plays arguably the most important position on the court; the center stands close to the basket (often called ‘playing the post’), and is expected to receive passes and score on high percentage lay-ups and dunks. A skilled center should also be a dominant rebounder and shot blocker. Due to the combination of size and skill required to excel as an NBA center, there are at any time only a very few number of stars at the position in the league. The impact of a stellar center on his team is incredible, as shown in the championships and accolades attained by such players as Wilt Chamberlain, Bill Russell, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Patrick Ewing, and Shaquille O’Neal. Throughout his career, Dampier has never been one of the five or so best in the league, but he has always been close, just good enough to put in a good performance against a lowly sub-par team but never at the level of the big boys. It has made for a frustrating career.

While the center is the largest and most imposing player on his team, in practice this can mean that he is also the slowest and most immobile. A poor center, for all his size, can be little better than a target for smaller, more talented players to dunk over. As the primary shot blocker, the center is also the team’s quickest accumulator of fouls, nipping the arms of driving guards and often having to sit for long stretches to avoid fouling out. Small, flashy guards are fan favorites; centers are often noticed more for their shortcomings[ii] (bobbled rebounds, foul trouble) than their contributions (boxing out, screens), and can, with their huge size, become scapegoats and targets of a frustrated fan base. While these points are true of even the best at the position, Dampier has been accused of them and defined by them his entire career.

Dampier was traded early in his career from the Indiana Pacers to the Golden State Warriors, a team that has famously missed the playoffs every year since its early nineties firesale. He put up a respectable 11.8 points per game (ppg) and 8.7 rebounds per game (rpg) for a terrible 1998 team that finished at 19-63[iii], but regressed from that production in his next five years for the club, which never posted a winning record. In 2004, his contract year Dampier was much improved, playing with a new intensity and averaging 12.3 points and 12 rebounds. Although there was skepticism about his effort rising with his chance to leave Golden State, Dampier was beginning to be regarded as part of the inner circle, one of the top two or three centers in the league[iv]. Dampier actually described himself as the number two center in the NBA, second only the O’Neal[v]. Regarded as an emerging star, it was time for Dampier to leave the hopeless Warriors and seek a free agent contract with a more successful team.

That summer, Mark Cuban, eccentric billionaire owner of the Dallas Mavericks, a team plagued for years by the lack of even an average center[vi], produced a seven-year, $73 million dollar contract offer as part of a sign and trade. The Mavericks boasted one of the league’s best, improving players in Dirk Nowitzki and a talented collection of supporting players, and were seemingly only one All-Star center away from Finals contention. Unfortunately, just as he had in Golden State, Dampier arrived to break up a successful combination. Dallas had a free agent of its own that summer but decided to sign Dampier instead of resigning point guard Steve Nash, the wild-haired Canadian All-Star and local favorite, who went to rival Phoenix. While Dampier’s statistics regressed to pre-2004 levels, Nash was famously revitalized in the desert, winning the league MVP Award.

The Mavericks drew the Houston Rockets and then Nash’s Phoenix Suns in the playoffs. Dampier’s comment from a year earlier that he was the second best center in the league was proved ridiculous by his sluggish play against Houston’s Yao Ming and Phoenix’s Amare Stoudemire, but when confronted he maintained, “I said last year I was the second-best, and I stick by what I said. Nothing’s changed.[vii]” The Nash-for-Dampier swap was showcased on a national stage when the two teams faced off in the second round. Nash averaged 30.3 points, 12 assists, and an astonishing 6.5 rebounds; Dampier, 7 points and 7.5 rebounds. It was the culmination of a season of frustration and national ridicule for Dallas fans.

Though the team had also underperformed in other areas, massive media and fan criticism surrounded Dampier going into the 2005-2006 season. He was called out on court by Nowitzki for his poor play and his signing was widely regarded as a disaster. Bill Walton compared him to Shawn Bradley, the awful center he replaced.[viii] Shaquille O’Neal called him “soft[ix]”. A 2006 preview said of the center, “The megadeal Dampier was egregiously given will go down as the final fiscal atrocity that killed the Mavericks. He's slow and predictable at both ends, and barely serves a purpose for this team.[x]” Richie Whitt of the Dallas Observer summed up Dampier’s first season as a Maverick with the following:

But mostly Dampier was, a slow-footed, sloppy-handed big man who fouled too much and contributed too little on a team knocked out of the playoffs by Nash and the Suns in the second round. He missed 21 games with a stress fracture in his foot. Shot only 60 percent from the free-throw line. Turned assists into turnovers with mishandles near the hoop. And, in a paltry post-season, he was shut down by the Rockets' Yao and called out by teammate Dirk Nowitzki after being outscored an embarrassing 40-0 by the Suns' Stoudemire in Game 1. [xi]

Probably as a result of his infamous ‘second best’ comment, Dampier continued to take a beating in the press from Shaquille O’Neal, who is not only the best center of his generation but one of the most media-friendly players. Once when coming off injury he said that he “played like Erick Dampier”[xii], and has also noted that Erick, or “Erica[xiii]”, would be a dominant center in the WNBA. Jabs like this echoed around the country as Dampier, with increased television exposure, uninspired play, and a monstrous contract became a national punch line and a player regarded as one of the worst signings in recent times, in the unwanted company of the likes of Chan Ho Park and Albert Belle.

The 2006 season would prove another ugly one for the much maligned center. Despite his salary (Dampier made $8,662,500 this year[xiv]), Erick lost his starting role and was replaced by the younger, taller DeSagana Diop, despite Diop’s utter lack of an offensive game. Dampier appeared in interviews to be indifferent to the demotion, prompting scathing articles from the Dallas media questioning his competitiveness, bringing up all the issues yet again: his poor play, giant contract, and replacement of the popular and energetic Steve Nash, who won a second MVP Award.

Dampier turned in a good performance against Memphis, a team without even the semblance of a quality center[xv], in the first round of the playoffs, but by the middle of the second round had been replaced by Diop again. Bill Walton referred to Diop as the “unsung hero” of the deciding Game Seven against the Spurs for his excellent defense against Tim Duncan and crucial offensive rebounding after coming in for Dampier. The franchise’s $73 million man watched the end of the most important game in Mavericks history from the bench. Matched up against Nash’s Suns again with a trip to the Finals on the line, Dampier played only 24 minutes and got into only two games in a series the Mavericks won 4-2. Once again $73 million sat on the bench as the clock wound down.

Watching Dampier play it is easy to see his flaws, but just as easy to see the toll years of criticism have wreaked on the once-promising young man out of Mississippi State. None of his movements are graceful, and the weight of expectation is almost tangible. Every play, from box out to bobbled pass to awkward shot attempt, is a referendum on his contract, competitiveness, and worthiness. Every little failure, a dropped pass, missed throw, or unfortunate foul, is magnified by the howling fans and historical record. When Dampier trudges back to the bench after picking up a third or fourth foul, it is possible to imagine him wading through the piles of criticism he’s received. A quick pan to him sitting on the bench reveals a glazed, faraway stare. He has deep, sunken eyes and always wears a serious, almost hurt expression. Even his nickname, “Damp” is underwhelming at best. What a disaster.

[i] http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/multimedia/photo_gallery/2005/06/23/gallery.nbafashion/content.4.html

[ii]http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/spt/basketball/mavs/stories/120605dnspomavslede.7a720dc.html

[iii] All stats from www.basketballreference.com

[iv] http://www.adonalfoyle.com/GAME_3.shtml

[v] http://www.dallasobserver.com/Issues/2005-11-03/news/whitt.html

[vi] http://deseretnews.com/photos/2212264.jpg

[vii] http://www.dallasobserver.com/Issues/2005-11-03/news/whitt.html

[viii] http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20051220/news_lz1s20galry.html

[ix]http://p073.ezboard.com/fdallasbasketballdotcomfrm6.showMessageRange?topicID=167.topic&start=21&stop=40

[x] http://probasketball.about.com/od/teams/a/mavericks06.htm

[xi] http://www.dallasobserver.com/Issues/2005-11-03/news/whitt.html

[xii] http://www.dallasobserver.com/Issues/2005-11-03/news/whitt.html

[xiii] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erick_Dampier

[xiv] http://www.basketball-reference.com/players/d/dampier01.html

[xv] http://www.commercialappeal.com/mca/sports_columnists/article/0,1426,MCA_468_4645993,00.html

It's Election Day!

2006-11-08T15:01:00.000-05:00

"Shave your beard and go vote again."

No, that was yesterday! Today is Matsuzaka deadline day, in which the teams have until 3 PM to offer bushels of money to a team named the Seibu Lions. I'm told it's going to come down to something like $30 million from one of the New York teams, Boston, Chicago, or Crazy Tom Hicks, but also that we're not going to know the winner for days or weeks, just like the Virginia Senate election. I'm thinking I'd much rather go with the unknown and possibly outstanding Japanese pitcher than known regressor Barry Zito, who's been playing in a pitchers park with great defense, curveball not withstanding. But of course we could be looking at another Contreras here. What clever epithet will Larry Luchiano think of next?

Here's Faster Than A Shark's special Matsuzaka Anticipation Playlist EP:

Mystery Dance - Elvis Costello
Mystery Train - Elvis Presley
The Murder Mystery - The Velvets

You get the idea. I do not know what is going to happen.

Uh, you guys?

2006-11-02T02:08:00.000-05:00

From UniWatch, the Celtics' new memorial patch for Red Auerbach:

Surely someone has missed something obvious.

I understand that green and black are the team's traditional colors, but simply coloring the clover red would be the clearest way to go here. As it stands, the patch looks like one of those psychological tests where you're supposed to state the color instead of the word (the correct answer here, and thus the triumphant step closer to sanity, is green.) Of course, had I a voice in the design, I'd ditch the whole clover motif and come up with something that looked closer to this.

The lost art

2006-11-01T17:40:00.000-05:00

Whenever some old fart starts waxing nostalgic about how athletes in his day were better, stronger, had healthier skin and constitutions and were more dynamic in bed, I usually suggest to them that they are missing Bill O'Reilly and they should go turn on the TV and stop talking. Or I would if I wasn't so busy thinking about what corner of their mattress they hid their fortune under. But one thing that those oldies definitely have right is nicknames. Nicknames used to be awesome; nowadays they're just a lazy-assed contraction of a player's first or last name. Jeff Bagwell, a surefire Hall of Famer and owner of the most ridiculous batting stance ever forged by man, is called "Bags" by his teammates. Bags! This would be acceptable if he had a penchant for carrying peoples' luggage unasked-for, or liked to steal hobos' bindles. But as far as I know he does neither of those things, he simply has a nickname that is a crappier version of his last name. A sorry state of affairs. So in honor of a lost art, I would like to celebrate some of my favorite nicknames, one at a time. Here are some undeniable truths:

- Alliteration is always good.
- Old-timey sounding nicknames beat modern-sounding ones. If it sounds like something Mr. Burns would say, it gets a big fat stamp of approval.
- More words doesn't necessarily make a nickname better, but they can't hurt. Two and three words are common for older players, but if you have a 4 or 5 word nickname, you've made the big-time.
- Most importantly: the best nicknames are descriptive. They should conjure up an image, and that image should have something to do with the player.

So, on with my first nickname: The Donora Greyhound

This one will probably be only moderately familiar to non-hardcore baseball fans - this player has a much more famous (and less interesting) nickname. Nicknames with the form "The ____ _____" are not uncommon for top-20 all-time type players. He is one of two Hall of Fame caliber players who hails from Donora, Pennsylvania, and the other player could very easily have been given this nickname himself. Along with Hank Aaron and Tris Speaker, he is the most underappreciated transcendent star in baseball history. Oh, and he rocks a mean harmonica. So if you didn't know, the answer is him.

Back at the altar of Google Image Search.

2006-11-01T00:24:00.000-05:00

Just briefly, to mark the start of the NBA season. Other sites have predictions. We have several, but ultimately far too few, Thorwald-blinding flash bulbs.

"That Olde Tyme Feeling"

2006-10-27T19:34:00.000-04:00

or, "A Night In Maroon", in which our intrepid chronicler of all things trivial and pedantic in sports discusses the best Hokie win in two years, in prose form.

The game began, as most games do, with the tailgate, that ancient ritual stemming from the Middle Ages when spectators of jousting competitions would gather together beforehand in order to eat fire-roasted meats and drink mead before proceeding to the arena in which they would watch one knight brain another with a pointy stick.

Tailgates have come a long way since then (how those people managed to enjoy themselves without "Cottoneyed Joe" blaring in the background is difficult to comprehend) but the essential idea remains the same. One addition to the modern tailgate that would have been unthinkable in the year 1253 - Jello shots. According to wikipedia, jello is not, despite popular misconception, created from horse hooves and bull horns. It is actually derived from boiled cattle bones and pig skins. Well that's a weight off of my mind. In any case, these particular jello shots are encased in plastic ketchup containers (for easy transport both to the venue and away from the venue ie. into the stadium). They are, it should be said, fairly disgusting - someone on the recipe end has gotten their wires totally crossed, either accidentally or on purpose, and made the alcohol taste not only noticeable but overwhelming, which sort of defeats the purpose of the jello shot (being an alcohol vector meant for gigantic vaginas who don't actually like drinking alcohol, like me). In classic jello fashion, they come in three flavors - green, red and orange. The green ones are filled with Southern Comfort, so us squares avoid them like the plague. By the time the tailgate was packed up I had downed about 4 of these alcohol bombs and had a pocket filled with 3 more. Two were consumed on the way to the stadium, the third safely stored in my pocket for consumption while standing at my seat. Hokies don't sit in their seats. Hokies don't stand in front of their seats. Hokies stand on their seats, a concept which very clearly demonstrates the pitfalls of, and futility in arguing with, group behavior. While consuming my last jello shot along with my compatriots we were asked by the girls in front of us where we had obtained said jello shots, in response to which I replied that they were giving them out at the gate. This witticism, naturally, left me giggling like a schoolgirl - most likely, these ladies turned away in disgust, but I was too busy enjoying my own drollery to notice. Plus I was half in the bag - did I mention that those jello shots had a lot of alcohol in them? Well, I'll mention it again.

The Hokies, despite my fears, did not unveil the mismatched sleeve look against the Tigers, and one can only hope that that style has quietly been mothballed. They went with a style I have never seen them in - fully maroon. Now some may complain about this, and I understand that, but I for one thought they looked pretty damn good. The orange over white socks breaks up the monotony of the color scheme, and some players were wearing long white sleeved shirts under their jerseys which also helped add some color contrast. I would not be sorry to see this combo again.

The game began in classic 2006 Hokie fashion - with Clemson driving down the field to score a touchdown to make the score 7-0. Shockingly though, this was followed by a long Hokie drive which also resulted in a TD, and tied the score at 7.

A quick aside if I might, on a common gameday ritual - lifting a person up and bench pressing them a number of times which reflect the current home team score. Now, there is nothing inherently wrong with this ritual - if you are a lady (although, considering the rare-but-all-too-real phenomenon of groping anything that can't fight back by certain less-developed members of the male half of the species, you would think most women would think twice). However, if you are a male, and you ask your friends to lift you up, you are a tool of the highest order (a circular saw?). This is unacceptable behavior that would be punished, in my America, by nothing less than surgical castration. Don't worry, you won't need 'em, trust me.

In any case, the next four Clemson possessions resulted in punt, punt, punt, fumble. Nevermind the fact that the Hokies only managed a single field goal in the intervening period of time - this was a good Clemson offense that wasn't getting anything going against the Hokies. The score was 10-7 going into halftime, with most of us feeling cautiously optimistic.

The halftime show was a welcome departure from the usual entertainment (the Marching Virginian bandgeeks forming unrecognizable geometric shapes and occasionally dancing, poorly, in ways that only the sort of person who defines themself by their status amongst other social outcasts who think playing "Iron Man" on traditional marching band instruments is the height of cool can do). The Highty-Tighties (the Corps of Cadets marching band) took the field and played, I don't know, a bunch of stuff by John Phillip Sousa. I can never hear the band anyway, but I'm pretty sure that's what they said it was. Now the truth may be that the Highty-Tighties are composed of the same sort of band geeks that the civilian band is, but they're also trained to kill, so they're automatically cooler, or at the very least less likely to be made fun of by a person who has been described as "ass-kickable".

The second half began with a 3-and-out by the Hokies, a familiar motif. But the subsequent Clemson drive would prove to be the backbreaker for the Tigers - 2 stops near the line of scrimmage and then a pass that found the waiting arms of Hokie linebacker Xavier Adibi. The Hokies had the ball on the Clemson 35, the crowd was in a frenzy, and 5 straight Branden Ore rushes put the ball in the endzone and the Hokies in complete control of the momentum.

Clemson desperately needed a big play to take the home crowd out of the game, if only temporarily, but they never managed it. Will Procter was an unmitigated disaster during the second half, completing 4 of 14 passes and leading the Tigers to a single first down. By the time the Hokies scored their final touchdown, with 2:07 left in the 3rd quarter, the Clemson fans had already begun to file out.

It seemed like a good time for a dinner break (all that alcohol was starting to sit poorly, so what better way to fix that than a heaping supply of cholesterol wrapped in rendered fat and, hopefully, some meat). Of course there was only one reasonable choice on a night like last night - the signature food of Lane Stadium (and, really, Blacksburg in general); a giant smoked turkey leg.

As one of the people I was with commented, it seems at least a little strange that our signature food has us, essentially, eating our mascot. I doubt Clemson serves tiger steaks at their home games. Or that Florida State serves up the dismembered, grilled corpses of Injuns for the consumption of their fans. But at Tech, we gnaw on the smoked remains of the Hokie bird. Which is, it should be said, mighty tasty. However, there is no way you can look cool when you are ripping chunks of bird flesh with your teeth. You invariably end up feeling, and most likely smelling, like Henry VIII, and while that may seem cool to the sort of guy who likes to grope coeds being hoisted up after the Hokies score, it's not so cool to the rest of us. In fact, I'd say it puts the idea of eating meat in its proper place - as something that's kind of horrifying. I read a book a couple years ago about Robert Falcon Scott's doomed trip to the South Pole, and one of the things I remember vividly from the book is the almost perverse pleasure the members of the expedition take in the new and unique animals they ate. Or 'et, as they say. Penguins, seals, albatross - if it could be caught and clubbed to death, they 'et it. Now that expedition did a lot of scientific work in Antarctica (as opposed to Roald Amundsen's, which basically dashed to the Pole and dashed back) but they also left the corpses of native animals behind because, god love 'em, a penguin is a tasty looking son of a bitch. And gnawing on the bone of a turkey, it's hard to honestly say that I (or any other meat eater) is really any better than some early-20th century explorer whose mindset when they see a fascinating new sort of creature is, "Let's eat it!" Anyway, I nursed the leg for much of the 4th quarter, and the Hokies finished off the Tigers in what looked like an easier fashion than me and my leg, trying to pick meat from tendon.

The Hokies never got rattled. They fed off the crowd in ways that vintage, good Hokie teams used to do. The running game and the defense carried the day, partially because they have do, but mostly because that is the formula for success that the Hokies have usually relied on. Even when Michael Vick was taking the snaps, the passing game was used sparingly, mostly for big gains that either brought the crowd noise to a fever pitch (at home) or quieted them down (on the road). To say that this was the best Hokie win of the year is not only incredibly obvious, but also an understatement. This win suggests that, yes, there is some life left in this team after all. Miami looms, but right now that almost seems like a good thing.

Addendum

2006-10-26T03:25:00.000-04:00

Of course the biggest problem with the MLB awards is the voters. Check out just how backward the BBWAA really is (are?) - here's their official website. It must be one of the first things Al Gore set up.

Marketing Baseball, Pt. I

2006-10-24T18:22:00.000-04:00

In which Faster Than A Shark attempts to address some of the disadvantages Selig and friends have given themselves in competing with the other major sports. We'll start with a minor quibble, but one that is a significant PR mistake.

Every year, a good deal of in-season sportswriting and fan interest is devoted to the major annual awards, specifically the MVP, Cy Young, and in good years, rookie and batting races. These debates, while generating a whole lot of badly written articles, are a definate positive for the game, offering friendly regional rivalry between contenders, and the amplifying the constant struggle to understand the meaning and significance of statistics.
This year's AL MVP race, for example, provided fans with a healthy regional debate between Boston, New York, Minnesota, and Chicago, whose contending players also each represented a different point in the perception of player value. Should the winner be the home run and RBI leader, David Ortiz, or a player with superior rate stats in Derek Jeter, or the batting champion and player at the most important defensive position, Joe Mauer? Several candidates with more balanced cases also figured into the discussion, most prominently Justin Morneau and Jermaine Dye. Such an array of diverse MVP candidates stimulates much discussion and is a good thing for baseball in general. Even a clear-cut race, such as the one for this year's AL Cy Young, has its benefits, creating an easily recognizable moniker for an already star player: Johan Santana, the best pitcher in Major League Baseball.
The problem here is the timing. The award encompasses only the regular season, is voted on after the regular season, and is one of the biggest topics of the regular season, so why isn't it announced at the end of the regular season? By waiting until after the playoffs, MLB diffuses all of the budding interest in the award and turns it into an afterthought. It also misses the possibility of increased attention and improved storylines on award winners during important playoff games. In the speech of announcers and sportswriters last year, "Steve Nash" disappeared. Every assist, every pull-up jump shot, these were the actions of a new, improved version of the man, "MVP Steve Nash". Consider the amplification of pressure (and thus, fan interest and sportswriter hyperbole) on Alex Rodriguez, if, during his infamous 2-15 0 RBI performance in the 2005 ALDS, he was constantly being refered to as the MVP.

The announcements now come sometime in November, headlined on mlb.com but pushed to the side by ESPN and the other news outlets, and for good reason. MLB releases the winners of its most prestigious honor at the exact moment during the year when the average fan's interest level in baseball is at its lowest. In November, baseball is an afterthought: football is in full swing, basketball and the college sports are just starting - even the major events of the offseason are weeks and months away. The spirited midseason debate and interest in this awards has long since disipated by the time they are currently announced. However, if made public just between the end of the regular season and the start of the playoffs, this debate would continue and carry on through what should be the game's showcase month. New focus would be placed on the performance of award winners in the playoffs, and whether they could 'live up' to their newly adorned titles. Sportswriter and fan interest in award winners is extra publicity for a sport that has problems drawing out of market fans for playoff broadcasts.
It's just a small example, just one little thing that could be improved. The commissioner's mandate is to act in the best interest of baseball. This pretty clearly qualifies.

A sheepish return

2006-10-24T17:36:00.000-04:00

Man, it's been a long time since I posted. Let's see, excuses....excuses.....well, I was sick for the last several days. And I've been catching up with my new favorite show what has all the spaceships and such on DVD. So, yeah, that's all I've got.

College football vs. pro football, in a nutshell: My football teams - the Virginia Tech Hokies and Washington Redskins, sport the reverse record of each other; 5-2 and 2-5, respectively. I feel the exact same way about the prospects of each team this year - crappy. The Skins are in a hole that is probably too deep to climb out of, and will most likely find themselves "playing for the future" (ie. playing this young black thing instead of this old white thing who, incidentally, really digs this even older white thing a whole hell of a lot) real soon. Now, I've been following the Redskins since the time they went from a great team to a league laughingstock - literally, my first season as a fan was the single Richie Petitbon year when the team went 4-12 and let me tell you, the Redskins never play for the future. Sure they pretend for a few games, even a half season maybe, but the lure of the high-profile free agent or forgotten veteran who looks, fleetingly, better than the hotshot draft pick is always too tempting to pass up. I'm already steeling myself for another decade of 8-8 finishes.

The Hokies, meanwhile, should be in a theoretically better position at 5-2 overall and 3rd in the ACC Coastal division, right behind a rapidly-imploding Hurricanes team. The problem is that the team in front of the Hurricanes, the Yellow Jackets, has already beaten the Hokies and only has one conference loss, which means the Hokies would have to win out their conference schedule and the Jackets would have to lose to two of the following teams: Miami, NC State, UNC or Duke, in order for the Hokies to be in the ACC title game. So you've got a combination of 1) a universally-regarded-as-sucky ACC and 2) a Hokie team that likely won't even get a chance to play for the title of King of the Dipshits, and Hokie fans have already written off what will likely be at least an 8-win season as a "rebuilding year". Of course, we're all focused on the day that Ike Whitaker takes the reigns of the offense from the Gummo-ish Sean Glennon - the buzz that he has yet to learn the playbook shouldn't be allowed to detract from the anticipation of that magical day.

The Hokies have a short week this week - a game against Clemson on Thursday follows a Saturday game this past weekend. Sadly, the Tigers won't be able to wear the most hideous non-Oregon uniforms so far this year at Lane Stadium (this monstrosity, which they wore against Georgia Tech), but maybe that's a good thing - it can't be easy to be tough against a team when you can't stop laughing at their clown suits. The Hokies, for their part, have looked sharp this season - most likely, they will break out the mismatched sleeves on Thursday and make me look like an idiot for praising them.

So football season is about halfway over and I'm already looking forward to another year of The Black Presidency. Aw hell, he'll probably disappoint me too, but at least he'll look cool doing it.

Finally, to end this on the completely unrelated note that it so clearly deserves, the last bastion of 80's-reference-based humor that's actually funny and not, you know, incredibly fucking annoying brought up something yesterday that I had completely forgotten about - kids who pronounce the word "crayon" like "crown". Apparently this shit perpetuates into adulthood. How the fuck do you get crown from C-R-A-Y-O-N? I mean, I know kids have some weird speech impediments - I knew a kid who pronounced the word "took" like "cook" which doesn't seem so much like an impediment as it does a kid who's really goddamn confused - but this crown/crayon business should take about 2 seconds to correct. It is imperative on our nation's teachers to indoctrinate kids on the proper way to pronouce crayon, and it's not the same as you would pronounce the name of something that the queen of England wears on her head right before she has another one of her fuck-up kids or their spouses ex-communicated. It's a crayon, and it comes in a big yellow box with a built-in sharpener, unless your family's poor and they buy you some off-brand crayons for which you will be deservedly mocked by the rest of the children in your class.

Belated Game Seven Story.

2006-10-21T18:15:00.000-04:00

I spent most of Game Seven stuffed into a Fung Wa bus somewhere between Boston and Chinatown, clutching at a dying ipod and smiling in disbelief at the delightfull chaos of twice-recommended The Master and Margerita by Mikhail Bulgakov. Luckily kept updated by the text messages of a resourceful Duker, I stumbled out onto a deserted midnight street with the game tied at 1-1 in the top of the eighth. Reasoning that a midnight Chinatown was no place to find a sympathetic television, I flew into the subway and half-ran through the rain from Byrant Park to Grand Central, finally locating the game, now in the bottom of ninth, in a bar in the corner of the basement food floor.
I can't imagine what compells a man, or more accurately six drunken, bejerseyed men, to watch the biggest game their team has played in six years in a tiny bar shunted into the corner of the busiest place on the Eastern seaboard. Nor can I imagine what compells the bartender of said establishment to close his place despite a growing crowd outside, looking through the bars at the thankfully visible television. My fellow congregators would surely have been glad to patronize the tiny place. I myself thirsted for a Guinness or some such sturdy refreshment, but settled for sipping out of the waterbottle I'd been nursing since leaving Brandeis.
Apparently the Mets had blown it during my time underground; the score was now 3-1. However, to my surprise, noted non-hitters Jose Valentin and Endy Chavez were on base, with no outs: this had the potential to become a thing. 'What if this is a thing?' I thought, clutching at my backpack and straining to see over shoulders and through the bars encasing the bar. It was evident to me from Cliff Floyd's first swing-and-miss that this rookie closer Adam Wainwright was the real thing, and through with no real rooting interest I quickly compelled and drawn in to what had clearly been a hell of a game (I would not even see the replay of Endy's catch until returning home).
While muttering with my fellow commuters about the excellence of Wainwright's curveball, and the train we were all about to miss, something else became clear to me, namely, how god damn awesome it was to walk into such a scene of frenzied fandom. We who were huddled outside represented a more sober, analytical view of the game, while the six men inside were in the throes of fully drunken prayer. It wasn't just their all-out applause on every taken pitch, or the screams at a strike, or the 'just this once' extorsions to Floyd and later, Reyes, Lo Duca and Beltran. They paced and brayed and stomped around in hopefull terror. Upon Floyd's strikeout, the drunkest of the lot and the most vocal bellowed the insult of insults with a word one hopes to hear only in textbooks and rap songs, then tried to apologise for it but got caught up in starting a 'Jose, Jose!' chant. Even the suited black man standing next to me had to laugh it off, forgetting it moments later anyway: the winning run was at the plate, after all.
I felt that I had witnessed a real New York moment, not the sentimental dreck that was everywhere after September 11th, but something worthy of The French Connection, something that made me a proud denizen, even if only of the suburbs, and a prouder still baseball fan. Where else do they care more, I thought? No Nascar results or Terrell Owens controversy could pierce this scene tonight, this scene of intimate sporting agony. It is impossible to describe the sound a passerby must have heard while Reyes' flare fluttered in the air. Off the bat, it was a game-tying, impossibly joyous double, but it dropped to a shocked, stuttering wail in Edmond's glove. Somewhere else in the city, Will Leitch's insides shot in all directions and he died a little, then broke into a cheer that reminded him he was still alive. Here, Paul Lo Duca was up, and the fear was tangible. I told the man next to me who had just missed his train that a HBP was the best case scenairo here, and we watched more deadly curveballs just miss.
The thing had nearly come to pass, and everyone knew that this was the moment, that impossible bases loaded ninth inning situation of everyone's deepest childhood dreams. We prayed for a hanging curveball, and Beltran hit one foul. It was 0-2 too quickly, maybe Beltran should have stepped out to drag it out a little, hell, maybe he did, but either way no one was ready for it to be 0-2, for the thing's possiblities to stretch so close and so immenently to nothing. It had to be another curveball, almost musically beautiful and destructive, and afterwards I quickly fled to await the next train upstairs, fearing the drunken aftermath of that curveball, frozen and gorgeous, which seemed to travel so slowly that we could see the exact last possible moment for Beltran to swing go by, just perceptable before it was over. The howl went up behind me and I left, stunned and proud and happy, to have seen even the end of such a game.

..and the Tigers win the pennant.

2006-10-14T22:45:00.000-04:00

Yeah, well.
Anyway, the question isn't whether or not the Tigers will win the World Series. They will. The real question here is, who do you pick out to come out of the AL Central next year? There's four scary teams there that you'd hate to bet against. The two favorites missed out this year, but they are still strong teams, and as Chicago and others have shown, this perfect blend of team pitching and well used role players is a fleeting thing. Bullpens disappear, starters regress, standouts become problems. Honestly though, the 2007 situation in this division is one of complete chaos. There's a just recently vaulted rotation in Chicago, the promise of a monstrous two-headed rotation in Minnesota, Pronk and his underperforming dwarves in Cleveland, and Jim Leyland's fellows, the latest balanced sportswriter's dream to succeed in October.
(Of course, there's a fifth team in this division, the Kansas City Royals, who will turn out to be the last team to take a series from Detroit in 2006. In fact, their case for contention is not as farfetched as one might think; they did play .500 or so ball in the second half of the season. The Royals finally have a real general manager, and at least some young talent in Teahen and Dejesus. Perhaps '07 is the year that Runelvys puts it all together? Or will Zach Greinke return from his season-long personality crisis exile and suddenly become Greg Maddux? These days teams come completely out of nowhere - can't you see Alex Rodriguez striking out on a sweeping Andy Sisco curveball to finish off the ALDS next year?)

Terror has a new face?

But that is how it has to be now-a-days. We as the educated, cynical segment of the baseball fanbase have to learn to pick out future surprises. So Taguchi hitting a home run? Kenny Rogers just completely inhabiting the 'gritty veteran' moniker? Just today Jeff Suppan hit a home run. We have to start expecting these things, and if that means a Detroit 06 title or a Florida 07 pennant then that's just how it has to be. Abandoning reasoned prediction based on statistics or overall talent has no place in the 21st century. Expect the unexpected? Expect the flabbergasting.

(Edit: Although FJM flogged him for it, Simmons made a similar point today about sleepers, and expectations and things. Not that I'm advocating reading his football columns. They're impossible.)

Urban sophisticates and Cardinalis cardinalis

2006-10-10T19:11:00.000-04:00

For fairness sake I figured I should do an NLCS preview too. Just like yesterday, I'm grading lineup, rotation, bench, bullpen and defense.

Lineups

Leading off -
NYM - SS Jose Reyes, .300/.354/.487, 64 SB, 17 CS.
StL - SS David Eckstein, .292/.350/.344, 7 SB, 6 CS.
As everyone knows, Eckstein leads the world in Scrap and Hustle Index (SHI) at a robust 67.4, whereas Reyes's SHI is a fairly pedestrian 28.2. But when it comes to playing actual baseball, Reyes is better. Advantage Mets.

Batting second -
NYM - C Paul LoDuca, .318/.355/.428, 3 SB, 0 CS.
StL - LF Preston Wilson, .263/.307/.423, 12 SB, 2 CS.
The NLCS, if nothing else, will answer for most baseball fans the question "Is Preston Wilson still alive?" Indeed he is. But he sucks. Advantage Mets.

Batting third -
NYM - CF Carlos Beltran, .275/.388/.594, 18 SB, 3 CS.
StL - 1B Albert Pujols, .331/.431/.671, 7 SB, 2 CS.
Sorry Carlos, you're a fine ballplayer but you sir are no Albert Pujols. Advantage Cardinals.

Batting fourth -
NYM - 1B Carlos Delgado, .265/.361/.548, 0 SB, 0 CS.
StL - 3B Scott Rolen, .296, .369/.518, 7 SB, 4 CS.
In 25 years, will people view Carlos Delgado as a man who courageously decided to speak his mind, rather than an anti-American ballplayer who is, therefore, with the terrorists? God I hope so. Oh yeah, he's better than even a 100% healthy Rolen. Advantage Mets.

Batting fifth -
NYM - 3B David Wright, .311/.381/.531, 20 SB, 5 CS.
StL - RF Juan Encarnacion, .278/.317/.443, 6 SB, 5 CS.
It could get really ugly with the hacktastic Encarnacion facing the nibblers on the Mets' staff. Advantage Mets.

Batting sixth -
NYM - LF Cliff Floyd, .244/.324/.407, 6 SB, 0 CS.
StL - CF Jim Edmonds, .257/.350/.471, 4 SB, 0 CS.
This assumes Floyd plays - his replacement would be Endy Chavez who is better, but still not as good as Edmonds. Advantage Cardinals.

Batting seventh -
NYM - RF Shawn Green, .277/.344/.432, 4 SB, 4 CS.
StL - 2B Ronnie Belliard, .271/.322/.402, 0 SB, 3 CS.
Two guys who started the season with other teams. The corpse of Shawn Green continues to collect a major league paycheck and, what's more, hold down a starting spot for a playoff team. Unfortunately for the Cards, he's STILL better than Belliard. Advantage Mets.

Batting eighth -
NYM - 2B Jose Valentin, .271/.330/.490, 6 SB, 2 CS.
StL - C Yadier Molina, .216/.274/.321, 1 SB, 2 CS.
Yadier is Spanish for "Somehow sucks even more than Bengie and Jose". Do you think Tony LaRussa made a deal with the devil that landed him Albert Pujols but ensured he would never have a catcher who could hit his weight? Advantage Mets.

So I have Mets 6, Cardinals 2. The Cards have the best player in the entire series, but the Mets have perhaps the best 1-5 in all of baseball. Obviously, the lineup is a huge advantage for the Mets.

Bench - The Mets have the aforementioned Endy Chavez, World's Oldest Man Julio Franco, Ramon Castro doing the backup catching duties, Chris Woodward and Michael Tucker. The Cardinals bring Chris Duncan (.293/.363/.589 this year), Scott Spiezio, John Rodriguez, Aaron Miles, So Taguchi, and Gary Bennett doing the backup catching duties. The only player on the Mets worth much is Chavez, and he may end up starting. The Cards can throw Duncan, Spiezio and Rodriguez at you. Huge advantage for the Cardinals.

Rotations - (the numbers here, again, are BB/9, K/9, HR/9, ERA and VORP)
1) NYM - Tom Glavine, 2.82/5.95/1.00/3.82/37.8
StL - Jeff Weaver, 2.46/5.60/1.78/5.76/-2.7
Yes, Jeff Weaver racked up a negative VORP this year. He was, it should be said, somewhat hit unlucky and his peripherals are better than his ERA would indicate. Except for HR/9, which is a disaster for Weaver. Especially against a lineup that eats up right handed pitching. Advantage Mets.

2) NYM - John Maine, 3.30/7.10/1.50/3.60/19.7
StL - Jeff Suppan, 3.27/4.93/0.99, 4.12/26.1
This is not that much of a mismatch - Maine strikes guys out, but gives up homers. Some will give Suppan the edge since he's a veteran - don't believe them, because that is outweighed by the fact that, for the most part, Suppan sucks. No one can be successful with those walk and K numbers. Something has to give there. Advantage Mets.

3) NYM - Steve Trachsel, 4.26/4.32/1.26/4.97/15.8
StL - Chris Carpenter, 1.75/7.47/0.85/3.09/67.2
Much like in the lineup with Pujols, St. Louis features the best pitcher in the series in Chris Carpenter. LaRussa gets him for game 7 if the series goes that far, which could tip the balance. Huge advantage Cardinals.

4) NYM - Oliver Perez, 5.43/8.15/1.50/6.55/-2.3
StL - Jason Marquis, 3.47/4.45/1.62/6.02/-6.8
It's our first two sucky pitcher battle. Compare the pitching in this series to that in the A's/Tigers matchup - except for Carpenter and maybe Glavine there is no one in this series who would be starting for the A's or Tigers. Between these two terrible pitchers, I'll watch football on Sunday night. Draw.

So the scorecard I've got is Mets 2, Cards 1 with one draw. If Carpenter could have gone three times he might have swung the balance, but he can't so I have advantage Mets.

Bullpen -
The Mets are going with Billy Wagner, Pedro Feliciano, Darren Oliver, Aaron Heilman, Chad Bradford, Guillermo Mota, Roberto Hernandez and Royce Ring. The Cards bring Adam Wainwright, Braden Looper, Brad Thompson, Josh Hancock, Josh Kinney, Tyler Johnson and Randy Flores. Even if you consider Oliver and Hernandez frauds, the Mets still have quality pitchers in Wagner, Feliciano, Bradford, Mota and, to some extent, Heilman. The good part of the Cards bullpen is Wainwright, Looper, Thompson and Kinney. The Mets are better at the top and deeper. Advantage Mets.

Defense -
The Mets' Defensive Efficiency is 0.708, good for second in the NL, whereas the Cardinals are at 0.704, 6th in the NL. Statistically there isn't much difference there, so I'll call it a draw.

So I have it as follows:
Lineup: Advantage Mets
Bench: Advantage Cardinals
Rotation: Advantage Mets
Bullpen: Advantage Mets
Defense: Draw

This is, on paper, a huge mismatch favoring the Mets. The Cardinals lack the one thing, left-handed pitching, that can shut down the Mets lineup. The best hope for the Cards is to hang on as long as possible and hope they can get it to game 7, when they can get the ball into Chris Carpenter's hands. I doubt this'll happen. My prediction: Mets in 5.

Sporting types and Panthera tigris

2006-10-09T20:46:00.000-04:00

Have you had enough of the shrill ARod/Torre/Yankees drama? Do you wish to read about anything else in the world? Do you like hacky, poorly-thought-out articles that everyone and their mother has already done better? Then you've come to the right place. In honor of the actual baseball games being played tomorrow by actual people, I present to you my pedestrian and most likely wrong ALCS Preview.

I am grading 5 things - lineups, rotation, bullpen, bench and defense. For bullpen, bench and defense, I'm looking at overall strength. For rotation, I'm going to compare the pitchers who are scheduled to match up against one another. And for lineup, I'm doing a comparison based on spot in the batting order (with some fudging, so the players match up well) rather than position. I think this is a more informative way to compare - because of it, I won't be using VORP for position players (since it's position dependent). And away we go.

Lineups (numbers are AVG/OBP/SLG, plus stolen bases and caught stealing)

Leading off -
Det - CF Curtis Granderson, .260/.335/.438. 8 SB, 5 CS.
Oak - C Jason Kendall, .295/.367/.342. 11 SB, 5 CS.
I'll take Granderson's power over Kendall's on-base ability - 1 home run is just not cutting it, and that OBP is too batting average dependent. Advantage Detroit.

Hitting second -
Det - 2B Placido Polanco, .295/.329/.364. 1 SB, 2 CS.
Oak - CF Mark Kotsay, .295/.332/.386. 6 SB, 3 CS.
Statistically, there's no difference here. As far as I can tell, these are the exact same person. Draw.

Batting third -
Det - 1B Sean Casey, .273/.336/.388 (season total). 0 SB, 1 CS.
Oak - RF Milton Bradley, .276/.370/.447. 10 SB, 2 CS.
This is an easy pick, especially when you consider the fact that Casey's numbers have gone down since he moved from Pittsburgh to Detroit. Advantage Oakland.

Batting fourth -
Det - RF Magglio Ordonez, .298/.350/.477. 1 SB, 4 CS.
Oak - 3B Eric Chavez, .241/.351/.435. 3 SB, 0 CS.
Another easy choice. Magglio is better pretty much across the board, and he has cooler hair. Advantage Oakland.

Batting fifth -
Det - SS Carlos Guillen, .320/.400/.519. 20 SB, 9 CS.
Oak - DH Frank Thomas, .270/.381/.545. 0 SB, 0 CS.
This was a tough one - Guillen has the advantage in OBP and is obviously better on the basepaths. In the end, I think Thomas's ability to hit the home run outweighs Guillen's advantages, and Thomas is no slouch in the OBP department either. Advantage Oakland.

Batting sixth -
Det - C Ivan Rodriguez, .300/.332/.437. 8 SB, 3 CS.
Oak - LF Jay Payton, .296/.325/.418. 8 SB, 4 CS.
Another easy one. Pudge is better across the board. Advantage Detroit.

Batting seventh -
Det - LF Craig Monroe, .255/.301/.482. 2 SB, 2 CS.
Oak - 1B Nick Swisher, .254/.372/.493. 1 SB, 2 CS.
The battle of low-average, good power guys. Swisher gets on base, Monroe doesn't. Advantage Oakland.

Batting eighth -
Det - DH Marcus Thames, .256/.333/.549. 1 SB, 1 CS.
Oak - SS Marco Scutaro, .266/.350/.397. 5 SB, 1 CS.
Pretty much the same as the leadoff matchup - Scutaro's advantage in OBP is offset by Thames' ability to hit the long ball. Only in this case, the ability blows Scutaro out of the water. Advantage Detroit.

Batting ninth -
Det - 3B Brandon Inge, .253/.313/.463. 7 SB, 4 CS.
Oak - 2B Mark Ellis, .249/.319/.385. 4 SB, 0 CS (note: this will probably be a platoon with Ellis and D'Angelo Jimenez. But Ellis's numbers are more competitive, so I used him.)
Yet ANOTHER low-OBP masher for Detroit vs.....well, in this case, not much of anything for Oakland. Advantage Detroit.

So, my scorecard has 4 for Detroit, 4 for Oakland and one draw. Technically a draw, but I believe that the bottom of Detroit's batting order is so much better than the bottom of Oakland's that they end up coming out ahead. So I'm giving it a slight advantage for Detroit.

Bench - The key players for Detroit are Omar Infante and Vance Wilson, with Alexis Gomez and the awful Neifi Perez and Ramon Santiago also available. Oakland's ace-in-the-hole is Bobby Kielty. Dan Johnson is a decent option, Adam Melhuse is doing the backup catching duties, and D'Angelo Jimenez and Hiram Bocachica are taking up roster space. The difference here is that Infante and Wilson are both good, whereas Oakland only has Kielty. Advantage Detroit.

Rotations (the numbers here are, in order, BB/9, K/9, HR/9, ERA and VORP)

1) Det - Nate Robertson, 2.89/5.91/1.25/3.84/42.0
Oak - Barry Zito, 4.03/6.15/1.10/3.83/51.0
This one is real close. I'm giving the advantage to Zito - he's had control problems but his home run and strikeout numbers are better than Robertson, and I'll give him a slight nudge for his postseason track record. Advantage Oakland.

2) Det - Justin Verlander, 2.90/6.00/1.02/3.63/47.0
Oak - Esteban Loaiza, 2.33/5.64/0.99/4.89/12.7
Don't let Loaiza's ERA fool you - he was tremendously hit-unlucky this year, and his peripherals track well. I'll give Verlander the slight edge, but this is closer than you think. Advantage Detroit.

3) Det - Kenny Rogers, 2.74/4.37/1.01/3.84/39.8
Oak - Danny Haren, 1.82/7.10/1.25/4.12/42.5
Kenny Rogers is a fraud. Haren tracks better in just about every way except ERA (yes, Rogers has better HR/9 numbers). Rogers strikes out less guys and walks more. This matchup definitely leans towards the A's. Advantage Oakland.

4) Det - Jeremy Bonderman, 2.69/8.50/0.76/4.08/39.2
Oak - Rich Harden, 5.01/9.45/0.96/4.24/9.5
This is actually probably the most intriguing matchup, and it's a shame it's the game 4 one. Harden didn't pitch enough this year to make an accurate assessment, but when he did he struck a lot of guys out and walked a lot. Even if he's 100%, Bonderman's peripherals are better - he walked a lot less guys, struck out almost as many, and had obscenely low home run numbers. Advantage Detroit.

This one I have to call a draw. I trust Detroit's rotation more than Oakland's in a long series, and I think that if the matchups were switched around Detroit might have wiped the floor with them. But they're not, and as such I have it 2-2.

Bullpen
Detroit is going with Jason Grilli, Todd Jones, Wilfredo Ledezma, Zach Miner, Fernando Rodney, Jamie Walker and Joel Zumaya. Zumaya's a strikeout machine, but also walks a lot of guys. Jones is his opposite; he doesn't walk anyone, and doesn't strike anyone out. The rest of the guys are a mixed bag, but overall Detroit's bullpen is a low strikeout, low walk type.

Oakland has Kiko Calero, Justin Duchscherer, Chad Gaudin, Joe Kennedy, Kirk Saarloos and Houston Street. Street and Duchscherer are probably the two best relievers in this series. Oakland's bullpen is the opposite of Detroit's - high strikeout, high walk. The difference is that Oakland's bullpen has freakishly low home run rates, whereas Detroit's are just low.

These are two very good bullpens. But Oakland has the two best bullpen pitchers on their side, and are able to dig deeper into their pen for quality pitchers. Advantage Oakland.

Defense

Real simple. Detroit had a 0.712 defensive efficiency (the rate at which balls in play are converted to outs), good for 1st in the AL. Oakland's was 0.694, good for 7th in the AL. Oakland has prided itself over the last few years in being a good defensive ballclub, but Detroit is better. Advantage Detroit.

So I have:
Lineup - Slight advantage Detroit.
Bench - Advantage Detroit.
Rotation - Draw.
Bullpen - Advantage Oakland.
Defense - Advantage Detroit.

I came into this thinking Oakland was the better team in terms of talent level, but I have to concede that Detroit is probably better. Oakland's biggest advantage is in the bullpen, and Detroit's is the bottom of the lineup and the bench. The A's best chance to win this series lies in doing the old A's thing of taking a lot of pitches and working their way into the underbelly of the Tigers' bullpen. Detroit is better off jumping on the Oakland starters and getting them for runs early. I thought about picking Detroit in 5 but I'm pussing out and going with Detroit in 6.

The Hate.

2006-10-07T00:53:00.000-04:00

Still staggered from the 6-0 loss to the Tigers this evening, I'll briefly report on one of the ugliest recurring elements of nationwide Yankee hatred. With the game well out of reach in the eighth, the crowd cheered as a Zumaya fastball soared out of the strike zone and past Alex Rodriguez's head. Rodriguez had already been beaned once in the game, by Rogers, but it is worth noting the cheering of the near miss, something I've seen quite often over his three seasons in the Bronx. It seems that the man is so hated nationwide that not only is he booed before every at-bat but road crowds actively cheer when he is close to being hit.
The game was well over at this point, and Zumaya was clearly not throwing at Rodriguez, not with a six run lead and with no grudge or history between them. He had just come out of the bullpen, and was a little wild with his first 102 mile an hour fastball. Perfectly reasonable. The proper crowd reaction to something like this should be a small gasp, and probably would have been for any other player. No one wants to see a decisive victory by the home team marred a player hit in the head by probably the most dangerous pitch harnessed by anyone in the game. Or at least no one should, but Rodriguez is hated so much that the fans were excited when he came close to a Piazza or even Ray Chapman moment. We've all been watching normal games when suddenly a batter is hit in the head, or a pitcher is hit by a line drive, or two fielders colide on a play. On field baseball injuries are painful and cringe-worthy to watch. Play pauses as the cameras show closeups of concerned players on both teams, and frozen, silenced fans in the stands. Always at the end of one of these injury delays, whether the player is taken off in a stretcher or gamely limps down to first base, he recieves a nice hand from the crowd, home or away. We've all seen this happen during a game. This is what those fans were hoping for when that fastball slipped out of Zumaya's control and toward Alex Rodriguez's head.
People are focused on the reaction Terrell Owens will recieve on Sunday in Philadelphia, but he may not even be the most hated athlete in America. He'll probably be knocked down several times to raucous cheers, but I doubt he'll be exposed to anything as dangerous as the possiblity of a 102 mile an hour fastball to the head. Considering his standing with his own fans, Zumaya's pitch might have been cheered even at Yankee Stadium. Hopefully, Rodriguez will have another chance to improve his image, at least to Yankee fans, over the next two days.

A Day at the Playoffs: Tommy Lasorda?

2006-10-03T23:58:00.000-04:00

Firstly, I am amused to report that I am enjoying the Lasorda playoff ads. Perhaps it is his slight resemblance, in both voice and stature, to a certain minister of awesome. This runs counter to Lasorda's usual image as an overturned bumbling joke. Or is it because they make fun of Red Sox fans?
Macha very riskily left Barry Zito in to finish the eighth with a man on, the batting champion up, and very good setup man and copy-and-paste champion Justin Craig Duchscherer ready in the bullpen. In contrast, Joe Torre pulled Chien-Ming Wang after only 6.2 innings, despite Wang having retired the last nine batters. Erstwhile lefty specialist (the word has a token connotation, like the black guy in a horror movie) Mike Myers promptly gave up a home run to the AL stikeout leader Curtis Granderson, leading to a parade of wonderful shots of worried Yankee fans suffering through a frightening bullpen despite the lead.
The once-traded-for-Eric-Milton non-hitter Nick Punto pulled out a crazy leaping stands catch, but McCarver was not around to immortalize it. Scroll down and wait for the horribly annoying Comeback Player ad to finish. It was a hell of a game in Minnesota, and this should be the best of these four series, oddly because neither of the teams can score runs. Oakland has the better starting pitching and should pull it out, even if Frank Thomas is walked every time up from now on.
The Cardinals won, sure. Too bad Jeff Weaver's starting tommorrow.
Lastly, the Yankees brought Ronan Tynan out of storage to sing about the separation of church and state. Not content with their annual showcase of the man's absurd ears, the Fox broadcast team elected to shoot him entirely from the ground. This is a technique once used to great effect by the late Orson Welles, which under the right curcumstances imparts the power and presence of a dangerous or important man by highlighting his girth and literal mass. Orson shot himself in this way in Citizen Kane, first to show us a larger-than-life man unstoppably on his way up, and then to emphasise the abject failure of an angry undignified husk of a man who has lost everything.
He uses it again in Touch of Evil, to emphasise the physical as well as moral corruption of his colossal police chief. In Orson's case, this angle adds a sense of power to the character, but it does not fare so well when applied by a Fox camera at the floor of Yankee Stadium. I couldn't find a proper screenshot, but seeing Ronan this way, between a section of grass and part of the upper deck, brings out not the underlying power of the figure but rather a sense of the pudgy ridiculous. The man's ears fly out in opposite cardinal directions, seemingly propelled by the bursting fat curvily lining the inside of his annual greatcoat. He is only a pork chop or two away from a full fledged Irish intestinal explosion. Do not expect him back next year, but do expect last rites over a coffin fit for Barbaro.

Orson, terrifying, corrupt, yet less corpulent than Ronan Tynan.

The Hebrew Leprechaun

2006-10-03T22:36:00.000-04:00

Let me start with a simple truth - just about anything that needs to be said about Mitch Albom has already been said. Slate's Bryan Curtis absolutely eviscerated him in an article published this past Thursday. I had absolutely no desire to rehash the same ground that a real, actual writer had just tread, especially since it's likely that Curtis has actually read, or at knows someone who has read, Albom's books, whereas I have not and do not. I was going to write about any other topic in the world. But when I opened up the mailbox on Saturday and pulled out the latest issue of Entertainment Weekly to find Kate Winslet giving me what a team of scientists have decided is the sexiest come-hither look of all time, I was able to pry my eyes away for the 2 seconds that I needed to read the following words in the lower right-hand corner - "Mitch Albom vs. His Critics". Still, I wasn't going to write about Mitch Albom, because really who gives a fuck about Mitch Albom anyway? But then I read the article and I realized, as a service to humanity, certain things in said article needed to be shared with the rest of the world who may not read this pop culture rag.

The background - Mitch Albom is a sportswriter for the Detroit Free Press, who is best known to the general populace for sentimental treacle "Tuesdays with Morrie", "The Five People You Meet In Heaven" and his latest book, "For One More Day", the peddling of which explains his appearance in EW. Besides being a writer of cheap, sentimental crap that delivers easy answers (more on that in a minute), he is also a target because in April of 2005 he turned in a column about a couple of Michigan State alums in the NBA (specifically, Mateen Cleaves and Jason Richardson) going to watch the Final Four in St. Louis, despite the fact that neither player was at the game - it turned out that they told him they were going to the game but decided not to, and Albom's column, having been written based on the assumption that they would go to the game, was, in essence, a fabrication. After the publication of the article, the Free Press launched a review of Albom's past columns, but was unable to find any evidence of other fabrications.

I couldn't find the entire column (the readily-available archives for the Free Press don't go back that far) but I found the first few paragraphs, which seem to be the source of the controversy:

"In the audience Saturday at the Final Four, among the 46,000 hoop junkies, sales executives, movie producers, parents, contest winners, beer guzzlers, hip-hop stars and lucky locals who knew somebody who knew somebody, there were two former stars for Michigan State, Mateen Cleaves and Jason Richardson,"

"They sat in the stands, in their MSU clothing, and rooted on their alma mater. They were teammates in the magical 2000 season, when the Spartans won it all. Both now play in the NBA, Richardson for Golden State, Cleaves for Seattle."

"And both made it a point to fly in from wherever they were in their professional schedule just to sit together Saturday. Richardson, who earns millions, flew by private plane. Cleaves, who's on his fourth team in five years, bought a ticket and flew commercial."

The portion of the interview about this scandal in EW went like this:

Q: What about the mini-scandal over your column?.....Were you surprised by how much attention it got?
A: Sure. And the people involved with it all apologized to me afterwards, from the publisher of the paper to the guy who ran Knight Ridder. They said, We never should have made such a big deal out of it, we should've trusted you and taken it for what it was, and not turned it into a big thing.
Q: Are you upset you made the mistake?
A: Well, sure. It was just careless. It was just rushed. But that's all it was. It was just a rush. These guys swore to me that they were gonna be there, and so I said, Well, they're gonna be there, so we'll just write that they were there. You shouldn't do that, you should just write [that] they planned to be there. That's all. It was just missing a word. That's it. Was it a mistake? Yeah. Should you do it? No. Do you apologize for it? Yes. Move on.

Comment: Obviously, EW isn't that interested in rehashing this controversy, but the interviewer feels obligated to at least bring it up. And even with the leading questions he's fed, Albom still manages to sound like an asshole. First, I'd love to see those so-called apologies he received from people who were simply doing due-diligence on a writer who got his hand caught in the cookie jar. Second, there's this statement: "It was just missing a word." Read the excerpt of the article and show me where a single word could be added to fix it. Is it the part where he describes what they're wearing at the game they didn't attend? The part where he tells us specifically how they fly to the game? Finally, and perhaps most douchebaggily, he uses the phrase, "Move on." As if we're all at fault for asking these questions, not him for making the shit up in the first place. Honestly, I think his indiscretion is low on the totem pole - he screwed up by publishing an article that ended up being wrong, got caught and had to apologize. This isn't Stephen Glass territory, and he doesn't deserve to be crucified for it. But when you do get caught doing this, you should be apologetic. You should be humble. You should never stop admitting that you fucked up, and you certainly shouldn't be confrontational to a public that wants to know you aren't going to do it again.

Okay, about that sentimental tripe. Here are a couple of interesting responses from Mr. Albom:

Q: What do you make of critics who call your books too sentimental or sappy?
A: Well, I've always been mystified. Since when did sentimental become a bad thing? Everybody's favorite movie is a sentimental movie - It's a Wonderful Life, or The Wizard of Oz. Nobody's favorite movie is some dark, dysfunctional slasher story. Everybody's favorite song is a sentimental song. So why all of a sudden is it bad to be sentimental in books? Critics have a problem with sentimentality. Readers do not. I write for readers.

Comment: This really needs no commentary, it is so far beyond stupid. It is clear that Mitch Albom has been spending too much of his time with the sort of people who choose to read Mitch Albom books. If someone told Mitch that their favorite movie was Dr. Strangelove and their favorite song was "Love Will Tear Us Apart" would his little tiny head explode?

Q: You don't like critics?
A: I think that sometimes critics feel that if a lot of people like it, it has to be too sentimental: "If the masses can get it, it's not special enough." I don't agree. I like a Beatles song. So do millions of others. So what?

Comment: This is a common Albom defensive posture, that he writes "for the people" instead of for critics.
Dear Mitch,
You are not the Beatles. They had a worldview that allowed for subtlety and nuance. You have a worldview that believes old people are full of trite platitudes, but only after they get cancer. And I doubt you own anything but The Beatles 1 anyway, because you are a middle-aged poseur. But at least you have big forearms, which take attention away from your gigantic ears.

Q: Given what you write about, it's kind of interesting to meet you on the anniversary of 9/11.
A: You know, what I found most resonant about Sept. 11 was the transcripts of phone calls from people who called from the planes or in the buildings, and how many of them were almost identical in their messages. I noticed those people all said, "I called to tell you I love you." That's it! Is there somebody going, "Why are you using such basic words? Can't you find some other way to say it?" No, not at the most real moment of your life! Those are the words you're gonna use. In some ways, maybe I'm more real than my critics are.

Comment: What kind of person over 6 years old believes this? Here's a 911 call from September 11 that is a whole hell of a lot more real than Mitch Albom's fantasyland vision (don't listen to this if you're put off by such things - it doesn't end well): scared to the point of panic, standoffish to the operator taking the call. Not because this man is a dick, but because that's how people act under unimaginable stress. This cuts to the quick of the Mitch Albom universe - he truly believes that people's lives end with a few words of wisdom, a single tear and a fade into black. Death is fucking terrifying. Most people go into it kicking and screaming. But in Mitch Albom's universe, it is simply "the most real moment of your life.", whatever the hell that means.

I was going to wrap this up with a recent Albom column, where he told the heartwarming story of a man confined to a wheelchair who was on his way to some sort of paralympic sporting event when the bus he was in crashed. It was, unsurprisingly, less about this man, and more about how lucky you should feel to not be him (yes Mitch, I can read between the lines). It is, I believe, fairly typical Albom. But the Free Press archive seems to have already taken it down. And besides, this has gone on long enough as it is: in the end, Albom is a lot like American Idol - lots of people love him, but I don't know a single one of them, and I'm not sure I care to. Cheap sentiment may make you a rich man, but it can't buy you respect, and it certainly isn't going to give your books any staying power. So you sleep on your pile of money, because there's one thing it can't buy you - a decent hair cut, apparently.

Guest post by Sanke Polemi

2006-10-03T18:41:00.000-04:00

Sanke - Sanke's lucky it's not 8 EST yet, otherwise I'd be nowhere near this computer. As my Yankees ideally pound the Tigers, Sanke is set to sulk among his vegan conclave.

According to some reliable sources, Craig Brewer and Terrence Howard (the power team that brought us "Hustle & Flow") are working on a movie about Charley Pride. Who is Charley Pride, you may ask (if you are me)? Wikipedia answers.
Apparently he was a Negro Leagues (sidenote--is "Leagues" correct? Were there more than one league?) baseball player turned country music star. I know, right? Is this at all a common occurance?
I previously thought that only football players and basketball players turned to careers in music. This seemed like an odd discrepency to me, and then I realized something: There is no longer a Negro League (not one or any).
It's true, you can look it up. A common complaint against the integration of baseball is that many Negro League players found themselves without jobs once it was dissolved. What do you think they all did? Um, duh; they became musicians. In approximately 1951, most people agree that the Negro Leagues disbanded (thank you wikipedia). What wikipedia will not tell you is that "Knuckleball" Jay Hawkins went on to become Screamin' Jay Hawkins, and that Strike Zone Richard just went by Little Richard.
Baseball clubs are, as we know, extremely superstitious. For example: wasn't there like a thing about goats? Realizing what happened to the deposed baseball players, modern players realize that the road to music stardom is one frought with sports failure. And some of them just need to achieve that failure without a record label's help.

Knuckleball Jay demonstrates his unusual pitching motion.

Knuckleball Jay with his Negro League World Series rings.
Knuckleball Jay in action, pitching to Josh Gibson in the second game of a doubleheader against the Homestead Grays on June 14th, 1937. Note the all-white uniforms Negro Leaguers were forced to wear to appease a hostile populace.

The sword of Damocles

2006-09-30T22:11:00.000-04:00

38-27

Meh.

We all knew it was coming. Over the first 4 weeks of the season, the team had played high school programs and girl scout troops. There is nothing to be learned about a program's strength playing BU, UNC, Duke and Cincinnati. It's a shame the team had to fall so hard against the first real team it played (especially since the Wreck took a beatdown last year in Lane, 51-7) but it's probably better that they dash the hopes of the Hokie faithful now rather than stringing us along for a few more weeks. Two Thursdays from now the team travels to Boston to take on BC, and we'll see if they can recover - BC's been a fairly consistent Hokie whipping boy over the last decade, so if there's any ranked team that can help us right the ship, it's them.

The O-line is a disaster. This has been a storyline that has mostly been flying under the radar so far, with our cupcake schedule, but it was readily apparent tonight. Too often, QB Sean Glennon was running for his life, and too rarely, HB Branden Ore had good holes to run through. The passing game is still crappy, but at least some of the blame for that goes to the line. The surprising thing was how sluggish the defense looked - G. Tech went up 21-0 before the end of the 1st quarter, mostly by exploiting the secondary. Calvin Johnson, it should be said, is really fucking good.

So, as it has every other year except one, Tech's hopes for an undefeated regular season end not with a bang, but a whimper. It's an annual tradition around here, and one we take in stride. Ultimately unphased, we'll be glued to our sets when we play BC, and we'll be jumping to the sounds of (sigh) "Enter Sandman" when Southern Miss comes to town on the 21st. Because really, what the hell else are we going to do?

Anyway, enough misery. My brother asked me to post the following, and who am I to argue? So, enjoy.

It's Really Happening.

2006-09-28T21:31:00.000-04:00

1964. Sam Cooke shot by hotel manager. A Hard Days Night and The Times They Are A-Changin' released. Peter Lorre and Harpo Marx die. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. wins Pulitzer Prize. Gulf of Tonkin resolution passes. Philadelphia Phillies lose 10 games in a row in September and lose the pennant to St. Louis.

Earlier today, Houston beat Pittsburgh 3-0 behind seven scoreless from Roy Oswalt and despite only getting three hits. The win is their ninth in a row. In St. Louis, Jason Marquis lasted two innings, and the team is down 9-1 in the fourth. Assuming a loss in this game, the Cardinal division lead will be all the way down to 1/2 game(s?). The Astros will go to Atlanta for three, while the Cardinals will host the Brewers. (Presumably, there's an extra game they'll have to make up if the thing is still in doubt at the end).
Now this has really been a hell of a baseball season. Consider all the candidates for 'The Best Story of the Year', or 'The Talk of Baseball', those wonderful hyperbolic summation terms people are so fond of. The Tigers came out of nowhere to lead the AL for most of the year and end up going to the playoffs for the first time since 1987. The Twins spent the first half playing Tony Bautista and Rondell White, and yet have blocked the offseason favorite White Sox and Indians out of the playoffs despite losing Liriano. The Marlins will finish nearly at .500 despite a firesale and a rookie-laden $15 million payroll. The Braves finally missed the playoffs. But somehow I find the Cardinals situation - a possible failure of historic proportions, to be the most compelling.

For the last week, or few days actually, I've been rooting for this to happen, for the only-just-recently unthinkable collapse to occur. It's not out of spite or hate for the Cardinals - I don't know any Cardinals fans, and I'm certainly not some bitter would-be rival North Sider. Although I've been enjoying Leitch's early morning pain, that's no reason to want an unaffiliated team to lose. It's just that the mystique of such a collapse is incredibly compelling. I find that I want to be a witness to a historyic failure, and I suspect that the Brewers and Astros will have many similarily motivated fans in the next few days. People congregate around a car crash or an argument, and root for a faraway gunman or convict to escape the authorities. The Cardinals are very nearly just such a disaster, and it is compulsively fascinating.

Guest Post by Top Grevey.

2006-09-27T20:52:00.000-04:00

Not to be confused with either Cary Grant or Topper Headon, our own Top "Topsman" Grevey earned some national notoriety back in '75 for his aborted Gerald Ford assassination attempt. After just squeaking out from custody, he has triumphantly reemerged.
Despite his claims that it was accidental, it seems that football player Terrell Owens tried to kill himself, which confuses me to no end. When it comes to premature death, athletes seem to rarely commit suicide. Suicide is reserved for those musicians who are too afraid to get into an airplane. Athletes, it seems, only die of eventual oscurity and franchise ownership (car dealerships, fast food joints, baseball teams). Being an athlete is widely considered to be the least depressing activity a person can engage in, other than playing piano while Ella Fitzgerald sings "Cheek to Cheek."
I think I understand the cause for the confusion. About a year (maybe two?) ago, when T.O. started getting big (side note--what kind of asshole goes by the initials that are universally recognized to mean "Time out?"), he was most often described as being a bit too small for pro football, and basically an asshole. I was immediately reminded of the role for which Cuba Gooding, Jr. won an Oscar, the "Show me the money!"-shouting Rod Tidwell. Does anyone else remember his hilarious, over-the-top, some-say-racist performance in that movie? Or what about Frank Sachs, Greg Kinnear's boyfriend in As Good As It Gets? In fact, we can even go back to his subdued but powerful performance in Boyz N the Hood. Clearly, the kid had talent. But somewhere along the way he became Mr. Snow Dogs-Radio-Daddy Day Camp.
So I think this may be another incidence of misreporting. Cuba Gooding Jr., depressed with the direction his career is going, has committed suicide, but the press mixed him up with T.O. (as have I) and just failed to check their facts. T.O. will have some very complicated things to explain to the stupified masses now.

T.O. tries to commit suicide!

2006-09-27T12:40:00.000-04:00

Just fucking with you. Go watch ESPN, I have nothing to add to this circus. Actually, neither do they. In fact, why are you still watching ESPN? Yeah okay, because you're hoping that one day Chris Berman will simply melt into a shapeless pile of goo in his chair. Me too. I bet it'll smell like rancid ranch dressing. Berman on one side, Michael Irvin on the other. Tom Jackson must have raped nuns in his former life.

Quick apology, directed at anyone who was on the road with me on Monday night, around 11:15PM. I was listening to Monday Night Football on the radio, and one of the announcers was talking about some football pick-'em league he was in and how he was doing really poorly in it. I think he was a former player, I'm not positive. Maybe a coach. Anyway, he said something like this (this is, obviously, a major paraphrase): "Now that I'm away from the game, I'm having a hard time picking the winners. If I was down in the locker room (like, presumably, he was on a regular basis before he was a "broadcaster") I could pick all the games easily, but up here it's a lot more difficult."

So, to all those people on the road, I wasn't yelling at you. Nor having a nervous breakdown. Mostly. I was simply yelling at my radio. I may have punched it too - I blacked out, so I can't really remember. If he.....was in the locker room......he could pick the games easily. You know what, let's just move on. My eye's starting to twitch again.

Anyway...it's almost the end of the baseball season. Half of the races are still in play - the AL Central (a watered-down race, since both teams are in the playoffs anyway), the NL West, NL Wild Card and NL Central (where the Cardinals are pulling a '64 Phillies right before our eyes. Or, in the vernacular of Bill Simmons, if you happen to be him, a "Mischa Barton right before she left 'The O.C.'"). But what this time of year is really about, assuming of course you're an Orioles fan and the races stopped having much meaning around May 15, is taking stock of individual seasons - MVP and Cy Young debates, interesting counting stats acheived by players on crappy teams, things of that nature. Yes, that was a lazy fucking segue.

Alfonso Soriano, playing for the other terrible Washington-area team, has posted a .281/.355/.569 this year. He also became a part of the 40-40 club, and is the first in that group to throw in 40 doubles. It's the best season of his career, and reverses a downward slide he had been in since his previous high-point of 2002. It's also come in the hitter-unfriendly environment of RFK Stadium, which is an important point that will be mostly overlooked.

(In my best comic book tone): Meanwhile, on the other side of the country.....

D'Angelo Jimenez is now playing for the Oakland A's, having been dumped midseason by the Texas Rangers. He signed a minor league contract with them, and looks to fill Bobby Crosby's roster spot at least through the ALDS. Jimenez has hit .203/.329/.305 in 59 at-bats this year, and his career hangs by a thread. He is at least 28 (and he's Dominican, so there is at least some chance that he's older) and he'll probably never see another job as a starter in the major leagues.

In 1999, the two prospects in the Yankee farm system that were talked about most by outside teams in terms of trades were Alfonso Soriano and D'Angelo Jimenez. Both were middle infielders and were considered, at the time, to be potential major league shortstops who were blocked at that position at the major league level by Derek Jeter. On January 24, 2000, Jimenez was driving a car in the Dominican Republic that collided with a bus. He suffered a broken neck and missed the entire 2000 season. He came back in 2001 but was traded midseason to the Padres for Jay Witasick, and became a nomad. Meanwhile, Soriano became the Yankees' regular 2nd baseman in 2001, supplanting human t-shirt cannon Chuck Knoblauch, finished 3rd in the ROY voting and has been a starter for one team or another ever since. He was nothing short of a sensation in 2002, missing 40-40 that year by one single home run, and was considered good enough in 2004 to be traded, essentially straight up, for Alex Rodriguez.

The thing though, is that between about 1999 and 2001, when both players' careers were still very much a matter of speculation, just about any prognosticator you would talk to believed that Jimenez would have the better career. Soriano's plate discipline was fairly terrible, whereas Jimenez's was good. Soriano had slightly more power, but his fielding was worse and he's almost two years older than Jimenez. It was thought that Jimenez would grow into his power, as players his age often do, and that Soriano would find the going a lot tougher at the major league level once pitchers realized he'd swing at anything they offered. Even today, Soriano remains something of a hacker (although he nearly doubled his walk rate this year, which may be a cause of his career year or merely a side-effect), and Jimenez's plate discipline never abandoned him. But Soriano can rake, and Jimenez can't, and that is the difference between being on the verge of cashing a huge free agent contract and being picked up off waivers by the A's.

It would be silly to discount the effect of the crash in the divergent careers of these two players. Something like that is no doubt traumatic, and forces a player to readjust to playing professional baseball. Lingering effects of the injury may manifest themselves in ways that directly affect a player's performance. Perhaps if Jimenez hadn't hit that bus he'd now be the guy with the 40-40 season. But the fact remains that people, sabermetric nerds primarily but also mainstream writers, thought Soriano would wash out, or at best be a Brian Jordan type player, someone with the ability to put up a good year or two but who would mostly be mediocre. Obviously, he's been a lot better than that. And Jimenez was supposed to be Miguel Tejada, and he's turned into Tony Graffanino.

I can only speculate, but I suspect there is something beyond the car accident in play here. Something fundamental to the way players improve with experience, and why projecting players who have yet to play in the majors is far from an exact science. Maybe Soriano is smarter and is able to process information better, which allows him to take more information away from each at-bat. Or maybe he received better instruction than Jimenez did, or more of it. Maybe Soriano has a better work ethic. Gary Templeton had all the talent in the world, but apparently he was lazy to the point that it hindered his ability to improve - something that's rare in the world of pro athletes, who generally have to work incredibly hard to get to the point they're at. I don't know, but the point is this - numbers are a fine indicator of what a player will be. They're certainly better than "he's a natural leader" or "he's got the red ass" or "he looks hot in his pants". But they only tell part of the story, and projecting from them into the future will always be an inexact science, no matter how finely they can be parsed. People who read Moneyball, and are smart, and who don't think it was written by a computer named Billy Beane always say this - numbers are an important tool that an organization would be foolish to ignore. But they aren't meant to supplant scouting, despite what the luddites like Little Joe think. They are meant to be used side by side, because numbers can't tell you things like how hard a guy works, or whether he cares more about chasing girls than learning how to recognize a change-up. And those things can cause a player to sink or swim, just like a lack of plate discipline.

Labels

2006-09-21T18:18:00.000-04:00

Before I get into my topic, a minirant about the state of talk radio (come on, were you expecting something else?) The political version of talk radio is possibly the most malicious and dangerous part of the national discourse - a lot of people listen to it at work, and it's about the only way you can get work done and also get "informed". But there's no accountability. If you write something in a newspaper or a magazine and you're full of shit, there's a record that can be checked. But if you say something on the radio, there's basically no readily-accessible record to use in order to call you on being a hypocrite. Obviously sports talk radio doesn't have quite the same influence, but it still suffers from a lack of accountability. If a certain radio host (and if you've read any of my earlier posts, you know who I mean) says, before the 2005 season, that the ACC is the best league in the country because it has the best coaches in the country, and then today states that the ACC is the worse league because it has the worst coaches in the country (the phrase was something like, "clearly, the worst coaches") despite the fact that the league has had ZERO coach turnover between then and now, no one is going to call him on it because no one really remembers what he says from one day to the next. But I remembered. And I say to you, The Worst Sports Talk Radio Host In The History Of Creation, that you are full of shit.

Okay, moving on. Certain teams are saddled with words or phrases, for good or ill, that will almost always show up in an opinion piece about them. I came up with a few, but I'm sure there are many more:

1) Pittsburgh Steelers - "blue collar"
"I'm blue-collar," Hines Ward says, by way of explaining everything."

I've never been to Pittsburgh, but from what I can piece together it is a city packed to the brim with stevedores and mine-workers, who relax from a hard day of work with a beer or three (domestic, of course) and some sort of incredibly unhealthy meat product. A sign of the decreasing racial gap in our country - it is now acceptable to refer to black players as "blue collar". No white collar football players here in Steel-town. Didi mao!

2) Chicago Cubs - "lovable losers"
Calamity on Clark Street: Why the Cubs Will Remain (Lovable) Losers

In the end, is there really anything lovable about losing? If you're a masochist, I guess. But year after year, the Cubs continue to suck or, at best, to fail in some spectacular way after a successful season, and every year they are called the lovable losers of Chicago. You'd think a city that experienced the greatest dynasty of the 1990's wouldn't tolerate this crap anymore.

3) San Antonio Spurs - "fundamentally sound"
"This is a simple but fundamentally sound defense played by San Antonio."

This moniker, of course, follows Tim Duncan into the bathroom and holds it for him while he goes. But the entire team has appropriated the name at this point, in complete disregard for every ill-advised, out-of-control Manu Ginobili drive into the lane.

4) Texas Tech Red Raiders - "high-octane"
"the Miners defense pushed the high-octane Red Raiders offense..."

This applies to any team that throws a lot of passes/scores a lot of points and couldn't stop my grandma from pounding it up the gut for 8 yards a pop, but it seems to be applied most often to the Red Raiders these days. If you think that putting high-octane gasoline into your engine will improve your performance you are 100% wrong - high octane gas is meant for high-performance engines, and most likely if you buy a car that requires it you already know it. Putting high-octane gas into a regular engine does nothing except for costing you extra money. So really, calling an offense high-octane doesn't make a lot of sense, unless it costs you more money. This is the opposite of #7 below.

5) Florida Marlins - "upstart"
"It was a huge day for the upstart Marlins..."

The Marlins have won twice as many World Series over the last 13 years as the Phillies have won in their entire 123 year existence, and this is because they are the undisputed champions of flushing their team and replacing it with cheap and good young players. They are always referred to as upstarts because they're always either not expected to do anything at all, or on the verge of being a good team. By the time they finally win they're already on the way towards dismantling.

6) Nebraska Cornhuskers - "corn-fed"
"T o welcome our corn-fed friends to Los Angeles..."

Obviously, if you call yourselves "Cornhuskers" then you're going to get labelled as "corn-fed" quite a bit. Corn-fed means a big giant white guy who plays on the offensive or defensive line. Is corn fattening? I'm guessing most of these guys got fat by eating a lot more than corn. And if you're black you're never allowed to be corn-fed; you're pretty much just a big fat guy who likes mama's (or grandmama's, as the case may be) soul food.

7) Detroit Pistons - "gritty"
"A nalysts sing daily praises to the Pistons' gritty defense and their laudable teamwork..."

This moniker suggests a defensive team that couldn't score on my grandma if she was in a coma and simply got wheeled onto the playing surface while lying in bed. Expect a lot of low-scoring games with a lot of ugly penalties/fouls and possibly two or three near-brawls. This of course accurately describes the Pistons, but this is a label that flows from team to team. I guess gritty relates to "grit" which is like determination and fortitude but sounds like the thing you bite on when you stop at Burger King on your way home from the beach. What unfortunate coincidence of nature caused beaches to be covered with sand? Why couldn't they be covered with powdered sugar?

8) Arizona Cardinals - "underachieving"
"...the eternally underachieving Cardinals."

The Arizona Cardinals have been underachieving for the better part of two decades, which would suggest to most people that they just kind of suck.

9) New York Yankees - "corporate"
"Weep not for that corporate golem misleadingly described as 'The New York Yankees.'"

This works as both a compliment and a pejorative - when the Yankees are winning, it is their corporate attitude that keeps them focused on the bigger picture. And when they're losing, it's their corporate attitude that keeps them from having the fiery passion needed to snap out of a losing streak.

10) Miami Hurricanes - "swagger"
"'Canes Missing Swagger"

This, to me, is the grandaddy of all team cliches. The Hurricanes only have two positions, like a light switch - they are either losing their swagger, or regaining their swagger. Right now they are losing their swagger, most likely because their coach looks like Robert Duvall's retarded younger brother. When they get a new coach and they beat Florida State on another missed field goal, they will have regained their swagger, which will hopefully include a Luther Campbell comeback. Because Luther knows where the bitches are at, and players at The U don't function properly without a full compliment of bitches.

Alex Rodriguez Psychoanalysis Chaos!

2006-09-20T11:33:00.000-04:00

Well, it's been almost exactly a month since the last wave of journalistic masturbation about that embroiled sports figure condescendingly known as 'A-Rod'. You may remember last month's fracas; it concerned an extended hitting slump that involved a pile of strikeouts and went on for about a week. Or perhaps you remember the printstorm before that, the one about several Knoblauchesque throwing errors at third. It seems it's time to go again. Here's Tom Verducci's Bronx Zoo throwback report on Rodriguez's presence in the Yankee Clubhouse. The thing is spreading it's way around like the latest Bonds report: here's coverage from ESPN, Deadspin, The New York Times, and Yahoo Sports.
The new chorus of articles really adds to how we see this man. Verducci likens him to the "prettiest girl in high school who also gets straight A's". We learn the he "works too hard" and reflog the old clutch accusations. Of course, the man's signature praise makes an appearence: "for all his gifts, A-Rod may never be seen by Yankees traditionalists as worthy of his pinstripes." Just take a look a the pictures attached to these articles, and don't forget the contract, which should properly have moved into legend by now under some moniker like "Hicks' Folly" but instead has been wielded over Rodriguez's head ever since. Apparently he's a loner in the clubhouse, a place where Jason Giambi advises Joe Torre that "'it's time to stop coddling him.'" Here sits the lonely A-Rod, humming "I Am a Rock" to himself between lifecoach mantra recitals, reflecting on his many failures.I'm two weeks deep into an Intro to Psychology class at my local community college (incidently, this means I can get into MOMA for free). We've visited Freud and Pavlov, talked of Oedipus, child abuse, and insecurity. I feel that a large part of the whole Rodriguez situation, from the predictibly intermitent assults from the papers and radio hosts to the fan dissatisfaction, is due to this being a most termanology conscious society. Whether through increased schooling, Woody Allen, or the repetitive underlying themes and plots of movies and television, we have all become amateur shrinks. The public is now incredibly familar with issues of insecurity, masculinity, all manner of diseases, disorders, disabilities, conditions. The popular lexicon expands through formerly scientific words: obsession, depression, penis envy. More children are diagnosed with personality defects or sent to councilling now than ever before. Through my years of elementary and middle schooling ADD was emerging as something some kids had to go take daily pills for. The term no longer exists; it's now ADHD (I'm skeptical; wikipedia covers it). It sounds like a cranky generalization, but this society grows more interested in mental illness for every episode of House.
I can't add anything to the press about Rodriguez. Any argument about the man, whether defending or attacking him, follows the patterns of years of tossed off journalism and single at-bat overreaction. The pattern of the defense starts with his statistics, whether this year's typical excellence (.286/.385/.517, 34 hr, 114 rbi, best Vorp, 44.9, among AL 3b) or the astonishing career numbers (.305/.385/.572, 463 hr, certain Hall of Famitude). It moves to subtly suggest that the man has become an issue with uncomfortable undertones in both class (from the contract) and race (the last name). It then moves on to address the perceptions of sample size and clutchness that hound the man every day in the press and minds of fans, and then, more subtly, the psychoanalysis of it all, encumpassing the insecurities and mental complexity of both the man and the fan. We find that sports journalism has shifted from the character assassination done to Ted Williams and Barry Bonds to something else, the accululation of doubt of a star in the spotlight. The struggle over Rodriguez's reputation becomes a new, postmodern study of a celebrity and his mind by a semi-knowledgable population with a fondness for pseudo-medical proclaimations.
There's just nothing to add on Alex Rodriguez from either side. Repetition, from lurching attack to scrambling retort, has been the constant with him ever since, even I have to mention it, the contract, and especially the trade to New York. In the end, my rambling thoughts today were probably just as masturbatory as Verducci's insider tale.

The little *

2006-09-19T19:41:00.000-04:00

The Mets "finally" got theirs yesterday, with the Yankees, A's, and Cardinals soon to follow. The Met clinching delay is probably the most press the Pirates have gotten all year, and most of the articles I read included surprise at Trachsel's 6 good innings. Their rotation is a pile of injuries, kids, and subpar veterans, and I wouldn't trust it to get past a Padre or Dodgers team that's just played a month's worth of postseason-level baseball. Every year a wild card team "surprises" in the playoffs - why should we be taken aback this year? Hate to talk about things like grit or toughness but the Mets just got swept by the Pirates in the three most meaningful/pressurefilled/advertised/overblown games they've played in months. The same argument goes against the Cardinals, actually, and I wouldn't be surprised if last night's home run madness turns out to be an NLCS preview. Were the Phillies to sneak in there, I'd certainly favor their deep rotation and two hitters 'gainst Leitch's two-star squad.
As for the American League, the Yankees will be playing the Wild Card team and so I am sorely hoping for Minnesota to pass the Tigers, leaving the two best staffs in the league to bludgeon each other while my team's absurd lineup sends doubles and homers into the long grassy gaps of Comerica. Both the Twins and A's ought to have a very good chance against the Yankees, whichever series they meet, so I'll go against both my own rooting interest and today's standings to predict an Oakland-San Diego World Series.

Guest post by Guyd Tarken

2006-09-18T21:26:00.000-04:00

Mr. Tarken has recently taken up residence with about a dozen anachronistic-style granola-eaters. Though he claims to be a vegetarian, the relocation was a tax issue and not a moral one.

I would not recommend living in a house with other people, if you can avoid it. Live alone, if you can, but if you cannot, at the very least avoid living with the people with whom I am forced to, once a week, spend two hours going over the minutia of the house's problems.

This would not ordinarily be a problem, as I usually just pick a seat toward the back and sleep through these sorts of events, but yesterday I found myself in the curious and surprising position to correct someone's grammar using an example from sports; specifically golf.
I have always considered it a badge of honor to not understand a lick of golf, because it is a bullshit game played by modern day Archie Bunkers. The closest I have ever come to golfing was once painting a golf course while casually employed as a housepainter. I had a solidly good perspective into the world of golfing, as the golfers considered me a reasonably white person to whom they could bitch about minorities, and the caddies saw me as a reasonably working class person to whom they could bitch about golfers. The best conclusion I could reach on the sport is that it is an awful way to spend one's time and I could NOT fathom why so many people think the subject is funny. For Christ's sake, Groucho Marx devoted about half his autobiography to the subject, and it makes for the worst reading in the book.

Anyway, back on subject, one of my housemates (a term that you'd think I'd hate more then the housemates themselves; you clearly do not know my housemates) complained that next to the sink, a pool of water had formed in a divot. This roused me. "A divot," I complained, "is one of those things in golf. Isn't it like the thing that you put the ball onto and then hit it off?"
"No," it was condescendingly explained, "the divot is when the club hits the grass and tears up some turf."
"So is it the turf or the hole in the turf?"
"Both."

This is bullshit. We cannot have the same word for an empty space and the item that is meant to be in that space. It would be chaos. But, though I thoroughly disagreed with the explanation (see any dictionary website and I will be proven correct), I found within myself a strong kinship with the person who explained it. She clearly does not know much about golf, either. We both apparently have the same idea of what a horrid sport it is. And, in that, we are united against God knows how many awful human beings.

Big Play Dave

2006-09-16T22:32:00.000-04:00

Hokies 36, Blue Devils 0. The world lets out a collective yawn, wonders when VA Tech plans to play a real actual football team (September 30, vs. Georgia Tech).

David Clowney has been my favorite player on the Hokies for a long time now, mostly because he's been here since about 1806. I liked him at first because his name makes me titter like a schoolgirl, but he has slowly blossomed into a big play receiver and the leader of the Hokie receivers. He went for 120 yards today, which is completely irrelevant to the following anecdote.

A friend of mine says he saw him at a bar downtown last night - he recognized him due to the fact that one of the people he was with is friends with Dave. This person claims that Dave called him recently and asked if he wanted to come over to, and I quote my friend "triple team some girl". This guy declined - no word on whether Dave decided to simply double team her or called off the entire endeavor out of disappointment. The moniker that I have given him, "Big Play Dave", will never sound the same to me again.

The Wheel of History

2006-09-15T14:49:00.000-04:00

It's my belief that history is a wheel. "Inconsistency is my very essence" -says the wheel- "Rise up on my spokes if you like, but don't complain when you are cast back down into the depths. Good times pass away, but then so do the bad. Mutability is our tragedy, but it is also our hope. The worst of times, like the best, are always passing away". - Tony Wilson

Yes, that's a quote from 24 Hour Party People, one of the most frustrating good movies ever made. It's an interesting look into a fascinating subject (at least in my eyes), the explosion of the Manchester music scene, and it's full of clever lines, but it's also clear that there's a lot more going on than the movie has the inclination to deal with.

I want to talk about another 24 hour party person, one of the most polarizing non-controversial figures in sports, The King Of All He Surveys and 1058th person to have seen Mariah Carey naked, Derek Jeter. This, I believe, will be the first time anyone has ever written about Derek Jeter, who has gone criminally unnoticed by baseball fans in general, and certainly by the mainstream media. You may ask, why am I writing about this nobody, this nothing, this schnook if you will? First, is it your business what I write about? No, so pipe down. Second, I heard Tim Kurkjian refer to him as (I'm paraphrasing) the "most underrated player in baseball and perhaps in the history of creation, from the birthing of the universe from the Hiranyagarbha to the end of our current cycle of existence and the Pralaya. This is a facinating idea on a number of levels, and I want to explore it.

Jeter came up in 1995 for his first taste of the majors, but his proper rookie season was 1996 (incidentally, I remember a Sports Illustrated piece from that year discussing the future of shortstops in New York, with Jeter and Cuban heartthrob Rey Ordonez being the focus of the piece, and it's so cute to think that a guy who could play the field like a motherfucker but who couldn't hit his way out of a wet paper sack could be the "future" of a professional baseball club. But I digress.) The 1996 Yankees won the World Series with Jeter winning the ROY award but really only being one cog on that Yankee team. The Yankees have since added 3 more championships, as well as 2 pennants and a slew of postseason appearances, and the guy in the middle of everything has always been Mariano Rivera. Oh wait, I was talking about Derek Jeter. Yeah, he's been around too.

Jeter has been the subject of intense debates for a decade. Those who blindly support and love him, like ESPN and, presumably, Jesus Christ Almighty (20 million per year, women at his beck and call, New York City as his plaything) can't talk about him without mentioning at least one of the following terms: intangibles, leadership, chemistry, baseball IQ, gives good head...wait, that's just me. Anyway, these people truly and honestly believe that Derek Jeter is underrated, because of the unstated assumption that baseball fans are too stupid to look past things like numbers and actual production to see the heart of the man beating out its intangibles one cutoff throw to home plate at a time. Slide, Jeremy, you fat fuck!

And then there is the other side, the side that believes Derek Jeter is the most overrated player since Phil Rizzuto (no, that's not a coincidence), that he's a terrible defender with a reputation as a great one because he makes that jump-throw look so damn pretty, that he's half the hitter Alex Rodriguez is and Yankee fans are a bunch of goddamn worthless monkeys because they can't see it. And yes, I am generally in this camp. Jeter has been a sucktastic defensive player (although I believe he's getting better, that his positioning has improved a lot, to the point that he's not that different from early-90's Cal Ripken Jr.) I believe that average fans see things in Derek Jeter that aren't there, because baseball journalists are constantly telling them how great he is.

But.....

Derek Jeter is, quite possibly, going to win the AL MVP this year. The people who don't think he should win, who think Jermaine Dye or Justin Morneau should win, have all sorts of reasons to vote against him, and most of them are wrong. "Jeter's not a run-producer, only RBI guys should win MVP's." "Jeter's not even the MVP of his own team." "The Yankees would still win without Jeter, how valuable could he really be?" These are stupid reasons. Jeter is second in the AL in VORP, behind Travis Hafner, who would win the MVP in a perfect world but perfect worlds are boring. Jeter deserves the MVP this year. And it should be pointed out that this isn't even Jeter's best year - that would be 1999, when Pudge Rodriguez walked away with an MVP that could have gone to Jeter, or Nomar, or Manny, or Pedro, or Robbie Alomar, but instead went undeservedly to Pudge. In a nutshell, Derek Jeter was pretty fucking good at hitting the baseball in 1999, is pretty fucking good at doing just that in 2006, and was pretty fucking good (to varying degrees) in all the intervening years.

The time in which a baseball player is actively playing the game is short - 15, 20 years for the longest careers. Between the time they retire and the time they die is closer to 40 years, or more than double the length of their active career. When a player is active they're described with subjective things like intangibles and locker-room presence by guys like Tim Kurkjian, but once someone is retired all that's really left is the numbers. 50 years from now, when a kid who never heard him play live is asked what he thinks about Bob Dylan, he's not going to talk about what he said one time to a hostile audience at the Manchester Free Trade Hall or how shitty he treated Joan Baez. He's going to talk about what he thinks about the songs on Blonde on Blonde. Musicians have different strengths - some are great live performers, some are funny and charismatic, some are controversial. But in the end, all that history is going to remember is what you managed to get down on record. Put out great albums, you'll be remembered as a great artist. Put out shit albums and no matter how great of a live act you are, you're destined to be forgotten. A player's numbers, his baseball-reference.com page, is the legacy he leaves. That's what he'll be remembered for above and beyond anything else. No one knows what Tris Speaker's intangibles were; no one will remember what Jeter's were in 50 years.

When you get down to that, when you strip all the extraneous bullshit away and just see what Jeter will leave behind, you're left with the inescapable conclusion that Derek Jeter is pretty fucking good at baseball. He has a career OPS+ of 121, which will certainly go up after this year. He has never finished a full season lower than 100, and he's done this at shortstop where (despite some recent history) it is still hard to find a good bat. He's not a great shortstop, maybe not even a good one, but he's a servicable one, capable of playing the position without killing his team, and that can be enough. He's not underrated, because casual fans think he's a god among men and real fans know that he's not better, in general, than a handful of other players. But that doesn't mean he's not really good, because he is.

Notes from the weekend

2006-09-12T17:28:00.000-04:00

Another one of these, because I'm a lazy bum and I can't think of a good topic.

- I don't want to go on about the Hokies too much. They won handily at UNC 35-10, a score which masks the ineptitude of the offense, specifically the passing game. The first two Hokie touchdowns were set up by an interception and a punt block, another came directly from an interception return, and a 4th involved a pass from "quarterback of the future" Ike Whitaker. Sean Glennon threw for 66 yards. Running back Branden Ore is basically the entire offense at this point - he's real good, but the lack of any sort of passing game is going to end in heartache.

- The Redskins lost 19-16 on the least shocking missed field goal ever. John Hall is to kicking what, presumably, Dakota Fanning would be to kicking - a little girl who can't kick the ball very far. The loss wasn't really Hall's cross to bear - a few key penalties down the stretch (Raiders type penalties - unsportsmanlike conducts and the like) buried the Skins in the final few minutes. Maybe it was Norv Turner throwback night and they forgot to tell the fans.

- I've finally figured out who Roger Federer reminds me of. This guy

- The NL MVP race seems to be coming down to Ryan Howard vs. Albert Pujols. Both fine selections - I like Howard's advantage in games played (140-125) but I'm a bit biased so don't listen to me. Carlos Beltran has also been discussed as a candidate, and he'd be okay as well - in fact, given his defense, he may be a better choice than either of the other two. Not to be missed, though, is the phenomenal season Miguel Cabrera is having. Most of the talk around the Marlins has been about their strong crop of rookies, but Cabrera is still only 23 (according to his bio, at least) and currently sports a 1017 OPS. He has increased that number every season that he has been in the majors. He is as good as any young position player in the league, and the Marlins would be fools to trade him.

- I watched Mona Lisa over the weekend; I had recently watched The Long Good Friday and wanted to round out my Bob Hoskins collection. Mona Lisa's a better movie, but The Long Good Friday has the better Hoskins performance. Michael Caine shows up because it was a movie made anywhere at any time during the 80's, so he was contractually obligated to appear. Clarke Peters also shows up as a sleazy pimp - it's odd to see him in a non-David Simon role (watch The Wire). His character is 100% the opposite of Det. Lester Freamon (watch The Wire). Plus it's an English movie, which is really incongruous with his usual role (watch The Wire). Yes, this entire section was a thinly-veiled excuse for me to harangue you about watching The Wire. Watch The fucking Wire already. Sunday, 10:00, HBO.

Ortiz Makes Stupid Comments; Ensures Jeter MVP

2006-09-11T13:32:00.000-04:00

Now your failure is complete.
ESPN: Ortiz says he should still be considered for MVP.
Say what you want about 'Captain Intangibles', but he'd never make a comment about his own MVP candidacy. Matter of fact, he rarely gives an answer to any loaded question of any kind. Mentioning that Jermaine Dye or Justin Morneau could win "depending on who makes the playoffs" does not advance Ortiz's point either. And bringing up Rodriguez just makes him should like a frustrated B-hatted blogger with the complete DVD set who has secretly started to believe in the curse again. His lineup comments are ridiculous as well; few players in all of baseball has better lineup protection than Ortiz, with Manny Ramirez hitting fourth. Of course the most important point is one that Ortiz has recognized: how can the MVP be from a team that's ten games back?

Joey, baby - dont get crazy

2006-09-08T15:33:00.000-04:00

Nah, just fucking with you, I never really got the appeal of Concrete Blonde. Johnette Napolitano is just a bit too goth chick scary for my taste, and Concrete Blonde seems like just another of those "too wussy for metal, too obnoxiously aggressive for college rock" bands that was so popular in the early 90's, like Faith No More.

But I don't want to talk about Johnette and her junkie boyfriend. I want to talk about a much more interesting Joey: Joey Porter, linebacker, Steelers. Joey always reminds me of that line by Principal Skinner that he used when he first began his attempt to boink Edna K, "I've always admired your tart honesty and your ability to be personally offended by broad social trends." Joey's always pissed off at something, whether it's the softness of the Colts, Jerramy Stevens actually suggesting that his team was capable of winning the Super Bowl or even, occasionally, our Supreme Overlord and Protector. Joey loves to be pissed off. Of course, the man was once shot in the ass, so who the hell am I to quibble with his approach towards life? Taking a bullet in the heinie is guaranteed to make you a bit high-strung.

You've probably seen the picture of Joey planting one on coach Bill Cowher's cheek (Fucking Deadspin, stealing my bit). Or maybe you haven't. Joey's like most high-strung people - when he hates you, he HATES you. And when he loves you, he wants to fuck you. Sweetly and tenderly, like you deserve, but make no mistake, Joey is going to make you scream when you come.

Everyone thinks that Joey's kiss is hilariously homoerotic. And I do as well. But you and I and everyone else knows that every single play in every single football game since the beginning of time is equally, if not more, homoerotic than that. Football is a nonstop succession of dudes touching other dudes. Sometimes it's blatant, like when someone congratulates a teammate by smacking him on his ass. And sometimes it's subtle, like when a guy gets down in a pancake block and the two of them end up on top of each other, sweaty bodies writhing against one another in a dance of aggression and ecstasy. Or when someone's at the bottom of a fumble scrum, and he reaches out and grab some dude's johnson just to see if it's bigger than his (it is). The truth is that football is, to paraphrase Leon the orange julius guy, "for gays".

So what happens when one of Joey's teammates, or leaguemates, comes out and says that he actually likes touching dudes and, what's more, chooses to touch them even when he's NOT playing football? And that he's not going to stop playing football despite all this dude touching? Everyone knows that the numbers aren't on Joey's side - even if the low-end estimates are true and only about 1% of American males over age 18 are gay, that makes about 17 gay men playing in the NFL right now. Well I don't know how Joey will feel, but I know how Todd Jones, Garrison Hearst and Jeremy Shockey (among others) feel about it. Not sunshine and roses, that's for sure, and not just because that's the sort of thing that Christopher Lowell might say. See, I pick on Joey because he's outspoken, but I would guess that most football players have the same sort of high-strung personality that he does, because how else could you get angry enough to hit people every week who have never done anything to you? And high-strung guys are the least likely to accept a change as (cosmetically) monumental as having an out teammate.

This is the last frontier in team sports. There are some out athletes among the individual sports - female tennis, specifically, has had more lesbians than "Where The Boys Aren't". But a major team sport athlete has yet to come out while still playing, so any idea about how he'll be received is pure speculation. In society at large, the idea of coming out has lost some of the stigma that was once attached to it - witness Baseball Prospectus's Chris Kahrl's recent admission that she is now living as a transgendered woman: "her heart’s been warmed by the utter nonreaction she’s gotten from baseball and baseball-journalism folks since converting to womanhood". But Chris doesn't have to suit up next to high-strung crazies like Joey, guys who maybe are threatened to be reminded just how gay their job is. It's going to take a superstar coming out to break the stigma of being gay and a pro athlete in a team sport, because only someone who is fully established and respected will be able to weather the criticism and, more importantly, the snide comments spoken on the field that don't appear in the paper. But it's the 21st century, and it's about damn time - we have yet to have a non-white or female president in this country, we could at least have a gay superstar athlete to show the world we're not as backwards as they think we are.

Guest post by Thank Charleston

2006-09-07T19:48:00.000-04:00

<-- This is not Thank Charleston; it is Angus Lennie.
Thank has had a tough time and he wants you to hear about it. Seems he was a tall child, but not nearly Andre the Giant level in anything. There was no famous author in his early life.

I have never wanted to be an athlete. I never wanted to grow up to be a baseball player, and I never wanted to play in Little League. But what comforted me all those years when I had to learn to read because all the other boys were busy breaking each other's shins was that in my mind, I could be a competitor if I wanted to. If I really worked hard and put my nose to the dugout, I could pick up a bat and send a ball sailing, or drop "the rock" through "the hoop," or sink a putter or nab a goal or what have you. With that logic, it was clearly my own sane choice to spend my time with the Animorphs, and later Billy Pilgrim.
What was frustrating, however, was knowing that there was one thing I could never be: a jockey.
Sure, I could wear them, but I was far too tall to ever be one. In fact, I was always absurdly tall, which led many people to mistakenly think I was a basketball player (I wasn't). What killed me was that I could have been the size of a jockey and still been a basketball player, but at my height I could never, ever, get on a horse and make it go fast.
Further distressing is my more recent revelation that this too-tall problem extends beyond the world of being a jockey. I am too tall to be an old-school physical comedian. Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin, and all three Marx Brothers (I know what you're thinking; shut up) were all very short men who would cast very tall villains to make themselves look put upon and sympathetic. If I want to appear in an auteur comedy from the 20's or 30's, I could only play the awfully serious guy who gets his what for.
It is times like these, when I am realizing the limitations of my height, that I think back to the Tom Hanks movie "Big," and remember how much that little kid wished he were bigger.
Fuck him.

Anibal Sanchez and Ricky Nelson.

2006-09-07T02:28:00.000-04:00

<--- Here he is in unhappier times. Beckett has a 5.11 era.
Seems as I was happily watching Rio Bravo, the Marlins rookie threw a no-hitter. It's always been hard for me not to root for his team, even in the 2003 World Series. They're a Hollywood-style up and down group who are always thrilling, and always full of rookies and young guys. It's impossible to hate the Marlins - they simply haven't been around enough. Not just the franchise, but the players are consistently of the young, wide-eyed variety. As for reasons to like them, there are plenty, starting with Joe Girardi, the 'Fish' nickname, the thematic teal. As a Yankee fan, I love seeing former Red Sox and Mets prospects succeeding, and even the most bitter dispariger has to be rooting for them to make the playoffs (well, unless Anibal-inspired coverage makes them insufferable.) Plus, Jeremy Hermida looks like Tom Waits.
They've got a way to go, being three back of San Diego for the Wild Card, though the Dodgers seem to be ready to collapse, which might open a space up for the youngsters. Juan Pierre and Luis Castillo and friends do seem to be small potatoes next to the potential of this team going forward, even if they finish behind the Padres or Phillies. To segue, the Marlins brash-young-up-and-coming act recalls Ricky Nelson in Rio Bravo, which I enjoyed thouroghly. The classic Western elements of the movie were great - John Wayne played a little lighter, paternal and sometimes tongue-tied and embarrassed version of his normal character, Ward Bond showed up and was shot, and the girl was way more liberated than I expected. Wayne in particular was a joy, showing some perfect comic timing and a genuine sense of misplacement at points. Coming a few days after seeing The Searchers, it was particularly startling to see even a chinck or two in the man. The confusingly named film also has a place in music history. It came out in 1959, right as rock n'roll was entering the mainstream, and starred two of the biggest musicians of the time, Dean Martin, representing the 50s crooning rat pack lifestyle, and Ricky Nelson, the new wave of early rock. The paring is something like Frank Sinatra and Montgomery Clift in From Here To Eternity - suddenly the star is middle-aged, and playing a supporting role.
Martin in particular is fantastic as the reforming "Borachón", Spanish for Drunk. He's quite a simpathetic figure, hands actually shaking as he goes through withdrawal. Famous as a real-life lush, he is here scruffy, unshaven, but ultimately loyal to father-figure John Wayne (it's a convention to shorten a name in a long piece like this one, but who would ever call the man 'Wayne'?) He begins the film's one well-selected musical interlude, singing laying down, with his hat over his face, in a great set piece just before the final confrontation. Ricky Nelson, representing the future of music (remember, this was 1959), sings the second part of the scene, pulling out an obviously anachronistic guitar and hits into an uptempo version of the nice old song "Cindy". I've a copy of a nice duet of this one between Johnny Cash and Nick Cave, and here we have Dean Martin on backing vocals.
To contrast with Martin, Ricky Nelson's young gunslinger is clean and handsome. His boyish, young-Elvis looks and soft voice work well with a noncommital character, who takes most of the first hour off before finally saving John Wayne from some thugs and joining our heroes. He's soft-spoken and teenaged, sure, but he's a very fast draw, even in an uninterupted cut. The group is preventing a man charged with murder from being rescued by his brother; in the process they kill ten or twenty men of their own, but in the name of justice. Rio Bravo's just a standard Western from the old Hollywood days, really, albeit funnier than most and a cast that represents to me the changing of the guard of music royalty, but there's something comforting and fun about it. A bit of the old Americana in the best sense perhaps. John Wayne may have been a right-winger, or at worst, a Nazi, but that doesn't mean he wasn't a badass. Nothing quite like a good Western, or a no-hitter by a 22 year old kid. A good night.

Notes from the weekend

2006-09-05T12:02:00.000-04:00

I don't have an overarching theme today, just some disconnected thoughts about the past weekend. If you'll be so kind as to indulge me; if not, I'll just write this crap for myself.

- The game I attended on Saturday was, naturally, VA Tech vs. Northeastern. Have I mentioned how embarrassing our out of conference schedule is this year? On tap we have Northeastern, Cincinatti, Kent State and Southern Miss. Even if we were good enough to contend for the title, our schedule would leave us out of all but the most favorable BCS contingencies.

- Sean Glennon's numbers (15-18, 222 yards, 3 TD and 1 INT) looked fine but don't be fooled - Glennon looked much worse than that. He fits every stereotype of a white quarterback - when he runs for a 2-yard gain his effort level is about the same as when an average running quarterback gains about 10 yards. His throws miss the mark more often than not, but he gets bailed out by his receivers. Maybe he was just working out the jitters (this was his first extended game experience) but if he doesn't improve, things are going to be bad for the Hokie offense against real teams.

- I don't mean to constantly harp on how much ESPN Radio sucks, but a certain morning show host that I hate with the white-hot intensity of a million suns went into one of his comfort zones today that absolutely makes me want to stab a homeless man with a bread knife: The "pit football against baseball and see which is more popular" bit. First, I know a lot of sports fans and pretty much to a man they are capable of being fans of both sports. Second, one of the arguments used against baseball is that once football season (college and pro being lumped into one catch-all category, even though they have distinct fan-bases) starts, baseball gets dumped on the side of the road by most sports fans outside of (ESPN BIAS ALERT! ESPN BIAS ALERT!) New York and Boston. This ignores the fact that historically (and not just since Bud Selig's reign of terror) most teams are out of the running by the beginning of September, giving most fans little reason to hang on to the scrap of the regular season left. It should also be pointed out that football (college and pro) doesn't have to directly compete against any other major sport as they limp to the finish line in December - the NBA starts in October so that by the time football teams are slotted into postseason spots, the NBA is already in the midst of its painfully long regular season, and the excitement of the season's beginning is already a distant memory. If the schedule was reversed, and MLB started its season around the beginning of December, plenty of NFL fans following 3, 4 and 5-win teams would abandon the sport for baseball.

- Also on ESPN Radio, Michael Irvin did his usual shuck-and-jive on the Dan Patrick Show, and I bet you can guess the topic. Okay, got your answer? You were close - he wasn't specifically talking about TO, but he WAS talking about how every wide receiver ever is underpaid and should continue to hold out until they're given unlimited supplies of fur coats, tasteful jackets and crack vials as far as the eye can see. Or something like that. Anyway, he stopped boogalooing long enough to make one lucid point - Brett Favre has been hearing "can't" so long that he's incapable of distinguishing constructive criticism from meanspirited bashing, and that's why he's suiting up for the Packers in 2006. Brett's not a silver spoon guy like, say, Peyton Manning - he had to settle for playing at Southern Miss, got drafted in the 2nd round by a 2nd rate organization that unceremoniously dumped him on what was then another 2nd rate organization, and constantly had to prove himself with the Packers before they learned to trust him. So now, when people around him tell him that maybe he should think about quitting, he's too hardened to listen to them. I don't mean to make this into some sort of Horatio Alger story - Brett's got many more athletic gifts than most of us - but he has had to learn to fight for what he has, and when you and I and everyone else knows that the Packers are terrible and Brett is a big part of the problem, he is simply incapable of hearing it objectively. This year will probably be frustrating enough that he'll finally make the right decision after the season.

- I realize that pretty much everyone on the face of the earth has, by this point, agreed that Oasis were a huge piece of shit all along and we were fools to be suckered in by them in the first place, but I watched the video for "Live Forever" on The Alternative last night and they still fascinate me. That song has one of the most kick-ass drum openings of all time; if you were hearing it for the first time, you'd listen to that and think man, this is about to seriously fucking rock. And then Liam starts singing and it's that grating Mancunian accent singing sub-Stone Roses psychedelic crap and you're incredibly disappointed. But then the song clears the first verse and goes into the bridge and you think, again, here is their chance to really knock out a strong chorus and save this song but no, they fizzle out into the "You and I/Are gonna live forevahhhhhh" lyric and you take the CD outside and fill it with buckshot. That song describes them in a nutshell - they had all the trappings of a really good rock and roll band (hardscrabble upbringing in working-class English town, a dangerously antagonistic relationship both amongst the band and between band and audience, a songwriter with an ear for melody) and they seemed good at first but once you start to get into the meat of the song you realized that they were creepily obsessed with their influences to the point that it kept them from pitching their own tent, so that all of their music is filtered through the mealy-mouthed psychedelia of the death rattle of Madchester. Oasis didn't want to be The Beatles, since they were astute enough to realize that no one really wants a "New Beatles" to ever come along; who they really wanted to be was the Stone Roses, but they came along about 5 years too late and ended up sounding derivative. It goes without saying that derivative music ages particularly badly because it lacks the courage of its convictions, having borrowed them directly from others.

(Seriously, Liam? Enough with the scarves.)

Edit: Here's the video, if you're curious -

The Underpaid

2006-08-30T22:21:00.000-04:00

Every season several writers break out the old standby article to get themselves through the doldrums of the late summer: the all overpaid/underpaid team. Here's a fairly typical example. Now overall this isn't a terrible column as such things go, but the issue I have is with these columns in general - the underpaid portion is always packed with pre-arbitration or pre-free agency players. Naturally, this calls for a long-winded discussion about the history of free agency in baseball. Faster Than A Shark - because we're better than you.

Traditionally, the relationship between teams and players was determined by the reserve clause. What is the reserve clause? Here's the final version of the language of it:

"... the Club may tender to the Player a contract for the term of that year by mailing the same to the Player. If prior to the March 1 next succeeding said January 15, the Player and the Club have not agreed upon the terms of such contract, then on or before 10 days after said March 1, the Club shall have the right ... to renew this contract for the period of one year."

Essentially, if the player and club couldn't come to an agreement on a fair contract by a certain date, the club could simply renew their old contract with the player. The clause said very clearly "one year" but the clubs took this to mean "in perpetuity" and the players took it because they didn't know any better. As long as the club tendered an offer, the player had little choice. He could go home to Alabama and raise chickens instead of taking the deal, but if he wanted to play major league baseball he had to take the team's offer.

Curt Flood was the first player to challenge the reserve clause, mostly because he didn't want to play for the crappy Phillies. He filed a lawsuit in the beginning of 1970 that ultimately went to the Supreme Court. His mistake, or his lawyer's mistake, was in arguing the case based on the antitrust exemption that baseball did (and still does) enjoy. They argued that the reserve clause depressed wages and ran counter to the public interest. The Supreme Court told him to go fuck himself, and Flood went back to baseball with his tail between his legs (eventually getting dealt to the Senators).

It was during the late-60's and early-70's that the MLB Player's Association, under the direction of Marvin Miller, finally woke up and realized that it was pretty damn powerful. The first player granted free agency was Catfish Hunter after the 1974 season - however, he only got out on a technicality. There was a clause in his contract stipulating that a certain amount of money was supposed to be paid into a life insurance fund. Stingy old bastard Charlie O. Finley failed to do this, and arbitrator Peter Seitz ruled the contract void - Hunter signed a lucrative free agent deal with the Yankees. Since this wasn't a situation that applied to most players, it was only a blip on the radar. But it showed the players just how much money was waiting for them if they had the courage to fight the owners on the reserve clause.

During the 1974 offseason, Dave McNally of the Expos and Andy Messersmith of the Dodgers refused to sign new contracts. Their respective teams offered them contracts under the 10 day deadline outlined in the reserve clause, and both played the season under that contract. After the season the two of them filed grievances to baseball's appointed arbitrator (Peter Seitz again) that they were only bound under that contract for the one year (the year they had just played) and were therefore free to sign anywhere they wanted. Seitz ruled that they were, and his decision was upheld on appeal. The free agent era had begun.

The owners, knowing they were beaten, did the only sensible thing, which was to sit down with the Union and work out terms of surrender. The result was the system that is now in place - teams have three years to move a player to the 40-man roster, and three years after that to option him to the minors. Once a player plays in the big leagues it starts his arbitration clock - the team gets three years to offer him contracts it deems fair, and the player either accepts them or stops being a professional baseball player. Over the next three years after that the player can go to arbitration where both the player and the club submit a figure, and an arbitrator picks one or the other. After this three-year period, the player is free to sign with any team. The team is of course always free to offer him a long-term contract (this is of course how the Indians built their 90's teams - by buying out their players' arbitration years and part of their free agency years, for more than arbitration money but less than free agent money).

So, after all that, I get to my original point. These underpaid lists are always full with pre-arbitration and pre-free agency players. They're underpaid because that is how the system is set up. Therefore, they shouldn't count as underpaid. Joe Mauer is one of the best players in the game right now, and he makes $400,000 dollars this year. But he cost the Twins a #1 overall draft pick and, more importantly, he is incapable of making more money. The Twins pay him $400,000, not because they're financial geniuses, but because they can.

So, here is my list of players who are actual bargains:

Ray Durham - $7M this year.
Has anyone noticed that Durham has an 891 OPS this year? Yeah, I hadn't either. This is the last year of his deal with the Giants, but he's making it count.

Scott Hatteberg - $750,000 this year (plus incentives). Signed through 2008 (club option).
The Moneyball star is getting on-base at a .396 clip and has thrown in 13 home runs.

Jermaine Dye - $5M this year and a $6M club option for 2007.
A legitimate MVP candidate.

Frank Thomas - $500,000, plus $2.6M in incentives.
Has given the A's basically his best-case scenario - healthy, and productive.

Carlos Guillen - $5M this year, and $5M next year.
Was never that productive as a Mariner (although he was serviceable), and has never been unproductive in his three seasons in a Tiger uniform. His OPS currently stands at 893.

Nick Johnson - $3.2M this year, $5.5M each of the next three years.
Technically Johnson's free agent clock hasn't started yet, but it will after this year and the Nats wisely locked him up through 2009.

Chris Carpenter - $5M this year, $7M in 2007 and an $8M club option in 2008.
2nd in the NL with a 2.96 ERA.

CC Sabathia - $7M this year, $8.75M in 2007, $9M in 2008.
Another player who doesn't hit free agency until after this season, but the Indians have him locked up through 2008. Sabathia is 26, sports a 3.22 ERA this season and has decreased his walk rate. He is worth much more than $7-9M on the open market.

And one player who I thought would be on this list but isn't:

Travis Hafner - $2.5M this year, $3.75M in 2007 and $4.5M in 2008 (club option)
Hafner is obviously grossly underpaid, but that's because he's only in his 5th season and therefore his free agent period doesn't begin until after next year. Since the club only has one free agent year locked up, I didn't count him.

(All the contract information comes from Cot's Baseball Contracts, a remarkable resource.)

It's Over.

2006-08-30T00:52:00.000-04:00

As the Red Sox's soul-patched, police-escort requiring mascot Doug Mirabelli struck out to end their 2-1 loss to Oakland tonight and put them 7.5 games back of the Yankees, I couldn't help but think of Roy Orbison....

Ok, so it's not the original. (I was going to go with lyrics but found it on youtube instead.) It's from an 1988 TV special, with Elvis Costello, Tom Waits, Bruce Springsteen and friends. You can see them all better in Pretty Woman, which I also found - I feel like writing a 5000 word Simmons-style paean to youtube right now.

The victory also puts Oakland up 7.5 in their division. Suck it, Angels! You will not take my team down again this year.

Faster Than A Shark: Three Steps Ahead of Page 2

2006-08-29T12:45:00.000-04:00

They take a look at Giambi's mustache. Apparently it is inspired by Mattingly, and here to stay. This is just the kind of article I was worried about. Won't someone please think of the children?

Jeff Karstens, Comically Ugly.

2006-08-28T02:09:00.000-04:00

Not to turn this blog into a log of google image search results of the dogs of our pastime, but hey, I am a bitter, critical man, and nothing amuses me so much as the site of such an obviously cursed fellow. I think they pulled him out of his mother with a hook, and left him on the hospital floor to expire curled up and gasping for breath. But Jeff Karstens pulled himself up from that floor, and into our hearts, with a quality start and a victory against the Angels today. Freakish in the vaudvillian rather than basketball draftee sense, he will get another start or two in an uncertain rotation, and fans who stick around after the game may get to see him jump through a flaming hoop or balance a beach ball on his nose.

Yankee Mustaches: A Growing Problem.

2006-08-26T18:18:00.000-04:00

I know you're all familar with the Yankees' team rules on facial hair, and you probably think it's a draconian, perhaps even totalitarian idea. The rule has its benefits, however: it prevents the corporate goatee, the drawn-on beard, the pubic chin, and the soulless patch. There is a loophole, perhaps instituted to induce the return of Don Mattingly or pacify Gary Sheffield: a mustache is allowed, but it's never been much of a problem. Sheffield's is tasteful, and Mattingly is a coach, so his facetime is limited. It's not that all baseball facial hair is bad - but for every Roger Clemens, there is a John Smoltz, and for the rare player who pulls off the goatee there are dozens of weak little emasulated ones. And then of course, there are a few absolute monsters. All this and more usually prevented by Steinbrenner's rule.
As this season has dragged on, Sheffield-less, into August, a creeping trend has developed, the first evidence of which began to be visible in the Red Sox series; a new influx of uncomfortably bad lip crust.These things take a few days to move from the suggestion of a problem to a full-grown facestrocity, but they have taken prominent, undoubtable places just above the talkers of Jason Giambi, Johnny Damon, and the harshly set jaw of Jaret Wright. I've watched, horrified, as these things developed over the last week, cluttering up two spots in the order with manicured black centimeter length abominations.
What if this catches on? What if, Idiot-like, it becomes a thing? Dare the mustache breach the permanently beardless face of Derek Jeter, or Mariano Rivera? All it would take is some clueless commentor or beat writer to invoke the name of the late 70s Oakland "Mustache Gang", in the manner of the Boston Massacre last week, for this trend to enter the lexicon. I fear for the upper lips of the Yankees of the future, and for the children of us all.

Golf!

2006-08-26T14:12:00.000-04:00

Yeah, golf. What's more elitist than that? Rich white snobs like golf, rich black snobs like golf. Fat rich people definitely like golf, like this guy:

and this guy:

So, on with the notes.

- The Bridgestone Invitational is being played this weekend and is currently led by a big giant swoosh. Reports suggest a person may be under the swoosh, but no one has been able to confirm these rumors as of yet.

- Yusaku Miyazato scored two holes-in-one in a single round on Friday (in the Reno-Tahoe Open, the second-tier tournament this weekend), becoming the first golfer to ever accomplish this feat. It is at this point that I downplay this incredible accomplishment by pointing out that no Asian golfer has ever won a major, despite the fact that Japanese people love golf almost as much as they love working way harder than stupid lazy Americans and tentacle rape

- Tiger Woods: Still richer than you.

- Phil Mickelson has picked up a nickname among other golfers on the PGA Tour - FIGJAM. Or, "Fuck I'm good, just ask me." Clearly, most golfers would describe themselves as "leg men" (yes, a cheap Phil-Mickelson-has-bosoms joke. Fuck you).

- Davis Love III seems like he'd probably be a huge douchebag. And no, it's not just because his name includes Roman numerals. It's also because his name is "Davis". What kind of country-club bullshit is that?

- Ernie Els is from South Africa, which coincidentally is also where Charlize Theron is from. Charlize is a supremely attractive lady, but for someone who gets topless in movies a lot her breasts are actually pretty disappointing. Here is a list of the last several best actress Academy Awards winners and whether or not they got naked in the movie they won for:

Reese Witherspoon (Walk the Line) - no
Hilary Swank (Million Dollar Baby) - no
Charlize Theron (Monster) - yes
Nicole Kidman (The Hours) - I can't remember. Nicole always gets naked though, so I'll count this as a yes.
Halle Berry (Monster's Ball) - yes
Julia Roberts (Erin Brockovich) - no (we're still waiting, Julia. We can wait forever if we have to)
Hilary Swank (Boys Don't Cry) - yes (I think)
Gwyneth Paltrow (Shakespeare in Love) - yes
Helen Hunt (As Good As It Gets) - yes, but only properly from behind (front was in a wet t-shirt which would technically a no, but combined with the rear shot I'm giving her a yes)
Frances McDormand (Fargo) - no
Susan Sarandon (Dead Man Walking) - no (Susan doesn't get naked anymore, but was once considered to have the best rack in Hollywood. No joke)
Jessica Lange (Blue Sky) - I have no idea. Has anyone ever seen this movie?
Holly Hunter (The Piano) - dear God yes
Emma Thompson (Howard's End) - probably not
Jodie Foster (The Silence of the Lambs) - no
Kathy Bates (Misery) - no

That makes 7 yes, 8 no, and 1 I don't know. The lesson Hollywood actresses should take from this is, come on, don't be shy. You could win an award.

- Vijay Singh once got kicked off the Asian Tour for accusations of cheating (which he denies). I don't know who to believe, but I do know this: Vijay rhymes with BJ. Draw your own conclusions.

- A poll of sentient beings throughout the known universe has determined that Charles Barkley has the ugliest golf swing in the history of creation.

And finally:

- Ladies and gentlemen, John Daly!

A Clever Little Article on mlb.com?

2006-08-25T15:09:00.000-04:00

What. Just when I had given up on the mainstream media, here's a nice little gem from the normal residence of beat writers and "The Weekender". Usually mlb.com can be counted on to provide idiotic bluster and obvious puff pieces. This little Pluto riff is pointless, sure, but cute, entertaining, and unexpected - just the sort of thing you'd expect from a less distinguished source.
My skepticism and distain returned quickly this morning after reading an article in the New York Times about Utility infielder Nick Green: "Green’s second three-hit game as a Yankee — both against Seattle — put his average at .202, the highest it has been all season."

Yankee-Mariner Thoughts.

2006-08-25T02:18:00.000-04:00

As the bear 'round here hails from the green Northwest, some thoughts on tonight's game. Seattle at times does not seem to be fielding a major league club, instead resembling some of those PCL teams he's always gushing about. The Mariners now employ someone named T.J. Bohn, who is startlingly harsh on the eyes. Our announcers pronounced it 'bon', but I sense the name was changed by its sub-Weaver owner some time ago to avoid the embarrassment of being known as Bone. There was also a Snelling, and of course their own hustling Eckstein/Erstad disaster, Willie Bloomquist, hit second. Wow. We also got to see both halves of the Indians' first base platoon, and some Ichiro antics (2-for-4 with a nice catch; the go-to cliche there is 'theatrics'). Randy Johnson give up four runs through three to this non-lineup and ended up going eight in an effort to fool us into thinking it a positive. The fans distinguished themselves in the ninth, standing the whole time and lustily booing Alex Rodriguez, who struck out against J.J. Putz (I do not mourn Chris Berman) to end the game. The Mariners are a dead team, but took 2 out of 3. I can only wish them the same luck against the Red Sox.

Guest post by Choppy Wilkes

2006-08-22T23:56:00.000-04:00

So, as any of you who have friends like mine (specifically, my friend F. Scott) know, pool is an excellent game to play. F. Scott has a pool table at his home in West Egg, and all his other friends and I enjoy making use of it. The walls surrounding the pool table are occasionally a bit tight and have framed pictures of John Ellway, but F. Scott has tiny cues for making shots in that area (wait, is the stick the cue or is that the white ball?). In any event, I have found that watching pool on television (ESPN 8) is only a little bit less fun than playing pool while drunk (I am not as good when I am drunk, unlike how every asshole you know claims to be).
So when my younger brother (a spry 12-year old named Jank who knows more about every sport than I do about any given subject) changed our television channel from Comedy Central's airing of every MADtv episode ever to ESPN 8's coverage of lady's pool, I was initially borderline enthused, and then confused.
As a staunch feminist (why not?) I believe that there should be fewer gender divisions in business and theater and whatever. I guess I can understand the logic of making separate leagues for men's and women's basketball (do they count as leagues? Or associations?), but separate pool leagues doesn't make any sense to me. I fully believe that men and women have the potential to be equally good at pool (unless I missed something. Does women's pool have slightly larger and softer white balls [cues, maybe?]?). Jank had an explanation, something about trying to have more or fewer people in a league or something, but I was coming up with my own explanation: men would be unable to play pool while looking at a pair of these (see Fig. 1 --->).
Seriously, Karen Corr. The audience in that 1980's Raffi video I own called, and it wants its eyewear back. Even my grandmother doesn't wear those any more. So what can we, as a pool-observing audience, do? I think we should encourage the Women's Pool Association (or whatever it's called) to adopt strict rules about how its players look. There is precedent.

Pranking the spaz

2006-08-22T17:11:00.000-04:00

If you missed the story, a minor hubbub has developed over a player on the Staten Island team in the Little League World Series dropping a very audible f-bomb during their game against Lemont, Ill. The video is no longer on YouTube, but reports also claim that the manager smacked the kid, which could be nothing or it could be really horrible. But I'll focus on the "fucking".

Little League sports are an American institution, a rite of passage that just about every boy (and some girls) go through. Sure there are overbearing parents and overzealous coaches, but for the most part they're just a bunch of kids, in snappy uniforms, playing a game and pretending to be big leaguers. And the Little League World Series has absolutely nothing to do with any of this.

When you, or at least when I, signed up to play baseball they set a try-out for a certain day at a certain time. They put all the kids in a big line and one by one put them through basic drills - throwing, catching, hitting. They grade all the kids on how well they did, and then assign them all to teams. And of course every kid, whether they're a 6'8" behemoth who looks to be about 38 years old or a 4'1" geek with Chris Sabo athletic goggles, has to be assigned to a team. So the teams are created, in general, to have similar talent levels. So naturally, when you have teams formed of guys with disparate talent, cliques form almost immediately. The home run hitters sit on one of the bench, laughing and joking and waiting for their turn - this is Group A. Players who are good but not great form another group, Group B. This is usually the group who are popular with the ladies - good enough to be an asset, but not so good that it's clear that they take it way too seriously. Next was my group - guys who aren't really so great, but who can do just enough things not to embarrass themselves. Group C. My fondest memories of Little League involve teams for which I wore the tools of ignorance - in hindsight, I was most likely given the job not because the coach thought I was a great backstop, but because I was the only guy who willingly submitted to doing it. Wearing that mask on a hot day is miserable; you sweat all over the padding, and eventually the dirt from the home plate area starts to get in there, making a gritty and unpleasant paste around your chin. But even with all that I liked it, because I at least had my niche that I fit into.

The final group is the spaz, Group D. If he's lucky there's more than one, so at least he has someone to commiserate with. But usually, he's alone. He sits at the end of the bench, he likely picks his nose, and when he actually does get into a game he chokes up on the bat to about the halfway point. The kid is an outcast, probably forced to play Little League because of a parent who wants him to get out and make some friends.

One of the clearest memories I have of Little League involves the spaz. It was in Single-A, the second-lowest level in the Fairfax County Little League program (you go there after you graduate tee-ball). It was towards the end of a game, and one of the kids in Group C who I was only casually friends with (because he was fairly clearly a screw-up, even at age 7. We'll call this kid Eric. Incidentally, I was a Group B player in Single-A, but after that the wheels came off and I settled firmly into Group C) managed to get hold of the spaz's (who we'll call Ben) hat, I think while he was batting. Ben was in my elementary school and just mercilessly picked on. Eric had a pen for some reason and he proceeded to write "Fuck" on the brim of the hat. Not "fuckface" or "fucking asshole" or "I fuck your mom". Just "fuck". At 7, that's badassed enough to count as an insult. Needless to say, when Ben came back he saw the hat, which Eric and I had a good laugh at. Ben, being an outcast, did the only thing a sensible kid in his position would do - he squealed to his mom. She was a weird old broad too (you could see where Ben got it from) and she gave Eric and I a serious tongue-lashing. Of course, the first thing I did was rat out Eric and tell her I had nothing to do with it, but no matter. I probably deserved it - it was a shitty thing to do, and I could have at least tried to stop him.

Cursing, especially writing curse words down (for posterity, so generations to come will know that 2+2 = shit), is one of the first "adult" things you can do. You're too young for sex or mind-altering substances when you learn your first good curse words, and throwing them around is rebellious and cool. You start tossing them around with impunity when there are no adults around, just because you can. And when you're playing Little League, you're in the perfect place with the perfect group of people to use them. When the coach is off somewhere else, of course.

But that's real Little League, where you're stuck with the spaz and the greatest thrill most of the players have is the pizza party. The Little League World Series is not real Little League. It's a bunch of All-Star teams, kids who can hit, and who can field. Most of the stories by news outlets focus on the childlike joy of the kids involved, how it's "still a game" to them, but make no mistake, these are the Group A kids, the ones who would never think about writing fuck on the spaz's hat because THEY DON'T EVEN KNOW THE SPAZ EXISTS. To them, he's just a vaguely person-shaped thing that exists in his peripheral vision when he comes back to the dugout to high-fives after hitting a home run. Real Little League has the spaz, and kids who write curse words on his hat, and laugh because someone just let out a really loud fart. The Little League World Series has kids who curse because they actually care about the outcome of the game. I think I'd have smacked the kid too, for being an ultracompetitive douchebag. But then I'd run like hell, because Group A kids could probably still kick my ass.

A Baseball Decision, Pt. II

2006-08-22T01:41:00.000-04:00

Whisky covered half of the Moyer trade, how a team that's going nowhere sent its longest-tenured and most beloved for a pile of nothing, robbing their fans of a few well deserved ovations. However, the trade looks just as bad from the other side. Gillick's been trading contracts and relics for a month: Sal Fasano, David Bell, Bobby Abreu, Cory Lidle, Rheal Cormier, and Ryan Franklin. Clearly a demolition, and a deserved one. But now his team has a good week and gets within four of the wild card, Gillick is thinking differently. "We thought we needed a veteran pitcher. He's a guy who's going to lend a lot of stability to our pitching staff." (mlb.com) The Phillies won today. That puts them at 62-62, .500. They're 2.5 games and two teams back of the Wild Card. The article also mentions the the change, that great upturn in Philadelphia Phortunes that has put them in a buying postition: "An 11-7 stretch since Aug. 1 transformed the Phillies from sellers to buyers."
This is what they used to call waffling. In the last month, Gillick has traded two starting pitchers, his right fielder and number three hitter, his starting third baseman and catcher, and a reliever. Then the team went and won eleven out of eighteen games, and he's brought in a 44-year old pitcher. A second mlb article pushes the new direction line, and tries to appease by linking Moyer to the team's glory days. (It turns out that Moyer is so old that his major league debut twenty years ago was against the Steve Carlton) Pat is so fond of his former Seattle charge that the two have worked out a mutual option for 2007, meaning writers and announcers will use words like "anchor", "bulwark" and "ageless" to describe the 45-year-old long into next year. It's a completely see-through gesture of competitiveness to a fanbase that every year watches the Phillies fall a few digits short of the Wild Card. Fire Ed Wade is now defunct, and its target only a memory. But his replacement seems well on his way to authoring another series of flawed just-short teams.

A Baseball Decision

2006-08-21T23:46:00.000-04:00

With the Seattle Mariners, it rarely is one.
Somehow, that makes Bill Bavasi's weekend trade of Jamie Moyer to the Phillies even more repugnant. A veteran lefthander playing in what is likely his final season is exchanged for a pair of Single-A pitchers. It is exactly a baseball decision (and one that, obviously, met Moyer's 10-and-5 approval).
It's one baseball decision the Seattle Mariners shouldn't have made.
In the days following the trade, Mariners broadcaster Rick Rizzs will play the company voice-box, speaking of the need to make "tough decisions" for the "future of the ballclub," acknowledging that sometimes those decision "are not popular with fans." Meanwhile, a single strand of drool will weep a path down the contours of broadcaster Dave Niehaus' sagging jowels. (Fellow broadcaster Dave Henderson will dutifully sop up the mucilage with a handkerchief, then replace the soiled linen in Niehaus' breastpocket.)
Jamie Moyer was a fixture in Seattle. In 11 seasons with the Mariners, he was with few exceptions a steady, enduring presence on the mound. An ace who compensated for his shortcomings with incomparable wisdom, whose book on American League hitters was the stuff of legend. A borderline Hall of Famer (in the sense that the D.C. slums share a border with Capital Hill). A pillar of the local community whose Moyer Foundation has given millions of dollars to support organizations and programs that help children in need (fortunately, the organization will remain in Seattle).
He is the final link to those Seattle teams of the mid- to late-1990s, which saved baseball in the city (though the fact that he arrived too late to be involved in the 1995 season has always seemed to me an incongruous--and inconvenient--truth).
He is larger than Mariners baseball.
His market value is a 23-year-old righthander with a 4.04 ERA in High-A and a 21-year-old righthander with a 2.23 ERA in Low-A, the latter formerly of Redmond, Wash., and Everett Community College (this is not exactly a ringing endorsement).
Fans in Seattle have taken the news with a mixture of shock and profound sadness. As I read a newspaper outside a grocery store in my neighborhood Sunday, an older woman asked what I thought of the trade, I assumed because the boldfaced "MOYER TRADED" header was splashed across the front page. But it was the B Section in my hand, which made no mention of the deal. These days, he is an eminent topic of conversation. We both expressed our regrets.
At the expense of a half-dozen farewell starts from one of the organization's most beloved players, the Seattle Mariners added two Single-A pitchers who might get an opportunity to pitch in the majors.
For once, it was a baseball decision.
In this case, the sentimental should have taken precedent.

Coincidence and Causality, II
During ESPN's telecast of the Dodgers-Padres game, announcer Dave O'Brien said that Los Angeles was 16-2 since acquiring Wilson Betemit from the Atlanta Braves.
In his next breath, he noted that Betemit was hitting .227 in August.

I'm in love with Massachusetts with the radio on

2006-08-21T14:46:00.000-04:00

Back from three days sleeping on a couch in Richman's state featuring four Yankee victories in Fenway park. These were slug festivals of the finest variety in which the new Abreu-tastic lineup stamped on middle relievers with relentless helmeted will. The underwhelming pitching matchups were correctly billed and the pace of the games (the teams were playing in most of my waking hours) pushed up the scoring further. It is not often pleasant to watch tired relievers getting flogged, and I can not imagine many people enjoyed these games, all of which were nationally televised. I did, however, as you might imagine. Added to that the satisfaction of rooting on the Yankees from within the depths of B hatted New England and it was an excellent time.
After Ortiz, Papelbon jerseys have passed Ramirez's in popularity there, as far as I can figure, despite Manny being their best player. With no computer it was startling to see Eric Hinske; I see now his price was but a PTBNL. That's two former All-Stars for nothing this August, though happily there have been no last minute pitchers. Why didn't they grab Mota, as a friend wondered? In short, a glorious sweepful weekend, and maybe more - Abreu just drove in Cabrera for a 1-0 lead in the fifth game.

The top 12 sports in the video game world

2006-08-17T21:53:00.000-04:00

That's my "Snakes on a Plane" title in honor of this weekend's most Samuelicious new movie. Why 12? Because I couldn't think of any more. In ascending order:

12)Volleyball. I don't know why I even bothered including it, except that I spent a lot of time with Sinjin Smith and Randy Stoklos when I was a kid, to the point that I actually watched beach volleyball on NBC during the afternoon on Saturdays. I can't imagine there's a huge market for volleyball games, except that one with the chicks with big hooters. It's a pretty static game - they might as well make badminton into a game, which would have the added bonus of making kids like badminton, an infinitely more fun game to play at a party than volleyball (especially if there's a lot of spaz kids in your neighborhood).
Classic representative of the genre: Kings of the Beach.

11)Soccer. I like soccer, especially the World Cup variety. But I have never played a soccer game that was any good. They're always too goddamn difficult and too goddamn boring. I might be willing to watch a scoreless tie on TV when it's world class athletes running up and down the field, but I damn sure don't want to watch a scoreless tie when it's my greasy fingers doing all the work.
Classic representative of the genre: Not a single one that I can think of. One of those EA FIFA games I guess.

10)Dodgeball. Obviously, this is only here for one reason. But hey, that game was pretty damn kickass, good enough to lift it over soccer. And I don't want to hear about the movie - until Ben Stiller turns into a floating angel when he gets eliminated, he can kiss my ass.
Classic representative of the genre: Come on. Look at the picture. If you don't know it, you're probably a terrorist.

9)Tennis. This is another game that's position here is essentially justified by a single title. I could never picture any reason why a kid would have gone to the store looking for a Nintendo game and said, "Mommy, can you get me Tennis?" But add Koopa, Yoshi and Wario, and now you've got yourself a game. This was of course Nintendo's entire strategy from the N64 on - take a crappy game, throw Mario and friends into it, and sell lots of titles. But Mario Tennis is actually good so take that Nintendo, dream ruiners!
Classic representative of the genre: Mario Tennis.

8)Boxing. Much like volleyball, this sport is just too static to make a great game. Obviously there's one title that all of us played growing up, but does anyone play those EA boxing games? Except for Turtle? Why not just play Street Fighter where you can be the Indian dude with the giant arms (they stole that bit from Master of the Flying Guillotine).
Classic representative of the genre: Punch Out! (Mike Tyson optional)

7)Olympic sports. Yeah, I'm going to lump them all together. Number one, it's tough to really get into something when they only put the son of a bitch out every 4 years. And two, so many Olympics titles are based around "alternate pushing button A and B as fast as you can for 15 seconds". That shit hurts. Still, these are fun change-of-pace games, especially if you had a Power Pad. And no, no one actually ran on those things (I play video games because I don't want to excercise).
Classic representative of the genre: Winter Olympics 1994. Fun as hell to do the downhill, painful as hell to do speed skating.

6)Motor Sports. Okay, now we're getting into the good ones. No, I've never had any desire to play one of those high-fallutin' NASCAR simulations that EA sells to the redneck market, but there are more than enough good racing titles to go around, whether you like midnight racing, street racing, Monte Carlo-style racing or plain old ugly pixellated racing. These are best played in the arcade of course, unless you happen to own a controller that's shaped like a steering wheel. And if you do, it's not too late to rethink your priorities.
Classic representative of the genre: Pole Position.

5)Basketball. Somehow, basketball games always seem better on paper than they actually end up being. I mean, it's a major American team sport with a large fan base, so they go all out with the realism and all that jazz. But in the end, it's a game where you run up and down the court and score pretty much every time. Plus, they decided long ago that what the fans want are dunks, dunks and more dunks, so that's pretty much all you end up doing. Still, basketball games are in the inner circle.
Classic representative of the genre: NBA Jam. Pretty much the default arcade choice until NFL Blitz came along. If the arcade had nothing else good, you could always get on an NBA Jam machine and rock some Detlef Schrempf.

4)Baseball. Much as it pains me to say it, baseball games have just never lived up to the top-billed status of their sport. Baseball games are always disappointing - too hard, too easy, too goofy, too unrealistic, too boring. That's not to say they don't have their place in the sports video game pantheon, just that it's really hard to find one that's worth wasting too much time on. They're this high partly by default, and partly because they are (or at least were) necessary in order to put together a simulation league with your friends. Oh come on, you know you did that too! Fine, I was the only one. Fuck you.
Classic representative of the genre: Tony LaRussa Baseball 2, for completely personal and sentimental reasons. I can still picture many players' 1993 stats because of this game. And I still have a soft spot for Jeff Reed for the same reason (this would only make sense if you knew Jeff Reed's righty/lefty split in 1993).

3)Golf. I consider this an upset in the number 3 spot, beating out a sport which I care a whole lot more about. But there is something incredibly soothing about loading up a golf game in the middle of winter and hearing the sounds of the links. This is the ultimate single-player sports game, something to do when you're....a huge nerd....with no friends. No, it's totally cool to design an entire course from scratch. That's not sad at all.
Classic representative of the genre: Tiger Woods 2006. Unlike most of the other games, I have no sentimental childhood favorite (well, except the game which was called Links, but that only had one course that came with it and it took forever to load each hole. It did have some catch phrases that are still burned in my brain though:
"Nice bird."
"Looks like it hit the tree, Jim." (I still have no idea who the hell Jim was, but his partner was a dick).
But the EA games are the gold standard, and they're good enough to be considered THE classics now.

2)Football. That's right, 2. I know most people would put it at #1 with a bullet, but I won't. Football has just about everything you want in a game - it's got a huge fan base, so a lot of effort is put into each title, it's fast-paced, it has a bit of strategy and a bit of action, and it's a sport in which you know all the players. But it has two drawbacks - half the game is spent picking plays rather than actually playing the game on the field, and having two players on the same team is more frustrating than fun (making games of more than 2 people kind of pointless). That's nit-picking though - football translates real well to the video game world. Just not #1 well.
Classic representative of the genre: Tecmo Super Bowl. The game of everyone's childhood. I also have a soft spot for Joe Montana Football for Sega Genesis, a game that I knew all the tricks to (screen pass left, spin move down the sideline - the spin move essentially made the ballcarrier untacklable.)

1)Hockey. Number 1, you say? Damn right. Hockey has everything you want in a game - it's fast-paced at all times, it's low scoring (so whenever you get points it's exciting) but not so low scoring that you're bored. It's just as fun with 4 people as it is with 2. It has recognizable names - maybe less so now after the strike, but hockey is still technically a big four sport. It's a team sport, so you can pick your favorite and take them to the title (a big minus for golf). There's even roster management for people who like that sort of thing. Hockey is the classic game for slacker movie characters too - "I'm gonna make Gretzky's head bleed for super fan 99 over here." or perhaps, "What difference does it make if I refer to her as a dyke? Or if I call the Whalers a bunch of faggots in the comfort of my own office, far from the sensitive ears of the rest of the world?"
Classic representative of the genre: NHL 95. One-timers were introduced in 94, but 95 introduced the full season schedule (the main difference between a goofy sports game and a realistic sports "simulation"). Honorable mention goes to NHL 96, which was the last year of the Quebec Nordiques and their awesome logo (RIP).

Guest Post by Short Redding

2006-08-16T15:31:00.000-04:00

(Welcome to a Faster than a Shark semi-recurring featurette: Guest Blogging! Today we hear from Short Redding, an alcoholic with a bad back who proudly refuses to know as much as one sentence of information about sports whatsoever. As of Saturday, we're talking eight hours sober, if Friday goes as planned.)

Now, as many of you probably know, there is a television sports commentator floating around by the name of James Brown. While he is neither as soulful as the Godfather, nor as bad (hardly super), these are both wholly forgivable as James Brown made the error of going by an extremely common first and last name (actually, though, the parents of today's James Brown should have known better).
However, in news that you also probably know but came as a surprise to me, Fox (or whatever) has replaced the black and proud Brown with a gentleman by the name of Joe Buck. I hope that you all will agree that this is a generally unacceptable name to have.
You may or may not be familiar with the film "Midnight Cowboy" (for which the song "Lay Lady Lay" was written). If you are not, I recommend you trot yourself to your local movie dealer soonest and purchase it, for it is a fine movie. There is one rather comical flaw to it, though, which is that Jon Voight's character is named "Joe Buck," which sounds like the sort of name your seventh grade English teacher (Ms. Isaacs, if you are me, which you may be) would come up with if she were creating a fictional porn actor for a grammar lesson ("...so you see, "Go fuck Joe Buck is an example of assonance..."). Even Dirk Diggler is a better name, and at least that was tongue in cheek (since we are discussing porn, I wish that there were a pun there which I could insist was unintended, but I really can't immediately think of any).
In any event, it was 1969, an era where anything went as far as filmmaking and also drugs. But why should a real human being be named Joe Buck? Further, why would that human being continue to go by that name following the success of "Midnight Cowboy?" Perhaps NBC will hire a competing sports announcer (does NBC have sports?) named Rick Blaine. (I'm going where the sun keeps shining...Casablanca!)
So can we, as a nation of human beings, in some way keep this man from using his own name? Perhaps by giving him an appropriate and catchy nickname. How about "Ole Satch?" Let's get on it.

Simmons

2006-08-16T14:59:00.000-04:00

Take out the Red Sox paragraph, the assorted bits about his fantasy teams and a few odds and ends* and Bill Simmons has written...a pretty good baseball column. In fact, scratch that - by the usual standard for a baseball column by the Palookaville Post or, you know, anything written on ESPN.com, this is an outstanding baseball column. If he keeps this up I'll have to mothball "Bill Simmons references" entirely. Alright, that's not likely, but it certainly looks like the old girl has some life in her yet.

*Kevin Youkilis was a major point of discussion in Moneyball, and would have gone to Oakland if Theo hadn't stepped in and said no. Now he's a major part of the Red Sox lineup. And Jorge Julio is not a quality relief pitcher. He's having a decent half-season in Arizona, which is unsustainable long-term. Just wanted to clear that up.