(The Padres’ Sean Henn (L) and the Cubs’ Carlos Zambrano (much,
much further L) before last night’s 12-3 Cub win in Chicago)
News out of Chicago this morning is that Cubs owner Sam Zell has given up his scheme of selling the Cubs separately from Wrigley Field while offering up Wrigley as an Illinois state-owned operation, and sell them together as a package deal. Hopefully, Bill Murray will soon be the Cubs’ GM. One reason the plan fell apart: Zell’s plan would have eliminated buying season tickets as we know them, as Editor & Publisher reports this AM: To avoid using taxpayers dollars for Wrigley, he plan depended on an untested concept known as “equity seat rights,” in which individual seats at the stadium are sold outright to individuals. The plan differs from the widespread practice of selling “personal seat licenses,” a fee that grants the right to buy season tickets.
“Zell, Cubs Chairman Crane Kenney, and their advisers have concluded that the equity plan and its tax ramifications would violate both the Internal Revenue Service code and the rules of Major League Baseball, the sources said,” the story by staff reporters Fran Spielman and David Roeder reported.
Wait, the Trib Co. killed a deal on ethical and legal standards? Honestly, if you had to bet on what would happen first, the Cubs in a World Series or that, what would you have taken? I guess Zell really is shaking things up.
As to last night’s Pads/Cubs bout, the Cubs came off a sweep of the Diamondbacks this weekend whose only down moment was the rain delay that kept Zambrano from going up againt Randy Johnson. Zambrano did not disappoint in last night’s 41 degree chill, holding back the Padres for seven innings and putting himself on second base with a stand-up double. The offense had a great shot to blow open the game in the 1st after a run scored and a bases loaded situation that dried up and left all three stranded. Dealt the same hand by pitcher Sean Henn in the sixth, they jumped on it for six runs followed by five more runs in the seventh. With Zambrano pitching, the Cubs did just fine. As soon as Eyre and Howry took over it got a little sketchy, the bags filled up and the Cubs’ fat lead and a double play got them out of it for a 12-3 final. Basically, win or lose, Piniella’s still struggling with his iffy bullpen and, imo, is lucky he the Padres suffer from the same issues (but Zambrano threw for us). People who insist that Marmol close should ask themselves if Kerry Wood is really the guy you want holding your lead for multiple, mid-relief innings?
Meanwhile, the Cardinals slipped out of first and fell a full game behind the Cubs. It didn’t help that STL catcher Yadier Molina and The Calculator himself got tossed out in Milwaukee, with Molina throwing his gear down for umpire Paul Schrieber, who I believe accused him of having a corked mask or something (photo by the AP’s Morry Gash).
For four games, the Celtics have done a pretty good job of making James’ life difficult when he tries to drive the lane. And with that in mind, it seems like a bit much to make a very big deal out of a highlight reel moment that occurred when a) the game was pretty much iced and b) Boston seemed spent on the defensive end.
Until you watch the clip another 3 or 4 times. Consider this : the series is tied at 2 and LeBron still hasn’t had a breakout game. Sure, even when he’s been relatively cold shooting, James has performed well at the other end of the floor, came up w/ 13 assists last night, etc. But a scoring explosion in character with what we saw throughout last year’s playoffs might well be in the offing
Manny Ramirez clobbered career HR no. 498 off Livian Hernandez in Boston’s 7-3 loss to Minnesota, but the enigmatic slugger reached another milestone a day earlier, making one of the more fantastic public statements of his career to the Boston Herald’s Rob Bradford.
“How am I going to win a Gold Glove if they take me out in the eighth (inning),” said the Sox left fielder, repeating a line he has passed through the clubhouse since he was removed for defensive replacement Jacoby Ellsbury on Friday night.
That was a joke.
This, however, wasn’t:
“I think I’m the best ever to play left field in Boston,” the slugger said.
He asserts no other Red Sox has defended left field like him because of his familiarity with the intricacies of playing so many games in front of The Wall.
“I invented that throw that I do,” said Ramirez, mimicking the double-play-like flip he uses to get the ball back into the infield. “I don’t know how it started, it just happened like three years ago. I have to practice it, though. I started to learn how to throw it where it tails right into Dustin Pedroia. But I need to practice it more. I haven’t practiced it at all this year. But I’ve got it.”
Despite the pride he takes in attempting to revolutionize playing left field at Fenway Park, Ramirez admits there are drawbacks to his style of play.
“It’s a bad habit,” he said of the sidearmed throws. “You should throw over the top sometimes. For Fenway it’s good, though. The problem sometimes when I’m on this type of field (at the Metrodome) I get into bad habits and throw it like that, just trying to hit the infielder’s mitt.”
As for Ramirez’ other Fenway innovation - playing closer to the infield dirt than The Wall - the Red Sox asked that he put that away for a while.
“They told me to play back,” Ramirez said. “I figured when I play in Boston anything that was hit over my head was a hit, so I catch everything that might be base hits. But if they want me to play back, I’ll play back.”
Rather than suggest that either Manny or Bradford sincerely rank the former’s defensive prowess ahead of Carl Yazstremski, I’ll instead submit that only a prodigious hitter/folk hero with 2 rings in 4 years could get away with the sort of boast that would otherwise result in irrepairable damage to WEEI’s telephone systems.
My nephew turned 7 last week and I got him a box of Topps baseball cards, the first he ever had. We sorted through 360 cards looking for his favorite player, Albert Pujols (didn’t happen), and while we got some good ones, the above cards showed up for no good reason at all. As a parent and uncle, I’d like to use this forum to let the Topps company know that kids all over America are going through massive bouts of disappointment just to get stuck with a Mitt Romney when they want a true “get” card.
Holding up a Fred Thompson, my nephew said “Is he a manager?” When I explained that he wasn’t even in baseball and was running for President, he just gave a Charlie Brown sigh – heartbreaking to the whole family. Then again, on getting his 4th Mickey Mantle commemorative card, he said, “Mickey Mantle, Mickey Mantle, I’m sick of Mickey Mantle.” This was followed by getting a Lou Piniella card, to which my nephew the Cardinal fan said, “Poo Piniella.” I said, “like Albert Pooballs?” This went on for a solid five minutes, which was also heartbreaking to the whole family, but I thought it kept me in the right frame of mind for the next time Rog comments on my posts.
“Forgive me if this reads like a blog,” wrote the Kansas City Star’s Jason Whitlock (shown above, before hitching a ride to Alaska Florida) last Friday. “I promise it will get more masculine from here.” And while Big Sexy didn’t quite keep that particular promise, let’s indulge the columnist for a moment or two in his insistence that he’s “desperately trying to go cold turkey on everything: sports, cell phones, television, laptop, newspapers, Gates short ends, car and Rev. Wright…quite possibly the most difficult thing I’ve ever attempted.”
It all started a couple of weeks ago when I began reading the book Into the Wild, a well-reported chronicle of a 24-year-old kid who chucked everything — money, family and belongings — and walked into the Alaskan wilderness hoping to test and discover himself all at the same time. He died within a matter of months, and author Jon Krakauer retraced his last days on earth.
I’m here to recharge. I need a short break to figure out what’s really important and recover from an incredible run of great stories to document. You know, I’ve been bouncing from one sporting event to the next pretty much nonstop for 18 years. I’ve been glued to a TV watching games for three decades.
I miss having nothing. Now I have two cell phones that ring and text all the time. I have multiple e-mail addresses that never run empty. There are a thousand blogs, newspapers and Web sites that distract me hourly.
I’m constantly analyzing rather than enjoying the games. That’s what I’ve figured out so far, after taking a brief step away from sports. Sometimes I’d rather be you, a fan free to turn my brain off and just cut loose.
I doubt there will be much sympathy for Whitlock, but much like any other creative endeavor, I can totally see how the daily rigors of self-promotion analysis of sports would run the risk of burnout. But what’s up with the last sentence, Jason? Being a fan and having a functioning brain aren’t mutually exclusive.
It’s basketball card season at the Roth Compound right now. That is, it’s the time of year when Topps starts assigning me batches of basketball card subjects, which I then turn into highly collectible pieces of glossy cardboard. Those of you who’ve seen those dramatically-scored Topps TV commercials — still photos of me looking progressively more exasperated in front of my computer while the words “Where Trying Not To Make Derrick Caracter Sound Like A Butthead Happens” are superimposed over my pale, sallow face — already knew about this.
While there are some challenges to the job, I like it. In part because it’s an interesting test of my writing skills (can I make it sound like I think Joe Crawford will be a good pro? I don’t know!), but also because it introduces me to a bunch of prospects I didn’t know much about. While plenty of people declare for the draft with no chance of being selected, there are still a few guys I don’t know about who seem like either interesting prospects or just plain interesting stories. My favorite so far is Keith Brumbaugh, a 22-year old forward who was Florida’s Mr. Basketball in 2005 and has been arrested six times since then (and perhaps more astonishingly, actually kicked out of Oklahoma State) during his well-traveled career.
What will become of Brumbaugh probably has more to do with how he plays at the Orlando pre-draft camp later this month than it does with his past arrest record. But while I’ll be following his fate (and not just because I’ll have to write something like 20 slightly different cards for him if he makes it), I’m more eager to see Tyree Evans, a prospect of Brumbaugh-esque promise who will be attending Maryland next year as a 23-year old junior. As the increasingly great Luke Winn explains in Sports Illustrated — it was current when Brendan Flynn sent it to me last week — Evans’ unusually advanced age for a junior isn’t because he was on a Mormon mission somewhere. We join the story three years after Evans plead down on a statutory rape charge at Massachusetts Winchendon School as a prep senior and two years after he was declined admission at Cincinnati, where he was (yes) a Bob Huggins recruit.
[In 2007] Evans served a brief stint in Richmond City Jail as a result of an Aug. 26, 2005, arrest on the campus of Virginia Commonwealth University, according to court records obtained last week by SI.com. According to the documents and a source close to the situation, Evans was arrested during a traffic stop with more than one-half ounce of marijuana in individually wrapped bags, as well as a digital scale containing drug residue in the trunk of his car.
The initial felony charge of possession with intent to distribute near school property was plead down to misdemeanor possession with intent to distribute (less than one-half ounce) on June 14, 2007, and Evans received a 12-month jail sentence, with 11 months suspended pending good behavior and community service obligations. (On the same day that he was released from a jail that he called “the worst place in the world,” Evans played in a Tri-City summer league contest in Richmond, and on July 19 appeared in the league’s championship, which his team lost to a squad featuring Cleveland Cavaliers forward Ben Wallace.)
Evans told SI.com that Maryland’s basketball staff was aware of his time behind bars — “They know all about my past, and as long as it wasn’t a felony, it was OK,” he said. But Maryland athletic director Debbie Yow, when reached last Friday, said that while Williams had worked through the Academic Committee of the University Athletics Council to secure Evans’ admission, Yow had not been informed of Evans’ incarceration. “I was aware of a misdemeanor [marijuana] charge — that’s it,” she said.
…Clearly Evans needs to thrive at Maryland to reach his dream of playing professional basketball, but does Maryland need him badly enough to justify the risk? The Terrapins ranked 219th in the nation in three-point percentage (33.8) last season, when they went 19-15 and were relegated to the NIT. And Williams has had some success with junior-college projects, particularly Steve Francis and current senior Bambale Osby, another Richmond product — but none of the Terps’ previous juco transfers have had criminal histories like Evans’. His commitment in April sparked spirited debate amongst Maryland fans on the TurtleSportsReport.com message boards, with the tone of user posts ranging from, “Our on-the-court problems are way too embarrassing right now to worry about off-the-court problems,” to the flip-side, stating that a scholarship offer to Evans “seems like a copout by [Williams], one that tarnishes our university’s reputation.”
Whether Evans makes it or not — scout Bob Gibbons’ assessment of him as “someone who has never been socially able to conform to rules and regulations” seems kind of right on — the piece is an interesting example both of how D1 sausage gets made, and of the consistently good reporting and writing Winn does over at SI. “Winn is now killing other CBB writers in actually doing some investigative reporting,” Brendan writes. “Not just reporting on press releases from Sports Information Directors or engaging in mindless debates about RPI nonsense.”
OJ was a pleasure to coach and I took the time to run him into the ground for about an hour and a half. His skill set has solid with the natural problem that young talented powerful players fight. Those problems were the ability to change speed, lowering the hips on moves, decelerating to finish, and core rotation coordination. With dead legs OJ continued to fire NBA threes with ease while he screamed at his partner for ending his efforts early.
Enter Rodney. Wait actually Rodney was there the whole time analyzing and pushing OJ to fight through and control his body language. Truly he was a mentor that day. He shared his story of how they met and reiterated the ESPN highlights of him just being straight forward with OJ about how life really is. At one point during our conversations he said, “The kid has a long way to go to meet the expectations that are out there.”
In many ways Rodney was right, he was also right about the fact that USC was a great choice because Tim Floyd had experience in the NBA and the other options Calipari and Pitino did not necessarily produce the hardest working, go getting professionals that Rodney wanted to instill into OJ. He also noted that LA is not the worst place to be in the world when you have spent the last five years in West Virginia and Ohio.
Next OJ ventured into the weight room and learned that he had a long ways to go to get his body to the level of an NBA veteran. Struggling with balance and rotational power activities again, he enjoyed the challenges and asked numerous questions. As he finished his supplemental shake in the steam room he pointed out that most of his competition probably spent their Friday afternoon in a different manner.
As I dropped them off at the infamous Infiniti truck, I questioned the relationship and the intentions in my mind. I then though back to all of the things that I have heard rumored in the college ranks. Things such as players being deliver to agents for future recruits, families getting high paying jobs in the college town that there son chooses, the amazing real estate quick flips that inner circles where able to pull off right around the time a recruit committed and the incredible upgrade in car choices.
After reliving my experience with OJ and Rodney, I think there are a lot worse things that the kid could have been surrounded with for the last 5 years. According to ESPN’s source Guillory may have spent used 250,000 over that time giving at least 30,000 to Mayo. That’s a salary of 44,000 a year before expenses or money spent or hell even gas for the Infiniti. In Los Angeles that is border line poverty. What anyone really gets out of the deal we may never know, but considering all of the things that go on in the sports business this probably is not uncommon. When you look at the fall out rate for highly regarded 9th graders over the following 5 years of basketball it looks like all of this may have been worth the investment however it happened.
Chelsea didn’t wait long to stick it to the champions, and this morning beat them in the race to pay Porto £16.2m for the scrawl of Portugal full-back Jose Bosingwa (above), the man Sir Alex Ferguson had earmarked as Che Neville’s heir presumptive. “The player is now in England to discuss personal terms and undergo a medical,” trumpeted a Chelsea statement, written before he put pen to paper. “More specifically, he’s in London, not Manchester, so yaboo sucks to you Fergie,” it continued, albeit in the version the Fiver amended with green pen in a bid to slip it past our meddlesome lawyers.
If Bosingwa’s medical was conducted by Chelsea’s resident physicians England’s Brave John Terry and Didier Drogba, it’s small wonder he came through with flying colours. Both players have passed themselves fit for Wednesday week’s Big Cup final, even though they must remain major doubts for Moscow. “Three or four days’ rest and I should be OK,” declared Terry, whose arm fell off yesterday. “Of course I’ll be OK for the final,” added Drogba, whose knacked knee remains entombed in ice.
Meanwhile back at the JJB Stadium, Ferguson spoke of how United would be “bouncing into [Big Cup] final now” before dismissing any talk that it might be time for him to retire. “That wife of mine just bullies me, so she’d throw me out of the door at seven o’clock in the morning! So that’s a definite no,” he och-ayed. “Oh no, I dare not risk the wrath of that lass from the Gorbals,” he continued, perplexing those of us who thought Carlos Queiroz hailed from Nampula in Mozambique.
I tried as hard as I possibly could to watch Fox Sports Ohio’s coverage of the Mets’ 8-3 win over Cincy yesterday, but ended up switching to WFAN midway through. By the 5th inning, the above advertisement had already been shown 4 times, and I think that’s more than any human being should be expected to endure.
(a widely recognized Anaheim baseball fixture reacts to a hidden camera video showing how the nachos are prepared)
Citing a study published in the latest issue of Portfolio, the New York Daily News’ Rick Shapiro gloats, “as New York fans watch their beloved teams from near-gleaming stadiums, several teams in the south and west play in ballparks mired in filth.”
California-based stadiums have the worst health records, according to an analysis of violations in 2007.
The Los Angeles Angels and the Oakland A’s “had far more food fouls than any other team,” the magazine says in its June issue. “While most were minor, some were, well, disgusting.”
Angels Stadium racked up a whopping 732 violations last year, including a cockroach infestation in the Stadium Club kitchen last August.
There was also a major vermin violation in April that forced the shutdown of a food stand.
The A’s McAfee Coliseum reported 493 violations, several of which came from food being exposed to “overhead leakage, dirt, insects, rodents and chemical contamination.”
Shea Stadium, on the other hand, had only 58 violations in 2007 – though there was evidence of mice, rats and flying insects found in food areas during a June inspection.
Yankee Stadium had an even cleaner record last year. It was cited for a mere 45 violations.
If not Mark Jackson, who Donnie Walsh told me was definitely his backup choice had D’Antoni preferred to coach the Bulls, Cesar Milan would’ve made perfect sense. More than anything, the Knicks need a strong pack leader. By all accounts emanating from Phoenix, D’Antoni made very few demands, thus consequences were almost nonexistent when details were ignored and defense wasn’t employed.
Walsh is well aware of D’Antoni’s inability to extract so much as a consistently pedestrian defensive effort from Amare Stoudemire. That discredits both the player and the coach. Walsh brushes off such criticism. He has always held D’Antoni in high esteem.
It’s well documented how D’Antoni felt about Marbury after coaching him briefly in 2003-04; the Suns were better off without him. The Knicks are still hung over from Marbury’s intoxicating acquisition. How ironic that one of the prime wheelers behind that deal (Jerry and Bryan Colangelo coordinated the swindle) that helped sabotage the Knicks is reunited with Marbury (next season, anyway) for the franchise’s next attempted reconstruction.
When it became obvious Jackson was a legit candidate to fill the Knicks’ coaching cavity, sources say Marbury reached out to him and pledged allegiance to his unraised flag. Determined to resurrect his career and upgrade his reputation, Marbury promised to do whatever was asked and vowed to show up in camp in great physical and mental shape.
Still, in the opinion of every league person I regularly consult in such situations - excepting Walsh, the only mind that matters - Jackson was the ideal fresh voice to reach Marbury, Curry, Zach Randolph, Crawford, Quentin Richardson (another D’Antoni reject), Jerome James and Jared Jeffries.
Who would’ve had a better chance to get Knicks players to quit their low-down ways for the next year or two until cap restrictions subside? The point god whose motivating message was well received by the vast majority of teammates during his 17-year playing career? Or the coach who had it made in the shade because of Nash and the Suns are excited is gone?
Like Barack Obama, Jackson would’ve been a more effective choice for change because of his inexperience.
I’ve heard at least one radio yackster opine that perhaps the acquisition of D’Antoni might make MSG a more attractive work environment in 2010 when the likes of LeBron, D-Wade and Chris Bosh hit restricted free agency. It’s not a ridiculous line of reasoning, but it remains to be seem just how committed D’Antoni and Wash are to a housecleaning in 2008.
It’s been a tough week for some of the glamor names in the relief pitching business. Aaron Heilman, just two seasons removed from being one of the game’s premier set-up men, was booed lustily at Shea yesterday during an inauspicious mop-up assignment. Joba Chamberlain bounced back from blowing a save against the Indians and found himself critiqued by that conscience of all-things-Yankee, Goose Gossage. Jason Isringhausen pulled himself from the Cards’ closer role. Boston’s Jonathan Papelbon blew a pair of saves in a row (the second with an assist from Julio Lugo). But there’s probably no prominent reliever in the game with as big a black cloud hovering overhead than Milwaukee’s Eric Gagne.
A trio of Brewer relievers combined (just barely) to protect a lead for Jeff Suppan earlier today, but Gagne wasn’t summoned. “He still wears his uniform casually enough to suggest amiable slovenliness; he still has the grizzly visage of his suddenly-seem-brief peak seasons; he still has the rumbling delivery and sweat-salted cap,” writes The MLB Source’s Jeff Kallman, however “that’s about the only thing that today’s Gagne shares with the Cy Young Award winner who once brought Dodger Stadium to its feet and to somewhere beyond the top of its voices.”
Gagne has been eroded in portions between a series of debilitating shoulder and elbow injuries, including a second Tommy John surgery and a followup to first liberate and then remove a suffocated nerve, and a Mitchell Report revelation that he had at least acquired human growth hormone. (Was he, too, looking for injury relief?) He’s been chipped from a plateau from which he could see the top of Isringhausen’s and almost everyone else’s scalps.
No closer in baseball who wasn’t named Gagne could cause every last Yankee in the opposing dugout, including The Mariano himself, to study his every look, his every grip, his every movement, his every element of turn, kick, delivery, follow-through, and intent.
That’s precisely what Gagne did one night in Dodger Stadium, in an assignment that began with inducing Alex Rodriguez to kill an eighth-inning rally and climaxed when he punched out Bernie Williams, in the roaring at-bat that began with Vin Scully himself prompted to turn off his mike, after uttering the sentence noted three paragraphs earlier, and just let the viewers sink into the depth of the din, right up to the moment he strangled Williams for strike three.
Gagne’s most jarring 2008 statistic: He has a 21.60 ERA to show for his blown saves and losses, but in eleven other gigs the other guys couldn’t pry runs out of him even at gunpoint.
Gagne’s probably accepted that the days he brought a city to a dead halt are gone forever. He’s probably hoping that the days won’t be dying in which he can throw a baseball with success of any kind at all. Isringhausen in his own right has only the second of those to worry about.
With all due respect to the Groundlings, Upright Citizens Bridgade or The Second City, the true launching pad for tomorrow’s comedy pioneers has to be the University of Southern California football program (video link taken from Gutty Little Bruins).
I realize these sort of hijinx aren’t everyone’s cup of coffee, but imagine how fantastic it would be if the USC athletic department allowed Brendan Carroll to issue a video response to the latest allegations concerning O.J. Mayo?
Saturday night the fans in Dodger Stadium booed Jones’ name when the starting lineup was announced. “Don’t you care that the fans in Dodger Stadium have turned on you?”
“No,” he said. “That’s their problem.”
I suggested that it’s not human for someone not to be bothered by booing fans in their own stadium, and he stuck out his tongue and made some noise.
“How do I write that down?” I said.
All together now: “I don’t care,” he said.
Without the fans, I said, there’s no reason for you to be here in Los Angeles playing baseball and no way you’re getting paid $36 million over the next two years.
“I don’t care,” he said. “You play for the team, you don’t play for the fans. The fans never played the game. They don’t know.”
As for his play on the field, the Tubbo has one home run, and so far it looks as if he has only warning-track power, which suggests he has lost something.
“If you think that’s what I’ve got, warning-track power, then write it down,” Jones said, and it always helps when I have a player’s permission to criticize him. “I lost my power, I suck, I should retire.”
“I hope you’re not waiting for me to disagree with you,” I said.
Then Jones went out, and struck out on three pitches in his first appearance at the plate. I wonder if he cared.
Some of the sports blogs, with Deadspin at the very top of the list, have gone way out of bounds on the common decency meter. And the comments that often accompany some of those posts — virtually all of them written by anonymous cowards who don’t have the guts to put their names on their despicable swill — truly don’t deserve to see the light of day.
We’re not talking about a First Amendment issue here; it’s really just a matter of common decency.
And none of the above is even remotely meant to suggest that blogs ought to be banned. On the contrary, bloggers are certainly entitled to their often uninformed opinions, sometimes based solely on information gathered by the working press with far more access, sources and scruples than most of them. But it’s a free country, and blogs — responsible or not — surely are not going away any time soon.
Still, Bissinger’s concerns should be all of our concerns. Do we want our sports-infatuated kids to grow up reading Deadspin and Kissing Suzy Kolber (don’t ask), or would we prefer them to peruse the internet or their local library to read the wonderful work of Red Smith, Shirley Povich, Jim Murray, Dan Jenkins and yes, most definitely Buzz Bissinger?
Hey, much as I love the notion of kids reading Smith and Murray, the latter’s been dead for nearly a decade and the former shuffled off this mortal coil in 1982. Never mind the new medium(s), there might actually be some voices worth hearing from that were born within the last 50 (fucking) years.
During today’s Fox baseball studio show, “>that great American man of letters, Kevin Kennedy (above, right) proclaimed that the San Francisco Giants, en route to an 8-2 defeat of Philadelphia, “have been surprising people all year long.”
This curious statement piqued the curiosity of the otherwise dense Jeanne Zelasko, who asked Kennedy, “you didn’t just mention the Giants and the top of the standings at the same time, did you?”
“Hey,” protested Kennedy, “they’re in 3rd place and not so far back.”
Yikes, who would’ve thought the return of Omar Vizquel would generate such optimism? Actually, even after today’s win — just their 3rd in the last 10 games — SF is 4th in a 5 team division with a record of 15-22. The only thing surprising about said club is that they’ve not got the worst record in baseball (though they aren’t far off).
It’s almost preferential to think Kennedy is trying to stay on Brian Sabean’s good side in the unlikely event the latter is ever again in a position to hire a manager. The only alternative is to presume Fox continues to employ an “analyst” as poorly prepared as any in the sport’s history.
The Detroit Tigers took batting practice twice at Comerica Park last night. First, hours before the game, and then a second time, after Yankee starter Kei Igawa (3 IP, 6 runs, 11 hits) took the mound. “Who knew that Igawa was Japanese for Esteban Loiaza?” asks the New York Daily News‘ Mark Feisand (link swiped from Repoz and Baseball Think Factory), who has a hard time swallowing the latter’s lame excuses.
I never thought I would meet a pitcher more delusional than Loaiza, who would routinely tell us after his starts how well he thought he pitched. I remember one game when he gave up six runs in five innings, all of the runs coming on four homers. He said to us, “I pitched very well, I just made four bad pitches.” I guess he didn’t take into account that those four pitches traveled almost 2,000 feet.
Igawa was nearly as insane Friday night in discussing his abominable outing, telling us that all he has to do to improve is to strike out more batters.
“The result is part of baseball. It can happen in any game at any time,” Igawa said through his translator. “The next thing I would like to work on is getting more strikeouts.”
“I felt the changeup worked well in terms of control,” said the clueless pitcher. “In terms of the slider, I missed three pitches, one high. Besides that, I think they were pretty good.”
They were pretty good. If you were a Tigers fan, that is.
Darren Rasner has fared far better this afternoon, allowing a pair of runs on 4 hits over 6 innings, as the Yankees lead, 5-2 in the last of the 8th.
Carlos Beltran singled, tripled and drove in 5 runs during the Mets’ 12-6 drubbing of the Reds in the first half of a Saturday doubleheader at Shea. On Monday’s “Mike & The Mad Dog”, the subject is gonna be why RBI’s are a poor indicator of a player’s value.
The following is taken from Sports Illustrated’s Richard Deitsch. I don’t know if Albert Belle was available for comment, but I suspect he’s a “Good Morning America” kinda guy, anyway.
In a reshaping of the network’s signature show, Hannah Storm is joining ESPN as the co-anchor of a new SportsCenter morning edition, SI.com has learned. The formal announcement is expected to come Tuesday morning in New York City at ESPN’s upfront presentation — the annual May event in which giddy television executives unveil to advertisers its future programming plans. Two additional extended morning SportsCenters are expected to follow the Storm-fronted show. “We’re declining comment,” said ESPN spokesperson Mike Soltys on Saturday.
Interestingly, the revamped SportsCenters will compete against the ESPN2 morning block of Mike & Mike In the Morning and First Take (perhaps Skip Bayless can debate himself on two networks.) Storm is expected to start sometime in the next couple of months.
I really couldn’t muster up any deep feelings about the above announcement until I imagined Chris Cotter screaming at his agent. At that point, I decided this was good news.
OK, I’ll admit for a brief time there was a spark between Austin City Council member Jennifer Kim (above) and myself. After a while, however, I determined the handful of things we had in common (our shared dislike for airport security queues, Solgar’s “Raping Dead Nuns” being our favorite song) weren’t sufficient foundation for a relationship (between constituent and elected official).
In spite of this, Jennifer won’t fucking leave me alone. For the past several weeks, she’s had a succession of friends (who sound suspiciously like robots) calling me at all hours, encouraging me to vote for Kim in today’s election. Some of these calls are from numbers with 310 area codes, which I believe is a trick designed to make me think I’m being offered a job to write for Jimmy Kimmel.
The most recent of these calls happened at 9:30 this morning. I don’t know about you, but at that hour on a Saturday I’m usually either asleep or trying to find my wallet & keys before someone else wakes up. Either way, I don’t need another harrassing call from one of Jennifer’s “supporters”.
If you’re a registered voter in the City Of Austin, not only would I like to encourage you to vote for anyone other than Ms. Kim — even if you have to write in that annoying crossdresser whose schtick was probably played out long before I got to town — but if you see anyone campaigning for her, please feel free to puke on them. I’d do it myself, but I’ve got to go back to bed.
What other place of business in America grants reporters unfettered access to its employees, much less the right to watch as its workers drop trou and shower? Hell, I’d love to take notes while playing “pass the TP” in the stall next to Mariotti but can’t get past the security at the Sun-Times front door.
You’re concerned that female reporters might be made uncomfortable by the display of a blow-up doll. What about a player’s discomfort at having strangers with notepads staring at his junk while asking about that botched double play in the third inning?
I’ve never understood why anyone is allowed in the clubhouse after a game, male or female. It makes no sense to me. Athletes should have a right to some privacy. They should have a right to blow off steam, relax, enjoy a good laugh and have some harmless fun, which is precisely what I believe the blow-up doll “shrine” was. (Oh yeah, and you might want to call it something other than a “shrine” which, by definition, is an object of worship and veneration.)
As a woman, I have the right to decide for myself if something or someone is sexist. To me, these locker room antics were juvenile and incredibly lame. They were also trivial, instantly forgettable (were it not for your column), and lacking any ill intent. Most important, I experienced not one whit of suffering or uneasiness as a result of exposure to them.
We live in a world where men still genitally mutilate millions of women, murder them in “honor killings,” force them into arranged marriages or prostitution, take them onto soccer fields and shoot them for adultery, set them on fire for not having a large enough dowry…
Yet here, in just the last fifty years, American men have done something no other group in modern history can claim: they have bloodlessly (albeit reluctantly and hamhandedly) ceded large chunks of their power over to women.
Their reward? We get our La Perlas in a twist because some ball players pull a schoolyard prank in the locker room.
I do hope Ozzie G. is taking notes. If he’s asked again about whether the blow up dolls are appropriate, the manager can remind everyone that neither he nor his players have practiced genital mutilation. Recently, anyway.
1) why hasn’t D’Antoni signed already?
2) if James Dolan was going to continue to bid against himself, what was the point in hiring Donnie Walsh?.
If you’ve read “:07 Seconds Or Less” you’re already trembling with anticipation about Eddy Curry’s role in a real fast-break offense. When next season’s Knicks successfully raise their scoring average per game to 125 points (while allowing 150), D’Antoni can fall back on the Garden’s media policy when asked if his $6 million annual salary — topped only by the earnings of Phil Jackson and Greg Popovich — might also buy something besides total indifference to defense.
Were the Knicks a year or two away from contention, if the club’s roster in any way resembled something D’Antoni could employ to achieve similar (regular season) results, perhaps I could understand. But as long as the Knicks remain in cap hell, as long as there’s any chance D’Antoni will have Stephon Marbury and Zach Randolph rather than Steve Nash and Amare Stoudemire, I don’t get it.
I have no doubt D’Antoni would be a vast improvement over Isiah Thomas. There’s no sane person who’d argue otherwise. Nor will I pretend his credentials don’t put those of Mark Jackson or Herb Williams to shame. But you don’t pay a coach $24 million to preside over a squad this shitty at either end of the floor, not unless this is purely a bullshit P.R. exercise designed to obscure the depths of the franchise’s ills. In short, exactly the sort of quick fix mentality inconsistent with what we’ve been told of Donnie Walsh.
Days after feigning a somewhat contrite tone over his televised mugging of Will Leitch, Buzz Bissinger takes a slightly different tact, telling Vanity Fair’s Marnie Hanel, “My apology is for the manner in which I expressed myself. I still believe what I said.”
Are there any blogs that are getting it right?
There’s a blog called The Big Lead. They cover sports seriously, and not with sophomoric sex jokes. I still believe that, particularly in the world of sports, blogs are dedicated to maliciousness and invective and cruelty.
Do you think that anything you said had an impact on Leitch?
I’m not going to win with the bloggers, but I think it has created something of a dialogue. Like most things in America, it’s going to be replaced very soon by Britney Spears’s latest rehabilitation stint, but for the time being I think it’s created a dialogue as to, “What responsibility does a blog really have?”
Did you get a response?
Yes. It was very gracious. I’ve even heard from—I guess I called him Balls Deep, but his name is Big Daddy Drew—and we’ve had a great exchange of emails. He’s actually a really fun guy.
I’ve gotten emails from people who work for various well-known sports blogs who say, “You know what? You’re basically right. A lot of the blogs out there are terrible.”
Whether or not Bissinger is capable of telling the difference remains to be seen, but it’s kind of awesome that a few dozen “die, horsefucker” bits of e-mail have convinced the “Three Nights In August” author this controversy had somehow won the entire nation’s rapt attention.
Only once in my life have I demanded a refund for a movie ticket based on the film’s actual content. Said opus was James Toback’s “Two Girls & A Guy“, “an insult to the public’s intelligence”, I told a stunned Chelsea Loews manager.
In retrospect, this was pretty lame on my part. Yes, the film’s first 30 minutes were a trip to Suck City. But having sat thru anything beyond the opening credits, I should’ve forfeited my admission. If I ever run into Toback, I fully intend to give him $7. But I digress.
The Guardian’s Mark Brown surveys the competition on offer at this month’s Cannes Film Festival, and reports Toback’s latest, “Tyson”, a documentary about the walking disaster area known as Iron Mike, is “an affectionate portrait” of the former heavyweight champion.
Toback said he had been always been fascinated by Tyson and cast him in his semi-improvised - and star-studded - 1995 movie Black and White, which satirises rich, white liberal kids who want to be black. The funniest scene has Robert Downey Jnr’s sleazy gay character coming on to Tyson: he gets slapped. “I’m from a different culture,” says Tyson.
In an interview with Variety magazine, Toback said it would be an honest portrait of the boxer. “The point is not to polish his image or make a cinematic apology, but rather to get a first-hand look at a very complex and epic story.”
Toback said he had conducted more than 30 hours of interviews with Tyson. “He was honest about all the things that have highlighted his life, from the bitter divorce, the ear-biting, prison, to his becoming a sex addict. He is self-aware, smart and a totally fractured personality, and he made himself completely vulnerable.”
HG: Considering your stance on Hip-Hop and the state of the black community, are Tech N9ne and the 57th Street Rogue Dog Villains potentially your Reverend Wright?
JW: You damn skippy they’re Reverend Wright, and I’ll never disown Tech N9ne, Big Krizz Kalico and Cutt Kalhoun and the RDVs. You can add Dr. Dre and Tupac to the list, too. I’ve never denied being a fan of rap music. I know why it touches people and where the gangsta element comes from. Look, I’m overweight and I would tell people McDonald’s is freaking horrible and should be outlawed. But that don’t mean you’ll never see me creeping through a Mickey D’s drive-thru at 2 a.m. and grabbing a Filet-O-Fish. Just because I acknowledge my hypocrisy doesn’t mean my criticisms are inaccurate. We all fall short of the glory from time to time.
HG: One thing we agree on is that The Wire is one of the greatest television shows of all-time. If they were to make a Wire movie, what angles or storylines would you like to see covered?
JW: More of Kima’s love life. There was a lot of time wasted on McNulty’s catting around when we could’ve seen what Kima was up to.
It had to happen sooner or later. Finally, there’s a point on which Whitlock and I could not be in greater agreement.
Edmonds, 37, was hitting .178 (16-for-90) in 26 games for the Padres with two doubles, one homer and six RBI. An eight-time Gold Glove winner and four-time All-Star, Edmonds also had played below expectations in center.
General Manager Kevin Towers said the decision to release Edmonds was twofold. “Edmonds was not performing at the level we were accustomed to seeing him in St. Louis,” Towers said. “That and the struggles of this ballclub.”
Towers said Edmonds is only a part of the Padres’ problems. “We saw some deficiencies on both offense and defense,” he said. “But our poor play is a reflection on the entire organization. We all need to be held accountable. We should be better than the way we are playing.”
The move was one of three made by the struggling Padres, who have lost 17 of their past 21 games, as they prepared to open a three-game homestand against the Colorado Rockies. They also promoted catcher Luke Carlin from Portland, where he was the backup to top catching prospect Nick Hundley, while optioning catcher Colt Morton back to Double-A San Antonio. And they claimed left-handed pitcher Sean Henn off waivers from the Yankees.
While admiting “there are obvious signs of decline in Edmonds,”, the Transaction Guy opines, “this does come off as somewhat hasty.”
Rather than eating $6M and replacing him with a Gerut/Scott Hairston platoon, the Padres probably should have given Edmonds a little more time to see if he had anything left to give. If not, at least you attempted to get maximum value out of the investment, and if Edmonds did happen to show some glimmer of his former self, perhaps San Diego could have gotten a warm body and some percentage of his salary paid off by another team.
While I don’t disagree with TTG’s general point, Edmonds not only looked atrocious at the plate (striking out more than once every four at bats), but his legendary diving fielding skills seem to have deserted him as well. Every few years, I’m obliged to recall Juan Samuel’s torturous transition to the outfield, and while Edmonds wasn’t nearly that rotten, he seemed to be having greater difficulty judging the path of a fly ball than ever in his career.
If, by some odd chance, you’re actually interested in injecting FACTS into Bob Smizik’s one-man crusade against the most successful sports talk show in Pittsburgh history - Hines Ward came on my show ALL THE TIME prior to me calling him out as the narcissistic phony he is. Attention junkie that he is, he couldn’t get enough of doing it. So what he said on Costas - as quoted by Smizik - is factually incorrect. I don’t criticize Hines because he won’t come on the show. I criticize Hines because his attitude is incredibly egotistic and selfish, something your crack staff of reporters might get around to writing if they weren’t as “buddy-buddy” with him as I allegedly am with the Penguins.
I didn’t know that you had to “confront” everybody you criticize. If this is the case, how come Smizik never “confronts” me? It’s true I don’t show up in every locker room in town because hey, if you’ve seen one naked guy, you’ve seen ‘em all. But I’m in the Penguins locker room quite often, and I’ve absolutely SAVAGED Georges Laraque and Michel Therrien all year long. I haven’t gone to Steelers game for years because
I’ve been doing a post-game radio show which necessitates being on site immediately after the game concludes. But this year, I’m not, so I will be going to Steelers’ games, and to Hines Ward, James Harrison, etc., I say - if you want some, come get some. Does anybody think I’m actually afraid? As for not coming around for months at a time, when did Smizik, Cook and Collier start showing up at Penguins’ games? You could hear the THUD when “one of America’s great (gag) newspapers finally jumped on THAT bandwagon.
Your one-sided coverage of my career is laughable. Last quarter, my show had the highest ratings book in Pittsburgh sports talk history, and it never got in the paper. Now, with this HBO exposure, the sky’s the limit (cough). If I were you, I’d can Smizik and h
