The Game That Matters

On Saturday, something that had not happened in twenty one years took place during the afternoon Tigers/Yankees game. The situation was thus:

Runners on the corners, Clemens on the mound, Posada behind the plate, the count was full, there were less than two outs. Jim Leyland, Detroit's manager, called for a double steal. For the edification of the baseball-ignorant, a double steal is a play by which the man on first attempts a steal of second, with two possible positive outcomes. If the catcher throws to second, the instant the ball leaves his hand, the man at third guns it for home. Even if the man stealing second is tagged out, the man from third easily scored and you gained a run. If, fearing a double steal, the catcher does not make the throw, the man on third stays put and you very simply stole second base, not only placing another man in scoring position but taking the ground ball double play out of the equation.

The double steal is a relatively quotidian occurence, particularly when aggressive managers like Leyland are around. He called the double steal this time, and the runner at first took off. Clemens threw a fastball which struck the hitter out, and Jorge came up gunning for second. As the double steal dictates, the man at third--Brandon Inge--immediately took off for home.

What Inge did not anticipate--heck, what no one anticipated--was that Clemens would stick his glove out and intercept the ball. This, of course, left Inge stranded between home and third, and Clemens easily tagged him out. It was a beautiful, rare (the last time it happened was in 1986) scenario which reminds all watching of the pure elegance of baseball.

Baseball is a game in which nine innings can go by without an unexpected event, or which a single inning can contain three uncommon, outrageous happenings. Baseball is above all a game, however, and it maintains that distinction with a pride and dignity that other sports could never hope to attain. No other game could see itself affected by the third basemen surreptitiously taking the ball from the pitcher, only to tag the man at third out when he takes his lead. No other game can elicit such sandlot trickery without losing some of its honor and its integrity. In baseball, the fact that it is a game is its honor and integrity. A rundown between second and third is every bit as plausible in a major league game as a little league game, and that makes sense because baseball is the game that connects generations like no other.

Baseball is a game where intelligence is valued, athleticism is helpful, but more than anything, simply skill is required to win. In football, you can be the greatest mind with the greatest throwing arm of all time, but if your body is smaller than everyone else, you will get crushed into tiny little pieces and never walk again. A linebacker can't simply be good at football. He also has to be big and fast. In basketball, even the greatest shooters languish on the bench if they can't jump out of the building and run past a train. In baseball, David Eckstein is a major leaguer.

Now obviously, to pitch you need a special arm which can throw it 95 mph. But then for every Joel Zumaya there is a Jamie Moyer, craftily outwitting hitters for years by throwing stuff that wouldn't scare me. Fielding doesn't so much require outlandish, eerie athleticism but awareness of the field, the hitter, the pitcher, the wind, a good jump on the ball, a quick throw to the right base. And heck, you could even pretend to forget there were only two outs, wait for the guy on second to sprint to third, then immediately gun him down. It has been done, and only baseball could do it with a sly grin rather than a sheepish frown.

So many fail to understand baseball's majestic greatness, and from a certain perspective that is understandable. If you don't care who wins the game, the right fielder moving ten steps to the left, the guy on second stealing signs, the fastball up and in begin to lose their transcendant qualities. You start to worry less about why the pitcher has shaken the catcher off four times and more about why he won't pitch and get the inning over with already. You start to lose sight of the elegant nine-inning format where the game itself keeps time, and wonder why a buzzer wouldn't go off so you could watch your beloved OC coming up next.

But when the pitcher is your pitcher, and the hitter belongs to the most underhanded, duplicitous, dirty, abhorrent team in America, the wheel play takes on celestial significance, the hanging curveball evokes somniferous horrors, and the umpire who calls too small a strike zone is a regular Jekyll when your team is batting, a loathsome Hyde when your team is pitching.

The counter-intuitive aspects of baseball which seem so inane to college football fans are the reasons baseball lives on. Yes, the defense does have the ball, and no, the pitcher's duel is not boring. When Joba Chamberlain wipes out the heart of Detroit's order, and Edwar Ramirez follows by throwing changeups that don't seem slow until you realize you struck out and the ball hasn't even hit the catcher's mitt yet, anyone with a heart can only rage with enthusiasm as the young guns are throwing the ball right by--or way in front of--the seasoned Tigers lineup.

There is nothing wrong with watching football or basketball or any other sport (save soccer). In fact, it could be argued that playing those sports is just as enjoyable or moreso (particularly given that I have played basketball my entire life). But for the James Bond flicks that are basketball games, there are the timeless baseball Godfathers. While football creates war movie epics, baseball crafts Citizen Kane, 2001 and Field of Dreams (the latter quite literally!). Not everyone udnerstands them, not everyone gets them, not everyone cares, but in a hundred years, no one will remember who Ethan Hunt is. I'm betting they'll remember who Dave Bowman is.

Call baseball elitist, call it esoteric, call it slow, call it an old man's game, call it an old game period, but just remember: Miguel Cabrera swung at an intent ball and won the game with it. That didn't require thought or muscles or reaction times. All it required was the puerile art of a kid who had played baseball his whole life, and knew he had done the same thing when he was eight years old.

Roger Clemens stuck his glove out. He is 45 years old. He probably did the same thing when he was ten. Here's to the ageless game, in every sense of those words.

~The Sports Maunderer~

Midgets, Morons, MSNBC

In the course of this blog's outrageously awesome research department (otherwise known as a nasty addiction to MSNBC.com), I have discovered why Americans no longer win international basketball tournaments, competitions and Olympics.

We are too short.

In all sincerity, how can one help but feel sorry for America. We used to be the tallest nation in the world, now we're short and fat.

But we still have our fallacious moralists.

Yes. Obviously. Indubitably. This guy is %100 correct. Clearly, declaring anything wrong while not being perfect yourself is hypocritical and pointless. Indeed, Bond's blatant cheating is acceptable, because, after all, other people have, at some point in time, cheated. Yes. The logic is irrefutable.

I know I normally leave the cantankerous, rambling soliloquys regarding the deprevation of morality to Mr. H.R. Williams, but really, this article is simply too inane to pass up. And sadly, it is rather reflective of America's general ideas about these things.

A) You can't ever claim someone else is doing something wrong because you aren't perfect either. Yes, that is a complete non sequitor, but what do you care?

B) Everybody is doing it, so you can't get upset by it. Yes, because obviously the more prevalent, quotidian and ubiquitous immorality becomes, the less disturbing it is.

C) It is instinctual; you would do it also. Quite so, because after all, the odds of someone having self-control in thie day and age are so low, that we believe simply because something comes naturally, that it is somehow ethical. Sure, that makes sense. Like when I just "naturally" want to kick Mike Celizic in the nuts, no one can complain because it was "instinctual".

Barry Bonds--knowingly or unknowingly, though we all know that such a control freak would not unknowingly do something like this (wow. I fit almost as many "knows" in there as Donald Rumsfeld)--cheated. He said so to a grand jury. This is reprehensible behavior, and one should not succumb to the puerile logic of any Mike Celizic in the world regarding his illicit overtaking of the home run record.

Of course, none of it really matters anyway. If Babe Ruth played in today's game (and hadn't spent his first several years as a pitcher), he would have hit 1,200 home runs.

And he did it all with a career .342 average. In case you were wondering, Bonds' is below .300.

And yes, the fact that Babe Ruth was a womanizer and drunk is reprehensible. I say this despite, having at some point in my life (I know, it is hard to believe) done something wrong. Oh aren't *I* a hypocrite. *wags finger at self*

~The Sports Maunderer~

P.S. In Bill Simmon's latest mailbag, a reader emailed him with the knowledge that he had recently bought the 1987 world series on DVD. Tim McCarver (Joe Buck's baseball buddy) at one point (I kiddeth not) uttered this sensational piece of insight:

"If you are a contact hitter, you've got to make contact to play in this league"

I feel like your life would be incomplete without this knowledge.

Well my bracket is in shreds

Gotta say, ESPN's "Who's Now" competition really surprised me. My bracket is in total shreds. I mean, goodness, only three of the four #1 seeds made the final four, and the other one was Shaq of all people. And Federer losing to Tony Parker? Who saw that coming. I mean it isn't like Tony Parker is a vastly overrated, ESPN created personality. But it could be worse, Tony could have beaten the greatest tennis player alive in the first round. Err



But really, I am just shocked that Tiger Woods got to the finals of this thing. I mean seriously, an ESPN moderated popularity contest where TIGER WOODS finished strong? What is this, verisimilitude land? I mean seriously, I could never have predicted any of these match-ups to go the way they did. Well, except for all of them. If I really had made a bracket, I would be undefeated right now.



Anyway, the time is for talking about baseball. Why? Because Aaron hasn't read my blog in a while, and the excuse he gives is fallacious. So in order to avoid making a liar out of Aaron "so hot it" Burns (no, I didn't make that up), I need to talk baseball for the first time in a while, so that his excuse ("You only write about baseball") makes some semblance of sense.



What to talk about? How about those wonderful Bronx Bombers. Yeah, them. The ones who have hit 21, 17 and 16 runs in individual games, but still managed to get shut out by the freaking Orioles. Paaaaaaathetic. Nevertheless, they are only 3 games out of the wildcard, because, well, the Indians have scored two runs or fewer in six of their last eight games. Funny how teams tend to go as their offenses go, even those with supposed great pitching.



Of course, the Yankees made a move at the trade deadline. A reliever was involved, because obviously the Yankees need bullpen help--their arms are worn out and even if they hadn't been mismanaged to a gruesome early death by the visage of vampire that is Joe Torre, they were never that good in the first place, so clearly trading for another bullpen arm was--



Wait, what? They traded AWAY Scott Procter?! They now have LESS arms in the bullpen than before? Yes, I officially quit on understanding this team. They make moves so boneheaded that one has to believe Brian Cashman is just sitting in a room with Torre somewhere, having this conversation:



Cashman: Joe, wake up, the game's over!



Torre: Hunh? What? Oh, right. Calm down, we need to tak this one game at a time, don't get too high or too low, stop worrying about whether or not you are playing well at the moment, just --



Cashman: Would you shut up? We're not having a team meeting after a seven game losing streak, we're talking trades.



Torre: Oh, right. Well, we need bullpen help and lots of it. Maybe a fifth starter also. But really, was just need to avoid doing anything dumb.



Cashman: I agree. So what do you say we trade part of our bullpen for a completely unnecessary infielder (we already have six of them) batting .231?



Torre: What? .231? Doesn't that mean that he gets hits every once in a while?



Of course, I'm not sure if that conversation could ever actually happen because Torre might not even know what "batting average" is. Really, I wonder if he has ever said anything other than "warm Proctor/Farnsworth/Viscaino up" in the fourth inning of a perfect game where Wang has only thrown 28 pitches.



A-Rod, meanwhile, needs to hit 500 quickly. He hasn't a hit since 499. Then again, I would have been a bit screwed up by the whole "going back in time for a suspended game thing" also, but seriously, he has done this 499 times before, you wouldn't think he'd find it so difficult.



Until the next boneheaded Yankees move (that won't be long...)



~The Sports Maunderer~

1972

Michael Vick was indicted just as Chris Mortensen said wouldn’t happen, Randy Moss and Tom Brady appear to be getting along fine just like ESPN unilaterally decided wouldn’t happen, and David Beckham is here to energize soccer in America, which everyone knows won’t happen.

Derek Jeter says the Yanks can catch the Sox, which everyone knows they can’t.

Talladega nights won the ESPY for best sports movie, which everyone knows sucks.

Dale Earnhardt Junior is going to replace Kyle Busch in Hendrick racing (probably the first NASCAR related factoid ever divulged on The Sports Maunderer), even though he stinks.

If only the world was as simple as in 1972. Back then, Americans were good guys, Russians were bad guys, and everyone else had to pick a side, rename itself Switzerland, or surrender (only one country chose the latter option, I’m sure you can guess which). Back then, no one had ever heard of steroids, and the Super Bowl was a new-fangled concoction of those dudes whose shoulders looked way too big. Movies were movies (and Al Pacino didn’t look dead), and Harry Potter had never been heard of (its too bad he isn’t dead).

In 1972, Bobby Fischer told the world he would win the World Chess Championship, though everyone knew the Russians always won. He then told the world he wouldn’t play because the cameras had to leave, and most people believed him. He was insane, after all.

He ended up not only playing but capping off one of the great stories of the 20th century. Bobby Fischer was a champion in every possible way; he was called a complainer, a crackpot, insane, reckless, and bordering on otherworldly. He was likely all of these things as well, but they do not diminish his greatness. Indeed, they were likely the reason for his greatness.

In the late 1950s and the 1960s, when Fischer was winning U.S. opens at the age of fourteen and beyond (he played in the U.S. Chess Championship eight times, and won each time), becoming the youngest grandmaster ever at sixteen, mesmerizing former world champions with his play and nearly disappearing on multifarious occasions, chess was hardly on the map of the world, except in the place that owned it: Russia.

Russian chess players were often seen as products of the communist system, and in the sense that Russia had a very good system for discovering and nurturing young chess talent, that was true. They were extremely varied in style and physiognomy, however, not all lining up as boring, mathematical, apathetic geniuses. The man who seemed to embody that saturnine, tedious verisimilitude did end up claiming the World Championship, however, in the form of Boris Spassky. He was the last in an impressively long line of Russian champions. Indeed, after Fischer, that line would start again and has maintained itself to this day. Since 1948, only three years have gone by where a Russian was not the world champion. So in case you haven’t gotten the picture, Russians are very, very good at chess.

So obviously when Fischer was in the midst of thwomping Spassky like a native American drum, the world was slightly interested. The entire career of America’s lone champion was worth discussing, though. It was, very simply, weird. It also contained the Sandy Koufax period of championship chess, and indeed that is a great injustice to Bobby Fischer’s play; not only was he better than Koufax in his prime, he never had a 4.00 ERA in his early career. Bobby Fischer was one of the great chess players of all time throughout his career. For a span of one or two years, he was far better than anyone else has ever been, possibly at anything.

To understand why ordinary people look at Bobby Fischer in a different light is to understand the obvious. He was calumnious, cranky, picky, quick-tempered—you never knew what vicissitudes of countenance he would showcase or what their effect would be. He was churlish, boorish, and in many ways simply a rude curmudgeon. If he had not played chess as well as he did, it is likely he would have been an ostracized crazy man.

To understand why chess players find Bobby Fischer interesting, one needs to understand that he did not simply win the world championship once and then disappear. Oh sure, he did that. But this man dominated tournaments like no one before him or after him has. He dominated match play against the world’s best like no one before him had or anyone after him likely will.

In high level tournaments, draws are inevitable. It is simply impossible to consistently outplay other grandmasters to the point of defeat over and over and over. For instance, a score of 7/12 (a win is one point, a draw is half a point, a loss is zero points) at a strong grandmaster invitational is considered a great outcome. The winner might be 7.5/12, if that. For perspective, 7.5/12 would likely mean a player scored four wins, one loss and seven draws. Draws are merely expected to outnumber decisions at such a level. In match play, where the same two opponents are facing each other repeatedly, draws are even more ubiquitous.

To illustrate the point: In Kasparov v. Karpov, the world championship match in 1981, the format was simple. First man to six wins claims the title, no matter how long it takes. After forty-eight games, the match was cancelled due to the absurd length of the match. Only eight decisions had been derived; forty of the matches were draws! In Kasparov v. Kramnik in 2000, Kramnik eked out a close victory in which Kasparov did not manage to win a single game. For reference, Kasparov is considered one of the best, if not the best player of all time by most pundits. He holds records for highest rating, duration of rating, and numerous other titles in addition to almost twenty years of being world champion. Yet he failed to win once. Instead, he racked up a ton of 1/2-1/2s.

So clearly, high level play is fraught with draws.

Bobby Fischer’s U.S. Open scores were : 1957-58: 10.5/13; 1958-59: 8.5/11; 1959-60: 9/11; 1960-61: 9/11; 1962-63: 8/11; 1963-64: 11/11; 1965-66: 8.5/11; 1966-67: 9.5/11.

Included rather innocently in that tiny diagram of domination is his impossible 1964 victory at the U.S. Open in which he won every game he played. He did not draw a single game. This is akin to a football team playing an entire season without even falling behind at any point in any game. As a player continues winning, it is the almost understood duty of each player who plays him to at least draw him. Yet they could not. Even with the black pieces (a common misconception is that black and white are equal in chess. They are not. A draw with black is more or less considered a good outcome at the highest levels), Fischer could not be touched.

And none of this takes away from his overall domination at the tournament from the age of fourteen and beyond. He played in eight U.S. Opens and lost three whole games out of ninety!

Well “so what?” you say, he was clearly the greatest American player ever. Indeed, so what. Never mind the fact that no player has dominated a tournament scene like that—what about the Russians?!

For the year leading up to his historic battle with Boris Spassky, Fischer put on a show like none other in the history of chess. To reach the position of world championship challenger, one had to first climb through a succession of zonal, interzonal and match play tournaments. After easily reaching the candidates matches (while posting scores of 19/22 and 15/17 in other, non-championship related tournaments), he played three of the greatest chess minds of the day. To say he extirpated them would be an understatement.

First, he played against Russian Mark Taimanov. Taimanov has an opening named after him, if you were curious as to his ability. Fischer won the match 6-0. Taimanov could not even draw him once. Towards the end of the match, Taimanov contracted a mysterious illness.

Second, Fischer played Bent Larsen, the strongest Danish grandmaster ever. Towards the end of another 6-0 rout, Larsen contracted a mysterious illness. It was dubbed “Fischer fever” and no one could really take it seriously other than an excuse to delay games towards the inevitable conclusion of the match.

The final opponent before Spassky: Tigran Petrosian, the former world champion, considered one of the three strongest players in the world. Petrosian finally offered a bit of resistance, managing a win in the second game and even the score. After a few draws, Fischer won again. Then, he won again. Petrosian was suddenly ill. Fischer finished him off with a four game winning streak. Fischer so dominated his opponents mentally and physically that they all complained of an ersatz illness.

After all, let us not forget it was Bobby Fischer. He never made a match easy. He complained about lighting, about chess sets, about chairs, etc. He would show up late to games, leave for extended periods of time, etc. He was perhaps the most difficult opponent to play in the world completely regardless of his ferocious ability on the board.

And he put his psychological warfare into full force with Boris Spassky. He first refused to attend his own match, then he arrived and refused to play because of the cameras and the spectators, then he forfeited the second game by not showing up. He had now played Boris Spassky seven times, won none, drawn three, lost four—one by forfeit. The world was beginning to think Fischer was as much of a poseur in chess as the French are in war.

But really, Spassky was doomed to lose. After agreeing to play in a back room away from cameras and spectators for the third game, Spassky finally broke and lost to Fischer. Over the course of the match, Fischer would relatively easily defeat Spassky. After grabbing a three point lead, Fischer was content to draw the rest of the games to eventually win by a score of 12.5-8.5 Bobby was the king of the world.

It would not stay that way for long.

It is often believed that chess drives men crazy. A wise man once denied that belief with the clever and indubitable line, “Chess does not drive normal men past the edge of sanity. Chess keeps insane men on the normal side.”

Nowhere was this expressed more visibly than with Fischer, whose disappearances, rants, hate and simply downright lunatic behavior since 1972 show a man who likely would never have been sane but for the board he so thoroughly dominated. For a period of a year, he so utterly crushed all comers that he might as well have played me and the result would have been similar to the greatest players of the day (I exaggerate of course, but if you aren’t enthralled by my hyperbolic cadence by now, you aren’t reading anyway. I am being arrogant of course, but if you aren’t enraptured by my egotistical rambling by now…).

Basically, I can’t write about the Yanks because the last time I did, they fell apart. But I don’t think the story of Bobby Fischer ever gets old. Some puling egomaniacal chess players of today will claim Fischer only won because of the fuss he created around matches. While this is probably absurd, it misses the point. Fischer was a whirlwind of chaos, and he had to deal with it just as his opponents’ did. Fischer was able to overcome everything else and simply win.

The mark of a champion is not upon those whose best is better than their best. You win because your worst is still good enough. At his peak, Fischer’s worst was better than even his opponent’s best. He overcame near-insanity, extremely skilled opponents, endless distractions and the freaking Cold War to dominate like no other.

To the thirty-fifth anniversary, here here,

The Sports Maunderer

Just Wait. Chess will make a comeback.

But before it does, I need to maunder for a bit. About what? I don't know. But I'm the Sports Maunderer and it has been a while since I have done any maundering. So I will now. I will not cop out like Posthill and close for the summer season. I will ramble and I will do it without having a clue what I am going to ramble about. But this used to be what the Sports Maunderer was, and I need some old school reminiscience.

(BTW, as wimpy as Posthill's attempt at covering the naked posterior of zero posts was, his latest incarnation was still outrageously funny--and irreverant and insulting and probably amoral but still--outrageously funny. [however, the Federer/Nadal hell he speaks of was a little uncalled for. Just because H.R. Williams mistakes all foreigners for illegal aliens {a blight upon society that Williams thinks needs to be eradicated with chemical weapons} doesn't mean he needs to mercilessly libel them. Even though he mercilessly libels everyone not named Ronald Reagan])



The NBA is having a bad year. I mean, when you have a bad year, it is probably something like "dang, my Christmas bonus was a little smaller than I was hoping". The NBA's bad year has involved a retarded ball-switch (does no one remember that they began this year with different balls?), a reneging on said switch, a Carmelo suckerpunch, a dreadful regular season in which 1/3 of the teams thought losing was winning (and were actually right), a postseason in which the finals were played in the secound round (and won by the wrong team due to stupid suspensions, horrible officiating and things we will get to later), the finals were over before they began and drew about as many viewers as "That 70's Show" re-runs, the draft lottery ended up shipping the two jewels of the draft to places no one will ever watch them, and to top it all off, we learn that the NBA, often portrayed as league of thugs, is actually controlled by the mafia!

What a year. As Bill Simmon's points out, no one will ever watch an NBA game the same way again. Think about that. The mob determined the outcome of the 2007 postseason! Tim Donaghy might have (and the "might" can be forgotten as far as public perception goes) purposefully made incorrect calls in the pivotal third game of that series. Can you believe it?

Surely, none of the other leagues are having image problems like that, right?

Heh...

Heh...

Heh.

Baseball is watching this guy (yes, that is him, before and after the AEDs [acne enhancing drugs]) tear down a hallowed record while ESPN tries to decide whether to slurp him (Steve Philips) or kill him (uh... wait, no, can't think of any ESPN analyst who holds Barry in a low opinion). For that matter, this "Barry Bonds, the greatest player ever" stuff is nonsense. Completely regardless of steroids he isn't even in a sane person's top five. I understand baseball is a sport where one guy can't win a championship. But shouldn't the supposed greatest player of all time have won at least a single championship? Thought so. Ruth won. Dimaggio won. Mantle won. Of course, being a Yankee helps.

In the NFL, Michael Vick was indicted (just so you know, our beloved Chris Mortenson assured us Michael Vick would not be indicted) for trafficking in illegal dogfighting. Yikes. He could go to jail. I mean, think about that. We have had players who didn't live up to their ultra hyped potential because of injury (Ken Griffey Junior), players who didn't live up to their potential because their potential was simply never there (Ryan Leaf) and players who have not lived up to their potential because they didn't work hard enough (ironically, Vick). But have we ever had a player who didn't live up to his potential because he got thrown in jail? I am really not sure. I have never heard of anything like this before. Imagine him being thrown in jail and missing out on the prime of his playing years. Wow.

So just remember. Though life may seem dim without The Sports Maunderer pounding out articles every other day, life could be much much worse. You could be David Stern, Bud Selig, Michael Vick, or you could be mentioned in Posthill and have a last name other than Reagan.

Until I detail the greatness of Chess' Sandy Koufax, this has been

~The Sports Maunderer~

Forgetfulness and salary caps

Well some things are too perfect to invent, and this was one of them. In a post titled: “Salary caps and forgetfulness”, I completely forgot to talk about salary caps. This makes sense, as my sports mood right now is scattered and lackluster. The summer is a complete sports void if your baseball team sucks. My baseball team sucks. Hence, the summer is a complete sports void. (How’s that for you amateur logicians).

While I could scream and inveigh and pule about the Yankees as I have done many times before, I believe that this would be pointless. They are wasting a monstrous A-Rod season, they are wasting a $20,000,000 Roger Clemens contract, and basically, I blame two people: Joe Torre and Bobby Abreu. As usual, Torre has destroyed the bullpen. However, Abreu’s year has been one of tremendous significance. Red Sox fans should send Bobby Abreu Christmas cards, and they should stuff them with cookies too. He obviously likes them. The fact of the matter is that Abreu has sabotaged this team (notice how during his own decent streak, the Yankees went 11-2) and I don’t care to relive his atrocious half a year by yelling about it. Though I just did, so...

Anyway, I was thinking to myself as the Spurs were labeled a dynasty by idiots and the NFL labeled as full of parity by morons and baseball labeled as broken due to no salary cap by stupid people... I thought to myself (...SELF! [BAM! {Le Betard!—tell me how many of those you got—}]) that not only are the people clamoring for a salary cap simply mad that no one cares about their teams, they simply don’t understand sports. At all.

The NBA, which has a salary cap, also has no parity. At the start of the year there are three teams that have a legitimate chance at a title—maybe a fourth some of the time—and that is it. That is the list. (Never mind that they all live in the West; each of the big three has one conference that dominates the others). The vaunted salary cap has not kept the Spurs, Mavs and Suns from dominating the league consistently. It didn’t keep the Lakers from dominating the league consistently. And the East is hardly better in terms of parity. All the teams are worse, but Detroit has reached the conference finals five straight years. Now is any of this a reflection on the money system of the NBA? Perhaps in the sense that good GMs know how to manipulate it with better results, but that is true of anything, anywhere. The lack of parity really only attests to the fact that a dozen players in a decade are good enough to take their team to the title, and the chances of those players changing teams are extremely low. In one of the rare cases where it did happen—Shaq—the team he moved to soon won a title.

In the NFL, the super salary cap and myth of parity are no different in falsity. Once you get past the shiny Brummagem they project, the NFL has no parity at all. The Colts, Patriots, Colts and Patriots have completely dominated the league for the past six years. Why? Hunh. I wonder. Might they have the two best players in the league at the most important position? Yes they might. In a similar situation to the NBA, where the East sucks, the NFL’s weaker conference also has a team or two that has dominated for the last half a dozen years. The Eagles in particular. Now granted, the titles are more spread around in the NFL than in the NBA, but that is because A) the NBA plays a series in the playoffs, and B) the NFL has 53 players on a team, tons of changeover from year to year, and regardless of a salary cap, it is made so that teams wont win for as long (players even break down faster. Great running backs are done by the age of 31. Great guards hit their prime somewhere around there). Both of these leagues have salary caps, neither have parity, and yet...

Baseball, the land of ultra unpredictability, is decried as being behind the times for its lack of a salary cap. Lemme see... How many teams have won two titles in the past eight years? Uh... none? How about in the past twenty? Two? Baseball doesn’t need a salary cap because for one thing, the idiotic first round allows a hot hitting team to win a bad game or two and get by a superior team before either side has even blinked. It doesn’t need a salary cap because baseball is inherently more luck based in a short series than basketball. It doesn’t need a salary cap because buying a team obviously doesn’t *work* over vast periods of time (no one remembers this, but the Yankees only stopped winning World Series’ when they started spending money). One player can’t dominate for years the way a Shaq or a Jordan or even a Peyton Manning can. If they could, the Twins would win every year.



Closing the Gap? This nonsense about Rafael Nadal "closing the gap" with Federer cracks me up. That's all I have to say. Really. Did anyone watch the fifth set? Before the fifth set, Federer stunk to high Heaven and he still won two out of four sets. When he flipped the switch in the fifth set (granted, it took him longer than usual to flip the switch), he made Nadal look like an amalgamation of n00b, L0s3R, and aMat3_R. Plus, Nadal looks like a girl. Federer wins all around.



In a really funny story I heard just the other day, apparently when Pete Sampras was dominating Wimbeldon (7 out of 8 years he won), and was closing in on Borg's five in a row record, Bjorn called the man who beat Sampras and thanked him for saving his record. Who was that man? Yes, it was Roger Federer. Who the heck would have guessed back then that Bjorn really owed him no thanks at all, since a few years later Roger would finish the job? I mean... wow. i-r-o-n-i-c.

In Women's Tennis News... Normally I would not deign to discuss the slow motion snore fest that is women's tennis (unless Maria Sharapova was somehow involved...), but I have to ask...

Who the heck is Venus Williams screaming at? Everytime she swings, she lets loose the most vicious, unecessary yelps that I have to wonder if she is being mugged. As if I needed any other reasons to avoid women's tennis.

Home Run Derby. Well. If you can call it that. The Derby produced zero moments of interest, including a putrid 3-2 (3-2!) final round. I guess the only good thing was that due to a lack of dingers, we didn't have to endure too much of the quacking, or clucking, or whatever you call that atrocious cacophony of noise that Chris Berman constantly shouts every time a player hits a--GASP!!--home run in the home run derby.

All Star Game: The AL won. But then, I could have told you that a week ago.

Sorry about the slow rate of posts, but it really isn't my fault that only one sport is going, and that nothing of interest is going in that solely going sport. Err... yeah.

~The Sports Maunderer~

Of salary caps and forgetfulness

I had a great idea for a post, so I logged onto the blog and decided to rant my guts out . Then... I forgot what my great idea was and am left floundering in the world of indecisive no man's land.


But there are always dynasties. There has been much talk lately that the Spurs are either at or approaching Dynasty status. Their main boast? They have won four titles in nine years. What? Nine YEARS?! That isn't even one every two years! That is crap! In the middle of their "reign", another team won three times in a row, and is probably closer to dynasty status than they are. Four titles in nine years for the NBA is nothing. Are the Lakers a dynasty right now because they have won three titles in eight years? This entire idea is absurd. Never mind the fact that their first victory was in a strike year where no one really has a clue who the champion should have been, or that the only remaining player from that team on the current team is Tim Duncan. Even if that championship was legitimate, they have never even won twice in a row.


Several times they have been bounced in the second round. And who have they won these "championships" against? In 2003 they only won because the Lakers, a vastly superior team, couldn't get by their own egos to go ahead and win the dang thing. In 2007 they got the title handed to them by David Stern, who screwed the Suns like no team has been screwed since the Raiders and the tuck rule. Heck it was even worse than that. At least that was a call on the field, not a dirty team playing so cheap and so below the belt and then getting rewarded for it. The only championship they didn't simply win by default was 2005. Some dynasty.


But this underlies a problem of more impressive proportions within the sports obsessed community. Dynasties are not this common! Winning a couple titles in a couple of years doesn't make you a dynasty. The argument could be made that only two professional sports teams are really dynasties: The Celtics of the Russell era, and the Yankees, period. The first won nine championships in a row or some other outrageous number. The second wins championships all the time, and has for EIGHTY-FIVE YEARS. Yeah that is a long time. If we are going to include slightly lesser teams in this discussion, the Jordan Bulls get in (6 in 8 years, and they would have had 8 in 8 years if Jordan had never wasted time striking out), the Steelers' 4 out of 6 get in (for football, that is mildly amazing), and maybe, maybe the Lakers of the eighties get in. But this nonsense about teams that sort of, kind of win four titles in nine years? Outlandish. Outrageous. And in the words of Jim Rome: Riiiiiiiiiii-DIC-u-lous.



The Yankees are awful. They are really, really awful.



Oh yeah! Well I was originally planning to write about my revulsion at the overused and loony phrase: "They're a blue collar, bring your lunch pale to work team"



Alright, first of all, the bring your lunch pale to work thing is nonsense. Never mind the fact that most of the morons who spout these phrases (I'm looking at you, Mark Schlereth) shorten the phrase to simply a "lunch pale" team. As absurd as that is (a lunch pale team? What are the other teams? Lunch BOX teams?), the ridiculous thing is that none of these guys bring any type of lunch-carrying device to work.



Blue collar? Well football, basketball and baseball players don't even have collars, so I find this inane, but since they are all making more money than Harvard Lawyers, blue collar simply seems to come up short as far as describing exactly how we should look at these teams.



Another problem is that "blue collar" teams like the Steelers usually lose to... uh, I guess we'll call them "white collar" teams like the Colts, so this moniker is hardly a compliment, even though the analysts usually intend it as such.



But finally, these supposed "blue collar teams" who play hard and rough and "smashmouth" (i abhor that phrase) football/basketball/baseball scarcely work any harder than those precision machines like the Colts. Peyton Manning works harder than anyone. But he is not "blue collar" because his team scores too often. It really boils down to this: blue collar teams don't score much, and "white collar" teams do. So I guess that even in sports, we should to ditch the blue collars?



It just doesn't make any sense.



Anyway, the NBA draft came and went without any interesting events. A few trades and such, the necessary Pheonix middle finger to their fans, and basically enough dull crap to suck the life out of any sports writer anywhere.



I suppose I could have warned you before you suffered through this post.



~The Sports Maunderer~

The Art of the Anecdote

Kurt Vonnegut's eight rules of short story writing.

1)Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.

2)Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.

3)Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.

4)Every sentence must do one of two things — reveal character or advance the action.

5)Start as close to the end as possible.

6)Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them — in order that the reader may see what they are made of.

7)Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.

8)Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.


Sean Salisbury's eight rules of short story writing:

1) It must be short.

2) It must be a story.

3) It must be readable. And by that I mean able to be read.

4) It must. be. really. short.

5) It must be interesting.

6) The Reader should come away thinking he read something.

7) Because he did, right?

8) It has to be short.


George W. Bush's eight rules for short story writing:

1) We must stay the course.

2) I declare war on terror.

3) Nucular.

4) Write it dead or alive.

5) Bring those blank pages ON!

6) We must stay the course.

7) We are winning the war against short stories.

8) Short stories? Are those terrorists?

No, this blog has not gone haywire, there is a point to all of this. (Those of you familiar with Sean Salisbury probably already divined that I will get this around to sports somehow). I just gave three examples of the same thing: people attempting to categorically provide relatively general rules for a broad topic. A lot of these become known as cliches (though not all do), and these anecdotes and adages pervade our society like McDonald's and morons. I am about to detail a list of sports cliches, and rate them according to one of three designations. The astute among you might have noticed by now that I provided you with three examples already, as guidelines for my designations. The three possible categories a cliche or overused sports adage can fall into are: "Useful, unuseful, and completely inane".

To illustrate my point, Kurt Vonnegut's rules for short stories are useful. Some of them are a tad obvious but none to the point that simply remaining silent would have been more appropriate than enlightening the world. Sean Salisbury's cliches are completely obsolete. Even mentioning them is a waste of breath because if someone doesn't comprehend that point already, they have no business bothering with their current goal and should instead take up kayaking. George W. Bush's rules are either completely lacking in pertinence, simply wrong, or so insanely ludicrous that they have no function. So our three ratings for cliches will be:

V

S

B

I'm sure you guys can wrap your head around those. So now, without further Tom Delay, my list of sports cliches.

Let's start it off with some you already have experienced my wrath regarding:

"Defense wins championships.": S. This cliche is true--good teams have good defense and good teams win championships therefore good defenses win championships. But it is utterly useless to state it all of the time--or any of the time. Also, if the speaker implies that defense wins championships but offense doesn't, I direct you to the 2007 Super Bowl.

"If you can run the ball, and stop the run, you will win in the NATIONAL. FOOTBALL. LEAGUE.": B. This simply is not true. The Vikings circa 2007 could do both of these things and yet could not win. They didn't even make the playoffs. Plenty of teams follow that trend, also; it isn't just a once in a lifetime thing. The reason this ridiculous statement has so much credence is due to the fact that theoretically, if you can run the ball well, the opposing defense will need to adjust in order to stop it, therefore opening up the pass. But the reverse is also true. You think the Colts would be able to run it worth a Larry Hughes jumpshot if they didn't have Peyton Manning throwing the ball all the time? Uh... no?

"Experience wins championships.": B. In the words of Billy Donovan: "I don't know how valuable experience is, because we won last year and didn't have any of it." Exactly. Why does this cliche pervade society? Because players who happen to be "inexperienced" are usually simply "not as good." For instance, in the NBA, Lebron only got to the finals in his fourth year. Does this have much to do with "experience", or is just a matter of him being better than he was four years ago? And if by "experience" you simply mean "more time to learn how to play better", than this cliche becomes an S, because DUH, better players win championships.

"If you believe in yourself, good things happen.": V. Yes, surprisingly, this one has some merit. A lot of people think the confidence thing is overblown, and let me tell you, in most walks of life that is absolutely true. But in sports, where you don't so much think as you react, the ability to mentally *allow* yourself to react is hugely integral to succeeding. If you are thinking, you are probably moving slowly and hurting your chances at success. If you believe so intently that you are good enough to do something without thinking, the odds dramatically rise.

"Good receivers catch the ball with their hands.": S. Is it a bit alarming that NFL commentators *actually* use this phrase? (Or was it just Theisman? It might be only him. If so, that's good.)

"Good pitchers pitch inside.": S. Good pitchers also pitch outside, up, down and everywhere else. The real line should be "Bad pitchers don't pitch inside." although that is pretty obvious as well.

"Great teams start with great big men.": V/S/B. This one is all three because it is true, false and useless and useful all at the same time. I lean toward a "B" overall, though, because cliches are failures if they don't almost always work. And this one does not always work. Then again, it works often enough that it is not completely and totally and entirely useless. But really, Luc Longley? Yeah, the Bulls built their team with a great big man. On the other hand, MJ was the greatest player ever, and big men have dominated the league for the past ten years (Shaq and Duncan have won eight of nine). Once again, though, as great as Shaq was, he had Kobe and Dwayne (granted, Shaq was a larger part of the reason they were good, but without them he still couldn't have pulled it off), and the Pistons managed to win without a dominant big man (Ben Wallace simply doesn't count).

"To win, their *insert best player here* has to have a huge game.": S. Yeah. Theisman loves it but so do other commentators.

"To win, they need to control the clock and win the turnover battle.": S. Another Theisman favorite, but it is proclaimed before every NFL game, by whoever is calling the action. Period.

Heck, let's make this rule:

"*Insert Joe Theisman or Tim McCarver quote here*": B/S. Hey look at those initials! I didn't even plan it that way!

"With their *insert player here* injured, other players need to step up.": S. I mean, come on. Who doesn't understand that when you lose a player, another player needs to attempt to take his place?

"They need to do a better job of taking care of the football/basketball.": S. Usually following a turnover or two, this phrase is tantamount to proclaiming "they need to score more" after three consecutive failures to do so.

Well there are more cliches that need destruction but those will have to wait for another time. At least now you understand the basic premise of how I dismantle and organize these preferred repetative sayings of America's fast-food populace.

Until next time,

~The Sports Maunderer~

Whilst being watched by aircraft

The anachronism of choice when referring to pictures versus words seems to be "a picture is worth a thousand words."

This age-old adage is nonsense, as has been proven by computers. The true exchange rate for pictures versus words: 100,000. You heard me. A picture is worth 100,000 words. A standard digital photograph utilizes approximately 1 megabyte of space on your hard drive. To match that with your standard single spaced Times New Roman 12-size font text on Word, one needs to fill up approximately 200 pages, or roughly 100,000 words. So if anyone ever spouts their favorite overused anecdote again, let em know they need to re-examine where they put the decimal.

Speaking of words, I have no clue how many I have wasted on this blog, but did you know that War and Peace is %75 as long as the Bible? Someone, somewhere, needs to tell this Leo Tolstoy guy to shut the heck up. (The perfect length is of course Charles Dickens. What word length is that, you say? Depends on what mood he was in)

I was musing on such matters when driving down a highway the other day; my ponderings were interrupted by a sign which alerted me that the speed limit was "enforced by aircraft". I'm sorry but has no one ever found this funny before? "Oh no, there are PLANES watching me! Now I'll slow down! Maybe they will shoot hellfire rockets at me if I don't obey the speed limit!"

I mean seriously, what do these fabled, invisible planes do? They circle around for hours just looking to find someone driving eighty, then they call the local authorities who by the time everything is said and done are probably no longer local, and then go back to searching for those impatient vehicular drivers among us? I suppose so. Fear the aircraft enforced speed limit!

Anyway, while I hardly need any reason to degenerate into completely non-sports-related topics such as phantom airplanes and long-winded authors, you will notice as this post continues that I am finding myself particularly off-topic; far more so than usual. The reason for this is simple. There are no sports stories to discuss right now. Well, to be more specific, there is *one* story and I'll break that down for you later, but--

OH CRAP! ESPN is sueing me for use of the phrase "break it down." I'm dead. Or not, but the reality is, ESPN should either patent that phrase, marry that phrase, or stop using that phrase. I am so, so sick of the ESPN analysts and talking heads using that inane phrase to the point where their "overuse" is somewhat akin to a guy who just died of cocaine overdose saying he "might have overused it". The phrase isn't even that useful to begin with, yet everytime you turn around, someone on ESPN is breaking down this that and the other thing. They break down the game before it starts, then at half time they break down the first half and what you can expect from the second half, and then when the game is over they break down the whole game, and then they break down what everyone said about the game, and then they break down all this breaking down. Geez, people. By now we are far beyond the atomic level. There is no plausible method of breaking anything down any further.

And even if there were, WHY ARE WE BREAKING THINGS FOR GOODNESS' SAKE?! There is no need to violently dissassemble every game prior during and after completion. How about showing us the big picture, instead of ripping it apart into McDonalds simplicity, completely lacking in insight? Oh, wait. That would require them to actually be capable of delivering insight. Well dang, what was I thinking.

Anyway, to move onto the one and only sports story worth talking about (no, I'm not reffering to Amanda Beard, you perverts), the Yankees have won eight in a row and are only--"only"--8.5 games out of first in the AL East race.

We all knew the Yankees would get hot at some point. They do it every year, this year is no exception, it was an inexorable, inevitable, indomitable force of nature waiting to happen. We didn't know the Red Sox would oblige by having a minor collapse at the same time. I gotta say, I did not expect the Yankees to make up 6 games in a matter of three weeks. I was thinking that even if the Yankees won twenty in a row (not gonna happen) the Red Sox would probably win fifteen out of twenty and the race would still not even be close. But the Red Sox have had some trouble lately, and it is about freaking time.

Regardless, this whole situation brings up the question of how long do you let your favorite team control your heartbeat before pronouncing them dead and thus detaching your heartbeat since obviously you don't want your own organs pulled down with your craptastic sports team. Some people say you never stop rooting for your team and I agree, but that is besides the point. "Rooting" and "living and dying" are entirely different things. If I want to make it to the age of thirty, I have to shut down my overdeveloped sports enthusiasm at some time, or I will have a palpitating heart until the end of September when a cruddy team finally puts itself--and me--out of my misery. So I think that when your team is fourteen and a half back, it is okay to put the "I'm in a euphoric mood when they win, I'm in a suicidal mood when they lose" thing on life support. And then if they miraculously pick up six games in a flash, you can re-connect your heartbeat to their's, only to likely see them blow it all again.

Man, I will be surprised if I make it to trigenarian status. Why couldn't I love the Patriots or something?

~The Sports Maunderer~

Oh the little things of life

Whilst browsing the channels of my television device recently, I happened across an event so rare, so uncommon, so incredibely difficult to find, so thought to be extinct, so thought to be dead, so thought to be gone completely from the face of the Earth for the remainder of human history that I stopped my surfing and gawked.

I had seen a ghostly visage of a sport once glorious: hockey.

Yes, amazingly, they still play it, and the finals are even televised!

I happened to watch during a power play, and even though no goals were scored, dang was it fun to watch. I began to question my hockey torpor, and wondered if perhaps my antipathy sprung from an inability to find hockey, rather than an inability to watch it and enjoy it. Then, reality struck back, and the power play was over. Hockey returned to its relatively dim, moridbund existance as a second class TV sport.

If it was all power plays, all game long, people would enjoy it much more. Much, much more. And this led me to thinking... It would be much more interesting to watch certain sports with one team perennially down a man. Or, in the case of soccer, where each teams plays about 13,456 people on the field at the same time, a team should be down *two* men. Now of course this would have to be alternated, with one team getting five minutes or something and then the other team getting the equivalent. I think this would be fantastic. This is up there with making all the girls throw underhanded in the field in college softball. That would make things far more interesting on the throw to first. (Though softball would pretty much be boring no matter what. When nearly every at-bat is a K, you get bored quickly. In real baseball, Ks are exhilarating because they aren't so simple to obtain and copious in plentitude)

Of course I doubt it would be much fun to play these sports then (at least for the players used to a certain way), but it would increase their marketability a gazillion-fold.


Steve Kerr is taking over as the Suns GM, which I find terribly disheartening, but indicative of a general trend. This is a rotten day for NBA fans because now they will have one less commentator who can actually commentate reasonably well. They were few and far in between. Now they are fewer and there is no in between. As we all know, the NFL has only one good commentating crew, and that bunch hasn't even commented on a single game yet (Tirico, Jaws and Kornheiser). The MLB has... Rick Sutcliffe. And he pretty much nullifies any good commentating crew even if there were such a thing in baseball. (If it weren't for Joe Morgan's Pujols man-crush and Yankee-hatred, he would actually be a decent commentator. Well. Maybe). Regardless, the sports realm has very few good commentators. Why?

BECAUSE THE GOOD ONES LEAVE TO BE GENERAL MANAGERS! And this is true. The guys who are smart enough to commentate well get better jobs, period. I mean there is also the inevitable and rampant "stupidifying factor" (networks purposefully use commentators who deliver no insight because the average viewer can handle absolutely zero insight), but for the most part, the good commentators simply go elswhere. Rare examples like Jay Bilas and Steve Kerr become all the more uncommon as their evolving breed continue to leave the nonsensical, unsatisfying world of analysing for a network behind, to take the nonsensical, unsatisfying--but better paying--world of analysing for a team who then signs the player you analysed and deemed worthwhile.

Come back Steve Kerr. We miss you.


Not that this has to do with sports, (its only racing, which requires zero athletic ability) but Danica Patrick is a whining baby crossed with a spoiled brat. She can't race with the best of them, so she blows off into hissy-fits and temper tantrums and expects people to still respect her. Uh, why should we give a crap about her anymore? There have been women before in the Indy racing series; she isn't the first and won't be the last. She was supposed to be different because she was supposed to win, and now that she has proven entirely unable to do that, she has degenerated into an eight-year old and taken advantage of the fact that she is a female. If she had been a dude, she wouldnt have gotten away with pushing (even if it was a pathetic semi-push) Dan Wheldon after their race a few days ago, and for that matter, if she were a dude she wouldn't have because she probably wouldn't have this sense of entitlement that comes from nothing other than the massive media attention she has recieved. Dan Wheldon was very professional in reacting to her babyish shove in an interview on PTI, (I recommend getting the podcast for June 5th, the interview was worth it), yet didn't back down from the fact that not only was she throwing a tantrum simply because she lost, but that she was unproffesional and appeared spoiled. The video of her stomping her foot last year after losing a race was hilarious, but it also underscored the fact that she appears to think she deserves to win and that it is always someone else's fault when she doesn't. (Though I guess from a certain perspective that's true. Why aren't those dozens of drivers getting out of her way?)


In other non-sports news (golf), I am now a big fan of Annika Sorenstam. Michelle Wie, who exibits many of the same qualities as Danica Patrick--except it is more her parents fault than her own, most likely--got shot down by Annika the other day, who claimed it was disrespectful and lacking in class to retire from a tournamnet claiming a wrist injury--when she was two bogeys away from being banned from the LPGA tour for the rest of the year--and then begin swinging again two days later. I admit I don't know much about golf, but I know plenty about injuries, and you don't heal a wrist by using it a lot. And besides, if you do heal a wrist in such a counter-intuitive fashion, she should never have withdrawn from the tournament in the first place!



Due to my sesquipedalian nature, I find it imperative to inform the reader that complex and operose tasks generaly necessitate the utilization of cerebral elbow-grease, while mundane and moribund tasks generally require merely elbow-grease.



Did that paragraph have a point? No. But they never do, because this has been the

~The Sports Maunderer~

Lebron

Well the title almost says it all. That was an unbelievable performance last night, and when I say unbelievable... I really mean it. I didn't believe it was happening. Not just the fact that Lebron won the game despite having to deal with two opposing coaches (Flip Saunders and Mike Brown's own self-sabotage), or that he has no teammates and managed to beat a good defensive team 1 on 5, or anything like that. To call it transcendant is to state the obvious, to call it Jordanesque is to apoint yourself Legolas, to declare it outrageous is to belittle the outrageousness of it, and yet...

And yet, as cool as it was, it still didn't send my passions to the heavens the way this game did. As astounding and terrific and outlandish a performance as Lebron gave, it still pails in comparison to the all around effort of a hungry team out-hustling, out-playing and out-doing a huge favorite in every way imaginable.

As a final note: Lebron is not going to win the finals. The Spurs are going to sweep or finish in five games against whoever they play. But for a moment let us suppose that maybe they win by some weird happenstance. It won't happen but if it did, Lebron would have pulled off the most dazzling feat any player ever has. Ever. Period. Without question. It isn't going to happen (notice that it took a monumental, historic, inimitable performance from Lebron to beat the Pistons--far from the Spurs level of dirty tricks and flopping--in two overtimes. There is no way the Cavs could beat the Spurs). It simply won't happen, but if it did, it would be unprecedented for sure.

It won't happen, but...

~The Sports Maunderer~

This post is gonna be short

By necessity. I have been working on a rather lengthy and--if I do say so myself--amusing and informative post that is nonetheless still unready for disclosure. So I give you some more random tidbits, while reminding you that Jack Sparrow and Captain Barbosa would be great at Scrabble.

Lebrons win: Having finally realized that if he passes to Donyell Marshall, the man will miss, or if he misses a shot and Larry Hughes rebounds and has a wide-open seven footer, Hughes will miss, Lebron simply stopped passing in the fourth quarter and took the shots like a man. And he made most of them. If the Cavs had any kind of a team behind Lebron, they would have a shot at an NBA title, but since they have Lebron and four bums off the street, they will probably not even be able to squeak out a conference title. If they did, a sort of weird thing would happen... Lebron would lose in the finals. I say this is weird because Duncan has never lost in the finals. Jordan never lost in the finals. Bird and Magic did but only because one of them had to. It is somewhat rare for superstars to lose in the finals, yet the possibility awaits.

Kobe!!!!!!!! Man, talk about a sportswriter's dream. This guy has been all over the place. I mean one second he wants chicken soup and the next he yells that he distinctly remembers ordering a veggieburger. The Lakers, much to my chagrin, are not going to trade him. I'd like the Lakers to trade him, though, because as much as I dislike Kobe, I still hate to see talent wasted. And that is a heck of a talent being thrown in the trash known as Luke Walton, Kwame Brown, Lamar Odom and Smush freaking Parker. I'd like to see him go to Chicago just so we could have those insane Kobe/MJ parallels fired up again. But it would be really interesting to see him go to Pheonix; if that happened, the 2008 playoffs would be a big sham perpetrated by a money-hungry organization perfectly willing to sell tickets to pre-ordained games. Ya know, sorta like the 2007 playoffs. But for completely different reasons. Even if the Suns gave up Marion and Barbosa and their 1st round pick, they'd have a starting line-up of: Nash, Kobe, Raja Bell, Amare, and... well who the heck freaking gives a crap who the fifth guy is. That team could take on half the NBA without a number 5. Ain't gonna happen, but... oh man would it be cool.

Arrgghh!! Yes, that is a legal word in scrabble. No, I don't understand how it can consider itself a viable, honorable game after such nonsense is disclosed. Regardless, there were lots of "grrs" and "agghs" and groans and stuff after Pirates debuted, and it wasn't just coming from the dudes with the dirty teeth. The people watching the movie were usually--or at least, should--be a tad dissapointed. I liked it, but it was a half hour too long, the plot was absurd, everyone was dead or risen from the dead, and a giant crazy woman simply doesn't do it for me (and I really mean giant). Still, I thought Sparrow got back to being funny, and Barbosa did a terrific job of being... well, Barbosa. But too many times they simply dragged things on for too long, expecting the moronic masses to consider jokes funny even after five minutes of dead-equine-whipping. Sadly, I think that many people did.

A-Rod: In a terrifying display of reporting skill, A-Rod was recently seen walking down a public sidewalk... without a watch on! How can he tell time? What if he is late for a game? Is this why he is always showing up in April and May but not October? Because he doesn't realize what month or day or hour it is? Ghastly! The covertly taken photos were... disturbing to say the least.

Anyway, don't shout at me for the short post. In a few days, you will be getting a relatively massive one. (And if you didn't get the A-Rod thing, you haven't been following your sports stories too well)

~The Sports Maunderer~

Random tidbits (But wait, there's Mort!)

"He should dominate for a lot more years"



Exceptionally worded sentence, would you not agree? Well, if you do, stop reading now because your intelligence quotient is probably low enough that you don't know what an intelligence quotient is.

Anyway, the previously quoted writ was written by writer Len Pasquerelli (if I spelled his name wrong, I apologize, but come on, look at that name), one of ESPN's NFL "experts". I don't so much blame him for this atrocious example of editing gone bad, but... well, yes I do, because it should never have gotten to the editing phase looking like that. Still, the fact that the editor(s) let it go is minorly insane. If this were a one in a million thing, maybe, but I read only a few of many ESPN articles, and I find such nonsense assiduously. You really would think that it would be harder to find said crapola--and similar crapola--on such a major website. And no, I don't usually say crapola quite so often.

Anyway, moving onto more sports-oriented stories, the Yankees did their best (granted, that is not much these days) to prove me inevitably correct by getting their heads handed to them on dirty platters by the LA of ANA of CA of USA Angels. (Hey, I like that. From now on, they are the Laanacausa Angels. That name sounds California-ish anyway). They did it exactly how I said they would. Getting outhit. Not outpitched. Outhit. They scored a grand total of seven runs in three games. Someone explain to me why this team has such a "great" lineup?

The Cavs are down 2-1 to the Pistons, even though that really should be reversed. Donyell Marshall eats for only one reason. He gets paid by the Cavs. He gets paid by the Cavs for one reason. To hit open threes. He got an outrageously open three point attempt to win game 1 (and give Lebron a triple double) but clanked it off the side of the rim. It was not even on target.

So I will not pile on Lebron because let's face it, he has to deal with a bunch of talentless losers as teammates. The Cavs would have had a decent chance at landing Greg Oden if Lebron was not on their team. They would have zero chance of hanging tough with the Pistons. Yet here they are. They are a decent team and it is for one reason only. Lebron.

With that said, he needs to play better. And by play better, I mean learn to shoot. Can anyone imagine how inexorable the Lebron James machine would be if Lebron could actually hit 16 footers with some type of regularity? He'd be... well he'd be winning this series 3-0, that's for sure.

Okay people, time for a lot more comments by...

The Mort Report Retort

Michael Vick apparently owns some dogs.

Jason Giambi allegedly used performance enhancing drugs.

The Spurs are in the Western Conference Finals.

The other team in the West is unknown as they have yet to show up.

Jason Giambi thinks using performance enchancing drugs is wrong.

Keyshawn Johnson got cut by the Panthers.

Jason Giambi doesn't think performance enhancing drugs help your performance.

The Celtics are very happy to be picking at #5, because that is a high pick.

Jason Giambi talks a lot.

What's a hodag?

Not sure, but the Wisconsin ones just won the 2007 College Ultimate Championships, by steamrolling the field. They won 15-7 in the finals and went on a 10-2 run after a shaky start. Basically, they could have played against superheroes and still emerged triumphant. The game was the third trip to the finals in four years for loser Colorado, but they have not won since their fantastic freshman, Beaufort Kittredge, led them to victory in 2004. He is still on the team and is still good, but apparently not as good as he used to be. Interesting.

More imporantly, Florida was defeated by Colorado in the semi-finals, allowing non-Gator states a little air as the blue dudes no longer have a stranglehold on every single college sport. But they still have it on most of them. It's just weird.

Anyway, enjoy the week, the weekend and the week after that; this has been...

~The Sports Maunderer~

Perception always wins

The idea of writing about the Yankees when they are so woefully mishapen and abhorrently grotesque to behold is...

Uncomfortable.

Yet I learned long ago that anyone--anyone--can write about things they love and manage to avoid sounding like a dyslexic ninth grader typing on a broken keyboard while watching American Idol and simultaneously texting a girlfriend. Well, okay, not everyone. I could name a couple people I have read in a couple newspapers I have seen that couldn't make an interesting column about the real life appearance of Superman or the real life dissapearance of Europe. Regardless, I maintain that writing about things you adore is far easier than things you merely lukewarmly observe or passionately detest. Anyone can write a movie review about V for Vendetta if they are just going to slurp up to it the entire time. But if you are actually going to point out its many, many flaws (unnecessary obsessiveness regarding certain social issues, unwillingness to carry artistic themes through the entire movie despite carrying them 3/4 of the way, overly dramatic acting, redundant explanation upon explanation, etc. etc. etc.) while also conveying your overall enjoyment... well that's something else entirely.

So I find myself utterly forced to write about that stinking bag of whining losers currently inhabiting the New York Yankee clubhouse.

(And I'm not going to get into Giambi, his "stuff", his alleged failed drug test or his overall idiocy. This guy is clearly a good-for-nothing nincompoop, so let us move forward)

The Yankees are clearly in trouble, and injuries have done a good deal to facilitate this mess of a season. Their managing has also been massively self-destructive, to the point where everytime they show that zombie-like visage falling asleep (until a pitcher approaches 100 pitches, then he springs to life with a vivacity unmatched by any human being currently sucking air), I want to throw bricks at the TV just to rid myself of such horror movie material. But still, the commentators and analysts proclaim the Yankees problem is their lack of pitching.

Wrong.

It is their utterly inept batting order.

"You're insane!" must be the response. "They have A-Rod, and Jeter, and Johnny Damon, and Abreu, and Hideki Matsui, and Jorge Posada, and Robbie Cano, and Giambi, and--"

Shut up. Seriously. I don't care to hear any more names, because the Yankees always have plenty of those. Their lineup is full of huge names who are often useless. The Yankees are paying Jason Giambi $24 million dollars this year to hit in the mid .200s. They are giving Matsui similarly bloated pecuniary compensation for being a ridiculously average hitter and a below average fielder. They are giving Bobby Abreu $16 million to stand in the batter's box and not swing at anything.

But beyond the individual performances (let's face it, Posada and A-Rod are having great years), the problem is simply that this is not a lineup; its a list of home run derby hitters. They have a leadoff man, a natural two hitter, then a power hitter, than a power hitter, than a power hitter, than a power hitter... and strangely enough, most of those power hitters can't even hit for much power. Besides Jeter, no one in this lineup can do everything you possibly need at that particular moment. A-Rod has been doing it for a few months now, but obviously he has had prior problems with such finesse. I give Johnny a pass here because he has had serious injuries and always plays his heart out... but he still fails completely more often than not.

This lineup is not built to win games, it is built to score runs. There is a monumental difference. This lineup scored 930 runs last year. That is a lot. It will probably score even more this year. But it doesn't win games. It gets twelve runs one day, ten the next, and then gives you aces and deuces for the rest of the week. It scores seven when they need nine, one when they need three, etc. This lineup does not score when it needs to, it scores at random intervals completely unrelated to the situation.

Even A-Rod's April surge followed this trend. Sure, he hit walk-off homers, but that is because every time he came to the plate he hit a homer. It really wasn't like he came through when it mattered most. He just always came through. This isn't bad. But even A-Rod, the best player to ever play, cannot keep this gargantuan production up for a whole season, and that's when you need to hit when it matters, steal when it matters, ground out to the right side of the infield when it matters, etc. Not only do the Yankees fail to do this, they are the polar opposite. When a rally is brewing and a red hot A-Rod is only a batter away with Jeter on first, no outs and Abreu up with a 3-1 count... good ol' Bobby grounds into a double play. Then he does it again, next time, in nearly the exact same situation. When there are runners on the corners in the seventh and one out and the game is tied, Matsui only needs to lift the ball into center to take the lead. Instead, he grounds into a double play*.

This is why they lost in the postseason last year, the year before, the year before, and the year before. Steve Philips can shout about their failure to acquire pitching all he wants (particularly ironic since he earned his seat on Baseball Tonight by failing to provide the Mets with much of anything during his tenure as GM), but the fact of the matter is that they almost never scored in the last three games of the Detroit Series. Cy Young could come have back from to dead and throw a 12 inning, one run game, only to lose.

Their pitching took some injuries early this year but battled through thanks to a terrific Andy Pettite April and May, Wang's return, and some outrageously decent minor leaguers stepping it up. But their big league veteran counterparts are doing nothing of the sort. And yeah I blame this all on Torre but that isn't the only point. Sure, he does a great job of putting them to sleep, but should big leaguers need someone to light a fire in their rectum? I don't think so.

You can shout at Carl Pavano and Kei Igawa and the strength and conditioning coach all you want, (and rightfully so), but if the Yankee linup were doing its job, no one would care.

*Matsui is an unbelievable specimen. Very rarely does a hitter strike out as often as he does, while also grounding into double plays as often as he does. How he manages this is beyond me. He could tell us, but he can't speak English, and if he uses Ichiro's translator, it would probably come out like "The innermost recesses of my soul carry the dragon of my competativeness to levels unparalleled. I attempt to honorably attack every valorous opportunity that providence feels warranted to grace me with, and unfortunately, the alacrity in my bat does not always match the courage in my heart."

Yep. And Joe Torre would probably say: "I'd rather have him up than any other player with the game on the line".

Oh wait, not probably. He did say just such a thing a few years back!

The 2007 New York Yankees.

Apocalypse

The first member of the media to ever criticise Joe Torre gets it. He gets it perfectly.

If you don't score, you don't win

The Nets managed to somehow lose game four of their series with Cleveland, despite being at home and despite a relatively poor performance by the Cavaliers. The Nets boast a trio of star players: Jason Kidd, point guard extraordinaire, Vince Carter, and Richard Jefferson.

The Cavs have one dude. Lebron. And Lebron did not exactly dominate this game (almost blew it by missing a late free throw).

So why aren't the Nets good? Tony Kornheiser wondered why they aren't *great*, despite having three stars on their teams. Everyone sees the three guys and thinks "man, they will be hard to stop".

Yet they are oh so easy to stop, for very simple reasons. Reason, actually.

None of them can shoot.

Oh, sure, Vince Carter is a fine player and so is Richard Jefferson, and Jason Kidd is clearly a terrific point guard, but none of them can shoot. They can drive, finish, pass, etc., but if the defense collapses, they kick it out and... then they have to drive *again* because none of them can shoot. This is a terribly constructed team. The big three can't hit a wide open 20 footer with any type of regularity. The opposing team can just give the three point line away and it won't matter.

It is here that one finds my biggest problem with sports teams of today. They have all forgotten how to win. You win in basketball by scoring more than your opponent. This requires the ability to SHOOT. If speed and hops were all you need, Tyrus Thomas would be Oscar Robertson. If the ability to slice and dice was all you needed, Devin Harris would be Magic Johnson.

Jason Kidd is a terrific point guard, but no one in their right mind would take him over Steve Nash. Want to know why? It isn't because Kidd is an inferior passer--he isn't, really--or because he is an inferior rebounder--he is clearly superior--or because he is worse at defending--he certainly isn't. It is because Steve Nash can do that tiny little thing which so many people can't in the NBA.

He can shoot the basketball and *make* said shots. If The Nets had anyone who could knock down an open jumper, they could very well have won each and every game they have played. Instead, they have let a Cleveland team more fit for posing for a "weirdest hairstyle of the month" contest than basketball, completely embarass them.

Now clearly, Vince Carter has always been overrated, and Richard Jefferson has always been well-rated despite people attempting to claim he is underrated (he is a good player, not a great one) and Jason Kidd is an exceptional point guard. But still, if any of them could shoot, this team would be nigh unbeatable. Instead, they have let a floppy-haired flopper, a guy who can't decide whether to wear a headband, a guy with a crazy patch of hair on the back of his neck, a guy who is a 700 hundred years old (also fat) and a superstar who doesn't seem to care whether he wins or not...

to completely embarass them. The Nets are every bit as bad as their record suggested. It is because they can't shoot.


This is not only a Net problem or a basketball problem though. The Knicks are a fine example of an extremely athletic--and utterly inept--basketball team. None of them can shoot. But in other sports, we have teams willing to break the bank on players who can do a lot of things well but can't do what they need to do at all. NFL teams are always ready to pay a lot of money for fast WRs who can jump. They often forget to check if they can catch. Marques Colston is not particularly fast, but he owned the league last year because he can do that oh-so-unimportant catching thing. In baseball, pitchers with great fastballs and knee-buckling curves are always hired... even if they have never won any games due to their complete inability to throw a ball over the plate (see: Jeff Weaver).

The teams that do well are the teams that get players who can do what they need to do to win (see: New England Patriots). They might not have ceisure inducing speed or mind-numbing power, but most of their players can do what they are supposed to (i.e. their linebackers can tackle, their QB can throw accurately, their tight ends can block and catch, etc.)

After looking at John Elway's career biography and stats, I have to wonder... what did this guy do that was so amazing? I mean, sure, he was extremely consistent, but most of the time that consistency manifested itself in 20 TDs, as well as just a few less than 20 INTs. Not to mention he only ever threw for 4,000 yards *once*. As far as winning... well sure he got to the Super Bowl a lot... and lost a lot. Until, finally, a great running game won it for him in 97 and 98. I'm not saying he wasn't great. But why is he the supposed greatest of all time? If anyone knows, please edify me.

World Series to be played... in November! The possible seventh game of the World Series would be played November first, thanks to the MLB moving back the starting game from October 20th to October 24th. Not sure why this is important but I thought you needed edification (by the way, my twisting and butchering of this word is completely purposeful).

The Most Bogus Suspensions Since the first suspension bridge fell down: Two words: You suck NBA, in much the same way that dropping your toast butter-side down sucks, in much the same way that feet wrapped in leathery, burnt bacon suck, in much the same way that the person trying to count out exact change in front of you sucks, in much the same way that an empty soda can sucks, in much the same way that My Chemical Romance sucks, in much the same way that a baby does a job on a thumb, in much the same way that falling in the mud sucks, in much the same way that getting dumped sucks, in much the same way that sitting in an airplane behind an obnoxiously obese person who is putting their seat back WAY too far and snoring sucks, in much the same way that putting on your shoes only to find out someone filled them with peanut butter sucks, in much the same way spinach sucks, in much the same way nuclear bombs sucks.

Yeah, that's right, I said it. NUCLEAR BOMBS! That's how pathetic these retarded suspensions are. I look forward to a disastrously low-rated Conference Finals and NBA finals, because NO ONE wants to watch a bunch of dirty whining babies who only got to where they are on the backs of scurrilous suspensions handed down by a league with as much common sense as a pauper has cents.

Oh I love it when my blog fulfills its purpose.

~The Sports Maunderer~

Some tidbits and a new business arrangement

"He threw the ball well," said Mariners manager Mike Hargrove, who added Weaver will take his next turn in the rotation. "If he throws like that the rest of the year we're going to be all right."

This is what Mike Hargrove said after Jeff Weaver gave up 6 runs in 5 1/3 innings.

I would love to see what he looks like when he throws badly.

Regardless of the humorous flavor involved with this quote, it is an established fact that Weaver has always been one of those pitchers who “throws the ball well”. His stuff has always been good. His pitches have movement and speed. Throwing the ball well is not his problem.

He still sucks.

How he parlayed his flash in the pan postseason performance into a heist worthy of “The Sting” is a question answerable only by Seattle’s GM (who by the way, has GOT to be the worst GM in baseball, for so many reasons). Nevertheless, at least he starts.

I’m looking at you, Carl Pavano.


Anyway, after the Rockets lost game seven, I braced myself for a bunch of random “Tracy McGrady can’t get it done” nonsense. I didn’t get as much as I thought (mostly due to his being completely overshadowed by a certain clumsy German), but some people still blamed him.

Big mistake. You watch that game, and you know that Tracy did everything short of ripping his heart out and throwing it at the other team to distract them in order to win that game. Yao Ming, on the other hand, is a colossal (no, this isn’t some pathetic play on words) failure. He is slow, can’t play defense, can’t even outrebound guys a foot shorter than him, is a turnover waiting to happen, and basically doesn’t provide enough offense to make up for his utter cruddiness everywhere else. Houston will never win with this guy at center, unless they happen to trade for Tim Duncan, Steve Nash, Lebron James and Tayshaun Prince, and relegate Yao to gatorade duties.

He stinks.

Meanwhile, in the big news of the week, Roger Clemens is coming back to the Yankees. This is cool but somewhat disappointing, because now when the Yankees go on a run and make the division interesting (hopefully culminating in a dramatic victory once again), everyone will say it was all Clemens, when it reality, it won’t have all been Clemens. But alas, such is the curse of being the Yankees, and having a history of simply being better than everyone else.

(Speaking of which, Steve Philips once said it was childish and arrogant for Yankee fans to expect to win the World Series every year... really? Seeing as, on average, they have won more than once every four years for the last 87 years, it seems relatively intelligent and perspicacious to me)

Anyway, I have entered into a deal in which I pay for the advertising services of Post Hill; to offset this cost, he pays me to advertise for him. So here we go. I will attempt to come up with a song better than the “worst song ever” candidates he usually parades from Kevin Federline and the like, regarding Post Hill’s awesomeness.

For sports there is only one place to go
The verbose and circular eyesore
You now happen to know
As the Sports Maunderer

But for all that stuff not sports related
!@#$!@#$%!#@$%@#$%
(Gotta have profanity in any song, period, if you want it to be famous)
Go to Post Hill, cuz he will...

Uh...

What the heck rhymes with “related”?

~The Sports Maunderer~

One Half Was More Than Enough

Everyone likes a vacation, but after a short time one realizes that most vacations resemble back-up quarterbacks. Sure, fans clamor for them, they look so pretty sitting there on the sideline while the starter struggles through a bad game, and if the backup ever comes in for the starter, he usually starts off well.
After a while, however, you realize that there is a reason this guy is a backup. The novelty factor keeps him afloat but he can’t play for sixteen games like your starter can. Home is a starting quarterback. Sometimes you need a break, but you always go back, with good reason.

May the Third, 2007 was not exactly a day I had been counting down to. It was the last day of work before a three day weekend and there was a game I wanted to see at night, but there are other three day weekends and sporting events.

I woke up tired, because you always wake up tired. Cereal, car, five hours of work. Work was an unpleasant experience, for reasons no one is interested in. Something everyone will understand though: after working fifteen minutes late on Monday so that I could finish fifteen minutes earlier on glorious Thursday, I was looking forward to an early exit. I screwed up a rendezvous, however, and was forced to simply wait for ten minutes in the rain, losing whatever advantage I had gained. May not seem like much at first, but after a crappy set of hours, everyone knows how frustrating that can be.

So I threw some things and hit some things and got over it. I had a friend come by the house for a few hours. For the most part, she informed me of the intrigue and recent drama occurring at her school. Always interesting, if somewhat depressing. After her departure I watched some sports news and intermittently checked on the Yankee game. Ultimate Frisbee was cancelled for the day thanks to an unpleasant string of precipitation.

I hate rain. It really sucks.

After dinner, an amalgam of The Office, throwback video games, novel-writing, Yankee winning and nephew adoration brought happier times and easier moods. The day was finishing better than it had started.

The whole day, I had been planning on watching the Golden State/Dallas game. Not only had I become interested in the series because it was history waiting to happen, but I had grown to love Golden State’s insane style of basketball. Ten days ago I had no idea someone could have that many tattoos, and now all I could think was “Man, that Matt Barnes guy hustles”. So I was looking forward to this capstone for Thursday.
Yet due to a TV territory war, I didn’t get to turn the game on until the second half was starting.

Didn’t matter.

Didn’t matter at all.

From the time I changed the channel to TNT to the time I had to calm a racing heart as I got into bed, there was nothing but pure, unadulterated, unexplainable basketball bliss.

Basketball paradise.

Basketball ecstasy.

In the most unbelievable combination of insane, crazy, “what the heck are they running?” basketball with “this is exactly how you are supposed to play”—running down every loose ball, penetrating at every turn, slamming it in people’s faces than kicking it out when they collapse, running them ragged around pick and rolls, swarming clumsy Germans and forcing turnovers and bad shots—I have never, ever watched a game that I cared more about and which was less in doubt from beginning to end.

And I haven’t even gotten to the crowd yet.

Before the game, I had read Bill Simmon’s vehement arguments that Golden State was one of only two remaining home court advantages in the NBA. He believed Dallas simply could not win in that environment, and was he ever proved correct. Dallas could have shown up with MJ in his prime and they would have lost (well, alright, that is pushing it). But regardless, this crowd is unbelievable. They understand everything. They know exactly when to cheer, how loud to cheer, why they are cheering and how to get the absolute most of their team while completely demoralizing their opponents. The Mavericks looked beaten and weary midway through the third quarter. And if you tell me this wasn’t due to that unbelievable Golden State crowd, you are nuts. They made me a Golden State fan for as long as anyone on this team is alive. I wanted to be in that building. If God had deigned it appropriate for me to die young, He would have let me attend that game and die in utter joy right afterwards.

This wasn’t one of those games where the big bad top seed looks like it is losing the game on purpose and will turn it around at any moment but just happens to wait too long. This game was utter domination by a team that was simply more athletic, hungrier for victory and less worried about defeat. They simply did not care what the score was; already up twenty, they pushed the ball to get a 2 for 1 at the end of the Third Quarter! And the crowd absolutely understood what they were doing, and applauded them like mad for it.
Every time the ball bounced for a long rebound, a Warrior got it. Every time someone drove to the basket, three Warriors swatted it. Every time a shot went up, a Warrior challenged it. They were everywhere. I have never seen five guys look like twenty as they did on this night of unexpected, inexplicable basketball perfection. I didn’t even know what city Golden State was in a few months ago. Now I know half of their lineup.

Baron Davis
Steven Jackson
Matt Barnes
Jason Richardson
Al Harrington
Andris Biedrins
Monta Ellis

They are all fast, they are all strong, they are all good at seemingly everything. And their coach, Don Nelson, just pulled off one of the great coaching feats in the history of anything. His team made the Dallas Mavericks appear confused, frustrated, and simply untalented at times.

And the home crowd understood it, too. They understood it all. Every time someone set up at the three point line and Baron Davis drove to the basket, they saw the collapse, kick, score coming. When Jason Richardson put the exclamation point slam on the game, they had seen it coming ten seconds earlier off of that terrific pass. I was sitting at home, watching on TV, and I was standing and cheering at points! I was always on the edge of my seat. The game was a bloody blowout, and I could not have been more interested in the next possession.

I went to bed last night having witnessed one of the great home crowd experiences of all time, and I wasn’t even there. They willed their team to near perfection, and I felt privileged just to watch. A 111-86 blowout later, I went to bed, not tired at all. You are never tired when you go to bed.

Torre is Inimitable

http://sports.espn.go.com/ncb/news/story?id=2859065

Finally. The NCAA is pushing back that wretched line. If it were up to me, the lin would be NBA length. That line sucks. Takes the midrange jumpshot out of the equation. That takes ballhandlers out of the equation. Right now, it is give it to a big guy until they stop him, then kick it out for open threes. Lame.

Maybe this will work a bit better.

Anyway this will be a shortened version because I am only here to say one thing.

JOE TORRE SUCKS

He jsut took Mike Mussina out of a game after he had thrown five innings of one run ball, but had reached that dreaded... SIXTY PITCH mark? Man this manager is bad. I don't care if Mike is coming off an injury. If he can't throw more than 60 pitches, he should never have come off in the first place.

Anyway, if you came here expecting more, too bad. Read the column below this one. If you already read that one... oh well.

~The Sports Maunderer~

Thank God

There is not much satisfaction to be gained from the Yankees recent change of direction in their strength and conditioning department--but there is definitely some.

The Yankees are somewhat old.

And Carl Pavano is somewhat fragile.

And they are having some bad luck.

And Torre is still mostly to blame.

But you are telling me that a 20 year old pitcher, a 26 year old pitcher, a 30 something hitter, a 38 year old pitcher, etc. etc. all just randomly began having hamstring problems at the exact same time, and there wasn't a bit of a common cause?

This makes me feel better.

What doesn't make me feel good is that after finally showing some heart last night--the Yankees blew the Rangers out of the park and got a no-hit performance from Philip Hughes--the news turned sour as Hughes is now going to miss 4-6 weeks due to injury. Oh boy. No, nothing else could go wrong. Well. They could give Joe Torre an extension. But other than that, nothing more could possibly go wrong.

Anyway, if you thought the Grammy's had lost credibility--I'm still wondering if they ever had any credibility--just know that sports awards aren't any better. Soon enough Dirk will win the MVP award with one of the most mediocre season ever to receive such an honor, but even worse than that... Rick Reilly is apparently an 11 time winning best sportswriter in America.

This guy thinks Torre is great, like all the media idiots (why do they defend him so sharply? They constantly tell us it isn't his fault they are losing, while at the same time telling us it was all due to his genius that they used to win! where, exactly, did Joe Torre gain mass brainwashing abilities?), but he also thinks Randy Moss is about as bad as Terell Owens and that he will destroy New England and that this was a terrible move by the Patriots...

WHAAATTTT?!

These comparisons are so stupid. Randy is NOTHING like TO. TO, when upset, lashes out and destroys the camaraderie of his team. He insults people, complains about QBs, etc. etc. Randy Moss, when upset, just dissapears. He is not a "cancer" in the club house (speaking of which, that word is way overused. Think up something new, people. Yes, Rick Reilly, supposedly the best sports writer we have, used the word repeatedly. So why am I not famous yet...?) and he does not ruin team chemistry. He singlehandedly took the 98 Vikings to the brink of a Super Bowl, only foiled by Gary Anderson's first missed kick all year (and a wide receiver singlehandedly taking a team by the horns and making it good is unheard of). He made Randal Cunningham look good. He made Daunte Culpepper look good. He could make anyone look good.

Now sure, he is thirty years old. But he is still raring to go. And he will. He will "go" a lot. And the Patriots will go to the Super Bowl.

And let's say I'm wrong about everything and he is a disaster both on and off the field. They only traded a 4th round pick for him! Kick him off the team and be done with it! They didn't lose anything. They'll still have a Super Bowl contender and they still will have plenty of picks in next year's draft. It isn't like they broke the bank on him anyway.

And yet, you want to know something funny?

Rick Reilly is without a doubt the best sports writer I have ever seen. His columns in the back of Sports Illustrated are usually hilarious, always informative and generally creative. He talks about off-beat topics and has witty ways of addressing them. I *love* this guy. In fact, when I first heard him spew the nonsense I just informed you of (on Mike and Mike in the Morning, a terrific radio show), I didn't even realize it was him, because I never thought Rick would be so obtuse.

It just goes to show that even the best sports writer can sound stupid when he *speaks*.

(Yes, I am only reacting this vehemently to his vitriolic attacks against Randy Moss because he also was very pejorative in his comments on the Yankees, but still. The thing with Randy is idiotic).

In other news, apparently someone somewhere conducted a "study" of NBA reffing and concluded that the refs are racist (if I got paid to write, I'd provide a link. Since I am not, you can use thirty seconds of your time and google it yourself). Now first of all, I scoff at the word "study", since all they did was look at statistics that others people compiled and gave percentages (I have performed a study of Albert Pjuols recent years, and have concluded that Albert Pujols usually hits a lot of home runs. See? I can do it too!). But still, their main point is a good one:

NBA refs are completely racist. Absurdly so. I can say without a doubt that at least 75% of the fouls called are on black players. Probably more. Maybe close to 90%. Those refs aren't even trying to hide it. They are all over the African-Americans. They won't let them do anything. They call fouls all game long. How many times does a white guy get called for a foul? Seven or eight times a game, at most? Come on you bigoted jerks, straighten this out.


Something to ponder:

If the Titans signed Keyshawn Johnson, he would give their entire receiver corps a %200 increase in receptions from last season.

Now, for our favorite sports version of Legolas, its time for the...

Mort Report Retort:

Brady Quinn fell to 22 in this year's draft. This was unexpected.

The Patriots are hoping to win a few games this year after a few minor offseason acquisitions.

The Lions picked a WR in the first round. What? That was from two years ago? What, no, it was three years ago? Wait, hold on, it was FOUR YEARS AGO?!

The Eagles hope Donovan McNabb gets healthy for this season, because most people agree he is the leading candidate for their starting QB job.


And with all the absurdly obvious stated, I leave you with one last thought:

Chris Mortensen makes more money to say "A diversion" then soldiers do to protect our country. Dear me.

~The Sports Maunderer~