Shawn Chacon did what a lot of fans in Philly never got the chance to do. Grab Ed Wade by the throat, throw him to the ground and jump on him. The Houston Astros are doomed. The Ed Wade story proves in America you can grow up to be anything you want except maybe GM of a baseball team.
"So at that point I lost my cool and I grabbed him by the neck and threw him to the ground. I jumped on top of him…Words were exchanged."
Shawn made a mistake here plain and simple. Everybody knows its choke all the way and then drop the lifeless body in a septic tank or well. For that he should be suspended. You either do it right or don't do it at all at this level of professional sports.
In Philly Ed Wade was the genius that traded All Star Curt Schilling for Omar Daal and Travis Lee, All Star Scott Rolen for Turk Wendell, Bud Smith and future All Star Placido Polanco. Only Placido never became an All Star in Philly because Ed Wade, you guessed it, traded him for machete wielding, arsonist, murderer and sometime head case reliever Ugueth Urbina. He traded future All Star Johnny Estrada for Kevin Millwood who proceeded to stink up 1 out of 2 seasons.
"Spoljaric, could you use that in a sentence please?"
He signed Andy Ashby who distinguished himself giving Phillies fans the finger and followed three straight seasons of 14 wins in San Diego with 4 wins in Philly. Wade is baseball's equivalent of Motel Hell when it comes to pitching, his Philly roster of acquisitions reads like a who isn't of pitching; Paul Spoljaric, Bruce Chen, Chad Ogea, Robert Person, and Vicente Padilla. Gutless, heartless and soft were used so often in the sports section of the Daily News, Dairy Queen advertised its ice cream was tougher.
Because of Wade, 3rd sackist David Bell played 4 seasons past his expiration date hitting an anemic .243 while hopeless Phillies fans jumped off the 700 level in despair.
Why Houston hired him remains an utter mystery. Personally I wouldn't pencil him in any baseball job higher than peanut vendor because even though he might have to make change for a five dollar bill he doesn't have to open the shells. When 3rd Place is the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow
During Ed Wade's 8-season death grip on 3rd-5th place in the NL East, the Astros made the playoffs a total of 6 out of 8 seasons. Last season without Wade the Phillies won the division.
Now Wade gets to Houston. He trades a shutdown closer, Brad Lidge (1-0, 18 saves, 0.87 era), for a banjo-hitting outfielder. Plus he's already doing to Houston's pitching staff what he perfected in Philly. We call it Eddie's patented panic move, when things go bad, blame a pitcher, a couple of bad starts and you're yo-yo'd into oblivion.
"He is suspended pending final resolution of whatever move we end up making with him…"
Which is where Shawn Chacon comes in or more accurately goes out. Wade pulled one of his legendary temper tantrums and finally met a brick wall most adult people do when they throw hissy fits with guys bigger than them. Houston loses a so-so pitcher by making Chacon walk the plank, but if they don't get rid of Wade they're going to get baseball's bubonic plague.
No Question About It
Fowl Line Bonus Feature
My good friend and Phillies fan, Don Z. Block is the poet laureate of the Brooklyn Dodgers, his take on Ed Wade's demise as the Phillies GM is rightfully one of the greatest pieces of baseball satire ever scribbled...here it is in its entirety.
I was there with Eddie when the bombs began to fall. We could hear the enemy outside using flamethrowers, and the air was filled with screams. Throughout the battle, little Eddie never stopped smiling. When it became clear that they would be breaking through the bunker door in a matter of minutes, Eddie called for his pet puffin, Charlie, patted it on top of its rather large gray head, and gave it a big, wet farewell kiss. By now we were all crying. Then Eddie slipped the bird some aspirin, and seconds later the creature exploded rather messily.
Eddie then asked us all to line up in a row so that he could shake our hands. When he came to me, I was so overcome that I could not look at him, but Eddie said, "Be brave, Paul. You were my finest acquisition. I will never forget how nobly you filled in for Randy. I want you to do me one last favor!" And he whispered in my ear what he wanted. I couldn't believe it.
Seconds later, I was toeing a mock piece of rubber in the bunker with the door behind me. At a mock plate stood Endy Chavez, a hitter with a reputation for always making contact. In my left hand, by the scruff of his neck, I held little Eddie Wade. I wound up and threw Eddie toward Endy. Endy took a mighty swing and finally made tremendous contact. Little Eddie went zooming towards the door on a straight line, and he lasered through it with a loud boom and a bright light--and then he disappeared.
We never saw him again. That night, the sky was filled with shooting stars--lots of them. And one of them, I am certain, was the Little Eddie.
Shaq finally did to rap what he did to movies. The latest shocking revelations include:
Shaq has recorded 7 albums worth of rap.
This nauseating tidbit is the WMD of rap. Forget nukes in Iran let's find out where the master tapes are and end this very real threat of ear rape that hangs over our nation.
First and foremost any analysis of this line begins and ends with the mental image of Shaq spreading the ham and Kobe going in tongue first. While there is a certain justice in Shaq metaphorically impaling himself on the once and future NBA king of room service employee abuse. There remains the lifelong collateral damage of us being forced to imagine it. Even radiation poisoning eventually kills you. No such luck here. What's baffling is Shaq included himself in this repugnant scenario. Why not shove Kobe's head in somebody else's Charmin Zone?
"Last week Kobe couldn't do without me."
Well not if you're going to make him taste test you Shaq. What kind of season did Shaq have that leaves him in any way, shape or form triumphant in a comparison of 2008 playoff performance? Shaq is playing like the ghost of Derrick Coleman, a shuffling, creaky echo of his former self.
"I got a vasectomy now I can't breed 'em"
I don't necessarily mourn Shaq's surgical loss of fertility mainly because that's a gene pool so shallow it wouldn't get the soles of your shoes wet but Shaq's groin-o-centric rapping takes too much information to a whole new level of suck. Maybe he went with the snip job because colon polyp is too hard to rhyme.
Patrick Ewing
To top it all off he takes a swipe at Patrick Ewing's lack of a championship ring no doubt a result of a wacky random firing of synapses in his brain. Way to kick a guy in the sack for no good reason.
Stephen A. Smith
Shaq lumbered into damage control releasing a statement to ESPN's Stephen A. Smith. Smith's been shot so deep into ESPN's Phantom Zone it's a wonder Shaq found him. Shaq took a Freudian Slip joyride on his hastily crayoned statement. Telling Smith and critics not to:
"...make something out of nothing."
Shaq is his harshest critic here, but careful analysis of the video shows his rapping doesn't even meet the low standard of nothing.
"I'm totally cool with Kobe. No issue at all."
Yeah but Kobe might not be cool. I don't know about you but the rap doesn't seem very complimentary unless of course orbisculating that particular orifice appeals to you. Shaq went on to say he is:
"...the difference between first and last place"
Once again Shaq cold cocks himself. Simple math, if you have Kobe on your team you're likely to finish in first place. If you have Shaq, say hello to my little friend, --last place.
I remember a time when all you had to do was say Kazaam to make a whole room full of NBA fans alternately snicker and vomit. Shaq was a great player, but acting wasn't his cup of tea, as it turns out rapping isn't his ocean of tea either.
The biggest, fastest, and possibly dumbest creature to roam the earth since dinosaurs is professional baseball and like dinosaurs baseball's inevitable extinction is just as predictable. What pushes a sport to the brink of doom? Let's examine how baseball illustrates a disturbing fact; the age of the sports dinosaur is drawing to a bitter and sudden close.
Baseball. Why did it resonate for so long? Why was it cherished for almost 150 years? Why does it seem so hollow and phony now? You have to go back to the beginning to see why the end of professional baseball is near.
Baseball isn't just the national pastime it is the national pastime and for good reason. Baseball was incubated in the civil war and afterwards became the panacea that healed a divided nation. Baseball was bigger in all aspects than we can imagine today, it held the promise of spring, the struggle of summer and the decay and finality of fall so perfectly in balance it's hard to imagine life without it.
The rhythms and pace are as perfect as the diamond it's played upon. It's the great equalizer. There is a profound truth to its demands. The ball, the bat, the glove, the dimensions immutably played across nine innings, three outs, and a box score that sings the game across time. Brandeis said, sports is truth because once it was reduced to a box score there were no interpretations, no gray areas just the game as it was played forever fixed in the amber of Linotype.
The earliest professional teams rose and fell like summer corn. The players an amalgam of college graduates, drunks, and shifty characters were every bit as dodgy as the grifters and con men that owned the clubs. There was no privilege between the lines that mattered save your baseball pedigree. It didn't matter that Rube Waddell was mad as a hatter and twice as childlike, on the mound he was un-hittable and just as likely to chase a fire engine, as he was to strike out the side. His manager, Connie Mack, for fear he would disappear on a bender, doled his salary out a few bucks at a time.
Race played no part in the beginning it wasn't until Hall of Famer Cap Anson, a de####able racist, led a cabal that drove Black players from the game in the late 1800's and then like a Shakespearian tragedy it took the man who saved baseball Judge Landis to maintain that prejudice until his death when Branch Rickey and Jackie Robinson shattered that vile barrier six decades later. But don't get all misty-eyed.
The Negro League in its day was the 3rd largest black owned and operated business, and cornerstone of the Black community, their players were every bit the equal of any major league player. Robinson may have broken the barrier but the barrier fell directly on top of the Negro League. Nor were the Dodgers all that racially smart or advanced. To maintain a quota system that suppressed black players in the majors after Robinson and Larry Doby broke the color barrier they lost Roberto Clemente to the Pirates in the Rule 5 draft because they already had their quota filled on the Dodgers roster. But none of this is news to any real baseball fan.
Baseball stars in every era were considered family heirlooms passed on from father to son, each adding his own layer. It was a legacy and a trust. But all that began to change in the 1970's. It isn't fair to blame baseball for the changing environment of sports or even society. Nevertheless baseball withstood much change without the bedrock shifting. But like a Brontosaurus or a T-Rex seeing the meteor cross the sky that would kill them it didn't understand its time was over.
Baseball has spilled more ink than any other sport. It has a lyricism that attracts great writers to scribble great things. But suddenly newspapers faced their own extinction. Great dailies fell all across the country, as cable supplanted print media and now sports, once the favorite section of the daily paper, was a click away for an increasingly lazy and entertainment jaded public. Baseball a sport that thrived because it was the only affordable entertainment for the poor and middle class saw it's impact and place dwindle as the price of tickets pushed aside all but the deepest corporate pockets.
Family owned teams sold out to corporations who care only about the bottom line. Media companies bought teams for programming and chucked them into the hungry maw of 24-hour sports channels without understanding or caring about tradition. Baseball became another commodity measured in ratings. Like earth inverting underneath a flood ravaged dike, tradition washed and whirled away and by the time of the last real commissioner, Fay Vincent, the only thing owners cared about was whacking up billions in profits and everything else be damned.
Over expansion, fueled by a lust for the billions it brought current owners in entry fees, diluted the quality of the players, to compensate the mound was lowered until pitchers could barely pitch six injury free innings a game over an entire season even on 5 days rest. Under the greedy and clearly dumbest commissioner, Bud Selig, owner by proxy of the Milwaukee Brewers, major league baseball extorted new stadiums from taxpayers and then priced them out of attending. Attendance still rose as corporate box seats and the wealthy supplanted the dopes that paid for the stadium and ratings rose like a bubble until an unlikely pin, steroids, popped it.
Steroids are the genie let out of the bottle of real fan discontent. Players like Roger Clemens and Barry Bonds put a real face on a problem created, fostered and supported by MLB, owners, and teams. Baseball was all a lie. The thing we cherished and grew up with was gone. Replaced by a shimmering Vegas resort mirage. When fan outrage finally brick walled the mealy-mouthed Selig he tried to whitewash it with the Mitchell Report. But nobody was biting. With each new revelation, an ugly truth was left flopping and gasping for air like a fish made out of raw sewage.
Look at the baseball landscape today. There are only two teams, the Yankees and the Red Sox and $100 million dollars in salary behind them is every other team. Sure they don't win the World Series every season, but most. It isn't even a league it's like Batman and Superman fighting to the death with the rest of the Justice League happily sucking mocha lattes at a Starbucks.
The other teams are content to grab the TV cash and act as a feeder system. But the sport no longer resonates. It no longer captures the heart, mind and soul of our nation. There isn't a single player that isn't playing under the su####ion of performance enhancing drugs. Their personal lives are displayed like a colonoscopy so any hope of them ever being a hero to a small child is unlikely and finally when you do go to a ballpark, they fiscally rape you so hard it leaves a bad taste in your mouth.
Baseball should look at hockey and figure it out. Once a sport stops resonating, canceling a season or signing the wrong TV contract, makes it very easy for Americans to simply walk away. Right now baseball is kicking dirt over that cliff. Baseball will reap what it sows. Fans unfortunately inherit the wind.
According to the Associated Press a Denver man wants the city to be prepared for space aliens and proposes a commission to deal with the matter. 54-year-old Jeff Peckman says an 18-member commission would form a strategy "...dealing with issues related to the presence of extraterrestrial beings on Earth." Surprisingly Peckman is still short of the 4,000 signatures needed to put the matter on next November's ballot.
LeBron James After bricking an 8 for 42 against the Celtics in their first two playoff games clearly he's been replaced by a clone from a galaxy far, far, away. Unable to get very good reception because of the whole change to digital broadcasting in 2009, his home planet, THX1138 only had reruns of a Kwame Brown highlight reel to base his basketball skills on. The LeBron clone slipped up after the Celtics loss when he said, "Being down 0-2, that's a tough hole to dig yourself out of. But if we want to win the series we've got to do it, even if we have to vaporize Garnett, Allen and Pierce."
The White Sox I don't know what solar system thinks men "stacking their bats" in front of a blow up doll isn't #### but it sure as hell isn't this one. And when you get right down to it there couldn't have been one single human in that locker room or he would have said as much in disgust.
Bill Belichick Come on. Who doesn't think he's an alien? The hoodie sweatshirt to hide the antennae sticking out of the back of his head? The robot stare? Spygate? Belichick was recently overheard talking to Roger Goodell when he said, "I knew I should have just caught the other team's coordinators in the tunnels and sucked their brains out with a straw." Richie Sexson Has also been absorbed by the alien collective. There's no way the human Richie Sexson would charge the mound after a pitch had been thrown at him yesterday. The human Sexson would already be on the DL this late in the season.
Dennis Rodman A gimme, confirmed by MIB and still thinks he can play basketball in the NBA. What would you expect from a guy who calls Solaxiant 9 home?
There are others who walk among us on the fields of green and hardwood floors of our hometowns. You might even know a few or suspect. This is the place and time to take a stand before all of sports is overrun and the only thing from earth is the bat or the ball.
It's a shame Eight Belles had to be euthanized at the Kentucky Derby. What's baffling is an organization that slaughters thousands of animals in the exact same manner is allowed to cry foul and use it as a platform to advance its psycho babble agenda.
PETA wants the jockey suspended for not knowing a complete accident was going to take place with a multi-million dollar horse. It's hard enough making weight for a jockey now they have to be psychic. In a contradictory demand:
PETA also announced plans to protest the Kentucky Horse Racing Authority on Tuesday, arguing for major changes, including a ban on using the whip or racing horses younger than 3. (AP)
I thought they were against all use of animals? Now they're saying, what the hell if the horse is three go right ahead and ride him...
PETA hypocritically kills by lethal injection 85% of the animals turned into its shelters annually. Thousands of pets take the dirt nap on PETA each and every year. For an organization with almost a million members you'd think they'd send them to a big PETA farm to live happily ever after like a Disney film. Fat chance.
How does the President of PETA morally justify the slaughter in her twisted vegan universe? According to the cult's head wackjob and founder Ingrid Newkirk; PETA provides, "...a painless exit from an uncaring world." They care so much they kill them dead. She goes on to describe a Walton's Christmas type exit where the animal is cooed, petted, and loved as it slips this mortal coil.
The reality is PETA was caught red handed injecting them in a van after they collected the animals from supposedly inhumane shelters in North Carolina and repeatedly left the bodies in a dumpster behind a Piggly Wiggly Supermarket. The bitter irony indeed. No doubt PETA picketed that chain for exploiting the wiggly in piggly.
PETA is a very dangerous cult. They compare processing animals for food to the Holocaust and owning an animal to slavery. Allowing them to speak for animals is like asking the ####'s to explain Passover.
PETA is the largest funder of animal rights terrorism in the world donating tens of thousands of dollars yearly to known terrorist groups like the ELF, ALF, arsonists and bombers. They send a convicted arsonist to colleges to explain how to make incendiary bombs to use on buildings and labs.
PETA will only be happy when every animal is "liberated" from man. In short, no shoes, belts, pets, livestock, meat, fish, or game, no guide dogs for the blind, no bio-medical use for life saving procedures and medicines. Scratch diabetics too, goodbye insulin, cross off leather goods like jackets, pants, or vests, furniture, and sporting equipment. No hunting, fishing or dancing bears. PETA wants to replace milk with beer for children. That's not even a joke or a typo.
Do they really care about horse racing? Do the math. If you turned over every horse used in the sport today, 85% of them would be bloated carcasses dumped behind your local supermarket within 24 hours. Because PETA knows an animal cannot bear the shame of once being held captive. So do us all a favor PETA ooze back into the swamp and leave horse racing alone. I can't wait until PETP, People for the Ethical Treatment of Plants reveal you for the mass murdering vegans you really are.
Suddenly sports finds the fans have a seat at the table again. After being pushed aside and trampled by the greed of athletes, owners and the media the fans suddenly have a voice and it roars. It isn't the processed cheese voice, massaged, manipulated and served in sterile bite size media chunks; it's a seething roiling ocean of discontent fueled by scandals, con men, and criminals guised as owners, players, and the press wading through obscene amounts of money.
It's a voice from Pandora's Box unleashed, unchecked, unfettered by considerations of programming and advertisers that once kept it in perfect order. It's a voice that lampoons pro-athletes for turning into fat, waddling ####, eunuchs of greed unable to stop stuffing their egos at any price or carpetbagging owners who squeeze every last nickel out of fans and taxpayers alike. Prior to the internet a fan was a boozy lush in the stands with an audience of none. After the internet, he is an anarchist who reaches hundreds, thousands, and millions and doesn't care if he displaces convention.
All the huffing and puffing about the internet by the old media isn't working. Jason Whitlock's latest online column for Fox is a perfect example. It follows an interesting passive-aggressive form. First he professes a love for bloggers and says to the effect, "Some of my best friends are bloggers." Fair enough, but for all his blog love the real Jason Whitlock managed to bleed through his camouflage. Take this sentence; However, they normally save their venom for more important targets than leaders of the online paparazzi.
Online paparazzi? So bloggers are a pack of insensible money-grubbing celebrity stalkers waiting to snap the next #### shot of a celebrity skank? Maybe we are. I know one thing I don't think it's very ethical to share a cab and then out the conversation in an article. Whitlock tomahawks Buzz Bissinger just like a blogger I know who sandbagged Philadelphia Daily News writer Bill Conlin in an email exchange. In both cases it's designed to gain notoriety wrapped in a thin veneer of pseudo-piety. We call it dry gulching where I come from, shooting a man in the back.
The article dissolves in what I'd call an exercise of coy blog bashing. Deploring deadspin's blogging about a broadcaster cheating on his wife. Imagine that? Is that why every traditional and not-so-traditional media outlet recently showed so much sensitivity to Roger Clemens, Mindy McCready and John Daley's ex-wife? Because affairs are off limits? Whitlock even chucks in the race card for good measure. Good. I wouldn't want any controversy to pass without filtering it through skin pigment. Still pretty tame stuff for Whitlock, who usually provides plenty of foaming at the mouth moments in his fine scribble. I guess defending bloggers is harder than it looks because we aren't very homogeneous. Plenty of us are bad, offensive, rude, childish, and out of control. We don't need you to defend us Jason. To who? For what?
Newspapers and magazines are buggy whips, bloggers have stormed the gates and the rabble is in the Bastille. There's no going back, just the fading whispers and echoes of an by-gone era that's passed as surely as the dinosaurs. I'm not going to get upset by haircuts on HBO hating bloggers, or even a guy like you Jason damning me with faint praise. Call me paparazzi, call me rude, heck, call me Ismael, but speak up, you're fading like an old photograph in dusty box. Did you know they once printed sports on paper?
Update: This post is a reaction to the content and ideas expressed in one single article scribbled by Jason Whitlock it is not an indictment of his body of work, his character or his ability to passionately express himself as forcefully as he does. I've blogged here and I've worked for FoxSports, they don't censor anybody, they are outstanding individuals in my book, without exception. They do have standards of appropriate conduct and decency they take seriously. If enough comments cross those lines they can and will take swift, decisive action. It's not censorship. I too have appropriate standards for my blog. If a comment crosses them, it's gone. I'm not censoring anyone but like Fox I apply that standard equally to all.
Remember when CBS owned the Yankees? For many New Yorker's it's a repressed memory equaled only by being a current Jets fan. Those were dark days when the Bronx Bunglers were the laughingstock of the American League.
George Steinbrenner managed to make the Yankees hated again and in the course of three decades built a perennial winner. He meddled, investigated, castigated and forbid facial hair below the lip but his wallet was every bit as big as his mouth.
18 times the Yankees made the playoffs and brought home a fistful of World Series rings. Whatever the Yankees needed George bought. But George hit the wall in 2006, age and illness forced him to the sidelines and like a lot of family businesses sometimes the son isn't a chip off the old block.
2007 started like a horror film, the Yankees stumbled out of the gate and were 18 games behind the BoSox by the end of May. Hank Steinbrenner was called Steinbungler and Hankenstein, Joe Torre made 500 pitching changes in 2007 crawling out of that hole to win the wild card. It was his last and possibly best hurrah. The Yanks were steamrollered by Cleveland in the playoffs 3-1. The ax soon fell on Joe in the form of a mumbled pay cut.
A-Rod made the off-season memorable with a bad agent and bad math skills, and the Yanks re-signed other veteran stalwarts like Rivera, and Posado. Unfortunately the well that brought the Yankees so much success ran dry. The open checkbook for pitching didn't matter. Every team in baseball desperate for pitching snapped up or traded circles around the Yankees, gone are the days where the Yankees culled the cream of the crop with money that left other teams gasping like fish out of water. Unwilling to trade their top prospects the Yankees saw Johan Santana come to New York as a Met. It was an ill omen for the Bronx Zoo.
The 2008 Yankees equaled last year's dismal April performance dropping 14 games. The better news is they're only 2 games out of first. The bad news? A-Rod and Jorge Posado are on the 15 day DL which spells real trouble for half of May, while A-Rod's pulled quadriceps might heal there's no definitive word on whether Posado will need surgery on his bum shoulder.
The pitching staff is good to fair to gut-wrenchingly putrid. The good, Chien-Ming Wang, (5-0, 3.23 ERA), and Andy Pettitte, (3-2, 3.23 ERA). The fair, Mike Mussina, (3-3, 4.73 ERA). (Is Moose headed for another meltdown like last season that got him sent on vacation in the middle of the wild card race?)
The gut-wrenchingly putrid; the young tandem of Phil Hughes and Ian Kennedy are throwing pillows and batting practice for opposing teams. Winless in April, getting shelled early and often, both sport ERA's that look like snowmen on a bad round of golf. Maybe they should take the bus to Yankee Stadium to remember what the minor leagues feel like. They did inspire Hank Jr. to throw an April shower about wasting Joba Chamberlain in a setup role.
Does Joe Girardi have the temperament to handle a powder keg owner foolishly shooting his mouth off to the press all season long? Despite the great job he did with the Marlins he got the boot for not #### kissing one owner who while completely insane isn't anywhere near as nuts as Steinbrenner aching to prove to Daddy he can man up before the daughter steps in to clean up his mess.
The Yankees are finally damned, by the one thing they can't buy, trade, release, or send to the minors; squabbling billionaire siblings. Like every other baseball fan in America I'm going to enjoy watching the bonfire of the baseball vanities...Stay tuned for May.
Innocent until proven guilty might be the foundation of law in this country but Roger Clemens says screw the innocent, literally. Reports are circulating Clemens carried on a 10 year affair with troubled country music singer Mindy McCready from the time she was 15!
I tend to believe Roger, after all it's not like 28-year old married men with two kids would line up to have sex with a fifteen-year old girl if NBC's To Catch a Predator is any indication. Have a cookie Roger, Chris Hansen has a few questions he'd like to ask before you're wrassled to the lawn by a swarm of disgusted police.
Rusty Hardin, Clemens lawyer & utility apologista, confirmed the long-term relationship but denied Clemens got beyond 3rd base. He did not confirm whether Clemens would demand to testify in front of Congress about his bagging a fifteen-year old girl.
"He...had...kind of an inappropriate relationship with her," Hardin said. "He's considered her...close... He has...had a sexual relationship with her." (remarks edited for context, clarity and damning purpose)
This shocking 15th hour revelation strips the last Boy Scout vestiges from the reptile formerly known as Roger Clemens. Meanwhile the mouthpiece for former trainer Brian McNamee was going Daffy Duck on the corpse of Clemens reputation calling it another example of Clemens, "...pervasive prevarications." Where I come from we call it something far cruder.
McCready had a No. 1 single in 1996 with "Guys Do It All the Time." Apparently a thinly veiled reference to Clemens insatiable demands for tawdry sex. That's my opinion and it isn't based on any facts. Just the usual rush to judgment in a Jerry Springer Universe.
Hardin did not respond to my imaginary email which doesn't surprise me in the least. Meanwhile the HOF announced a new exhibit, "Would You Like Some Candy--the wit & wisdom of Roger Clemens" was canceled until further notice. Said exhibit curator Hastings Muggeridge-Swinburn, "It was an attempt to rehabilitate the reputation of Mr. Clemens but all of us wondered why he kept quoting Nabokov's Lolita..."
The NFL Draft is like watching other kids open Christmas presents that suck. After all the mock drafts and blow-harding by the same experts year after year what you end up with as a fan is a big fat zero. Mock Drafts The most asinine of all endeavors. Where and when did it become not only important to guess what player will go where, but then grade yourself or others on how accurately they guessed? To what point? The teams themselves don't read mock drafts. The players selected with the first ten picks are so obvious you'd have to be under a rock not to guess them. I guess if you're anxiously waiting for the next issue of Coin Flip Quarterly a mock draft is right up your alley but for most fans it's an irritation we can live without. If you made up or read an entire seven round mock draft, get help. The First Round The stuff dreams are made of. But if you do a little research you'll find the gulf between the first ten picks and the next twenty-two is bigger than the Grand Canyon. Take QB's for instance, in twenty-years no QB taken from 11-32 has made the Pro-Bowl except as a spectator. Of the forty-plus QB's taken in the 1st round, 3 have won a Super Bowl and if your last name isn't Manning that number dwindles to one. Running backs taken in the 1st round #### out faster than a Yugo. Yet the 1st round mystique endures. Look at Andy Reid & the Eagles, he's backed the team out of the 1st round two years running because he knows what nobody will say out loud, if you don't have that #1-10 it isn't worth overpaying the 1st round bust. So do the math; Matt Ryan, (#3-Falcons), has a 7% chance of winning the Super Bowl in his entire career. Joe Flacco, (#18-Ravens), won't even make the Pro-Bowl. The Combine This is where the intense navel gazing pays off for the experts spewing out the raw sewage that gets lovingly crafted into countless mock drafts. Every year some combine darling vaults into the 1st round. This year's darling, Ohio State one-year-wonder DE, Vernon Gholston, charmed his way onto the Jets who wasted the 6th pick in the draft on him. Those wacky Jets, how they keep their fans from killing themselves never ceases to amaze me. You'll hear Gholston's name over and over for the next ten years whenever anybody is talking draft busts. I'll take a side order of Kyle Brady with that... Offensive and Defensive Linemen Did anyone get the same feeling I did they were watching the same film clips over and over? Behemoth crushes QB or RB, behemoth blocks for QB or RB. Is there a studio that just churns these mind numbing clips out all year long? Then you get the inane banter and dribble leading into the dullest thing ever saved on video, a clip of their combine workout. Never have little orange cones played as big a role in entertainment. Millions of people watching fat guys gallop around tiny cones. Excitement, Excitement, Excitement The draft has all the suspense of waiting for a bus on a rainy day. You're glad when it arrives but soon after you're crammed next to a guy that smells like a wet dog. The NFL draft provides the same experience when your team picks an unknown, undersized fill-in-the-blank player bracketed by two "Can't Miss" prospects who go onto Hall of Fame careers...couple this with mind numbing commercial breaks, thanks Tiger for inventing water with even more electrolytes in between winning golf tournaments in space, and you have two days of must not see sports TV. Holding Up the Jerseys With the number they were drafted. Please for the love of God we know you'll give them a uniform, it's a league rule, stop this awful practice. Grading the Draft The same knuckleheads that couldn't guess who got picked where are trotted out to #### on the teams who didn't listen to them to begin with. This is like asking a psychic to tell the future right after all the things they said would happen didn't. Simple fact is some of these guys will be very good players, some OK and not so surprisingly most are training camp cannon fodder. Next year I'm going fly fishing and I'm pretty sure sitting by a creek trying to outwit a fish can't be any less interesting than watching the NFL Draft.
Whoever said life imitates sport was right on the money but what if real life held some of the answers for sports? A nonsensical notion at best but what if sports started paying attention to the unimportant world around it? Maybe it would look something like this... $20 million 'virtual' border fence scrapped The US Government is pitchforking $860 million taxpayer dollars into this boondoggle that makes the newly clothed emperor look naked yet smart. It's not a fence but a bunch of iPhones stapled to poles that pinpoint illegal aliens crossing our border and then take a pretty picture. While an "actual" fence is centuries-old proven technology costing 10% of the "virtual" fence, virtuality leapfrogs the whole fuddy-duddy fence as a physical barrier concept and replaces it with cutting edge stupidity. "Oops" the first $20 million dollars just got flushed down the drain... Sort of reminds you of the Detroit Tigers doesn't it? They built the best "virtual" baseball team in the off season for $130 million dollars and right now the 8-year, $152.3 million dollars they dumped down the Miguel Cabrera drain is looking all systems go. Swatting a very ordinary, .263 with 5 dingaroos, Fatty, as his teammates like to call him, waddled over to play 1st base after a grueling three-week stint at 3rd. Meanwhile Dontrelle Willis and his $7,000,000 salary are nestled safely on the DL with zero wins, just two-starts, a hyper-extended knee and a 7.20 ERA. Willis has all the fixin's o####iant floparoo of a season. After notching 9 wins out of twenty played the Tigers are tied with the dismal KC Royals who managed to spend a paltry $57 million dollars for the same result. It looked real good on paper. Israeli Airstrike Targeted Syrian Nuclear Reactor Despite being years away from completion and based on a photograph of a Syrian wearing a I Helped Build a Reactor at Al Kibar & All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt those wacky guys at the Israeli Defense Ministry bombed the snot bubbles out the Syrian site. Their policy of Love Means Never Having to Say You're Sorry is simple, bomb first and refuse to answer questions later. That same solution might be perfect for those New York Knicks, after a 2008 season where Isiah Thomas redefined imploding, coughing up millions for his #### lechery to childish squabbling with Stephon Marbury, he topped it all off with, Whoops there go all my real jobs. Winning 56 games over two years and losing 108 as coach Thomas is a certified triple threat, he stinks at being President, GM and Coach. He singlehandedly destroyed basketball as we know it in New York City. Kept on out of spite to wring a nickel's worth of value out of the money paid him, Isiah the Useless was peremptorily bombed by his successor Donnie Walsh the other day with the announcement Thomas is banned from having any contact with members of the team! While he doesn't have an office, desk, phone or chair Thomas can still speak to Madison Square Garden chairman James Dolan, but only after saying "Donnie may I?" Walsh strafed the smoking rubble of Isiah Thomas' career in a recent interview saying, "He's answering to me and nobody's reporting to him." I wonder what the question is? Life and sports intertwine in ways so wacky you can't even make it up...
KINSHASA (Reuters) - Police in Congo have arrested 13 suspected sorcerers accused of using black magic to steal or shrink men's ####es after a wave of panic and attempted lynchings triggered by the alleged witchcraft... Purported victims claimed sorcerers simply touched them to make their genitals shrink or disappear...
We finally know why the Patriots lost the Super Bowl to the Giants...
I haven't been around lately but the reason may surprise you. My Editors at Fox dispatched me to cover the Mauritania Hockey Playoffs. You'd think a country located in Africa on the North Atlantic Ocean would be a veritable paradise and if by paradise you mean sand you'd be right. Here's a few things I learned after getting stuck there for over a week. It's hard to see why these plucky people who inhabit a dry, dusty, sweltering spit of desert have gone hockey crazy but they have.
Since clean water is measured in drops and sold in portions thereof certain accommodations have to be made, the rink for instance like most everything else is made of sand and not ice. A sensible precaution when you consider most water is teeming with bacterial and protozoan diarrhea, hepatitis A, and typhoid fever.
It's very easy to skate on ice, conversely it is very hard to skate on sand. The game is much more deliberate and prone to stoppage when the rubber puck melts or in most cases simply oozes around the blade of the stick.
According to the brochure at the hotel, Mauritania is a Democratic Republic the ballots however are cast out of the barrel of a rifle. It is a source and destination country for the trafficking of children for the purpose of forced begging and in certain parts of the country slavery still exists. Please enjoy your stay and complimentary wet nap.
Now to the meaty part of my adventure, after donning suitable togs for the desert, pith helmet and flask of bourbon fortified coffee, I met up with my guide and translator, umm, well he had a different foreign sounding name so I called him Gus which I explained meant "He who lives in a golden palace filled with fresh running water and virgins" Gus was very pleased and spent the next few moments pumping my hand and jabbering something about my bleached bones in the desert. Surprisingly the arena is very modern and oddly enough constructed of a ring of brightly painted port-a-potties, which Gus assured me was the 9th wonder of the world in pantomime while repeating, "no wait, no wait, no wait" and making a funny squatting motion. I asked Gus about port-a-potty etiquette in his delightful country and he replied very gravely, "Scorpion very bad."
We grabbed a cold cup of something that smelled like camel urine and made our way to our seats at center ice. We were just in time for the pre-game ceremony where four black marketeers were executed for selling pirated DVD's and the crowd went a little nuts when the executioner held one of the heads up and made the mouth move to the lyrics of the local team fight song.
The game itself was anticlimactic by the second period the sun had driven all but the already mad insane and the sand fleas made short work of any other comfort you might enjoy. The stench from the port-a-potty's didn't help either, my free advice? Plumbing. Lots and lots of plumbing cause when the favorite stadium food is an oozing meat/veggie/locust goop ladled into a flat-bread funnel you need it. It smelled so bad I took it to the nearest port-a-potty and just chucked it in cutting out the middleman, hours of unendurable bowl twisting agony.
The teams were evenly matched with the something-something-Kabir's taking a one goal lead early on when this swarthy guy 180'd his stick into the opposing team's captain's head who kicked the puck past his own surprised goalie with a leg spasm while he twitched on the red hot sand, this incited an on ice brawl that quickly spread to the stands where it turned out Gus and I were the only non-relatives in attendance.
We beat a hasty retreat to the hotel where I spent my time drinking iced lime gin & tonics and playing a game with the local gals I like to call, mustache or nostril hair...so I'm pretty sure the something-something Kabir's won because all the other teams were captured by rebels or arrested for being rebels Gus was a little unclear on that. I caught the next puddle hopper out and waved goodbye to my beloved inferno by the sea...
The future of the NHL may ride on the winged feet of Sid Crosby and Alex Ovechkin but the here and now of the Flyers-Caps playoff series is all Danny Briere. A cold start and a $52 million dollar free agent contract gave Flyers fans ample opportunity to boo Briere this season. Shocking ain't it? His afterburner playoffs performance converted the Orange & Black back into his rabid faithful. Briere's four goals and two assists in three games have pole-vaulted the Flyers into the catbird seat with a 2-1 advantage in the series. Alexander the So So, the league leader in scoring and likely MVP managed a lukewarm one goal in three games so far. Last night's game was no exception. Ovechkin eked out a measly four shots in 24:51 of play as the Caps got hammered like a nail 6-3 in Philly. The Flyers have now beaten the Capitols 4-2-1 this season which isn't trending well for Washington. The Caps never stood a chance the Flyers scorched them for three goals in a two and a half minute span. And for good reason. A pre-recorded version of Kate Smith sang God Bless America with beloved ex-Flyers announcer Gene Hart's daughter, Lauren. Kate Smith is a force to be reckoned with her record for the Flyers when she sings is a blistering 71-18-4. She is the beginning and end of all sport's good luck charms. This year Kate's sang three times for the Flyers who outscored their opponents 12-4 and swept all three games. Meanwhile, trade deadline acquisition, Vaclav "Vinny" Prospal, (the once and future Flyer), is making Flyers GM Paul Holmgren look like a psychic genius, he's scored 2 goals and notched 4 assists against those Capitols in three games. Holmgren is also responsible for acquiring other players making big plays in this series including goalie Martin Biron, and defenseman Kimmo Timonen who left the game after a vicious cross check by Brooks Laich. I was reading the Prince of Pucks the other day, he scribbled the NHL hoped Crosby and Ovechkin would use these playoffs to showcase their talent and raise awareness for the NHL struggling to avoid becoming "soccer on ice" and ending up broadcasting games on QVC while they sold appliances in the foreground. I'm badly paraphrasing a great scribbler that's forgotten more hockey than a roomful of us know. I think he's right, but hockey still needs to balance brutal with exceptional. What other sport does a guy crush his marble taking a slap shot to the groin, say he'd do it over again and by the way I'm ready for my next shift? Crosby and Ovechkin are all world but even Ty Cobb or Ted Williams can hit .200 in one series. For the Flyers they need to lopside things by winning Thursday night. Put the knife against the Caps throat. I'm thinking Kate's going back-to-back...for the Caps not only do they need Ovechkin to turn it on but Backstrom, Federov, Semin and Green; when you put the puck on the net bad things happen and i####oalie only has to stop 16 shots to beat you it's all over but the fat chick warbling "I'll Always Love You." If they're thinking Alexander the Great's reputation is going to win this series they'll have plenty of time to ponder that foolishness slurping girlie smoothie's through a straw in the very near future...
The Phillies attempted to curse the New York Mets yesterday burying ace hurler Johan Santana behind a concession stand at Citizens Bank Ballpark. The Phillies took their cue from a construction worker who buried a David Ortiz Red Sox jersey, (dubbed Hex Shirt), in the new Yankee ballpark to curse the Yankees. The Phillies went one step further burying an actual player.
"I was eeting breakfasts burrito when banditos keecked ze door in and I was keednaps," commented a perplexed Santana before being buried under two-feet of Portland reinforced cement. Excited fans crowded around the site jostling for a better view as Phillies owner William "Cheap" Giles and General Manager Pat Gillick pressed their hand prints into the quick drying cement. Giles in a prepared statement said, "We hope this brings the Mets as much bad luck as possible while preserving the good natured rivalry we enjoy." Santana's reply was a cryptic, "Blurb, blurb, blurb."
Mets executives were understandably outraged. "We intend to file an immediate grievance with the Commissioner's Office we strongly condemn this practice and seek the return of our ace," said Farleigh "Skip" Mellon, Mets VP of Marketing. "Anytime you innovate there are bound to be fuddy duddy's who disagree," replied Ruben Amaro Jr. Phillies Asst. GM. Meanwhile MLB Commissioner Bud Selig fresh from his triumphant announcement reversing tepid punishments doled out during his steroid whitewash was reluctant to comment. "Can they do that?" Selig asked before being hustled away to attend the American Pharmaceutical Association Banquet where he is accepting an award for Lifetime Excellence in Promoting Pharmacopoeia in the Workplace.
In related news, United Local Building and Trades Council 903 threw up picket lines around the Santana burial site protesting the use of undocumented day laborers to dig the hole and pour the cement. Local President Faffy "####" Ionini had this to say, "The use of non-union scabs to construct this site is shocking as well as distressing on many levels." When asked if the Local would interfere with Santana being dug up at Selig's order Ionini replied between bulging mouthfuls of greasy cheese steak, "Who the @%#! is that @#&hole?"
Baseball is back and so is Slobbermetrics! For most of us baseball means the crack of a bat, the thud of a ball in a glove and shelling peanuts from our nosebleed seats. For another segment it's the thrill of brand new batteries for their calculators, polishing the ol' slide rule and new numbers to crunch. In an effort to bridge the widening gap between those who like slobbermetrics and those who hate it we offer an olive branch. It's Slobbermetrics Explained...here are some common acronyms and terms used by baseball statisticians with the math safely removed and buried in a landfill...
AVGPAP You start out with beer & salty snacks and the starter your team signed in the off season for $17 million dollars starts throwing batting practice to the other team. At first you mumble and mutter but by the second inning you're hurling epithets that are 20mph faster than the only strike he throws.
Collapse Rate When you combine your teams pitching and hitting in the stretch run the number of games left is 25% fewer than they need to even sniff the wild card.
EqA An exercise in denying no matter how you slice the cheese you still end up with a pile of cheese and three fewer crackers than needed.
ISO Not to be confused with the most common form of isometric exercise baseball fans contemplate; completing the full beer curl. This is the crux of a single isn't worth a tinker's damn to a slobbermetrician. MAXPAP The point at which your vocal cords shred when you realize that fat slob of a manager is too busy spitting sunflower seeds to notice his pitcher burst into flames two innings ago and the opposing team is going around the bases like a side show carousel horse.
MORP Are players on your team worth the hundreds of millions of dollars they make while you play an adult game called life that pays far less. It's named after Robin Williams breakthrough role on TV based on an outer space alien, see; MINDY.
NRA This explains our second amendment right to possess firearms and why it's important players are not allowed to carry on the field or they might cap Pythagoras in his baseball know-it-all ####.
OUT Not to be confused with unknown outs which are accounted for by scorers having to go to the bathroom or take an important cellphone call during the game. PAP Proves slobbermetricians do not easily forgive or forget. Once they sink their teeth into something they hang on until they're distracted by more interesting statistical anomalies.
Park Adjustment aka The Wrigley Effect where a power hitter who can't clear the warning track on your team would have hit 70 home runs if he played for the Cubs. Cubs fans get to believe if their warning track wonder played at Coors Field he would swat 80 a year easy.
Pythagenport If you do the math carefully you can understand the science necessary to build a working Stargate in your backyard using components easily found in your garage.
RARP This simply explains why the guy on every other team is so much better at everything than your favorite player on the Tampa Rays. It's also the most common noise made in a ballpark bathroom after you eat more than six green hot dogs. It turns out Dr. Seuss was very very wrong about green food. Stuff Stuff is borrowed from what we clutter our garage with. It is the amount of talent crammed into an opposing pitcher every damn time you drop $100 bucks to go to Taxpayer Field to see a game. See; Shutout.
Ugueto Effect This explains why the Yankees are so good every year and your team sucks. Not to be confused with the Urbina Effect which postulates your crazy Central American pitcher is 386 times more likely than his North American counterpart to set a man on fire and hack him to bits with a machete because he looked at his sister while she did the Macarena.
Brett Favre will not go gentle into that good night. Favre coyly splattered his heir apparent like a shooting clay. The Roger Clemens of football retirement is well past second thoughts and salivating like Rosie O'Donnell at an all you can eat waffle buffet. What if Rodgers goes down on injuries? "...If that opportunity presented itself and they did call, it would be tempting. And I very well could be enticed do it."
Enticed? How about if Aaron pooches the first couple of games? How long is the rope when you know Brett is on the other end? What constitutes an injury scenario at that point? A bruise? Green Bay should issue a statement repudiating any idea of tapping the Favre keg. That beer is flat. Has Rodgers earned the right to start instead of Favre? "Aaron has fallen into a great situation..."
Rodgers should recognize keeping Brett's seat warm is a great honor and by accidentally stumbling into the unenviable and fairly untenable position of replacing a legend the only footsteps he'll hear sack him are that same legend running him over in the press between now and the start of the season. What's it like being retired for almost forty-days? "All the time people...ask me ... 'How do you do it? Inside I'm saying, 'I have no idea.' It's a struggle."
It sure is instead of fishing, hunting or doing all those things that might point towards a life after football you're chomping at the pigskin bit. What did you expect? Favre thought the Pack would follow last year's script and wine and dine him back into the fold. Instead they made the right decision for the franchise, while still a good QB, Favre reached the tipping point and faced with Green Bay's reluctance he used the nuclear option. Unfortunately he dropped it on his own foxhole. Two out of the last three seasons Favre was very ordinary--throwing 64 touchdowns against 62 interceptions. While he threw over 3800 yards per season his QB rating of 79 over that same span is a reflection of last season when he caught lightning in a bottle. It isn't anywhere near his glory days when he routinely averaged in the 90's. The problem is Last Hurrah's don't have second acts. If anything last season was his blaze of glory. It ended imperfectly when Favre's last pass was intercepted in the NFC Championship game. A game the Pack was favored to win. Move on Brett your moment in the sun is over and out. I won't be surprised if Favre commits the ultimate soiling of his legend suiting up for a forgotten season or two with another team, it'll be that Joe Montana, Johnny Unitas repressed memory of Chiefs and Chargers jerseys that never fit the legend that wore them.
Baseball is back and so is Slobbermetrics! For most of us baseball means the crack of a bat, the thud of a ball in a glove and shelling peanuts from our nosebleed seats. For another segment it's the thrill of brand new batteries for their calculators, polishing the ol' slide rule and new numbers to crunch. In an effort to bridge the widening gap between those who like slobbermetrics and those who hate it we offer an olive branch. It's Slobbermetrics Explained...here are some common acronyms and terms used by baseball statisticians with the math safely removed and buried in a landfill...
