DeJuan Blair is a Cyborg

Maybe Coach Pop will feel a bit more comfortable giving Timmy nights off if DeJuan continues to positively beast the league.  Eyewitness reports say the refs were making some pretty sketchy calls when he fouled out, so we were probably looking at a 30-25 had that not been the case.  The Zombie Sonics’ (TM Bill Simmons) rebounders were absolutely outmatched by a 6′7″ guy with no ACL’s.

The Spurs are getting hot at a good time, and they’ve beaten a couple of very good teams (as opposed to the bottom feeders that started their recent run) and have averted panic from the Spurs’ masses.  Any of the panic from early in the season has washed almost completely away for me.

Love it.

And So it Ends

My rooting interest in the NFL came to an official close yesterday, with Willis McGahee putting on a clinic against the Raiders’ run defense.  I’ll admit to being a little bit sad, but every day of the offseason is a day where JaMarcus Russell could be supplanted by…anybody, really.  Bruce Gradkowski is what we think he is, and Charlie Frye will probably be out of the league this year.  but I give them both credit where it’s due: The team played for them.  That means something.

The same should be said for Tom Cable.  He’s not the ultimate answer, but I’d like to see him stick around, if only for a bit of consistency.  His playcalling tends to be a bit erratic, but the defense played well enough in stretches that there’s not reason they can’t become a ball-control offense that runs well.

Okay, there’s one reason, and his name is Al Davis, but let’s ignore that in my fantasy scenario.  Long and short of it is that there’s some modicum of hope, and I intend to cling to that.

GINOBILI!

My gift to you, my dear reader (Hi mom!) this new year’s eve, is one of the prettier passes I’ve seen this year, coming in a game that has me now convinced Manu is back.  Enjoy:

I’ve gone from, “Oh God, what is WRONG with this team!?” to “We will lose again some time in March.”  I’d like to think the truth lies in the middle.

No, Really, This Grass is REALLY GREEN

I love my Giants.  I really do.  Living in Seattle has afforded me almost no opportunities to see them.  The internet makes it easy to follow them, but I miss out on the nitty-gritty of watching games and getting the hard-hitting analysis local broadcasters are known for.  That was a joke.

As a result, I’ve grown more fond of the Mariners, and I hear news about them above all others.  The point is, watching Jack Zduriencik ably wheel-and-deal his way though this offseason has made me extraordinarily sad.  Got a 300lb $48 million asshole?  No problem, we’ll take your headcase, and send a little change your way.  Need to shore up the starting pitching?  Hey, we’ve got some young guys, how about you ship over the former AL Cy Young winner who had a phenomenal post-season.  Instant offense?  Sure, I’ll take your utility-fielder-turned-speedster/OBP nightmare for $36 mill over 4 years away from THE division rival.

Why has all this made me sad?

Because instead of Jack, I have Brian Sabean.  The same guy who nearly set the Giants’ blogging community into a goddamned riot over the possibility of signing the one of the worst all-around players in baseball.  The same guy who thinks that this man is the answer in the outfield and in the leadoff spot:

This much fail in the infield? Let's put him in left!

The same guy who dealt one of the top 5 prospects in the system for 100 AB’s of Ryan Garko, who was promptly buried, despite the ability to not only take a walk, but make solid contact, and non-tendered for arbitration, meaning the Giants will not get a compensatory draft pick.

Top prospect.  100 ABs.

M’s fans, I am madly jealous of every one of you.  Your GM knows talent, and he’s being incredibly shrewd about making deals.  I want to hate you, but I can’t.  Enjoy it while you can.

BJ Penn is Really Good

I won’t post the picture here for the squeamish, but the damage to Diego Sanchez’s face after being positively smoked by BJ Penn was severe.  This link will take you to a picture within a Bloody Elbow post.  I cannot emphasize enough that this is not something most people want to look at.  Dana White said that he’s never seen someone as busted up as Diego was after the 5th round doctor stoppage, and I’d have to agree.  Replays showed that it was a high kick from BJ that opened the gigantic gash, which is something I’ve never seen before.

FightMetric is a site that attempts to statistically capture every strike, takedown, and submission attempt in a fight.  While not perfect, it does a pretty good job of capturing a snapshot of a fight.  Their report on Penn-Sanchez is absolutely mind-blowing; Diego managed to land, in nearly 25 minutes of fighting, 8 strikes.  He missed on one hundred strike attempts.  He was stuffed on 27 separate attempts to drag BJ to the ground.  The numbers alone don’t account for how badly BJ dominated Diego, but they help.

Overall, it was a pretty solid card, especially given the recent rash of injuries that have turned UFC 108 into a replacement fighter-thon.  The big question in the coming weeks, however, will focus on who the hell will step up to BJ next.  I know everyone will say, “it’s about fighting the best and challenging myself, etc.” but who would want to step up after seeing the thrashing Diego just suffered?

Fight Weekend

Big fight weekend coming up this weekend.  The only healthy UFC champion gets to defend his belt, a guy I used to really not be able to stand, BJ Penn.  Maybe it was the fact that he’s finally sticking to lightweight, or maybe he’s just talking less, but I kinda can’t help but like him now.  It’s weird.

Not going into analysis on this one, because everywhere Diego Sanchez is good, BJ is phenomenal.  Going from A ball to the majors is the best analogy I can think of for Diego, going from Clay Guida and Joe Stevenson to BJ Penn; few could ever pull it off, and those that do, there’s no doubt in your mind they’ll be sucessful.  There’s no doubt in my mind BJ is winning this fight.

On another note, Simmons finally weighed in with his piece on the whole Tiger fiasco, complete with his trademark conspiracy theories.  The point that he drove home the hardest was that this would have been a non-story, or at least a non-mainstream story, 15 years ago.  You can’t escape it today, no matter how much you want to (and my dumb ass is writing about it now; what is wrong with me??) and even the people who want it all to be gone are still reading updated stories and tweets.  It’s bizarre.

Whitlock fired his supposedly-last salvo at the hypocritical media angles that have been beaten into the ground, including a double-barrelled shotgun blast levelled into Rick Reilly:

Reilly’s advice was so asinine, contradictory and hey-look-at-me-and-not-Bill Simmons self-serving that it’s really unworthy of rebuke. Let me summarize it: “Hey, Tiger, prove you’re not fake by doing a bunch of fake (spit) that doesn’t fit your personality and invite me over to write about it.”

The second part of that captures the media flurry around this whole Tiger “thing,” and it absolutely is worthy of rebuke.  Reilly’s part of the old guard of journalists who still believe in preaching rather than conversing on a topic.  His moralism is laughable, considering how quickly and quietly he’s swept his own failures (documented here, better than I could ever hope to) to buy himself as much time on SportsCenter as possible.  It’s almost like an election year where, by the end, you care less about who wins and more about everyone just going the hell away.

Best of Luck, Peter

From Michael Rand at the Minneapolis-St Paul Star-Tribune:

Baseball Hall of Fame journalist Peter Gammons has decided to pursue new endeavors and will no longer be a contributor to ESPN after this week’s winter meetings.

Regardless of your baseball loyalties, anyone who follows the sport religiously at least knows, and usually very much respects, Peter Gammons.  Citing a desire for a less demanding schedule, Peter will hopefully still be writing about baseball, albeit in a less-demanding environment.

Good luck with whatever comes next, Peter.  Please write, when you’ve got the chance!

My Crow is Delicious, Thank You

In short, I owe Bruce Gradkowski an apology.  I didn’t believe in you and you played like you actually cared.  Thank you!

Seriously, though, I am positively shocked that the Raiders won that game.  But any loss by the Steelers is ok by me.

On another note, I was treated to the best of the early games here in Seattle, with New Orleans-Redskins on Fox and Indy-Tennessee on CBS.  This would have been the best of both worlds, had the (painfully stupid) NFL rules not switched me away from the Saints game with less than 2 minutes remaining, two plays before the TD pass to Meacham to tie it.

For what was probably the most dramatic non-Raiders game this weekend, I was instead “treated” to the sloppy first quarter of the Hawks-Niners.  The NFL has these broadcast rules in place, and very few of them make sense, but I doubt you could have even found me 10 Hawks fans who would have picked the ‘Hawks over  the end of the Saints game.  History or a sloppy 4-7 team?

And yes, there’s only one right answer to that question.

Jason Whitlock is my Hero

One of the writers I referenced yesterday as one whom I respect, wrote his rebuttal to the half-dozen “Tiger should make nice with the media!” stories.

My favorite parts are the absolute skewering both Charlie Pierce and Rick Reilly for their hypocritical histories, as seen here:

Pierce should’ve opened his column by admitting he dislikes Woods and his opinion is skewed by that bias. We’re journalists. We’re supposed to be transparent. Two weeks ago on Deadspin, Pierce trashed Bill Simmons and his New York Times-bestselling book. In that hit piece, Pierce failed to mention that he tried to befriend and mentor Simmons at the beginning of the decade and that in 2002 Simmons told Pierce to go (expletive) himself. That little nugget of information would’ve been very enlightening when reading Pierce’s Deadspin take.

I’m sharing this because it’s important for the public to know that the media act dishonestly all the time. We’re far more phony than Tiger Woods ever could be.

Let me give you another example. Reilly, the millionaire columnist for ESPN, wrote a damning piece for Sports Illustrated in 2004 about then-Colorado football coach Gary Barnett and a female kicker who claimed she was raped by a couple of her teammates. Reilly blasted Barnett, saying the coach didn’t properly monitor the more than 100 players on his team. Reilly never mentioned that just weeks before police investigated a sexual-assault allegation that stemmed from a high school party at Reilly’s Denver home. Reilly was not at home at the time. But his children allegedly hosted a party at his home and a 14-year-old girl claimed she was assaulted by two high school football players.

This is the moral high horse Tiger’s critics ride on. These are the people shouting on TV and whining in print that Tiger, in his last public statement, had the audacity to mildly criticize the way the mainstream media handled this controversy.

The Life of Reilly indeed.

Moral Arbitration Made Simple

It’s no stretch to say the Internet has changed sports journalism dramatically.  Major sites, like Yahoo(!) and CNNSI have both writers and bloggers, and everyone has a Twitter.  Some folks have access to athletes, some don’t, some espouse bizarre stats, some have been beating the same tired drum for 30 or more years.  Blogs and old-school news writers have basically the same schtick in the end: write something that invokes a response from the reader.

Thanks to Tiger Woods’ (alleged) indiscretions (and epically poor spin-job trying to put out the flames) we were treated this hack-and-slash job of a column by Charles Pierce, which received the following responses from 3 writers I very much respect:

“worst column i’ve ever read” – Jason Whitlock, KC Star

“Whitlock, for once I think you are understating it” – Bill Simmons, ESPN.com

“Love Charles Pierce as a writer. But even great writers can write bad columns” – Tim Cowlishaw, Dallas Morning News

Do editors demand these kinds of columns?  This is the classic “I’ve known this guy for years, and I can’t say this surprises me” bullshit that Pierce is spewing, which arises every time an athlete has a scandal.  Though I love the faux-journalistic line, “(Among his many headaches, there is absolutely no way that the Enquirer quits on this story. See Edwards, John.)” 

Also, thanks to the unholy flood of “Best of the Decade” columns, we’re treated to another round of “Steroid Morality for the Masses.”  I’m not going to deny that the best player for my favorite profession sports team was not only a colossal a-hole, but most likely using any number of, ahem, supplements.  I’m used to that talk, especially from mainstream sports writers, and to their credit, they’ve become more willing to slam everyone.  The part that makes me fume is the combination of holier-than-thou preachiness and hypocrisy.  And yes, I realize the irony of ranting about this on my blog.

Example: Tom Verducci for SI.com, who recently put together his All-Decade blah blah gave us this gem within half a page:

“(Alex) Rodriguez’s (home run) total doesn’t have authenticity because he spent at least three years juicing.”

Well, okay, if you want to play that card, it works, if you aim to be consist…oh wait, what’s this?  Manny Ramirez on your RBI and OPS lists?  Andy Pettitte atop your wins list?  I respect your right to an opinion, but lets’ not kid ourselves: Manny is entertaining, Andy Pettitte is, by all accounts, a nice guy, a real “Aw shucks” character.  They have also both been outed as PED users.  Consistency.  If you want to be the moral compass of American sports, consistency would be nice.