Commentary and news about sports and sports teams — and media coverage of them.
Letterman’s Top Ten Signs A Baseball Player Is Too Old:
8. While playing outfield, yells at teamates to get the hell off his lawn
7. When buying performance-enhancing drugs, gets the AARP discount
1. When he’s in the on-deck circle, asks bat boy, “What did I come in here for?”
“I’m not one to wish direct harm on anyone, but Clemens is 44 years old (45 in August). The clock runs out on every professional athlete eventually – here’s hoping this is the year it happens to Clemens.”
Awful Announcing on the news that Clemens has signed with the Yankees.
“It was a perfect Ron Burgundy moment.”
Awful Announcing on ESPN’s Michelle Bonner getting the David-Goliath story backward while talking about last night’s Mavs-Warriors game. (In case you don’t know, David won in both instances.)
Nice clip from Hoosiers.
“So big, in fact, that also playing the pro-am Wednesday was Super Bowl MVP Peyton Manning. Hardly anyone noticed.”
SI.com in an article about Tiger and Michael being paired today in the Wachovia pro-am.
An academic study of the National Basketball Association, whose playoffs continue tonight, suggests that a racial bias found in other parts of American society has existed on the basketball court as well.
A coming paper by a University of Pennsylvania professor and a Cornell University graduate student says that, during the 13 seasons from 1991 through 2004, white referees called fouls at a greater rate against black players than against white players.
Justin Wolfers, an assistant professor of business and public policy at the Wharton School, and Joseph Price, a Cornell graduate student in economics, found a corresponding bias in which black officials called fouls more frequently against white players, though that tendency was not as strong. They went on to claim that the different rates at which fouls are called “is large enough that the probability of a team winning is noticeably affected by the racial composition of the refereeing crew assigned to the game.”
I doubt this is surprising to anyone.
Steven D. Levitt has a take on this at the Freakonomics Blog.
“Over-hyped Notre Dame quarterback Brady Quinn learned the difference between media fawning and the free market in yesterday’s NFL draft when he went not as the first or second pick, but as the 22nd.”
MILWAUKEE—In what Major League Baseball officials are calling a “long overdue correction of a gross oversight,” Commissioner Bud Selig announced Tuesday the discovery that Hall of Famer Hank Aaron had in fact accumulated 50 previously unaccounted-for home runs during his illustrious 22-year baseball career, bringing his once record total of 755 to an even higher 805 and putting the all-time home-run record perhaps forever out of reach.
Works for me.
NewMexiKen attended the Albuquerque Isotopes – New Orleans Zephyrs AAA ballgame Sunday afternoon on a lovely spring day. It was public service day, so there were fire trucks and helicopters and a great tug-of-war between firefighters and police — the firefighters won. Sheriff’s Deputy Adriana Escalante sang a super national anthem, authoritatively and with a wonderful, strong voice.
Front row seats along the left field line for $10 each. What a deal!
How can they sell Sam Adams Boston Lager as an “imported” beer? Boston? Imported?
The U.S. Cavalry charge didn’t seem to elicit much of a cheering response. Perhaps many New Mexicans have an inherited aversion to that particular sound.
The ‘Topes won 7-4, a pitcher’s duel in Albuquerque.
Extra highlight: A La Cueva High School kid went deep five times in ten swings in a post game home run derby. Way, way deep on a couple of them.
Said to be Michael Lewis’s last paragraph in a article written for the first issue of Portfolio, a new magazine:
At this point, the soul of professional sports is beyond worrying about: Athletes are frantically self-interested; marvelously self-absorbed; always looking for any edge, however unfair; and forever leaping from team to team in search of a few more dollars. In other words, the jock market already has the morals of the stock market.
Lewis was reportedly paid $12 a word for the article, so that paragraph was worth $636 (depending on how you count hyphenated words).
Via Gawker.
A small, but entirely nice gesture.
The Washington Nationals wore Virginia Tech baseball caps during Tuesday night’s game against the Atlanta Braves as a tribute to the victims of the shooting rampage at the school.
Nationals players wore the burgundy hats with “VT” in orange when they took the field for the top of the second inning, and the team said they’d keep them on for the rest of the game.
| . . . appeared in his first major league game 60 years ago today. He went hitless but scored the winning run.
The front page of the Pittsburgh Courier, once the country’s most widely circulated African-American newspaper, conveys the significance of that day. Click on image to enlarge. |
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Via Crooks and Liars, The Daily Show on the Duke case and Nancy Grace. Don’t miss it.
“Once we remove Imus, the whole place is cleaned up.”
For the first time in Major League Baseball history, Commissioner Bud Selig has decreed that any uniformed personnel — player, coach or manager — can wear Jackie Robinson’s famous No. 42 as the sport celebrates on Sunday the 60th anniversary of Robinson breaking the color barrier.
Robinson will be honored in each of the 15 ballparks where games will be played . . . .
NewMexiKen agrees with the Sports Prof, every player should wear #42 Sunday. After all, isn’t 42 the Ultimate Answer to the Great Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything?
What position is responsible for the most home runs in baseball history, 1876-2004?
These young women were much, much smarter and much more decent than most of the adult commentary which has swirled around them this week. We thought their coach was outstanding too. Ditto for that superb Rutgers president, who told these young women that he and their school “have their back.”
Jesus’ General deserves your click on this topic, too.
And, via Crooks and Liars, The Daily Show on Imusgate.
Playing in the NCAA basketball tournament, it turns out, is just like gambling in Vegas.
Play long enough, and the house wins.
Mark Wangrin of the San Antonio Express-News compiled his “SAT” — Seeding Achievement Test — by taking the 10 active coaches with the most NCAA appearances and weighting their games with plus-minus values. Only two (UConn’s Jim Calhoun and Maryland’s Gary Williams) came out ahead, with Duke’s Mike Krzyzewski breaking even.
Coaches received zero points for beating a lower-seeded team, one point for beating a higher-seeded team or winning a Final Four game, and minus-one point for losing to a lower-seeded team, with additional minus points tacked on for each subsequent round in which they would have been favored.
The final tally: Calhoun 4, Williams 3, Krzyzewski 0, Tubby Smith -1, Bob Knight -3, Jim Boeheim -3, Roy Williams -6, Rick Barnes -6, Bob Huggins -8, Lute Olson -9.
Or to put it another way: NCAA tournament 29.
As much as may have been wrong, especially in the past, with the Masters and Augusta National, one has to think, “Wouldn’t it be nice if everything on TV was covered so well?”
MLB.com offers live audio of every game all season for $14.95.
For $119.95 you can watch games live all season, up to six at a time.
This is a baseball story, so let’s get right to the stats.
Today is Washington’s 65th Opening Day since 1910, when William H. Taft gave us a tradition: the ceremonial first pitch by the president. Taft threw the inaugural one for the Senators that year. In the local club’s 63 home openers since, a dozen presidents have done the honors 45 times, from front-row seats or from the mound, making them 46 for 64 overall (.719). Pretty reliable.
President Bush kept up the tradition in 2005, celebrating baseball’s return to the nation’s capital after a 33-season absence. But he missed last year’s home opener — and he’ll miss today’s, too, when the Nationals host the Florida Marlins at 1:05 p.m. Except for when the world was at war, only two other presidents, Woodrow Wilson and Richard M. Nixon, missed Opening Day ceremonies two years in a row. And Wilson had suffered a stroke.
West Virginia may have won the National Invitation Tournament, but the Mountaineers commemorative T-shirts are less than championship material.
They contain a misspelling.
The “West Virginia” printed on the shirts players wore after winning the NIT title with a 78-73 victory over Clemson on Thursday night is missing the last “i” in “Virginia.”
I always thought it was West Virginny.
“He’s not prepping to cover his 33rd consecutive NCAA men’s basketball Final Four by watching the teams’ games — ‘I don’t have a tape machine’ — or by going online, because he doesn’t have a computer.”
Michael Hiestand, USA Today, who says Packer provides “anecdotal evidence that NCAA [TV] ratings must be too low because people in airports always talk to him about the tournament.”
Update: NewMexiKen was mistaken about Cy Young earlier today. He was not one of the original five inductees. They were Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth, Honus Wagner, Christy Mathewson and Walter Johnson. Young was elected to the hall the next year (1937).
Photo taken in 1939 of the 11 living members among the first 25 Hall of Fame inductees.
Back row: Honus Wagner, Grover Cleveland Alexander, Tris Speaker, Nap Lajoie, George Sisler, Walter Johnson.
Seated: Eddie Collins, Babe Ruth, Connie Mack, and Cy Young.
Ty Cobb is the 11th man. He had missed a train on the way to Cooperstown and was so disliked, the other 10 wouldn’t wait to include him in the photo.