Category: Sports

Commentary and news about sports and sports teams — and media coverage of them.

2011 Tour de France

The world’s most beautiful stadium – the entire country of France – annually hosts the most important bike race of the year: the Tour de France. Upwards of 12 million fans line the roads to watch the race. For free. No tickets needed. The race traverses over 2000 miles in 21 days of racing. Every year the route changes, but the mountains are a constant: racers must scale absurdly steep peaks in both the Pyrenees and the Alps before a victory race onto the Champs Elysees in Paris. This year’s tour may be remembered most for the spate of horrible crashes that have eliminated many of the top riders. Most outrageously, a media car hit a cyclist at speed, causing a horrific crash that sent another rider cartwheeling into a barbed-wire fence. Both riders remounted and finished the stage. The race goes on through July 24. — Lane Turner (35 photos total)

The Big Picture – Boston.com

This Time It Clanks

Posnanski has some thoughts on the All-Star Game and you need to go read them all. But here are some teasers:

Of course it’s not perfectly fair — nothing on this earth is perfectly fair except for the slice-and-choose method of dividing pie*.

*One person slices the pie, the other gets to choose which piece she wants, That — along with 90 feet between bases, grilled corn on the cob, Thunder Road and “the sea was angry that day my friends” Seinfeld — are the closest man has come to perfection.

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*And for crying out loud, TV announcers, I’m not qualified to tell you how to do your jobs, but PLEASE STOP TELLING ME HOW MUCH INTENSITY THERE IS OUT THERE. Just stop it. Stop telling me that they want to win. Stop telling me that they’re really into this. I was out there. I know exactly how much intensity was out there. If you could harness all the intensity from All-Star Weekend and turn it to battery power, it would not start a single Coleco handheld football game.

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Most of all: Stop telling us that the All-Star Game counts. It doesn’t count. That’s important, too. Everyone tries to romanticize the past, but the All-Star Game has NEVER counted. Pete Rose did not run over Ray Fosse because the game mattered more then. Pete Rose ran over Ray Fosse because he’s a jerk.*

Gooooaaaallll

The U.S. went on to win 5-3 in a shootout.

I was in the bar of a restaurant in Captiva, Florida, where maybe two dozen people had gathered, a few at a time, as the game got tenser and tenser. When the US women, impossibly, won this game, there was much joy in that room, the kind of joy strangers have when they realize they all care about the same thing. We had thought our team was going to lose — we knew our team was going to lose — and damned if they didn’t win. It was an amazing, exhilarating moment. Especially if you happened to be with your 11-year-old daughter, who plays soccer.

Dave Barry

I heard about it on the phone from my 7-year-old granddaughter.

3000

4256 Pete Rose
4189 Ty Cobb
3771 Hank Aaron
3630 Stan Musial
3514 Tris Speaker
3435 Cap Anson
3420 Honus Wagner
3419 Carl Yastrzemski
3319 Paul Molitor
3315 Eddie Collins
3283 Willie Mays
3255 Eddie Murray
3242 Nap Lajoie
3184 Cal Ripken
3154 George Brett
3152 Paul Waner
3142 Robin Yount
3141 Tony Gwynn
3110 Dave Winfield
3060 Craig Biggio
3055 Rickey Henderson
3053 Rod Carew
3023 Lou Brock
3020 Rafael Palmeiro
3010 Wade Boggs
3007 Al Kaline
3003 Derek Jeter
3000 Roberto Clemente

All 28 are in the Hall of Fame except Rose, Biggio, Palmeiro and Jeter. Biggio last played in 2007, Palmeiro in 2005.

[Nearly 17,000 men have played Major League Baseball.]

Did you know?

That the NCAA requires student-athletes to sign over all future licensing rights? And that those rights reportedly generate around $4 billion a year for the NCAA? And that the athletes whose likenesses and names are used earn nothing?

Some former athletes are suing, but it’s about time the NCAA was dismantled.

Best line of the day

“For more than a decade, Ohioans have viewed Tressel as a pillar of rectitude, and have disregarded or made excuses for the allegations and scandal that have quietly followed him throughout his career. His integrity was one of the great myths of college football. Like a disgraced politician who preaches probity but is caught in lies, the Senator was not the person he purported to be.”

Sports Illustrated investigation on Jim Tressel, Ohio State

“Says the former colleague, who asked not to be identified because he still has ties to the Ohio State community, ‘In the morning he would read the Bible with another coach. Then, in the afternoon, he would go out and cheat kids who had probably saved up money from mowing lawns to buy those raffle tickets. That’s Jim Tressel.’ “

Ranking Baseball’s Best Ballparks

Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight ranks the ballparks.

. . . I looked up the average rating — from one to five stars — for each of the 30 major league stadiums at the popular review site Yelp.com. It’s no more complicated than that. All of the ballparks have at least dozens if not hundreds of ratings from individual fans.

The winner by a country mile is Pittsburgh’s PNC Park. . . .

Click the link above for all 30.

Jock of all trades

Second-baseman Wilson Valdez went 3 for 6 and a walk and then came on to pitch the top of the 19th inning and get the win for Philadelphia last night. He is the first player to start the game in the field, then win as a pitcher since Babe Ruth did it in 1921.

How good was Jesse Owens?

On this date in 1935, in a period of about 70 minutes, Owens broke three world records and tied another.

Competing for Ohio State at the Big Ten track meet in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Owens tied the 100-yard-dash world record at 9.4, Fifteen minutes later he long jumped 26 feet 8¼ inches, besting the existing world record by nearly 6 inches. He then beat the existing record in the 220-yard dash by three-tenths of second, running it in 20.3. Finally, Owens ran the 220-yard low hurdles in a world record 22.6.

I’ll have what he’s having

40-year-old Jason Giambi had three homers in his first three at bats for the Rockies last night in Philadelphia; 7 rbi.

Giambi’s the second oldest player ever to have a 3 home run game. Stan Musial did it at 41. Others who were 40 but younger than Giambi with three homer games: Reggie Jackson and Babe Ruth. Nice company.

Of course, there was the required cliché: “I’m just glad I was able to help the ballclub.”

Twitter update

Most posts will be here on NMK but a few others will be just tweets and some will be both. You can see the half dozen most recent tweets in the sidebar and click on them as you choose (or click on NewMexiKen on Twitter to see more).

Twitter is just another form of communication, no more, no less. I enjoy its conversation-like nature and spontaneity. Like the larger web, much is inane, so selecting the right people to follow makes it more or less valuable. You may assume my tweets will have the same half wise, half whimsical, half wit qualities you find on NMK.