Sports Shorts
This is going to be another of those random thoughts collections I have from time to time, mostly dealing with sports so it's convenient to put them all together. Also, my summer teaching job is leaving me mentally exhausted so this is probably gonna devolve into rambling... and likely full of grammatical errors.
We have reached the baseball All-Star break, and it's as good a time as any to review the picks I made... since I only made them about 3 weeks ago. No seriously, I was late on this, and I proved once again why I have to predict the baseball season before it starts, rather than take a snapshot in May and think that things won't change. In short, I may have been wrong about the Braves. In fact, as Jim Joyce would say, I kicked the sh-- out of that call. I said (with much confidence) that they were a last-place team, mailing it in for their lame-duck manager, and they would put it together and play hard next year when they had a new guy at the helm. Instead, Atlanta decided to rally for the soon-to-retire Bobby Cox, and despite the fact that their roster screams "last-place team" (hence, my prediction), they have the best record in the National League and are reminding Mets fans like myself what 1999 and 2000 were like. Although, I agree with many who think that Braves utility man Omar Infante did not deserve to make the All-Star team. I dub him the "Accidental All-Star"... he doesn't even have a regular position, does not have enough at-bats to qualify for the batting title, and apparently only made the team because of a stupid new rule that says one player on either side can re-enter the game if need be (like back in Little League). The rule doesn't belong, and neither does Infante.
Meanwhile, the Mets are fading out of the picture. An optimist would look at Sunday's win over the Braves and say, "Well, we're only 4 games out, we could trade for someone at the deadline and make a run." I look at it and see that we almost got swept by Atlanta (as usual), we played our best baseball of the year in June and never caught the Braves because they kept on winning, and we just dropped 4 of 6 at home. Also, Carlos Beltran is about to come back. He's certainly a gifted player, no doubt, he can help us offensively, but he is a clubhouse cancer. Remember in 2008 when Willie Randolph got fired, the media looked for someone to rally the team together, and nobody stood up and took the role. Yeah, that was Beltran's Mets, that was Carlos Delgado's Mets. If we're playing great, we just cruise. If we're playing poorly, we shrug and let things spiral downward. No leadership. David Wright has become the leader now in Beltran's absence, Jeff Francoeur has become a leader for this team, and Angel Pagan is 5th in the NL in batting right now. Are we really going to tell Pagan to take a seat now? Are we really going to tell Frenchy that he has to sit so that Mr. "I Never Hustle After a Fly Ball Because I Knocked Heads With Mike Cameron in '05" can go back to loafing around the cavernous Citi Field outfield?
Here's what you do with Beltran: Start him on the West Coast trip so he can get some at-bats and show everyone he's healthy and good to go... then you TRADE HIM. Yes, it will be tough to unload his salary on another team, but what contender wouldn't want his bat in their lineup? Give us a front-line starter in return (Ted Lilly or Javier Vazquez would do just nicely) and he's yours. Let him mess up YOUR clubhouse. If we dump Beltran and make a run, I'll be quite pleased. Otherwise, it's the original goal for 2010: just finish above .500.
We lost George Steinbrenner today. Now we can certainly pin a lot of the evils of the game on Steinbrenner: the out-of-control player salaries, the corresponding inflation of ticket prices, the gulf between baseball's haves and have-nots... but there's no denying he changed the game in his over three decades as Yankees owner. He gave us the Bronx Zoo, he gave us Billy Martin as manager (5 different times), he gave us the YES network (a.k.a. Al-Yankazeera). He also made the Yankees important and relevant again on 2 different occasions, in the late 70s when the Zoo was in peak form, and again in the late 90s when the latest Yankees dynasty began. They are the most storied franchise in the game, and when they are winning, more people pay attention to baseball. During the hockey playoffs this year, I rooted for Montreal to at least make the Stanley Cup Finals, not because I particularly liked the Canadiens, but because they are the NHL's most storied franchise, they haven't won a cup in nearly 20 years, and if and when they win another, it will only be good for hockey. As it was, we had one hell of a Finals matchup and hockey's popularity continues to grow, but a Montreal championship would also be great for the sport. The same thing as the Yankees.
Steinbrenner was not the first bombastic sports owner. We had Charlie Finley in Kansas City and later in Oakland, where he was joined by Al Davis. We had Jack Kent Cooke with the Redskins and LA's Lakers and Kings, Bill Veeck with the many teams he owned, and Howard Ballard with the NHL's Toronto Maple Leafs. But it seems like Steinbrenner is the yardstick by which they are measured today. We look at Peter Angelos in Baltimore as a Steinbrenner wanna-be who was good for about 5 years but hasn't been able to get out of his own way since. We look at Daniel Snyder's Redskins and wonder if they'll ever make a Super Bowl under his constant meddling. We look at Dan Gilbert's remarks about LeBron James (more on that shortly) and immediately wonder if that's something Steinbrenner would have said had a big-name free agent bolted on him. The man hated to lose, so he did whatever he could to keep that from happening and sometimes that may have been too much, but you can't argue with the ultimate results. Someday soon, he should be enshrined in Cooperstown. RIP Boss...
Now, back to the LeBron-a-thon because unfortunately it won't end. Any casual sports fan could have taken Dan Gilbert's "letter to the fans" as petulant and outrageous and been done with it... maybe after laughing about the fact that the guy used Comic Sans (the most easily mocked font there is). But not Jesse Jackson. Apparently he felt he hadn't been relevant in a while, so it was time to say something controversial, like his remark about Barack Obama's cojones. But to say that Gilbert was acting like LeBron was a runaway slave? That is just idiotic, and I would go so far as to say what Rev. Jackson said was itself racist. I know there are those who don't believe minorities can be racist because they don't have the societal instruments of power, but that world no longer exists. If we really are a "post-racial" society in the age of Obama, then we can do without comments like Jackson's.
And the worst part about it is IT KEEPS US TALKING ABOUT LEBRON JAMES!!! It's bad enough that the last few days have seen the usual "woe is us" media hand-wringing about the ESPN special and how much media attention is too much. When the media asks, "Why do we keep talking about this?" what they fail to see is THEY'RE STILL TALKING ABOUT IT!!! There's a theory in media called "agenda-setting", which states that when the media talk about something, we the public talk about it. Well there's got to be a flip side of that... if the media just shut up and stopped talking about something, maybe we would stop talking about it too. Perhaps now would be a good time to test that out. Of course, now that anyone can be "the media" through Twitter or Facebook (or blogs), it's pretty hard to stuff the genie back in the bottle on any topic anymore once it's out there...
Lastly, I'm gonna talk lacrosse... specifically, lacrosse and outright government stupidity. The world lacrosse championships are about to begin across the pond in England. Nations from all over the world send their best lax players to this tournament, including the Iroquois Nation. For those not from upstate New York, the Iroquois (or Haudenosaunee, as they prefer to be called, as the former is considered a French-imposed insult) are made up of 6 Native American tribes. The Iroquois invented lacrosse hundreds of years ago, before Europeans came to this continent. All of the Iroquois tribes are considered sovereign nations. It's been a bone of contention for many when it comes to tax disputes (and I've written about that here in the past), but the fact is we show them respect that was sorely lacking when we took most of their land from them in one-sided purchase deals over 200 years ago. As such, they travel with their own passports, not U.S. passports. Well, now that the new travel rules are in effect for crossing the border, Homeland Security isn't a big fan of Iroquois passports. So they told the Iroquois National lacrosse team, in so many words, that if they went to England for this tournament, they wouldn't be allowed back in the country.
It doesn't take a genius to realize that this is RIDICULOUS. And even more so was the suggestion that the players just get U.S. passports. No, that's not insulting. State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley proved a total lack of sensitivity or familiarity with Native issues by throwing his hands up and saying, "Well, we tried to help them." Then he punted follow-up questions to the nearest bureaucrat. The team has appealed to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (formerly their senator), and Janet Napolitano at Homeland to fix the situation, and as of this moment the situation has not been resolved as the team has to board their flight for England by tonight in order to make it to the tournament. This would be one time that the glacial pace and rigid nature of federal bureaucracy should be thrown out the window. The last thing this country needs is for the rest of the world to think that we don't treat our own indigenous people with proper respect, particularly when they are not allowed to compete for the world championship of the sport THEY INVENTED.
We have reached the baseball All-Star break, and it's as good a time as any to review the picks I made... since I only made them about 3 weeks ago. No seriously, I was late on this, and I proved once again why I have to predict the baseball season before it starts, rather than take a snapshot in May and think that things won't change. In short, I may have been wrong about the Braves. In fact, as Jim Joyce would say, I kicked the sh-- out of that call. I said (with much confidence) that they were a last-place team, mailing it in for their lame-duck manager, and they would put it together and play hard next year when they had a new guy at the helm. Instead, Atlanta decided to rally for the soon-to-retire Bobby Cox, and despite the fact that their roster screams "last-place team" (hence, my prediction), they have the best record in the National League and are reminding Mets fans like myself what 1999 and 2000 were like. Although, I agree with many who think that Braves utility man Omar Infante did not deserve to make the All-Star team. I dub him the "Accidental All-Star"... he doesn't even have a regular position, does not have enough at-bats to qualify for the batting title, and apparently only made the team because of a stupid new rule that says one player on either side can re-enter the game if need be (like back in Little League). The rule doesn't belong, and neither does Infante.
Meanwhile, the Mets are fading out of the picture. An optimist would look at Sunday's win over the Braves and say, "Well, we're only 4 games out, we could trade for someone at the deadline and make a run." I look at it and see that we almost got swept by Atlanta (as usual), we played our best baseball of the year in June and never caught the Braves because they kept on winning, and we just dropped 4 of 6 at home. Also, Carlos Beltran is about to come back. He's certainly a gifted player, no doubt, he can help us offensively, but he is a clubhouse cancer. Remember in 2008 when Willie Randolph got fired, the media looked for someone to rally the team together, and nobody stood up and took the role. Yeah, that was Beltran's Mets, that was Carlos Delgado's Mets. If we're playing great, we just cruise. If we're playing poorly, we shrug and let things spiral downward. No leadership. David Wright has become the leader now in Beltran's absence, Jeff Francoeur has become a leader for this team, and Angel Pagan is 5th in the NL in batting right now. Are we really going to tell Pagan to take a seat now? Are we really going to tell Frenchy that he has to sit so that Mr. "I Never Hustle After a Fly Ball Because I Knocked Heads With Mike Cameron in '05" can go back to loafing around the cavernous Citi Field outfield?
Here's what you do with Beltran: Start him on the West Coast trip so he can get some at-bats and show everyone he's healthy and good to go... then you TRADE HIM. Yes, it will be tough to unload his salary on another team, but what contender wouldn't want his bat in their lineup? Give us a front-line starter in return (Ted Lilly or Javier Vazquez would do just nicely) and he's yours. Let him mess up YOUR clubhouse. If we dump Beltran and make a run, I'll be quite pleased. Otherwise, it's the original goal for 2010: just finish above .500.
We lost George Steinbrenner today. Now we can certainly pin a lot of the evils of the game on Steinbrenner: the out-of-control player salaries, the corresponding inflation of ticket prices, the gulf between baseball's haves and have-nots... but there's no denying he changed the game in his over three decades as Yankees owner. He gave us the Bronx Zoo, he gave us Billy Martin as manager (5 different times), he gave us the YES network (a.k.a. Al-Yankazeera). He also made the Yankees important and relevant again on 2 different occasions, in the late 70s when the Zoo was in peak form, and again in the late 90s when the latest Yankees dynasty began. They are the most storied franchise in the game, and when they are winning, more people pay attention to baseball. During the hockey playoffs this year, I rooted for Montreal to at least make the Stanley Cup Finals, not because I particularly liked the Canadiens, but because they are the NHL's most storied franchise, they haven't won a cup in nearly 20 years, and if and when they win another, it will only be good for hockey. As it was, we had one hell of a Finals matchup and hockey's popularity continues to grow, but a Montreal championship would also be great for the sport. The same thing as the Yankees.
Steinbrenner was not the first bombastic sports owner. We had Charlie Finley in Kansas City and later in Oakland, where he was joined by Al Davis. We had Jack Kent Cooke with the Redskins and LA's Lakers and Kings, Bill Veeck with the many teams he owned, and Howard Ballard with the NHL's Toronto Maple Leafs. But it seems like Steinbrenner is the yardstick by which they are measured today. We look at Peter Angelos in Baltimore as a Steinbrenner wanna-be who was good for about 5 years but hasn't been able to get out of his own way since. We look at Daniel Snyder's Redskins and wonder if they'll ever make a Super Bowl under his constant meddling. We look at Dan Gilbert's remarks about LeBron James (more on that shortly) and immediately wonder if that's something Steinbrenner would have said had a big-name free agent bolted on him. The man hated to lose, so he did whatever he could to keep that from happening and sometimes that may have been too much, but you can't argue with the ultimate results. Someday soon, he should be enshrined in Cooperstown. RIP Boss...
Now, back to the LeBron-a-thon because unfortunately it won't end. Any casual sports fan could have taken Dan Gilbert's "letter to the fans" as petulant and outrageous and been done with it... maybe after laughing about the fact that the guy used Comic Sans (the most easily mocked font there is). But not Jesse Jackson. Apparently he felt he hadn't been relevant in a while, so it was time to say something controversial, like his remark about Barack Obama's cojones. But to say that Gilbert was acting like LeBron was a runaway slave? That is just idiotic, and I would go so far as to say what Rev. Jackson said was itself racist. I know there are those who don't believe minorities can be racist because they don't have the societal instruments of power, but that world no longer exists. If we really are a "post-racial" society in the age of Obama, then we can do without comments like Jackson's.
And the worst part about it is IT KEEPS US TALKING ABOUT LEBRON JAMES!!! It's bad enough that the last few days have seen the usual "woe is us" media hand-wringing about the ESPN special and how much media attention is too much. When the media asks, "Why do we keep talking about this?" what they fail to see is THEY'RE STILL TALKING ABOUT IT!!! There's a theory in media called "agenda-setting", which states that when the media talk about something, we the public talk about it. Well there's got to be a flip side of that... if the media just shut up and stopped talking about something, maybe we would stop talking about it too. Perhaps now would be a good time to test that out. Of course, now that anyone can be "the media" through Twitter or Facebook (or blogs), it's pretty hard to stuff the genie back in the bottle on any topic anymore once it's out there...
Lastly, I'm gonna talk lacrosse... specifically, lacrosse and outright government stupidity. The world lacrosse championships are about to begin across the pond in England. Nations from all over the world send their best lax players to this tournament, including the Iroquois Nation. For those not from upstate New York, the Iroquois (or Haudenosaunee, as they prefer to be called, as the former is considered a French-imposed insult) are made up of 6 Native American tribes. The Iroquois invented lacrosse hundreds of years ago, before Europeans came to this continent. All of the Iroquois tribes are considered sovereign nations. It's been a bone of contention for many when it comes to tax disputes (and I've written about that here in the past), but the fact is we show them respect that was sorely lacking when we took most of their land from them in one-sided purchase deals over 200 years ago. As such, they travel with their own passports, not U.S. passports. Well, now that the new travel rules are in effect for crossing the border, Homeland Security isn't a big fan of Iroquois passports. So they told the Iroquois National lacrosse team, in so many words, that if they went to England for this tournament, they wouldn't be allowed back in the country.
It doesn't take a genius to realize that this is RIDICULOUS. And even more so was the suggestion that the players just get U.S. passports. No, that's not insulting. State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley proved a total lack of sensitivity or familiarity with Native issues by throwing his hands up and saying, "Well, we tried to help them." Then he punted follow-up questions to the nearest bureaucrat. The team has appealed to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (formerly their senator), and Janet Napolitano at Homeland to fix the situation, and as of this moment the situation has not been resolved as the team has to board their flight for England by tonight in order to make it to the tournament. This would be one time that the glacial pace and rigid nature of federal bureaucracy should be thrown out the window. The last thing this country needs is for the rest of the world to think that we don't treat our own indigenous people with proper respect, particularly when they are not allowed to compete for the world championship of the sport THEY INVENTED.
Labels: baseball, lacrosse, LeBron James
posted by Dave | 4:11 PM
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