what's next Mr. December?

I’ve often argued that although not nearly as athletic as others baseball, unlike the other major sports, is the perfect game because there is no chance to Run-out-the-Clock. You must get through 27 batters in order to win a game, no matter how many mound trips, shake-offs or throw-overs to first base that a pitcher may take. Baseball is the perfect combination because of the symmetry: every major point of the game has the aura of three (three strikes, three outs, nine innings), the strategy: righty-righty matchups, double-switches, leaving a pitcher in and the pace which sometimes painfully slow leads to so much drama because there is so much involved.


Baseball allows for the only true home-field advantage which is based on rules not stadium acoustics, baseball has real strategy and being able to confine the adrenaline and being able channel it into concentration remains the best weapon for any player. Baseball has its downfalls too, it can be boring as all hell, it is too easily influenced by bad calls but most importantly it’s a kid’s game meant to be played on fields in the afternoons and instead has become manipulated by the dollar in every way.

In the mid and late 70’s, Reggie Jackson cemented his image in the hearts and minds of the fans of the New York Yankees and Oakland A’s for his heroics in the baseball postseason and earned him the nickname ‘Mr. October’. Two and a half decades later in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, Derek Jeter was dubbed ‘Mr. November’ as the Fall Classic was moved into November only after a 10 day hiatus in the regular season as the country dealt with the blow of the attacks. It was the only time that the world-series had been played in November and Jeter’s nickname seemed like it could not be overtaken for the sole reason that baseball wouldn’t purposely play the game of summer in a potential nor’easter. Well this is 2009 and we have a black president, a more stable Iraq than Pakistan and a porn industry which is bleeding money because of sites like YouPorn and XNXX and Bud Selig and his cronies decided that they can’t make enough money from April till October and now need to include another month to an already marathon season.

What disturbs me is not the fact that baseball extends for a few weeks but that playing into the middle of November is like having Hockey played in July, the feel is all wrong. Baseball of course has betrayed its fans over and over again by looking the other way as it became the ‘legitimate’ version of the WWE during the raging years in the late 90’s and early 2000’s and has spent itself into oblivion like a coked-out Wall Street executive of the mid 2000’s, so why should we expect anything different.

Last night I watched the first game of the World Series which started at 8pm which ensured that virtually no child under 14 saw the 5th inning. Which drips of irony as you still hear players refer to it as a ‘kid’s game’ while they are getting paid like those Wall Street execs who themselves have been accused of confusing their profession with a game.

Hip Injuries

In the last year or so A-Roid, Chase Utley, Carlos Delgado, Brett Myers , Royal’s young third baseman Alex Gordon and Mike Lowell have all had a torn hip labrum injury.   Baseball has been played for 100 years and this has never been an injury that has affected baseball players and all of a sudden a number of the game’s biggest names are breaking down because of torn hip-labrums.   For years we worried about elbow injuries, pulled hamstrings and ACL tears but within the last few years the hip injury has hit the sport

Lets take a step back and make some guesses to what could be causing this.    Take a guy like Delgado who couldn’t hit himself out of a paper-bag two years ago and then his number blew up last year.   A-Rod’s already been busted, Chase Utley looks like he’s stuffed his body into Lenny Dykstra’s and Mike Lowell hung out with Manny Ramirez for years.    Then lets think of what pharmaceutical options could be out there for today’s ball player and I’ll bet you dollars to donuts that there is a link.   Maybe it's time to tell these guys to start finding a new soft-spot as a launching spot for their fixes cause their bodies are would so tight that anytime a guy does something slightly out of the ordinary they pull something.  What kind of athletes are we breeding here, ones that can't even move anymore.

It wouldn’t surprise me if David Ortiz walked down the street and all of a sudden collapses into a total pile of putty as his entire hip disintegrates. 

how can you possibly compete when the best players are doing it?

So how exactly can you blame some 22 year old Dominican kid trying to make the Major Leagues from doing steroids. What can you expect out of a young player when he looks at the Major League landscape and the players who are already the best in the game (ARod, Manny, Bonds, Clemens, McGwire, Sosa, Giambi etc.) are doing steroids, HGH and horse pills. The young player can't compete with this guys when the playing field is level, how the hell can these guys compete with a juiced up Manny?

But this isn't about the plight of the poor latin player trying to take care of his family, it's about the fact that no young guy (white, black, hispanic, asian) can compete otherwise. I'm against steroids, I think it ruins the integrity of the game although spit balls and corked bats are not much better but my issue now is for the individual player trying to make the big leagues.
This is where the entire thing has to change. Either let them all do it or start doing everything in your power to stop them from doing it. I'll take major league baseball seriously when they run daily tests for steroids, blood tests for HGH and any implement a policy which says that any player who puts on 15 pounds gets a full cavity search.

As much as baseball tries to tell you they have cleaned up the sport, you know that this testing really isn't going to wipe steroids off the map cause it didn't deter a guy like Manny and he was already the most feared hitter in the game.
I'm not naieve enough to thnk that he started this last week and these guys all lie. When they get caught they all have the same canned first answer "my doctor gave it to me, not knowing it was roids" Then eventually they come out and say that they did it for a very limited time and we are suppose to believe them.

ARod says he never did it with the Mariners (where he made a name for himself and became the best player in the game) or with the Yankees (the team whose fans he is desperate to have embrace him) but only did it for the one organization (the Rangers) whose fans loath him anyway.

The sad thing is that when a guy gets busted now, it doesn't phase me. I saw the Manny news crawl along the bottom on Sportscenter the other night and thought "that was just matter of time" and my thought immediately went to Pujols, Dan Uggla, Hanley Ramirez and Vlad Guerrero and wondered how long it would take for those dudes to get busted.

If the top guys are going to be doing it and still only get a slap on the wrist how can you ever deter the young guy from trying to at least level the playing field?

In the meantime they should start testing David Ortiz for Big Macs

You got to be kidding me

The Knicks acquired Ewing from the Houston Rockets for the draft rights to French center Frederic Weis, the Knicks' 1999 first-round pick who has yet to play in the NBA. Ewing was drafted in the second round by the Sacramento Kings two months ago before being traded to the Rockets in the deal that sent Ron Artest to Houston. Coincidentally, the Knicks passed over Artest nine years ago to draft Weis with the 15th pick in a much-criticized move.


Are you kidding me.. the Knicks still have the rights to Freddy Weis???

The Green in Gang Green doesn't stand for the Environment

(you better hope the Jets wrap up before they bend you over)

So the Jets announced their long expected PSLs this week and unlike the Giants, they decided to only bend over a portion of their fans.. That sounds good until you realize that the ones that are going to get banged are the guys with the seats in the lower bowl which probably means they have been the longest ticket holders.

This is a typical Democrat plan, give the bottom half free health insurance and put it on the backs of the top half except in this case the top half can't afford it anymore than the bottom half.

The guys that are getting it are getting it worse than the fans with exactly the same seats for the Giants which will absolutely force lifelong season ticket holders to give up these seats which will then go to corporations. So you are going to sit in 3 hours of traffic, staring at that eye-sore called the Xanadu Center but I did read that these guys in the best seats will get free (no-alcoholic) drinks, here is $50,000 thanks for the free Pepsi.

The Jets promise their fans that they will no longer feel like 2nd class citizens, they tell you the new stadium will feel like a Jets Stadium but this PSL bull will all be assure you that it will feel like BankOfAmerica-MorganStanley-Goldman Sachs Park.

First they close Gate D..now this

It’s been a week of Favre news and I can finally absorb it.

First of all for anybody who thinks this was a bad move, with the QB’s the Jets had they weren’t going anywhere this year anyway, they don’t have a good young QB on the roster (you can talk to me about a young QB but that would have had to have happened 4 months ago at the draft). The Jets weren’t going to go anywhere this year with the combo of Pennington and The Kid with the Goatee they went 4-12 last year, with Pennington and the KWTG in ’08 you could hope for 6-10 or 7-9 this year. I love Chad but he couldn’t make the throws, he wasn’t making his team better and you better have a Ravens Defense from a few years ago if you want a QB to just manage the game

But more importantly, in this in city you need to win the battle of the back-pages, the Jets don’t just play 2nd fiddle to the Giants, they play 2nd fiddle to the Yankees, to the Mets, to Broadway, to the Hamptons, to everybody. And they were on the verge of pissing their fan base off more than they did with the closing of Gate D (last season the put an stop to the weekly Girls Gone Wild show at Giant Stadium where drunk Long Island slobs scream for Jersey shore chicks to show it all).

(photo by NY Times)

An important part of this is that the Jets are about to announce the PSL’s (Personal Seat Licenses, basically a one time fee for being a loyal customer which can range from $1000 to $20,000 per seat). Last week they were going to go to Jet fans and say “hey we haven’t won anything since 1969, the team hasn’t had a bonafide superstar since Joe Willie, the team you follow get treated like a bunch of 2nd class citizens by having to play at Giants Stadium which you heard about all the time from Giant fans who happily rub your nose in it. Oh yeah the team has had no stability for 30 years and if you live in NJ your tax money is helping build this stadium, don't worry if you live in Queens and Long Island you will had to deal with a 3 hour commute each way and now give us $1000 for that privilege.. oh yeah our team was 4-12 last year and all things point to the fact that we are going to suck again for the foreseeable future”

This is like ramming a wiffle ball bat up your *&% and then asking you to pay you for a new one.

Brett Favre keeps the fan-base from revolting.

Now the Jets have had a lot of press time (mostly positive) and now they have a face to the franchise, they can now sell these PSL’s to their loyal fans BUT more importantly to corporate clients and sponsorship. See Pedro Martinez as a NY Met right before they were trying to get city help for funding to get Citi Field built.

The Week that was Brett Favre in sports

Great call on ESPN radio: Padraig Harrington is the 94-95 Houston Rockets of the PGA tour..

Sergio Garcia does what Sergio does best...choke



THE ASSOCIATED PRESS/Carlos Osorio

If I ever get a chance to be a play by play baseball announcer, my shtick would be the following.. As soon as the team I'm covering gives up the first hit I'd say. "There goes the no-hitter" regardless when it happens.. First inning, first batter. "Here is Joey Smith, single up the middle and there goes the no-hitter"

The USA 4x100 swim relay was awesome but when the team that finished 5th still would have broken the World Record you wonder if these new seal-suits are the equivalent of metal-bats in the Major Leagues.

In general I think we all prefer the types of Olympic sports you only get to see once every four years like Volleyball, Swimming, Sprinting even Badminton, feels so much more Olympic than watching Kobe and LeBron or Nadal and Federer.

I wish I still had my Glenn Foley jersey, a little scotch tape and a magic marker and I'd have a Favre jersey.

Favre running his punishment lap already has 14000 hits on YouTube, wait till the TakeOnRighetti crew starts hitting the link.

Saw that the Steelers' Charlie Batch went out with an injury and they immediately brought in Byron Leftwich and Daunte Culpepper, just feels like they are trying to fill a quota here..

I know they want to make it sound authentic but does the guy who reads copy for the ESPN Radio Deportes have to sound just like Bob from LaBamba?

Where the Hell is Benigno?

Brett Favre,

Can we go back to 1998 and then make this trade.. maybe at about half-time of that Broncos game..

Where are the Jets today relative to right before I went to bed? They got a QB who is a few years past his best days but is still an improvement over Pennington. How much of an improvement? He can hit a receiver 20 yards deep running an out pattern, he can drop back and heave it 45 yards….but really what does he do? Like Pedro to the Mets a few years ago, Pedro adds credibility to a franchise who plays second fiddle to the Giants and the Yankees, and the Mets and the RedBulls and the Hitmen and everybody else. You know the Jets had to make a splash this year with the Giants hanging up another championship banner, this is the reason they were so aggressive in the off-season, but now they got a big fish.

Everything pointed to Pennington beating Clemens out of the QB spot.. So fast forward a years Favre plays OK and the Jets don’t make the playoffs, are they worse off than they would be if Pennington had not led them to the playoffs? No way, the way you’d feel as a fan would be exactly the same. Pennington is younger (32) than Favre (38) but he is not the future..


If the Jets had Matt Ryan or Brian Brohm on the bench I might feel differently but they don't, they have Kellen Clemens who has a sack the size of a walnut. He should take some advice from his big brother Roger and start manning up and start hitting people with bats and balls. The Jets know that Clemens isn’t the answer and thus it is not like your stunting his growth..

look at this guy, he looks like he plays Dungeons and Dragons for a living..and sucking at it

by the way His Fellow Oregon HighSchool football star Derek Anderson is hanging with playboy chicks...