Tag Archives: Sports

The Boston Red Sox and Baseball’s Golden Rule

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The World Series began last night, but never mind that.

A more interesting baseball story is unfolding in Boston, where just a few weeks ago the Red Sox finished playing baseball, but kept right on making headlines. (I’m serious this time, no sarcasm.)

In case you’d forgotten, baseball’s regular season ended last month, punctuated by the unprecedented collapse of the Sox down the stretch. The smoke has not yet cleared, but already heads have begun to roll. Manager Terry Francona was shown the door; the man who brought two World Series titles to Boston chased out of town amid a swirling of salacious rumors. Theo Epstein, the former general manager, will likely take the same position with the Cubs in a matter of days.

But the most intriguing result of the post-collapse airing of grievances in Boston has been the charge levied against a few members of the pitching staff: drinking during games.

A moment of clarification. There was no mid-game frat party in the dugout at Fenway, but there were four pitchers in the clubhouse. The story goes that Jon Lester, John Lackey, and Josh Beckett retired to the clubhouse during a game (on a day they were all not pitching) for a nice frosty beer. Relatively innocuous, right?

Wrong. This is a scandal. Continue reading →

NBA Cancels First Two Weeks of Season, People Still Don’t Care

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NBA commissioner David Stern announced today that the first two weeks of the upcoming season have, indeed, been cancelled and more cancellations appear to be on the horizon.

“[Players and owners] are very far apart on virtually all issues,” Stern said. “We just have a gulf that separates us.”

The NBA continues to take a dump all over its unprecedentedly large fan-base because guys like Jared Jeffries cannot take a pay cut (because they are irreplaceable). Half the league’s owners can’t make a profit and the other half steal all the good players. The system is broken and it’s not getting fixed anytime soon.

In 1999, the last time the NBA locked out its players, an eleventh hour deal was struck and it led to a much-maligned 50-game season that featured a number of fat, poorly conditioned players. That is the best case scenario today. There likely won’t be professional basketball this year and, when it comes down to it, nobody really cares that much. An ESPN poll found that a 3-to-1 majority of respondents did not care about the cancellation of the beginning of the NBA season.

It’s not particularly surprising. Everywhere you turn, major sports leagues are turning out products consistently more enjoyable than regular season NBA games.

The NHL has been trending upward since the league’s all time low in 2004, when their own lockout led to a lost season. High-definition has done wonders for hockey on television. Teams like the Blackhawks and the Bruins have brought hockey glory back to big, traditional markets from less-than-compelling locales like Tampa and Carolina. The NHL wised up and moved a cancerous franchise in Atlanta to up to Winnipeg. With the Knicks, Mavericks, and Lakers MIA, the Rangers, Stars, and Kings may well be the hot tickets in town this winter, and that’s just fine.

The NFL, the apple of the American sports fan’s eye, chugs along having overcome its own collective bargaining crisis.

College basketball, the NBA’s plucky little brother, consistently reaps the benefits of parity and the best postseason in sports and stands to enjoy a significant increase in attention in the absence of the professionals.

It won’t be until April or so, when the Playoffs should be starting, that people will begin to notice that the NBA is gone en masse. The ghost of the Playoffs will rise over the waning days of the NHL’s season and the baseball’s 2012 beginnings and a host of sad realizations will hit everybody. The last season of Kobe Bryant’s prime was likely squandered. A full year of peak performance from Blake Griffin, Derrick Rose, Kevin Durant, and LeBron James was lost. The last ride of the Garnett-Allen-Pierce Celtics and the Duncan-Parker-Ginobili Spurs was wasted. The Miami Heat and the New York Knicks were denied a chance to reach new heights.

All in all, the lifespan of a bumper crop of NBA talent will be shortened by a year. And for what? An argument over revenue sharing?

Sports fans may not care about losing October basketball, but come springtime, they’ll be longing for an end to the madness.

Crazy Redneck Calls Obama ‘Hitler’, ESPN Overreacts

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ESPN axed Hank Williams Jr.’s iconic Monday Night Football intro from tonight’s telecast after the country “star” crossed the line during a Fox News appearance this morning.

In case you missed “Fox & Friends” this morning, here’s what Hank Jr. said about President Obama playing a round of golf with Speaker of the House John Boehner.

“It’d be like Hitler playing golf with (Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin) Netanyahu… in the shape this country’s in.”

Williams went on to clarify that he saw Obama and Biden as the “enemy.” When ESPN heard about this they decided that they simply couldn’t, in good faith, allow him to sing the Monday Night Football song tonight.

But here’s the thing, Hank didn’t really say that Barack Obama was Hitler, he just put together a stupid metaphor.

Obama and Boehner playing golf together would be like Adolf Hitler playing golf with Benjamin Netanyahu. It’s just a really awful, and chronologically ridiculous way of saying they’d get along like cats and dogs.

Hank Williams the Younger was simply distilling his point of view into the simplest, most extreme form. Barack Obama is bad like Hitler, John Boehner is good like this guy, in today’s political climate they’d never get along. Hank only said it because he’s just poorly informed and angry. Who cares?

ESPN does. As if the viewing audience of Monday Night Football is so repulsed by the behavior of the fat old drunk that sings the theme song that they would simply turn the channel if they saw him on their television.

By taking the guy off the air, all ESPN is doing is validating Hank’s stupid opinion and drawing attention to it. By cutting him from the telecast, ESPN has made a news story out of this whole thing, basically telling the world that Hank Williams Jr.’s opinion on politics actually matters. It doesn’t. He sings a song.