Today marks the 45th anniversary of Lyndon Johnson signing the Civil Rights Act, and as always thinking about that puts me in the most patriotic possible mood ahead of the holiday. America can change! We'll be celebrating the weekend with fireworks, bicycle rides, parades, soy hot dogs, baseball and the beach, and hope you and yours have half as much fun this weekend. Back on Monday.
Jul 2, 2009 at 8:29 PM | 1 Comment When noted gel sculptor Cristiano Ronaldo was caught canoodling with Paris Hilton, this site offered him the advice that being Alex Rodriguez squared doesn't need to entail cubing the Yankees third baseman's dubious taste in women. Perhaps listening, the newly minted Galactico has now decided to take things to the next level entirely.
Jul 2, 2009 at 10:37 AM | Post a Comment As part of this site's continuing quest to bring you only that material most relevant to sports and life, we present the following giant image from the Library of Congress's website, which is up there with NASA's as an argument for not bitterly resenting tax day. Note the caption:
Jul 1, 2009 at 2:21 PM | 1 Comment I was never convinced that Lastings Milledge was all that great a prospect. Controversies real and contrived aside, you generally need to be really good at hitting for average, hitting for power or defense to star in the outfield, and when he was coming up through the minors he never showed any real sign that he was going to be especially good at any one of those. A .350/.450 outfielder with some speed who can fake it in center, plays for peanuts and might have a really nice All Star year or two in him is hardly worthless, of course, but on the other hand that basically describes a slightly better Jay Payton.
Still, if you'd told me two years ago that Milledge would represent something like the light end in a trade involving Nyjer Morgan I straight out wouldn't have believed you. Check the linked Fangraphs pages and you'll note that per UZR there's about 40 runs per 150 games worth of difference between their defensive performances in their careers. That's doubtless exaggerated (sample size!), but Morgan is an absolutely terrific outfielder and Milledge really isn't. When you add in that he's injury prone, obnoxious trying, hasn't been any better a hitter than Morgan (.318 vs. 322) per wOBA, and even has more service time, the five years worth of difference between them doesn't count for all that much. I wouldn't say Pittsburgh lost the deal—Milledge still has some upside potential, whereas Morgan is as good as he's ever going to be—but in an absolute sense Morgan is likely the more valuable property.
Of course if being a slightly better Jay Payton doesn't pan out, L-Millz can always go for being a slightly better Flo Rida. As far as I know Nyjer Morgan can't make the same boast!
Jun 30, 2009 at 4:07 PM | 3 Comments So it looks like Carlos Beltan hasn't suffered a potentially career ending injury after all, in a rare bit of good news for the Mets. A deep bone bruise is still no joke, though, and Beltran is getting a bit older, which raises the question in my mind of whether the Mets should consider moving him to right field on his return. Fernando Martinez has looked pretty slick in center so far, and you'd hardly be wasting Beltran in right given Citi Field's dimensions. Tom Tango has also made a pretty convincing argument (sorry for lack of cite, as I can't find it right now) that you lose nearly nothing playing a center fielder in a corner, as increased range makes up for diminished chances, so that it more or less all comes out in the wash. If playing him at a slightly less demanding position would lead to a slightly better chance of him staying healthy at a minimal loss of value it would seem worth thinking about seriously.
Jun 30, 2009 at 12:05 PM | 1 Comment There's some fair discussion over at Fack Youk and Shysterball about whether or not it was hypocritical of me to link a list, since convincingly debunked, of 2003 drug test failures last night. Obviously I don't think so, but it's worth explaining why.
I don't, first, think it adds credibility to this sort of list to link to it and discuss it. Obviously if someone I know passed on that list to me confidentally I'd talk to one of my editors and start checking the facts rather than just putting it online with some chin-stroking attached to it. Information that's already out there, though, being linked on various Twitter feeds and such, isn't really worth the resources involved in an actual investigation—in the end it's just something some anonymous guy posted on the Internet—but should still be openly discussed. The more eyes that are on it, the greater the chances of it being quickly exposed if it's a fraud, and that happened here—a commenter pointed out a very good reason to think it's a hoax, I updated the post to that effect, and now consider its authenticity a dead issue. As much as I hate to use the phrase, sunshine really is the best disinfectant.
Second, what I was criticizing here, in a post to which Jay at Fack Youk links, is basically a framing device. I think that generally speaking professional writers should write more freely about online rumors, at least so long as they clearly label them as such, and shouldn't feel the need to do so under various pretexts such as there being 'controversies' about this or that. Whether or not we like it very much, we live in a world where anonymous people can publish things that are potentially very harmful to other people's reputations, and I don't think the proper response always involves pretending that these things don't exist; sometimes it involves exposing them. This is all rather provisional, but it's a new world and everyone's making it up as they go along. In any event, the point here wasn't to traffic in sleazy rumors and if anyone thought it was, I'd be mortified. That's not what this site is about.
Jun 30, 2009 at 9:28 AM | 1 Comment If you're interested, some guy on the Internet posted what is purported to be a list of the 2003 drug test failures, which I pass on not because I want to give the list credibility—surely the fact that some guy on the Internet posted it lends it credibility to spare—but because it's floating around in the ether and is interesting. (Maybe some time when I'm about to stick my head in an oven I'll cobble up a 2,000 word post on journalistic ethics and the 'it's out there' principle, but I think for now it's enough to say it's out there.) Without passing any judgment on whether the list is accurate or not, or getting into the much larger, more important issue of how any names from the supposedly anonymous 2003 tests have leaked at all, there's nothing about it that's ridiculous on its face. A thorough but not comprehensive spot check reveals that these players all seem to have been in the majors in 2003, for instance, and if it's fake someone did some real work on it. I note, as an example, that in one of the multiple similar but not identical versions floating around one player is listed twice, in among two different teams he played for that year. That's detail. (Or really shoddy work, of course!) This also is not the fake list that got out the morning the Mitchell report was released, by the way—that's here and is entirely different.
Should this list or something reasonably close prove real—and there are some names on it that would genuinely shock and even disappoint me, which is saying something—it would be a good thing for baseball. If some of the game's more respected figures, people whom really no one suspected, turn out to have been users, the lesson will probably be less that they were frauds than that use was so pervasive that even some of the game's more respected figures were using. This might at last make people understand that drug use in baseball is less about morals than game theory, the fact that an unenforced ban is really implicit permission, and the fact that players seem to think drugs work—in all, that it's a chronic not an acute problem, one that can't be fixed or cleansed from the game with some grand act of contrition, redemption or punishment.
UPDATE: As pointed out in a comment: 'The list is a fake. It doesn't include Jason Grimsley, and we know it should as we know from his 2006 court documents that Grimsley failed that drug test in 2003.'
Jun 29, 2009 at 10:01 PM | 9 Comments Cal's 400 Liquors at Wells and Van Buren is not only a nice bit of old Chicago and terrific liquor store/watering hole/venue (their home page cues up the Mekons for pete's sakes, how could you not love this place?), but I can now attest that if you lose an extremely expensive telephone with a lot of contact information for famous people there, the only thing they'll do with it is call you and tell you that it's safe and sound behind the counter. So whether you live here or just come through every so often I'd recommend putting a visit on your agenda.
Jun 29, 2009 at 10:43 AM | Post a Comment As I've written before, Steve Phillips' announcing schtick doesn't outrage me, but it's induced more than the odd eye roll from this direction, and I'll be taking a drink every time he claims David Wright isn't having a good year, every time he blames Omar Minaya for guys like Jose Reyes getting hurt, every time he tells some inane story about Fred Wilpon, every time he intimates he'd be doing a better job running the Mets than the people who are actually doing so, every time he puts the team's failure to be doing better than two games out down to clubhouse problems/atmospherics rather than the shortstop, first baseman, center fielder, no. 2 and no. 3 starters and top setup man being hurt, and chugging if he mentions Mo Vaughn or Jeromy Burnitz. My liver will check in later.
UPDATE: I am shockingly sober. Maybe Phillips heard the anguished outcry of the Mets-loving masses! On to the Mets defense drinking game, I suppose.
Jun 28, 2009 at 7:03 PM | Post a Comment 
UPDATE: What US Soccer presumably wants to hear: As soon as Landon Donovan scored to make it 2-0, my four-year-old son grabbed his soccer ball and started juggling it and scoring goals in the living room.
Jun 28, 2009 at 11:04 AM | 1 Comment 1) What do you make of Derrek Lee's bat speed when he's late by about an hour on a high Mark Buehrle fastball?
2) Is the Scott Podsednik thing stranger than the Mark DeRosa thing?
3) If Jermaine Dye, Jim Thome, Paul Konerko and A.J. Pierzynski had a footrace, what would the order of finish be?
4) Are Cubs or Sox fans enjoying booing Milton Bradley more today?
5) How is it that Sox Park doesn't look sold out even when it is?
6) What's with Gordon Beckham having the worst at-bat music of all time? I keep meaning to ask the guy if it's a hazing prank, like being forced to wear a dress, but I'd feel bad if it turned out to be his favorite song.
7) I'm sure I've written about this before, but how is it that that White Sox get no credit for having the best fight song in baseball, which would be the best even if it weren't performed by a group actually called Captain Stubby and the Buccaneers?
Jun 27, 2009 at 3:20 PM | 3 Comments In the course of my work I read a lot of impossibly silly things about sports, and if I wrote about them all here I'd do little else, but this, from former PNAC honcho Gary Schmitt and via Matt Yglesias, reaches such a rarified level of incoherence that I thought it was really worth passing on. I'd like to just point and laugh, but I'm having a hard time deciding whether Schmitt's apparent belief that Spain outplayed the US just because they took more shots on goal, that soccer isn't popular in America, or that Europe and South America lack capitalist democracies is most insane. Why pick one, though?
While there's something deeply and inherently inane about the ongoing campaign by self-identified conservatives to read politics into various sporting idioms, though, the best thing about it is probably how utterly wrong this reading is even if you grant the premise that which game a country prefers says something deep about its politics (as opposed to its culture).
Soccer is a game of free improvisation and relatively limited coaching, in which the work of the collective props up that of the individual genius, and its economic structure is ferociously capitalist, allowing as it does for the demotion of bad teams and the free sale of talent. Football, by contrast, is a centrally directed and micromanaged sport in which, to caricature it slightly, the individual is completely replacable and utterly subordinated to the collective, and its economic structure is outright and explicitly socialist. Why America's love for the latter makes it heroically capitalist while the rest of the world's love for the former makes it decadently socialist is a question I couldn't even begin to answer on any level.
Of course the real answer is that certain precincts of conservatism have lapsed into an unthinking and really nauseating anti-Europeanism that somehow manages to view the great capitalist democracies of that continent as outposts of Brezhnevism. Why anyone would want to deny themselves the pleasures of a great sport because they've convinced themselves it isn't ideologically pure is beyond me, but better they spend time preaching about how Steven Gerrard is an avatar of godless communism than trying to influence public policy, one supposes.
UPDATE: It occurs to me that a relevant bit of reading related to this subject would be Simon Kuper's account, in Football Against The Enemy, of how when a soccer club basically took over the economy of Ukraine it proved so ardently capitalist that it seems to have been smuggling nuclear material for profit.
Jun 26, 2009 at 10:58 AM | 5 Comments Jarvis Cocker shows the world what he thinks of Jacko's claim to be the Messiah
Years ago, when I was a manager at the Strand, a very famous bookstore just off Union Square in Manhattan, the owner of the store let on that I was going to have to stay after hours and asked me to round up some clerks who wouldn't mind a bit of overtime. Of course this was because Michael Jackson had decided that he wanted to do some shopping there, and while everyone from Ehud Barak to Tom Verlaine found it easy enough to just drop in during normal hours, things weren't like that for Jackson.
A bookstore clerk, like a bartender or a lawyer, has an ethical obligation to respect the privacy of his clients, so I won't tell you what Jackson was shopping for, though you might be surprised by how unsurprised you'd be if you knew. I will say that he was far more freakish than you can possibly imagine. Not only did he have a retinue of children, for instance, but the children had their own retinue, one member of which had the duty of following after Jackson's daughter holding what I can only describe as a burka over her in such a way that it would cover her without touching her. Jackson's security detail, for another, told us that it was alright to talk to him if we had to—since he was looking for certain extremely rare materials it would have been difficult to avoid it—but that we should avoid eye contact and would preferably not look at him at all. I wish I'd followed the instruction, because even past his surgical mask and beneath a solid mm or so of thick beige foundation you could see skin like a lunar landscape. The facial surgery, at close range, was one of the more appalling things I'd ever seen; he looked like a Picasso. The remnants of former eye positions could be seen, like visual echoes, at the corners of his face, and thick bulges of plastic or bone jutted here and there from odd angles. He smelled decayed, like rotting leather.
The oddest thing, though, was the crush of a couple of hundred freaks who attacked the metal gate outside the store a few minutes after he arrived and began shaking it, scaling it, and trying to break through it and our windows into the store, and didn't relent until the police arrived; they'd apparently trailed his limo from the Plaza to the Strand. This was nearly 20 years after he'd made his last great record, and nearly 10 after he'd broken into normal programming to tell a prime time television audience about the indignities through which police had put his penis during a child molestation investigation. I don't think one could go through one's entire life having to be defended from these people and remain human, and indeed Jackson didn't. He was something out of Hans Christian Andersen, and I don't mean it as a defense of his terrible later records or his appalling personal conduct to say that I've never met anyone for whom I felt nearly as sorry.
Perhaps the saddest thing was that having lost his humanity, he seemed to think he had gained something else. You'll note that in the above clip, he's essentially being crucified while children and a rabbi (not visible in this clip, but quite present) worship him; there's another video where tens (hundreds?) of thousands of Eastern Europeans worship a Jacko statue and thank him for saving them from Communism. From Gary, In., which may be the worst place in America, to that! Twenty four hour news coverage and ponderous thoughts on the Meaning of it from people like me just aren't near equal to the strangeness of it all. Maybe Thomas Pynchon would be; I don't know.
Jun 26, 2009 at 8:46 AM | 1 Comment Steven Soderbergh is probably the worst director in the world, and certainly my least favorite. A neutral description of his career reads like a quarter-assed McSweeny's parody of what a hack director might get up to given unaccountable critical prestige and lots of money. This is a guy who made a remake of an Andrei Tarkovsky movie with fucking George Clooney in it, presumably because John Stamos was too busy to help put a new spin on Robert Bresson. A guy who made a movie in which Julia Roberts' breasts save cancer kids (or whatever). Who made a movie about drugs in which the unspeakable hypocrisy of our fallen society is ever so subtly represented by frenetic cross cutting between drug fiends and close ups on the hypocritical liquor in the hands of the hypocrites who hypocritically make our hypocritical drug policy, and in which the ultimate soul-rending degradation for a white woman is shown to be congress with a black man. Who made a 19-hour (or whatever) Che Guevara picture and followed on with a quick job starring Sasha Grey, the 'existentalist porn star.' Who remakes Rat Pack movies with casts that somehow manage to be less talented, which is about like running an Yngwie Malmsteen tribute act that makes one yearn for the original, and yet insists on presenting himself as a haughty auteur. There are more despicable filmmakers, perhaps, and it's to Soderbergh's immense credit that he's never organized boxing matches between himself and random Internet critics, but there's nothing that assures me that watching a movie will be like poking hot needles into my brain and filling them up with battery acid like the Soderbergh name.
Anyway, all that said, I was immensely disappointed to learn that his production of Moneyball was shut down, because unlike the average Soderbergh opus this promised not to be actually unwatchable but just damn funny, a high budget Ed Wood flick for the sports geek set. And with the script out, I'm pretty sure that the spiking of this flaming pile really does count as a national tragedy, if not for the reasons Soderbergh would like to think. Check this part out:
Sounds like a good fit for the director of Traffic.
Jun 25, 2009 at 10:43 AM | 1 Comment So I've been doing some catching up on what happened in the majors over the last week. Most of it wasn't very interesting, though if I didn't have a couple of articles to work on I would be sorely tempted to get piss drunk and write a 2000 word screed on the evils of Sammy Sosa, who wronged the pioneers and the Donner party, and how Manny Ramirez's epic villainy compares to that of Verloc or Favre, and how Don Fehr was responsible for it all because although he did what he was legally, ethically and morally obligated to do and did it well I would have preferred that he violate the law in service of my frail, delicate sensibilities.
I did, though, like this bit from Josh Johnson's agent, who was preaching the virtues of the young Florida Marlin two years ahead of his free agency:
''The way that I think Josh needs to be valued is somewhere between Burnett's contract and Sabathia's contract, and probably closer to Sabathia's," Sosnick said Saturday. "Josh is that guy in two years.''
This is great because I always admire utterly shameless bullshit from agents and this is just as wonderful an example as you'll ever find. You and I may think Johnson might need to run up at least one year in which he, say, qualifies for the ERA title if he'd like to get a Sabathia-sized contract—but his agent is here to move the Overton window! The clever thing about this is that even as you wave off the absurd claim, you're still more likely than you were before you heard it to concede the less but still ridiculous underlying premise that Johnson is a truly elite pitcher. One of the best things about this sort of outlandish claim, by the way, is the ever-escalating arms race to which it contributes. What is Chad Billingsley's agent supposed to say to follow on?
"The way that I think Chad needs to be valued is somewhere between a full strategic deterrent involving a sea-based second-strike capability and a fragment of the true cross," Stewart said Saturday. "A reasonably sized fragment too—I'm not just talking about a sliver."
Jun 24, 2009 at 6:36 PM | Post a Comment It's a third of the way through the game and there's lots of time for them to blow it, but the US men's national team is up 1-0 against Spain, The Best Team In The World, and you just have to wonder how it is they can go head up with these guys while being the sort of team that would doubtless go down 1-0 to the Duchy of Grand Fenwick. Obviously the US team is frighteningly overmatched by the speed and technique of guys like Torres and Xavi, but they have some kind of edge in size, which matters a lot, and it's fun to see the realization visibly dawn on them as they bull the Spaniards around.
UPDATE: GOD DAMN. 2-0! Raise a pint or eleven to these guys when you get a chance.
Jun 24, 2009 at 2:01 PM | 4 Comments One thing about writing sports is that when you take off for Buenos Aires, as it were, you try to avoid all news about sports, which is the opposite of what other people do when they have a bit of time off. And then of course the head of the MLBPA retires, the US men's soccer team advances in the Confederations Cup in deeply bizarre fashion, half the Iranian soccer team gets barred from competition for having the gall to show solidarity with people who are getting beaten to death for peacefully assembling, the Mets roster is reduced to a charred cinder seemingly one day away from disinterring dead players, Sammy Sosa is (shockingly!) named as a drug user, etc. and you have nothing really to say about any of it.
At least my return to the balmy shores of Lake Michigan has been pleasant, greeted as I have been by the news that I live two miles from the second most dangerous corner in America and that apparently having a badge around here entitles you to viciously beat women half your size and get off with probation.
Jun 24, 2009 at 12:47 PM | 3 Comments I'll be vacationing in New York for the next week, so there likely won't be anything here.
Jun 15, 2009 at 11:51 AM | 5 Comments On evidence of this interview, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood may really not be the guy you want disbursing all that stimulus money. He does laud the Portland model, which is all to the good and shows that he's been trained to make the right noises on cue. Is there any chance that he understands what they mean? Consider the follow-up.
You've spoken about drawing on the Portland, Ore., model of transportation as a "livable community" that emphasizes public transit and walking and biking paths. But is it exportable to all kinds of cities, even the largest?
I think it can be replicated in some cities. I also think you can replicate parts of it in neighborhoods in cities. Chicago is so spread out and so big, but you could connect neighborhoods, perhaps with light rail. And they've been connected by "rails to trails."
Yes... you could connect neighborhoods in Chicago with light rail. What an idea! If only Chicago were an incredibly dense and walkable city with an excellent, integrated network of train and bicycle infrastructure already in place, people could easily live there without needing to own a car, and relatively small sums spent on improving decrepit train lines and connecting more neighborhoods to the central system could really pay off by making it so that even more people could get along without having to drive everywhere.
This man is from Illinois, by the way. I don't even want to know what he thinks about places he's not presumably intimately familiar with, but New York can probably expect a bunch of federal cash to lay in an underground railroading apparatus.
Here's another gratuitous shot of Victoria Pendleton; I understand you need this sort of thing to be a properly edgy sports blog.
Jun 13, 2009 at 2:58 PM | Post a Comment This looks to be it. $79 no less!
UPDATE: In honor of the spirit of the event I've decided to spice up the site with gratuitous cheesecake shots of Victoria Pendleton, who can true my wheels any time.
Oooh... nice Mavics!
I'll bet she can push that gear!
Jun 13, 2009 at 10:25 AM | 5 Comments 