As I wrote in a recent post, the word "hero" is thrown around a bit too freely in the sports world. However, I heard a true sports hero this weekend.

As I was scooting around on Super Bowl Sunday, I listened to Mike Francesa's "The NFL Now" program in the car, because my brain hates my ears. My beef with Francesa is well documented. Up until this year, most of that beef was confined to his agenda-driven conduct during the baseball season. I still found his football work to be at least listenable.

But as the Jets made an improbable playoff run, he dismissed all of their accomplishments in the same snide, condescending manner he uses to talk about the Mets. When they made the postseason, it didn't count because the Colts and Bengals didn't try in weeks 16 and 17. When they beat the Bengals on the road, it was because of Cincinnati's mistakes. When they beat the Chargers on the road, again it was no big deal the Jets had taken down one of the best offenses in the NFL on their home turf.

Did the Jets draw an enormous amount of luck to get as far as they did? Of course. But who cares? The sheer improbability of all should have been enjoyed for what it was by anyone unlike Francesa, who traffics in misery for a living. It was a sickening, transparent attempt to both tweak Jets fans and get fans of other teams to cheerlead him.

The most frustrating thing about Francesa is that his medium (radio) doesn't allow for any kind of counterpoints he doesn't want to hear. If he wrote for a newspaper or a web site, you could comment on his completely faulty reasoning. Instead, he only welcomes callers who will kiss his ring.

On the rare occasion someone who disagrees with him gets on the air, Francesa merely screams at the poor guy until he gives up. I heard one call a few weeks ago where a reasonable caller accused Francesa of discounting the Jets because he didn't like them, and because their continued success made him look stupid. Francesa's voice got louder and louder with each response, and his counterpoints made such insane logical leaps they could only be explained by quantum physics. Eventually, the man on the phone couldn't get a word in edgewise and had to abandon ship.

Radio also being an ephemeral medium, Francesa doesn't get called out when he makes off-the-cuff, borderline slanderous remarks. Or when he just gets things wrong, like mispronouncing the name of Colts head coach Jim Caldwell. Throughout the football season, Francesa has referred to the Indianapolis coach as CaRdwell. Not once, or twice, or even a few times. All season long.

But yesterday morning, some brave, genius soul managed to get on the air with Francesa. This man not only called him out on his idiocy, but also made Francesa look like even more of an imperious buffoon than usual, as he mumbled he didn't "have time" to bother with getting Caldwell's name right because it was early on a Sunday morning. Yes, you work a whole 30 hours a week--when could you possibly look up the actual name of the AFC champion's coach?



God bless you, Rich in Massapequa. A man can stand up!

Hat tip to the hilarious @MikeFrancesaNY for the YouTube link.

The Numbers Game by Alan Schwarz is on my shortlist for best baseball books of the last 10 years. In fact, I'm hard-pressed to think of any that can beat it. The main reason: while so-called traditionalists deride or dismiss the sabermetric approach to baseball, Schwarz's book shows that stat obsession has existed as long as the game has. He even makes a convincing argument that baseball's number-rich nature is the main reason it became America's pastime in the first place.

The book is a brief history of baseball statistics: how they began, how they evolved, and who pioneered what. Schwarz points in particular to one largely unsung founder of baseball as we know it, Henry Chadwick. As early as the 1840s, newspapers published rudimentary "abstracts" about baseball games. It took Chadwick to refine these abstracts and turn them into the box score that we still use today.

In Schwarz's estimation, the simple comprehensiveness of the box score meant that it could (a) be printed in the newspapers without taking up too much real estate, and (b) give the reader a concise but thorough sense of what happened in the game. So the average working stiff (who lacked the money and free time to go to a ballgame) could follow a team even if he could never attend a game in person. It is probable the biggest factor in turning baseball from a game to a sport.

Chadwick also became an evangelist for baseball, and tried to develop and perfect the way it understood itself through stats. Some metrics he developed caught on, others never did, and still others would wait 100-plus years until the game understood their merit.

Schwarz also shows that every era has had its own Nerds vs. Jocks debate. He traces the roots of fantasy sports all the way back to the 1940s, and highlights a few lonely Bill Jamesian figures throughout the game's history who have, for the most part, been completely ignored by the MLB establishment and statheads alike. And he also shows that Billy Beane and his methods of team construction didn't appear out of thin air.

In short, Schwarz shows that the history of baseball's stats are really the history of the game itself. It is a thousand times more interesting than a book about math has any right to be. You can easily plow through this book in a day or two, and you'll wish it lasted longer.

Tim Tebow here, Heisman trophy winning quarterback and future NFL backup tight end. I want to use this extremely expensive chunk of Super Bowl commercial time to tell you an important story. Because I'm a giver.

The story goes like this: When my mother was pregnant with me, she was told by her doctors that she had a life-threatening health condition. Giving birth to me could have severely harmed her, even killed her. She was faced with a terrible, terrible choice no woman should ever have to make.

That's why I'm teaming up with Focus on the Family to make sure no woman has to make that choice again. No, not by helping to find cures for women's reproductive diseases, silly! I mean by banning abortion once and for all. Then, the choice will already be made for all women!

You see, life is precious, especially the life of an unborn child. It's more precious, in fact, than the life of the mother carrying that child, even if--nay, especially if--giving birth to that child will kill her. Why? Because of an incredibly complicated bit of celestial calculus. God's math is different from our earthly, sinful math. It is not up to us to judge God's math. Because unlike you and me, God doesn't have to show all his work.

Focus on the Family is an organization that does just that: we focus on the family. All families. We focus on every single detail of every single family. Where they work. How they raise their children. What TV shows they watch. Who they vote for. It's a big job, but somebody has to do it!

We also want to teach the families we focus on to pay that focus forward. By focusing on neighboring families, for instance. Scrutinizing them. Reporting suspicious families to the proper authorities. Of course, many of the family transgressions we want to focus on aren't illegal. But don't worry, we're focusing on fixing that, too.

We also know there are some untraditional "families" out there, too, headed by single parents and other heathens. We don't really consider them families, but don't worry, we are definitely focusing on them. And we encourage all of our members to focus on them, too. Long and hard, and harshly. Hopefully, your intense, unblinking focus can focus those people right out of your god-fearing town!

Finally, I want to thank CBS for having the courage to not bow to public pressure from liberals and other hell-bound folks, and show this ad. I also want to thank CBS for having to courage to bow to pressure from groups like Focus on the Family and not air that gay dating site ad.

It's Friday! Procrastinate and countdown to happy hour with these lovely bits!

Louis C.K., one of the funniest dudes out there right now, has a new sitcom in the works (Louie), which will debut in April on FX. Yesterday, I finally saw a brief ad for it. It's not much, but it's enough to get me all a-flutter.



I'm glad that this is coming out now, because his last sitcom (Lucky Louie) was unceremoniously canceled by HBO after only one season. (And yet they keep reordering that piece of bro-garbage, Entourage? What the shit?!) And as this video indicates, that cancellation nearly drove him to a very different career path.



Why do I love Mr. C.K. so much? Because he delves into the darkest corners of parenthood, in excruciating detail. As he does in this clip where he discusses the difference between boys and girls.



Or in this clip, where he talks about the horrible frustration that ensues when your child refuses to eat. YOU'RE ON THE GRID! JUST PUT IT IN YOUR FACE!



And because he also makes delightfully silly videos like this.

We welcome back Skitch Hanson to the Scratchbomb pages. You may know him from his nationally syndicated sports column, "Up the Middle". You may have also seen him on the ESPN roundtable discussion show, Mouth-Talkers! Or you may have read one of his 79 books, such as The Greatest Game You Never Saw and Possibly Didn't Happen at All. Without further ado, here's Skitch to talk about The Big Game.

Are there any more exciting words in the Sports Universe than "Super Bowl"? Not to this reporter! Except maybe "free buffet" or "case dismissed". There is no word too big to describe this event. Any newspaper man worth his salt, regardless of beat, must be there to take in the whole spectacle.

Sadly, my editor does not agree with that point of view. He thought my talents were better served trying to write a Super Bowl-related human interest story. "The farther away from Miami, the better," he said. I guess he's still peeved at me for what I did the last time I was in Miami for The Big Game.

As you may recall, that was a historic game that pitted two African-American coaches against one another for the first time in Super Bowl history. During the first Media Day press conference, I asked Lovie Smith if he beat Tony Dungy and the Colts, would that be considered Black-on-Black Crime? Some people took offense, but I think Lovie thought it was great. He even ran after me with his arms extended, his fingers grasping toward my throat, as if trying to give me a hug!

I protested my editor's decision, but there was no budging him. Sometimes, talking to him is like trying to get a word edgewise with my wife! Except my editor doesn't chuck whiskey bottles at me!

So I thought to myself, who would make a good human interest story for this Super Bowl? I can't go to Miami, so that eliminates any of the players actually participating in it. So how about players from the past? And who better to interview than ex-Saints players? Men who had to endure The Aints Years, decades of futility and embarrassment and golden tights.

Unfortunately, other folks had beaten me to the punch. I know it's hard to believe such an ingenious idea had already been taken by several dozen reporters, but it's true! By the time I started my research, nearly every person who'd ever put on a New Orleans uniform had already been profiled in one paper or another.

The more obvious targets were not an option anyway. Archie Manning won't speak to me after that time I accidentally shocked him with a pocket tape recorder and burned off all his hair (look, it grew back, didn't it, Archie?). And that kicker with the club foot refused to speak to me because I couldn't remember his name. But even the most obscure former Saints had already been taken by other writers.

The whole process was slow going, because I still do my research the old fashioned way: with a whole lot of elbow grease and shoe leather! And asking the secretary at the office where I can find some out-of-town phone books. The internet may be faster, but it can't make up for a determined, old school reporter. Plus, the last time I tried to look up something on the internet, I destroyed my computer. If a hard drive can break so easily, it doesn't sound so "hard" to me! Unless you're talking about the price to fix it, because that was definitely hard on my wallet, since the newspaper deducted the cost from my paycheck.

Finally, I found a forgotten tight end named Tommy Smith. He was drafted in the third round by New Orleans back in 1987, but never played a single down in the NFL, and retired from the league a few years later.

What a story! Can you imagine the frustration of not being to able to play for one of football's worst teams? What torture must this man have endured? How did it feel to get so close to his dream and yet still be so far away? Did he lay awake at night thinking of what might have been? And also, how is the postgame spread at The Superdome? Because I've heard mixed things.

So I visited Tommy Smith at his home in Abilene, Texas, a ramshackle little cottage on the edge of town. He had an old Chevy up on blocks, and a few sickly dogs running around his weed-filled backyard. It was certainly a hardscrabble existence for Mr. Tommy Smith since leaving the glory of the NFL, if this was his home.

Unfortunately, it wasn't his home. Turns out it was the home of a Tommy Smith, but not the Tommy Smith I was looking for. In retrospect, I had little evidence I was visiting the right address, or even the right town. But to be fair, I had no evidence that I wasn't.

The Tommy Smith I found was a shirtless, bearded man who told me to go away because he was too busy "tweakin'", then used a few words that I can't reprint in a family newspaper. I asked him who he was rooting for in the Super Bowl, and I think he said "Colts", but it might have been a burp. Then he slammed his screen door on my fingers and threatened to grab his shotugun.

Still, I think there's a valuable lesson in here for all of us. My journey to Abilene was a lot like the journey the Saints took to get to the Super Bowl. Years of missteps and blunders and testing the patience of their fans, who wondered if they'd ever pull themselves together. But lo and behold, the Saints have made it to the Super Bowl, and are one big step away from Valhalla.

I did not exactly succeed in my quest to find Tommy Smith, but I did succeed in not getting shot by a meth-crazed indigent. And in a way, I've made it to my own Valhalla. A small town named Valhalla, Texas, that is, and its Fresh-Aire Motel on beautiful route 27. They have wi-fi at only $17 a night, and an Applebee's right across the street. Jackpot!

If there's another lesson here from the story of me and Saints, it's this: don't be too hasty. Stay slow and steady, and success will come. You don't have to go chasing after the first name that resembles that of the man you're looking for, especially if that first name is found in a police report.

Now if you'll excuse me, I hear a Super Bowl calling me--a super bowl of Russian dressing to accompany my bloomin' onion, that is!

Does anyone make statues anymore? Chances are if you're wandering through a park and you see a statue, it's a good 50 years old. I don't know if the blame lies with Vietnam or the soaring cost of bronze, but at some point, the idea of immortalizing a HERO in art form became passe. If you do see a more recently completed piece of public artwork, it's likely a large cube or abstract figure, with a purposefully vague one-word title like FREEDOM or PRIDE.

Well, there is one place where you can still see a freshly constructed, representational statue: a baseball stadium. All sports refer to its stars as "heroes" when what they really mean is "guys who play good", but only baseball backs up that ethical confusion by literally putting its "heroes" on pedestals.

According to this post at Wezen-Ball, all but five MLB teams have at least one statue in their home park. Admittedly, the definition of "statue" is stretched pretty wide in some cases, as in this bizarre thing seen at Toronto's Rogers Centre (entitled "The Crowd"), or this outfielder that patrols the Tropicana Field bathrooms.

There are also a few "scene" statues with anonymous figures, like this one outside Whatever They're Calling The Place Where The Diamondbacks Play Now. (A cute idea, but the D'Backs logo on the player's uni is already outdated. Ooops!) Or this one outside Miller Park, saluting the hard working (and presumably hard drinking) workers of Milwaukee. However, the vast majority of stadium statuary are depictions of legendary baseball players.

The Tigers' Comerica Park has the most statues of all--seven--and all of them are dedicated to former Detroit greats. (The Phillies also have seven statues, but two of them are generic depictions of baseball action that used to live outside the now-demolished Veteran's Stadium.) The White Sox run a close second with six, and have the statue portraying the most recent event: their 2005 World Series title. Click here to see not-yet-disgraced Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich unveil the statue and get the shit booed out of him by a South Side crowd that had him pegged as a Cubs fan.

Surprisingly, the Yankees only have two (unless you count the plaques in Monument Park, which I do not). And they're really one large, detached statue: a rather bland depiction of Don Larsen tossing to Yogi Berra during his perfect game in the 1956 World Series. But I'm sure one day there will be a bronze recreation of when Derek Jeter drove all the snakes out of the Bronx.

The Nationals have three statues, despite only existing for five years. Two are of old Senators (Walter Johnson and Frank Howard) and one is of Josh Gibson, a Negro League legend who played for the DC-based Homestead Grays. These statues tried to be adventurous and capture "movement". An admirable experiment, but the results are kind of terrible. They all wound up looking like multi-limbed cement monsters.

George Brett's statue gets my vote as the most picturesque, as it looks over the waterfalls of Kansas City's Kauffman Stadium. A close second would be Roberto Clemente's statue outside PNC Park, which greets fans as they cross the Pittsburgh bridge named after him. Juan Marichal's statue in San Francisco is an eyeful, as it captures his unique, super-high kick delivery. Stan Musial's statue is also impressive, although his name on the pedestal, chiseled in huge letters and adorned with gold leaf, makes it look like the title of a musical.

The worst? There's none that are horrible, honestly, but a few that tip the Weird Scale. The dead, hollow eyes of Steve Carlton's statue in Citizen's Bank Park will haunt my dreams forever. Red Schoendienst's statue outside Busch Stadium is pretty great, showing him turning a double play. But in order to portray that motion in statue form, the sculptor supported him on a column of hardened Play-Doh.

But for pure WTFness, nothing beats Harry Caray's statue outside Wrigley Field. If this piece of art just stopped at his torso, it wouldn't be that bad, although his arm gestures make him look like he's trying to imitate the redesigned Jesus in Dogma. But the sculptor's acid must have kicked in when he reached the belt, because all of a sudden, Harry's pants start MORPHING INTO OTHER HUMANS. AAAAAAAAH!

I don't know what this is is supposed to convey. Harry rose to the heights (?) of announcerdom because of his fans? Or he stepped in a still wet, small-scale proletarian version of Mount Rushmore? Or he absorbed multiple twins in the womb, and they are just now asserting themselves? I really don't know how to explain this, but whatever the real story is, I think David Cronenberg should make a movie about it.

A recent post at Mets Guy in Michigan concentrated on what may be the worst Mets-related baseball card of all time (and perhaps the worst baseball card of all time, period): a Hostess-produced card for Rusty Staub in which the photo retouching is abysmal. I won't recount the story here; just click on this link and marvel at how horrible it is (and the interesting hypothesis forwarded to explain its hideousness).

The post also touched on a longtime feature of baseball cards: the hastily altered player photo. Back in the days of no Photoshop and longer production schedules, it wasn't always possible for the baseball card people to get a picture of a player in his new duds if he was traded in the offseason. Or even if he was traded the year before, since back then, most baseball card photos were taken during the previous season. And by my own amateur sleuthing, most of them were taken in either New York or LA. So if were swapped midseason and never made another trip to either coast, there might be no pics of you in your current uni.

For a good chunk of the 1960s, Topps (the biggest baseball card producer) didn't much care for verisimiltude. If a player was suddenly traded before the cards were made, they just used a generic, hatless picture, or blacked out his hat entirely, as evidenced by Rusty Staub's 1969 Topps card (seen to your right). Rusty went from the Astros to the Expos in a very late offseason trade (January 22), and since Montreal had yet to play a game, Topps--rather than find out what the Expos' uniforms might look like--scraped away the Houston logo on his helmet and called it a day.

Beginning in the early 1970s, Topps either decided this method was not worthy of their standards or hired some very ambitious/anal art directors. Because at this time, they began to document a player's new home to the best of their abilities--as ham-fisted and transparent as those efforts might appear.

When I was a kid and mired in a baseball card obsession, I bought a whole box of cards from 1977 for like five bucks. Why 1977? Because (a) that's the year I was born, and (b) it was the first year the Blue Jays and Mariners played, which at the time was the last MLB expansion. This historical fact fascinated me for dumb little kid reasons.

Topps wanted to document the freshman year for those two teams, of course. But since neither had yet taken the field, they had to improvise. In some cases, they did so admirably. In others, not so much.

Even as a young'un, I could tell something was off about some of these cards. I even recognized bad paint jobs on some of these unfortunate players. It was necessary for the aforementioned Toronto and Seattle squads, since this was their inaugural year, but they weren't the only teams treated to some paintbrushery.

I wish there was one long, Teutonic word for this feeling: a memory that infuriates you, even though it has no bearing on your life as it is lived now. I don't mean someone mistreating or betraying you, because that has a continued, negative impact on your existence. I mean something that is ancient history, something that has zero influence on your day-to-day life, yet still irks you whenever you think about it.

I'm going to call this sensation Retro-rage. I'm thinking about this concept because recently, I heard a friend of mine was looking to bolt his current place of employ. This piece of info reminded me that I once interviewed at the same company. And that memory stirred up another memory that enraged me, even though I'm gainfully and happily employed elsewhere.

Two-plus years ago, I was laid off from my job (another angry memory for another angry time). I had about a month before this lack-of-jobitude would seriously hit my family (including a one-year-old baby) in the pocketbook. Needless to say, I was quite anxious to find something, anything, very soon.

Yesterday, I wrote about stadium organists, a feature of the game that is quickly dying out. Another aspect that's already dead is one that probably shouldn't have lived to begin with: bullpen carts. Yes, once upon a time, relievers were shuttled from the bullpen to the mound in vehicles of varying size--sometimes a full-sized automobile, but more often golf cart-type contraptions.

In a weird way, the bullpen cart feels like it should be a more recent innovation. After all, today's athlete is supposed to be spoiled rotten, so it would stand to reason they would insist on being chauffeured to the mound like the fancy boys they are. But no, it was the supposedly blue collar relievers of yesteryear who were slowly puttered onto the field in embarrassingly tiny go-carts.

Paul Lukas of Uni-Watch wrote an exhaustive history of the bullpen cart a few years ago. My favorite tidbit:

1986: With happy fans spilling onto the field after the Mets' division-clinching victory on Sept. 17, Mets fan and former Shea Stadium vendor Eric Bennett heads straight to the bullpen, where he hijacks the team's bullpen buggy. He takes it for a brief outfield joyride before the engine conks out.

I keep a bottle of Sriracha in the kitchen at my office. Sriracha is also known as THE BEST HOT SAUCE CRAFTED BY THE HAND OF MAN. I don't use it too often, but it's a nice thing to have handy when your lunch needs an extra kick.

Today, as I went to the kitchen to fetch my lunch, I saw my bottle of Sriracha on the countertop. I knew it was mine because it has my hand-written note on it instructing the cleaning people not to throw it out (because they can and will throw out everything unless instructed not to).

The top was opened (it has an attached cap that unscrews like an Elmer's glue bottle) and some of its contents were dripping down the side. I also noticed that a lot more of the sauce had been used since I last used it. I'm pretty sparing in my hot sauce application, but it had obviously been applied liberally--by other people--since I last used it.

A coworker was in the kitchen at the time, waiting for his lunch to heat up in the microwave. It was unclear to me if this person was responsible for using my Sriracha. I didn't recognize him, either, because there are new people in and out of the place all the time.

I pondered what would be the correct approach to this situation. After all, using someone else's condiment is not like eating someone else's lunch (which has happened to me more than once at my current place of employ). But I personally would not use somebody else's condiments, and I felt like it was a little uncool that someone would just something that does not belong to him/her.

As I wondered what to do, the coworker removed his lunch from the microwave and left, leaving the Sriracha untouched. Now, again, I don't know if this particular person availed himself of my Sriracha. But whether it was him or someone else, he/she did so and just left it on the counter, unopened, with hot sauce dripping from the cap.

That is definitely unacceptable. So I grabbed my Sriracha and deposited it my desk. You're supposed to refrigerate it, but I'll sacrifice freshness for the sake of not having thieves and slobs pawing and mistreating it. Sorry folks, but you lost your Sriracha privileges.

I'm not nuts, right? I am totally within my rights to be stupidly pissed off about this, yes? Please reassure me.