Hey, it’s the All Star Break! Celebrate with this piece from 2008, wherein I recount how ESPN tried to turn Josh Hamilton’s very good performance at the Home Run Derby into The Greatest Story Ever Told. Smell the goodness after the jump. (Original post here.)
Continue reading “Classic” Scratchbomb: Down with Dope, Up with Hype!
Last Friday, my brother and I were chatting about Chris “Mad Dog” Russo, the former radio partner of Mike Francesa on WFAN. The two of them pretty much invented modern sports talk radio (for good or ill). Then, last year, he left WFAN to start his own channel on Sirius XM and fell off the face of the earth. Except when he busted on his former partner with fellow satellite radio prisoner Howard Stern during the Super Bowl, Russo has not been heard from in the mainstream sports media world since he jumped ship.
We both laughed at his hubris and short-sightedness. Because if people didn’t buy satellite radios to follow Stern, why were they gonna do it to follow Mad Dog?
Then, this weekend, Deadspin alerted the public at large to an epic on-air meltdown Mad Dog had on his show last Thursday (which, like everything else Mad Dog’s done in the last year, would have otherwise gone unnoticed). Deadspin pretty much covered the whole thing, and there’s no real need for me to rehash the incident, other than to just pile on. So let’s pile on, shall we?
Continue reading Chris “Mad Dog” Russo: The Gold Medal Winner in My Schadenfreude Olympics
Click here for an intro/manifesto on The 1999 Project.
I’m going out of order with the 1999 Project for today because (a) I am woefully off pace, and (b) it’s my stupid project and I can do what I want.
Also, as today’s post at Faith and Fear in Flushing reminded me, today is the tenth anniversary of the infamous, glorious, monstrous and righteous Matt Franco Game. Greg Prince’s post consists of nothing more than a transcription of Gary Cohen’s call of the last play of the game, rendered in e.e. cummings-esque free verse form. Which is perfect, because this game was poetry.
If I told you that the Yankees hit six home runs off of Mets pitching, and that Mariano Rivera came in to close out the game, you’d assume the Yankees won. As Mets Walkoffs pointed out, when you hit six (or more) home runs in a game, you tend to win. In the last 50 years, teams that hit at least six homers are 214-15. Add in the threat of the Sandman, and that sounds like a Yankee victory to any sane person.
But this was not a sane game.