Category Archives: Sports

Baseball

Come Back Home, Bobby V, All Is Forgiven

Subway Series. Hurrah. Fun time.

I have a feeling fans of both teams are greeting this annual Media Splooge-Fest with the same amount of (non)enthusiasm that Willy Wonka displayed when Augustus Gloop fell in the river of chocolate. (“Help. Police. Murder.”) Blame it on whatever you like–injury, malaise, bad weather, allergies, the bossa nova–but neither the Mets nor the Yankees are bringing their A-game on a daily basis. Hell, at this point I’d settle for somewhere between M and Q.

I’ll say this for the Yankees, though: they actually look like they might care about the game of baseball. They’re just not very good at it right now. And though they just lost 3 out of 4, they did so on the road to the amazingly hot Tampa Bay Rays.

Contrast that with the Mets, who just lost 3 out of 4 at home to a Washington Nationals team that, against every other team in the majors, looks like the Keystone Kops via the Special Olympics. And while dropping these games, the Mets looked as if they’d rather be doing anything else than be paid millions of dollars to play a kids’ game.

Witness the series finale, in which they made Jason Bergmann–fresh off the disabled list, owner of an ugly double-digit ERA–look like Walter effin’ Johnson. Mike Pelfrey had a surprisingly strong start, giving up just one run in 7+ innings of work–and lost. The Mets put the tying run into scoring position in the eighth and ninth innings, only to see it erased both times on boneheaded running plays that had to be seen to be believed. And even if you’d witnessed these Crimes Against Baseball as they happened, you wouldn’t be able to fathom how an adult who plays baseball for a living could do something so profoundly moronic.

And just to make sure that the team would go into their most scrutinized series of the year with the maximum amount of turmoil, Billy Wagner blew up over the ninja-like qualities of some of his teammates. Country Time can always be counted on to rush to the scene of a raging fire just in time to pour gasoline on it.

To try and distract myself from this state of affairs last night, I watched a documentary I’d DVR’ed: The Zen of Bobby V, wherein three NYU film students followed ex-Mets skipper Bobby Valentine over the 2007 season, his fourth managing the Chiba Lotte Marines in the Japanese major leagues (the NPB). This didn’t really help my mood, because the movie made me nostalgic for the late 1990s/early 2000s Mets, teams that were not as talented as the current crop but certainly played with more passion.
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Baseball, Pointless Nostalgia, Videocracy

Roger That

New Site Update: Them YouTube clips below will totally not work. Not sure who’s to blame, MLB or the Rocket. In either case, this post is provided for historical purposes  only.

When I was an MFA student, one of my workshop leaders, a writer of some renown (brag), told me that villains must be understood. Our class was wondering out loud if there could ever be a Great Bush Era Novel. He said that if such a novel were ever written, it couldn’t be an angry screed or political tract.

Even if you were no fan of George W. Bush (which I doubt anyone in the room was), your book couldn’t succeed on blind hatred. You could not portray Bush as a mustache-twirling Snidely Whiplash-type, or an incurious dolt. For such a book to work, he said, you would have to find some way to sympathize with him. Anything less would both fail as fiction and
trivialize an entire administration.

That doesn’t mean pardoning or condoning The Evil That Men Do. But villains in black hats are boring. Gray is much better, if scarier, because it makes us realize that given the right circumstances, virtually anyone can find themselves doing unspeakable things.

I dredge this up in the wake of the Roger Clemens debacle. Anyone who reads this site should know my feelings on the Rocket. I’ve poked him with a stick once or twice. Several times, in fact. In my mental Hall of Infamy, he’s one of a very select group of people I’d like to go away and never see again. If he became a hermit and lived out the rest of his days in a cave somewhere, I wouldn’t shed a tear.

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Football

Up the Middle with Skitch Hanson: A Date with Density

Today, Scratchbomb hands over the reins to nationally syndicated sports columnist Skitch Hanson, as we’ve done many times before. You may know him as the author of the highly popular column “Up The Middle.” You may also have read his best-selling books “What I Really Meant Was… ” and “The Top 100 Lists of Top 100 Sports Lists “. He’s also a frequent guest on ESPN’s sportswriters panel show Who’s the Loudest? Without further ado, here’s Skitch.

Last year’s Super Bowl pitted two black coaches against one another for the first time, and in so doing, completely eliminated all traces of racism from our country. This Sunday, we will witness another clash, one even more historic: a clash of destinies.

I asked a prominent scientist who asked to remain nameless, how do you determine which team’s destiny is greater? How do you measure the surface area of fate? What is the body mass index of karma and kismet?

He told me that all of these things are ephemeral concepts and therefore immeasurable. So I asked him, about the teams’ density ? That sounds like “destiny”. You can measure that, right?

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