Category Archives: Sports

Amazin Avenue, Baseball

Amazin’ Avenue Annual’s Potent Lineup

AAACover.jpgI’m contributing a few pieces to the Amazin’ Avenue Annual, a Mets-centric stat-friendly companion to the upcoming baseball season which should be out by March 1 (in both print and Kindle-y versions). I was already excited about this, but I got doubly-triply-quadruply excited when the outside contributors were officially announced yesterday, and it’s a fearsome lineup indeed.

Who, you ask? Why, Ken Davidoff from Newsday. Deadspin editor emeritus WIll Leitch. SNY blogger/sandwich enthusiast Ted Berg. Greg Prince and Jason Fry from Faith and Fear in Flushing, my favorite Mets blog I don’t write for.

But best of all, the book will include Joe Posnanski. Yes, that Joe Posnanski, the best baseball writer there is by a country mile. SI.com scribe, author of The Machine, and, again, the best baseball writer there is. His blog posts are always a treat to read, in spite of–actually, because of–their enormous lengths. Kinda like what Bill Simmons would be like if he dialed down the douche from 11 to 0 and excised the Karate Kid references.

Knowing that I’m going to have work in the same book as Joe Posnanski is at once humbling and terrifying. It’s like living on the same street as a famous architect; you feel like you have to keep your house in tip-top shape if Frank Lloyd Wright is just down the block.

So if my prose won’t get you to purchase this tome, I hope some of the aforementioned heavyweights will. And also Joe Posnanski because JOE POSNANSKI. C’MON ALREADY.

In conclusion, Joe Posnanski.

Football

Rex Ryan Laments Blown Opportunities

Thumbnail image for rex.jpgYeah, it definitely hurts to get this close and not make it just one step further. And for two years in a row now. But what’s really gonna keep me up at night is how much trash talking we coulda done.

That’s what got us here, from Hard Knocks all the way through the win against the Patriots. We just talked smack about everyone and everything, morning, noon, and night. Then we face the Steelers and all of a sudden we don’t say anything. Not a peep. That’s what killed us–we got away from our game plan.

But I don’t blame my players. I put this all on me. I had so many insults ready to go, both overt and veiled, and I didn’t use them. I took a cue from Wes Welker and wrote up a whole buncha press conference responses, all of which used the word “rape” in them, but then I thought that would’ve been in bad taste. I gotta hand it to Mike Tomlin and his team–I never would’ve thought anything was in bad taste a week ago.

And even if we didn’t go for the obvious digs at Roethlisberger, there’s so many petty details we could’ve shit-talked about. Like, “hey, what’s up with Polamalu’s hair?” or “your stadium is named after ketchup!” Maybe those seem like little things, but hey, little things win championships.

We coulda done it over-the-top, black-hat style and insulted the entire city of Pittsburgh. Maybe we could’ve downplayed the accomplishments of the labor movement. Maybe we could’ve mocked steel, maybe? “Iron, carbon, chromium, what kinda dumbass fuckin alloy is that?” Then maybe the Steelers would’ve been driven insane with rage and made a buncha mistakes. Oh well, guess we’ll never know what mighta been.

The only thing we can do is work harder. Develop better insults in the off season. Find new and creative ways to be dismissive of your opponents. Draft some athletic loudmouths out of college. And above all, never, ever stop talking. Because talk is cheap, and who wants to pass up that kinda bargain?

Football

Bears, Packers Resume Rivalry for Some Reason

packersbears.jpgCHICAGO–The entire Windy City is getting geared up for Sunday’s NFC Championship Game between the Bears and the Packers, two teams with decades of bad blood between them, apparently. The Chicago-Green Bay rivalry dates back almost to the NFL’s inception and remains the league’s most enduring, for reasons fans can not recall, exactly.

“I hate the Packers with a passion!” said Stan Cosnowski, a self-proclaimed lifelong Bears fan from Hammond, Indiana. “My old man always used to say, ‘I don’t care if we win two games this year, so long as they’re both against Green Bay’. I haven’t the slightest idea why he said that.”

Sunday will mark the first playoff battle between Chicago and Green Bay since 1941, the outcome of which has been lost to the mists of time. Footage of the contest has deteriorated beyond repair, but NFL Films president Steve Sabol insists “it was a tough-nosed, smash-mouth affair. I mean, it’d have to be, right?”

The most enduring image of the rivalry remains an old black and white photo, taken sometime in the 1930s, probably. In it, a bunch of guys covered in mud, wearing those old-timey leather helmets, fight to try and grab this thing that barely looks like a football by modern standards. The final score of this game remains unknown, but picture has come to symbolize the rivalry’s rich, featureless tradition.

“Bears-Packers is the best rivalry in sports, no question,” said Frank Kennedy, a Bears fan from Berwyn, Illinois. “I think it started with this guy who played for Green Bay a long time ago, some linebacker named O’Leary. After a game he got drunk and set a bunch of buildings on fire and almost burned the whole city down. I definitely read that somewheres.”

But it’s not just Chicago eagerly anticipating this obscurely heated battle. Thousands of “Cheeseheads” will make the trip to Soldier Field as they have for generations, for reasons that remain murky at best.

“You wanna know why I hate the Bears so much?” asked Trevor Lundegard, a Packers fan in town for the game from Eau Claire, Wisconsin. “Good, because so do I. The more I think about these strange emotions, the more they baffle me.”

In keeping with time-honored, unclear tradition, the mayors of the two cities have made a friendly wager. Chicago’s Richard Daley has put up several dozen of the city’s famous deep-dish pizzas, while Green Bay’s Jim Schmitt has promised some of his state’s finest cheeses. Regardless of who wins the bet, both mayors pledged to continue to irrationally despise the other’s football team.

“This as good as it gets,” Daley told a crowd during a Bears pep rally in The Loop. “Two bitter foes squaring off, in a match-up rife with tradition and history, the finer details of which escape me at the moment.”