Category Archives: Sports

Studio 60 on Roosevelt Avenue Marathon!

Hi folks, this is Sandy Alderson, TV’s Sandy Alderson on Studio 60 on Roosevelt Avenue. I’m sorry to say there won’t be a new episode this week, as NBS is airing a special two-hour edition of So You Think You Can Catch a Predator?

However, if you want to relive the exciting first season of the most compelling program of this or any era, you can have a marathon in the privacy of your own home! Just click on any of the links below to view your favorite episode(s) and fall in love with our little cowtown show about high-powered baseball executives all over again. Enjoy!

PILOT: The Origin Begins. The front office is thrown into chaos when Fred Wilpon trashes the team and a brash new owner, David Einhorn, comes aboard. How will Alderson handle it? No doubt with dignity and grace.

EPISODE 2: The Priest, They Called Him. Jose Reyes leaves the team to rejoin the priesthood. Oh, the scrutiny this brings on our beloved GM, you would not imagine! Plus, a new addition comes to the front office. Can Sandy trust her?

EPISODE 3: According to Our New Arrival. Einhorn goes over Sandy’s head and trades for controversial superstar Grant Linwood. Meanwhile, we get hints that perhaps Sandy is not the impenetrable rock he makes himself out to be.

EPISODE 4: The Pupil Dilates. Sandy’s former protege, Billy Beane, has gone Hollywood and is eager to show his old boss his new movie. Einhorn is eager woo Beane into the front office fold. And Alderson reveals a tad more about his troubled past!

EPISODE 5: Why Do You Think They Call It Dodo’s Blood? When Linwood suffers a catastrophic injury, Einhorn tries to keep his star player on the field by any means necessary. Namely, tons of dangerous drugs.

EPISODE 6: Numbers Will Lie. Brian Cashman throws his considerable financial weight around, while a persistent reporter threatens to expose Sandy’s obsession with statistics, the love that dare not speak its name.

EPISODE 7: The Secrets that Men Keep. A team-building trip turns out to be an elaborate ruse for contract negotiations with Linwood. Both Einhorn and Wilpon want credit for bringing back their superstar. Hilarious hijinks ensue, and only Sandy can untangle them.

EPISODE 8: To Vest an Option. When Einhorn tries everything he can to keep his closer’s pricey option from vesting, the closer takes the law into his own hands. Once again, it falls on Sandy to sort things out.

EPISODE 9: Drawing a Bead. Einhorn tries to get back into Wilpon’s good graces, but Sandy can not bail him out this time. He is wrestling with his own fearsome yet comfortable demons.

Up the Middle with Skitch Hanson: NFL, I Can’t Stay Mad at You

Today, Scratchbomb once again hands over the reins to nationally syndicated sports columnist Skitch Hanson, as we’ve done many times before. You may know Skitch as the author of the highly popular syndicated column “Up The Middle.” You may have read his best-selling book If You Can’t Fix It, Don’t Break It, and Other Homespun Aphorisms I Heard My Mechanic Say. He’s also a frequent guest on ESPN’s sportswriters panel show Opinions! You can follow Skitch on Twitter here. Without further ado, here’s Skitch.

When you say “summer,” some people think of sandy beaches, crashing waves, little drinks with umbrellas in them. But for me, when I hear someone say “summer,” first I wonder why they are just saying one decontextualized word; it seems odd, if you ask me. But then I think of the glory of NFL training camp. 350 pound defensive tackles running around in tiny shorts, glistening with sweat. Coaches screaming expletives through the blazing heat, while also wearing tiny shorts. Fans standing around and squinting. If you can think of a better way to spend a 97 degree August afternoon, I’d like to to hear it!

So when the NFL lockout dragged through June and July, I feared this summer would be a complete loss. I wasn’t having a great summer to begin with. First, my editor wanted a feature on the surprising Pittsburgh Pirates, but I haven’t been welcome in that locker room since that time I accidentally broke Andy Van Slyke’s kneecap with a fungo bat. (Long story short: I thought a saw a moth land on him.) Then, we had a bit of an ant problem at the Hanson household, which all started when my special fridge in the basement conked out, thus inviting the critters inside to feast on all the melted stores of frozen brownie batter I saved over the winter. All of this came on the heels of those trying two weeks when my wife locked herself in the bathroom with 12 boxes of Franzia and ordered one amulet after another from QVC.

No matter. All that’s in the past now (although my wife still is holed up in the washroom). The NFL is like that girlfriend who treats you badly, but you’ll always take her back when she bats her eyes and says she’s sorry, because…well, we all know why, right, fellas? That’s right, because she makes a killer pot roast. Of course, in this case, “killer pot roast” stands for “exciting grid iron action,” served up with a side of “Hail Mary passes” and a bowl of “thrilling playoff matchups” for desert.

Even though I’ve been covering the NFL labor situation since day 1, this sudden lockout resolution really took me by surprise. Granted, for the last month I’ve been covering it from a Day’s Inn out in Lawrence, Kansas. My editor said I should cover the ongoing negotiations between the owners and the players’ union from here. I tried to explain that none of the talks were happening anywhere near here, but he said it was the best place for me. So I can’t say I’ve had a bird’s eye view of the process, but I did get to see the historical site where William S. Burroughs first tried heroin.

Though I accept the NFL’s return with open arms, I still have to give a wag of my finger to those greedy players. If they had accepted the owners’ terms months ago, we would have never gone through this ordeal, and I wouldn’t have had to pitch potential articles to curling magazines as a fall-back plan. (I’ve read more about brooms than one man ever should.) This is not France or China or some other country where we go on strike every time the government takes away your fifth coffee break, fellas. This is America, where you do whatever your boss tells you to do, because the thought of losing your job and your health insurance fills you with a primal, bone-shaking terror.

Do you think I wanted to cover that bungee jumping competition in Death Valley? Or that cow-pie chucking contest in Bismarck? Of course not. I didn’t like doing these things any more than I liked walking into my office and finding the boss urinating on my treasured autographed picture of Angela Lansbury. But the boss makes the rules, and we all have to abide by them with gritted teeth, even when those rules are expanded to allow him to pee on your most beloved possessions.

Who am I kidding? I can’t stay mad at the players! I can’t stay mad at anyone right now! Not even my wife, though I found an empty bottle of Grey Goose and several open condom wrappers in her car. For the NFL is back and all is right with this part of my world!

* * *

I’ve received many letters and emails in the last year or so, asking why I stopped doing my “some things I think about things I think” feature in my column. To be honest, at some point I just plum forgot! When you write so many columns and drink as many diet sodas as I do, the mind just doesn’t retain information as well as it used to.

But since at least 12 of you have asked for it, here is the return of Some Things I Think About Things I Think!

  • Brett Favre: You’ve done this act countless times over the past few seasons, and I think I speak for everyone when I say, Keep it up! Can’t wait to see you in Philly or Indy or whichever team will have you next!
  • A note to the girls in Bridesmaids: You don’t have to work “blue” to be funny. Just ask Vicki Lawrence. 
  • Broccoli rabe: Sorry, don’t get it.
  • Asdrubal Cabrera is having an amazing season, but there’s something about that name I still don’t trust.
  • Call me crazy, but that Ashton Kutcher is gonna be a star.
  • Heard some Montgomery Gentry from a gas station PA system, and I have to say I was impressed.
  • Who has been better than Jamey Carroll this season? I would say several players have been.
  • Do they still make nail clippers?
  • What is going on with Congress these days? Could somebody tell me? I don’t watch the news too often.
  • Of all the high priced free agents who never won a World Series, Carlos Beltran never won one the most.
  • Finally saw that show Breaking Bad. I think it’s a little too intense for a program about a chemistry lab.
  • My wife just kissed some muscular, dark-haired stranger and left the house with him, arm in arm, as if I wasn’t even here. Must be Tuesday.
  • I often wonder what Christopher Cross is up to.

Bud, You Ignorant Slut

I’m sure Jerry Meals is a decent guy. Or at least I have no real evidence to suggest he’s not, so I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt. I don’t think he made one of the worst calls in the history of professional sports last night because he’s a terrible person. I don’t even think he did it because he was exhausted after 19 innings and just wanted to go to sleep. At least not consciously.

What I do think happened is that, with runners at the corners and one out in the bottom of the 19th, he figured the end was nigh. He visualized making a safe call at home and sending the home crowd home happy (what was left of it, anyway). He figured that if the hitter put his bat on the ball, one way or another this game was over. He figured this so much that when a ball was put in play, he couldn’t see anything else, even though every single other person in the known universe could.

It was a terrible, laughable, sorry excuse for an umpiring call, but I believe it was an honest mistake. He shouldn’t have to apologize today. Well, he probably should apologize, and he sort of has already. But the person who really needs to apologize is Bud Selig. His inexplicable clinging to antiquated ideas about replay means there was no mechanism to overturn Meals’ call. That is far more inexcusable than anything Meals did.

If you want to know why baseball has lost so much ground to other sports, this is a prime reason: It is the only sport where we actually debate whether getting things right might violate some notion of what the game means. Every decision about how to modernize baseball carries with it the weight of history and religious reverence. There are people who fear that any innovation may somehow prevent fathers from playing catch with their sons or grabbing a hot dog at the game. Every other sport–every other sport–changes its rules with insane regularity and nobody bats an eye. Baseball needs to start doing the same, the whining traditionalists be damned, or else devolve into an athletic cousin of Civil War recreation.

Last year, when Armando Galarraga was cheated out of a perfect game because of a bad call at first base, we were supposed to be salved by the grand gestures of good sportsmanship put on by the pitcher in its immediate aftermath. Oh, look at that, Galarraga brought out the lineup card! What a trooper! We’ve all learned a valuable lesson about being good sports! Hurray! We’re all getting pizza after the game!

That’s wonderful fluff for the Mitch Alboms of the world. The rest of us would rather see a game that can reverse terrible calls and have an actual sense of justice. Bud Selig, rather than take this opportunity to press for replay, instead emphasized the Albom-ian cheesiness of it all and let a chance to improve his game fade away along with the outrage. It was like saying that slamming your car into ditch taught you a lesson about not driving so fast into ditches, when the lesson you should take from that experience is to not drive into ditches at all.

Sports are meaningless without an assumption of fairness. The participants have to believe that everything is on the level to put forward their best effort. If you get screwed out of a win and the guy in charge just shrugs his shoulders, that’s not a sport. That’s a shell game.

I’ve puzzled for a while as to why Bud Selig is so hidebound on this issue, when he’s had no problem changing baseball in drastic ways elsewhere. During his tenure as commissioner, he’s added four expansion teams, restructured the divisions, moved one team from the AL to the NL (Brewers) and allowed another to wither and die (Expos), added a wild card berth and whole extra round for the playoffs (and is considering even more), aggressively took on both the players’ and umpires’ unions, oversaw the construction of the most new stadiums in the history of the game, allowed an astronomical amount of ownership changes, made the All Star Game determine home-field advantage in the World Series for some fakakte reason…need I go on? If you look at his record, Selig has done virtually nothing but alter the game of baseball. Why is replay so beyond the pale for him?

And then I figured it out: Every single one of the items I mentioned made Bud Selig and the other owners money. Bud Selig has no incentive to push for replay, no passion for the issue, because it will not line his pockets or the pockets of his buddies. Though he divested his stake in the Brewers a while ago, he clearly retains an owner’s mentality and sense of values, which essentially boils down to What’s in it for me?

There is nothing in replay for him apart from the added cost of outfitting stadiums with video equipment and hiring new umpires to man them. The cost of not adding replay is minimal and ephemeral–basically, he gets yelled at by guys like me when the Jerry Meals of the game fuck up, and that’s about it. A billionaire can handle being yelled at if it means he won’t lose any money.

Of course, there are long term costs to not adopting replay, such as failure to attract new/younger fans who can’t abide such idiocy. How can baseball possibly entice a generation of sports fans for whom the idea of not being able to overturn a bad call is unthinkable? Imagine if the Meals call happened in a football game. There’d be car-fllipping riots in the streets. The survivors would envy the dead.

Outside of Jackie Robinson, baseball has never been ahead of the curve, and it has never changed its worst, most damaging features until it was almost too late. Gambling, for instance, plagued the sport for decades before the ugly Black Sox scandal blew up. It allowed owners’ collusion to continue unfettered, which fostered resentment among the player and may have been the biggest factor in the 1994 strike (even if Ken Burns’ The Tenth Inning didn’t mention it at all). It had no PED policy to speak of for far too long, which both allowed steroids to flourish and made MLB’s response to the problem (once McGwire and Sosa couldn’t “save” the game any more) hamfisted and incomplete.

Baseball doesn’t have to exist. There’s a lot of entertainment out there competing for people’s dollars and attention, entertainment that doesn’t pull the rug out from under people’s feet with no recourse for retribution. At some point, people are going to decide that they can’t watch this antiquated shadow of a sport just because of apple pie and mom. If Selig doesn’t institute replay, and soon, the next terrible call will not generate any outrage at all, because no one will be watching.