Out Of Left Field

Well worth the weight loss (so far)

2011-07-25T16:30:00.000-04:00

Weight, BMI, body-fat percentages, who needs those? These before and after photos better illustrate progress (and probably explain why the non-paying-gig blog posts have dried up). Personally, exercising and eating clean have become high priority since mid-April. There is a lot of work yet to be done, of course.

Knock 'em dead, Kinger

2011-07-07T22:13:00.008-04:00

Once in a great while, those who Kingston sports near and dear are privileged to know a broadcast talent so extraordinary he becomes part of our shared heritage.

Nineteen seventy-eight: Chris Cuthbert broadcasts football games for CFRC 101.9 during the Golden Gaels' run to the Vanier Cup and goes on to a career at TSN.

Nineteen seventy-nine: Rod Smith enrolls at Queen's to play football for the Golden Gaels and goes on to a career at TSN.

Then for a long time, nothing happened. Until about 2007. On a Saturday afternoon of no particular distinction, yours truly happened to come across the dulcet tones of Tyler King calling a Queen's hockey game on CFRC. The result of that game has been forgotten by everyone save the players and coaches. What endures is that some typical insecure angry young man comment that I made on OOLF prompted Tyler, not that he needed the help, to e-mail asking for any tips to he could use to improve as broadcaster.

There was probably little I could impart since I work in a medium blessed with a backspace key, to be honest, but that hardly matters. What matters is that was the beginning of a beautiful friendship, one that has enriched the person who's the older of the two by a decade more than the younger individual. You are probably acquainted with either Tyler or me personally and professionally. If you are devoted or bored enough to be checking this long-dormant site tonight you probably know this is about sending Tyler, AKA Kinger, AKA Cookie, AKA Miguel Sanchez, off well as he wings west. Monday, he'll begin what seems like a great opportunity, working for Rogers Radio as a newscaster and hockey play-by-play announcer calling the action for the Fort McMurray Oil Barons of the Alberta Junior Hockey League.

No one gets that an opportunity while still on the cool side of 25 without working so hard for it that people feel compelled to open doors, like the way then-Kingston Kimco Voyageurs owner Gregg Rosen and coach Evan Robinson, my fellow Napaneean, did in 2010 when they agreed to let Tyler set up an Internet broadcast of their playoff games, which was without precedent for the Junior A team.

It has been and will continue to be a trip to have a rinkside seat to watch Tyler work on his craft, refusing to take the easy way out on any task, even though many do while trying to gain or keep a foothold in the tough-to-crack broadcasting field.

No doubt this reads like a total tire-pumping. That is not needed. Tyler has very fully developed ego integrity. It just bears putting in words that without our association, borne from a random CFRC/Queen's/Kingston/sports connection, the past few years would not have been as fun. Knowing Kinger was a conduit for keeping somewhat in tune with the Kingston sportscape. It meant having someone to bounce lines off, someone who could always be meta when it came to having a germane sitcom reference to break out with wit and impeccable timing. It also meant having someone to down a few beers with after the seminal Saturday in November 2009 when the Big Yellow Guys took down Laval. Tyler should know that I feel fortunate to have witnessed his career changes, I am glad I knew him while my professional set-up changed for the better.

None of that is profound, I know. Hey, the only true currency in this bankrupt world is what we share when we're uncool. That's from the Lester Bangs character in Almost Famous. Tyler has never seen that film, no matter how many times I have recommended it.

That's okay, though, since the kid is stubborn-to-a-fault true to himself, like most people who get anywhere in this life. What draws people to Tyler is that he has taken it to heart that being in the media isn't about the events or stories you get to cover on the corporate dime. It's about trying to keep yourself fresh. It's also about considering why the stories matter to the people involved, knowing all the while that understanding will not make you rich, it will win something much more valuable — respect.

By all accounts, Tyler has learned that, lived it and loved it on all of his stops. One mark that someone is capable of bigger and better things is those who effect lasting change before they move up the ladder. Very rarely does someone get to do that in campus media or at one of her/his first jobs. A proof of how good Tyler is the influence he managed to have in Kingston over a short period of time. The aforementioned Vees had never had live play-by-play prior to his arrival. Next season, that will carry on with Allan Etmanski calling the games.

Similarly, lots of young guys have had sports shows on CFRC 101.9 over the years. Most were just the same variation on Here's What's Happening In Sports And Here's What I Think About It — basically Bleacher Report in spoken-word form. Tyler's show, Offsides, grew into much more over its three-year run (interrupted by his stint at Syracuse). Tyler broke news with respect to the Voyageurs and Kingston Frontenacs and kept Queen's Athletics on its toes. Many informed sports fans came to see it as the city's most credible source for sports news.

One hope in writing this is that someone else comes along to fill that void in Kingston before too long. Sports coverage is a niche, nowhere as big in the grand scheme as hard news, but Kingston's dedicated sports fans are not always well-served by either of the city's two old-media outlets. That's not a slam on the hard-working people employed on the editorial side at the Quebecor-owned newspaper and Corus-owned TV station. Far from it. I am just trying to be honest about what everyone working in a newsroom knows but might not say aloud: the wild world of monetized media coverage means there is precious little a mass-audience newscast or newspaper can do for sports fans who want to know more about the teams in their backyard than who won and who lost. Most allow for as much unbridled creativity now as a box factory.

With time, that will change. All it will take a few more young people such as Tyler going out there and pushing the limits until they're the mainstream. Let's hope it happens soonly.

Ultimate baseball league: Texas Rangers

2011-03-21T01:20:00.009-04:00

The all-time Rangers should score some runs, with a starting nine that includes four MVPs and two table-setters who each on-based above .400 during the representative seasons.

The pitching, on the other hand, stinks like some of Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones' business dealings.

The Rangers have historically never been much on developing pitching in-house, so most of the best pitching seasons, by Ferguson Jenkins, Nolan Ryan, John Matlack, et al., belong to pitchers whose best work came with another franchise. Suffice to say, having Ken Hill as a staff ace is a bit dodgy.

That said, between a pitcher who threw no-hitter on LSD and a reliever who pitched with both hands, the Rangers are colourful. So they have that going for them, which is nice.

STARTING LINEUP

SS Toby Harrah, 1975 (6.6). He would have been a fantasy baseball darling if it had been invented, since the majors' leading palindrome was a middle infielder who was an on-base machine (he on-based .403 during his representative season). Sportswriter Mike Shropshire once wrote that he played an entire game in Tiger Stadium with congealed vomit in his hair.

2B Julio Franco, 1991 (7.0). Played forever and had an awesome, never-duplicated batting stance where he pointed his bat directly at the pitcher.

1B Rafael Palmeiro,* 1993 (7.4). He will forever live in infamy, period. Hit like a machine for a time.

LF Juan González, 1993 (6.7). The most forgotten two-time MVP in history. Was it Steroid Era guilt-by- association, being a bit of a one-dimensional run producer or just radiating little personality? He was a terror during his peak years.

CF Josh Hamilton,* 2010 (6.0). Still wincing at Rick Reilly's, "It's a bad night to be an atheist." Guh.

RF Rubén Sierra,# 1989 (5.7). The poor, lacking-in-taste's man Roberto Clemente, or at least he seemed like it for a few years in the late 1980s.

DH Jeff Burroughs, 1974 (5.7 oWAR). There was a time when Texas batters did not have a great home park factor; Burroughs won the MVP in '74 while losing about 150 points in OPS to the adverse winds at old Arlington Stadium.

C Iván Rodríguez, 1998 (6.6). Realizing he's still playing is akin to finding out Sony still manufactured Walkmans as late as 2010. The upshot is the longer he plays, the more it helps his Cooperstown case, since there'll be some tacit resolution over what to do about suspect players.

3B Buddy Bell 1979 (6.9). Played his entire career in Cleveland in the 1970s, Texas in the 1980s and also managed some godawful teams. Great glove man, though.

STARTING PITCHERS

RHS Ken Hill, 1996 (6.5). The de facto ace since someone has to be.

RHS Charlie Hough, 1985 (5.7). A knuckleballer who is threat to put up a double-double (10 walks, 10 strikeouts), just in the wrong sport. Kept his dignity intact even when hanging on while wearing a teal cap.
LHS Kenny Rogers, 1995 (5.2). Keep a safe distance, camera operators.

LHS C.J. Wilson, 2010 (4.6)

RHS Jim Bibby, 1973 (4.3). A human footnote; he pitched the Rangers first no-hitter, served in Vietnam and was the uncle of the NBA guard Mike Bibby. He was 6-foot-7 and his younger brother topped out 6-foot-1, so naturally the latter was the one who took up basketball.

RHS Dock Ellis, 1977 (3.6). His place in history was long assured by the time he ended up with the Rangers.

BENCH

1B Mike Hargrove,* 1977 (5.1). The Human Rain Delay himself. Would offer plate discipline and fielding, but not much else.

SS Scott Fletcher, 1986 (4.5). Trivia question: who was the first pro athlete in the Dallas/Fort Worth area to earn a million dollars a year? Herschel Walker? The starting cornerback on the 1984 SMU Mustangs? Nope, it was Scott Fletcher.

UT Mark McLemore,# 1996 (3.9). Played almost any position; also a curator of livestock.

3B Steve Buechele, 1988 (3.6). Apparently he was a poster child for the perils of paying for past performance. Buechele was kinda-sorta OK in Texas as a young player, but once he starting moving around from team to team, he usually salted the earth at for that particular organization.

C Rod Barajas 2005, (2.0). How can anyone not like him?

BULLPEN

RHR Jim Kern, 1979 (5.0). Was fortunate enough to enjoy his peak years in the late 1970s, when relief pitchers became famous, to paraphrase Sam Malone. Was once concussed by his own catcher.

CL Francisco Cordero, 2004 (4.2). There are two other pretty good closers

RHR Jeff Zimmerman, 1999 (3.6). You knew there would have to be a place for the Canadian whose career was much too short after he persevered against long odds to make the majors. His 1999 season is one of the best by a Rangers reliever.

RHR Jeff Russell, 1992 (3.4). In '89, Dennis Eckersley issued three unintentional walks all season. Why is that being brought up right now? Because the Rolaids Relief Man Award that season went to Russell, who had the most saves in the AL.

RHR Greg A. Harris, 1985 (3.1). Since he played in the 1980s before relief pitching was specialized, he'd be the long man of the staff. If he gets tired, he can always switch to using his left arm.

(* left-handed hitter; # switch-hitter)

Ultimate baseball league: Toronto Blue Jays

2011-03-18T01:30:00.008-04:00

Roy Halladay as a No. 3 starter? The all-time Blue Jays, for a franchise that only began play in 1977, have a pretty deep pitching staff even without a certain federally indicted former right-hander.

Batting-wise, we end up with a left-right-left combo of power hitters who each drew 100-plus walks. Those pitch counts will get run up. Meantime, with Roberto Alomar at second base, the starting lineup includes four Gold Glove winners, for what it is worth.

The Duane Ward-Tom Henke combo makes an appearance in the bullpen.

STARTING LINEUP

2B Roberto Alomar,# 1993 (6.4). I'm over that he was denied his rightful status as a first-ballot Hall of Famer in 2010. The vox populi of the BBWAA has trouble evaluating second basemen, who have a high burnout rate. Besides, it is better to burn out than to fade away.

By the way, remember the Alomar bio Stephen Brunt published soon after the 1992 World Series? Small world: one of his researchers one interviewed yours truly for a job as a copy editor.

1B John Olerud,* 1993 (8.4). Outside of Wade Boggs, Oly in 1993 had the highest OBP (.473) in the majors in more than 30 years. Yet he batted fifth all season. Genius, Cito.

3B José Bautista 2010 (5.6, but 7.1 oWAR). Gotta at least ask the question ... What has Joey Bats (pictured) got for an encore after that 54-homer, 100-walk season in 2010?

DH Carlos Delgado,* 2000 (6.5). The late 1990s-early 2000s answer to Fred McGriff, who he just beats out to for a roster spot.

LF Vernon Wells, 2003 (4.9). Not a cheat, as Vernon moves to the left on the defensive spectrum to provide the all-time Jays with an all-Gold Glove outfield. He was never better than he was while putting up a .317/.359/.550 slash line in 2003.

RF Jesse Barfield, 1986 (7.3). Nothing obscure here, this is the season when he became the first Jay to win a home run title. He also had the best outfield throwing arm of the 1980s, can play centre in a pinch and apparently found the Fountain of Youth.

C Ernie Whitt,* 1987 (2.8) / C John Buck, 2010 (3.0). A catching platoon of Ernie and Buck. Jays fans in their mid-30s will approve. It's okay to admit you're picturing Whitt's corkscrew swing.

SS Marco Scutaro, 2009 (5.5). A tough call, but WAR has Scutaro's 2009 season (100 runs scored, .379 on-base as the best year by a Blue Jays shortstop, especially considering he was only being paid $1.1 million.

CF Devon White,# 1993 (6.0).Two decades later, Jays sites are still doing tributes to the catch in the 1992 World Series.

STARTING PITCHERS

RHS Pat Hentgen, 1996 (8.4). You can impress people and win drinks at cocktail parties by stumping them on who had the best season by a Jays starter that wasn't suspicious. Hentgen probably is among the more anonymous Cy Young winners, but between him and Roy Halladay, this staff will keep the ball in the park.

RHS Dave Stieb, 1984 (7.7). The second-best Jay of all time, Stieb was hosed in the Cy Young voting at least once.

RHS Roy Halladay 2003 (7.5). The second Hall of Famer to have spent the majority of his career in Toronto? At 34, the current No. 34 of the Philadelphia Phillies has already met the standard for the Black Ink and HOF Monitor tests. Granted, a lot of the former includes leading the league in complete games, which is no longer really a relevant stat.

LHS Jimmy Key, 1987 (6.6). The stylish lefty who was much easier to love than Stieb. Pitched the most important win in team history.

RHS Juan Guzman, 1996 (6.5). High-risk, high-reward, much? Guzman was kind of a poor man's Pedro Martínez in the '90s, at least during the two seasons when he was fairly good. His ERAs over one six-season stretch: 2.64, 3.99, 5.68, 6.32, 2.93 and 4.95.

LHS Ricky Romero, 2010 (3.4). RickyRo gets the sixth-starter slot (meaning he's the 11th-best starter in Jays history) with the expectation he'll move up when this is revised in some future season.

BENCH

OF Shannon Stewart, 2000 (4.6). A better fourth-outfielder candidate than Reed Johnson, again.

2B Dámaso García, 1982 (4.4). The second Jay to bat .300 over a full season; later survived a malignant brain tumor.

3B Eric Hinske,* 2002 (4.0). The point of the exercise is to construct something approximating a 25-man roster. Hinske gets in since he can plug a leak at all four corners.

2B Orlando Hudson,# 2004 (3.2). Probably won't play much with a Hall of Famer ahead of him, but good to have around.

BULLPEN

RHR Mark Eichhorn, 1986 (6.4). Innings-eating sidearmer. Almost won the ERA title in '86, when he fell five innings shy of qualifying.

CL Tom Henke, 1987 (3.4). Probably one of the game's best closers east of Dennis Eckersley from 1985-92. His 1995 season (36 saves for St. Louis) was probably one of the best 'final' seasons.

RHR Duane Ward, 1992 (3.2). Was good for 100 high-quality innings a summer in those days when a team let a late-inning reliever throw that much. He even led the Jays in strikeouts one season as a reliever, which is like, what, a quarterback leading a NFL team in rushing? Too bad biceps tendinitis ended his career at age 31.

RHR Paul Quantrill, 1997 (3.0). On late-night Canadian TV you can see former Jays pitcher Paul Spoljaric appearing in commercials for a furniture wholesaler that cuts out the middleman. This other Paul was a perfect middleman in his day; his 841 career appearances is the most ever by a Canadian pitcher.

LHR Scott Downs, 2008 (3.0). A pox on left-handed hitters.

(* left-handed hitter; # switch-hitter)

Ultimate baseball league: Seattle Mariners

2011-03-17T11:30:00.006-04:00

Hey, Félix Hernández might actually get some run support. The first four spots in the all-time Mariners lineup includes four likely Hall of Famers, which raises the question of how in hell they never won a pennant during the years from approximately 1995 through 2002.

(Short answers: pitching, playoff baseball is a crapshoot and who cares, it was 10 years ago.)

King Félix leads a starting rotation that is relatively strong for a 35-year-old franchise, even with Randy Johnson needed elsewhere.

STARTING LINEUP

RF Ichiro Suzuki,* 2004 (8.1). This was about the point (the 262-hit season) when he went from foreign curiosity to living legend. The last great singles hitter is about two-plus seasons away from 4,000 hits combined for NPB and MLB, four seasons away from three thou in North America.
3B Edgar Martinez, 1992 (5.9). The most beloved Mariner will become the first DH in the Hall of Fame one of these days. Nineteen ninety-two was Gar's best hitting season (.343/.404/.544 slash line) while he was a position player, so let's use it to keep the DH spot open. It is either that or use either David Bell, Russ Davis or Jim Presley and no one wants that.
CF Ken Griffey,* 1996 (9.7). As Poz put it, Junior "was so much to watch that he he probably inspired to people to think he was better than he was." Saying Griffey inspired people to think he was better than Barry Bonds would have been more to the point. He will be a first-ballot Hall of Famer in 2016.
SS Alex Rodríguez, 2000 (11.0). The only debate is which A-Rod season to use. How did he not win MVP for leading a thoroughly mediocre Mariners team to a playoff spot in '00?
1B Alvin Davis,* 1984 (5.6). Typically associated with Bill James' concept of young players with old player skills. Davis on-based .380 career, more than decent considering his era.
LF Mike Cameron, 2001 (6.4). Three-time Gold Glover slides left on the defensive spectrum, since nobody puts peak-value Griffey in an outfield corner. This also takes care of the Mariners' eternal vacuum in left field. Cameron has never made enough contact to an elite player, but he's always been a treat to watch.
DH Ken Phelps,* 1986 (3.7 oWAR) / Richie Sexson 2005 (3.9).

"They kept saying, 'Ken Phelps, Ken Phelps.' " The irony of that is the Seinfeld-ized George Steinbrenner's baseball people were clearly in the right. Phelps was 31 in 1986 when he finally got a regular swing in the majors; he wore out right-handed pitching. He and the lefty-mashing Sexson would form a good platoon.
2B Harold Reynolds,# 1989 (4.2). Three Gold Gloves, good at getting on base, occasional boundary issues.
C Kenji Johjima, 2007 (3.4) / Dan Wilson, 1997 (3.3). A pair of good catch-and-throw types can decide which starting pitchers to work with. Wilson caught 190 of Jamie Moyer's career starts.

STARTING PITCHERS

RHS Félix Hernández, 2010 (6.0). Fingers are crossed that he did not waste the best 250 innings of his pitching life on a 101-loss team. Becomes the ace since Randy Johnson is needed elsewhere.

LHS Jamie Moyer, 1999 (5.7). Last threw a fastball in Babe Ruth league, but one of the all-time survivors.

LHS Mark Langston, 1988 (5.6). The best pitcher the Mariners had until the guy who came from the Expos in exchange for him (the kicker is the Randy Johnson deal was not a blunder, since 6-foot-10 pitchers aren't sure things). Langston probably should have never left Seattle, but the team had some cheapskate ownership.

RHS Mike Moore, 1985 (5.6). Power pitcher who started the trend of Mariners pitchers being a big part of World Series-winning staffs.

RHS Freddy García, 1999 (5.0). The six degrees of García include being traded for Randy Johnson and mentoring his compatriot, Hernández. Probably should be given the 2001 Cy Young (he had a 3.05 ERA that season) retroactively).

RHS Scott Bankhead, 1989 (4.2). Must have known how to pitch, since he was generously listed at 5-foot-10.

BENCH

2B José López, 2008 (3.9). Once had more home runs in a season than bases on balls. That is difficult to do!

OF Tom Paciorek, 1981 (3.9). It is arguable Paciorek had the best season by a Seattle left fielder during a strike-shortened season. That does not say much for the club, does it?

INF David Bell, 2001 (3.1). In the mid-aughties the Philies had Chase Utley and Placido Polanco and couldn't figure out that one of them should bump Bell off third base.

BULLPEN

RHR Bill Caudill, 1982 (4.3). Scott Boras is not the devil, but Caudill was the vessel for one of his more notorious stunts.

CL J.J. Putz, 2007 (3.9). One of the best relief seasons ever, which gulled the New York Mets into signing him.

RHR Bill Swift, 1991 (3.5). Was lights-out as a middle reliever in Seattle, then converted to starting after being part of a 3-for-1 deal that stuck the Mariners with Kevin Mitchell.

RHR Enrique Romo, 1977 (2.9). Once held the record for saves by a pitcher on a first-year team (16 for Seattle in '77). Major league career ended when his team couldn't find him. Was also traded for Mario Mendoza, namesake of the Mendoza line.

LHR Arthur Rhodes, 2002 (2.7). Do not comment on his diamond earrings.

Ultimate baseball league: San Diego Padres

2011-03-17T01:37:00.004-04:00

The all-time Padres look a little like the present-day team: deep pitching, with a group hitters headlined by two big stars.

Hall of Famers Tony Gwynn and Dave Winfield fill the all-important 2 and 3 holes in the lineup, with Adrian González as a cleanup hitter. The left side of the infield leaves much to be desired. That is what happens with a team that let Ozzie Smith and Ozzie Guillen get away in the 1980s.

STARTING LINEUP

2B Mark Loretta, 2004 (6.8). Who knew an egghead school in frozen Chicago produced a major league all-star? Loretta made the bigs out of Northwestern.

RF Tony Gwynn (pictured),* 1987 (8.1). On-based .398 or higher seven times on his way to being a first-ballot Hall of Famer; this was his best season far away, with a slash line of .370/.447/.511 and 32 net steals to go along with a Gold Glove in right field.

LF Dave Winfield, 1979 (8.4). The first 3,000-hit player to enter Cooperstown as a Padre; had a little something to do with the Blue Jays winning the 1992 World Series.

1B Adrian González,* 2009 (7.0). About to find out right-centrefield in Fenway Park is an awful long way from home plate. Should improve the lot of a below-average infield.

DH Greg Vaughn, 1998 (6.6). Set the team record for homers in a season (50 in 1998). His son is now a Mets prospect who was coached at San Diego State for none other than Tony Gwynn.

C Gene Tenace, 1979 (6.3). Obligatory Whammy! reference goes here; he was so much more than a knowing reference in Anchorman. Tenace was Gene, Gene The On-Base Machine (.388 career, .403 in 1979) throughout the '70s. He would get some starts at first base vs. left-handed pitchers, opening a lineup spot for Benito Santiago.

CF George Hendrick, 1977 (5.5). This was before he started the trend of wearing pants that came almost down to one's ankles. Hit .311/.381/.492 in '77, which was a big deal in those days.

3B Chase Headley,# 2010 (3.7). Plenty of time to move up the pecking order, if he ever figures out how to produce in Petco.

Staffing the hot corner for the Padres lends new meaning to the notion of "fraught." Knowing what we know and/or strongly suspect, one cannot include the late Ken Caminiti. Even adding Phil Nevin, whose only three good seasons came from 1999-2001, would be a stretch.

SS Khalil Greene, 2007 (3.6). Truth hurts. The most productive shortstop in San Diego's history is someone who is widely considered a washout. Social anxiety disorder hurt Greene's career.

STARTING PITCHERS

LHS Dave Roberts, 1971 (8.5). One of the all-time hard-luck seasons; Roberts posted a 2.10 earned-run average in '71 (second to someone named Tom Seaver) and was charged with a 14-17 record, since the Padres scored two runs or less in 20 of his starts.

LHS Randy Jones, 1975 (7.7). Advanced scouting has probably made junkballers of Jones' ilk obsolete. His fastball could not break glass, but the left-hander had Pete Rose's number so badly that the hit king used to bat lefty against him.

LHS Bruce Hurst, 1989 (6.6). His name is an anagram for B Ruth Curse, which is fitting for someone who was initially voted the 1986 World Series MVP before Boston blew it against the New York Mets. His first season with San Diego (2.69 ERA) was the best of his career, but a 15-11 record led to him not even getting a single Cy Young vote.

RHS Ed Whitson, 1990 (6.5). Pitched way better on the West Coast than he ever did on the East Coast. Should be remembered for helping the Padres come back from two games down to win their first pennant, not for brawling with Billy Martin in a hotel.

RHS Jake Peavy, 2007 (6.2). It would be nothing shy of astonishing if he ends up in the Chicago White Sox rotation soonly rather than never.

RHS Mat Latos, 2010 (3.3). He's just an excitable boy. Latos, only 23 coming into this season, has a chance to move up the ladder in future seasons. Made sense to include him here.

BENCH

UT Randy Ready, 1987 (5.7). Better to take a little bit of liberty (Ready batted only 423 times in '87, just making the cutoff) than include someone whose accomplishments are suspect. Ready can fill in at two infield spots.

OF-1B Carmelo Martínez, 1984 (4.6). Probably one of the few players here represented by his rookie season; he never developed as San Diego descended into mediocrity in the second half of the Reagan Decade.

UT Alan Wiggins,# 1983 (4.1). He was a tragic figure, whose fall reminds of how callous and careless society was a generation ago. Hit leadoff in 1984 when Gwynn, batting second, won his first batting title.

C Benito Santiago, 1987 (2.9). His reputation probably exceeded his actual ability, thanks to all those clips of him throwing from his knees to pick runners off at second base. The dearth of good catchers during his early career probably helped, too.

OF Dave Roberts,* 2006 (2.8). Present-day Padres coach was a sparkplug in '06, on-basing .360 with 37 net stolen bases.

BULLPEN

CL Trevor Hoffman, 1996 (4.0). As Dirk Hayhurst put it, he brought glory to "the everyman's off-speed pitch," the changeup. Also made a great entrance.

RHR Greg W. Harris, 1989 (3.7). Was a fine middle reliever around the turn of the 1990s (2.30 ERA in 117 innings in '89), but got converted to starting and then ended up in the pitchers' graveyard in Denver.

RHR Heath Bell, 2007 (3.5). From the days when he was Hoffman's heir apparent. Can come out for the eighth inning throwing some serious gas.

RHR Akinori Otsuka, 2004 (3.0). Japanese right-hander with a deceptive delivery. North American career basically ended after the Texas Rangers replaced him as their closer with Eric Gagne, which could really make a dude bitter.

RHR Scott Linebrink, 2005 (2.4). Mr. Consistency across the Aughts for the San Diegans.

(* left-handed hitter; # switch-hitter)

Ultimate baseball league: Montréal Expos

2011-03-16T01:20:00.006-04:00

The Expos could be the favourite in the NL Newbie division, which consists of expansion cousin San Diego, the Milwaukee Braves-Brewers and the trio that began play in the 1990s, the Arizona Diamondbacks, Colorado Rockies and Florida Marlins.

For starters, since a guideline was, when in doubt, put a player with the team which needs him more, Pedro Martínez (pictured), is on the Expos instead of the Boston Red Sox. The starting staff should be strong, although it leans right more than Steven Harper.

Offensively, how does Tim Raines-Andre Dawson-Vladimir Guerrero outfield (with Rusty Staub at DH and Gary Carter batting cleanup) grab you? Granted, manager Jonah Keri might have to get creative to optimize this lineup.

The infield is a weak spot. It still sucks that Hubie Brooks went down with a season-ending knee injury in 1986 when he was batting .340 and OPS-ing .956; otherwise he would have had the best season by a Montreal infielder. (The arbitary cutoff being observed here is 500 plate appearances for an everyday player, 400 for a utiltyman, 350 for a catcher. Brooks batted 338 times that season.)

STARTING LINEUP

LF Tim Raines,# 1985 (7.5). For the Rock, we'll pick a quintenessential Rainesian season where he on-based .405 with some power, had 52 net stolen bases (70-for-79), scored 115 runs and played a lights-out left field. All that and he didn't crack the top 10 in MVP balloting. C'est la vie.

In the present, of course, as a Raines supporter, it was gratifying that he is halfway to the Hall of Fame after garnering 37.5 per cent support in the 2011 Cooperstown voting. We all knew it would be a long process.

RF Vladimir Guerrero, 1998 (7.1). The age-23 version of Vlady would provide plate coverage nonpareil out of the 2-hole, along with power and speed. He might have to come out for late-inning defence.

DH Rusty Staub,* 1969 (5.9, 6.7 oWAR). Le Grand Orange was traded a lot during his career, but had his best three seasons with the early Expos.

C Gary Carter, 1982 (7.8). Remember when he trying to get a a major league managing job? This space did have some fun with that. Here is hoping it will not have to be reenacted during the 2012 U.S. election.

CF Andre Dawson, 1983 (6.6). One of his two seasons as runner-up for MVP; he was better in both than he was when he actually won with the last-place Cubbies in '87.

1B Andrés Galarraga, 1988 (5.1). It was a tough call to go with The Big Cat over Scoop, Al Oliver, but the .302/.340/.502 line Galarraga put up in '88 tops Oliver, who couldn't take a base on balls or field by the time he came to Canada.

2B Jose Vidro,# 2002 (4.6) / 2B Ron Hunt 1971 (4.9). Contrary to how some older writers remember it, the Expos did employ some decent second basemen after Rodney Scott was released in 1982. Vidro , who hit almost the same for his career from each side of the plate, was the best of the lot.

Hunt was once described by Bill James as "being as bad a player as you can be with a .400 on-base percentage." He holds still holds the record with 50 hit-by-pitches in a single season.

3B Tim Wallach, 1985 (5.5). Was the National League's Gold Glove and Silver Slugger third baseman in 1985. Now you know when Michael Jack Schmidt moved across the diamond.

SS Orlando Cabrera, 2001 (3.3). Every organization has that one black hole; the pool at shortstop was a little thin. Cabrera was good, as evidenced by the fact he's always with a team that makes the playoffs.

STARTING PITCHERS

RHS Pedro Martínez, 1997 (8.2). One would imagine it was a tough call whether to place Pedro with the Expos or with the Boston Red Sox, where he had his two best seasons according to WAR (10.1 in 2000, 8.4 in 1999). Then again, if you've ever met a Red Sox fan, you would know it was not a hard decision at all.

RHS Steve Rogers, 1982 (8.4). One of the better pitchers to never receive a single Hall of Fame vote. This is also a good time to remind people of Blue Monday. Yours truly once had the misfortune to work with an ex-Montrealer (know how you know someone is from Monreal? They tell you) who whenever the Expos came up in conversation, would say they had the tying run on third base with one out in the bottom of the ninth inning in that game. Nope; not true. The Expos never even got a runner past second base after the first inning that day.

RHS Dennis Martínez, 1991 (5.5). El Presidente, El Perfecto. That is all.

RHS Bill Stoneman, 1971 (5.4). No need to remind people Stoneman pitched the Expos first two no-hitters or that he was general manager of the Angels when they won the World Series in 2002. He almost he three no-nos; in his career-best season, 1971, he had a one-hit, one-walk, 14-strikeout game. Considering he led the NL with 146 bases on balls that season, a one-walk game was pretty extraordinary.

RHS Javier Vazquez, 2003 (5.4). How often does a NL pitcher throw a nine-inning complete game and lose? Vazquez did so in yours truly's last visit to the Big Owe. Mark McGwire couldn't even get a ball in play (three strikeouts and a pop foul) against him that night. And the Expos still lost.

RHS Liván Hernández, 2003 (5.3). Of indeterminate age and weight, but keeps on keeping on. Gave the Expos their last hurrah with a push for the wild card in '03.

BENCH

CF Marquis Grissom, 1992 (5.6). Former stolen base champ is the answer to a great trivia question: who was in centrefield when the 1995 and 1997 World Series ended? Grissom was on the winning Atlanta Braves in '95 and on the losing Clevelanders in '97, who lost on Edgar Renteria's 11th-inning walk-off single in Game 7.

Grissom would provide some late-inning fielding insurance in place of Guerrero.

4C Larry Parrish, 1979 (4.7). There will be some PAs at either infield corner or as the designated lefty-masher.

2B Delino DeShields, 1992 (4.0). Apparently Delino was a demigod to first-gen gamers. He had an awesome name, so of course he passed it to his son, now a Houston Astros outfield prospect.

C Barry Foote, 1974 (2.2). Gary Carter would catch 95 per cent of the games, so it's not a worry there's no good alternative.

BULLPEN

CL John Wetteland, 1993 (4.6). He was out there. He is still out-out there.

RHR Tim Burke, 1987 (4.2). Made the Expos in '85 as a non-rostered player and wound up becoming their relief ace within two years; during that Year of the Homer in 1987, he gave up only three in 91 innings. Actual quote: "If Jesus were on the field, He'd be pitching inside and breaking up double plays."

RHR Jeff Reardon, 1982 (3.5). Gary Carter beat him to the trend of former Expos earning World Series rings by a season; Reardon got his with the 1987 Twins. Having him here is just an excuse to bask in some Steve Rushin brilliance the SI Vault, writing on the development of the closer:
Baseball's closers have, historically, come from a can of mixed mustachioed nuts. And Reardon has closed more often than the most prolific of Century 21 agents: Through Sunday, Reardon's 339 career saves left him three short of breaking the alltime mark held by Hall of Famer-elect Rollie Fingers. Fingers, you'll recall, carried his teammates on the waxed handlebars of his curlicue mustache. Remember, too, the road-kill beards of Bruce Sutter (300 saves) and Gene Garber (218), the hood-ornament-steer-horns 'stache of Sparky Lyle (222) and the fearsome Fus of Goose Gossage (308) and Mike Marshall (178).

Long before the invention of the Gillette Atra twin-blade razor, these flamboyant relievers were causing heads to pivot. But few got the attention, adulation or remuneration afforded today's premier closers. In fact, the term closer doesn't do justice to the glamorous head-liners of the 1990s. Does Sinatra close for Steve and Eydie? No. They open for him, much as starter Tom Browning opens for stopper Rob Dibble in Cincinnati. (Sports Illustrated, June 8, 1992)

RHR Mel Rojas, 1992 (3.5). Felipe Alou's nephew, Moises Alou's first cousin. You know that. Did you know the family business has reached a third generation? Mel Rojas Jr. is an outfielder in the Pittsburgh Pirates system. Mel Sr. was an efficient right-handed reliever on some contending Expos teams in the first half of the 1990s.

LHR Woodie Fryman, 1980 (2.5). The well-remembered 'Spos southpaw left this mortal coil recently; he was good for them in iterations as a starter on some bad teams and as a reliever on some good ones.

(* left-handed hitter; # switch-hitter)

Ultimate baseball league: Tacoma Rainiers

2011-03-11T04:20:00.006-05:00

In our mind's eye, Franklin Gutiérrez will have an ample canvas. The Rainiers, AKA the Seattle Mariners B team, would play in Cheney Stadium, which has a 425-foot centrefield marking. Plenty of room to roam for the best-fielding centrefielder in the game today.

Far be it to suggest a pitching staff bereft of a starter with a 5.0 WAR could use the help of a big ballpark. The Rainiers boast a lefty-heavy staff.

Offensively, the mid-'90s M's are well-represented with Tino Martinez and Jay Buhner in the heart of the batting order. Of course, they were the supporting cast in those days, not the stars. The lack of depth means Canadian Michael Saunders could crack the lineup with a big 2011 season.

STARTING LINEUP

LF Phil Bradley, 1985 (4.3). Gave Seattle some credibility in the mid-'80s. Jays fans might remember him more from the 1989 Baltimore Orioles who finished two games behind Toronto; a quick check confirms he did hit .349 with an 1126 OPS against T-dot pitching that season.

2B Bret Boone, 2002 (3.9). It's not like his entire career should be stricken based on some strong suspicions, but the 2002 Boone was closer to his true level than the 2001 (9.3 WAR) or 2003 (7.1) iterations. Was a second baseman of modest talent for much of his career.

1B Tino Martinez,* 1995 (4.6). A fine first basemen who's here since his best season (1997) came with the New York Yankees, who might have employed a decent first basemen or four.

DH Leon Roberts, 1978 (4.1). The first Mariner to ever get a MVP vote after hitting .301/.364/.515 with 22 home runs in the team's second season of existence.

RF Jay Buhner, 1996 (3.0). I'll take Seattle outfielders not named Junior or Ichiro who have been on SI's cover for $1,000, Alex. Buhner put Seattle on his back during their Drive of '95, hitting 14 homers in the final 29 games.

3B Adrián Beltré, 2006 (4.6). This is probably more representative of who he truly is than whenever he's in a contract season (see 2004, Los Angeles).

CF Franklin Gutiérrez (pictured), 2009 (5.4). A worthy heir to the Mariners' tradition of fine defensive centrefielders; a one-man argument for why MLB should not just have the Gold Glove Awards, but a defensive player of the year award.

C Bob Stinson,# 1978 (3.0) / Dave Valle 1993 (2.7). If it wasn't for this song, Bob Stinson would have been completely forgotten. A .258/.346/.404 line is good by the standards of Seattle catchers.

Dave Valle's claim to fame is that when he was in a massive slump in 1991, Seattle bars began using his batting average as a beer price. No word of a lie, his absolute lowest average of the season came on the biggest drinking night of the summer, Independence Day, when he dipped down to .128, or $1.28 if you prefer.

SS Craig Reynolds,* 1979 (2.4). Has it been mentioned there is a real big drop-off among Mariners shortstops after Alex Rodríguez? Omar Vizquel and Carlos Guillén also did their best work with other franchises, so that leaves the job open to Reynolds, who was the Opening Day starter in the Mariners' maiden season and also an all-star in '78. He co-holds the MLB record of three triples in one game.

STARTING PITCHERS

RHS Erik Hanson, 1990 (4.6). Used his power curve to record 211 strikeouts in 1990, but was never again that dominant.

LHS Matt Young, 1983 (4.8). Was better than his lifetime 55-95 record, especially since one of those losses included being the first pitcher to throw an eight-inning complete-game no-hitter and not have it count as an official no-hitter. That was kind of a microcosm for Young's hard-luck career.
LHS Dave Fleming, 1992 (4.7). Was a one-hit wonder (17-10, 3.39 ERA in 1992 despite a low strikeout rate) before settling into a quiet normal life as a school teacher.
LHS Jeff Fassero, 1997 (4.4). One could set a watch to reading every summer to having Fassero linked to teams that needed another quality starter or a veteran left-hander. His best season was actually in 1996 with the Expos.

RHS Joel Piñeiro, 2002 (4.4). Quality over quantity; as a fifth starter, it is not such a big deal that Piñeiro is hard-pressed to hit 200 innings every season.

LHS Floyd Bannister, 1982 (4.3). Quick, who was the first Mariners pitcher to win a strikeout title? No, not Mark Langston. Bannister did it in 1982; he had only two double-digit strikeout games all season.

BENCH

CF Ruppert Jones,* 1979 (3.3). Some at-bats could be found for the the original Mariner, who was their first expansion draft selection in November 1976.

OF Wayne Comer, 1969 (3.0). A cheat? Since the criteria for this owes more to Calvinball or TEGWAR, it is kosher to include one Seattle Pilot. Comer was the P's starting centrefielder before the franchise was bogarted by Bud Selig in Milwaukee.

2B Joey Cora,# 1997 (2.3). It was not Edgar Martinez or Ken Griffey or Randy Johnson who carried the Mariners into their first league championship series appearance in 1995. It was Cora. Admit it.

3B Jim Presley, 1986 (2.0). Adequate player who was one-man explanation for (a) why Edgar Martinez will have a long road to Hall of Fame induction and (b) why the Mariners did not have a winning season until 1991. The two go hand-in-hand. Anyone who had a complete set of 1987 Topps baseball cards (with the awful wood grain design) has a good chance of recall Presley's rather rank ratio of bases on balls (32) to strikeouts (172).

BULLPEN

RHR Shigetosi Hasegawa, 2003 (3.0). Had a good career in two cultures (3.33 career ERA in Japan, 3.71 in the American League). Was the closer for the Mariners' most recent good team in 2003.

LHR Ed Vande Berg, 1982 (2.6). Considered the original LOOGY, since in 1982-83 he had more appearances than innings pitched. That means Tony La Russa cannot take full credit for developing the modern bullpen? Let us hope so.

RHR Jeff Nelson, 1995 (2.5). Threw a wicked slider; among a select few who played for both teams in those three Mariners-Yankees post-season series.

RHR Mike Timlin, 1998 (2.5). Won two World Series rings with two different AL East franchises who are not named the New York Yankees, so that narrows it down considerably. He's needed more in the Seattle stream.

CL David Aardsma, 2009 (2.0). Hard-throwing closer for the current Mariners; control can be an issue.

(* left-handed hitter; # switch-hitter)

Ultimate baseball league: Round Rock Express

2011-03-10T15:00:00.004-05:00

The Express are the first of our amalgam teams, drawn from the second failed Washington franchise and the best of the rest from the Texas Rangers.

What is there to see? Frank Howard, the 1960s home run champions who was known as the Capitol Punisher and Hondo in his day, does not have to worry about carrying around his 6-foot-7, 275-lb. body around in the outfield. Real baseball rules were late in coming for Howard, whose last season was the first season the DH was used.

Four of Round Rock's six starting pitchers are named either Rick or Dick, and one of the Ricks was kind a of dick in his youth.

STARTING LINEUP

LF Rusty Greer,* 1996 (4.8). A one-team player is rare, but Greer was a one-organization player. On-based .387 for his career; best known for making a diving catch to secure Kenny Rogers' 1994 perfect game.

2B Ian Kinsler (pictured), 2008 (5.3). Consider the middle-infield defence spoken for.

DH Frank Howard, 1969 (6.3). The first representative from the franchise's Washington days, Hondo probably was a Hall of Famer dropped into the wrong era, just going by his 10-year peak. Despite that, he hit 382 home runs before his big body betrayed him just after the DH was created. In '69, under Ted Williams' tutelage, his offensive WAR was 8.1.

1B Mark Teixeira,# 2005 (6.0). Might have a little trouble cracking the all-time Yankees lineup.

3B Ken McMullen, 1969 (6.2). Prototype third baseman from the late 1960s; homered in his final plate appearance.
SS Michael Young, 2006 (4.6). Has moved all over the fielding spectrum; has anyone else ever been a Gold Glove shortstop one season and then shifted to third base the next season?

CF Gary Ward, 1984 (4.4). A nondescript contact hitter who isn't even the most notable Gary Ward in baseball (that would be a legendary college coach at Oklahoma State). Ward at his best hit a somewhat empty .300.

RF Gary Matthews Jr.,# 2006 (3.4). The season that led to him being rewarded with one of the worst contracts of all time.

C Jim Sundberg, 1978 (4.9). Generational defensive catcher in his prime; in this realm he'll have his work cut out for him with a mediocre pitching staff.

STARTING PITCHERS

LHS Pete Richert, 1965 (4.9). Apparently he was a cult hero to Strat-o-matic players, since it was damn hard to reach base against him when he was on.
RHS Dick Bosman, 1970 (4.4). Supposedly Ted Williams had no time for pitchers, but he and Bosman got along famously. The latter is a minor league pitching coordinator for the Tampa Bay Rays, the adopted favourite team of us nerdlingers.
RHS José Guzmán, 1991 (4.2). Was briefly known as The Wrong Juan when his namesake was an all-star pitcher for the Jays.
RHS Dick Donovan, 1961 (4.0). Won the American League ERA title in '61 while pitching for an 100-loss expansion team. How did he do that? A A ridiculous BABIP and park factor helped.

RHS Rick Helling, 2000 (4.0). Was a 20-game winner when people still thought that had currency; Chuck Klosterman also put a hex on him.
LHS Rick Honeycutt, 1983 (3.8). Came to prominence as a lefty setup man for the Oakland A's turn-of-the-'90s mini-dynasty, but the finesse left-hander was an absentee ERA champion.

BENCH

2B Bump Wills,# 1977 (4.9). Had one of the most infamous error cards, since one of Topps executives was apparently tight with the 1979 baseball equivalent of Eklund.

UT Aurelio Rodríguez, 1970 (4.6). Gold Glove third baseman who would offer some late-inning defence; also ensures one of the Rangers team of having an A-Rod who's not such a douche.

SS Ed Brinkman, 1969 (4.3). The term good-field, no-hit shortstop was gone by the wayside. It had a lot of currency in the days of Brinkman, whose park-adjusted OPS+ was 65.

CF Don Lock, 1964 (3.7). OK, you try coming up with something witty about a player whose career ended 42 years ago. According to B-R, he was top-three in the AL twice in range factor

C Paul Casanova, 1966 (1.9). Father of former journeyman catcher Raul Casanova; catcher is apparently a weak spot for the Rangers once you get past Pudge and Sundberg.

BULLPEN

LHR Darold Knowles, 1970 (2.9). One of two left-handers on this team whose greatest fame came as a supporting reliever on an Oakland team which won three consecutive pennants. Knowles
LHR Mike Paul, 1972 (2.9). There are no great swingman seasons anymore; in '72, Paul made 20 starts and relieved in 29 other games; his ERA (2.17) is still the team record.
RHR Steve Foucault, 1974 (2.7). Another member the Billy Martin Cut Short My Career Club. Foucault was a one-man bullpen for the '74 Rangers who made a run at the Reggie Jackson-Rollie Fingers Oakland A's, but was out of the game a few years later after hurling 144 innings in relief.
RHR Dale Mohorcic, 1987 (2.7). His Wiki says he played a California Angels pitcher in Naked Gun. Gotta call BS on that, since Mohorcic is right-handed and the Angels hurler was a lefty.

CL Neftali Feliz, 2010 (2.4). Room must be made for Feliz, the miscast closer of the Rangers' first pennant winner.

(* left-handed hitter; # switch-hitter)

Ultimate baseball league: Tucson Padres

2011-03-10T05:15:00.005-05:00

San Diego's second unit is a bit of a patchwork crew, with a No. 1 starter who was charged with more losses than wins over his career. Still, it's a good sample of the Padres through all their mostly mediocre uniforms and frequent costume changes.

Can you believe those all-gold uniforms that Nate Colbert (pictured) wore in the '70s?

Our imagine Tucson Padres (who, by the way, are just in Arizona for a two-year stopover) are in a division that includes the Los Angeles Angels' and Seattle Mariners' second squads. In other words, it would be more watered-down than the current NL Central.

STARTING LINEUP

3B Bip Roberts,# 1990 (5.3). Not everyone was a fan of the 5-foot-7 leadoff man without a position, but he certainly speaks his mind. Working on the poachers/game warden paradox, has suggested Victor Conte be put in charge of MLB's anti-steroid enforcement.

DH Brian Giles,* 2005 (5.3 oWAR). His best season with the Padres. Better ballplayer than a person, evidently. Drew a ton of walks toward the end (NL-high 119 in 2005) after losing his power to Petco Park.

RF Sixto Lezcano, 1982 (7.2). Owns the fourth-best season ever by a Padre, which would surprise some people. One of many 1970s rightfielders with a cannon throwing arm.
1B Ryan Klesko,* 2001, (5.2) / Nate Colbert (pictured), 1972 (5.2). Colbert holds one record likely to never be broken, hitting five home runs in an Aug. 1, 1972 doubleheader earn a share of a mark held by Stan Musial. What might be less known is Colbert was in the stands 18 years earlier when Musial hit five big flies in a single day.

A platoon makes sense, especially since wrong-armers were Klesko's kryptonite. Some extra plate appearances might be found for both as the DH, since the UBL is playing under modern baseball rules.

C Terry Kennedy,* 1982 (5.4). The real-life Terry Kennedy is the manager of the actual Tucson Padres Triple-A team. You can't plan that stuff.

LF Gene Richards,* 1978 (3.5) / Reggie Sanders, 1999 (4.3). There is some support for Richards as a generational Padre. Had more than twice as many triples (63) as home runs (26), so that tells you how he rolled. Had the highest career batting average by a Padre prior to the arrival of Tony Gwynn, which tells you how bad the team was prior to the arrival of Tony Gwynn.

Sanders is easily the most anonymous member of the 300-home run, 300-stolen base club, largely since he changed teams every two years.

CF Kevin McReynolds, 1984 (5.5). The lingering image of McReynolds dates from his Mets days, when he made it easy to portray him as an Arkansas yokel dropped into the Big Apple. However, he had his best season for the Padres' first pennant winner in '84, compiling a 2.0 defensive WAR.
2B Quilvio Veras,# 1998 (3.6). Our first appearance from the '98 Padres team that got a severe ass-forking from the Yankees in the World Series. It would have all been different if Mark Langston hadn't been squeezed in Game 1, Itellsya.
SS Garry Templeton,# 1986 (3.0). Was traded straight up once for Ozzie Smith, who is in the Hall of Fame, while Templeton today is managing in the Golden Baseball League. It was kind of a big deal in 1979 when he became the first player to collect 100 hits in a season from each side of the plate; B-R.com now lists him as collecting only 95 as a righty.

STARTING PITCHERS

RHS Clay Kirby 1972 (5.3). Power pitcher with a high walk rate, but he gave the early Padres some shred of credibility. Fans of made-up curses must love that no San Diego pitcher has thrown a no-hitter since Kirby was lifted for a pinch hitter while working on one during a 1970 game.

RHS Andy Ashby, 1998 (5.0). Was easily confused with Alan Ashby, along with a couple of Padres pitchers with similar skills. Was second in ERA on the '98 pennant-winning team.
RHS Andy Benes, 1993 (4.9). Won a strikeout title

RHS Joey Hamilton, 1995 (4.9). Was good for the Padres (3.83 ERA across five seasons in the 1990s), but reeked anywhere else (cough, Toronto).

LHS Dave Dravecky, 1985 (3.7). An inspiration to us all

RHS Eric Show, 1986 (3.6). A tortured soul.

BENCH

CF Jerry Mumphrey,# 1980 (3.0). In 1980, the Padres were the first team to have three players each steal at least 50 bases and they finished last in the National League West. Let that be a lesson. Mumphrey stole 52-of-57 that season.

C Fred Kendall, 1973 (2.3). Better known as Jason Kendall's father, but was an original Padre.

UT Tim Flannery,* 1985 (2.1). Could play second base, third and blues guitar.

BULLPEN

CL Mark Davis, 1989 (4.4). Easily the worst pitcher to ever win a Cy Young Award; he was about the third-best pitcher on his own team that season.

RHR Lance McCullers, 1986 (3.1). Was known as Baby Goose (as in Gossage) when he first came up in the '80s.

RHR Luis DeLeon, 1982 (2.7). Ahead of my time, but he was very good at ages 23-24 (100-plus innings with 2-something ERAs) before fading out. He didn't stop pitching, though, going to to play in a record 14 Caribbean Series.

LHR Craig Lefferts, 1990 (2.4). Standout middle reliever for two pennant-winning teams who overcame being unable to use his right eye when he pitched.
RHR Mike Adams, 2010 (2.3). Future closer material or so they once said.

(* left-handed hitter; # switch-hitter)

Ultimate baseball league: Las Vegas 51s

2011-03-07T07:10:00.015-05:00

Since entertainers well past their prime always end up in Las Vegas, it is oddly fitting a roster of the best of the rest from Blue Jays history is largely drawn from the '80s.

Ah, to be young again and believe that a team in powder-blue polyester uniforms playing on carpet in the corner of a CFL stadium represented the diamond game in its ideal form. No less than five of the nine starters, along with one of the starting pitchers, is drawn from that decade, when the Jays were usually awesomely good until October. Borderline Hall of Famer Fred McGriff, who had his best season in Toronto, anchors the starting lineup, while the good version of Juan Guzman is the staff ace.

Of course, by process of elimination, you might be able to figure out who is on the Jays' all-time team that will published at a later date.

The 51s' division includes Fresno (a Giants B team), Sacramento (an Athletics B team) and Reno. They might be up against it in a division with two original franchises, especially since the lineup isn't very deep.

STARTING LINEUP

CF Lloyd Moseby,* 1984 (6.2). In another time, the Shaker might have been a 40-homer corner outfielder, but he fit well into '80s baseball, with all of its stolen bases and triples (he even tied for the league lead in three-baggers once). First Jay to score 100 runs in a season.

SS Tony Fernandez,# 1987 (5.0). Was probably overrated in his prime since artificial turf makes middle infielders look better. It meant more to have one of the 1980s Jays around for the second World Series triumph. It's probably a surprise he is not on the A squad.

DH Fred McGriff,* 1989 (6.6). Will the Crime Dog and his .377/.509 career ever earn entry to Cooperstown? Led the AL in home runs, bases on balls and OPS in 1989, which only him to sixth place in the MVP vote.

LF George Bell, 1987 (5.0). Ol' Senor Ding-Dong himself, as the only Jay to be a league MVP shall be known retroactively. No wonder Manny Ramirez idolized him; Jorge being Jorge included karate-kicking pitchers, eating McDonalds in the clubhouse, driving in runs by the assload and not being able to field worth a damn. Also hit the other Blue Jays walk-off home run off Mitch Williams, which few remember since no one in Toronto watched baseball outside of the years 1989-93.

RF Shawn Green,* 1999 (5.9). Well, there has to be one representative from the era of ArenaBaseball and the Jays being under an absentee owner that was not Rogers.

2B Aaron Hill, 2009 (5.4). Don't be silly and think he's as good as Roberto Alomar was in Toronto. Who does that?

3B Kelly Gruber, 1988 (4.8). Only Jay ever referenced on Kids In The Hall (Kevin McDonald: "But if Kelly Gruber makes one more mistake, he'll have to change his name to Kelly Boober.") . Enjoyed water skiing, according to Marty York.

1B Willie Upshaw,* 1983 (4.3). Be honest, you can still hear Murray Eldon calling his name at Exhibition Stadium.

C Darrin Fletcher,* 2000 (2.3). Recorded a promo for CFRC 101.9 FM's The Sports Revolution in 2001, which in Neil Acharya's mind, makes him the seventh-greatest catcher of all time.

STARTING PITCHERS

RHS Doyle Alexander 1984 (5.6). In hindsight, he must have been a smart pitcher since he thrived in Exhibition Stadium despite having nothing resembling a major-league fastball.

LHS Ted Lilly 2004 (5.0). Nothing against him, but it completely spoiled the summer that time when he was the Jays lone representative at the all-star game.

RHS Jim Clancy, 1982 (4.8). The original innings-eater.

LHS David Wells, 2000 (4.5). The Boomer in Vegas; honestly, that is just how it worked out.
RHS Shaun Marcum, 2010 (3.8). Good luck in Milwaukee, Marcum.

RHS Todd Stottlemyre 1991 (3.8). Eighteen years later, former Philadelphia mayor Ed Rendell is still a dillhole. The perception was that Stottlemyre never quit put it together in his Toronto years, but evidently he was decent.

BENCH

OF Alex Rios, 2007 (4.5). It ended poorly for him in Toronto, but he did many things well, if never at the same time.

3B-SS Tony Batista, 1999 (4.3). A guaranteed stumper among Blue Jays fans is to ask them to name all seven Jays who have had a 40-homer season. Bell, Jesse Barfield, Jose Bautista, and Carlos Delgado come to mind no problem. It might take a minute to recall Green and Jose Canseco, but Bautista, who had the world's most open batting stance, is a tough pull.

OF-1B Adam Lind,* 2009 (3.3). Lefty bat off the bench, if needed.

3B Rance Mulliniks,* 1985 (3.0). Platoon partner for Gruber, plus there is undying respect for someone who got a World Series ring for basically hanging out in the bullpen all season.

C Gregg Zaun,# 2005 (2.1). Does anyone feel we are poorer for it that Rogers Sportsnet does not let Zaunie have a can of Skoal in his breast pocket when he's on air with Jamie Campbell during post-season telecasts?

BULLPEN

CL B.J. Ryan, 2006 (4.0). A rare lefty closer, The Beej was sneaky fast before arm problems derailed his career.

RHR Pete Vuckovich 1977 (2.9). Old Clu Haywood himself (he played the Yankees slugger in Major League) was a swingman with the original 1977 Jays, pitching the first shutout in franchise history.

This is how bad Cy Young Award voting was 30 years ago. Vuckovich won in 1982 with the Milwaukee Brewers even though the only categories in which he ranked in the top five of the league were winning percentages and bases on balls. Really. He

RHR Billy Koch 2000 (2.7). After The Wrestler came out, many ex-WWE stars claimed to be the basis for Mickey Rourke's character, The Ram. No ex-ballplayer ever claimed to be the basis for Kenny Powers — they're not typically so desperate for money — but Koch might have had a case. He burned brightly for a few years and slots in here as an eighth-inning reliever.

LHR Jerry Garvin, 1980 (2.6). Some acknowledgement has to made for the Jays early years. Garvin was a lefty who managed to have a high leg kick and a good pickoff move.

LHR Tony Castillo, 1995 (2.5). The last two spots in the 'pen are a bit of a weak point, but Castillo was either better than most people remember or he just got to work in all the low-leverage situations. Was credited with the win in Game 4 of the 1993 World Series, the 15-14 game, since obviously it is all on the pitching when a team scores 15 runs.

(* left-handed hitter; # switch-hitter)

Sixty (starting) nines, dude: the all-time baseball league

2011-02-28T00:18:00.010-05:00

Baseball is the intellectual's game since all the action takes place in the observer's head — which could also be why it takes nearly three hours to complete seven minutes of action.

That's the best way of introducing a fun little side project borne from a secret shame: creating a 25-player roster for all 30 current MLB franchises, plus another 30 historical rosters. Sixty nines, as it were.

This sort of ties with the concept of metafandom, along with having personal and professional obligations that proscribe any blogging on baseball. Talking about a game will never replace watching the best players in the world do their thing. However, there is a lot to be said for the idea a lot of Seamheads, as Craig Calcaterra put it recently, have come "to love or obsess about the game — through something other than actually sitting down and watching it."

For yours truly, the gateway drug into being a stat geek was a computer simulation from called Earl Weaver Baseball that was released in the late 1980s. There is general awareness that John Madden Football was catalytic for sports video games, but Weaver was innovative in its own right (you could play an entire season and it recreated different stadiums). Its era-specific rosters using Hall of Fame players, this being before people realized using one's name and likeness without compensation was probably actionable, was a better introduction to baseball history than Ken Burns' Baseball (not being hyperbolic, it really was).

From about 1989 through 1996, a shameful number of hours were wiled away playing games between, for instance the AL 00-30 team with its Ty Cobb-Tris Speaker-Babe Ruth outfield (and two .400 hitters, Harry Heilmann and George Sisler, sitting on the bench) and the likes of the AL 61-75 team, on which the 1961 version of Roger Maris was the fourth outfielder behind Mickey Mantle, Frank Robinson and Carl Yastrzemski. Even more time was pissed away typing in contemporary players' stats from the backs of baseball cards to make rosters of current players to make imaginary teams.

As a 15-year-old loner growing up in a rural area, it was either that or learn how to hunt or fish. Remember, this was before kids out in the boonies had the Internet or meth labs. Besides, who wouldn't have been curious to see what kind of power numbers Frank Thomas would have put up if he was 'created' and placed on a team that played in Fenway Park?

Suffice to say, that's always been there. So, if all this goes according to plan, by Opening Day each roster should be posted.

Here is a rough format:

Franchises will be grouped by vintage. The Blue Jays and their 34-season history aren't competing with Red Sox and Yankees, whose lineups can be drawn from nearly a century. Feel free to read that as a protest against MLB wrecking a good thing, being a sport, no salary cap, with a bad thing, unbalanced schedules and too many divisions.

That expanded playoff format cannot happen soon enough.

No player may be used twice. Rob Neyer of sbnation.com, a few years ago, published his Big Book of Baseball Lineups. When it came out, I was all, "How dare he have the drive and work ethic to see to fruition an idea I never acted on!" However, Neyer's objective was just picking the best lineup. This exercise is under the guise that there's some realm where these teams would actually play, so Barry Bonds can't be on the Pittsburgh Pirates and San Francisco Giants.

A couple years ago, yours truly also managed the Blue Jays in a Seamheads.com sim league. Again, players could be used more than once. This is more pure.

Each player will be chosen by his most representative season. The criteria is to use WAR (Wins Above Replacement) to pick a 25-player roster with a batting order using a designated hitter, bench, starting rotation and bullpen.
Context counts. That's a way of dealing with suspect Steroid Era seasons or one-year wonders. For instance, Brady Anderson's 50-home run 1996 season (6.6 WAR) should get tossed out, but his '92 campaign (5.4) that better reflected his overall body of work is permissible. Some emphasis will be given to more contemporary players, since baseball has become more competitive over time. In other words, anyone from the pre-Jackie Robinson era or Dead Ball Era (before 1920) will have to be more exceptional than a latter-day player.

Here are the divisions:

AMERICAN LEAGUE

Classic: The charter franchises — Boston Red Sox, New York Yankees, Chicago White Sox, Cleveland Indians, Detroit Tigers.

Modern: Teams that took their current form in the 1950s and '60s — Baltimore Orioles, Minnesota Twins, Los Angeles Angels, Oakland Athletics.
Newbies: The under-40 (as in seasons) teams — Kansas City Royals, Texas Rangers, Seattle Mariners, Toronto Blue Jays, Tampa Bay Rays. Some allowance is being made for the Royals' small-market woes.

NATIONAL LEAGUE

Classic: Chicago Cubs, Cincinnati Reds, Philadelphia Phillies, Pittsburgh Pirates, St. Louis Cardinals.
Modern: Los Angeles Dodgers, San Francisco Giants, Houston Astros, New York Mets, Atlanta Braves (dating from 1966).
Newbie: San Diego Padres, Montreal Expos, Milwaukee Brewers, Colorado Rockies, Florida Marlins, Arizona Diamondbacks. The Milwaukee team would draw on seasons when that city had a NL team.

INTERNATIONAL LEAGUE

North Division: Buffalo Bisons (Mets B), Lehigh Valley IronPigs (Phillies B), Pawtucket Red Sox (Boston B), Scranton/Wilkes-Barre Yankees (Yankees B), Rochester Red Wings (all-time Washington Nats/Twins B), Syracuse Chiefs (players born in '40s).

South Division: Brooklyn Dodgers, Charlotte Knights (Chisox B), New York Giants, Norfolk Tides (all-time Browns/Orioles B)

West Division: Columbus Clippers (Cleveland B), Indianapolis Indians (Pittsburgh B), Louisville Bats (Cincinnati B), Toledo Mud Hens (Detroit B).

PACIFIC COAST LEAGUE

American North: Iowa Cubs (Chicago Cubs B), Memphis Redbirds (St. Louis B), Nashville Sounds (Brewers AL-only, 1969-97), Omaha Storm Chasers (Kansas City B).

American South: Albuquerque Isotopes (Dodgers B), New Orleans Zephyrs (players born in '50s), Oklahoma City RedHawks (Houston B), Round Rock Express (Senators/Rangers B).

Pacific North: Colorado Springs Sky Sox (players born in '60s), Tucson (Padres B), Salt Lake Bees (Angels B), Tacoma Rainiers (Mariners B).

Pacific South: Fresno Grizzlies (Giants B), Las Vegas 51s (Blue Jays B), Sacramento River Cats (Athletics B), Reno Aces (players born in '70s and '80s).

Hope this can be pulled off!

Blog blast past: Balsillie boarded; the Phoenix Coyotes story few people read

2011-02-26T01:31:00.000-05:00

As you know, the bond sale that would keep a NHL hockey team in Glendale, Ariz., has gone awry. Reading back to July 30, 2009, it's not surprising when you realize whose interests the NHL and most politicians are really representing these days.

The NHL really showed Wednesday how as a business, it is a game of TEGWAR, The Exciting Game Without Any Rules.

Jim Balsillie's camp smartly pointed out minutes after he was denied that this had nothing to do with his fitness to be an owner, and that the judge in Arizona said in June that the league would have to show he didn't have the cash. Of course, the nets had already been moved, like a group of kids moving their ball hockey game down the street (which might cheese the judge off, but that is neither here nor there). Bruce Arthur's National Post column pointed out, well, if it wasn't money, then it had be something else, but this is the league that let future felon Boots Del Biaggio into the fold.

Granted, being the person who waits for Canadians to wake up to what Gary Bettman's NHL stands for is like being sent out on a snipe hunt. Please, though, sometime between now and the next labour stoppage, clue in that denying Balsillie, again, really betrays that the NHL always represents its interests to the bitter end. It's just that those interests have nothing to do with the great game of hockey and everything to do with corporate malfeasance that could launch six Naomi Klein screeds and a couple Bruce Cockburn ditties. They won't care you could have three teams in Southern Ontario which would each draw more than the Phoenix Coyotes (with higher ticket prices) until the day when the U.S. economy is really up a creek.

The Coyotes are just a game piece in a scheme where, to quote an alternative weekly said the week Balsillie's bid for the Coyotes became public, a "broke" city is "also trying to line the pockets of some of the wealthiest investment groups in New York City, Saudi Arabia, and Abu Dhabi." (Phoenix New Times, May 14.)

The above link came via Make It Eight, Eh?. From the look of it, a Hamilton, Ont., insurance broker named Craig Ferguson, over the run of this sordid saga, has evolved from a thinking fan's case for the NHL to put more teams into Canada to advocacy for taxpayers in Arizona in the wake of a swindle/boondoggle which is going down in the American southwest. You really should, if you have time, read through it since Ferguson makes it clear why the hell Jerry Reinsdorf wants to own an unprofitable hockey team which has never been about hockey from the day it arrived in the desert.

"The attraction to the Coyotes hockey team has always been an issue of land development opportunites and great deals with government, and the profits that would go along with them. Nobody in their right mind would take this team with the clear math currently in place. As soon as (former owners Jerry) Moyes and (Steve) Ellman broke up the land from the ice, that’s when the 'Coyote' should have chased the Roadrunner out of town.

"Are we to believe, as mentioned by the Reinsdorf camp, and now even by the new Canadian/American mixed coalition represented by Daryl Jones (Research Edge LLC) that trying to share in a little bit of food and parking is going to cut the mustard? 'Little things add up' is the argument? Were we born yesterday? And, if I might add, if Daryl Jones and his group thinks they are going to break into this game with nickel and dime thinking, they had better think again. Like all politics, what would make sense from a genuine, honest angle usually doesn’t win the prize."

In other words: Cha-ching! Ferguson has flipped over a couple other rocks, noting two weeks ago that Jerry Reinsdorf's son is "is a director of a partnering firm, International Facilities Group (IFG), that has a hand in consulting the City of Glendale for the Jobing.com arena, and more."

It is not like this should shock anyone. For the most part this is the way of the world, at least up until Bear Stearns went nips-up last fall. (At this point, one should allow that maybe the NHL would like Balsillie to pay $350-400 million for an expansion team instead of $212.5M for an established team. At some point, though, these guys have to stop playing the Canada card.)

Most sports fans, regardless of background or intelligence, would be like, "Why should I care that the the city of Phoenix is going to hand over $100 million in subsidies in return for 200 public parking spaces at a time when it can't afford to open public pools? I just want to know if the team is going to relocate or not." Thankfully, no one needs a public pool in a desert during a time of high unemployment). That is just the nature of following a sport, nothing wrong or evil about it.

However, it does seem crazy how few in Canada have really gone to lengths to explain how the Duel in the Desert, so-called, was more than Gary Bettman and Bill Daly delivering a big screw-you to Jim Balsillie. In the grand scheme, this only reaffirms Canadians' Pavlovian slavishness to the NHL. Hockey is a wonderful sport, perhaps the best of the team games, and the NHL is more appealing to watch that it has been at pretty much any point in the Bettman era.

At the same time, to repeat Peter Gent's "every time I say it's a business you call it a game and every time I call it a game you say it's a business" corollary, let's have some clear eyes. At the end of the day, this league Canadians hold so near and dear is run by some not-too-nice people who are only to eager to be part of greater outrages. On a macro level, it does affect the competitive product.

It was nice to speculate for a couple days when that one bid group for the Coyotes talked about playing games in Halifax or Saskatoon and having an AHL team in Thunder Bay. Maybe that was akin to The Simpsons episode when Monty Burns ran for governor: "They're like seals. Toss 'em a couple fish and watch 'em jump."

Point being, smarten up. The next person who says Balsillie needs to learn to play by the NHL's rules should get two minutes for bein' stupid. (Outgoing Montreal Canadiens George Gillett actually accuse of him creating a "distraction" that caused the Habs' season to go downhill was a new low. (Mr. Gillett, I have with me a Mr. Jared Allen who has debunked the myth athletes can be distracted, and he's not above using physical force to make a point.)

Rules? The NHL has but one that it honours, realizing its place as a pipsqueak in the lumbering dinosaur of the American economy, 2009. Balsille, to borrow a line from those Ford ads which have been playing all summer, might "pulled off a game-changer" by moving the Coyotes to Southern Ontario, but there were other interests to defend.

Gary Bettman fits right in with the Boomer mentality where old-economy businesses hide that they are just going around in circles, slowly losing ground before realizing time has run out. The commish is a pipsqueak in the grand scheme of bankrupting America, but like any good CEO, he knows who he works for. That's why they pay him the big bucks.

As previously stated, "It would be silly to use the league's idiotic business practices to justify non-interest in what happens on the ice." However, this has been an exercise in the NHL as usual. It has no rules and when you have no rules, you have less of a game.

Related:
Balsillie vows to press on; BlackBerry billionaire given rough ride by NHL's board of governors as bid for troubled Coyotes rejected (Paul Waldie and David Shoalts, Globe & Mail)
NHL: Anybody but you, Balsillie (Bruce Arthur, National Post)

The thinking fan's reaction to the Mike Fisher trade ...

2011-02-12T12:06:00.003-05:00

Far be it to point out keeping Bryan Murray is a move down the slippery slope of not really rebuilding a la that other Ontario-based NHL team. Farther be it to feel vindicated that the same diehard Sennies fans blog that ripped yours truly for pointing out the obvious in 2009 is no longer publishing now that the team is contending to win the draft lottery (where Murray will talk himself out of drafting Ryan Nugent-Hopkins). Funny how that worked out.

Canada to become a nation of Gomers

2011-01-30T12:57:00.002-05:00

Odd how a government that claims to be on the side of law and order wants to alter laws in a way that would lead to disorder. This is what happens when you have a permanent minority government whose overarching principle is, "What's the worse that can happen?"

You'll be hearing me talk ... face for radio, body for sin

2011-01-14T01:30:00.010-05:00

Everyone's heard about Ted Williams, that homeless man with the golden voice. It might interest you to know Friday's Carleton-Queen's basketball doubleheader will be called by someone who is typically as dishevelled as Williams was when he was discovered — but minus the golden voice.

Yep, yours truly will be doing play-by-play for all four games at the Queen's Centre this weekend, on the radio live for CFRC 101.9 for the Ravens-Gaels games Friday and for TV Cogeco Kingston's tape-delayed broadcast of the Queen's Saturday games vs. the Ottawa Gee-Gees.

Short story even shorter, purely by happenstance, Will Cunningham, the station's sports director and a promising young broadcaster in his own right, needed a play-by-play announcer for a couple games in January.

It seemed like something to do on a lark, just to see if I could pull it off. My experience broadcasting hoops has all been on the colour-commentary end, including working with National Post reporter Mark Masters during the CIS Final 8 in 2009 and '10.

In terms of play-by-play, all I've got is about a half-dozen hockey telecasts a half-decade ago for Cable 5 in Simcoe, along with three quarters of Queen's football play-by-play more than a decade ago. (That was during Queen's 1-7 season in 2000; there were a couple games in which the two regulars just couldn't take it anymore; as one of them put it during a 60-point loss to Laurier, "Both teams have put in their backups, so we're putting in our backup.")

So please listen — and be kind.

Also, yours truly will be on News 570 in Kitchener around 10 a.m. ET Friday to talk about the Kayla Watkins story. (Watkins is the 12-year-old Toronto youth hockey player who quit her peewee rep team after another parent drafted a contract to limit her ice time.) That's right; promote the appearance on a campus station, downplay the one on a major talk radio station.

Blog blast past: The annual Tim Raines rant ...

2011-01-04T03:41:00.000-05:00

Robbie Alomar should take his rightful place in Cooperstown on Wednesday when the Baseball Hall of Fame vote is announced. What of another table-setting switch-hitter who played in Canada? From Jan. 5, 2010 ... apologies to the people mentioned by name. The meds are doing their job, thank you for asking!

Seeing as, "Numbers can be presented so many ways, folded into so many origami shapes," so it's understandable a baseball writer might twist it around after being bombarded with an "avalanche of numbers" during the lead-up to Wednesday's Baseball Hall of Fame election results. Jeremy Sandler should get the BBWAA honour for being a wee bit off-base.

"The obsession over numbers 'proving' Hall of Fame worthiness also leads to inauthentic comparisons. Tony Gwynn was a first-ballot selection with a .388 on-base percentage, 1,383 runs and 319 steals. Thus, one could argue Tim Raines should not be languishing with 22% support with his .385 OBP, 1,571 runs and 808 stolen bases."

(Two paragraphs later)

"Every player needs to be evaluated on his own merits against the best players of his era and of all time. To do this, numbers will tell part of the story, but will never tell the whole story."

Did anyone else see that? It seems as if (and please don't read this as a personal attack, it just happens to be one article that came to attention) the argument is for wanting to one day live in a world where we rate each ballplayer against the best players of his era, but without making "inauthentic comparisons" such as one between Tim Raines and Tony Gwynn. You should just be able to find "what lies beyond what the mere calculations can show."

From the department of, "yeah ... no," you cannot compare Raines to Gwynn just because one was a National League outfielder born in 1959 and the other was a National League outfielder born in 1960, a whole eight months apart! You may not compare a player who was a MLB regular from 1981-98 with someone who was a regular from 1984-99 just because they each:

Played a corner outfield spot and some centrefield;
Spent their peak years in the NL at about the same time (1983-87 for Raines, '84-89 for Gwynn);
Usually batted in a similar place in the lineup (91% of Gwynn's career plate appearances and 90% of Raines' were hitting first, second or third);
Hit similarly well in the leadoff spot (Gwynn OPSed .823, Raines OPSed .813)
Hit similarly well in the 3-hole (Gwynn OPSed .860, Raines .856)
Had similar short-and-squat builds (Raines was listed at 5-foot-8, 178 lbs.; Gwynn, 5-11, 199);
Batted from the left side (Raines was a switch-hitter);
Had a son of the same name make the major leagues;
Had a son of the same name make the major leagues as an outfielder;
Went into coaching after retiring as a player. Yep, totally inauthentic.

This is half about a fondly remembered former Expo getting his due (Jeff Blair: "... the lack of support for Raines is embarrassing") and half about media types who, present company included, get uber-defensive whenever something complex crops up. It is understandable. Some people don't like trying out new ways of seeing. Some cannot wait to see what's next.

Staying barely on-point, the argument is not that Tim Raines was better than Tony Gwynn.

The point is that they had contemporary careers where they each fulfilled the same role about equally well. Except Gwynn was not just a first-ballot inductee, as Sandler describes it, he was elected with 97.6% support three years ago. If you picture the Baseball Hall of Fame as the trendy new nightspot, Gwynn was let inside the velvet rope post-haste. Raines is standing out in the cold while the doorman pretends to scan a clipboard. Raines ... Raines ... Raines ... don't see it.

As Joe Posnanski, whom Sandler cites in his column without even a hint of irony, noted," ... there are only 26 players in baseball history who have received 90% of the vote, and that list does NOT include: Frank Robinson, Joe DiMaggio, Al Kaline, Mickey Mantle, Sandy Koufax, Yogi Berra, Bob Gibson, Walter Johnson and Warren Spahn."

Gwynn had the high batting average and the 200-hit seasons (a hitting feat you know is vital since Barry Bonds, Babe Ruth and Ted Williams accomplished it a combined never). Raines had the bases on balls, sick stolen-base success rate and scored more runs. Same aims, different means.

Raines' argument is not airtight; no one's is. However, the same out clauses that are applied to him have been overlooked for other players. For instance, one sympathetic sportswriter said of Raines, "Should get more votes than he does, but unfortunately his peak years were mostly spent on mediocre teams." Raines' teams finished above .500 in 12 of his 15 seasons as a regular, compared to 8-of-16 for Gwynn. For pity's sake, Ryne Sandberg played on only three winning teams in his whole career. No one ever mentioned that when he was on the ballot, since he played for the Chicago Cubs and was a clean-cut white guy.

Anyway, the song remains the same with Tim Raines. He received 24.3% support in 2008, 22.6 in 2009. Billy Williams, the 1960s and '70s Chicago Cubs outfielder, received similar support (23.4%) in his first go-around in 1982 and was elected five years later. For some reason, he kept gaining about 10% each year. It has not happened for Raines. It needs to this year or next.

The second part of this is feeling personally frustrated at working in the media and being surrounded by people who are rigid when fluidity is needed, especially when people can call BS so conveniently. It is disappointing to hear Jeff Blair, who is always a great read, say he "will not vote for a player on subsequent ballots if I didn't vote for him on the first."

There are issues with how some ballplayers have crept up to around 20% support to eventually getting the necessary 75% (Jim Rice was a classic example), but come on, Jeff. What, no one should ever re-evaluate their critical opinion, especially if new shit has come to light, man? In other fields, academe, film and literary criticism, people change their minds all the time. They decide they liked a book or movie, or that they hated it. about a book or movie they didn't like the first time around. It's called being human.

Getting back to baseball, you have to be careful not to beat people over the head with sabremetrics. It has found its rightful place. It is just a gas to see poor Jeremy Sandler projecting that he's threatened. Sorry to come off like a graduate of the Harry Neale School of Knowing What Everyone Is Thinking, but here is a grown man who says, "People do not live and die with their favourite players because of mathematical formulae. Adjusted ERA or VORP never made a kid put a poster on his wall." One, as if that proves anything and two, did anyone argue that we should hang our arses on trying to see the world through a child's eyes?

Yeah, when you were a kid, you were drawn to specific ballplayers for all sorts of reasons, but no one voted to put George Bell into the Hall of Fame because he had an awesome Jheri-curl and once tried to do a flying karate kick on a Boston Red Sox pitcher named Bruce Kison.

You grew up, kind of, and you learned to use your mind, instead of losing it when faced with complexity.

Enjoy election day. Please keep an eye on how big a leap Mark McGwire takes. By 2 p.m., Roberto Alomar should be a Hall of Famer. Sweet.

Blog blast past: "It's a white man's game"; an examination of racism in minor hockey in Canada

2010-12-18T22:24:00.000-05:00

No doubt you heard the awful story about Greg Walsh, the house league hockey coach whom the Ontario Minor Hockey Association suspended for the entire season after his team forfeited a game in which one of his players, Andrew McCullum, was subject to racist abuse. It is embarrassing, speaking as a Canadian who covers hockey, loves hockey and played in the OMHA (1983-96).

Perhaps it's all of a piece with some larger virulence which is going unchecked (particularly on CBC each Saturday night). Either way, this July 14, 2008 post from Duane Rollins (actually, a repost of a newspaper article Duane wrote in '07) showed minor hockey officials in Ontario are resistant to even broach racism. Their attitude hands-off indifference at best and at worst it's enabling by labelling it as quote, unquote "part of the game."

There are always going to be idiots in the world and the best remedy is to call it out. Greg Walsh acted correctly. Cue Rollins, from two years ago:

Normally, driving home from a hockey game is a chance for Denis Commanda to catch up with his son Theorem. An energetic and athletic boy, Theorem is usually a chatterbox during his and Denis' long drives back to their West Nipissing home.

"He'd want to talk about the game," Denis said. "Everything about it. We'd usually talk about everything."

However, the drive back from Theorem’s March 20 game against a North Bay team was different. On that day, instead of the sound of an excited teenager filling the air, there was silence.

Denis says he wasn't talking that day because he was too angry. He suspects that Theorem was too sad.

Both father and son were responding to an incident that occurred about midway through the third period of the game. It wasn't something that would have been obvious to most of the people watching the game.

Actually, only a select few people were likely aware that anything had happened at all.

What happened was this: Theorem and the opposing goaltender became involved in a discussion. The North Bay player became angry and responded by directing a racial slur at Theorem.

He called him a "bush nigger," referring to Theorem’s Aboriginal heritage. It was the second time this season that Theorem’s team, which has five Aboriginal players, had experienced racism while playing the North Bay team.

In many ways, Denis says that he shouldn't be surprised that these incidents took place. After all, being called a wagon burner, or worse, was a nightly experience for him when he played junior hockey in the '70s. Back then, he dealt with the slurs the way that you would expect a junior hockey player in the '70s to do so -- with his fists.

However, he says that the times have changed. Or, at least they should have.

"I thought we evolved, you know," he said. "I don't think we should have to deal with that type of thing anymore. It discourages the kids."

Not isolated

Incidents like the Commandos experienced aren’t isolated to Northern Ontario. In March, several Six Nations players and fans say they had to deal with similar things during two separate playoff series with the Eastern Ontario town of Campbellford.

(Campbellford, eh? -- Ed.)

During the Ontario Minor Hockey Association all-Ontario midget CC semi-final, the Six Nations players say they were subjected to racial slurs from fans located immediately above the player’s bench. Six Nations players say they had beer poured on them from the crowd while the slurs were being shouted.

In a video of the game taken by a Six Nations fan, there is clear evidence of a young man pulling a silver can from his pants while standing above the Six Nations bench. However, you cannot understand what the fans are saying in the video.

Players and fans of the Six Nations bantam team say they had a similar experience during their OMHA final series with Campbellford.

And while covering the final game of that series, I witnessed behaviour of some Campbellford fans that was, if not racist, then certainly distrustful of Six Nations’ people.

Unaware of my affiliation with an Aboriginal publication, a Campbellford fan approached me prior to the game to offer a bit of advice.

“Watch yourself,” the woman dressed in the Campbellford team colours of black and gold said. “They will spit in your (food) from above.

“Be careful,” she added ominously.

Later, while shooting photographs in the penalty box, I heard a penalized Campbellford player say, “Stupid Indians. I fucking hate them.”

Not a new thing

It's not a new thing, of course. Aboriginals have dealt with racial slurs for as long as they have playing hockey. The unspoken code amongst Native players is that there are two acceptable ways to deal with it -- beat 'em on the scoreboard, or just beat 'em up.

"It's a white man's game," former Boston Bruins tough guy Stan Jonathan, a Six Nations native, said. "They would call me a wahoo and a wagon burner and all sorts of things. You just have to learn to take care of yourself if you want to be successful."

Taking care of himself was something that Jonathan never had difficulty with. In just over six full NHL seasons, he spent the equivalent of 12 and a half games in the penalty box. He added 91 goals, including 27 in 1977-78, but it was his toughness that Jonathan was best known for.

In that he was typical of Aboriginal players. Although there have been exceptions, the normal way a Native player makes it to the NHL is with his fists. There is a long history of Aboriginal enforcers in the NHL, from Jonathan to Bob Probert to current-day players like Jonathan Tootoo and Chris Simon.

That toughness is a source of pride amongst many Native hockey fans and players. And it speaks to an overall code of behaviour that has ruled hockey for generations.

If you are wronged, you take care of it yourself, the code says. You do not look for outsiders to fight you battles. Outsiders are not to be trusted.

Don’t want to hear it.

A cheerful voice answered the phone when I called the head office of the Northern Ontario Hockey Association March 30.

"Good morning, NOHA. How can I help you?"

"I'm calling from an Aboriginal publication in Southern Ontario. I have a letter that was," I said before the voice cut me off.

"I know what you are calling about and I don't want to hear any more," it says, more serious now. "I'll take your name and number and pass it on."

"I don't want to hear any more." It was a common response to my requests.

Three calls to Hockey Canada -- none returned.

Calls to several minor hockey officials throughout the province -- none returned.

A call to the coach of the player involved in the act of racism directed towards Theorem Commanda--not returned.

Additionally, no one from Campbellford was willing to talk. Actually, the town’s minor hockey vice president, Fred Todd, indicated that it was the position of the organization that the OMHA would speak for them.

“I have nothing to say,” he said in March 2007. “Talk to the president of the OMHA. What he says is our position.”

And the NOHA never did get back to me.

Denis says the reluctance to talk should be expected. Canadians, whether they are involved in hockey or not, have a tendency to view themselves as “nice,” he says. And nice people don’t make racial slurs.

“They don’t want to deal with it,” Denis said. “But, they need to. I want to make sure that they do.”

OMHA executive director Richard Ropchan was the only hockey official to respond to a request to be interviewed. He indicated that the OMHA did not typically get involved in specific hockey games or series. However, the game officials do have the authority to call a game if they feel that the players’ safety is in jeopardy.

Local officials can also step in if things become problematic, Ropchan said.

In the Campbellford-Six Nations midget series the OMHA took the “unusual” step of sending an observer to the games, Ropchan said. He said that the observer was happy with what he saw during the series.

“Both teams and fans appeared to get along,” he said.

When asked if the OMHA had ever considered requiring racial sensitivity training for its members, Ropchan seemed to be taken aback. It appeared that it was something that he had not considered before.

“We don’t really have anything like that,” he said.

It should be about the game

Ultimately, that’s the type of thing that Denis would like to see. Having played hockey at a high level, he says he understands that sometimes emotions get the better of people. However, if they have a better understanding of where someone is coming from, it’s less likely that they will cross a line, he suggests.

“We just want a chance to talk to the (North Bay) team,” he said. “We want to teach them a bit about our culture.”

The North Bay player that made the slur was asked by his coach to apologize to Theorem after the incident. He did so, and, although Denis says that he is happy that he did, he suggests that it isn’t nearly enough.

“The longer it went, the angrier I got,” he says. “The more I wanted to fight it.”

In a formal complaint to the NOHA, Denis has asked that the player make a written apology and that the coach, managers, trainers and players of the North Bay team, as well as representatives of the NOHA, have an Aboriginal speaker address them. The speaker would talk about the value of multiethnic cultures and about how destructive racial slurs can be.

Denis also asked that the North Bay player be monitored moving forward.

As someone that loves the game, Denis says it would be the right move for the NOHA to make.

“These kids were picked for the team based on their skills and abilities as hockey players,” he said. “At no time did their racial background come into play. That’s the way it should be.”

Denis made the complaint to the NOHA on March 2. He’s still waiting to hear back.

Note: The last time I touched base — about July 2007 —the NOHA had still not resolved the complaint.

Guess which one really did think he was bigger than Jesus

2010-12-08T14:04:00.000-05:00

Everyone is doing a John Lennon tribute today; here's his classic Monday Night Football interview with Howard Cosell.

Modern technology won't make you Ice-T; to quote a true working-class hero, you're still fucking peasants as far as I can see

2010-12-08T10:36:00.011-05:00

The only way poseurs can offend is with their obscene lack of self-awareness.

The last thing anyone from the over-30 set who grew up on P.E. and NWA wants is to get in a twist over some wannabes. The second-last is to give said wannabes who feel it is high-larious to record a rap video with a chorus that includes "Fuck Queen's" or a gay slur any undue publicity.

Granted, you could point out the University of Western Ontario students shot part of their video in TD Waterhouse Stadium and thus would have had to get permission from school officials. Never mind that connotes giving tacit approval to insulting another Ontario university, the OUA Code of Conduct be damned.

The copycat response from University of Guelph students is probably worse, what with its what-grade-are-you-in homophobia. ("You would have thought I had fangs / Take the 'n' out and you just described the Mustangs" / " ... and Queen's, fuck you too / fuck you fuck you fuck you.")

Seeing a bunch of spoiled brats degrade a musical genre and insult the university two of my family members — my educator mother and engineer sister — attended is blood-boiling. You just know it's a matter of when until someone from Queen's will retaliate, even though some might argue the video response was posted 10 months ahead of time.

A little dollar-store cultural anthropology, kids: the great hip-hop came from a place of being an outsider, feeling excluded, be it due to race, class or intellectual sensibility. Those threads run through the rhymes of Ice-T, Chuck D or Eminem. Perhaps that's why the former two struck such a nerve two decades ago with teenaged white boys. It was also evident in the later work of that working-class hero who left us 30 years ago today.

Now you have these ciphers, who can quote the lines but have learned none of the meaning, mimicking it to validate their snobby, cliquey superiority. This is what the generation which is going to have to save the world, along with Xers, is wasting its time on? They want to do that, fine, but it's not exactly inspiring.

Every generation is entitled to a few years — or decades, in Boomers' case — of look-at-me preening. So it goes. Hopefully, millennials' gift of sharing its self-involvement so quickly and thoroughly will help them get it out of their systems relatively quickly.

Perhaps this is a live-and-let-live deal, it is protected speech, but it is fair to ask what it means. After all, OUA schools have taken a hard line with bad behaviour when it's convenient. In 2009, Guelph suspended senior quarterback Justin Dunk for one game for swearing on live television during a game against Western. How could what Dunk did, off the cuff during a game, be punishable while using the Gryphons logo in a rap that promotes homophobia is okay? Talk about arbitrary rule.

I saw this a few weeks ago but withheld comment. My student days are long, long past. There is enough burden involved with getting a degree, especially with runaway student debt

However, even as recently as the late 1990s, there was still this notion that post-secondary education was as much about cultivating some semblance of character and couth, not just the degree. Those qualities count for more in this life than any numbers on a transcript, especially when studies show a lot of those numbers are generated by academic fraud.

The bright side is most people have to learn this eventually. Some will make it tougher on themselves than others.

Latest on Brock Lesnar

2010-12-04T13:42:00.002-05:00

It’s amazing how since his loss against Cain Velasquez at UFC 121, much of the discussion has been about Brock’s next move and not Cain’s.

Since the one round beat down by the hands of Cain, Brock has been rumoured to

A) Wrestle in the WWE

B) Have a 3rd encounter with Frank Mir

C) Fight “Big Country” Roy Nelson, who recently had his bout with Shane Carwin scrapped after the latter pulled out with an injury.

Well, UFC boss Dana White has said that Lesnar isn’t going to the WWE, and it doesn’t look like he wants a Lesnar-Nelson fight to happen. Lesnar, and many other fans, don’t seem to be too interested in a third fight with Mir, even though that is the fight that would generate the most dough and PPV buys.

Shane Carwin is still sidelined with a back injury so he’s out as the next opponent for Brock (unless they fight in the spring). Going further down the list of available opponents after Mir and Nelson is Antonio Rodrigo Nogueira who’s definitely a stiff test for Brock and also Ben Rothwell.

If the UFC wants Lesnar to stick around for a while though (and earn some major moolah and PPV buys), they need to develop him and match him perfectly so he can improve. If not, he may have one of the quickest downward spirals in MMA history.

The reality is though, whatever Lesnar’s next move is, and whenever he announces it, many people will be listening closely. He’s still one of the most popular UFC fighters there is, and he can bring in all sorts of fans.

And as far as the question of, “Is Lesnar’s mystique gone?” - or anything along those lines – the answer? Far from it.

Brock has lost twice in the UFC but that’s not that strange for an MMA fighter. No fighter that Brock has fought in the UFC so far has been scared of him. People know what he brings to the table and he’s definitely beatable. He was beaten by Mir in the first fight, was hurt against Carwin and Velasquez but his wrestling skills are outstanding as are his ground and pound.

He’s still a top UFC contender, an entertaining fighter, and if matched perfectly, could be a big money maker for the UFC for many fights to come.

If he can win enough that the UFC can sell him as a credible opponent, then their job is done.

It's a big building with patients, but that's not so important right now

2010-11-28T22:38:00.003-05:00

Leslie Nielsen has left this mortal coil where a lot of people are humming the Naked Gun theme tonight. Requiescat en pace.

"I'm a locksmith and I'm a locksmith."

"Give me the strongest thing you've got."

"I am serious. And don't call me Shirley."

" ... and where the hell was I?"

Enjoy the turturkeykey and your football with that milquetoast fair catch

2010-11-25T05:29:00.000-05:00

A happy Thanksgiving to our American friends. You might not have invented insulin, instant replay, standard time, caulking guns or the BlackBerry, but you did perfect the three-camera sitcom.

WKRP Turkey Drop
- Watch more Videos at Vodpod.

Close only counts in horseshoes, not for purple ponies

2010-11-20T16:56:00.006-05:00

Dedicated to Greg Marshall and the Western Mustangs, for the third consecutive year.

Remember, kids, it is OK to be an opportunistic jerk if you admit your jerkiness. It is also OK if you likened Donnie Marshall to Rex Grossman during a radio hit before the Western QB's four-interception day against Laval. (It's in Kinger's archive from last Thursday.)

Nine of 19 for 61 yards with four picks and a 15-yard sack, what's that in adjusted net yards per pass? Minus-6.7 yards. Really.

New interests, new blog

2010-11-20T01:13:00.005-05:00

I have started my own blog on Canadian curling issues and commentary called As the Rock Turns, located at http://www.borksport.wordpress.com.

I may still post here from time to time, but my main efforts will be placed on my Brandon Sun duties and the new As the Rock Turns blog at the address listed above.

Thanks for reading and please continue to support Neate Sager and his work with Yahoo! Sports Canada by reading his excellent work. I once had the honour of being the first person to read his stories before they were placed on a newspaper page. It was never boring, and always informative and entertaining, even if it was describing games that were debacles or interviews that were gong shows. Or it was simply the best read that day.

Without him, we wouldn't have had many years of reading entertainment here, and I wouldn't have become a blogger.

Keith Borkowsky

30-for-30 on the occasion of a special sibling's big 3-0: celebrating a great sister who plays goal, with a list of 30 great goalies

2010-11-01T01:37:00.001-04:00

You try coming up with a list of 30 Trinas.

In hindsight, our parents were prescient to bestow a somewhat rare first name on their only daughter. They must have had some hunch their second-born would be the pony to bet on, so picking one of the trendy girls' names of the day — Brooke, Shannon, Ashley and so on and so on — would fail to suffice.

Man, did they ever call their shot. My sister, Trina Sager, who celebrates her Big Three-Oh on Monday, has matured into a young woman whose many facets are always turned on. She has found her calling as a professional engineer working at a Fortune 500 company without being overly careerist, as witnessed by the presence of my wonderful brother-in-law, Amer Murad.

It is not self-deprecation when I talk about Trina and say, "She's the successful one." Trina has just never let anything hold her back from using her gift. She can visualize a finished product and all the steps needed to make it reality and she will get everyone around her enthusiastic about being on that track. The Top 40 Under 40 awaits.

She has expanded upon a family calling. Our dad is builder. Trina became an engineer. Our mom is an educator. I make a reasonable stab at a living by using words. Having a daughter follow dad and a son follow mom kind of fits that age.

Still, that name has posed a challenge for almost a year. A first thought that came to mind last year after writing a birthday tribute post to our brother — 25 Shawns — was "how am I going to come up with list of 30 Trinas for next year?"

There are not that many famous Trinas this side of Scandinavia. Using Katrina would be a cheat. Our mom made it a point to clip the K-a. The only moderately well-known Trina is a mediocre rapper whose given name is actually Katrina.

Fortunately, Trina being a goaltender was a perfect write-around opportunity. Goalie is the only position in hockey that defines the individual for perpetuity. Say, "I played goal," and people will intrinsically understand that your take on things will be out of the ordinary. There aren't many positions in sports that someone can use as self-defining shorthand long after their playing days end. The quarterback in football and the catcher and pitcher in baseball are the only others which come to mind.

It is specious, but fun to wonder if being a goalie sowed the seeds of Trina's success. That line from that famous sketch with Margaret Atwood ("a good goalie anticipates play; a great goalie influences play") applies to her. Trina has influenced everything she has touched.

So in honour of her 30th birthday, here is a list of 30 goalies who have been great, with one catch. Each one must have done her/his best work during Trina's lifetime, since the 1980-81 season.

30. Kim Martin (2001-) — The Swedish netminder who upset Team USA in the 2006 Olympic women's semifinal.

29. Gilles Meloche (1970-88) — Being mostly on lousy teams obscured that he was good; in the spring of '80, he drove the final nails in the Habs' chances of winning five consecutive Stanley Cups.

28. Shannon Szabados (2006-) — Quite possibly the best women's goalie ever.

27. Mike Richter (1988-2003) — Reputation suffered by playing on apathetic Rangers teams, but was good enough to back Stanley Cup- and a World Cup of Hockey-winning teams.

26. Kelly Hrudey (1983-98) — He is in the top 100 in adjusted goals-against average and at did his best to make the Wayne Gretzky L.A. Kings looked defensively sound.

25. Dwayne Roloson (1994-) — Still going relatively strong at age 40 with the New York Islanders. Could have had a Stanley Cup ring and a world championship gold medal within a span of 12 months in 2006-07 if Marc-André Bergeron could have contained Andrew Ladd.

24. Cristobal Huet (1994-) — The best French-born goaltender in NHL history. Well, there's actually only been two.

23. Olaf Kölzig (1989-2009) — Class act who won a Vezina Trophy.

22. Sean Burke (1987-2007) — Canada's goalie in two of last Olympic hockey tournaments when it was a quasi-amateur affair; had a better career than most realize.

21. Mike Liut (1977-92) — The first goalie to win the Ted Lindsay (then Lester B. Pearson) Award and the only one to ever help the Hartford Whalers win a playoff series.

20. Jaroslav Halák (2005-to date) — One of the best 'tenders of the post-lockout era.

19. Ron Hextall (1984-99) — The volatile temper overshadowed that he could play. How's this for long-term success? Hextall led the NHL in save percentage once in the high-scoring 1980s and in goals-against average once in the low-scoring '90s.

18. Grant Fuhr (1981-2000) — Wasn't necessarily great, but a generation of impressionable kids thought he was during the '80s.

17. Andy Moog (1980-98) — Better numbers and more longevity than his flashier and more famous Edmonton netminding partner.

16. Miikka Kiprusoff (1994-) — Good enough to trick people into believe the Calgary Flames have a competent front office. Helped Finland win the Olympic bronze medal in Vancouver.

15. J.S. Giguère (1996-) — One of the better Dead Puck Era netminders and won a Conn Smythe Trophy despite playing on a non-Cup winner.

14. Billy Smith (1973-89) — The Islanders probably could have won with many different goalies when they ran off four Cups in a row in a diluted league (just check Smith's stats vis-à-vis his backups' numbers). Battlin' Billy was their guy.

13. John Vanbiesbrouck (1981-2002) — Got the third-year Florida Panthers to the Cup final once.

12. Curtis Joseph (1989-2009) — The second-best undrafted goalie of the entry-draft era, who helped some mediocre teams go deeper into the playoffs than they were otherwise entitled.

11. Marty Turco (2000-) — Lack of playoff success has hurt how he is perceived, but he's been awfully good. Only Tony Esposito surpasses him as the best goalie to ever grow up in Sault Ste. Marie and play at a Michigan college (Turco at the U of M, Tony O at Michigan Tech).

10. Jonas Hiller (2001-) — Better than most people know.

9. Ed Belfour (1989-2008) — The best undrafted goalie of the entry-draft era

8. Tim Thomas (2002-) — The best late bloomer since Roli; not his fault he was almost 30 by the time people realized he could stop the puck.

7. Ryan Miller (2002-) — So good that some Buffalo Sabres on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls would not have minded if the U.S. had won in Vancouver.

6. Tomáš Vokoun (1996-)— Criminally underrated. Started out in the Canadiens system and they failed to hold on to him, so you know he's good.

5. Martin Brodeur (1991-)— Calling him overrated has come into vogue, but he is a unique athlete. Name how many other teams in one of the big North American ball-and-stick leagues have had the same starter at a key position since the year Jean Chrétien and Bill Clinton each took office.

4. Roberto Luongo (1998-) — Probably the best of the aughties, or at least the best one to play exclusively in cities which are never seeing a Stanley Cup parade. Saved his best Olympic performance for when it mattered the most, which was no doubt appreciated by Canadians who were based in the U.S. during the Vancouver Games!

3. Henrik Lundqvist (2000-) — Wow, just imagine how good he could be if he had a glove hand? Three-time goalie of the year in the world's second-best pro league, the Elitserien, and a Vezina might just be a matter of when. Also has an Olympic gold medal.

2. Patrick Roy (1985-2003) — Helped make the butterfly ubiquitous while winning four Stanley Cups and becoming an antihero for the ages by telling off Montreal Canadiens president Ronald Corey.

1. Dominik Hašek (1980-) — The best ever. Put it this way: if Roy had played half his career in Europe and Hasek had spent all of his in North America, would anyone need convincing the Dominator was the most dominant? His peak is right up there with any player's best, as The Contrarian Netminder recently argued:

"In the calendar year of 1998, including the regular season, playoffs and Olympics, Dominik Hasek had the following stat line: 54-20-14, 1.75, .943, plus 16 shutouts. He averaged nearly 1 shutout every 5 games, playing mostly on a Buffalo Sabres team that was the worst team in the league at shot prevention in 1997-98 and 5th worst in 1998-99. The Sabres' win threshold over those two seasons was .917, meaning that they needed a very good goalie just to be a .500 team." (Brodeur Is A Fraud)

Trina, hope you enjoy the list if it happens to come to your attention. Happy birthday.

Halladay and His Accomplishments Are Easy To Cheer For

2010-10-18T16:17:00.002-04:00

In an era where many athletes have massive big headed ego’s (sometimes both literally and figuratively – see Barry Bonds), few are as deserving and as former Jay Roy Halladay.

While numerous others have won awards, and have pitched the no-no and the perfect game, Halladay’s achievement stands above many with his performance against Cincinnati last week. Here’s why:

When
Not only was it the post-season, it was Halladay’s FIRST post-season game! If that doesn’t say amazing and astonishing then what does? Playing great in the regular season game and doing great in the post-season are two completely different accomplishments. Need a better example? Okay, having 30 wings in one sitting is impressive, but having 30 wings in 15 minutes deserves more accolades.

How
Pretty much every pitcher who’s had a no-no or perfect game has had great defensive plays behind him, but Halladay’s pitches were hitting every corner. Don’t get me wrong, Jimmy Collins snag and throw to first was beautiful, as was Jayson Werth’s low catch in right field. But for Halladay, he had curveballs fooling hitters and making them look as confused George Bush talking about sovereignty. Former teammate Scott Rolen was a three time strikeout victim. The cutter hit the corners and the four seamer zoomed by batters. On top of that, he had a hit, run and RBI more then the entire Cincinnati Reds team.

Not bad for a guy who’s a lifetime .123 hitter.

Who
It’s Roy. In an era where major stars from Toronto teams have left for bigger money and have had their dedication questioned, Halladay remains as one of the few who arguably left after being dedicated to the franchise. Halladay stuck around and tried to make things happen, but left on not “good” terms with the Blue Jays faithful, but incredible terms!

To this day even when Vince Carter returns to the ACC, he’s met with boos curses and fans holding funny signs. The same is likely to happen for Chris Bosh. And just last night was Hedo “Ball” Turkoglu met with boos and jeers.

But for Halladay? After his no hitter against the Reds, the Blue Jays celebrated as if they won the World Series.

And in short, that’s what makes you want to cheer for Roy Halladay. A dedicated athlete who goes about his business in a quiet, humble and professional manner. While that used to be the norm, it is now refreshing to see an athlete so deserving get his dues.

Hope this helps ...

2010-09-14T16:04:00.003-04:00

Got a favour to ask.

A good friend, Clifford Martin, and his father-in-law, Mikhail Gorbounov, are each entered in the half-marathon event (21 km) during the annual Army Run in Ottawa on Sunday.

It's a little late in the game, but Cliff has an idea. His sister, Tanya Martin, is having a is having a corneal transplant but the cost of artificial cornea, some $3,000 isn't covered by OHIP, so the pair have decided to make it a fundraiser. For $5 apiece, you can guess either Cliff or Mikhail's time on Sunday. The winner will get half the pot and the other half will go toward Tanya's procedure.

Mikhail, a competitive athlete, completed a 10-km event in about 45 minutes earlier this year. Cliff averages 50-55 minutes for 10 km, so there is a gauge.

To make a pledge and place a bet, drop a line to cliff_martin@hotmail.com. Cliff may explain whether it's $5 to bet on one runner's time, or $10 to bet on both.

Canada vs. Brazil U-17 Women's World Cup Live Blog

2010-09-13T17:26:00.003-04:00

Tonight the Canadian U-17 Women's team plays Brazil in their final group stage game of their World Cup campaign. The Canadian girls will need a win or a draw and some help elsewhere to qualify for the knockout stages. The match kicks off at 7:00 PM EST/ 4:00 PM PST and will be live on CBC Bold and cbcsports.ca.

Canada - Brazil

Canada Break Eight Game, Fourteen Month Winless Streak

2010-09-08T20:10:00.003-04:00

The Canadian Mens National Team's 2-1 win over Honduras in Montreal last night was a watershed moment for the Canadians in several ways. First off it broke a winless streak which spanned over eight matches and fourteen months. It also will help Canadians put behind them the memory of Canada's last match against Honduras in Montreal, the ill-fated World Cup Qualifier which saw the team's realistic hopes of qualifying go up in flames after a 2-1 loss. Following a more recent loss in Toronto against Peru last week it was important for the team to leave their home supporters with something to cheer about from their first set of home friendlies in three years.

Canada came out looking much more physical than the side that lost to Peru on the weekend. Last minute call-up from the Vancouver Whitecaps,Terry Dunfield, added some grit in the centre of midfield. As did Montreal-native Patrice Bernier. The two new starters along with Will Johnson who started his second straight match kept the Honduran midfield from generating many opportunities and prevented them from really playing with the ball at their feet.

The real key to preventing the Hondurans from having anything like the free reign they have previously against the Canadians was the centre back pairing of Kevin McKenna and Dejan Jakovic. McKenna played the role of the hardman, winning balls in the air, getting stuck in, but he also was a threat going forward as demonstrated by his game-winning headed goal and several attacking runs. Jakovic on the other hand was the real ball playing centre back, he moved the ball forward, intercepted Honduran passes and played a very smart positional game. The two played together at the 2009 Gold Cup for Canada and have featured together in several friendlies since. They really compliment each others abilities and look to be Canada's top centre back pairing heading into 2011.

Going forward Canada had much more of a cutting edge than they did against Peru, or really for all of the last fourteen months. Although Rob Friend still was not creating loads of chances as the lone front man he got a lot of help from the left flank in the form of Josh Simpson. Simpson was named CSA man of the match and showed some of his best stuff beating men down the wing and putting the ball into dangerous areas. He was rewarded with a somewhat of a scrappy goal, but after a good bit of build-up play from the Canadians. Coming off a fantastic match in Toronto three days earlier Simeon Jackson was kept quiet by the Hondurans, but he still managed to carve out a beautiful chance in the last ten minutes which only to fire it hopelessly over the bar.

With fifteen minutes left Canada started to look stretched so Stephen Hart brought on Atiba Hutchinson in the centre of midfield for Dunfield. Hutchinson calmed the game down and helped create several chances going forward. He was Canada's biggest attacking threat for the fifteen minutes that he was on the pitch.

The game was delayed with only eight minutes remaining for about half an hour due to lightning. The stoppage really killed the flow of the game heading into the last eight minutes, but added to the drama as Canada held on for a tight win over their CONCACAF rivals.

For coach Hart a 2-1 win over a weakened Honduran side will not be enough to prove that Canada is ready for a serious run at the World Cup, but it certainly is a start. After the match McKenna said he found the Honduran game to be more difficult than the Peruvian match, but Canada just adapted quicker and were more up for the challenge. This kind of comment really bodes well for a team that has had difficultly adjusting to different opponents in the past. Just one of many reasons to be a little more optimistic following this set of Canadian friendlies. It may take a while, but slowly this team is improving and preparing for Mission 2014.

Canada vs. Ghana U-17 Women's World Cup Live Chat

2010-09-06T17:56:00.003-04:00

Join me for a live blog as the Canadian U-17 Women's team kicks off their World Cup campaign in Trinidad and Tobago against Ghana. The match kicks off at 7:00 PM EST and will be live on CBC Bold and cbcsports.ca.

Canada - Ghana

Mission 2014 Kicks off with Loss

2010-09-05T14:34:00.007-04:00

Canada's soccer supporters group, The Voyageurs, branded yesterday's men's international friendly against Peru as the start of Mission 2014, Canada's quest to qualify for the 2014 World Cup in Brazil. The title Mission 2014 comes from a banner which boasts the signatures of Canadian soccer fans wishing their team good luck. The banner will go on a trip across the country so it can be signed by well-wishers of the national team everywhere from St. John's to Victoria, but despite the sentiment Canada's Mission 2014 got off to a poor start last night with a 2-0 loss to Peru.

Canada came out strong in the first half and tested the Peruvian keeper, Raul Fernandez, on several opportunities. Coach Stephen Hart opted to start the game in a 4-3-3 formation with Rob Friend as the target man through the centre alongside Dwayne De Rosario and Simeon Jackson on the wings. Throughout the first half Jackson was a major threat, beating men and making runs down the right hand side of the pitch. He was clearly Canada's most dangerous player on the night. The only thing missing from Jackson's game was the final ball into the box. This was a common theme for Canada last night as Friend was given very little service up top.

Without the usual face of Mike Klukowski at left back, Hart opted to start with Marcel De Jong. De Jong is solid defensively but cannot offer nearly as much going forward as Klukowski who many believe to be Canada's best crosser of the ball. Unfortunately De Jong's chance to impress at left back was cut short when he was carried off injured (with what was later revealed to be a broken shoulder) inside the thirty minute mark and was replaced by Ipswich's Jamie Peters. Peters looked uncomfortable all night and was at fault for the second goal letting his man run right into the box unmarked. The recently converted midfielder did very little to put himself higher on the depth chart for the that left back spot.

The centre back duo for Canada of Kevin McKenna and Adam Straith generally had a good match. The back four fell apart for the first twenty-five minutes or so of the second half committing numerous errors leading to the two Peruvian goals, but the youngster Straith and veteran McKenna righted the ship and held Peru for the last twenty minutes of the match. At the age of nineteen Straith is still proned to making rookie errors and he did several times throughout the match, but his ability to read the game is fantastic. He can cut out passes, his positioning is good and he looks to be an interesting prospect for Canada as they continue on Mission 2014.

The midfield three of Julian De Guzman, Atiba Hutchinson and Will Johnson put in a decent performance but were far from outstanding. De Guzman had one of his better games at BMO Field this year, looking to go forward much more than he does with TFC, but maintaining his defensive solidity. The biggest criticism of the three midfielders coming out of the Peru game was the same criticism they've been facing for the last four years. They cannot seem to find that incisive pass that carves open the opponents and leads to an opportunity. They keep possession well, they move the ball forward, but they just do not provide any threat in the attacking third of the pitch. Although this improved midfield helped Canada keep their shape throughout the first half.

Canada's 4-3-3 has often dissolved into a 4-5-1 with the two wingers hanging too far back, last night that was not the case. In the first half especially the Canadians kept their shape well and kept the ball well. Although the goal scoring chances were not there, this ability to play a 4-3-3 must have pleased Hart. If there is one main positive to take out of the loss to Peru it will be Canada's ability to maintain the ball in this formation.

Mission 2014 continues when Canada takes on Honduras in Montreal this Tuesday, where Hart will hope the team builds on this performance and comes out with a result against their CONCACAF rivals.

Home Friendlies Shed Light on Serious Problems for Canada

2010-09-02T01:03:00.004-04:00

It has been more than two years since the Canadian Men's National Team kicked off their short and unsuccessful World Cup qualifying campaign, and now the team is back at it again. For the first time since the qualifiers in 2008, Canada is playing on home soil with friendlies against Peru and Honduras this upcoming week in Toronto and Montreal respectively. With a new coach at the helm in the form of Stephen Hart there appears to be a fresh new beginning for the men's national team, but a closer look reveals the only real change is in the declining optimism of Canadian supporters.

In 2008 Canada boasted what many supporters believed to be the best squad since Canada's 1986 team which yielded the country's only appearance in the World Cup to date. Midfield stalwart Julian De Guzman was coming off a career year with his club team Deportivo la Coruna in Spain's La Liga, Dwayne De Rosario was ripping it up in the MLS, Canada's aging defensive core of Paul Stalteri and Richard Hastings had proved themselves in the 2007 Gold Cup, the team looked ready to take on the best CONCACAF had to offer. They went on to finish with just two points from six games in qualifying and were eliminated without coming anywhere near the form expected of them.

Now that Canada is returning home the shine has long faded off this generation of Canadians, but a close inspection of the rosters selected for Canada's upcoming games reveals the only difference between this team and the 2008 team to be four players and two years. Toronto FC defender Nana Attakora-Gyan, relatively unknown Greek-based midfielder Gianluca Zavarise, promising centre back Adam Straith, and keeper Haidar Al-Shaïbani are the only players involved in this set of friendlies that played no role in the 2010 qualification campaign.

England has been holding on to their "Golden Generation" for years as the results keep on deteriorating and based on the evidence of this squad Canada may be following in suit. There are some players who have impressed in the past two years who were involved but not ready in 2008 and have benefited from these two years of experience. The two players that immediately come to mind are the English-based duo of Jamie Peters and Simeon Jackson who have both progressed at a quick rate and will be in contention for starting places this weekend. However on the whole the last two years have not been kind on Canada's Golden Generation. De Guzman appears to have regressed since his move to Toronto FC, De Rosario still has yet to perform with the national team, German-based striker Rob Friend has never translated a solid goal-scoring record at club level to Canada, and Hastings has returned to being a major liability at the back. Not looking so Golden anymore. Despite two years of sub-par performances from some of Canada's most talented players, they are still the best options Hart has or is willing to gamble on in these two friendlies.

The main story lines leading into these two exhibition matches from the main stream media include the controversial issue of taking Toronto FC players away from a competitive fixture, the chance for Stalteri to earn a Canadian record 82nd cap and the simple fact Canada will be playing in front of their home supporters. The elephant in the room is that Canada enters this pair games without a win in over a year, and with only one goal in their last six matches. This is a Canadian team that is close to an all time low during a period where soccer is generally on the up in Canada with Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver all to be competing in the MLS by 2012.

The good news? Canada has plenty of time and stability plus a solid amount of preparation to come. By the end of 2010 Canada will have played six friendlies, the most Canada has played in one calendar year since they matched that total in 2005. Canada has a solid full-time head coach in Hart who plans to be with the team right through the 2011 Gold Cup and World Cup Qualifying. Best of all Canada is getting friendlies against the type of opposition they will be playing in the CONCACAF region. Canada played CONCACAF rival Jamaica earlier this year and are facing Honduras in Montreal in the second of these two friendlies. They will also have played three South American teams by the end of the year who play a similar style to many of the teams in CONCACAF.

Canadian supporters across the country, especially those based in Toronto and Montreal, are excited for a chance to welcome home their team after a two year absence but the occasion can only serve as a short term distraction to the many challenges facing this team.

Blog blast past: When Doornekamp's MVP performance was for some birds of a different feather ...

2010-08-27T16:00:00.002-04:00

Former Carleton Ravens hoops star Aaron Doornekamp is on Canada's roster for the FIBA world championship, which begins Saturday in Turkey. From March 19, 2007, here's a post from someone from the same corner of the world, written the day the Odessa native was MVP of the CIS Final 8 after scoring 20 points in a championship-game win over Brandon.

Back in the day, Ernestown Secondary School had an English teacher named Peter Peart. Give a weak answer in his classroom — the sacred confines of 208 — and often you'd get zinged, "Good enough for Odessa."

With that line, Mr. Peart* summed up everything about the hometown and alma mater of Aaron Doornekamp (pictured), who was the linchpin of the Carleton Ravens' latest national championship run on the weekend.

Odessa, Ont., is a basic bedroom community which has had 1,000 people forever and hasn't changed much since I graduated in 1996 (I lived between Odessa and Bath, another bedroom community). It's so nondescript that during the Capital Hoops Classic in January, one writer asked the rest of the press box denizens, "Where's Odessa?" even though there was a good possibility he had driven past it on Hwy. 401 dozens of times.

Anyway, "good enough for Odessa" laid it out there. You had a choice: Be small time and never live a day in your life, or go for the big time. You might pull it off, but it could also be a royal asskicking.

Hopefully that gives some context to why it was such a trip yesterday, a for a fellow ex-Ernestown Eagle to see Doornekamp hugging his proud father Henk on the Halifax Metro Centre floor in front of thousands of people and a national TV audience. Aaron, the last in the Doornekamp-Smart line of succession that basically was one-half to two-thirds of Ernestown's basketball program for about a decade, kicked plenty of ass himself to help secure the Ravens' fifth straight national title.

Canadians generally don't do the whole alumni thing like Americans do when it comes to their high schools. Ernestown is no exception in this regard, but damn is it freakin' sweet to see one of our own garner such accolades. It almost makes up all the jokes and snide comments people make about a rural high school, along with the myth about buying a statue of the horse instead of football equipment, which is even acknowledged on the school homepage.

My mom teaches at ESS. Last April, a popular recent graduate, Tristan Webb, was killed after being struck by a train. A few weeks later, three students were charged with making alleged Internet death threats, which made national headlines. Right after the new school year started, there was a pellet gun shooting on a school bus which occurred the same day as the shootings at Dawson College in Montreal. It's been a rough 12 months, so any positive publicity for Ernestown is really good these days.

So call it cornball, maybe even a little sad on my part, but yeah, it's OK to vicariously celebrate this.

On Saturday, you could watch one former Eagle, '96 grad Adnan Virk, anchor NCAA Tournament coverage on The Score in the afternoon, then flip over to TSN and see Aaron Doornekamp play a big part Carleton's semi-final win over Ottawa. Was there another high school in in Canada, let alone one with 650 students in a village of 1,000 people, which had two of its grads playing prominent roles in the hoopla for both the U.S. and Canadian versions of March Madness on the weekend?

Good enough for Odessa? Hell, we're good enough for the whole country. One cannot help but think back to mentors such as Mr. Peart, who saw that we were. Thanks, Aaron, for making sure some of us can't forget where we came from.

(* No relation to Neil Peart of Rush fame, although over the years Peter probably gulled more than one teenage metalhead who asked. Deadpanning, "Yes, he's my brother," would have them going, usually for a couple seconds.)

Moral of the story: Think before hiring a 'Barbie blonde' who blabs about going to Dr. Anthony Galea when your marquee sport just had a doping scandal

2010-08-26T04:44:00.021-04:00

Only in Canadian Interuniversity Sport do you get this good of an ironic epilogue.

This summer, yours truly was fairly consumed by pointing out the Waterloo Warriors doping scandal was exacerbated by a bush-league approach to collegiate sports in Canada (there are exceptions to the rule, which one should be grateful for). It was, to my mind, blown out of proportion since it was the only point of reference many media consumers had to Canadian university football. Meantime, CIS has moved aggressively to increase drug testing, but it's only a half measure if they don't start to market it better.

Anyway, so over the summer Ontario University Athletics, with a team shut down for the season by doping, needing to continue to take those steps, went about hiring a new PR person for for media relations.

Presumably those factors would rule out giving the senior communications job to a 24-year-old who blogged about being treated by Dr. Anthony Galea during the period while she was interviewing for a job with the OUA.

Yep, Laura Bridgman, a self-described "Barbie blonde" and "occasional vixen," whom I'm told has been hired as the OUA's communications and social media coordinator, claims to be a patient of Galea. The Toronto physician is is facing "separate U.S. and Canadian criminal investigations for, among other things, alleged smuggling and drug-related offenses."

It's irony, on a base level. There's nothing wrong with going to Dr. Galea. However, a big part of being a communications professional is realizing what needs to be dealt with seriously. Much of spin control is knowing what you should not say. And here is the OUA, hiring someone who not only lacked the self-awareness to realize she shouldn't say that about Dr. HottiePants while applying for a job with a league that's been doing damage control over doping all summer, but was amused by his notoriety. Did the OUA check that out? That's all.

"The man who injected my ankle, Dr. HottiePants, is actually Dr. Anthony Galea. He founded his clinic (ISM Health & Wellness) when I was 4 years old. My love of old men wins again!

"The name sound familiar? He's the doctor that's treated Tiger Woods, A-Rod, and others in the states without a license to practice in the US. Read the telling story about him in The Washington Post from June. Oh even without trying, I'm all drama, drama, drama!" (Aug. 11, 2010)

Nineteen member schools, countless numbers of newspaper journos looking to abandon ship and this is who the OUA hires to help increase its media presence? This is about who hired the person, not the person who was hired.

Some might question quoting Ms. Bridgman's blog, but it was discovered in about, oh, 10 seconds of Googling. Her LinkedIn professional profile links to a Twitter account connected to her blog. That makes it fair game. Many an employer does an Internet search on a job applicant, just to see what comes up.

Also, Twitter followers ain't everything, but Ms. Bridgman only has 231. At least two cisblog.ca contributors have several times more.

I don't presume to know what's in the minds of female athletes aged 18-22. Surely, there are some progressive women who play sports in the OUA and might be interested to know their interests will be represented by someone who uses phrases such as "PR chickies" on her blog.

You really have to wonder about the due diligence and thinking-it-through elements on the OUA's part. Bridgman, by the way, is a recent grad (2007) of the University of Windsor, where OUA president Gord Grace is athletic director. She was a communications assistant for the conference in late 2008, so she has some experience, just not a lot.

Ultimately, if the OUA wants to be looked upon at big-time, there are standards. One is having a resident communications specialist who doesn't raise concerns by failing to cover her tracks online. People have to keep their fun and professional sides separate, or it could be bad for credibility.

No one is saying you cannot hire a young woman, but hire a experienced communications professional. Instead, a sporting concern with an upstream swim to to earn credibility with a sadly still male-dominated sport media went and hired a young woman who's blogged about having her panties exposed ("navy lace boyshorts for all those walking on a different street this morning and are curious to know") by a chance gust of wind.

Ms. Bridgman's blog also contains misspellings of simple words ("with out" and "miss-read"). To quote Toby Flenderson, "Is that enough? Do you want me to go on?"

Of course, in that same episode of The Office, Michael Scott shoots back, "Why are you the way you are?" To answer the question, it's about wanting the OUA and CIS to grow. An organism only grows if it exposes itself to light, turning to people who think about the league critically, bring new ideas. Not sure that happened here.

There were some reservations about getting into such an obscure topic, and full disclosure, some of the unsuccessful applicants are acquaintances. Sometimes you have to call in your cards, though.

One has to believe the OUA had applications from people who were better and more mature than this — female, male, 20-something, 30-something, 40-something, whatever.

The point is the obvious, though. It's all inter-related. A lack of professional standards contributed to the Waterloo debacle blowing up real good. Now it gets reinforced by hiring someone who doesn't filter very well. This isn't an personal attack, and I'm deeply sorry if it's construed as such. The sticking point is Grace's screening process.

It's not so much a literal connection. Still, people in the same realm of sport which has become super-serious about steroids have turned around and hired someone who did not seem to grasp why Dr. Anthony Galea is in legal trouble, to work in media relations. That beats just about all.

Damien Cox strikes out, but why is José Bautista hitting all those homers?

2010-08-24T00:46:00.019-04:00

Saying someone doesn't know rate stats from counting stats is the new "doesn't know his ass from second base." Put another way: it's tough to trust a journalist with semantic data if her/his age exceeds José Bautista's home-run total — 40.

That's a gross generalization intended it makes the point. Greater minds have hit Damien Cox's weak-ass cheese about the Blue Jays' Bautista out of the park -- Cox Bloc even came out of retirement -- but whatthehell.

A couple points: One is that Cox showed what can happen when the perpetuation of PED hysteria is combined with an age of digital democracy. It's possible for anyone to write a So-And-So Must Be On Steroids post any day of the week. (Bleacher Report must exist for some reason, people.)

Every sport is in play (Mike Wilner: "You can either choose to believe those who have passed [drug] tests are clean or you can choose to believe that cheating is still rampant in the game and enjoy the game anyway.").

That makes it awfully curious that since every sport is fair game, a hockey writer such as Cox went out of his way to ding a ballplayer. Just saying.

The second point is that Lloyd Dobler principle from Say Anything, "I know that I don't know." One of daily journalism's old saws is the "good at English, bad at math" stereotype. Speeding up the sports culture hasn't changed that; it's only served to reveal it. And it's not any more prevalent among older journos than younger ones.

The difference, though, is some realize journalism is not the totality of one's personal experience and general knowledge. As a former mediocre math student, I know I am the wrong person to come up with all-encompassing, quintessential answer for why Bautista has been such an outlier, with 40 homers and counting through Monday. (His previous single-season high in the majors was 16.)

(Update: Dave Cameron, who might be that right person, has looked at it over at Fangraphs.)

At the very least, you gotta make an effort, you know?

Cox's first mistake, of course, was focusing only on the raw sum, Bautista's home-run total. It's not about the counting stats. It's about the rate stats.

At a glance, Bautista seems to be on a unique if unsustainable run. Only two everyday players in the majors have had a higher percentage of their batted balls become fly balls than Bautista (53.2%, according to what was posted at Fangraphs as of 12 a.m. Eastern on Aug. 24).

Only three had had a higher percentage of their fly balls go out of their park than Bautista (20.8% home run/fly ball rate). You want to question anything, question why he's able to get more loft on the ball, and hit it so far (although we know steroids don't make you hit the ball farther).

Rogers Centre, according to Hit Tracker, is the homerdome this season, yielding a MLB-high 2.86 gopher balls per game. New Yankee Stadium is next at 2.78, then there's a huge drop-off down to the 2.5 range.

Bautista has hit 25 of his 40 homers at home, in about 50 fewer at-bats than on the road.

That helps make the case Bautista is just an outlier. It doesn't give us all the answers, but it gives us a good framework.

Only one other everyday player hits more of his batted balls in the air and has also seen at least 20% of his fly balls sail over outfield fences — the Arizona Diamondbacks' Mark Reynolds. But you know where this is heading. Reynolds, who had 27 homers through Monday, is famous for striking out in a 40% about of his at-bats, nearly twice Bautista's whiff rate. Reynolds' home park is also a launching pad.

Who else is beating Bautista in home run/fly ball rate? The Cincinnati Reds' Canadian first baseman, Sports Illustrated cover boy Joey Votto (26.1%), leads the majors. Votto doesn't hit the ball in the air with any great frequency, which is part of why he's vying for a batting title in the National League while also being up with the leaders in home runs (and guess what, Votto's home park in Cincy also is notoriously generous for homers, 2.39 per game).

Tampa Bay's Carlos Pena (23.5%), has a ratio of almost three strikeouts for every two base hits he collects, for pity's sake. Next up is another Three True Outcomes slugger, the Washington Nationals' Adam Dunn (21.7%).

Bautista has struck out 95 times in 522 times at-bat this season, which isn't a lot for a cleanup hitter. He's more of 2 1/2 True Outcomes & mdash home run, base on balls, a few strikeouts.

A mathematician, I am not, but there is some plausibility to saying Bautista is on a roll, derived from changing his approach to produce more fly balls in his home run-friendly home stadium. The increase in his home run/fly ball rate from 2009 over the past season (12.3% to 20.8) is almost identical to that enjoyed by Votto (17.5% to that aforementioned 26.1). But no is wondering how that came to be for Votto, even in his hometown of Toronto. Nor should they.

None of this completely explains away why Bautista made it to 40 homers this season before anyone else reached 35. He did show signs when he put up a .339 on-base / .606 slugging with 10 homers in 125 times at-bat in Septemeber. It wasn't meant to, since I ain't that smart. The point is it's not that hard to at least be in the ballpark, so to speak, when an ballplayer's performance improves markedly. It's asinine and reductionist, not to mention played-out, to just automatically mention steroids. You could even say it's pathetically naive to think going for shock value for its own sake works.

The truth is out there if you care to learn how others are looking for it. Perhaps Damien Cox will learn to do that someday.

(The gist of Cameron's post:

"For the most part, he’s been hitting bombs like the two he drilled [Monday] night. If we look at his HR/FB rate, you can see that his frequency of getting balls to clear the wall isn’t that unusual: 21.5 percent of his flyballs have left the park this year, which still ranks him behind Joey Votto (25.7%), Carlos Pena (23.7%), and Adam Dunn (21.7%). Over the past three years, five players have averaged a HR/FB rate of 21.5% or better, which isn't exactly uncharted territory.

"Bautista will likely never have a year like this again, but there’s no reason to think he’s going to revert back to the version we saw before last September."

Good stuff.

(Image credit: The Canadian Press.)

Blog blast past: Hats off to our Ruthless capacity to live a lie

2010-07-18T07:00:00.000-04:00

In the wake of George Steinbrenner's death, here's a piece on the closure of Yankee Stadium in from Sept. 22, 2008.

You can't talk about Yankee Stadium. There isn't any such place.

Cranky-panted Seamhead objections notwithstanding, it is impossible to not be touched on some level by the closure of the Stadium. One would have to be a sad bastard to begrudge anyone who gave in to the faux gravitas on Sunday night in the Bronx.

Look at it this way. A lot of people never visited the Montreal Forum, or maybe only got to do it once or twice. They still felt a sense of loss March 12, 1996, the day after the Canadiens played there for the final time. It's part of the understanding that pro sports would not exist without the glow you get from our shared existence as fans. I'm talking about the vibe that means two people can make plans to meet up with two other people they barely know after a game and already have the basis for a conversation.

That might be part of where the feeling of loss with the closure of the Stadium comes from, the loss of a first-hand experience. Speaking as a history buff who had the foresight not to study history in university and lose the ability to enjoy it, history is best when it's scuffed like one of Whitey Ford's pitches. Think about all the kids who'll never have the chance to be introduced to that now -- although with what the Yankees charge for tickets, plenty were denied that already.

Moving out of Yankee Stadium is another step closer to having our shared experience come even more prefab, sanitized and franchised.For instance, Maury Brown at The Biz of Baseball noted that Yankee Stadium III will have "a martini bar and a steakhouse on the inside – a ruse designed to recall the historic memory of the past while tapping into the wallets of those that come to a new stadium, not just to watch a game, but to be serviced in grand style."

In other words, you get Phil from Marketing's undercooked and watered-down notion of the 1940s and '50s passed off as historically based. Sterling Cooper would be proud; people think they are getting something, even if it's actually about as true to that bygone era as a typical Mad Men episode. Like, come on. Who has a martini and a steak at a ballgame?

So much for that famous ad that starred Humphrey Bogart: A hot dog at the ballpark beats a steak at the Ritz. And, of course, any baseball fan you'd want to watch nine innings of baseball with with drinks beers, always in the plural.

Enough about that, though. All in all, the Stadium sendoff owed more to George Orwell than to George Herman Ruth. This goes way beyond the Yankees ignoring their dismal 1986-92 era by not even having the common courtesy to bring out Steve "Bye-Bye" Balboni to wave bye-bye.

(Balboni was a laughably limited part-time DH who played two seasons in pinstripes and almost hit his weight over that time. In fairness, he weighed 225.)

Roger Clemens? To borrow Yankee TV play-by-play man Michael Kay's home run call, "See ya!" The disgraced right-hander was misremembered in the official record, even though it was just last season that the Yankees wanted him so badly that he signed a pro-rated $28-million contract for one season.

Ex-manager Joe Torre, who's now with the L.A. Dodgers, was similarly "disappeared." Never mind that Torre guided the Yankees to four World Series titles or that the image of him sitting stoically in the dugout is burned into my brain, thanks to Fox's death-by-a-million-quick-cuts style of presenting playoff baseball.

Torre won more titles than Hall of Fame Yankees manager Miller Huggins, who only had 15 other teams to contend with, and more than Ralph Houk, whose stature was such that he could only be portrayed in 61* by the guy who played D-Day in Animal House. However, he was fired and he's headed to the playoffs while the Yankees are not.

All of it rang a bit hollow, right down to the what-keeps-this-guy-alive Bob Sheppard's recorded player introductions. The Yankees ownership is likely feeling no pain over leaving. They have been trying to escape from that place since about 1981, when Snake Plisskin was appointed to the board of directors.

Remember the racially loaded innuendos George Steinbrenner perpetrated in the early '90s about the Bronx being too scary for his season ticket holders? It was all part of grand scheme:

"In truth, this was a happy occasion for everyone but the fans, who will need mortgages to afford tickets next year. The Yanks will finally own their own ballpark, the players will finally move from the utility closet in the basement into a real clubhouse, and the ownership will pocket fistfuls of cash from 60 luxury boxes.
-- Wallace Matthews, amNY.com

Translation: It mean the Yankees, whom you need to have in the playoffs so you can hate something and know that you're alive, are turning into MLSE with foul lines. (The closure occurred on the same weekend the Tampa Bay Rays, with a payroll just $5 million higher than perpetually injured Yankees pitcher Carl Pavano's contract, wrapped up their first playoff berth. By the way, Rays owner Stuart Sternberg grew up as a Mets fan.

All the "85 years" talk reveals is our admirable, Costanza-like ability to live, like, 20 lies at the same time. It neatly ignores that, as ShysterBall said, "For the record, the last home run in Yankee Stadium was hit by backup catcher Duke Sims. It happened on September 30, 1973 against the Tigers. After that game, New York played for two years in Shea Stadium and then 33 years in one of those unfortunate 1970s-era ballparks that are now finally and mercifully gone."

Then's there the reality that the Yankees' deal with New York City for public assistance for Yankee Stadium III stinks to the point that even proud Republicans are calling the baseball team "taxpayer-leeching pimps." Republicans using that language? You'd swear a Democrat was about to get elected president.

There is all of that and more. It's not a Yankee-hating thing (eh, maybe a little). Maybe all of this speaks to the general shallowness of modern life.

In the absence of clarity, the best way to deal is to give priority to the mythology of Yankee Stadium has value, too.

For pity's sake, it was the only place that could be called the Stadium without anyone asking which stadium. When Crash Davis went off on his "one more dying quail" rant in Ron Shelton's Bull Durham, he talked about how one more hit per week was the difference between being in the bush leagues and being in Yankee Stadium.

It was about as close to something anyone can understand as you're going to get in a Hollywood sports film.

Sure, as far as ballparks appearing in movies go, Kevin Costner also played a character who felt compelled to drag a famous author to Fenway Park. John Hughes knew Ferris Bueller's day off would be incomplete without a trip to Wrigley Field. That is only from a fan perspective.

What Shelton, the ballplayer turned writer meant, was that Yankee Stadium was the proving ground for a player. The media has dumbed that down over the years, but it does not make it any less true.

Yankee Stadium was Oz-like -- a fantasy world full of odd creatures with names like Billy, Mickey, Whitey, Yogi, Reggie, Jet-ah and Mariano. On one night in 1996, thanks to Jeffrey Maier and an egregious case of craven home-team officiating, it was more like the shower room in Oz for the Baltimore Orioles. (Yeah, I went there.)

Whatever you think of the Yankees, there is a sense of loss when you know that here on out, Aura and Mystique are likely just the nom de peel of A-Rod's, um, casual acquaintances.

All of that is being left behind in the greater name of greed. Sports is big business, but it still sucks.

That's right, Legal Suit Larry is still mayor of Ottawa

2010-07-15T13:11:00.003-04:00

Be honest. You would love to join "a Coalition of the Melba Toast."

Far be it to wonder how a G8 capital with one of the most educated populaces in North America has a sitting who can't even say stump-speech clichés ("a camel is a horse designed by consensus" instead of "committee") properly.

What did Jon Stewart say? There will come a day when the adults are in charge again.

David Brent would be a better NBA owner than the Dunderhead in Cleveland

2010-07-14T17:02:00.008-04:00

It is just kind funny to contrast to see what the guy who portrayed the definitive rude and crude boss, David Brent, says about Steve Carell leaving The Office franchise, compared to what another guy said recently about a star leaving his franchise.

"It was expected of me, as executive producer, to persuade him to stay on. With syndication in full swing the more successful the show remains, the more billions we all make. It was tempting, but the truth is, I believe he is doing the right thing. He's fulfilled his contract and more, and is a huge film star now ... I'd be lying if I said he should do more. He shouldn't. He should move on, continue to do great work."

Would that Dan Gilbert had an iota of Ricky Gervais' sense and self-awareness.

Something else Gervais did with The Office that Gilbert never did in James' seven years in Cleveland: Surround the star with a deep supporting cast.

100 favourite movies ...

2010-07-14T02:35:00.006-04:00

So, the assignment is to list 100 favourite movies without explanations or research, no checking Rotten Tomatoes, no making sure that a great film is on there. Arrange them in alphabetical order, but once you have 100, no takebacks.

Here's what came out:

A Beautiful Mind
Absence of Malice
Airplane!
Almost Famous
American History X
American Splendor
Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy
Any Given Sunday
All The President's Men
Bamboozled
BASEketball
The Big Lebowski
Blazing Saddles!
Bull Durham
Boogie Nights
Boyz n The Hood
The Cable Guy
Casablanca
Casino
Chinatown
Dazed and Confused
Dead Man on Campus
Dr. Strangelove: Or, How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb
Drowning Mona
Eight Men Out
Election
Eurotrip
Fargo
Fahrenheit 9/11
Fast Times at Ridgemont High
Ferris Bueller's Day Off
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
Fever Pitch (original UK version)
Fletch
Full Metal Jacket
Forgetting Sarah Marshall
The 40-Year-Old Virgin
Gandhi
Glengarry Glen Ross
Goodfellas
Grosse Pointe Blank
Harold & Kumar Go To White Castle
High Fidelity
Hoop Dreams
Hoosiers
Hot Tub Time Machine
Inglorious Basterds
The Jerk
Just Friends
Kill Bill Vol. 2
The Last Waltz
Little Miss Sunshine
The Longest Yard
Lost In Translation
Love And Death
Mallrats
Master & Commander
Mean Girls
Million Dollar Baby
National Lampoon's Animal House
Network
North Dallas Forty
Not Another Teen Movie
Office Space
One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest
Owning Mahowny
The Paper
Platoon
Pulp Fiction
Raging Bull
Reservoir Dogs
Rocky
Rushmore
Say Anything
The Shawshank Redemption
Slap Shot
Smokey And The Bandit
Snatch
Sometimes In April
Stand By Me
Star Wars
Stripes
Superbad
Swingers
Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby
Taxi Driver
There's Something About Mary
This Is Spinal Tap
The Truman Show
Top Secret!
The Untouchables
The Usual Suspects
V For Vendetta
Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story
Wall Street
Whale Music
What About Bob?
Without Limits
Wonder Boys
Youth in Revolt

Hugh Laurie 1, Bud Selig 0

2010-07-13T22:45:00.004-04:00

For anyone a little taken aback by Major League Baseball and FOX's self-serving pabulum about the "spirit of philanthropy" prior to the MLB All-Star Game.

Ironic, considering which network House airs on.

One way LeBron could have got people on his side

2010-07-09T13:12:00.002-04:00

Allowed Jim Gray to ask, "LeBron, lemme ask you: It seems now there is an opening. The American public is very forgiving. Are you willing to show contrition, admit you're just in it for the money, and make some sort of apology to that effect?"

Two points, and two only, about Chris Bosh and LeBron James

2010-07-08T16:42:00.004-04:00

The LeBron James free-agency story, and to a similar extent Chris Bosh in southern Ontario, have hit a point at which everyone thinks he/she has to say something clever for fear of getting kicked out of the cool kids group.

Spare it. This is all that need be said.

Bosh: The only question is how to react the first time he returns to Air Canada Centre with the Miami Heat to play the Raptors. There should just be silence and 10 seconds of head-shaking since he came across very well until two weeks ago. Booing would just be misplacing anger at the Raptors' inaction and at the Toronto sportgeist being unable to be patient while a franchise bottoms out strategically.
LeBron: Manufactured outrage that involves pandering to our worst tendencies to drum up page views is dead (Oz has spoken) is dead; this is just the parasitic-symbiotic relationship between sport and corporatism run amok; and you should have got an idea about him when he wouldn't speak up about Darfur until it was convenient for him, as if an athlete is supposed to be held to a higher standard. Plus, this is his prerogative, did you forget that too?

Enjoy the show.

The Toronto (Caution: May Contain Football Like-Substance) Varsity Blues?

2010-07-06T18:41:00.004-04:00

The U of T Varsity Blues' chances of appearing in "obscure college football scores" some time in the next 4-5 years have shot up by 4,000 per cent.

This is too good, in a football-nerd context, not too mention: Toronto has an incoming defensive back, Greg Easterbrook, who has the same name as the author of ESPN.com's eggheaded Tuesday Morning Quarterback column. The mind behind TMQ, Gregg Easterbrook, whose football obsessions include obscure colleges, conservative coaching decisions and pass-wackiness, is the one with the extra G.

One can only hope this gets the Varsity Blues a mention on TMQ at some point, notwithstanding that Page 2 hasn't been hip since Varsity Blues first became a staple of late-night cable programming.

It's nice, at the risk of playing the Canadian who clings to any mention of the country in the U.S. media, to think the other Easterbrook has a secret fascination with CIS football. He did mention then-McMaster star Kojo Aidoo in his annual nonsensical mock draft column. The Queen's Golden Gaels were also mentioned last fall for executing a couple daring third-down gambles while closing out Laval in the Mitchell Bowl.

There was some hedging over whether it was worth posting about Easterbrook. Football recruiting news is handled very well by Canada Football Chat and the 25 schools planning to participate in CIS football this season. For the rest of us, there so much uncertainty over what those players might become in a few years. However, The Sporting Blog had a post on Tuesday about some college basketball recruits with odd names, so the attitude was, whatthehell.

All that is known about Easterbrook is he played at Ernestown Secondary School near Kingston, whose program is only two years old. He presumably appreciates football success can be a long time in the waiting for a school, not a bad understanding to bring to a Toronto team trying to turn the corner under coach Greg DeLaval.

"U of T went 49 football games without a win. That's nothing.

"Ernestown Secondary School went forty-eight years without a victory on the gridiron." (Sept. 18, 2008)

The Varsity Blues should seize the day with their Greg Easterbrook, if he becomes a starter. As TMQ would say, be bold and the football gods will smile upon you, U of T.

(Totally self-indulgent, I know.)

Blog blast past: Don't run so fast with the Semenya stuff

2010-07-06T11:28:00.000-04:00

South African runner Caster Semenya has been cleared to resume competing. Remember all the controversy late in the summer of 2009, all the wannabe biologists making jokes she was a man? Of course you do. Here's a told-ya-so post from Sept. 10, 2009.

It seemed to shut-the-hell-up on the Caster Semenya saga. No one needs another white, heteronormative dude rambling about a subject he knows little about — middle-distance running, never mind gender issues.

Anyway, it seemed worth saying don't buy all the hype about the Australian report that Semenya is a "hermaphrodite, someone with both male and female sexual characteristics."

Well, not so fast. It kind of leapt off the page when a Digital Journal article noted that "despite having higher than normal levels of testosterone in her urine samples, she is still within the ranges allowed for women in sports." Meantime, via Deadspin, where some gentrification has taken place since Tommy Craggs moved in, The Science of Sport noted that it is not so cut-and-dried:

"Even if all this were true, it still does not necessarily mean that she will be disqualified from future events. There are conditions which are allowable, which would see Semenya being able to compete after surgery (the surgery, by the way, is for health reasons. If you have internal testes, then they can become cancerous, and so must be removed. This might explain their desire to get hold of her, with ASA" — Athletics South Africa — "standing in the way).

"The point is that even if the article is accurate, and the source is reliable, the actual decision around Semenya would not necessarily be disqualification."

Please do not take this too literally since it's an amateur observation (I squeaked by in science), but all the "three times the normal level of testosterone" stuff feels like it is out of context. Like Craggs says, there are genetic freaks in every sport. No doubt most elite female athletes have much more testosterone than the average female. A NFL linebacker would produce more than the average accountant.

Meantime, like the Science of Sport dudes said when all this blew up three weeks ago, " ... genitalia are so ambiguous, that trained medical doctors will disagree and debate for hours over whether someone is male or female, even when that person is already a teenager. Final year medical students, when shown pictures of ambiguous genitalia, and asked to vote 'male' or 'female,' are often wrong!"

Point being, there is still plenty of reason to be skeptical, and maybe people should stop acting like they learned biology from the Season 1 South Park episode where Eric Cartman finds out his mother is also his father. It is probably beside the point to note this does betray the "great in history and English, but bad at math and science" journalist stereotype, or to slag those who have hang their arse on doing a mindless cut-and-paste rather than being smart enough to think for themselves, or realize something is beyond their grasp.

The Lloyd Dobler adage from Say Anything — "I don't know, but I know that I don't know" is a good adage. Gender is more fluid than the labels female and male. Is that so hard for people to understand?

The IAAF has encountered these cases before and will do so again in the future. The furor over Caster Semenya has seemed overblown. Besides, let's be honest, since when did the mass of sports fans anyone care who won an 800-metre race, female or male? It's not the 100, 200, or the marathon. It's too in-between, pun intended.

Blog blast past: Semenya was such a freak, you heard it a thousand times that week (and NOW?)

2010-07-06T10:52:00.000-04:00

South African runner Caster Semenya has been cleared to resume competing. Remember all the controversy late in the summer of 2009, all the wannabe biologists making jokes she was a man? Of course you do. Here's a told-ya-so post from Nov. 19, 2009.

From the department of "told you so," the South African runner Caster Semenya is keeping her gold medal from the world championships.

Or have people already forgotten about how, for a couple weeks in late August and early September, suddenly everyone fancied herself/himself an expert on gender determination? The temptation is to paraphrase from Jon Lajoie's Michael Jackson Is Dead video ("You fuckin' hypocrites," extremely NSFW). Anyway, point being, whatever is still to come out about Semenya, the fact remains the way some people who should know better reacted is kind of mortifying.

Anyway, a quick google turned up a blog post from U.S. runner Jill Geer, "The myth of fairness meets the question of gender," which is pretty illuminating. She notes that now-infamous photo of Semenya flexing at the finish line (which is just strange since a runner's stock-in-trade is her legs and lung capacity) and her choice of coach did not do her any favours. But still...

"Reading about (Semenya's) case has been an eye-opening education for me as I've learned about the incredible varieties of genetics that cause huge variations in what is male and female. It's like learning that it's not always day and night; it's often dusk and dawn. Until you read about and understand the science, it is hard to understand why the case isn't clear-cut.

"Of course, the uncertainty only makes the issue more tragic. If I were an athlete who finished behind Semenya, I would feel bitterly angry and cheated. If I were Caster Semenya, I'd feel equally cheated, and perhaps even more so: I'd feel I'd been cheated not out of a medal but out of my right to enjoy my life. Not only has her performance been called into question, but her entire life has been made the subject of intense public debate, cruel jokes and salacious rumor-mongering. In a classic bit of side-show grotesquery, she was even trotted out in sequins for a South African women's magazine.

These are just a few reasons to feel angered by the whole affair, but if Semenya was put in a position to compete when people close to her knew there might be an issue regarding her sex, it is even more infuriating.

"... Erin Buzuvis of the Western New England School of Law in October delivered a paper entitled 'Caster Semenya, Sex, and the Myth of a Level Playing Field.' While I don't necessarily agree with many of her assertions, that she attempts to lay out a rational argument as much as possible is to be lauded.

"... Even if competition is divided along the lines of sex, she argues, there is inherent natural variation and "unfairness" within the sexes. What is fair, and is it possible and desirable to try to create fairness when there is no such thing as a truly level playing field in sport? To wit, some women have naturally higher testosterone, and more strength, than others. Some runners have grown up at altitude and therefore have an advantage in distance running. Some athletes are wealthy and can afford training aids that others can't."

Whatever happens, happens, one would hope the reaction is a little more mature next time.

Losing that fake concern about drugs in sports, made easy

2010-07-01T17:32:00.022-04:00

At first blush, it was like someone didn't see Run Ricky Run.

It was tough to stay reined in after reading Winnipeg Sun column pointing the CFL's new drug policy is toothless and PR-motivated. (Rob Pettapiece has tackled the CIS angle over at cisblog.ca.)

Seeing "illegal drugs" and having marijuana lumped in with steroids was almost cause to go off after a long three weeks of seeing much of the drive-by media cock up the Waterloo War-roids story.

Plus it poked fun at Ricky Williams. Who does that anymore? The Washington Times, which is obviously run by liberal guilt-ridden propper-uppers of permissiveness, describes him as "a guy who just wants to spread the love."

"With a policy like this, Ricky Williams might want to come back.

"Actually, the use of marijuana, the former Toronto running back's drug of choice, isn’t even covered in the CFL policy. Neither is cocaine.

"The message to players: if you find the NFL's policy on 'recreational' drugs too stifling, come on up! The Cannabis Football League has a job for you!

"Wouldn't team presidents and GMs, most of whom claim to be so eager to connect with their communities and their fans, particularly families, want to know if their players are abusing illegal drugs?"

A sober second thought is that is actually a great takedown of how old media pander to a 21st-century answer to reefer madness with steroids and PEDs, the shorthand term. As a whole, it talked a lot about the Waterloo debacle, but didn't listen or learn.

No one wants to chat about how CFL and CIS football players using steroids is just a sports-of-the-times thing. The reality a a newspaper column is a 600-word sprint makes it even harder to approach. One might as well go the other way and be satirical.

For the last time, what happened at Waterloo was no shock. Look around. Big Pharm has a hook into about everybody and nutritional supplements can be bought by any student, fact. That has almost been a fourth wall in much of the Waterloo coverage. Steroids bad ... over-the-counter stuff that might work like a steroid pretended away.

Of course, we can't have that conversation. It would force OMDs to confront their own bias and cease and desist from being governed by their hang-ups and need to judge a younger generation. They're not going to give that up, especially when falling back on shallow snark out of uber-defensiveness is available.

That means the above from Paul Friesen is brilliant, and that is said in full sincerity.

He pointed out how print journalism is so self-limiting when it comes to examining anything complex. It was hook-line-sinker on this end, to the point an e-mail had to be sent just to ask for explanation. On further review (a phrase that is apt after the Saskatchewan Roughriders' wild win over the Montreal Alouettes), it works on several levels.

It skewers our dated attitudes about how sports should uphold some notion of muscular Christianity instead of athletes outwitting and outplaying each other for our vicarious joy.

The same goes for how people get in a bunch about illegal drugs. Meantime, they pay no mind all the readily available legal ones that have created a trendy career for women who look a lot like the breadwinner at Mike Fisher's home.

Using Williams as an Athletes Behaving Badly straw man hits on an irony in sports fandom that we don't talk about much. Why does the marijuana-smoking Miami Dolphin have such a stickiness, while jocks who have committed heinous crimes that made life difficult for at least one other human being go straight down the memory hole?

Dollars-to-Doritos says if we walked into a bar showing a CFL game and asked people about Ricky Williams, all could ID him as a halfback who is a lover of the herb. How many could tell you about Trevis Smith, a Saskatchewan Roughriders linebacker whom in 2007 was sent to prison for knowingly exposing his sexual partners to the HIV virus?

That is effed-up that we remember Ricky and forgot Smith. You might halfway seriously wonder why we obsess more over what male athletes put in their bodies than what some have put in a woman's body against her will, excuse the crassness.

That last graf calls out that collective effed-upedness:

"Wouldn't team presidents and GMs, most of whom claim to be so eager to connect with their communities and their fans, particularly families, want to know if their players are abusing illegal drugs?"

Feigning concern about for "families" and using "illegal drugs" as an all-purpose blanket term are classics out of a career politician's handbook.

It shows concern without addressing the matter. As such, each has become a common media trope that could and should be retired faster than the Blue Jays' 3-4-5 hitters on most days.

Families?

A sports team may be family-friendly, but it's not a morality cop.

The Trevis Smith saga actually illustrates this very well. Family-friendly really just means a family of four can still afford to watch a competitive team play a game amid a raucous atmosphere. That's it. That is the connection the CFL (and CIS football) has to make.

The crowd in Regina at the Riders' CFL 54-51 overtime win over the Montreal Alouettes on Thursday is a proof.

The Riders are one of the most profitable teams in the CFL and the most passionately followed. Their fans, like all fans, have voted with their time and disposable income that their support begins and ends with the product.

Having a player convicted of a crime was embarrassing for the Roughriders organization in 2006. Then-GM Roy Shivers was fired while all this was before the courts, but it was for a variety of other reasons. Point being, it passed. However, abject behaviour by players, coaches, or team execs (see Eric Tillman) has little sway with rank-and-file sports fans. They can sort it out on their own and continuing living their lifes without any media moralizing.

That should make it clear we have little to no need to extend the nanny state to the performers in spectator sports. It's like some people want that in order to screen out contemporary life from creeping into their notion of the world of fun and games. Oh, not stupid reality again! It's the damned modernity which shapes the fun and games, pal.

Denying it makes you as a big a goof as Stephen Valeriote. He is a former Waterloo football player who tried to blame the adverse tests at his alma mater on almost all things CIS except the testees (and the two players who have been arrested and charged).

"So you ask yourself: ‘Why were so many players at UW on steroids?’ Was it because that the only way to compete with older, heavier, stronger players out east and out west was to bulk up?

"I don't like to criticize without offering a solution. In order to purify men’s university athletics, I suggest that they adopt the following rules:

"Ban ex-OHLers or Jr. A hockey players;

"One year in junior football or Quebec prep school equals one year of university eligibility."

Purify? Who believes anything is pure now? We find a peace within a state of compromise, so GTFOY, sir. Get. The. Fuck. Over. Yourself.

Far be it to point out CIS men's hockey has not had a positive doping test in almost forever. Never mind asking how the average age of football players at out-of-province schools could have influenced behaviour among players at Waterloo. The Warriors could only meet those teams in a national semifinal or Vanier Cup. (Hah!)

Since Valeriote is a school teacher, one can only presume he'll swallow it wholeheartedly the next time a student fails to turn in classwork and blames it on someone else.

Any culture of prohibition is a rearguard action. Legislating morality is a losing battle. The only line is when drug use is a symptom of a discipline problem that affects one's job performance. Stereotypes aside, it might not in all cases.

Whose job is it to instill the personal responsibility which keeps one on the straight and narrow? The people who look after you for the first 18 years of your life. Parents, the main part of the family unit.

Acknowledging that means baby boomers have to really look at how their four decades' of self-indulgence have trickled down to millennials.

Just thinking about that would make their collective lips numb. There's probably something you can take for that. Which brings us to:

Illegal drugs?

Using wacky-tabaccy-loving Williams as Mr. Bad Example, tongue in cheek, spoofs how careless some in the Canadian media are/were about in providing context on this matter.

Dogging Williams obviously doesn't hunt. His drug habit is far from the worst among NFL castoffs who have come to the CFL in the past 15 years. Remember Todd Marinovich? He was a former first-round flameout who told Esquire writer Mike Sager (no relation) that he shot heroin at halftime during his short-lived stint with the B.C. Lions in 1999.

"Todd retrieved a premade rig out of his locker and went to the bathroom to shoot up. Sitting on the toilet, half listening to the chalk talk, he slammed the heroin. As the team was leaving the locker room for the second half, he struggled with the screen in his glass crack pipe — he wasn't getting a good hit. Then the pipe broke, and he lacerated his left thumb. By the time he got out onto the field, his thumb wrapped in a towel, the game had already started. He took up the clipboard, his only duty. 'I didn't even know what play they were calling,' Todd says. 'Nobody looked at the shit I wrote down anyway.' "

Todd Marinovich did heroin at halftime. Do you need Norm Macdonald to repeat that for comic effect?

And that segues into the drive-by media's blind spot, that aforementioned fourth wall about nutritional supplements, a highly unregulated industry. The prevalence of prescription drugs in everyday life is barely mentioned, too.

People know. However, it gets in the way of keeping a column or story simple(istic).

Rob put it best:

"Now that we have a list of banned substances, and the use of any of them in CIS counts as a first strike with respect to the CFL's policy, an enterprising reporter could take Appendix D from this PDF, then go to the well-known supplement franchise with several locations in the country (some close to university campuses) and whose website lists product categories like 'anabolic agents' and 'pure creatine powders,' then find something with lots of levels of one of the banned substances in it, then ask how many of those products have been sold recently to young men. But I guess that's too esoteric a task."

Of course, that ain't gonna happen.

Who wants to read that drug use in Canadian university football might only be only marginally more prevalent than it is among males ages 15-34 who exercise regularly? That is not sensational or sexy.

It would also jeopardize the concept any athlete who has not tested positive for a banned substance is by deductive reasoning a clean athlete.

Perhaps someone is getting by on eating well and getting eight hours' sleep each night.

It would probably be more honest to just accept most high-level competitors have their little helpers. Every profession has something. Imagine a newspaper put out in a world without caffeine.

That would be much more honest about where we are as a society. That's all this is, a plea for a little more honesty, which means to stop scapegoating athletes, especially the ones in CIS who make an easy target.

The obliviousness to how all drugs reshape our lives is just tiresome. (As a friend put it: "Do you eat meat? Well, you took a steroid.") By the way, the aforementioned Eric Tillman, the former Roughriders GM who had to leave after he was convicted to sexually assaulting his family's 16-year-old babysitter? He attributed his actions to the effects of prescription medication. No irony there.

In closing, it is sickening the University of Waterloo used a criminal investigation of a couple players as a kneejerk excuse to whack its football team and throw 53 players under the bus.

One may only wonder if other Ontario universities are wondering why they couldn't be so lucky to have a gift-wrapped reason to not compete in CIS football, during an an era when the calibre of play is on a huge upswing. (So, so Canadian: it's getting tougher to win, so why try?) It is equally nauseating to see the same 53 players received the angel treatment, too.

Honesty replacing fact-plus-fiction and truth-minus-facts (Chuck Klosterman's characterizations of most news stories) would involve the media not seeing everything as so cut-and-dried.

Specifically, is it that wrong to think the CFL not testing for cocaine and marijuana is barely worth a mention, since neither is the issue?

One, not testing for it might reflect a quaint view there is still some right to privacy left in the world. Two, it might be an admission it is hypocrisy to bust players for that when there would be no pro football worth watching if not for stronger legal drugs used during training and recovery periods. (Those are taxed drugs, so the government doesn't fret about them as much.)

The CFL, by its actions, essentially said:

"Look, we realize people decided we were expected to come up with a doping policy like all the big boy-pants wearing leagues, even though we always have been and always will be an independent minor league with oddball rules. So this is the best we can do. It's not going to catch everybody, but it'll help us sleep at night. Now go work out your moral and ethical dilemmas on your own instead of expecting to find answers to them between the lines of a football field."

The world where a sports commissioner could say that is the world I one day to want to live in.

In not so many words, the CFL kind of did address fans and media as if they were adults. Fans are so there. The media not so much.

That "Cannabis Football League" crack, even if it's sarcastic, is reminiscent of the exact kinds of remark that kill in a newsrooms that are bastions of old-media hubris. It does not reflect trying to challenge one's own set of assumptions, let alone so-called conventional wisdom. It just reinforces it.

Old media got old for reasons beyond technology, people. That's why there's not a snowball's chance in hell it can discuss such a topic seriously.

Blog blast past: Putting Bonds into some perspective

2010-06-26T11:28:00.002-04:00

U.S. federal prosecutors on Friday decided not to challenge a ruling that tossed out evidence in their case against baseball's home run king Barry Bonds. Between the World Cup, NHL draft and Arizona Diamondbacks pitcher Edwin Jackson throwing a "lame no-hitter," it probably didn't get much coverage. It seems like the case that was supposed to go to trial 15 months ago is flagging. From Nov. 16, 2007, here's a post from when Bonds was first indicted:

Dave Zirin of the Edge of Sports sums up the lunacy and self-serving hypocrisy of the U.S. Department of Justice (or as he calls it, "Just-Us") vis-a-vis Barry Bonds:

"The actual indictment parses in language that would shame a Clinton. It reads, 'During the criminal investigation, evidence was obtained including positive tests for the presence of anabolic steroids and other performance enhancing substances for Bonds and other athletes.'

"This is idiocy raised to the level of law. It makes me wonder what they're teaching at Jesus-land Legal Academy these days. Did Bonds actually test positive for steroids or were pharmaceuticals only found in these mysterious un-indicted 'other athletes'? And what is a 'performance enhancer'? That's not even a legal or medical term; it's sports radio shorthand. The cortisone shot into Curt Schilling's ankle in the 2004 playoffs was a performance enhancer. The Viagra coursing through Bob Dole's veins is a performance enhancer. Whatever keeps that smile glued to Laura Bush's face is a performance enhancer. It's a colloquial phrase that tells us nothing. It only raises the question whether the indictment was written by Mike or the Mad Dog."

To a serious person, the Bonds indictment is more laughable than anything else. He's a huge jerk, and no baseball fan outside the Bay Area will miss him.

However, there are no white-hat types here; if anything, Bonds' hat is a lighter shade of gray than that of the people trying to put him in jail. (Thirty years? He won't serve a day.) The same U.S. Department of Justice that's trying to take down Barry Bonds is the same one that authorized torture not too long ago. It's the same legal system that, as Zirin notes, drags its feet on hate crimes against African-Americans.

Consider this the denouement, the final unravelling, of Bush-Cheney America. Like Chuck Klosterman wrote shortly before Bonds surpassed Babe Ruth 18 months ago:

"... it's been a half-decade where many long-standing fears about how America worked (and what America represented) were gradually -- and then suddenly -- hammered into the collective consciousness of just about everyone, including all the people who weren't paying attention to begin with.

"Here was a man" -- Bonds -- "accomplishing unbelievable things ... but we did not really believe or disbelieve; we just sort of watched it happen, and then we watched it get out of control, and then we expressed shock without feeling a grain of surprise, and then we tried to figure out how we were supposed to reconcile an alien reality we unconsciously understood all along."

Now the U.S. establishment is going to make up for it on the back of Barry Bonds. Anything's possible, considering all this has already done something seemingly impossible -- make Barry Bonds seem like one of the good guys by comparison. Last word to Dave Zirin:

"The idea that they (the U.S. Department of Justice) have no time for Megan Williams, but invest years in the prosecution of Barry Bonds should make any good person of conscience utterly enraged."

Related:
It was never about Barry, and of course it always was (Deadspin)

That's all for now. Send your thoughts to neatesager@yahoo.ca.

Hockey Hall of Fame, class of 2010

2010-06-22T18:34:00.001-04:00

There's only one thing I can say, aside from the women's selections were well deserved. Dino's in, Pat Burns out? What the Hell?

Something like the truth with so-called Waterloo steroid scandal

2010-06-15T04:26:00.007-04:00

The volume of linkage below says it all with what happened at Waterloo on Monday.

The Warriors football team getting benched for 2010 even made The New York Times, plus it was in sports sections in U.S. cities such as Charlotte, Kansas City, Knoxville and Minneapolis where much of the readership hitherto was unaware Canada has college football. Even the Ottawa media noticed, actually calling the Warriors "one of Canada's most storied university football programs." (It's definitely in the top two in the Kitchener-Waterloo region and in the running for the top 26 nationwide.)

Rob Pettapiece, who will be a UW alumnus by the end of the week, had his rebuttal to the decision. My paying gig should be priority, but as so often happens when the quote, unquote real media cover a CIS story, there are some myths that have to be debunked.

That this is only a one-year suspension.

Greg Layson gets credit for this point. Waterloo has looked to cut expenses. Rob has alluded to UW's indifference to its profile in major sports such as basketball, football and men's hockey. It has a kickass women's rugby team, which is win-win since it's a growth sport which does not cost much to run.

That is why it is reasonable to think Waterloo football ain't coming back, despite the predictable day-after denials swallowed whole by the drive-by media.

It's a simple plan.
- Do an amplified impression of Claude Rains in Casablanca ("I am shocked! Shocked!") about players being on steroids.
- Imply upstanding student-athletes knew but didn't tell (see Point 2).
- An across-the-board punishment which is not entirely unjustified.
- Come back in a year and plead hardship, saying they're isn't enough money for football and the scandal killed recruiting.
- Not have football again.
There is a chance all is on the up-and-up and Waterloo comes back in 2011.

It is going to be a long, long road back to respectability. Football players aren't like basketball players. They don't go to a school for a chance to start as 18-year-old rookies, since most know they need time to get faster and stronger.

Some of you are probably aware of when the NCAA gave Southern Methodist University's football team the death penalty in the late 1980s. The Mustangs sat out 1987 and '88. A program which counted NFL greats such as Eric Dickerson and Dandy Don Meredith as alumni needed 21 seasons before it made it back to a bowl game, even though almost every .500 team in the NCAA goes to a bowl.

It's possible UW looks at this in a year and says, "Too hard, don't bother."
That we should presume total innocence on the part of players who did not test positive.

It is possible to have compassion for the players who do not have a 2010 season without striking up a symphony of small violins.

One Toronto bird-cage liner ran a column headlined, "Innocent held hostage at Waterloo." It somehow neglected to mentioned there is an extant police investigation that will try to find out what coaches and players know and when it became known.

Teams win as one and lose as one. Society in general seems loath to accept collective penalties, but it's hard to believe that the majority of the players in the Warriors locker room did not know something was up. There are no secrets in a team's subculture, hence that further investigation. Athletes, like anyone else, are supposed to call out unethical behaviour.

One of the more illuminating quotes from a player came from Jordan Verdone, the promising linebacker, in the Toronto Star:
"I’m not upset with them at all. Everyone that got caught is a hard working person. They actually loved and cared about football so much that they wanted to become better."
Not to turn into Dr. Cal Lightman, but does that ring of someone who had no idea his teammates could be doping? Maybe or maybe not. There is a part of human nature where we try to rationalize behaviour, especially when a different action might have staved off a cruel twist of fate. And losing an entire football season is a cruel twist of fate, no matter how it is inflicted.
This pertains only to the present-day team and nearby OUA schools.

The crux of a steroid scandal is it cast doubt on anyone who has a sudden spike in performance. It gets applied retroactively. Everyone knows now that steroid use baseball didn't magically start in 1995 when they were trying to get fans back after a strike cancelled the World Series.

That is germane to CIS. The book is open on the past 10, 15 years, since anyone picking up a paper now knows how it easy it was to sidestep doping controls:
"A football staff member, for example, can choose which numbers go in the hat. And if a player chosen happens to be absent from practice that day, he’s off the hook.

"You can see how easily a team could protect players who might be suspected users."
How far back the investigation will stretch depends on what police need to know and, to some extent, how much Waterloo admins want to know. One goal of an investigation is to establish patterns of behaviour, how things were always done.

That is not to suggest anything indecorous happened at Waterloo prior to 2009. Let's call this is a historical sports irony. That roughly 1995-2005 period is now associated with a lot of drug scandals in sports. There was baseball with Mark McGwire and Barry Bonds (my prediction he'll never spend a day in jail is looking better each day), Marion Jones going from golden girl to U.S. federal prison inmate, Floyd Landis losing his Tour de France title, people snidely calling the 1996 Atlanta Olympics "the HGH Games."

No one talked about this on Monday since they likely don't remember, but Waterloo won its only two Yates Cups in 1997 and '99, running Hall of Fame coach Tuffy Knight's venerable wishbone option.

It seemed ironic that when all that was going on the great wide world of sports, a school typically synonymous with second-division status in OUA football won its only championships. It also did so with a run-based offensive scheme that required blockers who were agile, but beefed-up enough to overpower opponents. And shielding players from a drug test was as easy then as it was as late as last fall.

That's only being pointed out to illustrate what kind of tangents people go on after a steroid scandal.

Waterloo is an open book going back 10, 15 years. The same goes for neighbourhood rival Laurier, especially after its players weren't tested when the CCES showed up on campus.
The University of Waterloo taking the high road with steroid abuse.

The only pee Waterloo cares about is in PR. This all harkens back to some fat, dumb and bald guy said last fall in regard to another egghead school cancelling its fall homecoming weekend.

Universities, especially Ontario institutions that aspire to elite status, are little more than paranoid public relations vehicles these days. They are so quick to come down on any kind of bad behaviour that could mean negative headlines that stayed cached on Google forevermore.

They could have gone ahead with the season. It would have been a tougher call to pull the plug on a winning team. It was easier to use a 3-5 team as a political football and show the university, in institution-speak, doesn't take these matters lightly.

Did you notice Waterloo director of athletics Bob Copeland was left to make the announcement instead of university president David Lloyd Johnston? Johnston wasn't about to get the taint on his suit. I'll say it: he should have made the announcement.
The media's concern about steroids in the CFL and CIS.

It is a good story when a university takes a knee on an entire football season.

The subtext to why there was so much coverage is part monkey-see, monkey-do and part is that excrement runs downhill. Everything that happens in Canada typically follows in the shadow of what has already happened in the United States. The U.S. media went through its period of high dudgeon and righteous indignation over athletes being goosed up on steroids. We're a little more into shades of grey in Canada, but we still needed one to make our own.

Waterloo was built right to spec, a legitimate news/sports story and a vulnerable target. People have commented that how it's funny that people got bent out of shape about juiced baseball players, but gave the NFL a free pass. The latter is a sacred cow. In Canada, the NHL is a sacred cow. Insinuations about doping or player misbehaviour are almost always rebuffed with extreme prejudice.

It's a little easier to put the focus on football and little easier to go after CIS. It's petty to ask, "Hey, TSN, since a CIS 'scandal' led Sportscentre, does that mean you'll make more of an effort with covering the basketball and football championships?"

At least we understand why they played it up in such a way. Canadian football's lack of a drug testing policy could have been an issue long ago. Odd how that works.

I have about run out words on the subject. Some sort of punishment was needed. Honestly, you should read Bill James' 2009 essay that says in future generations, everyone will be taking some form of steroid, once the health risks are controlled.

In the here and now, drug testing in CFL and CIS needs sharper teeth, even if it's more for keeping up appearances.

Related:
UW suspends football team’s season in wake of steroid scandal (Christine Rivet, Waterloo Region Record)
Waterloo steroid scandal a 'wakeup call' says University of Regina's director of athletics (Ian Hamilton, Regina Leader-Post)
Solutions elusive for CIS doping problem (Bruce Arthur, National Post)
Waterloo doesn’t shirk dirty work (Randy Starkman, Toronto Star)
Plugging the loopholes; Dobie applauds off-season tests (Paul Friesen, Winnipeg Sun)
Coach trying to fix 'collateral damage' (Perry Lefko, sportsnet.ca)
No football for a year: captain 'sick to his stomach' (Greg Mercer, Waterloo Region Record)
Waterloo suspends football program over steroid use; Waterloo’s 2010 season ends after nine adverse drug tests confirmed among players (Allan Maki, Globe & Mail)
Innocent held hostage at Waterloo; University of Waterloo’s harsh solution leaves normal kids left out in the cold (Steve Simmons, Toronto Sun)
Doping scandal bombshell; University of Waterloo Warriors football program has been suspended for a year (Ryan Pyette, London Free Press)
Sevigny disappointed but not surprised by steroid scandal (Greg Davis, Peterborough Examiner)
Suspension a 'black eye' on university football, says Huskies coach (Matthew Wuest, Metro Halifax)
Collateral damage (Rob Massey, Guelph Mercury)
Argo stunned by Waterloo revelation (Terry Koshan, Toronto Sun)

A not crackpot K-Rock Pot notion: the Kingston Senators

2010-06-12T20:12:00.015-04:00

The spirit of late, great Kingston sportscasting institution Max Jackson demands sharing the idea that a reader sent word of a Facebook group advocating for the Ottawa Senators' American Hockey League affiliate to play out of the K-Rock Centre.

Feel free to put file that in the Just Crazy Enough To Work desktop folder.

"The timing is right for Kingston to bring in better hockey. Elton John came here, why not the Baby Sens.

"Consider that Kingston is geographically located right in the center of Ottawa, Montreal, and Toronto. The games featuring these teams would be rather exciting for the city.

" ... The capacity for a hockey game at the K-Rock Centre is 5,700 patrons. There are only 8 AHL teams that averaged higher attendence than that last season. Binghamton averaged 3,629.

"... It's closer to Ottawa so they (the Senators) can move players and personnel much easier. Also, Sens fans could easily make the drive down from Ottawa to see a game. That's much tougher to do with Binghamton."

It would never happen in a billion years. Merely mentioning it verges on, "What, renovating the restaurant you don't own, or pending 200 million dollars you don't have?" territory.

Still, as a connoisseur of blue sky thinking applied to sports, it is not all that as insane. An AHL team moves into Kingston bearing the colours of the Senators, who have built a pretty solid following in the city due to Rogers Sportsnet's regional broadcasts. The Frontenacs franchise then relocates down Highway 401 to Cornwall, where the Royals could be reborn. The Cornwall Civic Centre complex is still up to Ontario Hockey League standard.

It fits in with two broader trends in sports. One is that Major League Baseball and NHL teams have a preference for having their Triple-A farm team close to home. In baseball alone, the Cleveland Indians, New York Mets and Philadelphia Phillies have managed to partner up with a Triple-A team in the same state just within the past three seasons. (The trade-off, mind you, might not be all that great for the Senators. A player would not have to clear customs if he is meeting the team in Ottawa, but keep in there are times they call someone up during a U.S. road trip.)

The second is the AHL is probably going to try to grab a share of smaller-sized Canadian markets, especially the longer Canada is underserved by the NHL. It already went into Abbotsford, B.C., whose metro population (159,000) is about the same as that of Kingston (153,000). The arrival of the Abbotsford Heat, who are the Calgary Flames' affiliate, hasn't been a slam dunk. The Heat averaged 3,700 fans, but there are questions about the financial burden taken on by the city.

The rub is Kingston already has assumed the financial burden and needs to find a way to get more revenue out of the building. In any business, one way to do this is offering something new, changing the formula.

The Frontenacs might be past the point where they're part of a normal ebb and flow with attendance and on-ice results. Twelve seasons without a playoff series win, with the same general manager (quoth Mark Potter from late 2008: "If Larry Mavety survives in Kingston, junior hockey won't") has made it look like stagnation.

The move to the K-Rock Pot, which the OHL Arena Guide calls "an easy rival of Oshawa's GM Centre as the best new arena in the league" has not helped grow their fanbase past their 2,300 to 2,800 loyalists. The Fronts had the same percentage decrease in attendance this season, despite a 25-point improvement, as the nearest rival, the Belleville Bulls, did while dropping off by 50 points. Their radio broadcasts have been on three stations in as many seasons.

Some that is poor management. Some of it is pause to wonder if the market for the OHL is ever going to recover in Kingston. The one certainty is the city has hockey fans, as evidenced by the sellouts for the world junior exhibition games in 2008 and the turnout of 5,100 for the Brampton Battalion-Frontenacs Game 7 loss.

The Baby Sens moving in would be a cool change. That team could average 4,000 fans across 41 home dates (seven more than the OHL's 34), if the pricing point was kept realistic.

The AHL is a better calibre than the OHL. The Senators, who have talked about holding their rookie camp in Kingston in September, would continue to solidify one of their satellite centres.

Owner Doug Springer could make more money, but would have little to no say over coaches and player personnel. It's win-win.

Obviously, a handful of people joining a Facebook group asking for a Kingston AHL team is not a news story. Kingston should be getting more from its top level of hockey. The city needs more people attending events at the K-Rock Centre. The Senators could always use a way to keep chipping away at Toronto and Montreal's powerbase.

Last, but not least: Ottawa Senators fans would have a reason to go to an arena which is actually located downtown.

(For anyone wondering: getting into this has nothing to do with a certain critic of the Frontenacs now being on the junior hockey beat. Now, your humble agent is sufficiently addicted to self-Googling to have heard a few variations of, "Now that Neate is covering junior hockey, will he say the same things about the Frontenacs?"

Short answer: no. Longer answer: no, but not for reasons you might think and did you really just refer to yourself in the third person?

The tone probably will change because youth condemns and maturity condones. It is time for an attitude adjustment. The hope is the Frontenacs would allow bygones to be bygones, presuming they ever heard about this site.

Of course, that's a totally self-serving statement after suggesting the current team leave town on the say-so of some Facebook users.)

Great moments in OMF: Non-sports columnists columnizing on sports

2010-06-12T16:06:00.014-04:00

(Moral of the story: Anything only known to us through black-and-white photos and film footage, probably not relevant to the present day.)

It seldom ceases to amaze why columnists who are not on a sports beat get to waste ever-shrinking newspaper space writing about sports. It almost always ends in mental cutaways to Barbara Bush saying to a reporter, "I'm embarrassed for you," or Walter Sobchak in The Big Lebowski bellowing, "Donny, you're out of your element!" That alone is usually enough to say, don't bother with behind-the-curvers.

Still, you wonder why someone such a columnist at the Toronto Star gets to cliché-monger his way through a fine whine about the Toronto Maple Leafs having the NHL's longest Stanley Cup drought among the Original Six teams, since the Chicago Blackhawks won for the first time in 48 seasons. It also covers a twit typist for the Ottawa Citizen using the World Cup as a device to betray his own aging white guy insecurity by recycling feeble footy jokes about "let's go to Nairobi to find out how to make a soccer ball out of garbage" and "stay tuned for Ghana versus Serbia!"

There are people who pull off the cross-over. Stephen Brunt can touch on universal themes through his books and columns. Earl McRae, whom it was privilege to count as a colleague, could do it with aplomb. There are people who are shifted from sports to "city side" to plug a hole. It's a very short list, though.

The practice could be justified by saying, "Well, sports affects people's lives and the mood of a city and everyone is entitled to an opinion." Anyone who writes a column eventually resorts to writing one about how they have no use for a particular sport (if memory serves, someone wrote a "I choose not to golf" column for the Simcoe Reformer one time, but at least it ran in the appropriate section).

It never goes the other way, though. A sports columnist does not get to say, "Screw writing about the Senators' salary cap situation. Today, I am writing about light-rail transit even though I am barely acquainted with the details and the paper has people with a much firmer grasp of the subject. It affects Senators' fans lives and everyone is entitled to an opinion."

Besides, most of the time, when the columnist ranges into sports, it's a gong show. Take it away, Royson James:

"Consider, since the likes of Frank Mahovolich and Red Kelly and Ted Kennedy, hockey’s best players have not worn the blue and white. Canada’s Team — the grand and glorious Maple Leafs — has failed to sign a single one of the game’s greatest players during all those championship-empty years.

"Wayne Gretzky may consider this his NHL home city, but Leaf team owners managed to scuttle any chance The Great One would skate for the home side. Bobby Orr, Mark Messier, Pavel Bure, Teemu Selanne, Mario Lemieux, Sidney Crosby, Alex Ovechkin and the most spectacular talents shone elsewhere. Leaf fans settled for Darryl Sittler, Mats Sundin and Doug Gilmour."

Talk about a flagrant misread — which teams did the transcendent stars of the 1950s and '60s such as Maurice Richard, Bobby Hull, Gordie Howe and Jean Béliveau play for again? HockeyDB also has no listing of a "Mahovolich."

A cursory understanding a sports history, which granted is not a job requirement for laying out pages in either Toronto or India, would suggest it is folly to compare the Original Six days with the modern 21- to 30-team NHL. The Leafs of yore were one of just six teams. In those days before the entry draft, they had right of first refusal on any player in the richest and most populous region of essentially the lone country scouted by the NHL. All that, and Bobby Orr ended up in Boston. Speaking only as smugly as someone not yet alive may, it is a wonder the Leafs captured only nine of the 25 Cups during the Original Six period.

The Montreal Canadiens, with first crack at players in the second most populous region of the same country, won 10 over the same time span. Like Harry Sinden said once, "Let me tell you about that so-called great rivalry ..."

Point being, why give space to someone who writes the Blue Jays won "back-to-back titles in 1991 and 1992" and expects overworked copy-editing cats, who someday soon will be located in Sagar, would correct it to 1992 and 1993? Or thinks he's scoring debate points by referencing how the New York Yankees "routinely sign baseball's biggest names and brightest stars" without informing readers who might not follow sports religiously that Major League Baseball has no salary cap, unlike the NHL?

The same goes for Mark Sutcliffe at the Ottawa Citizen, the same guy who finds humour in the abject poverty of Nairobi, spewing about CBC's World Cup coverage. There is no need to party like P.C. thugs circa 1991 and accuse him of anything ending in -phobia. Hacky and hickish suffice.

Someone who feels it necessary to spend two good paragraphs explaining to readers Canada is not playing in the FIFA World Cup should probably see if the LCBO has that little-known English lager Shutyerwordhole on special during said FIFA World Cup.

Far be it to say Sutcliffe is writing more out of his generational discomfort than any actual knowledge. That would be a classic case of a writer creating an imaginary divide to soothe his own ego, and he's not to be bested in that Olympic event:

"What does it say about our hyphenated national identity that between Sidney Crosby's goal and the next Winter Olympic hockey tournament, this is what passes for a unifying event: Millions of Canadians enthusiastically waving the flags of other countries?

" ... Plus, the soccer audience is more urban and urbane than the typical Canadian, which might attract a different advertiser to the CBC. Hockey evokes a rural picture, with guys in mullets and lumberjack shirts sipping Tim Hortons while they watch their kids on the outdoor rink. Soccer is played by the archetype metrosexual, David Beckham."

Metrosexual? No one has used that word in three years, although in Ottawa, being three years behind the times would have ahead of the general populace by a cool decade.

Short answer, it says we live in a great country where people have an option in their rooting allegiances. It is not harmless, although it's a challenge for the Canadian Soccer Association when the national team is playing a home friendly.

However, that is a question for the soccer crowd to answer and report back to the group. Point being, people who do not know sports being allowed to embarrass their newsrooms and the trade is bad editorial policy, or old media fail. That space could be used on something more meaningful. The non-sports columnist opining on sports belongs in the Bad Idea Jeans Hall of Fame.

It also goes against the grain of a better way to do it, finding broading meaning by staying specific to a subject. Be universal by being particular. Like, no wonder this site went back to being a hobby blog, eh? That's how the mulleted Tim Hortons patrons would say it.

Ottawa's Chris Bisson drafted by San Diego

2010-06-08T13:42:00.005-04:00

Some of you might have noticed: second baseman-shortstop Chris Bisson of Orleans, the east end of Ottawa, was drafted by the San Diego Padres in the fourth round of the MLB first-year player draft out of the University of Kentucky.

It was a treat to write about Chris for the Ottawa Sun in 2009, and tip off readers to the likelihood he was going to be a relatively early pick.

Bisson hit .329 as a junior at Kentucky this season and led the Wildcats in base-stealing (32 in 39 tries) and bases on balls (28). He could be good fit for a National League team, especially if he adds another positions. He has the option of not signing and playing his senior season in the NCAA.

Congratulations are due to Chris' Ottawa-Nepean Canadians coaches, Don Campbell and Tim Nelson. It's pretty special to see a Canadian who is not a pitcher or corner player drafted.

Seven things you may be presently aware of about John Wooden

2010-06-06T16:45:00.003-04:00

John Wooden was called the greatest coach in American sports history so often it lost all meaning. People said it without caring or considering why.

In recognition of his death at age ninety-nine, a number that has to be written out, the best answer is that he evoked an era when a coach got to just coach. The obligations are so much more vast today. It was also a statement dripping in truth, on account of those 10 NCAA men's basketball titles in 12 seasons with the UCLA Bruins. That longing for a simpler time runs through a lot of sports discussion. Remember the scene in Oliver Stone's Any Given Sunday where the Miami Sharks defensive coordinator played by Jim Brown muses about going back to coach high school football where "kids are just happy to just to play?" It's kind of patronizing to the sports figures of that vintage to assume there was less pressure. Pete Newell, whose influence rivals Wooden's, quit coaching before his team since it was affecting his health. When Newell died in 2008, he was remembered as a basketball icon, not an American icon.

We would be wise, or at least honest, to admit there is no turning back the clock to Wooden's time in the high-dollar sports world. Wooden leaving this life might forever deep-six sportswriters using him as a rhetorical device to express their distaste for the NCAA's excesses. John Calipari can be critiqued without cheapening a legend, plus there's what comes up when you Google "sam gilbert + UCLA."

Wooden's iconography long has passed into fable. Everyone knows the aphorisms ("be quick but don't hurry") and the anecdotes. He never made more than $32,500 a year at UCLA. He would pause to point out to players why "farthest" was grammatically correct instead of "furthest." He worked in a dairy in the off-season during his early seasons in California. He would sit freshmen down and show them how to put on their shoes and socks in order to avoid blisters.

Bill Walton came to the first practice of the season once with hair down to his shoulders -- as was the style at the time. Walton, rebelling in a conformist way like only Boomers could in the 1970s, said the coach didn't have the right to tell him how to wear his hair. Wooden replied, "You're right. I don't. I just have the right to set rules for my team. I want you to know I fully understand your feelings. And we're going to miss you, Bill." It wasn't a question of taste. Wooden felt shaggy hair took longer to dry and didn't want his players catching a chill when they left the gym.

What more can be said? It's impossible to sum up someone who was around when super-eggheaded University of Chicago played football in the Big Ten. Seven things about John Wooden, one for each of those consecutive titles:

The Pittsburgh Pirates once offered him their manager's job. The notion of a major-league baseball team putting a basketball coach in the dugout was and is so far-fetched Wooden carried a news clipping in his wallet just to disabuse doubters.

Wooden brought a baseball mind to basketball, as a former player, Andy Hill, related in Steve Bisheff's John Wooden: An American Treasure (the source of all of the quotes in this post):
"He used to keep stats during practice. I'm talking real detailed stats with charts about everything. He'd know how many times this guy got offensive rebounds and how many times this guy turned the ball over. That's how he picked who played."
He might have changed how teams practise. Wooden never held practices on a weekend. He started out in an era when college basketball coaches ran players into the ground. Don Haskins of Glory Road fame, once recalled scrimmaging nine hours a day over Christmas break when he played for Henry Iba at Oklahoma A&M (now Oklahoma State) in the 1940s.

Jerry Tarkanian once said, "I honestly believe Wooden made his kids believe they were in better shape. His practices lasted two hours, maybe two hours and 20 minutes. Mine went three, three and a half hours ... he got more done in less time than the rest of us."
He was an icon from Indiana who had no tie to the state's two iconic schools. Wooden grew up 17 miles from Indiana University but didn't play for the Hoosiers, attending Purdue instead. Notre Dame was out due to religion. He later coached at Indiana State.

He was offered Indiana's coaching job in 1971, but couldn't bear leaving UCLA. Wooden recommended Jerry Tarkanian to Indiana. Indiana hired someone named Bob Knight. That seemed to have worked out for everybody.
He was a crusader for racial equality. Wooden, as John McCarthy noted in a guest post on Jeff Pearlman's blog that can't possibly be done justice, withdrew Indiana State from post-season play in 1947 since one of his African-American players was not going to be allowed to play. This was just before Jackie Robinson debuted for the Brooklyn Dodgers and almost two decades before Texas Western won the NCAA championship with an all-African-American starting five.
"Coach Wooden, as the Coach and Athletic Director of the 1946-47 Indiana State Teacher’s College, turned down the opportunity to play in the NAIB (now the NAIA) National Tournament because Clarence Walker, who was black, would not be permitted to play. This was Coach’s first year as a collegiate Head Coach and he turned down the opportunity to compete in the nation’s most prestigious National Championship because a black player – who, by the way, was a freshman, did not start, and played sparingly – was not going to be able to play. Flat out turned it down on principle, although the opportunity would have been a huge boost for his personal career."
As a postscript, Walker got to play in the tournament the following season. Indiana State was runner-up. Wooden moved to UCLA the following season.

It seems like basketball's integration story is less often told than those of baseball and football, but similar obstacles existed.

Basketball, even at the NBA level, was played in small cities that weren't very cosmopolitan in the '40s and '50s. Games were held in cramped, confined gyms and arenas compared to a big ballpark or football stadium, so loud-mouthed fans were in closer proximity to the players, in an atmosphere akin to a junior or minor pro hockey crowd during the Slap Shot era of the 1970s. It's crazy to think people don't know what role a 32-year-old Wooden had in effecting social change.
He might have been an engineer. Wooden enrolled at Purdue University in 1928 intending to study civil engineering, so that might give an idea he had an organized. In those days, engineers tended to come from the moneyed classes, and a requirement was attending a civil engineering camp in the summers. Wooden needed to work, so he ended up taking his degree in English.
He didn't travel outside California to recruit. Well, he did in 1965, for a centre named Lewis Alcindor, whom today is better known as ~~Roger Murdock, pilot~~ Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.

One stat that has to be thrown in: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar scored 56 points in his first NCAA game in 1966. Some Division I teams today struggle to score 56 with the 35-second shot clock and a three-point line.
The margin of error was less in those days. Remember, in Wooden's era at UCLA, only conference champions went to the NCAA Tournament. One season USC went 24-2, was ranked No. 1 much of the season and missed the dance.

Guess who accounted for both losses.

Standing to the side of the Mike Wilner controversy

2010-06-06T13:11:00.006-04:00

Three of the more absurd aspects of FAN 590's Mike Wilner receiving an "unscheduled vacation" (National Post) for the Blue Jays' biggest series of the season against the Yankees:

The Manager, in accordance with Tao of Stieb editorial policy, either not remembering or exercising/feigning selective amnesia.

He tried to get away with not knowing which relievers he had used prior to Kevin Gregg's ninth-inning meltdown on Wednesday: "I think (Shawn) Camp finished the inning, didn’t he?"

Wilner pointed out Scott Downs had come in to retire Reid Brignac to end the Tampa Bay Rays eighth. Downs was thus unavailable when Gregg walked the universe in the ninth and the Jays lost 7-6.

Call this a value judgment, but sportspeople usually have good recall.

Put it this way: Hockey Night in Canada's Mike Milbury was a failure as a NHL general manager. Yet, when Milbury was playing for the Boston Bruins in the 1970s, he said he could describe in detail every goal the Bruins allowed that season. Honestly, Cito Gaston couldn't remember which pitcher he used in a game the previous evening?

(As an epilogue, the Jays went 3-3 on their homestand against the Rays and Yankees. The thread in all three losses was they had a lead entering the late innings.)
William Houston positing there is such a creature as "a radio executive with backbone."

That deserves the Stinsonian "please." In fairness to Houston and others who pointed it out, this likely plays out differently if Nelson Millman was still FAN 590's program director instead of Don Kollins.

The rub is professional teams have rode herd on their quote, unquote radio partners for a dog's years. It's the spoken-word medium where there's still an expectation of independent sports commentary, largely by default.

The TV side is often left alone. People forget what was said by the next commercial break (or at least did prior to viral video). People have come to terms with team-employed TV voices overemphasizing the positive. Cheerleader isn't even an insult anymore.

The rule of thumb with the written word always was anything negative in the newspaper had a short shelf life. The way it translates to today is no one can read, let alone bookmark, everything written on the Internet. That leaves radio is in no-person's land.

(P.S. to the Toronto Sun: the Spanish word for testicles is spelled cojones.)
Wilner being almost as much of a Teflon man in Toronto on par with yesterday's men, Cito Gaston and Jays president Paul Beeston.

It's not a shock the reaction is nearly 100 per cent pro-Wilner. Tyler King did a definitive takedown times two of that during 2008's Tothilnergate.

Jeff Blair did tweet Wilner's line of questioning was better suited to a one-on-one situation, where The Manager would be less likely to get defensive. Wilner's ensuing blog posting was the real smoking gun.

For the behind-the-curvers and/or control freaks at Rogers Media, saying, "I don’t need to be belittled by the skipper in front of the entire assemblage when I’m asking legitimate, rational questions about a situation that he brought up earlier in a conversation," might come off like airing dirty laundry in public.

Wilner's wordage, belittled, doesn't sit well. Belittled is a victim's word, and like what was said about NFL owner Al Davis in the Straight Outta L.A. 30-for-30 documentary, if you play the victim long enough, you'll become a victim.

In a sports journalism context, it hints at hell having no fury like a sports nerd scorned (we can smell our own). Being condescended to by a coach or manager is the What Is, slings and arrows of the outrageous fortune of getting paid to take a world of games so seriously.

The give-and-take between jocks and journos and is a clash of multiple intelligences that can never be decided. The athletes' intelligence -- the very term dumb jock should rate a smack in the head -- is focused on surviving and thriving in their sport. Their minds are hyper-disciplined, from necessity.

It is like what David Foster Wallace said, they have to accept living in a child's world. Peter Gent had a great line in North Dallas Forty: "Football players aren't people who leave home and try to play football. They are football players, who come home and try to play people."

A journalist can have a more encyclopedic knowledge of Super Bowl and World Series winners, more formal education and a greater ease with using $50 words in casual conversation. Most of us could not abide the trade-off Gent and Wallace outlined.

That has to be considered when you are on the jocks' turf. As a sports mediaite, you have to like it and lump it by definition. We're there since we fell in thrall with sports, but couldn't play them.

No doubt Wilner's blog posting cheesed off old media types more than those who have grown up digital. He could claim he's there to inform and entertain, so people should know that someone who critiques Cito clashed with Cito. He didn't even play it up, putting it well down in his posting.

It fit with how a Maple Leafs blog (it might have been Pension Plan Puppets) once admonished beat reporters who kvetch about being inconvenienced on the job or feeling insulted by a source. The audience only cares about what comes out of journalism, not what goes into journalism.

Saying Gaston could not recall if Scott Downs was available and offered a weak "you need to look at some stats" defence, then pointing out said stats or lack thereof, would have sufficed. Or he could have set up a FakeCitoGaston Twitter.

It would have affirmed that what happened was an instance of Classic Cito, painting his team into a corner and setting it up for failure while the media put it on the player(s).

Framing it in personal terms did cross a line, just not necessarily one that warranted Wilner having his wrist slapped or worse. He got a raw deal from his Rogers overlords. Please do not overlook that he flew a little too close to the sun on the wings of Seamheaditude. Belittled? It comes with the territory.

(Also, there is total awareness of the irony this post might prevent this writer ever appearing on a Rogers-owned radio station, so don't bother pointing it out.)

The ironies of Roy Halladay's perfect game

2010-05-31T14:53:00.008-04:00

Go figure: Roy Halladay threw a perfect game without being a Toronto Blue Jay, or even being Roy Halladay.

A pleasant irony for a Jays fan is that Doc was not totally in vintage form when he retired all 27 Florida Marlins hitters for the Philadelphia Phillies last Saturday. An irony for Canadian ball fans is that Marlins owner Jeffrey Loria, the guy who killed baseball in Montreal, is actually selling thousands and thousands of unused tickets as keepsakes. Hey, there's profit to be had.

Halladay threw more pitches, 115, than he did in 38 of the 43 nine-inning (or more) complete games that he turned in for the Jays from 2002 through '09. For a Canadian point of reference, Dennis Martinez hurled 96 pitches when he was El Presidente, El Perfecto for the late and lamented Expos at Dodger Stadium on July 28, 1991.

So, Down Goes Brown was not woofing when it Tweeted, "Roy Halladay pitches a perfect game; or, as Jays fans call it, the fourth or fifth best game we've ever seen him pitch." That would make us Jays fans, to play off another Philly sports figure with a medical-profession moniker, the 2010 answer to hoops nuts who claim people only saw the real Julius Erving in the American Basketball Association instead of in the NBA with the 76ers, where he's more remembered.

Doc's perfecto has prompted the inevitable retrospectives on Hall of Famer and U.S. Senator Jim Bunning's perfect game for the Phillies in 1964. (Bunning needed just 90 pitches in that one.) Each did it in his first year with the club after coming over from an American League team. Each was credited with his seventh win of the season. Bunning is one of Halladay's comparables.

Beyond that, it's noteworthy that a few years back, it seemed like Halladay slotted into the Bunning family of pitchers who as Bill James wrote, "are the whole package ... (but) do lose sometimes because they throw strikes, and if you put the ball over the plate sometimes the batter is going to hit it." In 2006, it seemed like -- and perhaps this was giving in to pessimism -- that might work against Halladay's chances of twirling a no-hitter.

More balls in play meant more chances for someone to get a flare, a gork, a ground ball with eyes, one more dying quail. It was less apparent that at that time, Halladay was posting the lowest strikeout rate of his career in '06 (132 in 220 innings, an even 5.4 per nine). He had been sidelined the previous season by a broken leg, which perhaps affected his stamina and forced him to economize and try to go for those more democratic ground ball outs.

On Saturday, of course, Doc had 11 strikeouts. He was on top of the Marlins hitters. FanGraphs noted he did not allow a single line drive and had the highest single-game Win Probability Added in almost five years.

Because of the tight score, Halladay accrued a fantastic +.888 WPA. That mark is the highest for any pitcher since June 26th, 2005, when A.J Burnett and the Florida Marlins defeated the Tampa Bay Devil Rays 1-0.

All of that has to be tempered by noting a wide strike zone helped Halladay wriggle out of a few 3-1 and 3-2 counts.

Halladay's feat, as it did for Bunning, should add to his "recognizability quotient." That's awesome in the long run. It was always evident Doc had the goods to throw a no-hit, no-run game, as much as it's a logical impossibility to predict.

Point being, though, as a Jays fan, seeing that his pitch count hit an unsightly, un-Doc-like 115, is cause to smile. It shows which city and country is home to the gallery that best reflects his art.

Confirmation that what you're with isn't 'it' ...

2010-05-31T11:38:00.008-04:00

Talk about a clear signal one has passed to the other side of the generation gap.

A purpose of going to the NHL Scouting Combine this past weekend, in the capacity of Buzzing The Net, was to bank a few Q-and-As with some of Canadian Hockey League players that will run, up until the June 25-26 NHL draft in Los Angeles. One question we asked in order to get a window into guys' outside-of-hockey personality was, "Favourite TV show and/or movie?" It's far better to ask that than favourite band, since it preempts the "all kinds of music" answer and journalists having to look up spellings of any acts that have come on the scene since 2003.

Not to give any spoilers, but Two And A Half Men was a pretty popular answer. It is television's No. 1 comedy, plus it's on constantly in syndication. Entourage, Lost and Family Guy popped up a couple times. A few answered Friends, on the premise that anyone who can survive the Wingate and V02 max tests is at no risk of having his dude membership revoked.

On Saturday, two players back-to-back answered Seinfeld. At that point, it came to mind that another TV comedy, the one which still airs in the same time slot it had in the 1990s, hadn't been mentioned once.

"No one's mentioned The Simpsons," I said.

"Yeah, that show's kind of old," one of the Seinfeld aficionados said.

Talk about jarring. You don't need to know what's on Taylor Hall's iPod playlist to know athletes aren't arbiters of cultural tastes. Personally, The Simpsons hasn't been a must-view since 1998 or '99. It doesn't take Chris Turner to know the show defined at least one generation, both those who were teenagers and young adults in the 1990s, along with their parents and younger siblings. (To this day, my 25-year-old brother's family nickname remains "The Boy," Homer's term of endearment for Bart.)

Still, athletes watch a lot of TV, since much of their time is spent in hotel rooms relaxing and resting up for games. There is total recall of feeling validated as a 13-year-old in 1990 after seeing an article in The Hockey News which the New York Rangers' Darren Turcotte listed The Simpsons as his favourite show: "A lot of hockey players like it because of the sarcasm."

(There's a chance I read that while hiding The Hockey News under my desk during French class. The French teacher at my elementary school was named Liz Latourell. Her spouse coaches football, meaning there is actually a high school football coach in Kingston whose last name sounds like "lateral," a football term.)

Not having a single Simpsons lover among 40 or so teenaged players was like Lyndon Johnson saying, "If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost Middle America," during the Vietnam War.

Or it was like the Season 6 episode when Homer is aghast after finding out his kids and their classmates have never heard of his favourite bands. However, cupping a hand to one's face and saying, "For more information on The Simpsons, consult your school library!" would kind of prove the point.

A cool change ...

2010-05-23T18:17:00.005-04:00

In Canada, the puck chases you:

A better self-promoter would have mentioned a move to a new sports beat before covering its major championship, the Memorial Cup. He also would not have waited some five weeks to mention he had left one job to start a new one, covering junior hockey on the newest addition to the Yahoo! Sports family of sports blogs, Buzzing The Net.

A hope is this opens some doors, career-wise. Honestly, the past few months have had that David Byrne how-did-I-get-here feeling, notwithstanding the absence of a beautiful house and a beautiful wife. (All in time.) It was a major whaaaaa? moment when Yahoo! inquired in November about being the Canadian writer on Fourth-Place Medal during the 2010 Vancouver Olympics. It was dream when it actually happened, and it was one further still when Yahoo! made that made it worth it to leave a copy editing job at the Ottawa Sun.

There is much more that should be said. This site will remain active, more as a vanity project, for anyone interested, including my old Portage la Prairie Daily Graphic running mate Keith Borkowsky, whom it was great to reconnect with in Brandon all week. The CIS Blog (cisblog.ca) torch will be passed to more capable hands.

Thank you so much to everyone who has shown support over the past seven years when I had one foot in the blogosphere and another in print journalism. This promises to be a fun next step.

King of Central New York media ...

2010-05-14T18:06:00.003-04:00

Greg Paulus played four seasons of basketball at Duke, but he's never been around such talent:

More after the jump!

Totally projecting: Roy's record reaffirming realignment

2010-05-09T15:40:00.011-04:00

It turns out there are a couple convenient lame justifications for diving into MLB realignment, even if it's making this blog more single-issue than a fringy mayoral candidate.

The one spur is Roy Halladay, as you know, has been credited with six wins in seven starts with the Philadelphia Phillies, with an ill FIP (two home runs allowed and a 48-to-7 strikeout-to-walk ratio in 56 innings). It seems like Doc, with another 27 or so starts ahead on his 2010 docket, could be on his way to the 25-win season some in Canada predicted when he went from an American League also-ran to a National League power. Some people might not even be sated with 25. Couldn't he win 28, matching what the recently passed Hall of Famer Robin Roberts did for the Phillies in 1952?

(Another way to pose the question is to ask how few losses Halladay will have at season's end. It's the same query yet it avoids parroting the media overemphasis on a pitcher's win total. Bonus!)

The perceived gulf between the AL and NL is obviously a big part of why people are predicting Halladay could hit a statistical mark only one NL pitcher, since divisional play was created in 1969, has reached while working in a five-man rotation. And Tom Seaver did it in 1969, no less.

That segues right into the second spur, the Wall Street Journal piece that pointed out, for the million and sixth time, how MLB's current alignment has screwed over Halladay's old team. It would not do to accuse Canadian ball fans of having ulterior motives, but perhaps we want Halladay to finish a record such as 24-2 or 28-1 since it would help prove the NL is really, really bad. As the Journal put it:

" ... The American League is clearly the stronger of the two, based on interleague records and the differences in performance of players who jump from one league to the other. Since interleague play began in 1997, AL teams have won eight of 13 World Series and 12 All-Star Games (there was a tie in 2002). They have compiled a .566 winning percentage against NL clubs over the past five years. Now that (MLB commmissioner Bud) Selig has blurred the line between the two leagues — he's abolished their separate league offices and umpiring crews — the time may be ripe to go all the way.

" ... if the leagues were united in one 30-team league, and each team had to play all the others a similar number of games, no more than two National League franchises would have even qualified for the postseason in the past five years.

"In 2008, the Toronto Blue Jays finished well out of the playoffs and in fourth place in the brutal AL East, which includes the powerful Boston Red Sox and New York Yankees. But in an adjusted schedule where all teams played one another, Toronto's actual .531 winning percentage that year would have been .564, with the improvement coming from playing the National League teams more often.

"That would have put Toronto in seventh place in the 30-team league, good enough to make the playoffs. That year's World Champions, the Philadelphia Phillies, would have finished in ninth place, out of the playoffs.

"The 2006 Blue Jays, Chicago White Sox and Los Angeles Angels suffered a similar fate, missing the playoffs despite weighted winning performances that placed them ahead of three National League playoff teams — the Los Angeles Dodgers, San Diego Padres and (World Series champion) St. Louis Cardinals." (emphasis mine)

The Journal's argument was for one 30-team league. That ain't happenin'. (The very notion has been well-parried by Jason Rosenberg at It's About The Money.)

It's for the best to ignore any blue sky realignment scenario such as a promotion-relegation system. The chance of that being installed in a North American league is remote for the same reason the National Football League won't adopt college rules for overtime and pass interference. Ego and simple chauvinism will not permit acknowledging someone else might have a better idea.

Major League Baseball is also married to having the AL and NL and calling its final the World Series. And there is no such thing as "pretty married." Maybe they do it that way over in Europe where they call soccer "football" (them and everyone except Canada, Australia and the U.S.) and teams get promoted and related at the end of the season. We don't know. Frankly, we don't want to know.

A personal theory, though, is MLB is due to make some change to zazz up its product. All this talk about realignment might really be over the shelf life of the current format.

Baseball is coming up on 20 years since it went to a six-division format in 1994. It had four divisions and a balanced schedule (those were the days) for 25 seasons, from 1969-93.

Look at the other leagues:

The NHL was split into two conferences and four divisions for 25 seasons (1974-75 through '98-99).
The NBA adopted two-and-four format a bit earlier and maintained a little later (34 seasons, '70-71 through '03-04).
The NFL had six divisions for 32 seasons (1970-2001), before it went to eight in 2002 after expansion to 32 teams.

So, tongue firmly in cheek, there is more to realignment talk than the attendant issues of addressing competitive balance, revenue disparities and AL East widows having a hard shell of cynicism that all the Blue Jays' ninth-inning comebacks against AL Central teams can't crack.

They should remedy the fact that a Blue Jays fan can only be anhedonic about the team being 19-14, since it has yet to face the Yankees and is 10-4 against the AL Central. Granted, it's impossible not to enjoy Fred Lewis' ninth-inning three-run homer that decided today's game against the Chicago White Sox. There's an off-chance it forced Joe Cowley to madly revise his game story at the last minute, after all.

Beyond that, Major League Baseball is bored. The other two major leagues and the NHL have had the fun of fighting off competitor leagues, ill-advised expansion and franchises hopping from one city to another and possibly back.

They must feel left out. Using 1970 as a baseline, since that was the year Bud Selig bogarted Seattle's team and made it the Milwaukee Brewers, MLB has 22 teams which have continuously played in the same city for the past 40 years. That compares pretty well to the NFL (17), NHL (12) and NBA (11).

Those pro sports operators are like the rest of us. They like to switch it up every so often.

MLB is pretty locked into its traditional league lines, but keep in mind those are more happenstance, accidents of history. Baltimore, Boston, Cleveland and Detroit had National League teams once upon a time. Milwaukee, Philadelphia, St. Louis and Washington were in the American League. Baseball would look much different on the west coast if the Pacific Coast League had succeeded in establishing itself as a major league in the 1950s. Vancouver could have had the first team in Canada. There was also the Continental League threat in the early '60s.

Toronto was almost a National League city. The San Francisco Giants were thisclose to moving there before the Blue Jays franchise was granted.

Point being, it's all very elastic if you take a long enough view, and there's enough reason to believe the situation might change for the Jays sooner rather than later. It seemed best to mention this with the club holding a 19-14 record (built mostly on a 10-4 mark vs. the AL Central) with 51 games yet to come against the Boston Red Sox, New York Yankees and Tampa Bay Rays.

Someday, MLB will have some alignment and scheduling that will prompt one to look at a team's actual record without first checking how it breaks down by division. Ooh, look, the team which leads the AL Central has also played 21 of its first 32 games within the AL Central. Gotta be a coincidence.

Meantime, Halladay's record for the Phillies might be the story of the summer for a Jays fan, even if the team manages to play .500 baseball. (Tip for Rob Neyer's Jays essay in his "eras" project: 2005-10 is the Roy Halladay era.)

A baseball fan of a certain vintage, with the exception of Pedro Martínez' 23-4 season in 1999, only knows gaudy won-loss records through old baseball cards. It's been exactly two decades since the last 25-win season and that by Bob freakin' Welch, who was the third-best pitcher on his own team.

One has to go back a few more years to the last time a pitcher earned 24 wins while being charged with less than five losses (Dwight Gooden in 1985 and Roger Clemens in '86 each managed 24-4 marks. Ron Guidry was 25-3 in 1978). No pitcher in the modern era has had 20 wins with two or fewer losses, although Greg Maddux was 19-2 in a strike-shortened 144-game schedule in 1995.

Small wonder it seems like every Seamhead of my acquaintance is riveted by whether Halladay could end up in that aforementioned Tom Seaver territory. Part of that is baseball being an exercise in statistic memorization by nature. Part of that is pride of having appreciated Halladay before he went to a big-market team and last but not least, being reminded it won't always be this way for the Jays. There is yet hope.

New Bobcat in town

2010-05-04T17:44:00.003-04:00

Sometimes, you can return home after all. Brandon University went to it's alumni ranks once again to hire a new men's basketball coach.

Gil Cheung, a former BU player and assistant coach, was hired to replace another BU alumnus, Keith Vassell, today.

Last season, Cheung was head coach of the men's basketball program at Douglas College in New Westminster, B.C.

BU officials, who have had to strike a hiring committee for this post frequently since former coach Jerry Hemmings last patrolled the sideline in 2003, said in a press release they hope Cheung represents a long-term solution for the program.

Ottawa Fat Cats' elephant in the room: rainouts

2010-05-03T21:21:00.010-04:00

Namely, what if it rains and wipes out one of their scheduled doubleheaders?

That consideration seems to be another the big brains have overlooked. It might also be reassuring if, with less than two weeks to go before the opener -- some Intercounty Baseball League teams are already playing games -- the fledging outfit had announced the signing of more than a whole one player signing on its website, although the league lists 15 under contract. No word on what level most of the players will come from, but the National Capital Baseball League (an "adult amateur league") has posted a message that the Capital City Cubs have folded, which is surely a coincidence. Way to beat the bushes, fellas.

Seriously, though, what if it rains? There were two postponements out of three scheduled games last weekend:

"There were 31 postponements in the 2009 regular season.

So it’s swell that the Fat Cats, taking Oshawa’s lost place in the loop, are paying the bus fare for other teams to travel to the nation’s capital.

It will probably save the Panthers around $1,500, (Kitchener Panthers president Bill ) Pegg guesses. It’s also fine that the Cats will put other teams up for a night in a hotel. But there will still be little wiggle room for delays when the Panthers make their lone weekend visit to Ottawa on June 5-6 for a Saturday double-header and a Sunday matinee.

" 'Most of these players work,' Pegg said. 'And we’re not the only team like that. You can't say to a guy, "Do you want to take off at noon on Tuesday and Thursday because we’re going to Ottawa." I don’t think so.'

" ... 'Most of the teams are on record as saying going to Ottawa during the week for playoffs just isn’t going to happen,' Pegg added.

"That means Ottawa needs the coveted fan-friendly weekend dates in a series. That’s another issue.

"So the IBL better pray for sunshine and clear skies, whenever the Fat Cats play.

"Otherwise, scheduling could get messy."

One almost wonders at the chutzpah of the Ottawa operators, making a nice, community-run Southern Ontario league re-arrange everything for them. What is their contingency for rainouts? Are we that arrogant in Ottawa to not realize we're tampering with almost a century of tradition?

Why are they charging 12 bucks a game and putting together a team of neighbourhood players who were hitherto playing in the NCBL, an "adult amateur league?" Enquiring minds are wondering.

Since the future of the Ottawa baseball stadium is hanging in the balance, these are questions the Ottawa media must begin asking this week, instead of rehashing ill-informed Expos-Jays comparisons about a baseball team in Toronto. Not next week.

(Speaking of: FYI, Mark Sutcliffe, it was not an "ESPN blogger" who said the Blue Jays should be moved to Caracas. Rob Neyer -- he has a name, you know -- was referring to that idiot in Chicago. Good luck with your next marathon, though.)

Related:
Panthers still wary of Fat Cats’ entry into IBL (Jeff Hicks, Waterloo Region Record)