Sports tomes: Selena Roberts' swill not selling so swell

Ours is not to wonder why Selena Roberts' takedown book on Alex Rodríguez is selling worse than Brian Griffin's novel, Faster Than The Speed Of Love.

"Published in early May by HarperCollins with an announced first printing of 150,000, A-Rod has sold just 16,000 copies so far, according to Nielsen BookScan ... As of Wednesday afternoon, the book ranked No. 2,904 on Amazon.com, where even James Frey's discredited memoir A Million Little Pieces — at 1,776 — is outselling it."

Ah, what the hell, let's theorize with the aim of making sure that no matter what, it can't just be blamed on what a ShysterBall commenter panned as Roberts' "shallow, flash-in-the-pan 'journalism.' "

1. Carrying around a book about Alex Rodríguez would be like carrying a Bear Stearns tote bag. There's such a profound sense of shame that everyone would just like to keep their distance.
   
   
2. Even before the economic meltdown, sports publishing was a tough racket. Who's got $29.99 to shell out for a book which has largely been discredited? Sports bios also depend on how popular the athlete is and what kind of a season he's having. It could not have helped sales when Rodríguez was on the disabled list.
   
   
3. A rule of thumb with sports publishing is a book needs something to sustain it once the holy-flurking-schnit factor runs its course. It's like the books José Canseco put out: Once you've got the dirt, what is there, really?
   
4. Two other Yankees books hit the market first, Tom Verducci and Joe Torre's collaboration, The Yankees Years. A good friend has been sending MSN messages almost daily with some of the inside stuff in the Verducci book. Some of it, like the part about Roger Clemens having a trainer rub liniment on his testicles, has been excerpted, but there's a lot more beyond.

Bottom line, hearing that Roberts' book isn't selling stirs up schadenfreude. Oh well, she got her big advance.

OOLF Hot Audio: Bart Given

Today, your humble pseudo-blogger had the pleasure of welcoming former Toronto Blue Jays Assistant GM, Sportsnet columnist, and proprietor of insidethemajors.com, Bart Given, to Offsides, Kingston's most listened-to hourlong sports talk program. And as always, we're sharing the audio here on Out of Left Field, because it's swanky to do so.

So listen on for insights on Bart's rise from in-game entertainment to baseball operations, the methods by which J.P. Ricciardi ran his front office, and finally a few bouts of prognostication, including on Roy Halladay.



(you'll have to boost your volume a bit - I forgot to amplify the mp3 and with how slow my rural internet is, it's not worthwhile to re-upload it)

Also, since my brain was not working well today (flu not quite gone yet apparently), feel free to guffaw at my frequent inability to formulate complete sentences. It's hard to concentrate when you've got to keep your finger on the cough button. Listening to it now at times my voice cracks so much that I almost sound like one of Stewie Griffin's "how about that novel you been workin' on" rants.

That novel you've been working on | Movies & TV | SPIKE.com

Stranger than non-fiction

Someone up there has a complicated sense of humour. One day, there's a story that a writer might have made up parts of his memoir about playing minor-league baseball, then there's a story the next about the death of pitcher who was traded for bats.

John C. Odom, a right-handed pitcher whom the Calgary Vipers indy-ball team dealt away for 10 bats -- maple bats, to be fair -- died a few months ago. Only now is it getting around (a Feb. 5 Associated Press item mentioned his claim to fame, but not that he was deceased).

One can only assume how the Calgary Vipers front-office people feel tonight, especially after hearing the comments from Odom's last manager, a guy with the straight from central casting name of Dan Shwam, "I really believe, knowing his background, that this drove him back to the bottle, that it put him on the road to drugs again." It's human nature to feel sorry for John Odom, who was only 26, even though he's someone who will be remembered for getting the blunt end of how superfluou modestly talented athletes are in lower-rung leagues.

Bill Baer over at Baseball Digest Daily had some strong words about Calgary trading bats for a ballplayer (Odom couldn't get into Canada due to some troubles he'd with the law several years earlier.) It's not clear if it's something that can endorsed. John Odom obviously had personal demons, and as much as employers have to accommodate that to some extent, there are limits (full disclosure: Speaking as someone diagnosed with depression seven years ago).

"One of the more consistent lines of thought in moral theory is that an action is immoral if it causes some kind of unpleasantness for another person. I find it hard to believe that Calgary, which has claimed that the trade wasn’t made as a publicity stunt, thought that Odom would be met with nothing but positive and encouraging responses. The trade essentially said that Odom wasn't worth another professional baseball player or even a medium-sized wad of cash; he was worth ten processed 34-inch-long pieces of wood.

"Oftentimes it takes a tragedy for our error-prone ways to manifest. Dehumanizing athletes, who devote years to perfecting their craft, by trading them for next-to-nothing is a business practice that, hopefully, will now come to an end. It's a shame it took the suicide of a multi-talented kid to reveal this to us."

It's something to think about

(Meantime, about Matt McCarthy and the book Odd Man Out: There is reason to wonder why The New York Times was all over one bogus memoir, while protecting another dealing with much heavier subject matter.)

Related:
A tragic end for minor leaguer traded for bats (The Associated Press; via Baseball Digest Daily)

Updike and the Splendid Splinter, for those scoring at home

For anyone wondering, John Updike's famous essay, "Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu," on Ted Williams' final game was referenced into the fourth paragraph of his obit in The Guardian in England. The New York Times put it in the 11th paragraph.

In keeping with some of Updike's themes, one has to feel guilty for being able to quote part of the Williams essay ... Like a feather caught in a vortex, Williams ran around the square of bases at the center of our beseeching screaming. He ran as he always ran out home runs — hurriedly, unsmiling, head down, as if our praise were a storm of rain to get out of ... which isn't even from the best part of the essay. It was not even the best piece of writing produced from that day, Sept. 29, 1960.

Rereading Updike now, having devoured it as a younger reader, what sticks out is the part about baseball is the one team game where a loner can flourish.

"But of all team sports, baseball, with its graceful intermittences of action, its immense and tranquil field sparsely settled with poised men in white, its dispassionate mathematics, seems to me best suited to accommodate, and be ornamented by, a loner. It is an essentially lonely game."

That is it in a nutshell, even you can see Updike making it about himself.

The funny part is that out of that day, Ed Linn, who was there for Sport magazine, wrote one of the best pieces of his career. It was the kind of blend into the background and observe piece, but it was in keeping with most of the writing about Ted Williams, as a cranky guy who was very particular, but was a genius at baseball (like another leftfielder named Barry Bonds, as Sports On My Mind noted).

It is nowhere near as widely quoted, although when a book called Impossible Dreams: A Red Sox Anthology was published in 2003 (conveniently, just before Boston fans become completely insufferable), the Linn piece was included.

It's worth picking up. One should go for Ed Linn making writing accessible over John Updike making it look impossible every day of the week.

FNL: Burning for you, but not enough of you

Friday Night Lights does the slow burn so well.

That's the best stab at a segue into what makes FNL so "critically adored." (Its return to network TV was last week, after the full season ran on DirecTV.) Characters' emotions come out the same way you would expect it to in real life. It's the iceberg analogy: The show keeps seven-eighths of the emotion hidden until an appropriate time.

A slow burn is tough to bring across on TV. No doubt Mad Men pulls it off, but that's for someone else to say. Friends who are FNL devotees have often said they can relate Dillon, Texas, to any number of small Canadian towns where everything rotates around junior hockey (a subculture which has never been fictionalized particularly well).

A great case in point of how in the season opener came when a mortified Tyra Collette, the femme fatale played by Adrianne Palicki, watches her mom and older sister Mindy, a stripper, dance closely with some questionable dudes at a questionable bar. It ends with Mindy's boyfriend, Billy Riggins -- older brother of Tim Riggins (the Taylor Kitsch character), getting up on stage so he can drunkenly propose marriage.

It was supposed to represent trivial people, but there was no gawking or look-down-the-nose judgment. Watching it, as someone who grew up in the country, there was the sense that someone who works on the show gets that vibe. They've seen the desperation of a dive bar at closing time. They might have attended the Texas equivalent to a buck-and-doe, which in rural Canada is a party that's held to raise money for a couple who's getting married. (Generally, they tend to be all-time pissups.)

Any other show would have had Tyra make a face and stomp off on those long legs of hers. In the FNL universe, she stayed put, but you could read her like a book, the sense of someone seeing her future if she didn't get the hell out of Dillon.

Someone who grew up in a major city, which is most of us (especially in Canada, a country of big cites) might not fully understand. Those who have that background might not want a reminder of that decrepit Hooterville where they were raised.

Obviously, there is more to FNL. Others who write professionally about entertainment can better talk about its acting, how its characters don't come from affluence or wealth, unlike most popular prime-time dramas and how there are real consequences for bad decisions. One gets the sense that Smash Williams' situation, a former all-everything running back with a bum knee working at an ice cream parlour, is more commonplace than the media would ever care to let you know.

For a fan, the show is on such a level that reading the plot summaries on IGN.com (not to mention the spoiler for Season 4 hinted at by Variety, assuming there is a Season 4) before the series came back on network TV was practically a requirement.

For one thing, it allows one to zero in on how the actors and writers are going to pull it off. Secondly, it opens up awareness to the show's subtleties. Like The Simpsons, one is rewarded for paying attention.

For instance, in the season debut, Riggins/Kitsch goes to the ice-cream parlour to talk Smash/Gaius Charles into not giving up football. There's no hints dropped that in Season 1, there was tension between the white fullback and black running back(mostly personal, perhaps somewhat racial). Viewers are expected to know.

During the scene, there's a close-up on Smash standing behind the corner, and in front of him is a placeholder with the number 20 on it -- his jersey number. It was there, if you cared to notice.

It happened again in the final scene. The Panthers had just won their opening game. There was a postgame party, drinks flowing, band playing (both kinds: country and western). Riggins was telling Lyla Garrity (Minka Kelly's character) that he didn't mind if she didn't want to come out as a couple. Prim, proper Lyla, the one-time one-half of the school's power couple going out with Riggins, who was best friends with her ex, Jason Street? It would not do.

Lyla, won over by Riggins playing the role of the concerned guy, moves in for a kiss. The shot switches to an overhead view and as the band twangs, "help me find my daughter," there's Buddy Garrity, Lyla's dad, standing there slack-jawed because he's been watching the entire drama unfold.

That alone is not going to make you check out the show. Most people make up their mind about a show in its first season, although thankfully advances have meant that's no longer possible. For a fanboy type, though, it illustrates FNL's appeal -- you want to know what's coming, just to be able to notice the little nuances.

And you're waiting for the next slow burn to hit its boiling point.

Related:
Why Matt Saracen got surly (Slate)

If you reference Jeff Foxworthy, you might be ...

It's a good week when FOX Sports' Joe Buck and ESPN.com's Bill Simmons have so clearly worn out their welcomes.

Simmons hasn't stopped mewling about taking the collar on his NFL playoff picks last week, going 0-for-4 on the divisional games. It earned him a Drew Magary denunciation on Deadspin () and a right good FJMing from Kissing Suzy Kolber.

BS: "Can you think of any two people who have less in common than James Brown and Pacman Jones?"
KSK: "Caligula and Judge Reinhold."

There is the element of "who cares? So they're big media stars and you're not," but it's worth sharing since some people be like-minded about both individuals in question. Magary also had a great point that people should maybe get past the, "I think (blank) are going to win," unless you're someone on the level of Nate Silver of Baseball Prospectus and FiveThirtyEight fame. His rant would have done yours truly some good after 8-0 Queen's lost to 4-4 in Ottawa in the OUA football playoffs.

Simmons' act was fresh in the late '90s and in the 2000s, but it's become the sport media's analog to Will Ferrell's man-child act. It ticked the giggly in the late '90s and early 2000s, when people -- especially men who realized that you're not going to be young forever, but you can at least be immature -- just needed to disappear into, say, one of Ferrell's comic constructs and laugh like a hyena for 92 minutes. Eventually, you wonder when someone who's a NBA guy in his medium will stop making an ABA movie, to paraphrase one review of Ferrell's thin 2008 vehicle, Semi-Pro. It is often a similar deal with Simmons' references to 1980s pop culture, the Boston Celtics of that era, gambling, Grady Little and porn.

(Et tu, Sagert?)

As for Buck, there's nothing wrong in gnashing your teeth as he somnambulates through a telecast for the 1,001st time. Buck is a good traffic director, to borrow a term used by a TV person in one of Dan Jenkins' satiric novels. He works in television, where they take a break every seven minutes, reinforcing the message that nothing matters (not this is anything close to an original insight). As a Deadspin commenter noted, it is fun to re-imagine iconic sports moments, like the 1980 Miracle on Ice, as they would have been called by the late, great Jack Buck's issue:

Dave Silk clears the puck, it doesn't look like the Soviets will be able to regroup in time, and the U.S. advances to the gold medal game against Finland.

Again, it doesn't matter, but it's a good release. The larger point is that we are at the end of a decade, and in on the very small sports-fan scale, Buck and Simmons should be left behind in this one, where they belong.

(Buck and other play-by-play guys will be a topic of discussion today on Offsides, Kingston's most listened to hour-long sports show, 4 p.m. ET on CFRC 101.9 FM, cfrc.ca.)

Related:
Winless, but not witless ... (Bill Simmons, ESPN.com)
Always Be Covering: Unless Of Course You’re Too Busy Dissecting Teen Wolf (Kissing Suzy Kolber)
Kenny Albert Should Replace Joe Buck as Fox's No. 1 NFL Voice Before We Are All in a Coma (Stephen Kaus, Huffington Post)

Another Buffalo football team Toronto can turn up its nose at...

Here's one for the too-funny-by-half files: The Buffalo Bulls are projected to play in the International Bowl at Rogers Centre next month.

This means Rogers will struggle to sell out the stadium for a another football game involving a Buffalo team with a fair-to-middling record.

The NFL Bills are 6-6 coming into Sunday's game vs. the Miami Dolphins. The Bulls, with ex-CFL QBs Turner Gill (pictured) and Danny Barrett as head coach and quarterbacks coach, respectively are 7-5, going in as heavy underdogs vs. Ball State in tonight's Mid-American Conference championship game. (Ball State is 12-0 and has an all-everything quarterback named Nate Davis, for anyone who hasn't watched proud alumnus David Letterman any time in the past few weeks, or read Jason Whitlock's epic takedown of the BCS and ESPN.)

This is going to come off shenanigans from a second guesser. Buffalo was on the shortlist of potential NCAA football teams for OOLF to clasp to its bosom (about that, seriously, Sager, join a gym). It was one hell of a post, but it just never progressed past the conceptual stage to the get-off-your-lazy-ass-and-write it stage. Part of the problem was the content had to wag the lede dog a bit. The first line was something like, "If this were written like a Lavalife ad, it would say, 'must be able to read Proust and a Tampa Two defence.' "

(To quote an older colleague: "Oh, you still don't think you're going to marry someone smarter than you, do you?")

It had got to the point where it seemed odd to have followed a brand of football for 20 years, getting caught up in the internecine hatred between rival teams, who's-No. 1 debates, Heisman hype, and BCS boondoggles without cheering for a specific team, or ever attending a game. Talk about geek love. But how could you have any moral high ground for razzing Notre Dame fans when you don't even have a team?

Plus, some big-time U.S. sportswriters -- Bill Simmons, Joe Posnanski -- during the past couple years have put out the call to readers to help them pick a soccer team to support. Poz, bless him, said for him it was about wanting to "feel international."

With all apologies to those better, more popular writers, how about actually being international? Supporting the Manchester I-Don't-Give-A-Craps or the London Not-A-Real-Sports does not make one any more worldly -- fact.

Clamouring to have a favourite college football team seemed a perfect protest of the weak. Everyone else wants feel international? I'll be parochial. This is the sporting analogue of Stewie Griffin hearing a banjo and exclaiming, "Mommy, I want a mullet."

Of course, this could never be as simple as picking one of the old-money powerhouses, or even an arriviste team such as Texas Tech. You can't pick a school such as Alabama or Southern California, not with what's known about the serfs of the turf.

A favourite college football team would have to represent a school with a modicum of academic integrity. That condition knocks off the whole Southeastern Conference except Vanderbilt. It would have to be a team which can compete for a championship of some kind on a regular basis. So much for Vanderbilt.

On and on it went over this season, following the "brain" schools every week to see how they fared. Northwestern is 9-3, but they're out for being in the Big Ten, which has ceased to be big or ten.

The same goes for the Minnesota Golden Gophers, who are in their first season with a new coaching staff, also held appeal (especially since the Vikings might end up being their co-tenants yet). Minnesota's coach, Tim Brewster, is also a big proponent of helping create opportunities for African-American coaches; he has more black assistant coaches than any other team in the country. Minnesota could also be struck for playing in a border state -- if Syracuse, Washington and Washington State's woes have taught us nothing, it's that the population demographics in the U.S. augur poorly for major-college teams in northern states.

The search went far and wide, even dipping down to the Football Championship Subdivision. How about Villanova, or Montana? A couple of Conference USA schools, Rice and Tulsa, which have Ottawa natives Tyler Holmes and Scott Mitchell as their starting left tackles, have also been on the radar screen. They both play wide-open football, are academically prestigious, but C-USA teams very rarely have their games beamed into Canada, which would make it tough, sorry, fellas.

Anyway, Buffalo had a lot of desirable qualities. As a MAC school, they'll never get anywhere near a BCS game. If this season's Ball State team can't, who can? That doesn't mean they're not worthy. Elliott Smith didn't need to have his songs on the Billboard Top 20, right?

The Bulls seemed like an appealing underdog team. Until last season, they had averaged about two wins a season since joining the NCAA's top division in 1999. As noted, their coach, Gill, used to play in the CFL. They even had a QB with two first names in senior Drew Willy.

Besides, if Toronto interests, or any interests, are going to steal Buffalo's NFL team, one should adopt the Bulls in solidarity with Western New York football fans. It's only right.

Anyway, to sum up, that post never got written, but all you are probably better off. Buffalo is also going to the International Bowl, and one wouldn't want to do it disservice by not promoting the hell out of it.

(Yours truly is spoken for in NCAA hoops but it was noted that the UB basketball team only lost by four against the No. 2 UConn Huskies last night. Carleton beat Buffalo by 10 back in August, by the way.)

Calling Larry Mavety a 'great hockey man' is stranger than fiction

Larry Mavety: Great general manager or greatest general manager?

His Royal Mavesty now has more players from his 2005 draft playing for the Brantford Golden Eagles Junior B team than for the Kingston Frontenacs, the team he works for, at least nominally. Daryl Borden, who was the first goalie taken that year, has signed to play with his hometown Junior B club, where his new teammates include Matt Reis, Mavety's fifth-round selection.

This is being written apologetically as possible. For starters, it is running over the same old ground. As well, one has to be balanced and owner Doug Springer's declaration that "Larry Mavety is a great hockey man," and that the Frontenacs are looking to the future should get the full consideration that it deserves.

Come on, people. Springer said they were looking to the future. No one should have needed any more convincing to slug back the Killer Kool-Aid (Save The Fronts' phrase, not mine) and just forget the past 10 seasons. It is just nitpicking to point out that, if it takes three years to properly get the measure of a draft, Kingston made five picks from the second through the fifth rounds that year. None of them are playing major junior hockey.

Please don't be a smartass by saying, "Well, how many are playing for the Frontenacs?" The answer to that is also none.

Editor's note: This probably would have gone by uncommented upon, were it not for that fact that Borden is displacing an 18-year-old goalie named Thomas Shelley.

Thomas Shelley, no word of a lie, might have saved my life one day.

December 2004 it was. A stranger in a strange town, the sports editor at the local paper decided that rather than go to the office he would walk the two blocks from his apartment over a computer store to cover a high school hockey game. Ostensibly, it was to get an early story for the next day's paper, but really, four months into a new job in a town where he didn't know anyone outside of the other people at the paper and local coaches, he just was not quite ready to face the world that day.

Standing for a hour in a nearly empty arena on a Wednesday afternoon, watching high school boys glide around on skates, that symphony of blades cutting the ice that Canadians hear in their sleep, letting loose that primordial roar when they scored, well, that was a way to ease back into life piecemeal.

High school hockey, in most of Ontario, basically comes down to who goes to your school. The game, Waterford vs. Holy Trinity was a mismatch. Trinity was the county's spanking-new Catholic high school in town that had opened within the past five years, and whose success in sports was much resented among the town's old guard. Families who prized education and status as much as their faith sent their daughters and sons to Trinity. They had a lot more boys with competitive hockey experience to choose from. Waterford was smaller and rural, full of boys who played hockey more for fun.

Most of Trinity's skaters wore gloves and hockey socks that corresponded with the local rep teams -- it was almost a game to count them up, the St. Louis blue and gold (Delhi), the Leafs' triple white stripes (Simcoe) or the pre-Ovechkin Washington Capitals blue and black (Port Dover).

Waterford had fewer players, probably not enough for three forward lines and two defence pairs and seemed to move with a little less zip. He might not have been there that day, but one of their star football and rugby players was on the team, and the assessment of him was, "He hits like a ton of bricks ... skates like one, too."

In goal, was this Grade 9, barely standing above the crossbar, clearly way past his team in talent. It should have been a blowout, but Trinity was slow to get into it, giving Waterford an opening to score on a completely random play. After that, it got ridiculous. The rest of the afternoon was Thomas Shelley standing up to a unrelenting tsunami of vulcanized rubber. He played every minute of this ridiculous game like it was the third period, tie game, Game 7 of Earthlings vs. the Klingons. He stoned Trinity's swiftest players on breakaways. The high, hard shots that he couldn't catch, he would juggle for just an extra beat, almost like he was teasing the forwards going to the net before they went careening past empty-handed.

There was no Penny Lane in Almost Famous to snatch the pen away from the stooge who was dutifully keeping his own shots-on-goal tally at rinkside, so he could stand back and listen and watch with his eyes. Starting the second (and final) period, down a goal, Trinity took 16 unanswered shots. The question became how much longer Shelley could keep this up? With about three minutes left, Trinity finally got one, not a cheapie, but a good goal, and the game ended in a 1-1 tie. Final shots on goal, according to the stooge's tally: 49-9. The second total might have been a bit generous.

Shelley, of course, wished he could have had that one back, but a tie game seemed more symbolic. The Waterford coaches laughed the laugh of someone who had got away from something: "There's no I in team, but there is a T and it stands for Thomas," one of them said.

It was just a high school game in a small town. Hockey-wise, it was not evidence of anything other than a 14-year-old having a very good game. It was also proof that life was not all black. Thanks, Tom.