Buh-bye to the blogosphere, for a bit

It's said a door never closes without a window opening.

With that in mind, Out of Left Field users are owed the truth. This site needs to be re-invented. It was good for mid-2006, but that is like the Mesozoic Era in blog years. However, the site, concept, what have you, needs to be re-invented or re-invigorated in order for it to be fun and fulfilling for all involved. It's not a shutdown, it's more of pause and reflect. The invitation is out there for new writers. Any and all ideas about how to changes its look or tighten its focus should be considered.

Any questions, e-mail neate.sager(at)yahoo.ca, neate.sager(at)sunmedia.ca or oolf.writers(at)gmail.com. Thank you so much to those who have supported this site since 2006. Hang in there. Hopefully the ride will start up again without too long a wait.

Don't bother giving baseball a purity test

Further to the point made four months ago that baseball's shame over steroids "will serve to liberate it from the conceit ... that baseball is the best game of all because of its record book."

Bill Simmons has drawn a lot of eyeballs with a column attempting to define what was the purest era in baseball from a statistical and competitive viewpoint. He settled on 1988-92, a era of modest offence (someone could win the batting title hitting .313, or win the home run crown with 36, as Fred McGriff did for the 1989 Blue Jays), which "now seems Jonas-level pure, after the fact. Cocaine had become passé, and the number of suspicious statistical guys -- we could create the word "'roidy" here, just for kicks -- was a handful, at best. Er, worst. They clearly didn't damage the game any more than the spitballers, scuffers and corked-bat guys of earlier eras."

Craig Calcaterra, the ShysterBaller, weighed in:

"(Simmons) may be right, even if the definition of 'pure' is a bit unclear and maybe not that useful. What is useful, however, is Simmons' highlighting the fact that, at just about every single point in baseball history, there was something, be it drugs, or rules, or racist policies or whatever, that altered the statistical and competitive landscape. Some of them -- and I'm thinking segregation here -- were borne of even more malice than the cheating of the steroids era.

"Simmons' observation puts lie to the notion, so popular in recent years, that the steroids era's greatest evil was that it somehow sullied a heretofore pure record book. There was nothing pure about it, and certainly nothing consistent about it. Lefty Grove would have been a Hall of Famer whenever he played, but there's no escaping the fact that a lot of the guys he got out wouldn't have been able to sniff the big leagues if black players had been allowed in the game. Bob Gibson would likewise be celebrated, but his 1.12 ERA in 1968 would never have happened if he was pitching from a modern mound in a modern retro-park. We talk about baseball's wonderful continuity all of the time, but things have changed in radical ways over the years, and no one has ever presented any evidence to convince me that steroids impacted things any more radically than did high pitchers' mounds, huge strike zones, segregation and dead balls." (Emphasis mine.)

It is gratifying to see that meme filter up to someone who deservedly has a larger platform. The point is the obvious. The game was never perfect, and it's good to rid yourself of the idea that baseball was once this perfect, incorruptible game or that it was better when you were younger. It's a mental construct which seems to come up a lot in hockey, too. People believe the NHL was somehow better when 57-point teams could almost make it to the conference final, as the Maple Leafs almost did in 1986.

Here's what this site said in February, when the excrement hit the aerofoil device over Alex Rodriguez:

"Rodriguez breaking the home run record... good thing: Contary to what you might have heard, Rodriguez has not destroyed the game's history. His shame will serve to liberate it from the conceit, kept up by self-appointed gatekeepers such as Bob Costas, that baseball is the best game of all because of its record book.

"Those of you who have also watched all 18½ hours of Ken Burns' Baseball, six times over in the past 15 years might remember this part. At one point, Costas says the grand old game stands alone since you can rhyme off numbers such as 56, 755, 4,256, .406 and everyone will get the reference. In other sports it is, "How many yards did Jim Brown have when Walter Payton passed him? How points did Wilt Chamberlain have when Kareem Abdul-Jabbar passed him to become the all-time leading scorer in the NBA?"

"Statistics are a good backup for confirming what you saw or filling in what you missed. It's mostly a reflection of the competition player faced, the conditions (i.e., segregation, scouting, home ballpark), the way the game was played at the time and whether he was fortunate enough to enjoy a long career. Everything needs to be put into context, not just the Steroid Era.

"The failure to understand is this is why Dick Allen, who played in the low-scoring 1960s and early '70s, is not in the Hall of Fame ... Oh, and remember, anyone who played before the game was fully integrated, their numbers are a bit suspect too."

It cannot be stressed enough that this is not an attempt to usurp credit. That's a bit like the end of the Family Guy "Blue Harvest" episode

Chris: "Didn't Robot Chicken already do this three months ago?"
Peter: "I wouldn't worry about it, Chris. I don't think people are even aware of that show's existence."

Related:
Baseball has never been pure (Craig Calcaterra, Circling The Bases)

Seeing red over the land of the Orange

One tries to maintain some privacy and a stiff upper lip ... but readers are owed an explanation if something happens that affects your ability to provide a service to them.

Last week, I wrote an article about Ottawa Gee-Gees basketball guard Josh Wright for the Ottawa Sun's Jan. 8 edition. It appears that around 3:22 p.m. Eastern time that day, it was posted verbatim by WTVH, the CBS affiliate in Syracuse, N.Y., where Wright previously played for the Syracuse Orange. They tried to cover their tracks by saying "Reprinted from Ottawa Sun," but it was not authorized. At best, it's not fair use and at worst it is out and out plagiarism. The fact it is was the third most popular story as of midnight Sunday (more than their story about the Orange's win Saturday over Rutgers) is cold comfort, especially when it's your work and you're not getting any of the revenues. Not to get on the high-horse, but the facts are on my side.

(Update, Jan. 12, 5:20 p.m. — the story has been taken down from WTVH-5's website and its sports director apologized "wholeheartedly" over the phone.)

I wrote posts earlier on the night before teasing the article for this site and for cisblog.ca, lest anyone dispute the timeline. The Kingston Whig-Standard, a sister paper of the Sun's, also ran the article ("Former NCAA player joins Ottawa," Jan. 9).

It is true that blogs do use other media to provide context for their posts. However, we all take pains to make sure that we are not representing someone else's work as our own. That did not happen in this instance.



Since when do American TV reporters use phrases such as "non-puck-headed Canadians?" Is that WTVH's target demographic all of a sudden?



The individuals responsible at WTVH might think they did by saying, "Reprinted from Ottawa Sun," but that is insufficient. At this time, there is not a lot of collaboration and content-sharing between metropolitan newspapers in Canada and network affiliates in upstate New York. Our beats seldom overlap.

Hopefully my ant overlords will talk to their ant overlords, and this will be smoothed out to everyone's satisfaction. I'm pissed off and don't know when that will not be the case.

Thanks for listening. Every effort will be made to carry on and keep on keepin' on at Out of Left Field, but it's going to be tough for the next few days.

(Rob Pettapiece has a put a companion post up at cisblog.ca. Thanks so much, Rob.)

The screwballs have spoken!

It's not on par with predicting that Mats Sundin would end up in Vancouver on the same day the Ottawa Senators put Jason Spezza on the third line.

Nevertheless, it's funny to see that Deadspin had to ask for an end to sports-themed jokes about Muthathar al-Zaidi, five days after someone else said it was not in play as comedy material.

"The pain that the Bush Administration inflicted on Iraqis is such that you probably can't make a sports joke. Please, let's not have any jokes that with an arm like that, the Detroit Lions should give a tryout to Muthathar al-Zaidi." -- this site, last Sunday

Of course, no one listened. Americans can always draw amusement out of bringing democracy to someone else's country.

"Many people submitted multiple versions of what is essentially the same joke and we already posted a couple of them days ago, so you can probably stop making them now. And simply changing the crappy team in the punchline doesn't make it more original. Folks tried the Cubs, the Lions, the (baseball) Giants, the Pirates, the Bills ... basically anyone who roots for a horrible team has, at some point in the last week, made some kind of zinger along the lines of "Boy, maybe [pathetic sports franchise] should sign that guy!" Then they chuckled softly to themselves and shook their head wistfully, while everyone around them rolled their eyes and pretended to look for a lighter ball. (In my mind, this story takes place at a bowling alley.) It's the mid-December 2008 version of the "black box" joke. ("Why don't they make the plane out of that?!")" -- Deadspin, just now

You can't say we didn't try.

Finishing just out of the medals ... part of our heritage

Congratulations are due to The Joy of Sox, James Mirtle's From The Rink and Cynthia Long's Beijing 2008: A Dual Perspective for podiuming (not a real word) in the Canadian Blog Awards, Best Sports Blog division.

Thanks again to everyone who supported this site. It was, to evoke the words of many a Canadian athlete, a victory just to be in the final, and saying that might not make us the best, but it makes us the most thoroughly Canadian ... eh?

Fronts: The K-Rock Pot has boiled over

There was no need for a third man in on the king of Kings' Friday afternoon sports panel on CFRC 101.9 FM (cfrc.ca).

TV Cogeco's Mark Potter and Tim Cunningham aired out the Kingston Frontenacs organization, specifically owner Doug Springer and GM-for-life Larry Mavety for nearly a hour on Friday. It was almost cathartic. They gave voice to what Cunningham, the former Queen's hockey coach, called "a real anger developing towards the Kingston Frontenacs," who have not won a playoff series since 1998. Potter, using the needle he wielded to great effect as the sports anchor at CKWS in the '80s and '90s, suggested Ted Nolan or the ex-Leafs coach Paul Maurice is a possible saviour.

It means so much more coming from them. It is one thing to put on a blog that Mavety has to go ("Fronts GM-for-life should be sacked over team's arrested development," March 31, 2007) or that the only hope is to have a former NHLer buy the team off Springer ("Captain Kirk is our Obi-Wan (as in only hope)," Jan., 7, 2008) and do what Bob Boughner and Warren Rychel have done with the Windsor Spitfires. It is bound to get more attention when it's two hometown media guys who have been around major junior hockey in Kingston since the Canadians came into being in 1973-74.

The whole schebangabang is available for download, thanks to some work by MisterDB from Fronts Talk. Tyler should soon add something in a more compressed format.

Meantime, here are some highlights:

Cunningham, on the low attendance (announced at, wink, 2,894 for last night's loss to Peterborough): "There is a real anger developing towards the Kingston Frontenacs and I don't know how you cure that. Winning is one way, but as I talked about earlier, you have to change the culture and they've got to make some fundamental changes. They would have to win a lot of games and have quite a playoff run for people to really forgive them and to consistently fill that building. Until that happens, we're going to see crowds like this."

The Potter proposal: "Well, you hire Ted Nolan, that's how you do. You phone Ted Nolan -- you should have phoned him in the summer -- and you say, 'Ted, what's it going to take to get you to Kingston?' And I'm serious about that. I think if they pay Ted Nolan the kind of money that I think he would want to come here, with assurance that he's going to have full control to run this hockey team, I think if you hire Ted Nolan tomorrow, within a month or two the K-Rock Centre's going to filled and you're going to have a winning hockey team."

Potter, on the attitude toward the organization: "I have never seen, ever seen -- and this is a team that once lost 28 games in a row -- I've never seen the negativity among hockey fans in this city that I'm seeing now. And a lot of it, obviously, let's be frank about it, this is an organization that has not won a playoff series in 10 years, and whether he deserves it or not, I think you'd have a pretty tough case to make that he doesn't deserve it, Larry Mavety bears the brunt of that, right?

"... The first step is to get rid of Mavety, obviously just to move him back to general manager is not the answer, get a guy like Ted Nolan, people say I'm crazy, but it would take a move like that to get a winning culture."

Potter, a few minutes later: "How about Doug Gilmour and Kirk Muller? If those guys owned this team, do you not think the community would rally around this team and do you not think they would have the right people in place and do you not think you'd have a winning franchise? I mean, look at Windsor, with (ex-NHLers) Bob Boughner and Warren Rychel. I mean, they had the worst owner in the league -- until Springer came along -- for 15 years and they turned that franchise around -- look at where they are -- and they've owned that team for three years. So it's possible, but you gotta let it happen."

Potter, on the team's lack of leaders: "It's ridiculous they don't have a captain."

Cunningham, on the need for change: "The Frontenacs have been handed a beautiful new building and an opportunity to change. The culture around the team has changed, but the culture within the team has not."

Cunningham, on accountability and the occasional lack thereof: "In fairness to the management of the team, I would wish that they would make themselves more available to tell the Kingston fans what they're doing. I think that there seems to be this disconnect between the fans and management, and because of the lack of communication, there seems to be this bitterness on the part of the fans."

On the refusal to make changes

Tim: "It's hard to know what the people in control are thinking. I would have thought there would have been some more significant chances prior to this. The word was after Coach Cassidy was fired (after a 2-9-1 start last season), from Doug Springer ... Doug said, 'I'm going to do whatever it takes to win.' Then it was, 'we're going to be a top four team in the conference. We're going to host a playoff series.' A few weeks, it was 'changes on the way.' They ended up trading for (forward Kelly) Geoffrey, who's on their third line."

Mark: "The way things work in the world of the Kingston Frontenacs, well, they beat Guelph and everything's great again and it's going to be that way for the next 10 or 12 games, where I think had they lost that game to Guelph, something might have happened this week. Either Larry Mavety replaced as coach or a key player traded -- something would have transpired."

Potter, on the permanent intermim coach: "I still fundamentally believe that Larry Mavety doesn't really want to coach this team ... it'd be very interesting to go back and dig up some of the newspaper reports from the first time he stepped down, which I guess was 2003, 2004, when Greg Bignell took over. As I recall it, it was, what, 'I can't relate to the players anymore' -- more or less paraphrasing -- the game has passed me by.

"... At the end of the day, people say to me, 'why is he still behind the bench?' I think he can be controlled by the ownership."

On the specialty units

Potter, on the league-worst power play (9.3%): "They really don't have a power play, per se. They just use their top two lines and intersperse them a bit."

Cunningham, on the league-worst penalty killing (76.0%): "I just don't see the aggression ... and that's coachable."

At least one Mav is good: "There just does not seem to be a system that this team is playing ... were it not for Mavric Parks, their win total might be one or two (instead of five)." -- Potter

One hopes that Mavety and Springer heard some of it and realized every last word was warranted from a strict business perspective. Apparently, a few hours later, Springer and His Royal Mavesty were asked to go on with Potter for a post-game interview after the Fronts lost 4-3 in a shootout to the Peterborough Petes. They declined, which says it all about the "lack of accountability" (Potter's phrase, with Cunningham concurring) with this sorry excuse for an organization.

Shame on them. You don't get better unless you're willing to listen. Ultimately, though, when you have people who command respect in the community willing to stand up and say the organization has to be overhauled, it's a good move.

Update: Via MisterDB, here are the highlights from Offsides:



Here is the post-game from TV Cogeco:

About that shorter MLB season pipedream...

Under the heading of crazy coincidences, our Rob Pettapiece commented last week on a post that baseball could run an April 15-Sept. 15 regular season, 140 games.

Some guy at a somewhat larger media outlet -- Rick Morrissey at the Chicago Tribune -- was on the same wavelength.

A wonderful solution would be for baseball to start the season April 15 rather than April 1 and end the regular season Sept. 15 instead of Sept. 30. That's correct: a 130-game schedule."

Well, it would be more like 140 games in 154 days.

ShysterBall inveighed against this: "... it seems just as likely that such columns are about lazy writers, looming deadlines, and easy ideas." That's unfair: There is the whole issue of consuming and using less, plus teams might sell more season tickets for 70 games instead of 81.

Related:
130-game baseball season? Why not? (Rick Morrissey, Chicago Tribune, Oct. 30)

Dining out on McDonald's moniker (take that, Tother)

Bless you, Cox Bloc -- being the coiner of a colourful nickname for a slick-fielding shortstop might not seem like much of a claim to fame. You take whatever you can get in this life, however:.

Mike Toth's most recent column laments the lack of colourful nicknames in the modern baseball world ... Sure, there are no Wahoos and Catfishes anymore, but Toth is apparently unaware of the brilliant McGlovin, bestowed upon the Blue Jays' Human Highlight Reel (with the glove, not the bat, of course) by Neate Sager."

It figures that acclaim for the splendid sobriquet that was coined in 2007 wouldn't come until near the tailend of an '08 season where McGlovin has been reduced to mostly to pinch-running.

Also, this is a reminder that everyone should go to the Baseball Hall of Fame website and vote for the late, great Tom Cheek for the 2009 Ford C. Frick Award.

Following up...

A breakthrough in the Sens Chirp case ... the short form for "durable innings-eater" is abbreviated DIE ... Taylor Hall, not just a dormitory...

• Cue the Dragnet theme, everyone. There's a lead in who's behind Sens Chirp, thanks to an anonymous whistle-blower:
  
  

  The blog writer is Jose Cuervo from hfboards and the sportsnet forums. He knows a secretary/employee in the Senators' front office.

  That's more than we had. It's not like you could wait for the guy to take 'shrooms and run into the street naked screaming he's the one who did it. That method of crime-solving only works once a decade.
  
  It's still fun to picture Sens president Roy A. Mlakar batting out these blog posts every time the Senators go two days without getting the front of the sports section. For some reason, the Mighty SOPO is pictured as one of those old-school, two-finger typists.
• Adam van Koeverden is your Olympic flag-bearer. (Rollins hopes for Clara Hughes in 2010 and knew AVK was the hands-down choice.) In other countries, is this even a big story?
• Skepticism greeted the Philadelphia Phiillies trading for, all together now, durable innings-eater Joe Blanton last week. He only gave up two homers in his first start for the Phillies and they won thanks to a ninth-inning Mets meltdown, thank you very much.
• Kingston hockey star Taylor Hall getting some accolades from Sports Illustrated rated a story in several CanWest papers today.
  
  To think there was guilt over being so tardy as to have only put a post up about more than a week earlier. Clearly, someone so derelict should be marooned near the bottom of the media food chain, huh?

Absolutely right, and they were wrong

" 'What's the shelf-life for a website that only has women in bikinis?' McIntyre asked. 'Eventually, there needs to be substance to back up the fluff."
-- The Big Lead's Jason McIntyre, in Monday's L.A. Times

"A lot of the major sports blogs are just thinly veiled soft-porn sites with lightweight commentary sprinkled in between the bikini pics of the plastic-looking silicone sisters. So much for being firmly for the separation of sports talk and spankbank material."
-- Some guy, December 17, 2007

(Obviously, this only applies to The Big Lead, who was subject to a pretty good takedown by the savants at KSK, and many, many others.)

Related:
Bissenleitch For The Final Time; or, So You’re Saying I Was Right? (Sports On My Mind)

Hank Kissinger, didn't he catch for the Braves?

Time was -- talking about way back in 2005 or '06 -- there would have been great glee at seeing an out-of-town NHL writer call an Ottawa hockey writer a "gas bag" and a top hockey blog issue a similar smackdown.

(For readers in the capital ... three guesses which hockey writer at which paper -- don't click through before you guess!)

There's just a little glee, the kind that comes from the self-satisfaction one only gets from dutifully passing along links to the audience and then trying to act all aloof and above the fray. Seriously, though, reading that just does lend proof that to the Boston Phoenix's theory that, paraphrasing Hank Kissinger, the reason there's so much mudslinging in the sports media is because stakes are so low.

Not that anyone needs another navel-gazey piece about the sports media, but the Phoenix piece is worth a read. Bill Simmons sounds like a sage compared to Buzz Bissinger.

Related:
Bad sports; While old and new media are mending many fences, they’re still squaring off in jockland (Adam Reilly, The Boston Phoenix)
The Garrioch Effect (KuklasKorner)
Keep your Malkin jersey (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette)

Blog blast past: Deadspin goes big time ... as explained by Almost Famous

Will Leitch is leaving Deadspin, but really, the ride had irrevocably changed course almost two years ago, way back on June 28, 2006....

Music, true music, not just rock ’n’ roll, it chooses you. It lives in your car, or alone, listening to your headphones, vast scenic rituals and angelic choirs in your brain. It’s a place apart from the vast benign lap of America.

Lester Bangs (Philip Seymour Hoffman) in Almost Famous

Not to get all navel-gazey, but fast-forward three decades, replace "car" with "computer," since for some of us in the year 2006, the computer is the car, a status symbol you practically wear. Make the legendary typist Hoffman captured so note-perfectly into an obsessive sports nerd, and you likely have a Deadspin commenter.

Fortunately, the feeling of those commenters (including this one) today can be pretty much be summed up with Almost Famous and Simpsons references. It's nice to use that as a defence mechanism.

Among sports bloggers and their readership, it's barely an exaggeration to say Deadspin is on par with how Homer Simpson once described television: "Teacher ... mother ... secret lover!" This isn't sarcasm. It's just hard to articulate what kind of positive impact Deadspin has had without coming across as gushing.

There is no other, non-Fanboy-sounding way to say it, even if describing it to the uninitiated beggars language. What is Deadspin exactly? It's hard to sum up in a sentence. It's defined by what it isn't. It's somewhere in the middle between the amatuer on the message board, the preening TV talking head and the beat writer with questionable critical reasoning skills.

Remember Lester's line about why he preferred The Guess Who to Jim Morrison? "They have the courage to be drunken buffoons -- which makes them poetic!" They will go where the MSM can't or won't.

(Footnote from the present: Did this not totally intuit Drunk Jays Fans, which launched a few months later?)

Like rock 'n' roll, there's no need to explain it -- try to, and you deserve the treatment Penny Lane (Kate Hudson's character in Almost Famous) gave the teenaged rock writer, William -- snatching his pencil away when he tried to take notes during a Stillwater concert. You just feel it.
It found me during some random night of typical late-night multitasking -- Internet-scouring, channel-surfing and drowning some sorrows -- last November, about two months after its September '05 launch. Here was a site that promoted itself as "sports without access, favor or discretion." It contained stream-of-consciousness lines such as, "We were never quite down with the Red Hot Chili Peppers -- they always seemed like what would happen if you introduced frat boys to heroin," and "Is it possible to do anything dignified wearing a Hawaiian shirt?"

It was the "Does anyone remember laughter?" moment. As the world of big-time sports gets fuller and fuller of people who are full of themselves, someone made sports fun again.

Alas, if you're clicking over there now, you're a little like William Miller when Bangs tells him, "You got here just in time for the death rattle, last gasp, last grope."

You know how people like to jump the gun. That seems to be the consensus among the site's commenters in the wake of not one, but two shout-outs from ESPN this week in columns by Patrick Hruby and Bill Simmons. Quoth wildcatfan: "Close commenting now!"

It's inevitable. Anything good and original gets mainstreamed eventually, taking what Bangs deprecated as the "long journey to the middle." Or as rsr26 put it:

So Deadspin is about to go mainstream? And I was in on it before the masses?! I feel like I'm back in college, and REM just released "Green." You're with me, pretentious cultural snob.

That's about the size of it, and it all went down right as yours truly had a post that jokingly asked to be co-opted, and made note of how much cultural capital is involved in understanding the joke behind "You're With Me, Leather," which has grown pretty much organically into a T-shirt that has been worn by a host on MTV, that much-maligned exemplar of faux rebelliousness serving to feed soulless corporate consumerism.

Bart: "I don't get it, Lis. If everyone is acting like me, why does it suck?"
Lisa: "It's very simple, Bart. You've defined yourself as a rebel. And in the absence of a repressive milieu, your societal niche has been co-opted.

That's no knock on the geniuses behind Deadspin, Rick Chandler and Will Leitch, who have been kind enough to toss a link Out of Left Field's way from time to time. In St. Urbain's Horseman, the late, great Mordecai Richler, as he so often did, took the piss out of the artistic integrity crowd with his protagonist joking about those, "Who would never sell out, because the opportunity would never be offered."

In other words, if you don't get mainstreamed eventually, you ain't tryin' hard enough. Deadspin will still be a must-visit for yours truly today, tomorrow and next week, but the handwriting is on the wall. You can count on seeing dim high school boys wearing "You're With Me, Leather" t-shirts by this fall. All that from two guys and a lawyer.

You’re coming along at a very dangerous time for rock ’n’ roll and that’s why I think you should just turn around, go back and be a lawyer or something. I can tell from your face that you won’t.

Start-up in September '05. First signs of colonization in June '06. You're with me, Deadspin.

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

Plus most movie theatres are also air-conditioned

Cracked.com (warning: the video begins as soon as you click through) went to town on The Love Guru. It's OK to admit you're planning to see it on June 20 because, well, it's got some hockey and Pineapple Express doesn't open until August.

(Seriously, make Cracked.com a regular stop, and yes, this is partially motivated by having gone to high school and university with one of its editors. It's good to trumpet others' success when your own are so meagre.)

Shameless self-promotion...

Some guy answering to the name "Neate Sager" will be a panelist on Tyler King's sports roundtable, Offsides, on CFRC 101.9 FM (cfrc.ca) today at 4 p.m. Eastern.

In praise of amateurishness...

There's no better way to betray a lack of originality than to start compiling Canadian media approval ratings, in an admitted rip-off of a similar, albeit enjoyable feature at Deadspin.

These goofs were smart, though, to start off with Sportscentre anchor Jennifer Hedger. She she meets most conventional Western standards (talking about the hemisphere and the university) for feminine beauty, which is bound to help draw a few lookey-loos and drive traffic. That's not to say you shouldn't participate (and that it won't make for some good reading).

A couple years ago, there was a post on this site riffing on most of the on-air talent at the three Canadian sports networks. It's no longer up here, because long story short, it's always good as a writer/blog guy to have friends who hold you to a high standard.

Point being, it's the Canadian media, the on-air talent nowhere near the platform of ESPN, so a very scolding wag of the finger goes to those who waste their beautiful minds giving Internet trolls a forum to vent their jealousy toward those pretty people on the TV. Granted, some of you would snip that maybe this will get Ms. Hedger some Internet fame and a TV job in States -- out of sight and earshot. But that's hateful.

Take it from a guy who's been there and is living with a few regrets.

CIS CORNER: KING, OF ALL KINGSTON MEDIA

• As you know, friend of the site Tyler King hosts a weekly sports roundtable, Offsides, each Friday on the Queen's student station, CFRC 101.9 FM (cfrc.ca).
  
  There's now a veritable treasure-trove of archived podcasts, if you're into that sort of thing. Hearing The Coach from K-Rock 105.7, Tim Cunningham, say the Leafs organization is "being run worse than it was in the Harold Ballard days," then add a few moments later, "there's not the drunken zaniness, but it's just as inept," is worth the download.
  
  Drunken zaniness ... beauty.
• Speaking of the Golden Gaels, Queen's just announced a new hockey recruit, centre Danny Morgan. Morgan averaged more than a point per game this season for a Junior A team which won the Eastern Canada title and went to the RBC Cup national championship. There will be no debate over whether it's Danny or Dan.
• Carleton's sports website has an update on the former Ravens uber-guard, Osvaldo Jeanty, who extended his personal title streak to six years in a row by helping Noerdlingen wins its division and earn promotion for next season. One wrinkle of European basketball is that it recognizes a comprehensive stat called Effectiveness Rating that weighs a player's averages and his shooting percentages (some basketball-geek websites such as 82games.com have something similar, but the NBA doesn't seem to have officially adopted it yet). Jeanty's ER was a solid 14.0, which again, is a by-product of coach Dave Smart's system.
  
  Here's hoping that a couple other Ottawa ballers, such as fellow Ravens guard Ryan Bell, gurad Sean Peter from the Gee-Gees and Kadie Riverin, who had a standout career with the women's team at Rice, get a chance to play overseas come fall.
• Former Queen's soccer all-Canadian Stacy Malloch has been hired as Carleton's new sports information officer. We wish her well.

(While we're on a hometown theme, Halifax Herald reporter Kristen Lipscombe, who's covering the world hockey championship, is a Kingstonian.)

"I AM OVER 50!" IS THE NEW "I DRIVE A DODGE STRATUS!"

This is the most accessible YouTube-age of the blogfather, Will Leitch, being ambushed by on Costas Now by H.G. (Buzz) Bissinger last night (the full video is at Deadspin).

The question is whether you believe that the culture that is reflected in some-not-all sports blogs is top-down or whether it filters up from the audience. It's probably more the latter and the relationship isn't even close to 50/50. It changes so fast -- just click through the archives and see how much the frequency and the style of posts on this site have changed in the past two years.

Bissinger's heart is in the right place, although telling someone you just met that he's "full of shit" before going on to express concern about a coming world that's "more profane" is a bit ironic. Thing is, why does he assume that his generation has any monopoly on civil discourse?

The one irritating aspect was how he and Bob Costas tried to portray Leitch's posts and the comments at Deadspin seem like one and the same. That's disingenuous at best. The counter-point is the same as it's been for every creative person since the invention of movable type: Buddy, it's not my fault what people choose to take from my work; I just write the sucker and move on.

Bissinger apparently doesn't have a long enough memory. If memory serves, when his best-seller Friday Night Lights was published, he was subject to death threats in Odessa, Texas, because passages in the book prompted the governing body for high school sports to investigate the Permian High football program, and ultimately bar the team from the state playoffs. Bissinger's response (again, going off memory) was that he only wrote what he observed -- he couldn't be blamed if it got a certain reaction.

Why is it any different for Will Leitch? Because he's 32 years old? At the same time, there was a good point in there somewhere. Instead of blaming the blogs, Bissinger, Costas, et al., should set their sights on the bean-counters in Big Media who've forced newspapers to become more like TV rather than stretch. Newspapers aren't suffering due to the Internet; if anything, it makes it easier to write and report since so much more information is readily available.

Someone's going to figure out how to cover sports in print while complementing the blogosphere and vice-versa. Costas should set his big brain on that instead of taking passive-aggressive swipes at Will Leitch.

Sports Media Journal, by the way, cut right to the quick with the blog reaction, asking (paraphrasing here), "If you're confident in what you're doing, why do you need someone else's approval?" In other words, Bissinger, Costas, let it go.

TWO YEARS OLD; THIS WILL BE A TREAT

This little site began with a Warren Zevon reference two years ago, so piggybacking on his art is appropriate for marking Out of Left Field's birthday.

(Move ahead to the 3:45 mark and listen to man play.)

There is not much to be said that hasn't made it into one of the 2,406 posts that have appeared here across the past 732 days. There have been countless late, lonely nights, endless empty threats to retire, death by a thousand typos and of course, shenanigans.

Someone even got sued that one time. C'est la vie.

Please know that there is no end to the gratitude toward everyone who has contributed to two years that have never been dull, except maybe during the dog days of the baseball season and that period in the dead of Canadian winter when the sun is just a rumour. There are too many folks to mention by name, but it takes in readers, commenters, every other blog who's linked here, colleagues who have gone from not knowing what a blog is to understand what makes someone write one, plus the family and friends who have been very encouraging.

Truth be known, it's too hard to get through this without thanking some people specifically. It seems best to keep it to the family (Mom, Dad, Trina, Shawn and Amer) and friends who have been supportive sincebefore this site launched -- a group including but not limited to Neil Acharya, Jim Burnett, Keith Borkowsky, Samantha Craggs, Jeff Dertinger, John Gillis, Dan Hirschorn, Greg Hughes, Tiffany Mayer, Dan Pearce, Peter Roney, Dan Rowe, Darryl G. Smart, Trevor Stewart. and of course, Christopher J. Thomas, the world's oldest teenager.

Then there are the people who've become trusted associates through the blog, such as Jean-Pierre Allard, John Bower, John Brattain, Andrew Bucholtz, John Cosway, Andy Grabia, Carl Kiiffner, Tyler King, Greg Layson, Mark Masters, James Mirtle, Erin Nicks, Dennis Prouse, Pete Toms and Mark Wacyk. Everyone should be so lucky to have a commenter such as Dennis. Dan Pawliw of the Queen's Football Club gets a special thanks.

The Tao of Stieb deserves a special thanks; so do Deadspin, Boatmen Blog and the motley crew over at Epic Carnival. Last but not least are all the readers, who might prefer having staying anonymous. Every e-mail, supportive or critical, has done the trick.

Like Warren said, some will sink, but we will float.

DUSTIN OFF SOME STORYLINES; TSN IS MOST LOW DEF

ESPN.com will be OK with or without a link from here. Regardless, Jonah Keri and his high-minded contemporaries were nice enough to take a contribution for raines30.com back in the fall and attention should be paid to his 100 Storylines for the 2008 baseball season.

In particular, Keri is touting Dustin McGowan to supplant Roy Halladay as the Jays ace by the end of the season. That's a relatively new one.

It's too bad about the Jays getting rained out this afternoon. Mike Wilner's best line about the "ludicrisosity" of scheduling a baseball game in New York City on March 31:

"I get to come to Yankee Stadium for the first time in my life and I get to see a big white tarp rolled out on to the field."

Meantime, the Drunks call attention to the real kick in the pants, which is that fans miss out on getting to watch the opener in HD. TSN will be airing the season opener of the Rogers-owned baseball team on Tuesday rather than the Rogers-owned network, which is showing Mathematically Eliminated vs. Effectively Eliminated, the Leafs and the Sabres.

Granted, the ballgame could be a nothing game too, but no one will know that for at least a month. What's better? TSN tomorrow or more rain and Sportsnet picking it up on Wednesday? Let's hear it.

Please don't make this into a Jamie Campbell vs. Rod Black kvetchfest. It's tiresome, for one. It's not about them. It's on the highers-up in Canadian broadcasting who don't invest in bringing along bona fide baseball play-by-play people and just expect to get lucky, which can happen. The rest of us are just supposed to believe that there isn't a man or woman in a country of 33 million people who can commentate baseball. That's hard to believe.

A MODEST PLEDGE...

CFRC 101.9, Queen's University's campus radio station, is having their annual funding drive. In an effort to capture the spirit of the thing, Tyler King of CFRC Sports fame is devoting today's edition of Offsides, the station's 4-5 p.m. Friday afternoon sports roundtable, to interviews with some of the station's former personalities.

Tyler has interviews lined up with Jaime Stein and Bill Miklas, former Gaels play-by-play men. There's also one with a guy who started out at CFRC doing stats for football broadcasts, but who believed in himself and rose through the ranks to do agate -- entire pages of sports statistics, thank you very much. So if you want to hear me yammer on, you can listen over the Internet (cfrc.ca) around 4 p.m. today.

CFRC's aiming to raise $17,000 during its 10-day pledge drive, so if you're in the mood, please donate here.