The other 20 worst things to happen to the Vikings

Brett Favre's signing with the Minnesota Vikings is supposed to go down on Friday, July 3, according to the unimpeachable Mike Florio of Pro Football Talk. Other oracles are chiming in. The production of No. 4 jerseys has already been green-lit (how unfortunate that phrase evokes the colours of a certain rival in Wisconsin). Some even wonder if this is the canary in the coal mine, that owner Zygi Wilf has resorted to a desperation play because he wants to unload the team since it has zero chance of getting a modern stadium.

The indispensable Daily Norseman has tried to counsel Minnesota Vikings fan through this. As it put it in a piece titled The Favre Stages Of Grief.

"As a group, we've been through way more than this, and we've been through way worse than this ... and we've managed to persevere for this long. To be honest, I'm not even sure if 'signing Brett Favre' would crack a list of the Top 20 most disappointing things to ever happen to the Minnesota Vikings."

Twenty most disappointing things to ever happen to the Vikings, eh? Consider that gauntlet picked up, even if the author is unaware it was even thrown down. If nothing else, it's way to build a a forcefield for Favregeddon, starting right after the jump.

First off, there need to be ground rules, which the author reserves the right to make up off the top of his head.

Randy Moss' mock-mooning at Lambeau Field during the 2004 playoffs does not count. It came in a game where the Vikings beat the Green Bay Packers at Lambeau Field. Moss came off better in that fiasco than FOX Sports' Joe Buck did. Scratch perennial 1,000-yard running back Robert Smith retiring from football in 2001 when he still had a few good seasons left, since that was his personal decision. Mocking former running back Onterrio Smith for getting busted at the airport with something called an Original Whizzinator is also out since that incident was symptomatic with his problems with addiction (read this post by one of Smith's one-time teammates, NFL tight end George Wrighster, and then say Onterrio Smith is fair game).

The rest is in play, as far as anyone knows.

20. Starting quarterback, Spergon Wynn

Spergon Wynn III was hardly cut out to be a CFL quarterback, let alone a NFL quarterback. The epitaph for his career in Canada came courtesy of one-time B.C. Lions teammate, Carl Kidd, who once said, "Spergon can be a good quarterback at times." The rub is none of those times involved the two starts he made for the Vikings late in 2001. He went 48-for-98 for passing with one touchdown and six interceptions and never started another game. He is the answer to a great trivia question: Who started at QB in the Vikings' last game under Dennis Green and the first under Mike Tice?

19. Drafting Troy Williamson

He's open deep and ... oh, he can't hang on! There is another NFC North team which is synonymous with spending first-round draft choices on wide receivers whose 40-yard dash times turn out to be fool's gold, but Williamson's ignominy ranks with any of the approximately 72 receivers Matt Millen drafted when he was doing to the Lions what a bunch of dopes in suits did to the U.S. auto industry.

Williamson, the No. 7 pick in 2006, was expected to give the Vikings the deep threat they had lacked since Moss left. Three years later, his name is mostly a punchline and he's an entry in Worst Man Drafted tournaments. Some of his drops were so bad that the director of a cheesy football comedy wouldn't have even included them, for lack of believability.



18. Paul Ferraro's special teams unit (2008)

Seven return touchdowns allowed in one season, a NFL record. The crazy part is Ferraro moved up the coaching ladder after that showing, since he was hired by the St. Louis Rams to coach their linebackers. Granted, that means worrying about three players, not all 11 on the field at one time.

17. Tony Dorsett runs 99½ yards (Jan. 3, 1983)

Perhaps it was not disappointing in the classic sense. It's just that the NFL Network seems bound by policy to have to air the clip of Dorsett's dash at least once every 24 hours. No one remembers that the Vikings actually won that 1982 Monday nighter, no mean feat when you allow a running back to go 99 yards on a play when his team lined up with only 10 guys. True story.

16. Vikadontis Rex (1995-2000)

There is only room for one lame dinosaur mascot in the four major sports. The Toronto Raptors totally called this one. Vikadontis was introduced in the wake of the Jurassic Park phenomenon in the early '90s, probably as a way to appeal to the kids. Of course, the Vikings already had a mascot, Ragnar, played by a guy who holds the world record for shaving with an ax, so it just ended up muddying the brand.

15. Antonio Freeman's catch (Nov. 6, 2000)

A semi-legitimate sports journalist is conditioned to eschew using the word fluke. However, what happened on the night of Nov. 6, 2000 was nothing but a damn fluke. The Vikings and Packers never should have been in overtime in the first place, but in a driving rainstorm, the Vikings botched the hold on a last-second field goal try.

In OT, Freeman slipped on the wet field while running a deep route and Dishman appeared to bat it to turf. However, it hit Freeman, who managed to complete the catch, get to his feet without being tackled and cut inside a defender to score and give Green Bay an ill-gotten 26-20 win. It also cost the Vikings home-field advantage throughout the playoffs.



14. Dennis Green tries to sue the team (1997)

To be fair, you might call a lawyer too if you had coached a perennial playoff team and found out the highers-up tried to replace you with a rah-rah college coach like Lou Holtz who was a failure in his one shot in the NFL.

13. Randy Moss' long goodbye (about 2002 to '04)

There are reasons Randy Moss is great and wonderful beyond him being in the picture when people talk about the greatest pass receivers in NFL history (after Jerry Rice and somewhere in there with Marvin Harrison and Lance Alworth from the AFL and if you include Terrell Owens in there, you're asking to get punched in the balls).

Moss showed an outcast could make it in an American team sport. That point was generally lost amid the "I play when I want to play," the meter-maid bumping and leaving the field before the game was over. No one really got that at the time, except perhaps for Karl Taro Greenfeld, but he didn't profile Moss until after he been traded to the Oakland Raiders for next to nothing. Meantime, there was so much lost potential left back in Minnesota, even though it's hard to begrudge Moss on NFL Sundays when he's catching touchdown passes from Tom Brady and polishing his application to the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

12. Daunte Culpepper's knee injury (2005)

When pro football historians (how do you get that job? Is there a test, like the foreign service exam?) talk about the great passing combos whose first names need not be mentioned, they'll talk about Montana-to-Rice, Manning-to-Harrison, Unitas-to-Berry, and Brady-to-Moss. It will ignore Culpepper, who threw to Moss during his prime years, from the time he was 23 until he was 27.

It went so well for long, then one day it did not anymore. Since '05, Culpepper has played for the Dolphins, Raiders and the Detroit Lions, so you could say the injury was career-ending.

11. Pass not intended for Darrin Nelson (Jan. 17, 1988)

Plenty of teams have seen their Super Bowl dreams dashed in the final minute of the conference championship game, just yards from a tying or winning touchdown. The killer is that the final play of the 1987 NFC championship vs. Washington, the underdog Vikings ended up with Anthony Carter and running back Darrin Nelson in the same area of the field. That made it easier for Hall of Famer Darrell Green, who was covering Carter, to break up the pass. It was intended for Nelson, but considering that Carter had set a playoff receiving record the week before, it's hard to perish the thought Wade Wilson was throwing for him.



In hindsight, the other kicker two decades later is the Vikings, as a blue state team, could have won on the field and on principle. That was the season when the NFL used scab players for three games during a players' strike. The fake Vikings went 0-3, but they still made the playoffs and were six yards from victory.

10. Super Bowl IV (January 11, 1970)

The first of the Vikings' four Super Bowl losses might not be well-remembered. The fact remains is they were 12-point favourites going in against the Kansas City Chiefs and lost by 16. No team ever favoured by such a large spread ever lost again until 1998, when a certain bunch of Cheeseheads, thanks to a couple key turnovers by a quarterback wearing No. 4, lost to Denver after being favoured by 13.



9. Smoot boat scandal (Oct. 6, 2005)

Easy enough to laugh this off now, but the general mood was less tolerant in 2005. Between Moss leaving and Culpepper suffering a thermonuclear knee injury, it was a rough few months.

8. Jim Marshall's wrong-way run (1964)

Marshall's record of playing in 282 consecutive games across 20 seasons basically makes him the NFL's answer to Cal Ripken Jr., except Ripken did not have to get cut-blocked or leg-whipped on a semi-regular basis. However, there's a belief the member of the Purple People Eaters is not in the Pro Football Hall of Fame all because of one boner he pulled in 1964.



7. Nooooo! Nooooooo! (Dec. 28, 2003)

Six years later, the question how? remains unanswered. An 11-point fourth-quarter lead against the worst team in the NFL should have been safe. Somehow, the Arizona Cardinals, led by depth-chart fillers such as Josh McCown and Nathan Poole, scored two touchdowns inside of the two-minute warning, helping Favre and the Green Bay Packers get into the playoffs, keeping the Vikings out after they had started the season 6-0. It also inspired an epic rant. Of course, since the best a Vikings fan can usually hope for is justice delayed, several years later the NFL changed the so-called force-out rule, so Nathan Poole's end-zone catch would not count if they were playing the game today. Of course, they're not playing the game today, even if some of us are just replaying it over and over.

6. Metrodome opens (April 3, 1982)

Let's get this straight: You gave up the best home-field advantage in the NFL? How did that work out? Baseball's Twins, the NBA's Timberwolves and the University of Minnesota football team have each scored swankier digs, but only the Vikings remain unable to score a modern stadium.

5. Korey Stringer's death (Aug. 1, 2001)

As a fan, there is a lot you-don't-wanna-know when it comes to the sacrifices pro athletes have to make. Springer's death due to complications from heat stroke uncovered the dark side of the sport. Pushing someone that far was so needless, so unnecessary that it hardly seemed like a game.

4. 41-doughnut (Jan. 14, 2001)

Have you ever sat there as a sports fan after your team lost by a slim margin and wondered if it would have been easier to take if they had never been in the game? Losing 41-0 in the NFC championship game to the New York Giants, getting shut out by a defence which had Jason Sehorn on it, well, there's your answer.

3. Drew Pearson pushes off (Dec. 28, 1975)

Pass interference is like obscenity. There is no definition of it, but everyone knows it when they see it. Pearson's look of restrained jubilation after catching the Hail Mary pass from Roger Staubach to beat the Vikings in the '75 playoffs is all the proof one needs to know he pushed off on Hall of Fame defensive back Paul Krause, even if the replays are actually inconclusive.



2. Herschel Walker trade (Oct. 12, 1989)

The trade was so bad the temptation is to believe it was a conspiracy to restore the Dallas Cowboys to NFL prominence and help the league's TV ratings recover in the wake of the 1987 strike. It's easier to accept that

1. Almost perfect (Jan. 17, 1999)

All together now: Damn! One can finally laugh a little about it now that has been spoofed by an Emmy-nominated sitcom. It's a burn, not a serious one mind you since this is just football, to never know how Randall Cunningham and Cris Carter might have done in a Super Bowl. It is clear the Vikings might have been headed for a fall, having flown to close to the sun on the wings of bad song parodies.



(It was the end of the 20th century. You try to forget, but booze only helps so much.)

Of course, there was more to it than Gary Anderson (who, as Marshall Eriksen/Jason Segel has noted, is now retired and owns a fly-fishing business ... in Canada), missing a 38-yard field goal that would have wrapped up the NFC title when he had not missed all season. There was more to it than the irony that the Atlanta Falcons' winning field goal was also from 38 yards and it was kicked by Morten Andersen, a Dane, meaning the Vikings' fate was sealed by an actual Viking.

It was the aftermath. In this case, it meant having to go out afterward to cover a hockey game for The Queen's Journal while wearing a Moss jersey (going home to change was not an option) and being asked, "So, who won? Last I checked Minnesota was way ahead."

The point is the obvious. Vikings fans have been through much. After reading the magic words, "Top 20 most disappointing things," it took maybe forty-five seconds to come up with about 18 of the items on this list. Put all of it together and we're Brett-proofed. Bring him in, already.

Sixteen-year-old ballplayer jumps the queue — David Stern's head explodes

One can only assume NBA commissioner David Stern, who so fiercely defends his league's draft age minimum, is going to love hearing what's going on over in baseball.

It seems juicy enough to break the Clavin rule for: Bryce Harper, the 16-year-old phenom from Las Vegas who was the cover story ("Baseball's LeBron") in the June 8 Sports Illustrated, could enter the MLB Draft next year, before his high school class graduates. Scott Boras is his adviser, but you did not have to ask.

The Las Vegas Review-Journal detailed how Harper is going to go to a junior college, obtain his general equivalency diploma (as a lot of teen actors do) and possibly be eligible for the draft in 2010. S.I. said he could have been a top-5 pick this year. Taken a certain way, his father, Ron already sounds a tad defensive: "My son is going to live with us and still eat at the same table. His brother" — a left-handed pitcher who is transferring to the same school, College of Southern Nevada — "will be a mentor to him. Why can't it be a good story?" Perhaps it should be. If Bryce Harper is everything he's cracked up to be, he probably should play vs. 20-year-olds in junior college. He hit .626 this season and with a slugging percentage that could get him into Harvard if you took out the decimal place and passed it off as his SAT score. He's just like Jeremy Tyler, the 17-year-old hoops phenom who's passing on his senior year of high school to play basketball for money overseas.

This fruit tree is probably well picked over. Jason Rosenberg of Vote For Manny fame already covered off the angle that the poor Washington Nationals, once they pay a king's ransom for No. 1 overall draft choice Stephen Strasburg, might have another Boras-represented BPEALSLY (Bestest Prospect Ever, At Least Since Last Year) on their hands. (The Nats are a mortal lock to draft No. 1 overall next season, since they have the same record after 61 games as the infamous 1962 Mets.) Jeff Pearlman noted Harper is being robbed of a childhood and that this is further proof that youth sports are nuttier than a pecan log. This late in the game, it's best to reach for the top branch and use it to whack David Stern for his age minimum, which is blithely called the one-and-done rule.

If Scott Boras can get Bryce Harper into the MLB Draft in 2010 — maybe MLB could stop it, but the rule is you're eligible if you're 16 and have a high school diploma — it makes it harder for Stern to justify his age minimum, AKA the one-and-done rule. How can anyone justify making basketball players wait until they are 19 or 20 to start making money at the game? Please understand that the age minimum has less to do with education and protecting the welfare of basketball players. It's more about preserving college basketball as a free farm system for the NBA, plain and simple.

You are right if your first reaction is to say it is apples-to-pears to compare draft eligibility rules between basketball and baseball. The NBA's premise with the draft is that players should be pretty much ready to roll right off the assembly line (U.S. auto industry pun intended). Baseball, as Tom Verducci explained in his profile of Harper, "is so skill-specific that even the best, most physically mature young players typically must endure several levels of minor league apprenticeship to learn the game."

Out of that, baseball players from Canada and the U.S. have long had an option. They can sign with a MLB organization out of high school or go to college, mature emotionally and physically and still take a stab at baseball in their early 20s. The system has a lot wrong with it, but at least it involves a choice. Boras and the Harpers simply seem to be trying to exercise that option one year sooner, and it's not even clear if they will succeed. He would stand to college a huge bonus if he does sign out of high school (which you would have to figure he would. To recycle a joke that was current when Ken Griffey Jr. became a major league star at age 20, going to high school has knocked a couple years off Harper's pension).

The question becomes, how can you reconcile Bryce Harper, who is white, getting an option when a lot of people are squeamish about Jeremy Tyler, who is black, exercising the same option. Granted, Tyler, like Brandon Jennings did when he went to Europe in 2008 instead of college, is taking a step which involves repudiating the entire U.S. basketball development system. There is great hue and cry over a 17-year-old weighing offers from European teams. Imagine the reaction in Canada if a junior hockey player such as Kingston native Taylor Hall, who some believe could go No. 1 in the NHL draft if he was not too young, announced that he was leaving the OHL's Windsor Spitfires to go play in Russia. People would be royally P.O.'d.

Really, though, what Harper's move in baseball betrays is how badly Stern and the NBA would like to keep things as is. They are partially motivated by the status quo, but really, the NBA would hate to go down baseball's road. The league has enough financial challenges without having to pay to stock minor-league affiliates with players who, let's be honest, are very good but don't have big-league skills.

The farm systems in Major League Baseball are expensive to run. The cost recovery can be be underwhelming, since the organization has to have a lot of marginally talented players under contract so their future superstars have someone to play against. There is also a bit of a battle going on between MLB and its partner, Minor League Baseball, or MiLB, over money. Basically, MLB would like their little brothers to pay full freight when it comes to player costs.

Stern and NBA owners probably want little part of such a player development system in their league. It would cost money. It's better from a business standpoint to have someone playing college basketball, getting on ESPN, instead of playing in front of a couple thousand people in Great Falls, Montana.

It is probably blue sky thinking at its worst, but if the NBA was really so concerned about education, they could simply work collaboratively with all the stakeholders and establish something called the "NBA Scholarship." They would identify players with NBA potential, pay for them to go to school and give them honest feedback about when to enter the draft (I know, too naive by half). There is always the law of unintended consequences, but it might work to weed out agents, the diploma mills, the players getting someone to take their aptitude test for them (as Chicago Bulls star Derrick Rose is accused of doing in order to get into the U of Memphis for his one-and-done year). They could use a carrot-and-stick approach to make sure colleges opted in. The NCAA already takes scholarships away from schools if their basketball team doesn't do well in the classroom, just imagine when a coach is told he can't give a scholarship to a certain player since his team has a 17% graduation rate.

It also might help the NBA with talent identification. The Raptors, for one, have talked about greater collaboration between their franchise, Canada Basketball and Canadian Interuniversity Sport, but league and NCAA rules limit what they can do. How stupid is it that a sports league stands in the way of increasing or improving the talent pool in a country of 33 million people?

This has become a very long post, but people should try to work past tongue-clucking over Bryce Harper and Jeremy Tyler. They should also lose a little of the liberal guilt and stop seeing this solely as black and white ... how come you can't turn pro at 18 in basketball when it's commonplace for mostly middle-class and Caucasian tennis, golf and hockey players?

That works against asking tough questions. It was hilarious when, after it hit the news that about Rose allegedly not taking his SAT broke, you heard people try to blame this on the NBA. That is a total crock, since shenanigans in college basketball go back to the days when there was still a tip-off at centre after every basket. It's just mind-number to see traditional media types towing Stern's party line that "the overwhelming failure rate of America's most promising prospects" is a reason to raise the age minimum. The rub there is that, hey, news flash, there is always going to be some attrition rate with promising young athletes. As a random example, take the first round of the MLB draft back in 1999. Sixteen of the 30 players taken never played a single game in the big leagues, yet no one screamed for reform and the world, remarkably, stayed on its axis.

The rub is that Harper's case shows how the genie is out of the bottle in all the big ball-and-stick leagues. It shows where Stern has gone wrong taking a halfway measure that denies someone the right to get paid somewhat according to his ability. The genie will stay out of the bottle until such time that the big money dries up in sports (which it might, look at what happened to the Romans; sometimes it's as if the WNBA, with its 40-game regular season, requirement that players have a degree).

We should work past the hang-ups and follow the money. That's what Bryce Harper, his family and Scott Boras are doing. They are the honest ones, at the end of the day.

(Meantime, should one be sympathetic to the Washington Nationals' situation, being an unprofitable team which is going to have to pay big for Strasburg and might have to for Harper? A gut feeling is "no." For starters, the Nationals were put in Washington even though it did not deserve a team. Secondly, once upon a time the No. 1 pick rotated between the American and National leagues — AL in odd-numbered years, NL in evens. However, Bud Selig and the boys got greedy and changed it.)

Related:
Harper ready to give college try; 16-year-old Las Vegas High baseball prodigy registers at CSN, plans to attain GED to speed draft eligibility (Matt Youmans, Las Vegas Review-Journal)

The wildcat formation: Dr. Z totally called it

Deadspin has a nice tribute to Sports Illustrated's Dr. Z, Paul Zimmerman, the long-time NFL writer who was stricken by a pair of strokes last November.

Zimmerman always wrote to increase understanding, which is one of the two nobler goals of sports writing, and he didn't blow smoke up the superstars. One way to appreciate Dr. Z is to harken back on one of his more memorable pieces, from S.I.'s 1989 NFL preview, which had Randall Cunningham on the cover with the words, The Ultimate Weapon. It was one of those end-of-decade pieces, envisioning how football might look in the 1990s. It might be fun to wonder, two decades on, how prescient he was.

Dr. Z's predictions:

"The defensive emphasis in the years ahead will shift to big people who can run — 'tweener types, 220-pound linebacker-strong safety combinations and 250-pound linebacker-defensive ends." Partially right. There are plenty of NFL stars who could fit that loose description. Off the 2008 All-Pro team alone, one could pick out the Miami Dolphins' All-Pro linebacker Joey Porter (started his college career on offence and then moved to defensive line), the Arizona Cardinals' 230-lb. strong safety, Adrian Wilson and the Steelers safety Troy Polamalu (who plays in the tackle box on a majority of plays). The Chicago Bears linebacker Brian Urlacher, who was a college safety, could also fit in ther.

"Offensive coaches will give some thought to the emergence of this new monster and then come up with one of their own, thereby fortifying the most neglected position in football, tight end. They'll convert college linebackers and quick defensive ends." In 1988 and '89, no tight ends were among the top 20 NFL receivers in yards gained (yes, it's still strange the NFL ranks players by receptions instead of yardage). In 2007, three tight ends were among the top 20. In 2008, then-Kansas City Chief Tony Gonzalez was 12th and Dallas' Jason Witten was 25th.

"Players on both sides of the ball will be taller but lighter, because an effective anti-steroid policy will be implemented, preferably in consort with the Players Association (more on that later." Swing and a miss. Chalk this up to wishful thinking.

"Teams will load up on running backs, carrying as many as seven regulars, as more and more good runners come out of college. Teams will attack in waves, with three sets of running backs, to ensure that the offense always has fresh legs in the game. The heavy-duty 1,500-yard back could become obsolete." Forty-two NFL running backs had at least 100 carries in 1989, in a 28-team league. Forty-nine toted the synthetic leatherskin at least 100 times in 2008, in a 32-team league, about the same average per team. There might be more good running backs, but only so man coaches are willing to use regularly.

"With the emergence of mobile, more athletic quarterbacks from the colleges, NFL teams may put an extra passer in the back-field, much the way the Dolphins sometimes used backup quarterback Crash Jensen with (Dan) Marino in the mid-'80s." Talk about prescient. The evolutionary process has not been as quick as one might like. However, between the emergence of the Wildcat formation, the Miami Dolphins drafting a dual-threat quarterback such as Pat White of West Virginia, he might have been on to something.








(Kissing Suzy Kolber, of course, did this way better last summer.)
Type rest of the post here

Zack Greinke: Depression is still a four-letter word, for now

There was a time fairly recently when you wouldn't have heard about Zack Greinke and his depression, so having it out in the open is a step forward.

It is curious, though, that the Sports Illustrated cover story on the Kansas City Royals ace, get this, omits the word "depression." Greinke's condition is referred to only as "social anxiety disorder." Two years ago, when Greinke was making his comeback, the same publication referred to his "debilitating case of depression."

That speaks to how depression is a touchy topic. The mere mention strikes at the heart of the way society has been going for the last 30 years. It is understandable to look at Greinke and see this as an upbeat story about a pitching phenom who has an 0.00 ERA heading into his start tonight vs. the Toronto Blue Jays. No one is expecting sports journalism to save the world, but at the same time, that goes to show why a best-selling book about male depression was entitled, I Don't Want To Talk About It. Like it or not, you live in this world, you have to see how this world contributes to depression.

It is progress that the Kansas City Royals were sensitive to Greinke's condition (it's beside the point that they had a lot of money tied up in him). Like Joe Posnanski says:

"Baseball is not a game known for understanding or compassion. The gentle relief pitcher for the Royals, Dan Quisenberry, wrote a poem about his manager Dick Howser, the refrain being Howser's quote for every occasion: 'Piss on it.' That was Howser's answer for losses, for slumps, for bad pitching performances, for anything gone wrong. Piss on it. Get 'em tomorrow.

"And that's the image of the big league game: cold, hard, rub some dirt on it, walk it off, there's no crying in baseball, Texas manager Billy Martin once telling Mike Hargrove that Hargrove could not take off to attend his father-in-law's funeral because "that's not immediate family."

"That's the game (then-Royals GM Buddy) Bell and (then-GM Allard) Baird grew up in. But on that February morning, they saw a young pitcher in pain, and they told him to go home and stop thinking about baseball. 'There's business and there's personal,' says Baird, now a special assistant with the Boston Red Sox. 'And most times in the game, business comes ahead of personal. But I think in this situation, we were talking something bigger than business. There's right and wrong, and I don't think there was any gray area here.' "

At the same time, though, only seeing this in terms of Greinke fighting through the mental health equivalent of Tommy John surgery smacks of stopping halfway.

As Sharapova's Thigh noted, Greinke dealing with depression should command more attention than Texas Rangers slugger Josh Hamilton overcoming drug addiction. Who's the bigger underdog, really? The young man who overcomes a genetic predisposition toward depression, which will be one of the world's top five public health problems by 2050, or the one who overcame addiction? Maybe that is apples to plantains, but it's clear whose story the public would prefer to hear, since drug addiction has a higher tsk-tsk factor. Most sports likers know about Hamilton, while many are only now hearing about Greinke.

This is just a layperson's understanding, but 21st-century life is a major exacerbator of depression, and that really wasn't in the article. There are a lot of factors: Diet, poor sleep patterns, social isolation (the contradiction that the more people who live in cities, the more cut off from each other we feel). The biggest might be the focus on the individual (the "You Sell," as it's called), which has eroded our social bonds. When everything is MySomething, that can be scary if you have problems. It's reasons like that which mean, although it sucks if you're unemployed, that a recession is not something to be completely feared.

It is curious that Greinke, as Poz detailed, is that he was often "talked with friends and family about becoming a full-time position player so that he could get to hit," so he wouldn't have to be out there alone on the pitcher's mound. It was like he wanted to disappear into a more group setting, being in the dugout with the boys sizing up the opposing pitcher.

Again, it's complicated. Greinke is not the first young athlete who needed time away before coming back, although this was more than simple burnout. Hall of Famer Robin Yount toyed with ditching baseball for golf when he was 21 years old and as Bill James once argued, that was part of him making a commitment to baseball. Greinke had to make a commitment to being a pitcher.

The point today is that there is a lot which has to change about the way we're leading our lives in order to meet the challenge of depression head-on. It was a well-written SI cover story, a perfectly good read on a sunny Wednesday afternoon, but leaving out the D-word was a bit of a downer.

Related:
Zack Greinke Is In Total Control; The rise of the young Royals ace has been as spectacular as his fall was chilling. His anxiety disorder now in check, he's unleashed the full range of his remarkable talent (Joe Posnanski, Sports Illustrated)
Greinke to appear on this week’s cover of Sports Illustrated (Kansas City Star, April 27)
Greinke Has Been Perfect, but He Is Trying to Do Better (The New York Times, April 23)
Zack Greinke Has The Admirable Story, Not Josh Hamilton (Matt Clapp, Sharapova's Thigh)

He did all that for one lousy joke...

Posting the trailer for Paper Heart (comedienne Charlene Yi explores if there is such a thing is love, she's the girlfriend of Michael Cera, who does his whole awkward-cute routine that has already started to wear thin) can actually be justified here. It's a stretch.



How do you justify putting this on a sports blog? Well, comedy is a collaborative enterprise, just like sports. It only works if everyone buys in. That clip also spins off into how grateful one should be for everyone Judd Apatow family of performers. And there is a YouTube clip that's surfaced of Seth Rogen, circa 1996 (he would have been 13 or 14 years) doing stand-up comedy in Vancouver. He jokes about playing rugby, so that justifies a bit more.



Also, do you remember that Vanity Fair spread last month on the New Kings of Comedy. There was the one picture of Seth Rogen, Paul Rudd, Jason Segel and Jonah Hill (AKA the obnoxious one in Superbad).

Lord, I apologize, but the immediate point of reference was a 1997 Sports Illustrated feature on baseball's new breed of slugging shortstops. In hindsight, it revealed that Alex Rodriguez was always shallow and mindless:

" 'C'mon with me to New York, DJ,' Rodriguez says. He has been trying all evening to persuade Jeter to fly with him the next morning to an awards show, having failed at dinner with his A material: " 'Cindy's going to be there. Cindy Crawford!' "

(That wouldn't have been so apparent if you were about the same age and only a couple years' removed from having a Cindy Crawford poster on your bedroom wall.)

That article mostly focused on A-Rod, Derek Jeter, Nomar Garciaparra and, wait for it, the Blue Jays' Alex Gonzalez.

Jonah Hill is Alex Gonzalez. Please consider the stretch made.

Zen Dayley: Harry and the Bird ...

Ball fans were still absorbing the news about Nick Adenhart — and now comes word about Mark Fidrych, of mid-1970s Detroit Tigers fame, and Harry Kalas, the longtime Philadelphia Phillies play-by-play voice, have left us on the same day.

The form calls, as a unreformed baseball nut, to try to do justice to both men.

Firstly, Fidrych. (Joe Posnanski, who had benefit of actually being alive in 1976, will have more later, so you can skip reading from this point forward and wait for his take). One way of summing up The Bird if that if he hadn't existed, Richard Linklater might have had to invent him for the generation which wishes it had been young in the free-spirited '70s, instead of the nervous 1990s, where just saying hello could get you charged with a hate crime.

The timing and tide was right for Fidrych, "with his Framptonian nest of hair." (Steve Rushin, Sports Illustrated, July 2, 2001). From this vantage point, he stands as the last folk-hero American athlete, who barely got paid more than the people sitting in the stands (the stage ledge in Michigan even passed a resolution to try to get his salary raised above the major-league minimum, $16,500). The state of Michigan, then as as now, was down on its luck on its 1976, the auto industry leaking oil three lanes wide. He provided some very necessary solace, so maybe it's not for nothing he would go when the city and state which embraced him so is up against it once again. It's a reminder that whatever comes up, we've been there before.

Meantime, as the story went, he was without airs to the extent that he lived in an apartment with no telephone. Perhaps there was some lesson in there, an argument that modesty is overrated.

"He was almost too down to earth. "He was just a wonderful guy to be around. I think the antics on the field were never an act. I think it was his true feelings. He was just a simple guy, lived a simple lifestyle and just brought that lunchpail mentality to the pitcher's mound every four or five days."
— Pawtucket Red Sox president Mike Tamburro, via The Associated Press

Fidrych was also kind of a poster child for the abuse of young arms. The double edge of his runaway success was that the Detroit Tigers allowed a pitcher just two years out of high school to throw 24 complete games — a career for some pitchers — in 29 starts, including five extra-inning games. Using Tom Tango's pitch count estimator, one can guesstimate that Fidrych had several games where he threw 150 to 175 pitches. For instance, in his fourth career start, he pitched an 11-inning, 5-4 win, with four bases on balls; he probably threw in the area of 176 pitches.

That would never happen today. These days, a smart organization would probably have shut Fidrych down in September once his team was out of the hunt (the '76 Tigers finished 74-87, fifth in a six-team AL East). Really, every time you hear some sports-talk radio reactionary going on about pitchers being babied, you should be entitled to find him and staple a printout of Mark Fidrych's career stats to his forehead.

Fidrych represented the innocence of youth. Well, innocence has a down side. Be that as it may, he'll always be the answer to a great question, what would you do if you were told you would be a major sports star for a year, but only for a year? By most accounts, he handled that question with his own goofy kind of aplomb.



Harry Kalas

Greater minds have already commented on the relationship which forms between a good baseball radio play-by-play voice and her/his audience, so spare a thought for Phillies fans today. They've lost two good ones in just more than a decade, since Kalas' analyst, the Hall of Fame leadoff hitter Richie Ashburn, died unexpectedly in 1997.

Kalas was known for his work with NFL Films, but he was Philadelphia's guy through and through.



Bill Baer of Crashburn Alley, a fine Phils blog, said it best about Kalas several weeks ago.

"I could listen to Kalas talk about anything — knitting, different types of leaves, flossing techniques — for hours on end. His voice and delivery are incredibly captivating, no doubt why he is a legend among legends in the broadcast booth. To boot, he is one of the most genuinely humble people you will ever have the privilege of hearing."

Harry Kalas, according to his Wiki, was actually a catalyst for a change in MLB broadcasting policy. In those days, the hometown radio broadcasters were always shunted aside for the national guys during the World Series. There was such a stink over Kalas being bounced off the broadcast in 1980 that starting the next year, the locals were able to call the game. That speaks to what Philly had with Harry Kalas and what Harry Kalas had in Philly.

R.I.P., Harry. R.I.P., Bird.

Related:
Kalas: 'His substance was his style' (Pro Football Talk)
Goodbye, Harry (Brian Joseph, Baseball Daily Digest)
In 1976 the Bird flew into baseball, free of guile, a little bit gullible and absolutely lovable. Twenty-five years later he's the same rare Bird. (Sports Illustrated, July 2, 2001)

Batter up: Arizona Diamondbacks

It's that mystical, wonderful time of year where you commit to a team who you know fully well won't win. This season, in honour of an popular Internet meme, we'll present 25 things tangentially about each Major League Baseball team. At bat: The Arizona Diamondbacks.

1. The recession has hit Arizona hard with close to 200,000 jobs lost and housing prices predicted to fall another 10-15%, according to Sunday's Republic (there are already 60,000 homes up for sale) The state is kind of a poster child for the easy-money excess of the last decade in the U.S. Baseball is more dependent on local revenues than the NFL. The Diamondbacks spring training attendance was down 9% from last season.
   
   
2. Their payroll is in the $70 million US range, so the upshot is they have stayed fairly lean and mean.
   
   
3. Check at the end of year to see how 21-year-old rightfielder Justin Upton did in the second half opposed to the first half. He's steadily improving, so don't sweat him not starting Opening Day.
   
   
4. Lefty-hitting shortstop Stephen Drew and free-swinging centrefielder Chris Young each came on after the all-star break last season. Drew is the best shortstop who doesn't play in the NL East, although he will never have the intangibles of a certain Captain who plays in the Bronx.
   
   
5. Brandon Webb is Arizona's ace unless his heavy workload catches up to him. Since it's human nature to have eyes for another, Dan Haren might be a more viable Cy Young Award candidate.
   
   
6. The common refrain is they don't have much pitching outside the Big Two, but somehow they had the NL's best strikeout-to-walk ratio (2.73) and gave up just 147 homers despite playing in a hitter's park.
   
   
7. Closer Chad Qualls was nails for three seasons as the eighth-inning man out of the bullpen. Their bullpen has been stable through two seasons, but it's hard to stay clear-eyed when a team blows a 4½-game lead in the final month. a href="http://www.azsnakepit.com/">AZ Snakepit notes it's time for the "gurgling vortex of bullpen suckage to be turned off."
   
   
8. There is a ripple in the water over Webb saying the Dodgers' Manny Ramirez isn't "going to be doing the same thing he did last year." That was a ridiculous thing to say. People hit .396 all the time (what do you mean, not since 1941?).
   
   
9. Webb winning his first nine starts in 2008 was a bit of a surprises, but it was a total stunner that the last pitcher to do it was Andy Hawkins (career record: 84-91).
   
   
10. Their Triple-A team is in Reno, Nevada, not far from the Jays' farm club in Las Vegas, so there's a natural rivalry. Really? OK, not really.
    
    
11. Qualls attended the University of Nevada, which is in Reno. You just know it's in the back of his mind that if he ever goes down on a rehab assignment, he can hit all his old college hangouts, see if he's still got the high score on Golden Tee.
    
    (Demetri Martin does a bit that you should be able to look the names of the peoples with the high scores on a video game and add "is lonely." You can do the same with anyone living outside the United States who knows that the University of Nevada football team runs the Pistol offence.)
    
    
12. Not naming name on this site, but whoever wrote the Diamondbacks began last season like they would win 100 games should have his hands cut off. Their best 30-game stretch (21-9) simply happened to come in the first 30 games before their peaks-and-valleys offence caught up to them.
    
    
13. Relievers Billy Buckner and Tony Peña are not related to 1980s players Bill Buckner and Tony Peña.
    
    It would be a lot cooler for the D-Backs if Billy Buckner has an outlier year as an innings-eating reliever.
    
    
14. One hopes Felipe López has a big year at second base, one season after being released by the Washington Nationals. He's good extra part.
    
    
15. More great moments in digital democracy: A MLB.com reader says if the D-Backs win the division, "they will do it with pitching and small ball." This was said about a team which had only 58 stolen bases and 1,287 strikeouts last season.
    
    Playing small ball with that group would be like taking a football team with a great passing game and expecting them to run the wishbone.
    
    
16. Randy Johnson left for the Giants, but they signed 6-foot-11 reliever Jon Rauch, the tallest player in baseball history. One hopes the Big Unit left behind his custom-made wingback chair.
    
    
17. There's something annoying about seeing a Triple-A team's press release that notes it has a pitcher who "made nine appearances as a rookie for the World Champion Arizona Diamondbacks in 2001." Do you think he likes being reminded that he was a heartbeat away?
    
    
18. Were ours a just God, they would pay dearly for not re-signing Tim Raines Jr. after his big summer in Triple-A. The chip off the old Rock (so, so sorry) hit .311/.346/.530 with 61 extra-base hits, just like his old man, without the walks, which was why it was in Triple-A.
    
    Both Tim Raineses are now with the Newark Bears in the Atlantic League.
    
    
19. One name in the system that jumps out is Daniel Stange, a minor-league reliever who's apparently considered the "best sleeper" in Arizona's system.
    
    As an added bonus, he has the same last name as Lee Stange, who pitched for the 1967 Impossible Dream Red Sox.
    
    
20. First-round draft pick Daniel Schereth (throws lefty, throws very hard), who's being groomed as a closer, is the son of three-time Super Bowl-winning offensive lineman Mark Schereth, who famously had 29 operations during his playing career (and as the NFL's first Alaskan, was good fodder for quirky Sports Illustrated features). The younger Schelereth has only had Tommy John surgery once.
    
    
21. You rarely see a lefty-hitting shortstop, except on the Canadian national team. Drew, though, is one of the few. Meantime, what would cause someone to think the Brewers' J.J. Hardy hits left-handed? That's a mystery for the ages.
    
    
22. Prospective No. 5 starter Max Scherzer is beginning the season on the disabled list.
    
    
23. Outsports is taking them to win the NL West.
    
    
24. Superannuated Tom Gordon is also on the DL. There's no truth that he's in Arizona since it's never too early to shop for a retirement home, cheap.
    
    
25. Former Jay Ryan Roberts gets the 25th spot in this preview, since he got the 25th spot on Arizona's roster. His only career homer was at Yankee Stadium.
    

Batter up: Houston Astros

It's that mystical, wonderful time of year where you commit to a baseball team who you know fully well won't win. This season, in honour of an popular Internet meme, we'll present 25 things that are tangentially about each team. At bat: The Houston Astros.

1. Senators owner Eugene Melnyk wants you to know anyone who thinks the Astros should blow up their roster should get a bomb and blow themselves up. They fluked out an 86-win season, but now have an aging lineup and strange as it might sound for a team in Texas, have about run out of bullets.
   
   
2. Astros great Craig Biggio is now coaching his son's high school baseball team. People have been saying they're better than they get credit for, but everyone will soon realize that they have just been overachieving.
   
   
3. It might have been better to come up with a list of 25 beejos than 25 things about the Astros.
   
   
4. Houston ace Roy Oswalt's closest comparable is Roy Halladay. And they have the same name!
   
   
5. It's best to not go looking for a picture of Astros owner Drayton Moore and just picture him as the Rich Texan from The Simpsons. Carlos Lee and Miguel Tejada's contracts are on par with owning the world's fattest racehorse.
   
   
6. They had the oldest team in the majors before signing a 37-year-old catcher universally known as Pudge. Ivan Rodriguez hasn't been a league-average hitter since 2004.
7. If you want to know why Nolan Ryan pitched forever, check the expression he gets on his face just before he reaches back to squirt Charlie Kerfeld with champagne. It's right at the end.
   
   
   
8. At one point this spring they had overwhelmed one opponent, underwhelmed 16 and whelmed three. Their overall spring training record was 11-19-1. It only means something if you let it mean something.
   
   
9. FanGraphs gives their farm system an F.
   
   
10. Centrefielder Michael Bourn's 41 steals were the most for a Houston player since Craig Biggio swiped 50 in 1998. This is about the only similarity between them as players.
    
    It's always a laugh-and-a-half to read that a player could be good "if he can get his on-base percentage up." That's almost like telling a basketball player, "be taller."
    
    Bourn could crack .300 if he started getting hit by pitches at a more Biggio-esque rate. He was plunked only twice last season.
    
    
11. There's a sneaking suspicion that the Baseball Prospectus people listed catcher Jason Castro as the 76th-best prospect just so people could say they didn't have anyone in the top 75. That was downright decent of them.
    
    
12. Mixing and matching interleague opponents really mushroomed once the Astros, an NL Central team, started playing the Texas Rangers, an AL West team (in the first couple years, the West played the West, and so on). There are some great ideas to make interleague better, but don't expect it to happen.
    
    
13. The most glamourous thing about middle reliever Geoff Geary is that he's represented by the Beverly Hills Sports Council. Somewhere there's a 25-year-old guy trying to use, "I worked on Geoff Geary's contract" to impress women.
    
    
14. Lance Berkman has on-based .413 and slugged .560 in his career, which are big-time numbers for a 10-year veteran. He's kind of a poor man's Jim Thome.
    
    
15. Has everyone forgotten that it was reported last spring that a Houston trainer supplied steroids to retired Astros great Jeff Bagwell, along with Roger Clemens and Andy Pettitte?
    
    
16. Jose Valverde (pictured) is a dominant closer, but the Astros having him might be a bit like GM execs keeping their private jets. It's going to be a long season in Houston.
    
    
17. Please show some love for Wandy Rodriguez, who's among the best pitchers no one outside of fantasy leaguers has ever heard of.
    
    
18. This Roger Clemens Sports Illustrated cover from five years ago is pretty ironic.
    
    
19. Tuesday is the 30th anniversary of former Astro Bob Forsch throwing what was then the earliest no-hitter in baseball history. His cather that night was The FAN 590's Alan Ashby, who the good Lord willing, will get to commentate the next Blue Jays no-hitter.
    
    
20. You probably knew that veteran outfielder Darin Erstad was the punter for the Nebraska Cornhuskers when they won the NCAA football title in 1994, but did you know he actually caught a pass that season? You do now. It's around the 2:00 mark of the clip. Apparently, the Cornhuskers were using an old Ottawa Rough Riders playbook: Have the holder drop the snap, pick up wildy run around wildly and heave it downfield and hope something good happens.
    
    
    
    
21. From the department of "good to know," the franchise record for losses in a season is 97, set the first year the team was known as the Astros.


22. The best baseball team in Houston right now is probably the Rice Owls. They're 19-7 this season.
    


23. Minute Maid Park could stand to lose Tal's Hill in centrefield. How someone hasn't broken their neck running up that incline is absolutely amazing.
    


24. Lance Berkman's spouse is named Cara and knowing that is not the least bit pathetic.
    
    
25. Cecil Cooper could be the first manager fired this season, one of the risks of working for the Rich Texan.