Ultimate baseball league: Round Rock Express

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

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

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

STARTING LINEUP

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


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


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


4. 1B Mark Teixeira,# 2005 (6.0). Might have a little trouble cracking the all-time Yankees lineup.


5. 3B Ken McMullen, 1969 (6.2). Prototype third baseman from the late 1960s; homered in his final plate appearance.
   
6. SS Michael Young, 2006 (4.6). Has moved all over the fielding spectrum; has anyone else ever been a Gold Glove shortstop one season and then shifted to third base the next season?


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


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


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

STARTING PITCHERS

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


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

BENCH

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


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


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


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


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

BULLPEN

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


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

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

Blog blast past: Putting Bonds into some perspective

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Top 5: Getting in Tournament mode

The NCAA Tournament (always capitalized) tipped off in earnest. You're been up nights trying to figure out which 10 seed might make it to the Sweet Sixteen (Michigan, maybe Minnesota with Toronto's Devoe Joseph), strip-mined The Wages of Wins for pearls of wisdom, maybe said to hell with it and picked teams based on who has a funnier nickname, although none have anything on the one matchup in the women's NCAAs between South Dakota State (the Jackrabbits) and Texas Christian (the Horned Frogs).

You're wrong if you think this is all about knowing which team doesn't have an adequate backup centre if their best big man gets in early foul trouble, although that might help you fill out your bracket. March Madness is not an event. It's an attitude.

1. Re-read portions of Will Blythe's To Hate Like This Is To Be Happy Forever: A Thoroughly Obsessive, Intermittently Uplifting, and Occasionally Unbiased Account of the Duke-North Carolina Basketball Rivalry.
   
   Granted, Blythe probably went a little far trying to claim that there's no internecine hatred like Duke-Carolina internecine hatred. However, it's brilliant and it gets to the heart of why people follow sports, to rationalize irrational loathing.
   
   Duke has never done you any wrong, yet you hate them and hate yourself for picking them to reach the Elite Eight. You might not watch NCAA Division 1 hoops all season (especially since the 35-second shot clock makes for a slower-paced game to Canadian eyes which have got used to the 24-second shot clock in the CIS), but when you see Duke, you're seeing the whole bile-pushing line of succession, from J.J. Redick back to Wojo to Bobby Hurley and Christian Laettner. Who's playing for them now doesn't seem to matter much.
   
   
2. Re-read Chuck Klosterman's essay "33" (anthologized in Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs). It's about the 1980s Celtics-Lakers rivalry, but it gets to the core of basketball. Relating to the sport comes down to black-and-white philosophies. You need your absolutes (do you favour a team with great bigs, or one with savvy senior guards) if you're going to be able to fill out your bracket by noon ET tomorrow.
   

   QUESTION #8: Should capital punishment be legal?
   Laker People say no, as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is a human rights activist who would question the validity of any practice that essentially replicates the original crime. Celtic People say yes, because anybody who's looked into Larry Bird's eyes knows he's a killer.

   This might embarrass both the person it's about and the person who said it, but a friend said that he knew the Carleton had it in the bag at the CIS Final 8 when he saw that one of the more important Ravens had noticeably deep-set eyes. He went on to explain that men have deeper-set eyes than women due to the warrior culture, when people fought with swords. With tongue firmly planted in cheek, this would mean Carleton's path to this national title started back in 1066 on some battlefield in England.
   
   
3. Go on YouTube and watch as many One Shining Moments as you can. You will cry. It's OK to cry.
   
4. Watch Hoosiers. It's a CRTC and FCC mandate that some cable channel must being airing it late at night on the eve of the Thursday first-round games. It was Reagan-era schmaltz, but it was good schmaltz.
   
5. Stay up half the night preparing arguments for why the Canadian university champion should get a NCAA bid (or saying, hey, our tournament is good enough). More than one Canadian hoops devotee has said it would be great if the CIS champs could be given a spot in the NCAAs, not as one of the no-hope 16 seeds, but maybe as a 12 seed against a team such as Utah, seeded fifth in the Midwest Regional.
   
   Imagine the interest if some wild Canadian horde were allowed inside the velvet rope. Imagine the pressure on the U.S. coaches and players to maintain the NCAA's superiority.
   

Do all that, and you'll be ready.

(Classic To Hate Like This Is To Be Happy Forever moment on the phone with my mom earlier this week: "Did you see the Jets beat out the Raiders?" she said, referring to two area Junior C hockey teams, the Amherstview Jets and Napanee Raiders. Neither of us have ever attended a game, so taking glee in the Raiders' dust-biting might seem like bad form.

However, it made sense. The Sagers are Ernestown people, not Napanee people, no matter what our mailing address says. As kids, we played our minor hockey and ball for Ernestown Township, since it was closer to house and most of all, not Napanee, which tended to take youth sports a little too seriously. All five of us attended Ernestown Secondary School and played various sports, although it was good that my brother got to play a little football for the Napanee Golden Hawks. The lines are clearly delineated.)

Moose/Morris ...

The arbitrary nature of glory is the pedantic phrase floating around amid the retirement tributes to Mike Mussina, the New York Yankees pitcher.

The corollary could be called Moose/Morris. Each fall, when Hall of Fame voting talks heats up, someone will try to expand the thumbnail sketch of Jack Morris as the ultimate big-game pitcher. Oh, that Jack Morris was nails when he chucked that 10-inning, 1-0 shutout in Game 7 of the 1991 World Series. Please ignore that his career earned-run average was close to 4 -- 3.90 in regular season, 3.80 in the playoffs.

Mussina's career arc defied the signature moment, but when you think about that, who are those for? They're not for the ballplayers. They know whether a guy can play. They might be good for tugged-a-million-which-ways journalists who need to marshall the facts for an argument quickly and need to latch on to something.

This is The Geek talking, but those "he never won a ..." arguments are especially grating. It's that arbitariness-of-glory. Mussina finally had a 20-win season this year. ShysterBall noted that doesn't happen if Yankees teammate Xavier Nady doesn't hit a three-run homer on the final day of the season.

Mussina also won 19 games in both 1995 and '96. The first time, the season was shortened due to the 1994-95 strike, costing him at least three starts. In '96, his near-miss was a footnote to an incident that Blue Jays fans have not forgotten. On the final Saturday of the season, Robbie Alomar, the day after the incident where he spit on John Hirschbeck, homered in extra innings to help the Orioles wrap up a playoff berth. Mussina started that game and left with a 2-1 lead after throwing eight solid innings. Ed Sprague sent it to extras with a homer in the ninth inning off future former Jay Armando Benitez, though, denying him his 20th win.

The question becomes on whom does Mussina's Cooperstown case hinge -- Xavier Nady or Armando Benitez.

Like Wallace Matthews at Newsday noted today, "the easy out on Mussina was that he had never won a Cy Young, never pitched for a world champion, and never won 20 games."

Who said you have to have to done this or that? It should not matter that Jeff Bagwell and Craig Biggio do not have World Series rings, just like Mussina, or that Biggio was never a league MVP. That was never the standard for Cooperstown anyway. The ranks would be a whole lot thinner were that the case.

Who said you had to be the best anything of your era -- right-handed pitcher, shortstop and so on -- to be in the Hall of Fame? It is no fault of Tim Raines' that he happened to play within the same era as Rickey Henderson, his only superior as a leadoff hitter.

In the early 1960s, when Ted Williams homered in his final at-bat, a writer for the old Sport magazine named Ed Linn wrote the piece of his career describing the event. It was his misfortune that some dilettante named John Updike was also at Fenway Park that day and a wrote an essay that proved far more enduring. It didn't make Ed Linn any less worthy, though.

Not to take this any farther into a cheap Klosterman rip-off, but Moose/Morris, and the amount of bile and bandwidth that baseball geeks expend on these debates -- how does it really affect your life, really? -- speaks to one of modern man's primordial fears. No one wants to be forgotten and maybe people project that on to ballplayers, sorry to be pretentious.

Morris had some great moments across his 18 seasons. Mussina had a better 18 seasons, period. Some of us just can't understand why the former holds more appeal to people.

It's all part of our rock-and-roll fantasy

Just to whet the appetite for Chuck Klosterman's debut novel Downtown Owl, he did a Q&A with RandBall.

Among other things, he dodged the question of creating a clever name for a fantasy sports team, but did it in a creative way.

RB: Creating clever fantasy football team names has replaced creating clever band names as an idle past-time for 20-something males. Discuss.

CK: No idea. I don’t understand the question. But here’s my new plan: I want to start a band that only plays cover versions of songs that tell narrative stories about how the group itself started, such as Boston’s Rock and Roll Band, Bryan Adams’ Summer of ‘69, and that one good single by Art Brut. However, we could only play one gig.

It's unfortunate that Klosterman didn't want to get into it — maybe he just doesn't do the fantasy-league thing, or doesn't want to admit to such nerdish leanings.

(It won't be long until Good Enough 4 Odessa is rolling through the Rockhard Fantasy League season. There will not be obsessive posts about this ... and that can be put in a certificant that you can frame.

We'll always have the wraparounds in NHL 94

Damn you kids with your carefully considered haircuts, your constantly changing relationship statuses on Facebook and your complex hockey video games.

Reading about the next step in online play for EA Sports' NHL 09 is a one-way trip to the other side of the generation gap. Obviously, this is nothing new for the hardcore gamers, but for a guy who's still perfectly content to play Madden or the NCAA 08 college football game for hours on end on a PlayStation 2 (how 2002!), it's mind-bending.

(For anyone who's wondering, given a choice, today's trivia question would not revolve around a certain former Raptor who will never, ever be forgiven. Time heals almost all, but not that.)

David Littman, the producer of NHL 09 (like Chuck Klosterman once said, how long until we have video-game critics, the same way there are film critics?) offered a window earlier this week into what's in store for the gamers. The latest edition of the hockey franchise will include an EA Sports Hockey League where teams, with up to 50 members, can be created and compete against other teams. This builds off the 6-on-6 mode that's apparently pretty popular (some of us still like playing these games alone, usually with alcohol within an arm's length; sweet liquor eases the pain).

Far be it to suggest that if you can swing getting 50 people together at one time in this day and age, all that energy should be put to something other than an activity that's popular among eight-year-olds with ADHD. How about organizing an actual hockey game? Or reading to children?

You should read it all, if you're interested, to get the full appreciation, but this kind of jumped out in a not entirely pleasant way for the guy who's on the wrong side of 30 (cue the Logan Run's theme):

"... we want to make the people sitting at home into superstars. Instead of wearing someone else's name on the back of your jersey when playing online, it is your name on the back. Your team is trying to win the EASHL Championship and you will feel the pressure to perform for your teammates. With our performance tracker feature, you are graded on how well you play hockey, not on how well you play a video game. The leaderboards show the real names of people instead of their gamertags. This is the first step for people to become the next sports superstars. In a few years, we want there to be SportsCenter-style highlights and interviews with our gamers.

Jesus. This runs counter to the gaming experience of someone who came of age during the Paleozoic Era of sports video games. It wasn't about feeling like a superstar, sitting at home -- there was supposed to be guilt attached to playing your 11th game of NHL 94 that day when it was bright and sunny outside. Another part of the appeal was that the games weren't realistic, whether it was Bo Jackson being untackle-able in Tecmo Super Bowl, the hot spots on the floor in NBA Jam, or being able to deke the goalie with the same move every time in some of the early EA Sports hockey games. Remember the one-timers? They were unstoppable.

Obviously, the paradigm has shifted. Gaming is serious. People post their highlights on YouTube. It used to be that if you, say, played an entire 162-game season of Earl Weaver Baseball on your parents' Tandy, you kept it to yourself and didn't tell anyone about it, because you know sharing that fact was a sure way to be socially unpopular -- even more so.

The next edition in EA Sports hockey franchise will probably reward gamers for their use of hockey cliches in postgame interviews, which is another step toward a world where no one will ever having anything original to say.

Ah, you kids. You'll never know what it was like to make Gretzky's head bleed. Those of us who did, and still do, are going to go listen to some sad bastard music.



Related:
NHL 09 Q&A: EA Sports Hockey League Revealed (Adult Gaming Enthusiasts)

'Lights' out for two of the series' bright spots

It's actually good to read that Friday Nights Light is phasing out two of its most prominent characters now that it's somehow survived for a third season.

Two main ingredients in the fanaticism the show inspires (among many) is that the show's writers go at it the same way that Brian (Smash) Williams, who is apparently being written out of the show, runs the football -- straight ahead. It doesn't juke and jive or step out of bounds when it has to show the saints as sinners and the sinners as saints. That's lacking in most prime-time dramas. It's even set in this decade, too (take that, Mad Men).

The series' focus is on the people connected through a Texas high school football team, so changing some of the players makes sense for the FNL franchise. Besides, you pretty much have to go along, since Rule No. 1 of being a FNL fanatic is always presume its writers and producers know what they're doing. If they're planning to just have a four-episode storyline apiece in Season 3 for The Smash, played by Gaius Charles (pictured) and Jason Street, the quadriplegic former star quarterback and coach played by Scott Porter, they probably have their reasons (some of which might be budgetary). It also saves Porter, who's 29 years old and has a bit of a receding hairline, from being the oldest-looking teenager on TV since 90210's heyday).

In the FNL universe, key characters should move on, since that's life during the period between ages 16 and about 24. People can be dominant figures in your life for a few months or couple years and then they're gone. Writing out Smash and Street means FNL is also avoiding another classic TV trap of what to do when characters finish high school. Granted, a cynic would point out that if they were going to let go of any teen character, it should be Lyla Garrity, who was somewhat dull -- but played by Minka Kelly -- as the head cheerleader in Season 1 and was somehow duller -- but still played by Minka Kelly -- as a born-again Christian in Season 2. There's a compromise there. Losing Lyla might have hurt the show in the key demo of Lonely Guys, Aged 28-34. (Or am I projecting?)

Besides, you just know the writers and producers will see how far they can take it before Lyla ends up with Tim Riggins (the fact Riggins is played by a Canadian, Taylor Kitsch, is enough of a small victory for at least one Lonely Guy, Aged 28-34).

Street was a senior in the first season, while at the end of the truncated Season 2, Smash had signed on to play football at fictional Whitmore University, an academically prestigious Historically Black College that just happens to be within a short drive of Dillon, Texas. For all intents and purposes, the Smash ceased to be integral to the show once he gave his word to Whitmore. He had his ticket out of Dillon and presumably, a better life, and having him go to a HBC also removed any of the moral ambiguity about a young black man going off to the salt mine of big-time college football.

One reading of Smash's story would be that it addressed some liberal guilt on the part of series creator Peter Berg, who also directed the 2004 movie, and his cousin, Buzz Bissinger, who wrote the book (about 20 years before he became the embodiment of evil in the blogosphere). One of the major weasel-outs in the movie was the way it used a real-life Smash, James (Boobie) Miles, an African-American running back whose career was ruined by a knee injury during the 1988 season chronicled in Bissinger's book. Sixteen years later, the movie as an epilogue, only let us know that Miles had grown up to become a father of two, but it never let on whether he ever got a shot at an education once he was no longer of use to a football team. Bissinger wrote in a 2004 Sports Illustrated article that Miles lived in penury and that he had occasionally loaned him money.

Granted, someone a whole lot smarter would really have to be the one to make such an accusation.

The point is that the series has to evolve, so dropping a couple characters whose story arcs had played themselves out makes sense. It might help get FNL back to showing and not telling, which didn't always happen in Season 2, when the writing staff was likely aware it needed to try something/anything to draw more eyeballs. (That was the most grating part of the much-loathed Landry/Tyra murder plotline -- the writing staff actually acknowledged the compromises the show has to make to stay on the air in the long run. It just didn't do it in enough of a "yeah, we know" way, like The Simpsons and Arrested Development ("Save Our Bluths!") have mastered over the years.

The only sad part is that just reading about this in July increases the appetite to see the show. February -- when a 13-episode Season 3 will begin airing on NBC after a fall run on DirecTV -- is too long to wait. Seriously, some of you are going to check this show out, for the rest of us' sake?

Anyway, last and certainly least, here's here's a Top 5 of Smash and Street moments.

Smash:

1. Scoring the last-second touchdown, on a hook-and-ladder play, to win State (ep. 22) -- that has to be in there.
2. Schooling the Matt Saracen (the team's quarterback) in Guy Code for breakups: "Takin' it like a man, Matty. You know, avoiding the calls, ducking out, hidin' in the bushes."
3. In Season 1, Smash's girlfriend was a minister's daughter named Waverly Grady. The expression on Charles' face in one episode where they sneak into someone's backyard to go skinny-dipping in the pool -- caught between the conquest and being caught -- is priceless.
4. Leading the Panthers' African-American players in a walkout before the first playoff game in Season 1. (My Season 1 DVDs are out on loan, so details are fuzzy, but it's a great transition from self-absorbed jock to rabblerouser.)
5. During a recruiting trip to fictional Oklahoma A&M, being caught el flagrante delecto with a girl by her nosetackle-playing boyfriend and being forced to use his 4.3-in-the-40 speed to avoid a beatdown. It also meant running out of the dormitory in just boxers and having to wait until after sun-up for Matt Saracen to arrive with clothes and a ride home, but hey, you're only 17 once.

Street:

1. OK, so it's not a moment, but the treatment of Street's paralysis in the first half of Season 1 came off as pretty authentic -- having to re-learn basic motor skills, the loss of friends. When his buddy at the rehab centre, Herc, who has the same spinal cord condition, says, "We're the lucky ones -- we've got the use of our hands," well, it kind of hits home. The same goes for when he loses it on Lyla in the Mud Bowl episode.
2. Becoming the town pariah after word gets out about his parents suing everyone involved with his injury (Season 1). Street unsuccessfully tries to buy beer at a corner store that he'd presumably always been served since he was a football hero. "You won't sell it to me 'cause I'm in a chair?" ... "No, I won't sell it to you because you're underage." Just then, Riggins, whom Street is on the outs with, saunters into frame, and of course, gets served thanks his fake ID -- "there you go, Sergeant Riggins."
   
   Outside, Riggins hands Street a six-pack. And they're buddies again? Well, not right away. The show doesn't work that way (unless the plot line is based around race, then it always get resolved easily).
3. Singlehandly resolving his parents' lawsuit (Episode 20). It was a little over the top, but it kept the series from having any scenes in a courtroom.
4. Turning Saracen into a QB (toward the end of Season 1).
   
   

   Coach: You don't have any laurels, you understand me.
   Street: You don't have any laurels, Saracen.
   Coach: Not a damn one.

5. Selling that car (Episode 35). Toward the end of Season 2, right before he impregnated that strawberry-blond waitress (come to think of it, Street's mom is a strawberry blond; this show's writers think of everything), Buddy Garrity hires Street to sell cars at his dealership. None of the other sales reps are none too keen on competing with a paralyzed ex-football hero, so Street gets foisted on the mother of all tire-kickers -- and reveals why he was the type of QB who would make his teammates want to run through a brick wall for him:
   
   

   Street: "Why won't you let yourself buy this car? ... I'm just trying to understand ... all these salespeople around here, look at them, they've given up you, so they send me, wheelchair guy, rookie, low man on the totem pole, to talk to you, because none of them believe that you can actually pull the trigger and purchase a vehicle. Well, let me tell you something. You love this car so much that you come in two days a week -- two days a week! -- just to look at it and you walk out. Gerald, life is too short, life is too short. It can change in an instant. Take it from me. So be a man. Take control of your life. Be a man. Buy this car. Show all these people that you're capable of making a decision."
   Gerald: "I'm gonna really think about it."
   Street: "No. No more thinking. No more dithering. No more wasting everybody's time -- especially your own, because that's what you're doing every time you come in here. Buy this car because you love it, because you want this car and you want to drive off this lot, in this car, today."
   Gerald (long pause): "Okay."

Brilliant. See what you've been missing?

(Thanks to Erin Nicks for the link.)

Related:
Exclusive: 'Friday Night Lights' Cuts Two Players (Mike Aussiello, Entertainment Weekly)

Showtime wasn't necessarily blow time...

Here's a little something to whet the appetite for Game 2 of the Celtics and Lakers tonight ... the sight of Kurt Rambis' Bermuda shorts really makes one wonder why NBA commissioner David Stern waited until 2005 to institute a dress code.

Chuck Klosterman's been kind of ubiquitous during these NBA Finals since he wrote that famous essay about Celtic People and Laker People. You have to love his take on U.S. national politics vis-a-vis the NBA, "Kobe would vote for whoever was ahead in the polls ... I have to assume Barack Obama does not have to worry very much about dominating the NBA vote. If 80 percent of southern Ohio was composed of professional basketball players, we would be out of Iraq by 2010."

He doesn't need the advertisement, but Klosterman's first full-length work of fiction, Downtown Owl: A Novel, is being published in the fall. It's already available on Amazon.

Zen Dayley: Here's a cellular phone, call someone who cares

Brian Tallet in the 10th instead of Jesse Carlson or well-rested B.J. Ryan? These games count in the standings, you know.

• Anyone who wonders why Orlando Cabrera, a superior shortstop, is on his fourth team in five seasons should read this Sunday column in the Chicago Tribune.
  
  Even Cabrera's teammates on the White Sox apparently have little time for his habit of calling the official scorer after being charged with an error. Bob Verdi, the writer, also has a solution:
  
  

  "Most players are also notoriously frugal, so one way to fix this would be to charge them for ringing the press box. As it is, dugout phones are free phones. But ask these millionaires to fork over a quarter, and then watch them try to make collect calls."

  Anyone who's really obsessive about sportswriters will notice that Bob Verdi got a dig in on Jay Mariotti at the end of his column. Mariotti wouldn't be serving as an official scorer, since that might require (a) knowing how to score a baseball game and (b) actually attending the game.
• Everyone saw that Arizona's Brandon Webb pitched a complete game in one hour, 52 minutes? Bud Selig is right. Baseball games are too long.
  
  (There's some nice use of anecdotal evidence.)


• Shaun Marcum still leads the AL in WHIP after giving up 11 hits across seven innings in a no-decision vs. the Angels last night. That's how good Marcum has been.


• Joba Chamberlain starting aginst the Jays on Tuesday, when Sportsnet is airing the game, not Wednesday when it's TSN's turn, proves the existence of some higher power. You can already hear Rod Black pumping out the sap if he was calling a Joba start at Yankee Stadium. "Joba Chamberlain ... a young man of such vast potential ... wearing pinstripes ... in the final season at this historic ballpark ... in the Bronx." Goodness gracious, Jays fans suffer enough indignities already.


• There was major coverage of B.C. high school slugger Brett Lawrie by the Globe and Sun Media on Saturday. One almost hopes Lawrie goes before the Jays pick at 17th overall, just to remove the possibility of the know-nothings slagging the team five years down the road, even though the MLB Draft is a total crapshoot. (Minor League Ball's latest mock first round has the Jays taking Lawrie.)
  
  Lawrie, at 18, does seem like something special. Arizona State's Brett Wallace, at least according to his press clippings, also seems like the total package down around where the Jays are selecting.

That's all for now. Rest assured, something new is in the works for the Zen Dayley, to keep it fresh and well, actually appearing daily. Meantime, for anyone who might be interested, Chuck Klosterman's first novel is due out in three months and the GQ profile on Marston Hefner, Hugh Hefner's remarkably well-adjusted 18-year-old son, is worth a read.

Send your thoughts to neatesager@yahoo.ca.

This is the business David Stern has chosen; or, don't cry for me, Manu Ginobili

Only a couple more dominoes have to topple before we will have the Lakers-Celtics NBA final (none of the Finals nonsense here) that David Stern knew was what you really wanted. Sure, maybe you tried to claim otherwise, but, uh, yeah, it's time to submit.

"This is what sets the NBA apart from every other team sport in North America: Everyone who loves pro basketball assumes it's a little fixed. We all think the annual draft lottery is probably rigged, we all accept that the league aggressively wants the big market teams to advance deep into the playoffs, and we all concede that certain marquee players are going to get preferential treatment for no valid reason. The outcomes of games aren't predetermined or scripted, but there are definitely dark forces that play with our reality. There are faceless puppet masters who pull strings and manipulate the purity of justice. It's not necessarily a full-on conspiracy, but it's certainly not fair. And that's why the NBA remains the only game that matters: Pro basketball is exactly like life."
-- Chuck Klosterman (Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs, p. 96)

Bucholtz had a good post on this yesterday. It says here San Antonio has a little karmic payback coming after the hosing Steve Nash and the Phoenix Suns got in last season's playoffs.

Related:
Use The Stern Button, David! (Sporting Madness)

CIS CORNER: "BETTER RED" FOR THE RAVENS

Notes on our players and teams of interest from The 613...

HOOPS

• Final 8: There's plenty at The CIS Blog (and the cishoops.ca crew outdid themselves) on how the weekend in basketball went down.
  
  Carleton will face Alberta (the last school other than the Ravens to win the national title) in the late quarter-final Friday, but you knew that already.
• Gee-Gees: If it hasn't been said enough, Ottawa coach Dave DeAveiro did a job this winter with a Gee-Gees team which could sometimes go madly off in all directions. The Toronto win in the OUA East semi-final, plus going down to the final shot against Carleton without Josh Gibson-Bascombe, that was something else.
  
  Brock, which won the OUA play-in game 68-58 over the Gee-Gees to grab the next-to-last Final 8 berth, was just a little deeper and a little older. Any team which can hold Dax Dessureault to 4-for-17 from the field was meant to win.
  
  Donnie Gibson, the Ernestown grad, had a breakout season with 11.8 points on 46% shooting, including 38% on threes, during the regular season. He was at the forefront of the late charge they made on Sunday.
• Ravens: A good companion to Andrew Duffy's feature in Sunday's Citizen on Ravens coach Dave Smart is the profile Chuck Klosterman did on Steve Nash in 2005. Smart's Ravens, in their own way, also boil basketball down to its purest form -- "consciously creat(ing) short-term sacrifice if that loss yields long-term social benefit to players ... From each his ability, to each his needs."
  
  The feeling on this end with how Dave Smart coaches has always been, Why wouldn't you coach that way? His Carleton Ravens players seem to come in with their eyes wide open; they know what they're getting into.
  
  It's important, as Nash pointed out in that article, not to "glorify the idea of playing basketball." That said, one analogy for what Carleton has done is that Smart takes young men who might be predisposed to becoming cutthroat capitalists, but who are open, even eager, to be share-the-ball, sprawl-on-the-floor socialists for four or five years. They also rebound really, really well.
  
  (Much obliged to Andy Grabia from The Battle of Alberta for the link -- and sorry about the U of A Pandas hockey team. Laurier's got big hawks.)

HOCKEY

• It would be remiss not to point out that a Kingston girl, Kaley Powers, scored the first goal last night to help point Laurier toward ending Alberta's two-year run as national champions with a 4-2 win in Ottawa.
  
  All the Golden Hawks have to do to bring the national title back to the OUA is take down McGill, who's won their first two games via shutout. It's only just, since year after year the OUA only gets to send one team to nationals despite being the deepest league in the country for women's hockey.

Related:
The mind of Smart (Ottawa Citizen, via cishoops.ca)

ACTUALLY, THE WORD IS TRAGICOMICAL

Brian Windhorst, who covers the Cleveland Cavaliers for the Akron Beacon-Journal (where Chuck Klosterman worked once) had some telling words for The Big Lead about how badly major media gets it wrong with the blogosphere:

"I think the development of blogs is fascinating and I also think how most newspapers do blogs is comical. Four years ago when I went to my bosses and talked about doing a blog they had no idea what I was talking about. Now, many papers are just reactionary. Editor tells reporter: 'hey, do a blog' and most of the time the writer doesn't want to do it and neither of them know what a blog truly is. You hear all these beat writers bitching about it all the time. I have a piece of cyberspace they call a blog but it isn't, it's a journal." (emphasis mine)

That begs a new term: The iCab.

As in, It's Called A Blog. It's even got that cute lower-case i in front of it which automatically confers coolness on any device or product.

It explains why, for the greater good, this site has to die. By March 1 at the latest.

Suicide is painless
It brings on many changes
And I'll never have that recipe again

That's right. A MASH theme/McArthur Park mash-up.

It's not about any one media personality or who or did or didn't get nominated for else is up Best Sports Blog. (Although, quickly, Ian Mendes, really? Great guy, class act, terrific TV presence, probably doesn't leave his socks on floor at night either, but for pity's sake, his sportsnet.ca iCab has been updated three times in the past month. Doesn't that violate any number of anti-idling bylaws?

Number of comments on Mendes' posts since Dec. 17, 2007: 32
Number of comments on OOLF posts over same span: 123

It's about the futility of trying to be heard against "uninterested ownership" that controls the major media outlets in Canada (to borrow good friend Dan Rowe's term from a book review he has in the Jan./Feb. Quill & Quire*). There's a perfectly sound explanation why it's 2008 and there is no Bill Simmons or Will Leitch of Canada and there never will be.

I thought I would be, but it obviously isn't going to happen. That is just well considering Simmons, as per the KSK takedown, is obviously finished. (Simmons actually wrote the Indianapolis Colts lost last weekend since they were afraid of the New England Patriots; a grown man actually wrote that.)

If people who are recognizing quality blogs can't grasp that lumping in Chuck Swirsky (love ya, Swirsk) with those whose interested ownership is almost entirely sweat equity is not to true to what "a blog truly is," what's the point anymore?

Anyway, being overlooked, snubbed for something is nothing novel. Hell, I've been a court-certified expert going back to Grade 5 when Stacey Parks invited our entire class -- except for one person -- to the first-ever boy-girl party.

Point being, Windhorst captures the sense of futility of going on with this blog, not to mention writing for free.

He says four years ago he went to his bosses about a blog? Imagine how it feels reading that as someone in the Canadian media who's blogged for five years and who has never once in that entire time been asked for an opinion on the company's online presence, let alone asked to contribute. Never mind that this is coming from someone who has some proven writing chops ...

... screwit. Pointing out meagre accomplishments, that really just removes all doubt about how who really doesn't get it? And that's what is comical about the last couple years of my life.

So your ride is leaving. Some will be stranded, but chances are there are enough iCabs for everyone.

Some damn fine sites are nominated, including Battle of Alberta, Mirtle, Drunk Jays Fans, Hoops Addict and Dinosty. Hopefully one of them wins.

It says here cishoops.ca or Ottawa Lynx Blog and The Tao of Stieb get "it" better than Mendes, Swirsky and their corporate masters. Fortunately, Mark, Carl and Pete, and the shadowy forces behind The Tao have much better big-boy coping skills.

Any concerns, questions, send them to neatesager@yahoo.ca.

(* Straight to the point about my relationship with Q&Q: There isn't one, but I would have loved to have had one. Wrote an article for them in summer 2006 called "The Anti-Sports Book." E-mailed an editor a couple times about writing again. He never replied; apparently he got the memo that Sager is a stupid hick from Napanee. Yet I still asked for a Q&Q subscription as a Christmas gift, which shows I have to be too stupid to live.)

RAPS: THE POSEURS DON'T KNOW FROM POSEY

As a Raptors fan who has to deal with the typical Toronto attitude, it's a curse to have a memory.

It means having to suffer the casual fans who were nowhere to be found when the team was 27-55 two seasons ago intone, in that smarmy way that people who don't know how to care about some silly team do, "Oh look, the Raptors lost to the Celtics again." Part of it is that the media in Canada tend to indulge the haters. This is the Age of Narcissism, the Era of Predictable Disillusionment (thank you, Chuck Klosterman). The TV producers have all the market research to justify that kind of framing job.

Honesty gets left out of the equation. The Raptors were brutal. They are in awe of Boston right now. It's still one game out of 82 in the middle of December. Stuff your pap about needing to beat Boston on Dec. 16 where the sun doesn't shine.* The NBA does not give double credit for beating any team, let alone those who are 20-2.

James Posey is a killer as the C's glue guy, by the way. That was a big fear in the summer.

As for the Raps, as a group they had to empty their tank in Friday's comeback win over Indiana, which was the kind of game they used to give away. Today was their fifth game in eight days and a letdown could have been expected. Those aren't excuses; that's the reality of playing 82 games over 5 1/2 months. MLSE has millions, but it doesn't make a team of flesh and blood into a machine.

(Full disclosure: Jason Kapono's 29 points on 9-of-14 shooting, plus 5-of-5 at the free-throw line vs. the Pacers helped someone win in the Rockhard Fantasy League this week, hence the quickness to call BS.)

Thankfully, some of us have enough memory to recall the bad times. Some remember that Bryan Colangelo said Andrea Bargnani would take 3-5 years to find his form in the NBA. Some realize the team has a huge run of home games in the New Year. See, having a memory isn't a curse. They stank like a gym locker today, but it's done and over with.

Related:
Celtics rip Raptors again (Associated Press)

FEELING DEFLATED AFTER THE GREY CUP

Everyone seems to be saying today that the Grey Cup was thrilling if you're from Saskatchewan, unwatchable if you love Canadian football.

All week there was whole vive-la-difference going on comparing how healthy the league is financially -- attendance up, TV ratings up -- compared to the last time the Grey Cup was in Toronto in 1992.

It's almost a complete opposite a complete mirror image in terms of the quality of the game. Around the time of that '92 Grey Cup, when Doug Flutie passed for more than 500 yards -- more than the combined output of Ryan Dinwiddie and Kerry Joseph on Sunday -- the CFL was hurting financially.

It was the choice of the football coinnoisseur, though. Sports Illustrated sent its nuts-and-bolts football guy, Paul Zimmerman, up to cover that Grey Cup, and he raved about CFL ball being a "chessboard gone mad." Compared to the NFL, where Bill Parcells-Joe Gibbs ball-control offences ruled, it was a revelation.

Fifteen years later, contrast that with the overnight reviews:

"This was one time the network should have switched to Heidi." -- Montreal Gazette

"...the 95th Grey Cup game was a few moments of glory wrapped in 31/2 hours of poor throws, dropped passes and one team, the Saskatchewan Roughriders, actually outscoring itself at one point, a true CFL oddity." -- Globe & Mail

"The first offence-free Grey Cup in recent memory..." -- Toronto Star

The CFL used to let us indulge our need to feel superior to the Americans. Our game, with our wider field and one less down, enabled Doug Flutie to explore the full range of his talents. It was a place for smaller players such as Gizmo Williams and Pinball Clemons. In the '70s, the CFL gave African-Americans -- Chuck Ealey, Condredge Holloway, Warren Moon -- a genuine chance to start at quarterback -- long before the NFL was so enlightened.

CRYING OUT FOR A CREATIVE BREAKTHROUGH

Now it has a healthy bottom line, a better TV contract and the game sucks. C'est la vie. The way to sell a lot of cultural prodcuts to Canadians seems to be to make it look like a watered-down imitation of something American.

People who are the top of the CFL hierarchy read so many reports for so many years about teams losing money and failing to draw in a wide audience, that it started to believe that was all that mattered. Like the NFL, it's become more about the people who have no real interest in the game, getting casual fans to watch and bring up the TV ratings. The rush to cater to those folks, to quote Chuck Klosterman, "creates a nonspecific product that isn't appealing to anyone."

Meantime, the game has steadily evolved into one of field position and managing the ball (yawn). The CFL has lost the plot.

Defence dominates, which is fine, but the league is crying out for a creative breakthrough on the offensive side of the ball. It's almost like since Flutie went back to the NFL 10 years ago, the league collectively forgot how to put together an exciting offence that balanced running with passing. That's led to two Grey Cups in a row that were almost devoid of any big-yardage plays on offence; on Sunday, aside from a 50-yard Winnipeg touchdown, the next two longest gains on the day both came on pass interference penalties.

If you wanted to see someone fake out an entire kicking team à la The Giz on Sunday, you would have had to flip over to the Chicago-Denver NFL game to see Devin Hester torch the Broncos for two touchdowns. If you wanted to see an offence spread receivers sideline-to-sideline and light up the scoreboard, you could have seen that in almost any NCAA and NFL game during the U.S. Thanksgiving weekend. You could have seen that on Friday during a game between Colorado and Nebraska, two programs which won national titles in the 1990s while running a variation of the power option -- all running, almost no passing.

Canadians should be proud the Americans have co-opted the CFL's style and embraced the more open style of offence. We should understand that a lot of players who are the seventh or eighth wide receiver on a NFL depth chart might have come to Canada and been stars in another era. Twenty years ago, a starting wideout such as Antwaan Randle El probably would have come north to play for a chance to play quarterback. The same goes for another converted QB, the New York Jets' Brad Smith, who's now a special teamer.

It could be, that being Canadians, we always have to invent a crisis for ourselves, but it's clear that the league, like the running backs in Sunday's game, has hit a wall tactically. The game has become predictable, and thus boring.

Here's a couple ideas that worth throwing against the wall to see if it might spark some creativity:

1. No "I" in team. American coaches' overuse of the I formation with its "stretch" and "search" plays has led to predictable running games. The CFL could effectively outlaw the I (and the single back set where the QB is in the shotgun and the running back often starts the play eight or nine yards deep) by making a rule that prohibits any back from lining up more than five yards deep between the tackles.
   
   In the long run, it would make teams use more motion and misdirection in the running game. They would have to find lighter, more agile offensive linemen who can pull and trap-block. The two-back offence -- remember Neil Lumsden and Jim Germany? -- might return, and quarterbacks would have to develop better ball-handling and faking skills. An exciting running game is just as much fun as an exciting passing game.
2. Wider hashmarks. This is touched upon in the Todd column linked below. To be honest, I wasn't aware the hashes in the CFL were once only 15 yards from the sideline (it's now 24). It's clear it was changed since coaches probably hated it. The league could slowly phase it in, moving the hashmarks out by three yards every two years.
   
   The coaches would have no argument about having less room on the short side to run the ball. As it stands, they would have nothing to be worried about since nearly every play is up the middle or off tackle. They need to rediscover the wide field.
3. Get fan opinion. Seriously, when the league sits down to discuss rule changes in the off-season, each team should have one hardcore CFL nut at the meeting to discuss what they liked and didn't like about the style of play.
4. More Canadian players. The homegrown talent in the league has probably caught up to the import ratio. Some teams now start Canadians and have American backups playing special teams. Over time -- phase it in so no one's career is ruined in one fell swoop -- the league should go from about 18 Americans per team to 12 or 14. Sure, maybe the game would be a bit more ragged and imprecise for a few years, but that's the CFL.

Who knows if any of that would bring back the CFL we once knew and loved. It would be a hell of a lot better for what passed for the league's showcase on Sunday, though.

Recommended reading:
A once wild, woolly CFL goes to hash (Jack Todd, Montreal Gazette)
Four Ways to Save Sports Media (Chuck Klosterman, Esquire)

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

FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS SLOWS IT DOWN

The New Yorker has a piece up on Friday Night Lights. What a world we've come to live in: The fave mag of erudite Easterners covering a show set in the world of Texas high school football. That's some Chuck Klosterman-like cross-referencing.

FNL's appeal, at least on this end? The storytelling it has has been marginalized in a sports media culture that, as Klosterman wrote in this month's Esquire, that is moving too fast for its own good. FNL probably allows itself more mood time than any show on a network. It's willing to slow down. A lot of people want that: How else to explain why more good books about sports seem to be appearing than was the case 10 or 15 years ago when the Internet and digital cable were in their infancy?

There's more to Friday Night Lights than that, of course. It seems to have something for the dude who's largely ignored by all the marketers and media conglomerates who seem bent on Maxim-izing sports coverage 5-6 years after the breasts-and-beer mags peaked as a cultural force. The show's trying to appeal to women more this season (i.e., less football scenes), since ultimately it needs more of that 53 per cent of the population to survive.

The show lets a man believe his own BS that he's a sports-loving Sensitive Guy. Too bad it's self-defeating: "Oh, you're 30 years old and you watch a show that's about high school football." It's not like that, honestly!

THE WORLD JUNIORS AND CHUCK KLOSTERMAN

Prior to the shootout, the dominant image of Team Canada's semifinal game against the U.S. at the world junior hockey championship -- a 2-1 shootout victory -- was an American power play late in overtime that the Canadians just barely survived.

There was goalie Carey Price calmly steering aside American shots that could have ended Canada's gold-medal hopes and defenceman Ryan Parent staying out for the whole two minutes of the penalty kill. Parent was just going by instinct near the end of his shift, as he was completely spent, unable to get enough strength behind a clearing attempt to get the puck out of his own end, but the point is, he was out there. The Americans should have scored, they deserved to score, and still there was no way in hell they were going to. The outcome wasn't foreordained by that penalty kill, but if you're looking for a moment when this group of Canadian juniors established their own identity instead of merely being a group of 20 Hockey Canada automatons, that was it.

Now, why is this important beyond it allowing Canada to play Russia (4-2 winners over Sweden in the other semi) on Friday for the gold medal? As it happened, today's reading material is Chuck Klosterman's low culture manifesto Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs. Twelve hours after last night's rant, the combination of reading Klosterman's argument that country artists such as Garth Brooks and Shania Twain are actually better at understanding the human condition than the likes of Bob Dylan and Liz Phair. Reading that while watching teen hockey players engage in a grim struggle against an American team who arguably deserved to win reminded me of how wannabe intellectuals like me sometime lose sight of the big picture. Seeing teenagers such as Parent and Price be tough in the face of a tough job, resonates with more people, and although they would never describe it in such a way, they might understand people better than I do. That quality helps you in a team sport, if not in art.

Anyway, it's a truth that TSN's coverage of the world juniors skews hokey and melodramatic, and most elements of the modern Canada may not as well exist (although the goaltending hero of the '06 tourney, Justin Pogge, was raised by a single mother). Yes, by the end of the tournament you can almost feel like you're held captive by the same block of commercials that are aired at the same point in each telecast. Then you see how it unfolded at the end today -- Jonathan Toews outwitting U.S. goalie Jeff Frazee not once, not twice but thrice in the shootout before Price stoned Peter Mueller to clinch the win -- and realize that is as close to a display of pure Canuck id as you're going to get most days.

As for analysis, there's not much to add. Canada is an underdog in the gold-medal game against the talented Russians. They haven't found enough secondary scoring among their forwards, so their best chance on Friday will be to win a 2-1 or 3-1 game on the strength of Price's goaltending and their defence corps. Is it just me, or have the world juniors basically come to resemble NHL hockey from 4-5 years ago, where a 4-2 game practically seemed high-scoring?

Another world juniors note: Rogers Sportsnet is reporting that the International Ice Hockey Federation is considering expanding the world juniors to a 12-team format. That figures, since only in this year has the depth caught up enough to justify inviting 10 teams. Is the IIHF taking advice on expansion from Gary Bettman?

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