Recently in Sports Category
Earlier this year, I was really pleased at how well one of my favorite Yankees, Chien Ming Wang was performing, even as the rest of the Yankees were for the most part shitting the bed. Well, karma bit me in the ass. The Yankees continued to suck, and teams even started slapping Wang up a little bit. I stopped writing about Wang (and, at all) even though there were many times I felt like making the obvious Wang jokes. More recently, the Yankees are on a roll, but Wang was injured rounding the bases in Houston. He hopes to return by September. In the meantime, we have to hope the Yankees offense, which has suddenly found some life, is able to carry us for a little while longer. For the now, the Yankees are playing hard without Wang, but let's hope he gets better sooner rather than later. 
Here's to the 2008 Syracuse Men's Lacrosse team, NCAA Champions. One year removed from the worst season in school history, the players came back with something to prove and did a great job reminding everybody why they have more lacrosse championships than anybody else. With the football team blowing goats and the basketball team missing the tournament, it was good to see Syracuse Athletics back on top once again. 
In a recent thread about the Yankees/Devil Rays game one of the commenters took some quotes from one of my all-time favorite movies, The Big Lebowski, and rewrote them to feature Indians closer Joe Borowski as the Dude. You have to love both baseball and the movie to get any humor at all, but it inspired me to whip up the movie poster above. Continue on for the full comments, and don't forget to visit RLYW if you like the Yankees.
I am not sure how often I am going to blog about baseball, but after my boy Chien Ming Wang dismantled the Red Sox yesterday, I had to say something. Besides, whenever Wang pitches a good game, it makes for an irresistible headline (my second choice was "Boston Bats Choke as Wang Comes Up Huge" ). Luckily, Wang has been straight dealing for most of the season. His only really bad inning was the fifth, when he gave up a home run to J.D. Drew for his first hit, and even that ball was very catchable. The only other hit came with a bunt in the 9th inning. It took him only 93 pitches to get threw the whole game. Cy Wang here we come!
Today's game comes against Josh Beckett while we are throwing Mike Mussina, he of the 85 MPH fastball, on the mound. Hopefully Moose has his good stuff and Beckett is still a little off coming back from his back/hip injury. Honestly, I'm more concerned about the Yankee bats, but I think they'll come around.
March Madness (and April Madness I guess) is now over. The Kansas Jayhawks win over the Memphis Tigers was absolutely amazing. After the games on Saturday, I wasn't sure how close it would be. Memphis looked dominant against UCLA, and Kansas almost blew a 28 point lead against North Carolina. In the end, almost blowing that lead might have helped Kansas, as they were tough down the stretch, coming back from 9 points in regulation to win in overtime. Memphis flinched just enough, and Mario Chalmers hit an amazing shot to save the Jayhawks season.
I remember meeting two girls from Kansas who flew out to watch the Jayhawks play USC in Los Angeles in early December. That kind of fan commitment is rare, although escaping the midwest for Southern California can't really be called a sacrifice. Anyway, I think I was rooting a little bit more for Kansas in this game. John Calipari is a good coach, and I hope he wins the title someday, but Bill Self is also a good coach and he deserved the win. Kansas has always had great fans, and I know it was heart-breaking for them to lose to Syracuse one year, then watch their coach depart and win a championship a few years later. Now they can get on with their lives (we hope).
Overall, it was a good tournament. There was no Syracuse, which sucked, but there was another first-time winner in Coach Self. Over the last ten years, there have been seven new coaches to add their names to the list of champions. In the last 15 years, only three teams have one more than once (UConn, Kentucky, Florida), which says a lot about how great the sport is. Can't wait to do this all again in eight months.
Although the Red Sox and Athletics played last week in Japan and the Nationals and Braves played last night in Washington, I feel like today is the real opening day. Almost everybody is playing games today, and nobody is more than a game out of first place. I have a lot of hope for the Yankees this year. They will need to depend on a young pitching staff and a hope that the mashers in their lineup stay healthy, but I feel good about this year. Call me crazy and superstitious and romantic, but I feel like the house that Ruth built will have something to say about things before they tear it down for a new Yankee Stadium. Chien Ming Wang is on the mound for the Yankees vs. Roy Halladay of the Blue Jays. Unfortunately, I have to work so I won't be able to watch the game, but there are 161 more I have to look forward to.
And if you love baseball and love legos, you'll love these lego recreations of baseball stadiums.
UPDATE: Dammit New York weather! Rain delay until tomorrow....
Hideki Matsui is one of my favorite baseball players. Before playing for the Yankees, he was one of the most popular players in Japan and a huge celebrity. He loves baseball and baseball fans, perhaps even more than his famously large porn collection. All of this means I was very happy to hear that Godzilla got married in Manhattan yesterday. It all came as a huge surprise to his teammates. From Peter Abraham's blog at Hudson Valley News:Hideki Matsui not only got married yesterday, he completely suckered Bobby Abreu and Derek Jeter.The three made a bet at the beginning of spring training over who would get married first. Whoever got hitched first would win. But there was a caveat: the losers could keep their money if they got married as well.
Abreu, because he already has a girlfriend, would get six months. Jeter, who is single, would get a year....
..."Derek has a year or I win," he said.
Asked whether he got married just to win the bet, Matsui let out a loud laugh. "Maybe," he said.
The prospect of Matsui getting married to win a bet would go down as one of the greatest spring training pranks of all time, but I don't think that's the case. Matsui was very proud of what happened, and showed everybody a picture of his new wife...sketched on a piece of paper. The press release says that she has a reputable position at a highly respected company, so I am happy she won't bring shame upon Hideki's ancestors, at least until he asks her to star in one of his movies.
I was excited to come home from work yesterday and watch Syracuse in the NIT. The team was playing well, having beaten Maryland last week to put them in the NIT quarterfinals against UMass. Syracuse lost at home to UMass earlier this year, and it was considered a "bad" loss because UMass hasn't made noise in the A-10 for a long time. That loss was one of the reasons they didn't make the NCAA tournament.
I don't want to dwell into too much detail and get too worked up over an NIT game, but the Orange had a 22 point lead with a little over 14 minutes left - and lost. I got home just as the second half was starting. I called my dad to make sure he was watching the game, and thought I would enjoy a nice little blowout before making dinner. Oh how wrong I was.
Syracuse has had a tough year, losing their top player with a knee injury during the season, and their best shooter to a knee injury before the season even started. They started two freshman, two first year starters, and a juco transfer. I guess I should be happy that they were able to throw together such a team and get into the playoffs, but getting blown out like that sucks. As the game was winding down, it seemed like the Orange players wanted to throw an alley oop after every possession. That will happen with any young team, but they forgot to play defense and UMass remembered how to shoot threes at about the same time, and that was all she wrote.
I do think Syracuse will be a very good team next year. They had a good recruiting class, should return all of their players except perhaps Donte Green, and will get their injured players back. That means the team will have depth. Since so many of the young players had to play this year, it means we'll have experience. Hopefully everybody will remember how it feels to be embarrassed in your own house, and use that as motivation to kick ass next year.
This movie clip is from A.I. Assault and carries the tag line Programmed To Think. Wired To Destroy. If that doesn't suck you in, try the plot synopsis:
When a plane carrying a pair of top secret military robots crashes on a deserted Pacific island, a team of Navy seals must find them and turn them off as soon as possible for the longer they are activated, the smarter they become.
Still haven't sucked you in? Tony Gonzalez makes a cameo! Yes, the Kansas City Chiefs star tight end apparently decided to try a little acting on the side. He is co-piloting a plane with George Takei at the helm, and, well, let's just say he's no match for secret military robots. In the battle of professional athletes who moonlight as co-pilots, you have to give the edge to Kareem Abdul-Jabar.
Even though I consider myself a Bracket Pro, I am not having very good luck with my NCAA tournament bracket. My bracket has waaaay too much red for me to win, but I can't complain because there have been lots of exciting games and plenty of upsets. I would actually be OK, if it weren't for UConn. Once again, my faith in the Big East does me in, but San Diego really did deserve that win for the way they played.
Anyway, I should be rooting for UCLA since I work there now, but I am going to jump on the West Virginia bandwagon (and I as you see from my bracket, I did pick them to beat Duke). I had some family who went to school there and they are in the Big East, so it's a natural choice. I also have always loved Bob Huggins teams, even though he graduates like 2% of his players and his teams try to beat you into submission. Still, I have always liked the intensity his teams bring to the court.
I think this year has shown us how much quality there is in college basketball all across the country. Yes, Duke lost to West Virginia, but they weren't the only big team that had to struggle today. UCLA and Stanford had to pull out tough victories in games that a lot of people didn't think would be close. I am really looking forward to the rest of the tournament.
I absolutely love March Madness. Syrcause didn't get in for the second year in a row, but they had a lot of injuries, so I am not surprised. Like I said at this time last year there is always next year. However, last year's tournament brought first round losses for Duke AND Notre Dame. And what a heartbreaker with Duke! For me and all of the others who hate Duke (about 99% of the earth's population at the time of the last survey), there is nothing better than to see Duke's collection of scrappy white kids with bad hair cuts get beaten by a bunch of even scrappier white kids with even worse hair cuts. Belmont played almost perfectly the entire game, and then fell apart in the final 30 seconds. Either that, or Duke had been sleeping the entire time and decided to wake up. Either way, this probably means Duke will be in the final four, and I'll be making unintelligible screams for much of the next two weekends.
By now, you've already filled out your brackets, but I loved this link of the characters who ruin every NCAA office pool. I am clearly the last one, the Bracket Pro, because I like to pretend that I live college basketball, always mock people for having lots of "chalk" (i.e. picking the favorites) in their brackets, and I prepare a speech for every single pick. Thanks to MariusJanulisForThree for the original link.
I think Will Ferrell is funny, but I am starting to get a little sick of his standard shtick. The last movie of his that I thought was really funny was Anchorman. Every movie he has been in since then (with the exception of stranger than fiction) usually has him playing the exact same type of character. He's still funny, and there are still parts of his movies that make me howl in the theater (like when he stabs himself in Talladega Nights), but I feel I know the formula and therefore I am fine waiting for his movies to come out on DVD before I see them.
Semi-Pro might be different. Kent Ackerman apparently did a lot of work to make the movie look and feel authentic, and I appreciate that. I absolutely LOVE the ABA even though I was born several years after the league was absorbed by the NBA. I was really lucky that my dad loved basketball so much, so I got to hear stories of Dr. J and George Gervin. I practiced my free throws and layups when I went to the court, but I would always find time to work on a little finger roll. You could imagine how ecstatic I was when Nike came out with a series of commercials around 2002 that featured an ABA theme and lots of funk:
Now that's amazing. I love the shots of them getting off the bus. I really need a suit like Jermaine O'Neal (about 50 seconds into the video above). The Dr. Funk commerical was OK, but it just got better from there:
Wow. George Clinton, Bootsy Collins, and the rest of the P-Funk all stars. And if I am wearing Jermaine O'Neal's suit, my honey should be wearing Lisa Leslie's dress (51 seconds in). I am seriously beginning to wonder whether Nike should A) Sue Newline for stealing their concept and thinking people would be fooled by using pasty white guys or B) Get Bow Wow and all his friends from Roll Bounce together to make their own movie. Now THAT would be a movie I would watch. Maybe I should get started on the screenplay.
I really don't like betting on sports. To be very good at it, you have to bet against your favorite team a lot, and I am the type of guy who likes to believe my team can win every game (yes, even the Syracuse Football team). I will put some money on an NCAA Tournament bracket, or fantasy sports league, but never on individual games. Of course, when your football team makes it to the Super Bowl, you have to rethink your priorities.
When the Giants made the Super Bowl, I made a friendly bet with two friends of mine who are die hard New England sports fans. If the Patriots win the Super Bowl, I will suffer the public shame of wearing an item of Red Sox clothing in public. If the Giants won the Super Bowl, my friends would have to wear some sort of Yankee paraphernalia. To some, this is not really a big deal, but to a sports fan, it is the ultimate shame.
At first, I had lined up a nice assortment of pink t-shirts all professing devotion to the Yankee captain. Some were almost semi-tasteful, while others were a little more over-the-top. I settled on the "Joba Rules" t-shirt pictured above would be a better form of punishment. The pink Jeter t-shirt might get you pummeled in certain places in New England, but the Joba t-shirt will win you the admiration of hard core New York sports fans, and that's the last thing thing any self-respecting Masshole wants.
