Williamsport can't be all bad

They come out in droves this time of year. They fill up message boards or their parenting blogs or whatever outlet they can find to talk about the flaws of little league Baseball. They believe they’re just pointing out the truth. The 12 year olds from Chula Vista, Ca might call them haters. Some might call them pathetic.

More than anything though, I think those who spend the last few weeks of August criticizing the kids playing baseball on ESPN are missing the point. It’s not about some 12 year old’s draft prospects six years from now. It’s about kids from the neighborhood, could be any neighborhood, putting together a magical run of baseball for an entire summer. It’s about the commitment these kids and their families make to the team. It’s about the community that embraces them for it. That’s the stuff that doesn’t quite get through on television.

No, the kids playing in Williamsport probably aren’t the best 12 year old ball players in the world. But they are the most impressive. Little league has restrictions. Teams can’t just put together the best players from a region and see what happens. You go with what you’ve got. Most teams never make it past districts, the initial stage of All Stars. Usually everything after that is icing on the cake. To make it all the way to Williamsport is one of the most special accomplishments in all of sports.

And it’s something none of these kids and no one they know will ever forget.

Forbes Magazine recently called Chula Vista one of the most boring cities in America. That’s not true anymore, not to the folks from San Diego County’s second largest city. They’ll fill up pubs and restaurants and they’ll be glued to the television watching their boys. All the flaws of little league baseball and the people who like to talk about them can go to hell.

Chula Vista will remember this forever. 20 years after Trumbull won the World Series, people in Connecticut still talk about that team. The banner still hangs in the city. My girlfriend is from Cranston, RI and was 12 when her town made it to the finals. They were rock stars, she says. My freshman year of college, I had a kid in my Western Civ course who was the star of the Tom’s River, NJ team that won it all. Our professor even knew who he was.

This means the world to these kids and their communities. And anything that brings that many people that much joy can’t be all bad.

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As teams schedule for a championship, college football loses relevance

I’ve always had a strange affection for the BCS. I loved the idea from the beginning. Having two teams actually play for a National Championship as opposed to letting writers (the sports version of death panels) pick the champion was what college football had always been missing. And when it screwed up and the wrong teams ended up playing for the title, I stuck by its side, turning my head the way a delusional parent does when they find out their angel of a child is actually using pages from his math book as rolling paper.

Put simple, I might be the system’s biggest apologist. But if Rutgers ends up playing Penn State for the National Championship, I’m out. I will disown the BCS forever.

Normally this wouldn’t be a concern at all. It’s been strange enough to see the Scarlet Knights finish in the top half of the Big East the past few seasons and the Nittany Lions are typically a mortal lock to screw up at least one must-win game every year. But given their embarrassing schedules, both teams have a realistic shot to run the table, a notion that has to make the people at ABC queasy.

If Rutgers is unbeaten after it travels to Maryland (a team that might win four games all season) at the end of September, the talk of a perfect season will start to get loud. The Scarlet Knights get Pitt, South Florida and a down West Virginia team at home and something tells me Army just won’t have what it takes to stop them.

Meanwhile, Penn State is more likely to get beat by its practice squad than the nonconference teams it scheduled. In what most people consider the easiest schedule of any BCS program, the Nittany Lions play Akron, Temple, Syracuse and Eastern Illinois and go on the road just four times all season. Joe Paterno himself could quarterback his team through this schedule.

It’s not just the two teams from the northeast guilty of scheduling for a championship. Ole Miss, who beat Florida last season, is a top ten program playing two games against IAA teams and two others against schools who couldn’t win a high school championship in most states (Memphis & UAB). Wisconsin misses Ohio State in the Big 10 this season, plays three nonconference games against teams that won’t finish in the top 100 and also has a IAA team on its schedule. And don’t forget about Notre Dame, who crazy Lou Holtz picked to play for the BCS Championship specifically because of its weak schedule.

The only thing worse than not having a playoff decide the champion is allowing a team that has five variations of Wofford on its schedule to reach the title game. And that’s what could very well happen this season.

If it does, college football will be hockey to me.

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National League is the greatest performance-enhancer of all

Given the times, there was a lot of speculation. There were rumors, as there are for anyone who puts up those kinds of numbers. Some even had him on a list or two. But even though his sin was more evident than just about anyone in the history of baseball, no one could get him.

Until now.

Albert Pujols is guilty of playing in the National League, which is undoubtedly the greatest performance-enhancer of all.

Pujols cracked homerun number 40 on Sunday afternoon, but a better indicator of just how far the certain NL MVP is from his competition might be new teammate John Smoltz. After putting up numbers your beer-league softball pitcher would be ashamed of in Boston, Smoltz pitched like Bob Gibson in his first start for St. Louis, setting a Cardinals record by striking out seven consecutive hitters and getting the win.

Smoltz is just the latest player to come over and dominate the inferior league. Matt Holliday was traded to St. Louis just before the deadline and hit .400 for over a month. Since his trade to Philadelphia, Cliff Lee has been the best pitcher in baseball. And of course last year you’ll remember C.C. Sabathia and Manny Ramirez were sent to the National League at mid-season and proceeded to lead Milwaukee and Los Angeles to the playoffs.

Pujols has been there all along, exploiting thin pitching staffs to the point that he’s become the most realistic Triple Crown threat in decades.

That he plays in the weaker league doesn’t necessarily make Pujols’ numbers any less impressive or authentic. Or does it? Any Cardinals fan would be quick to point out that he is a career .355 hitter against the American League, but it is worth noting that he is on pace to have his best season at a time when the gap between baseball’s two leagues has never been so wide.

Two of the top three teams on the planet might play in the National League. But the next 13 come from the American League. Then you have a handful of teams from the International League. And you might have to look at a few teams playing in Williamsport this week after that.

Only then can you start to consider the rest of the National League.

This is the same argument that has been made in some of the other sports. Nobody took the NBA’s Eastern Conference serious two years ago because three of its playoff teams were .500 or worse for the season. In College Football, it’s a virtual guarantee that whatever Big East team qualifies for a BCS Bowl will face criticism for playing in such an awful league.

Pujols probably deserves to be subjected to similar questions. He might very well be the best player in baseball, but it’s only fair that we put his gaudy numbers in perspective. It’s not his fault, but his second-rate competition hurts his mystique.

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If losing a banner is the only penalty, why wouldn't college coaches cheat?

John Calipari is the best recruiter in America. He’s got the top coaching job in college basketball. And he’s going to make more money at Kentucky than John Wooden, Dean Smith and Bob Knight ever could have dreamed of. But unlike those legends of the sport, and unlike many of his current rivals (Pitino, Calhoun, Krzyzewski, Williams, Izzo – all guys he makes more money than) Calipari has never reached the Final Four.

At least that’s how the NCAA sees it.

Yesterday, the NCAA ordered Memphis basketball and its former coach to vacate its record 38 wins and appearance in the 2008 National Championship Game because Calipari had an ineligible player on the roster. Calipari became the first coach in history to have two Final Fours with two different teams erased from the record books. In 1996, his UMass team reached the Final Four and later forfeited its season because the NCAA found that Marcus Camby had accepted gifts and cash from an agent.

In a world, particularly the sports world, where we want nothing more than to see the punishment fit the crime, this penalty amounts to nothing more than a harsh warning. Only nothing comes after the warning, as Calipari has proved. It’s an out-of-date sentence that might have worked years ago when history and records were only found in almanacs. But what does it prove now? We all witnessed Memphis’ title game run and if you haven’t you can check it out on YouTube. Everything is on YouTube.

And if we’re being real, the only question that should come from the NCAA’s ruling is this: Why in the world isn’t every college program cheating? If losing a banner is the only punishment, doesn’t it seem worth it? Those banners are ugly and can be replaced with sponsor logos anyway, right?

Or maybe everyone is cheating. Memphis made it five Final Fours in the last 17 years that have been corrupted by a team doing something un-amateur. Chances are UConn would have joined them this season if Nate Miles wasn’t tossed out of school before classes started last fall.

Maybe this stuff is as prevalent in college basketball as steroids in baseball were in the nineties and at the start of this decade. The juice made you bigger, faster, stronger and more durable and up until a few years ago, pro wrestlers were more likely to be caught using than baseball players.

There was only upside.

It appears the same goes for recruiting in college basketball. If attempting to erase history is the best the NCAA can do, then coaches will take advantage.

Coach Cal sure did.

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Minnesota players will have high expectations for Favre

My senior year of high school we had a kid on our baseball team who got away with everything. He was lazy, smoked too much, drank even more and despised every teacher almost as much as they despised him. He was that guy. He’d show up late to every practice with what appeared to be a running hangover. He’d ditch class in favor of playing gym softball, except when he blew that off too. But our coach always catered to him, helping him stay out of any real trouble and somehow managing to keep him on the field for a full season.


We didn’t necessarily resent him. We weren’t jealous. We never really bitched about the puking during batting practice. In fact, the preferential treatment wouldn’t have bothered us at all if he could hit. Hell, I’d have taken whatever Home-Economics test he couldn’t pass if he was batting .400 for us. Our biggest problem with him was that he simply wasn’t that good.

You have to wonder if a segment of the Minnesota Vikings will feel that way about Brett Favre now. Of course he’s going to be treated differently. One could even argue that at his age, he’s earned the right to skip training camp. And there’s no doubt that 464 career touchdown passes does wonders for his credibility.

But isn’t his league leading 22 interceptions last season a cause for concern? Is having a gunslinger at quarterback on a run-first, second and third team really a recipe for success? Favre might be a much better option than anyone else the Vikings had, but he also could make Adrian Peterson a lot less effective. At least initially, defenses won’t stack the box the way they did last season; but when they realize the quarterback is just as likely to throw a pick as he is a touchdown, they’ll go right back to focusing on the run. And that’s when Favre will start trying to make plays you couldn’t make on the new Madden.

It’s not as though the Vikings signed him for his leadership ability either. Ask anyone on the New York Jets about that. Last year, an anonymous player told Newsday that “there was a lot of resentment in the room about him (Favre). He never socialized with us, never went to do with anyone.”

At least we liked our teammate.

To the Vikings comes a big arm with an even bigger ego. He gets a pass for being too lazy to attend camp and for flip-flopping on his retirement decision like a bad politician. But something tells me his teammates won’t be as forgiving as mine were with our drunken second basemen. The NFL is a results-first, what-have-you-done-for-me lately league, so the new guy better produce right away or be prepared to be run out of the locker room.

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Tiger being Tyson?

Veteran sportswriters love golf. I don’t know what it is, but every Sunday following a Major, every scribe over 50 in the country suddenly becomes Mark Sanford and starts writing about golf as though it were their Argentinean soul mate. For that reason, I’m going to leave it to the Mike Lupica’s and Rick Reilly’s (you’ll have to wait until Wednesday for Mr. Reilly) of the world to discuss what YE Yang’s come-from-behind victory over Tiger Woods at the PGA Championship means for the history of golf.

I’ll just point the obvious out: You can spin it however you want, but Tiger shit the bed. It wasn’t quite the Yankees in 2004 or the USSR hockey team in 1980 (I consider those the two biggest chokes in sports history), but it was significantly worse than Michigan losing to Appalachian State or the Mets September collapse in 2007.

The best comparison to Tiger’s breakdown might actually be Mike Tyson’s loss to Buster Douglas in 1990. Think about it. Each was the best in the world at his respective sport (Tiger still is). They were insane betting favorites (An Irish sportsbook paid out to those who bet on Woods before play began on Saturday and leading up to the Tyson/Douglas fight, virtually no sportsbook would even take bets because it was expected to be so lopsided.). And while Tyson was undefeated overall, Tiger had never lost when leading a Major heading into the weekend.

The end-result wasn’t a Yang and Douglas win so much as a Tiger and Tyson loss. Tiger played too conservatively on Saturday and watched everything go right for his opponent on Sunday. Tyson didn’t take his challenger seriously and fought virtually the entire fight with vision in only one eye thanks to his cornermen forgetting to bring an endswell to the ring.

Add it all up and voila! You’ve got two of the most memorable choke acts in sports history.

Of course, that’s probably where the comparison between Tiger Woods and Mike Tyson ends. Something tells me Woods will never take a chunk out of Phil Mickelson’s ear (although it would make golf infinitely more entertaining) and considering his biggest offense to date is swearing on the golf course, I doubt he’s going to end up in the clink.

But it should be pointed out that for the first time in five years, Tiger Woods will not be the defending champion at any Major and despite playing pretty well this weekend, he still missed the cut at the British Open and wasn’t really in contention on Sunday at either the U.S. Open or the Masters.

Will he bounce back from what must be considered a failure of a season? Or can Jack Nicklaus breathe a little easier today?

Am I getting ahead of myself? Probably. But history shows that some athletes and teams are never the same following their most noteworthy collapses.

Just ask Mike Tyson.

If you can find him.

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Random Rumblings: Look on the bright side, Red Sox Nation

Wasn’t 2004 supposed to lift the weight off of Red Sox Nation? After winning for the first time in 86 years, weren’t fans expected to halt their whining when things stopped going the team’s way? Maybe it was the second World Series that did them in, that got them too comfortable with being on top, because it has become clear that the Nation is more panic-ridden than ever.

Reaching the playoffs in baseball is more difficult than in any other sport, and if the season were to end today, the Sox would be heading to Los Angeles as the American League Wild Card winners despite…

*A pitching staff once considered the deepest in baseball that now runs thinner than any team over .500 in the sport.

*A top slugger who picked 2009 as the year he wanted to go clean for the first time since he was sitting the bench in Minnesota.

*A catcher who last year didn’t have the bat to break your beer-league softball lineup and this year doesn’t even have the arm. No one is talking about his game-calling ability this year, by the way.

*The 2008 AL MVP hitting the sophomore slump in his junior year in baseball.

*The closer allowing more base runners than he’s ever allowed before.

*The 18 game winner a year ago that won just once before the team realized he was too out-of-shape to even bother using.

*The combination of Julio Lugo, Jed Lowrie, Nick Green and whoever else played shortstop this season.

I could go on forever, but the fact remains if simply getting to October should ever be good-enough for Red Sox Nation again, 2009 is that year.

• You can slam Rick Pitino all you want. Call him an embarrassment to his family. Label him a baby killer. But if he walked into your house to recruit your kid, you’d melt for him the way Turtle did for Tom Brady on Entourage last week.
  
  And if you did actually hold your ground and spit on Pitino, he’d just go right to the next kid on his list and chances are it would be your son that loses in the end.
  
  
• Notice that you hear nothing about Vince Young when plays well, as he did last night in the Titans second preseason game. It seems to me Young has been labeled in such a way that he will actually have to be a Hall of Famer to ever be liked in the NFL.
  
  How unfortunate. Young isn’t a puppy-killer or worse yet, a drunk-driving murderer like other guys in the NFL. He’s not getting arrested three times a year or shooting himself in the foot in night clubs. He’s simply the victim of overhype, much like two other prominent players in his draft class, Reggie Bush and Matt Leinart.
  
  
• It’s crazy to think that 89 years after a ball player named Ray Chapman died from a pitch to the head, we still have players getting hurt the same way today. In the last century, we’ve figured out how to juice the balls, the bats and god knows the players. Why haven’t we juiced the helmet yet?
  
  
• I’m not Tiger Woods’ biggest fan by any means. But I enjoy dominance in sports and there is perhaps no more of a sure-thing than when Tiger heads into Sunday leading a Major. I hope that continues today and forever so that I can say that even though I grew up in a time when sports was littered with cheaters and drug addicts and criminals, I got to watch the single most dominant athlete in history.

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Like the TV Evangelist, Hamilton just another con artist

Here’s hoping everyone keeps their eye on the ball with this Josh Hamilton story. It’s not about journalistic integrity or Deadspin’s place in the media or whether or not A.J. Daulerio is going to hell. Like it or not, a blog broke a story that every news outlet from the New York Times to the Dallas Morning News to ESPN would have and now will run with.

This is about Josh Hamilton the con artist. The man who was given a second and third and who knows how many opportunities to clean up his act because of his ability to hit a baseball. Most addicts don’t get that many chances. Josh did. And he became an inspiration to hundreds of thousands of people batting all types of addiction all over the country. Do a Google search and you’ll find an endless number of personal blogs of addicts who consider Hamilton a hero.

Now he looks like a fraud to his fans, the Texas Rangers, Major League Baseball and most importantly, his wife, who probably had no idea there were pictures involved during her husband’s one-night relapse.

It’s not just that he fell off the wagon one night in January. That happens. It’s that his face is spray painted on the side of the wagon. Hamilton is supposed to be the poster boy for overcoming addiction. He never mentioned anything about this in April when ESPN ran its “Homecoming with Rick Reilly” program and thrust him back into the national spotlight. The show was heart-warming. This is a heart-wrenching.

He could have come right out and said exactly what he said today. He could have warned everyone that it doesn’t matter who you are, this type of thing can happen to anyone. Instead, he let the public think what they wanted to think. He let ESPN fawn all over him. He admitted nothing, at least not publicly, until Deadspin ran those pictures. And for the record, the story might be that he informed both his wife and the Rangers of his slip up right away, but why did his personal assistant Johnny Narron tell Deadspin that he would be shocked if the pictures were real?

It sounds more like Hamilton took the route many of his peers have taken when it comes to steroid: Say nothing until you’re caught.

Well, now that he was caught, this is a story that shouldn’t just disappear because he’s a good interview and a nice guy. And the lord can’t be his crutch for everything. He needs to explain how he could have the audacity to suggest that he was unhappy with a Rangers contract extension offer in March knowing that his team knew what happened only two months before.
He needs to explain how he can still look at himself in the mirror every morning knowing he makes $10,000-$20,000 per speaking appearance to tell his story and inspire everyone under the sun when he knows that he isn’t being honest.

Hamilton is basically the TV Evangelist who preaches one way of life and lives in a completely opposite way. He’s convincing the way con artist addicts usually are and we believed him because we wanted to believe him. Because we all know someone who has lost battles with addiction and we all wished they could have turned out like Hamilton.

We’ve all been had. For that, Hamilton has a lot more explaining to do.

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Vick isn't the athlete we need to worry about

One could make the argument that Michael Vick is among the most hated people in America right now. 72 percent of sports fans dislike him and I guarantee that number would be even higher among non-sports fans if the question were posed like this: “How do you feel about a man who pleaded guilty to funding a dog fighting ring and killing at least 6-8 dogs?” Considering the typical Americans’ affection for animals, it’s safe to say Vick might be up there with Bernie Madoff.

In this case, hate is probably okay. I mean, it would be far more alarming if the majority of Americans supported a puppy-killing felon. But anyone who believes Vick is all that’s wrong with today’s athletes clearly hasn’t been paying enough attention to all the wrong in today’s athletes. What Vick did was evil, no doubt, but let’s make this clear: For all the influence he may have once had, it’s not as though a whole new segment of the population has decided that dog fighting might be a cool thing to try.

The same can’t be said for guys like J.R. Smith and Plaxico Burress, who not only represent the worst part of American culture; they embrace it. Since entering the NBA, Smith has made more news for his affiliation with the Bloods street gang than he ever has for his performance on the basketball court. During this year’s playoffs he was seen flashing gang signs and recently, he decided to replace the letter “C” with “K” in all of his tweets, which is what Bloods are known to do. Burress , of course, was recently indicted on weapons charges for shooting himself in the foot with an unregistered gun in a crowded night club last year.

Smith and Burress’ situations are unrelated, but not uncommon. Unlike Vick, whose heinous crimes and harsh punishment did everything but glamorize dog fighting, there are still hundreds of thousands of young people who think gangs are an outlet and carrying a gun is the only way to stay safe.

My point isn’t that we should be letting Vick off the hook. It’s just that we should be focusing on the more-pressing and far more-common issues that affect our young people. Issues, like you know, gangs and guns, which claim thousands of lives each year. Instead, Smith’s decision to rep his gang got less than ten seconds on PTI and the Burress indictment coverage focused more on whether or not he will get to play in the NFL this season than the fact that he is going to end up in prison.

No one wants to look at the larger picture with these guys. Vick is never going to be looked at the same again, but Smith is probably more popular today than he’s ever been. There are Bloods all over the country embracing him. And Burress is looked at as a guy who needed a gun because he felt like a target. Sadly, there are thousands of people who identify with that feeling.

Vick may have committed the worst crime, but it’s people like Smith and Burress that carry the most influence. And those are the guys we should really be worrying about.

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Trade Deadline Random Rumblings: Why do teams wait until July 31?

In some ways, the week of baseball’s trading deadline kind of mirrors finals week at colleges and universities throughout the country. There’s the anxiety, the pressure to do well and of course, a lot of work that probably could have been completed much earlier. But students have excuses for waiting until the very last minute to show signs of life – they’re busy playing flip cup or groping women or they’re in work study thinking about flip cup and groping women.

So what’s a baseball team’s excuse? Why do so many teams wait until the very end to bolster their rosters? Surely Theo Epstein realized his team needed a bat long before this week. The Tigers must have known they’d need another pitcher if they want to remain atop the AL Central. And weren’t teams paying attention last year when Milwaukee traded for C.C. Sabathia three weeks before the deadline? All he did is win his first four starts (all before July 31) and lead the Brewers to the Wild Card.

This year, it appears the Seattle Mariners were the biggest losers for waiting to make a move. A month ago, they were 3 ½ back in the AL West and looking like they could actually make a run. By Friday, they had become sellers, officially throwing in the towel on 2009 by dealing Jarrod Washburn to Tigers. Couldn’t they have made an offer for Victor Martinez or Cliff Lee in June? It’s not as though the Indians, Pirates or Royals were planning on making a playoff run by that point. Certainly some team must have been willing to deal early with M’s.

Instead, they’ll join about half the teams in baseball in playing irrelevant games for the next two months. It’s as though they skipped their finals and moved right back to flip cup and groping women, which are probably the only things that will keep Ichiro and Co. interested the rest of the season.

• Look, I realize the Red Sox had to make a splash at the deadline to both strengthen their lineup and take the spotlight off David Ortiz, and Victor Martinez was one of the best guys available. But let’s not act like he’s the next Manny or Ortiz or even Jason Bay.
  
  Martinez gets a lot of credit for being a great hitter simply because he qualifies as a catcher in fantasy baseball, a position that typically sees about three productive players per season. Martinez, 30, has never hit more than 25 homeruns in a season or had an OPS above .879.
  
  Considering that Adrian Gonzalez probably could have been had for a few more prospects, I can’t help but be underwhelmed by Martinez.
  
  
• This was the first Twitter-fied trading deadline and it brought me back to my middle school days when AOL chat rooms were all the rage. Nothing like a bunch of random people posting rumors nonstop for hours on end.
  
  The biggest Twitter controversy of the day? The fake Buster Olney, who broke the news that Dennis Eckersley was the Hall of Famer who used steroids.
  
  
• Off the top of my head, Zach Duke is the only player I know that still plays for the Pittsburgh Pirates.
  
  
• It seems like everyone gets it wrong when grading teams during the trading deadline. The teams that deserve failing grades are the teams that didn’t make any moves. The Yankees Rays, Angels and Rangers all expect to be there in the end and none of them got better on Friday.
  
  
• Under/over on the number of playoff games Roy Halladay pitches in his career. I say 1.5 and I take the under.

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