Welcome back to an abbreviated and (slightly) overdue “I got stuck working a long bartending shift today” picks column. A decent 10-6 performance last week brings me to 91-64-5 for the season, here are the picks:
Cincinnati (+10.5) over Pittsburgh
How long before Chad Johnson is doing commercials for Taco Bell’s new recession special “Ocho Cinco Cents” taco?
Cleveland (-3) over Houston
If Drew Bledsoe, Tony Romo and Coco Crisp have taught us anything, it's that broken fingers are good for quarterbacks, and bad for center fielders. (Speaking of Coco, sad to see him go after a great season and an under-appreciated three seasons, but this Ramon Ramirez character looks legit, around 9K/9 innings, better than a 2-to-1 walk-to-strikeout ratio, and very few home runs. With Jacoby and Drew starting they'll need a solid right handed 4th outfielder, but on paper at least it's a good deal for both teams, and both players.
After a no-great-shakes-but-still-makes-money 9-5 performance last week to bring me to 81-58-5 on the season, I’m back with another week of exciting NFL picks.
New England (-3) over East Rutherford Jets
Get used to me picking the Pats. I always do, but even with one of the worst injury bug infestations in recent memory (starting QB, safety, linebacker and top 9 RBs) the team is continuing to slowly figure out their new identity. That, and Mangini is yet to show he can outwit a motivated Belichick—look for a confused Favre to make a few key mistakes and the Pats to slug out a too-close-for-comfort 3-7 point win.
Atlanta (-6) over Denver
See my comments from last week re: not betting against Matt Ryan (until Vegas catches up and overvalues him—which it seems on the verge of with a 6 point spread).
Greetings townies and townie-wannabes. After a couple weeks mourning the end of a sweet-and-sour Sox season I’m back to the blogosphere with a new weekly gimmick, an NFL picks column that will hopefully fill the dual-purpose of satisfying your unending need for new time-wasting internet nonsense now that the election’s over, and serving as an outlet for my overconfidence after a hot streak the last few weeks in my internet pick ‘em leagues that’s left me 72-53-5 against the spread so far this year (thus relieving the pressure that could lead me to bet actual money on these games just as I start regressing to the mean). So, without further adieu, here are the picks with home teams in bold
Denver (+3) over Cleveland
The worst passing defense in recent memory. A coach nicknamed Cromeo, who actually had to devote time this week to convincing the press that he makes decisions about who’s starting, not the fans. (His other nickname? Lil Romeo.) One starting quarterback has 8 career passing attempts. The other, according to my buddy Lindsay, hails from the lost tribe of Ugly-Baldwins. Who the hell knows. Take the points.
True to my word in an email to friends about yesterday’s post, I’ll be blogging after every game from here on out, hopefully for another week or so. (That email also featured multiple typos, including a misspelling of TownieNews.com. My publicity director days are numbered.)
I watched the game at Maison Jawff-Man last night. Here are some thoughts from the two of us (his are the funny/insightful ones):
--I’m not even going to mention TBS’ technical difficulties. I’m not going to talk about the Twilight Zone feeling of tuning in at 7:55 to find a BBC bloopers clip show hosted by Dick Clark and a lady who apparently was on the Hughleys (when did that show air, like 5 years ago?) but who I only remembered from the Fresh Prince of Bel Air. Or the shock of that show ending and an episode of the Steve Harvey show coming on—seriously, I’d rather have Paul Harvey at that point.
I won’t dwell on what it felt like to log on to mlb.com, tbs.com and espn.com and find no mention of whateverthehell was going on (thank you Boston.com for being on top of things). Nope, I won’t even mention how technical difficulties are understandable, but cutting to a crappy re-run that probably 50 people watched when it first aired instead of finding someone, SOMEWHERE to at least do audio-play-by-play and explain what the hell was happening in the most anticipated baseball game since Game 1 of last year’s series or game 6 or 7 of last year’s ALCS is completely inexcusable. (I don’t care if the entire Atlanta TBS headquarters were down, you can’t find a guy with a cellphone at the game to call in to CNN headquarters and broadcast the audio on TBS? I don’t buy it.) Or how glad I was we had a radio to listen to, unlike 700 people at the Cask 'n Flagon, which must have been bordering on Thunderdome-territory by 8:20 PM. Nope, you won’t hear a peep out of me about any of that.
Team Fitzy was in full effect to watch Game 5 the other night- a couple notes from The Comeback:
--What was with pitching Kazmir over Shields and then yanking him after 6 solid? If you could pick a single moment when the Sox lost the momentum in this series it was game 2, when Tito stuck with Becket too long, pulled Masterson and Paps too early and put old man Timlin out for the twelfth—all three adding up to the pitching decision equivalent of Mike Martz and the Rams playing for the tie against the Panthers in the 2003-04 playoffs.
--After the Ortiz home run the first thing I thought about was Kevin Millar before game 4 of the ALCS in 2004 saying, “Don’t let us win today. Don’t let us win today and give ‘em Pedro tomorrow and then Schilling game 6 and then anything can happen in game 7.” It was a pretty obvious comparison and my buddy Winthorp sent a text with the same quote about two minutes later.
--Here’s where it gets strange, though. Still down by three in the 8th, the television next to the one showing the Sox game at the bar was running the Best Damn Sports Show Period, which had a segment of Manny lowlights (including the brilliant dive-fall-miss the ball by 5 feet-stand up-fall again-land on top of the ball-do a backward bridge to pick up the ball from under your ass-stand up and laugh it all off while Theo has a slow motion aneurysm from earlier this season—if anyone has a link please send it!) when suddenly there’s KEVIN MILLAR clumsily flopping a dreadlocked wig onto his head and talking about Manny. The rest, my friends, is history.
Idle hands, the cliché goes, are the devil’s plaything, and that seems about as true in the sports world as anywhere else. All-Star breaks, the lead up to the NBA and NFL draft (and I hear the bars of Saskatoon and Belarus are CRAZY before the NHL draft), and the interminable stretch between playoff rounds are like a semi-annual call to boredom-bred foolishness for athletes and their journalistic enablers, and while it wasn’t exactly the A-Fraud opt-out, dinner and dancing with Pacman and Ray Lewis, or a leisurely evening drive with Eugene Robinson, Tim McCarver got things going this week by saying of Manny’s pre-trade antics: “some of the things he did were simply despicable, despicable—like not playing, refusing to play. Forgetting what knee to limp on.”
Initially this didn’t seem like anything worth writing about. Tim McCarver—the guy whose criticism of Deion Sanders playing football and baseball on the same day prompted Neon to dump three buckets of water on him after a the Braves won the 1992 NLCS—criticized a player? Tim McCarver, the bloviating expounder of endless platitudinous moralisms made incendiary remarks in an interview? About a player he’s about to cover? Really? McCARVER?!
But what got me going was this post from the usually solid Joe Sheehan of Baseball Prospectus:
In July, when Ramirez was supposedly “refusing to play,” the Red Sox played 24 games. Ramirez played in 22 of them. This was tied for fourth on the team with J.D. Drew and Jacoby Ellsbury. He was sixth on the team in plate appearances (AB+BB) in July. Not quite Lou Gehrig’s numbers, but he helped out a bit more than David Ortiz (six games), and was in the lineup somewhat more often than peers such as Moises Alou (one game). Oh, he didn’t get three days off in the middle of the month-Ramirez played in the All-Star Game.
When he played, Ramirez killed the league. He hit .347/.473/.587 in July. His OBP led the team, and his SLG led all Red Sox with at least 25 AB. The Sox, somewhat famously, went 11-13 in July. Lots of people want you to believe that was because Manny Ramirez is a bad guy. I’ll throw out the wildly implausible idea that the Sox went 11-13 because Ortiz played in six games and because veterans Mike Lowell and Jason Varitek has sub-600 OPSs for the month.
Four days before he was traded, Manny Ramirez just about single-handedly saved the Red Sox from getting swept by the Yankees, with doubles in the first and third innings that helped the Sox get out to a 5-0 lead in a game they had to win to stay ahead of the Yankees in the wild-card race.
If all of the above is “refusing to play,” I would sincerely like to see what “trying” looks like. It would be entertaining to see a player post a .600 OBP or .800 SLG.
On second thought, they’d probably just blacklist him.
Greetings from Blogland. Good to be back in Boston this past weekend, even if briefly, as I write this from the Lucky Star Boston-New York bus after a month of traveling that’s included: finding a bunch of hot-off-the-presses Jack Chick religious comics in a Tropicana Field bathroom, seeing a teenage heavy metal cover band at a bar in Chard, England that was inexplicably named Martha’s Vineyard, and trying out Ray Bourque’s restaurant in the North End (ahh the face of gastric delights). Next stop: San Francisco, where I’m hoping that after a decade of putridity, 49ers tickets are easy to scalp, and there’s a Sox bar to watch the first couple games of the playoffs.
I didn’t get into TFB’s MCL/ACL in the last post, had I been blogging at the time I probably would have done my best to stand pat while everyone else added to the pile of sports pundit putridity that followed SpyGate, but I can’t ignore the specter of the second Pats-game-whose-name-shall-not-be-spoken in just two weeks and the fallout from it. From that first Ed Hochuli-style premature whistle followed by a Matt Cassel interception/Derek Lowe Face, to the Pats D unveiling their new Christian Rock orchestra, Jars of Clay Feet, there was a stunned, unfamiliar silence that settled over Boston. Shaking heads and vacant stares in Southie; frustrated murmuring in Westie; not even the tattoed Australian freak juggling knives atop an aluminum pole could shake the mood in Faneuil Hall; and out in Worcester, this kid was pissed. Really pissed.
Greetings boys and girls, welcome to the first installment of Boston sports and townie topicality in a blog in which I’ve decided to forego the tedious tradition of a clever name for a rotating series of bad puns, pompous alliterative allusions, and Carlos Quintana references. Tonight’s title: The Night of the Joestown Flood.
In honor of the imminent destruction of the Yankees' glimmering ode to the kind of Soviet Bloc concrete stark-itecture that brought us Government Center, Sullivan Stadium, the UMass Dartmouth campus and Chet Curtis’s hair, I thought I’d take a look at the new ballpark being built in my adopted home here in the Boogie Down Bronx. As it turns out, the Yanks are giving us 800 million more reasons to hate them, one for each dollar that taxpayers are kicking to Steinbrenner and Co. to tear down one of the oldest stadiums in baseball, bulldoze a popular children’s park, and build a luxury-box infested baseball shopping mall that will have fewer seats at higher prices. Congratulations Gotham!
It isn’t the first time either, in 1972 New York City bought Yankee Stadium for $24 million—more than twice what George Steinbrenner would buy the entire team for a few months later. The city then renovated the stadium for $160 million, and leased it back to the Yanks for about the same price I pay for my apartment. What did city taxpayers get in return? For starters, a giant wall that ended a 50-year tradition of catching a glimpse of the game from the elevated train, a spike in ticket prices, and a brand new four-story garage (what hip-hop historian Jeff Chang called “the most secure parking lot in the South Bronx”) that made it easier for suburbanites whose tax dollars weren’t paying for the stadium to get to games without having to use public transportation or patronize any non-stadium purveyors of food and beverage.
All this while the city was literally going bankrupt and the South Bronx neighborhood that the new stadium was supposed to “revitalize” was falling prey to a wave of apartment fires, drugs and violence that led one local doctor to call the area Necropolis, “a city of death”—think “The Message” by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, who got their start a few blocks from the stadium. Maybe it had something to with the few dozen fire stations the city closed, or the 5,000 cops laid off on a single day in 1975 to try and trim the budget. But hey, all that money left Georgey Boy with enough cash to buy Reggie Jackson a Rolls Royce Corniche, make illegal campaign contributions to Richard Nixon and threaten to move the team to Jersey!
