| THIS IS A READ-ONLY ARCHIVE FROM THE SORABJI.COM MESSAGE BOARDS (1995-2016). |
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cards-mets -> mets a's watching the big unit flounder was awesome. a-rod continues to choke in the post season. hooray, baseball. --- niners v. raiders - the shit bowl. exciting! we'll get too see who gets to hold the distinction of being the worst bay area sports team until nov. 1st. --- college bb can't start soon enough. UNC is going all the way. --- some one weigh in on nhl, because i have yet to give a fuck. --- i need some sports talk here. |
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a's are gonna choke. |
tigers do have some intertia. if they can beat zito tonight, then maybe so. |
i stopped being a raider and thus an nfl fan when al davis got rid of chuckie some 4 years ago. dumbass. jerry rice doesnt play for the bay area teams any more so whats the use. |
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hee. told you so. 2nd and 3rd, no outs? choke choke choke. |
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btw, did you notice that the commercial for the honda minivan was playing P-Funk? we got the funk, gotta have that... minivan? it must be the end of the world. |
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nice two-run homer to make it 7-3 so far tonight... too bad about that rain delay. would have liked to watch the mets/cardinals between commercial breaks. ice cream cake, flowers, candles, indian take-out, and baseball. and swine said he mailed the cd's today. the only thing that could make it a more perfect birthday would be surfing. but i get to do that this weekend. |
i jinxed it. fucking a's. |
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thank you! before the series started i was thinking tigers in 6. now i'm thinking tigers in 4 or 5, because now they go to detroit, and by friday night when the game starts, it's going to be about 35-40 degrees. wussy californian's can't take that shit for nine whole innings... sorry nate. well, not really. |
i'm a giants fan. sigh. but don't write off the a's yet. now they have an opportunity to do something that has never been done before. |
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except by Boston. yankees = satan's little helpers |
every team that has won the first two LCS games on the road has won the series. |
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Torre, Piniella, Girardi, I think it's all the same. The position of baseball manager is the most over-rated role in sports. The top-heaviness of the Yankees is Steinbrenner's doing. He had to have Giambi, Johnson, and some others who've come and gone whose names I can't remember now. Torre gets stuck with that, and if it seems you could have worse problems than a dugout full of rock stars, can you imagine being chair of some community board or a congressional panel or some modest political group only to come to work one day and find that your team has been replaced with Bill Clinton, Arnold Schwarzeneggar, the pope, and Terrell Owens. That sounds like a Bill Maher panel. I guess it's not the same since a baseball team is not a decision-making entity. Bah whatever. It seems the Yankees economy depends on reaching the post-season, and if they continue to fail in the playoffs then the new stadium and the YES Network and all their other trinkets could be in jeopardy. Who would care? Not too many people. The fans would still come to games if they played in Albany. Steinbrenner gets all this piss and hate (successful Americans always do), but I believe those who say that Steinbrenner revolutionized the game. Decades ago Steinbrenner threw millions of dollars into youth baseball programs in Central and South America -- at a time when that amount of money funded baseball programs for generations. Today Major League Baseball is flooded with talent from those regions in ways that no other American sport can claim. If the Yankees Radio Network does not get rid of Suzyn Waldman then I will simply stop following this team. She is nasel and crabby sounding in the broadcast booth, but she does a great job with the pregame and postgame sets, and she is a great radio call-in show announcer. John Sterling is just a fact of life these days, but he has zero rapport with Waldman and her cloying "oh me oh my" type responses to Sterling's lead are just bothersome if you're trying to actually follow the damn game. Plus they shove all these pointless money-grubbing promos into the mix. The Time-Warner Triple Play promotion is the most laughable. I'm going to finish eating a pork chop and then sleep. |
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the yankees are exactly boring. did steinbrenner's money instill the love of baseball in latin america? maybe it did, i honestly don't know. my dislike of him (no so much) and his yankees (more so) has to do with making the business of baseball so forward and evident. i want the illusion that it is all about peanuts and beer and the single most difficult task in all of sport. i don't want to think about some team with a roster being paid three times the median team salary always making it to the playoffs. fuck the red sox as well. and fuck barry bonds. and fuck baseball ads that mention pinot noir. on to the nba. who wants to lay odds that the warriors don't make the postseason again? |
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i don't have anything against steinbrenner personally (what little i know of him personally), and i don't hate him because he's wealthy, and i certainly don't hate the yankees because of him. that would be putting more importance on him than he's worth in dollars. what i hate about the yankees is a hate is what i hate about professional sports in general - it's not about the game or the talents, it's about who can afford to *buy* the talents. and i hate that the talents whine and cry to get paid ridiculous amounts of money for what they do. i love the tigers, they've always been the only sports team i ever cared about actually. in the same way that a lot of people in my age group are nuts about the Steelers. it's not at all dependent upon being from pittsburgh, but because of their late 70s superbowls and their sense of *team*. the bare-bones team (we don't need no stinkin cheerleaders!) from a bare-bones city. in hawaii you forget professional sports even exists. years went by and i never owned a tv. when i moved to austin i right away started to going AA games. the local team is now AAA league, the feeder team for the Astros. within the year i decided to be an Astros fan and K and i used to drive to houston to go to games. senor and i have done that a few times too. anyway, i'm totally rambling on about nothing because i just got back from a short weekend of surfing on the gulf of mexico (fun, but fuck do i miss the waves in hawaii!), and in between sat at the bar and watched the Tigers give it up the ass to the As. that was like icing on the cake after beating Satan's Little Helpers. funny too... if you don't believe me you can ask Senor. about 45 seconds before the Tigers won the 4th game, i knew it was going to happen. i said aloud, "this is it, this pitch, right here. two-run homer this pitch, this game is over". and then it happened. Senor, one of the biggest sports junkies EVER, a sports SCHOLAR, looked at me with renewed respect ;) and i was reminded of being a freshmen in highschool, and watching the tigers win the pennant. reminded of sunday double headers with my step-family. driving in the JAH-HETTO to tiger's stadium. me hating that they tore down that stadium. feeling suspicious of the new park, as my sister and brother in law drove me down to comerica park two summers ago, where we sat at the third base line and watched the tigers beat the Pirates. and me LOVING comerica park... the gigantic tiger scupltures in front. the location in downtown. sitting among baseball fans who were sticking it out with a team who did nothing but lose and lose badly since 1986. going to greek town after the game for dinner and beers. it's that kind of stuff that makes you love a team. i don't love teams that can win because the owner can afford to buy the best players. where's the team in that? where's the game? and now, with three glorious years of the yankees eating shit in the playoffs (or is this the 4th year now?) just goes to show. winning can't always be bought. though i do appreciate the fact that many of the tiger's players have central and south american heritage. |
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no, really? i'm still having a difficult time comprehending Beltran's unbelievable choke last night. after all that, at least go out swinging. though the card's pitcher's were so tight last night. i really wanted the mets to win, because i thought it would be a more fun, interesting world series if they played the tigers. the upside though is that we get to watch the cardinals be completely humiliated in the world series. again. nonetheless, at the end of the day, when it comes to being a baseball fan, personally there's more satisfaction in watching an interesting world series, than seeing my team win it by a landslide. |
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true dat. |
which makes me think hopeful thoughts. which means we're going to suck hard. |
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nba is all smoke and mirrors. it's a bunch of rock stars all trying to be the lead guitarist. no music, all notes. zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz |
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okay, not totally humiliated. tigers in 6. i forgot kenny rogers was a yankee. boooo. |
you yankee haters might consider graduating to some new kneejerk reaction at some point. they haven't won for years. but it makes for great sportscenter. but it makes for great sportscenter. but it makes for great sportscenter. |
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anyone wanna come over for dinner tonight? we're having cardinal gumbo. |
so, you think tony didn't make a stink about kenny's extra coating because his whole bullpen has dirty hands as well? hooray baseball. |
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once a yankee, always a yankee. must win at any cost. this message brought to you by Knee Jerk Reactions R Us. i saw the spot and it looked like a bruise, so that's what i assumed it was. until it became an issue during the game. for some reason it never occurs to me that a player would try to cheat while being televised during the world series. but people do stupid things all the time. also, it didn't look to me like the ball was doing anything noticeably different than any other time i've watched rogers pitch. but whatever. does anyone remember the name of the pitcher who got busted for having a file in his pocket? when the umpire approached the mound to ask him about it, the pitcher took the file out of his pocket and not-so-discreetly flung it on the ground behind the pitcher's mound, then shrugged his shoulders at the umpire, and did the whole "what file? i don't know what you're talking about," schtick. |
but it isn't like he suddenly started sucking when he wiped it off after the first inning. |
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i believe it was the great phil niekro who was caught with the nail file. good one! i saw some shots of rogers from earlier this year with tar on his hand but not such a blatantly huge glop of it. the master of doctoring the ball speaks: In Perry’s Book, a Brown Smudge Is Not a Black Mark By JACK CURRY Published: October 24, 2006 ST. LOUIS, Oct. 23 — Gaylord Perry, that master of doctoring a baseball who was just as much a master of making batters think he was doctoring it, has no doubt about what Kenny Rogers smeared across the palm of his left hand in the World Series. Perry laughed at Rogers’s explanation that it was dirt. Perry, the man who was defined by the spitball, and by all of the histrionics that accompanied throwing it or not throwing it, watched Rogers pitching for the Detroit Tigers on Sunday. Perry said he immediately detected that the brown smudge on Rogers’s hand was from a well-known sticky substance. “Oh, well, he probably just used a little pine tar,” said Perry, sounding like a convivial, convincing Southern lawyer. “There’s nothing wrong with that.” Then Perry, who lives in North Carolina, said Rogers could have kept his hand from getting discolored and kept his secret had he selected a different brand. “If he got some North Carolina pine tar, that’s clear,” Perry said in a telephone interview. “You’ve got to know what you’re doing.” For 22 entertaining years, Perry applied spit, Vaseline, baby oil, hair tonic and several other wet substances to the surface of the ball to help make it move more. Perry would adjust his cap, tug at his sleeves and rub his face and neck before unleashing a pitch, forcing hitters to think he was loading the ball with a foreign substance every time. Since Perry vigorously stumps for pitchers who are seeking advantages, he was giddy about what he felt Rogers had done in taming the St. Louis Cardinals, 3-1, in Game 2. Perry said that pitchers use pine tar in chilly weather because the ball is slick and the stickiness allows them to have better control. The wind chill in Detroit was 30 degrees at game time. But Perry said he never used pine tar to deface a ball; he preferred rosin, which is legal, to get a better grip. Perry, a Hall of Fame pitcher who won 314 games, does not blame Rogers for saying the substance on his hand was dirt. But neither does Perry believe Rogers. “If it was dirt, something had to make it stick there,” Perry said. “Dirt isn’t just sticking there in cold weather.” Television close-ups indicated that Rogers had something on his hand in the first inning, but he washed it off before the second and pitched seven more scoreless innings. Rogers reiterated on Monday that it was not pine tar. “It was mud, rosin, sweat and spit,” Rogers said. “It’s always there.” As Rogers was surrounded by about 75 reporters, Todd Jones, Detroit’s closer, stood 50 feet away and said that he has used pine tar on balls during his career. Jones, who writes a column for The Sporting News, wrote in 2005 that he used it every time he pitched for the Colorado Rockies at Coors Field. Jones said the substance helped him grip the ball in the 5,000-foot elevation in Denver. “My situation was, when I was in Denver, I had to have it or I wasn’t going to be worth anything,” Jones said. “In 2003, I had an 8 E.R.A. It didn’t help. It’s not an advantage. You’re just trying to break even.” Jones said he stored the pine tar in his glove or on his hand or in other undisclosed places. Pitchers who are caught using pine tar on balls are ejected and suspended for 10 games. “This is not brand new, guys,” Jones said. “It’s an accepted thing. I think there’s a difference between pine tar and Vaseline.” Perry said that Rogers, by using pine tar, was not cheating and was “taking advantage” of a situation. Even though Rogers briefly had something on his hand, Perry said what might be even more relevant is what he planted in the hitters’ heads. “He did his thing,” Perry said. “He got all the Cardinals thinking he was doing something with the ball. That’s half the game right there.” As Perry watched Rogers on television, he felt a kinship with the pitcher who has morphed into an October force by throwing 23 scoreless innings in a row. “I’m proud of him, man,” Perry said. “He did it to them. Good for him. Now you’ll have a thousand high school kids using pine tar, too.” Perry joked that if the Cardinals wanted to know what was on Rogers’s hand, a hitter should have “just walked out and shook his hand to see if it was sticky.” Perry said the best strategy for the hitters would have been to move up as much as possible in the batter’s box and hit Rogers’s pitches before they broke. When Rogers was asked about Perry, he called him a “great pitcher,” but he did not address the slippery method that helped make Perry memorable. Meanwhile, Perry reveled in discussing Rogers. Perry noted that he has white pine trees on his property and offered to send Rogers some of that North Carolina pine tar. “This will probably stay with him,” Perry said. “It’s like the spitball has been for me. It’s stayed with me for the rest of my life.” oh, yeah, GO TIGERS! |
was at a crowded bigass pub in Manhattan 2 nights ago and a full nobody was paying attention to the baseball game. similar experience when the space shuttle vaporized a couple of years ago. same experience tonight in Queens. Joe Buck's velvet voice can't save this boring nonsense from cultural oblivion. All the freakin' tourists pile on at the post season, like no baseball has happened all year long. Still combing the newsfeeds for word on new Yankees radio announcers, those Mets announcers or so much better. |
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you're right, and i'm not just saying that because the tigers lost. what a boring game. but i wouldn't call the game of baseball boring nonsense. do you think nobody in the manhattan pub cared because it wasn't the yankees or the mets playing? do you think nobody payed attention to the shuttle explosion because they've all lived through so much worse and something seemingly so small and so far away doesn't really register now? as for baseball, maybe it isn't rock and roll enough. or violent enough? people don't have the patience or attention span anymore. i'm out of sleep drugs... |
fuck 'em all. gnight! J |
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ha! totally. but so does Pudge, who is sucking ass in the playoffs. he's what... 0-11? sheeeeit. btw, you know the one thing i love about kenny rogers and always have? how he stomps off the field at the end of an inning, totallly emotionless. |
The fact that his name is pronounced POO HOLES always cracks me up, too, but my puerile sense of humor hears Mike Sweeney as "Mike's Weenie," and I swear sometimes the announcers are working with that pun. I've heard "Mike's weenie is swinging at everything tonight," "Mike's weenie is a hard one get out" and other childishness. I don't know if Suzyn Waldman is getting the ax, but it wouldn't surprise me. She was pretty good on YES, as I recall, but she does have a face for radio. Just not the voice for it. She does pretty well hosting call-in shows. the most hilarious announcers i've heard are the chicago white sox radio announcers. during a Yankees/White Sox Alex Rodriguez hit a 3-run home run, and all the announcer said was "And the Yankees score 3 runs." didn't say it was a home run, didn't say anything at all until the next batter came up. they are shameless. people i talked to who ignored the space shuttle said their reaction was "oh, it's the space shuttle again." the first one had more impact, i think, because it was the first one, and it was more dramatically filmed so we saw it replayed thousands of times, and because the civilian school teacher was on board. the second accident was what it was, but everyone on board knew the risks of their line of work, and i think there is generally less interest in human space flight. it seems like all they're ever doing up there is testing the effects of weightlessness on some new object or life form. if commercial airlines had the safety record of NASA there'd be dozens of planes a day dropping out of the sky. i almost said "manned space flight." i played MANS once in Scrabble and my opponent challenged, saying that word needs an apostrophe. but no, 'the guard MANS their post' is the proper use of the word. i won the challenge, but quit using that word. |