It’s been a long week. For one thing we had to keep listening to the NHL’s rationale for keeping the Coyotes in Phoenix, Eric Belanger’s brain-dead comments about Winnipeg (until now, I didn’t think hockey players were that stupid) and the American media’s desperate screams about Barry Bonds.
On top of that I had to call three hockey games (none of which was in Winnipeg), finish a magazine, complete the sports section of a newspaper, do the sports every morning on two radio stations, start a new book (working title, Quiet Hero: The Ken Ploen Story) and try to get rid of this pleurisy/pneumonia/Black Plague thing I have going on. Not whining. Just tired.
In the meantime, there was no shortage of bat-shit crazy going on out there and that will make today’s posting a little easier.
1) Love the U.S. media trying to make Barry Bonds’ ex-lover Kimberly Bell some sort of saint. She was his mistress through two marriages. I can think of a word other than mistress, but I wouldn’t use it in mixed company.
I often listen to ESPN radio on my XM service and they had that guy Mark Fainaru-Wada on, talking about the salient points made by Bell during her testimony in the Bonds case. In case you’ve forgotten, Fainaru-Wada wrote a book about Bonds, The Game of Shadows, using more than 200 anonymous sources (believe it at your peril). Bell was one of the few people he actually quoted on the record. When your entire career clings to the veracity of the testimony of the former mistress of a big league baseball player, you’d better go on the radio and tell people she has an immense intellect and no bitterness ’cause anyone with a brain bigger than a walnut isn’t going to believe it.
As Fainaru-Wada tried to tell people, “ex-girlfriends never lie,” all I could do not to puke all over the steering wheel, was sing Winnipeg Most’s new song as loudly as possible. The American media wants Bonds to be convicted so badly, it no longer has any credibility whatsoever. In fact, anything a sportswriter tries to tell you about Barry Bonds is probably a lie.
2) My wonderful wife is a Cleveland girl, born and raised. As a result, her disposition is often dictated by the success of her beloved Browns and Indians. And that’s not a bad thing. The more her teams lose, the funnier she gets.
So on Friday, as the Indians were losing 14-0 to the White Sox after four innings in their 2011 season opener (they eventually lost 15-10), Sally decided to go to Facebook to vent her frustration.
“I wonder if there is a ‘Cleveland Indians Suck’ page,” she asked.
Moments later I hear, “Gee, that’s harsh.”
Sally found the “Cleveland Indians Suck Big Black Monkey —–,” page.
“No wonder I don’t like Facebook,” she said, and went back to watching her game.
3) Right now, I’m watching the Tigers-Yankees game on FOX. Commentator Ken Rosenthal is an idiot. Miguel Cabrera does not owe anyone a second or third apology for his February DUI — in English or any other language. One apology is plenty. Rosenthal is far too self-centered, self-absorbed and self-important.
By the way, why doesn’t Joe Buck just wear a Yankees jersey when he calls a game? Gawd, his pro-Yankee game calls are insufferable. And Tim McCarver? He’s now blind as well as terrible.
Thank gawd for the mute button.
4) Here’s what’s wrong with baseball and with every sport that doesn’t have a salary cap. Alex Rodriguez will make $32 million playing for the Yankees this season. The Kansas City Royals’ entire payroll, including players on the DL, is $36.1 million.
The Yankees payroll is $2o1.7 million. They should win EVERY game.
Meanwhile, when Baltimore manager Buck Showalter went off on the Boston Red Sox, the American media all jumped to the defence of their beloved poster-child- for-all-things-holy, Red Sox GM Theo Epstein. Trouble was, Showalter’s comments might have been impolite, but they were also pretty close to true.
“I’d like to see how smart Theo Epstein is with the Tampa Bay payroll,” Showalter told Men’s Journal. “You got Carl Crawford ’cause you paid more than anyone else, and that’s what makes you smarter? That’s why I like whipping their butt. It’s great, knowing those guys with the $205 million payroll are saying, ‘How the hell are they beating us?’ ”
Actually Boston’s payroll is about $162 million, but really, what’s the difference?
Oh yeah, A-Rod.
5) This story was e-mailed to us from a reader of the Detroit News:
Detroit Tigers manager Jim Leyland is a crusty old soul who has little use for the media on a good day. But let’s just say he’s really pissed now.
Player X is an ESPN the Magazine blog written, allegedly, by unnamed players from the various sports. In his inaugural entry, the baseball Player X takes a few unflattering shots at Detroit Tigers first baseman Miguel Cabrera:
“In any group, there’s always the crazy uncle who just can’t seem to figure it out. Cabrera, who’s been charged with DUI, is that uncle. I guarantee any one of his teammates would have picked him up if he’d called. Ditto his GM. …
“But, really, why isn’t Cabrera paying a guy $100 a night to drive him around? Plenty of guys do that. That he didn’t is a slap in his teammates’ faces. Even if it costs $36,000 a year, we have watches worth more than that.”
Even though the remarks make good sense, the comments set Leyland off and I agree with him. Frankly, if you can’t put your name on it, if you won’t take ownership of what you say, you are a gutless swine.
“To me that’s a gutless (jerk) that doesn’t put his name to it,” Leyland said. “If somebody would have said, ‘Hey, this is Jim Leyland and this is what I say, he should do this or this, then that’s fine.
“But when you (another expletive) hide behind somebody else’s expense, that’s chicken (expletive) to me. But you guys know your business more than me. Maybe that’s ethical, I don’t really know. But I’d be (pissed off) if I was Cabrera.”
And that’s why I really, really doubt a player actually wrote it. My sense says ESPN wrote it and declared that a player wrote it. I follow a lot of players on Twitter and if a player wants to say something, he will, and he’ll put his name on it and he won’t care what people think.
I believe Player X is an anonymous blog made up by ESPN The Magazine so that spineless reporters can hide behind somebody else.