It was quite a week. We watched the Winnipeg Blue Bombers bring in a new quarterback, we headed off to Mankato, Minn., to watch opening day of Minnesota Vikings camp and then headed back to Minneapolis for the Twins-Angels series.
As a result, here are a few more things that went banging around in my brain this past week…
1) Last week, Blue Bombers head coach Mike Kelly was fined $1,000 for verbally abusing the officials in Week 4’s 19-5 loss to Toronto.
The Bombers were so dreadfully awful in that game that I didn’t really notice the officials much, but I will say this: CFL officials are so bad, so rotten, that somebody has to verbally abuse them. Just to keep them awake.
2) It sure didn’t take long for the Bombers to sour on defensive tackle Tyrone Williams and quarterback Richie Wlliams. Even before the team went to Toronto for this past Saturday’s game with the Argos, the two were gone. Released outright.
Wow! There was an awful lot of newspaper space wasted on those two four-week clunkers.
3) Here’s how you beat the Minnesota Twins: Walk Joe Mauer and Justin Morneau every time they come to the plate. Hell, I’ll take my chances with Michael Cuddyer or Jason Kubel.
If you let the “New M&M Boys” hit, they will. They’ll beat you. But if you never face them, they’ll score a couple of runs, but not enough to hurt you. After all, that Twins pitching staff is awful. It’s going to give up 8-12 a game (especially if you’re the Los Angeles Angels) and a couple of Twins runs won’t even dent that.
4) My old friend George Sherrill was traded from the Baltimore Orioles to the Los Angeles Dodgers on Thursday. He didn’t want to go, but he’ll now have a legitimate shot at winning a World Series. Not bad for a guy who spent 2002 and 2003 with the independent Winnipeg Goldeyes.
Asked by the Los Angeles Times after Friday’s game (where he struck out three of the four batters he faced) if he ever saw himself “reaching this point while he was toiling in the independent leagues,” Sherrill said: “I didn’t know what this point was. I just wanted to keep playing. I guess that’s why some girlfriends took off.”
5) There is a great deal of gnashing of teeth these days over “The List.” That’s baseball’s notorious list of people who were voluntarily and anonymously drug tested in 2003. It’s a list with 104 names on it, but only seven names have been leaked.
It’s a list that allows the mob-like mainstream media to continue to attack the game even though the mob-like mainstream media was a big part of the cover-up of steroid us in baseball when Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa were saving the game in 1998.
Because most members of the mainstream media have no idea what steroids are or what they do, they use the leaks from the list to vilify athletes and attack baseball’s credibility.
It’s unfortunate that commissioner Bud Selig is just a liar. He, of course, claimed that the people who agreed to be tested in 2003 would never see the results of those tests and that tests would never be made public. Now, the results are being leaked out bit by bit, most often to the New York Times, by someone who obviously has an agenda.
For the mainstream media, steroid use by athletes is always big news. For baseball fans, however, it’s meaningless. They really don’t care.
In fact, if I’m paying $100 for a ticket (remember, the mainstream media doesn’t pay for tickets and therefore doesn’t know what we’re paying to watch baseball these days), I want my jocks to be 6-foot-8, 300-pounds and have the ability to hit a baseball to the moon. I don’t care if fat, old Babe Ruth, a man who never hit against an African-American pitcher, has all his records broken, I want to be entertained when I pay exorbitant prices to watch a stinkin’ ball game in August.
6) The Ottawa Sun, home of the hopeful and silly Bruce Garrioch, a really nice guy who seems to go out of his way to create trade rumours that don’t exist — and never have — came up with a doozy this weekend. Even TSN and Rogers Sportsnet picked up on the story without checking out anything.
The latest rumour goes like this (and remember, this is the same Bruce Garrioch of the Ottawa Sun who had Vincent Lecavalier going to the Edmonton Oilers, Chris Pronger off to St. Louis, then Chris Pronger off to New Jersey, then Chris Pronger off to Boston, then Chris Pronger off to Toronto, Jay Bouwmeester to Edmonton — sheesh, he loves Edmonton — Scott Niedermayer off to Boston, Evgeni Malkin to the L.A. Kings, Ilya Kovalchuk to Montreal and on and on and on): The San Jose Sharks have offered F Jonathan Cheechoo and D Christian Erhoff to Ottawa in exchange for F Dany Heatley, but the deal won’t take place unless Montreal steps in and sends Mike Cammalleri (the free agent that Bob Gainey just signed) to San Jose to get Patrick Marleau (where did he come from?) and his $6.3 million contract.
The San Jose Mercury News called Sharks GM Doug Wilson. He denied he was interested in making a deal with the Senators. Meanwhile, if Garrioch had checked out the Habs payroll situation, it would become evident to him that the Canadiens couldn’t handle the salary cap hit.
At some point does the mainstream media look at Garrioch and say, “The Sky is Not Falling Today?” Or not? Do they just keep eating this stuff up.
If he was right once…