July 2007 - Posts
Even Major League Baseball, which has a vested interest in hyping the game, can’t find a drum to beat about the looming July 31 trade deadline. Here’s what MLB.com has to say about the prospects of big news coming down: “Few deals in the works.”
This is what most analysts expected. I wrote a couple of weeks ago that fans shouldn’t expect anything earth-shattering. Top teams are reluctant to trade their best prospects, and the many teams involved in wild-card and division races don’t want to unload anybody.
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I still don’t think that Michael Vick is ever going to play football again, but even though the conviction rate is 95 percent in federal trials, I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s one of the five defendants in a hundred who walks.
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At times such as these, when prosecutors are making more sports news than players, you may want to do more than visit sports-law.blogspot.com, you might want to bookmark it.
It is where lawyers and sports law professors go to talk about the legal issues faced by former NBA ref Tim Donaghy and soon-to-be-former Atlanta Falcon Michael Vick.
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The NBA ought to watch the daily news reports out of the Tour de France, but only if it enjoys being depressed.
There are reports on what happened. Today, for example, Michael Rasmussen, who hails from Denmark, held onto the yellow jersey after everybody rode a really long way and sweated a lot somewhere in France. But if you read the AP story, you’ll notice that it includes the usual stuff about what happened in the race, but also spends a lot of time talking about drugs and cycling. CONTINUED >>
Those who believe or hope that Michael Vick’s legal problems will be plea-bargained or argued away – or even that it will take a year or more for the case to come to trial – won’t want to read this, but it’s something they and everyone else interested in the case ought to know.
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If you’re a Chicago sports fan, you had better hope and pray that the Cubs’ recent surge is going to continue, because it’s starting to look as if the Bears are not going to reprise their Super Bowl journey of last season.
Even in the best of times, teams that lose the Super Bowl have a hard time making the postseason the following year. In the past six years, only Seattle has pulled it off, as Jay Mariotti of the Chicago Sun-Times points out.
And in the past month, the Bears have gotten worse, not better. In late June, they cut defensive tackle Tank Johnson for an inability to avoid being arrested. And now, All-Pro outside linebacker Lance Briggs says he will sit out all but the final six games of the season because the Bears wouldn’t negotiate a long-term contract that met with the approval of himself and his agent, Drew Rosenhaus. Instead, the team designated him their “franchise player,”meaning he gets a one-year contract at the average salaries of the top five players at his position – in this case in excess of $7 million.
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Oscar Pistorius was born without shinbones. At the age of 11 months, his legs were amputated at the knee. Nineteen years later, running on high-tech carbon-fiber prosthetics, he’s fighting a battle to be allowed to attempt to qualify for the Olympics.
Seems straightforward, doesn’t it? If he can run as fast as able-bodied athletes, why not?
But the IAAF, track and field’s governing body, wants to ban Pistorius on the grounds not that he’s disadvantaged, but that his prosthetics give him an unfair advantage. Naturally enough, this has raised howls of protests from advocates for the disabled.
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David Beckham, a.k.a. Mr. Posh Spice, is going to sell jerseys and get on tabloid covers and fill countless online blogs and celebrity sites with gossip as meaningless as it is breathless about his house and cars and tattoos and glamorous wife.
He and his wife are celebrities; and in this country the fact that he plays soccer is the least part of his appeal. He’s not a guy who scores at a prodigious rate but is more of a playmaker, so the casual fan isn’t going to understand why this highly paid superstar isn’t banging balls into the net every other time down the field – or even every other game.
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I’m trying to think of reasons to tell Red Sox fans not to get too smug just yet. It’s been, after all, not even three years since they buried the 8,000-pound gorilla that had been leaping out the shadows every time the team was in danger of doing something grand and beating their hopes and dreams to a bloody pulp. Has anyone checked to make sure the beast is really dead?
In some quarters, the AL East is already being conceded to the Sox. And no matter where I look, I can’t find neurotic Sox fans huddled around a flat screen sucking down Sam Adams and worrying about how their team is going to blow it again to those loathsome Yankees.
The New York tabloids haven’t given up yet. The New York Post led off Wednesday’s sports section with this headline: “Yanks: It Ain’t Over Yet: Jeter ‘No Question’ We Can Catch Bosox.” The Sporting News isn’t quite as sanguine, but concludes that, yes, if all the planets are in alignment and the omens are right and the creek don’t rise, the Yankees can make run at it.
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I love the Home Run Derby. I wish they’d bring it back some day.
I’m not sure what that was on my television tonight. It must have been exciting, because ESPN consumed an entire hour previewing it and Chris Berman yelled himself hoarse before he got half way through the introductions.
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This one comes courtesy of Bob Sullivan, who writes The Red Tape Chronicles for MSNBC.com and is relentless in exposing fraud and skullduggery in space both cyber and actual. As the subject involved hockey instead of a scam, it got forwarded around the office until it landed in my lap. (This is called the editorial process; at least that’s what I’m calling it.)
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It’s amazing how little attention we pay to the rest of the world. I hadn’t even known that the 2014 Winter Olympics were due to be awarded until the announcement was made today that they’re going to Sochi, a Black Sea resort in Russia.
You can lay that to the fact that none of the candidate cities were in the United States. If we’re not involved, we don’t care.
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It's unlikely that the Mariners are going to forget how to win now that their manager, Mike Hargrove, has quit on them.
By his own admission, he didn't have the passion for the job that he'd had when they were finishing last during the past three seasons. I don't get it, and neither did his G.M., Bill Bavasi, who has known for the past ten days that Grover had spit the bit and wanted out.
“We're not happy about this, not a bit,” Bavasi said. “But we're happy for him.”
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