May 2008 - Posts
No Dice-K? No problem for the Boston Red Sox.
This is the measure of how well Theo Epstein and Larry Lucchino have built this Boston team: the Sox can face the possibility of losing their best pitcher for weeks or even months and not feel obliged to go into panic mode.
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I don’t know what Mets owner Fred Wilpon is waiting for, unless it’s for his underachieving team to go on a 10-game winning streak and save Willie Randolph’s job. But it ain’t gonna happen, and all Wilpon is accomplishing is the public torture of one of the finest men ever to play sports in New York.
I hate to say it, but Randolph is done in New York. The sooner Wilpon and general manager Omar Minaya fire him, the sooner the Mets can get on with the business of messing up this season. And I’m pretty sure that’s what they’ll do, because the Mets problem is on the field, not in the dugout.
But as much as I think Randolph isn’t to blame for the Mets’ disappointing start, I’m even more convinced that he’s been so damaged he can no longer lead the team. As his center fielder, Carolos Belttran, was honest enough to admit, when the manager’s job is in jeopardy, it’s a big-time distraction.
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I used to be one of those traditionalists who said baseball should not enter the 20th century, much less the 21st, by embracing instant replay.
I was stupid, and I was wrong.
Seeing three home runs in one week disallowed by umpires whose eyes weren’t good enough to decipher what they were looking at has convinced me it’s time to use technology to make the game better. There’s no need at the moment to use it for judgment calls on plays at first or tags at the plate or anywhere else. But it is absurdly quick and easy to rewind the tape and see whether a ball hit fair or foul, over the wall or off it. There is no reason not to do it.
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If there were any doubts about what kind of man Willie Randolph is, they were laid to rest this afternoon when he began his weekly report on New York’s WFAN radio by apologizing for “the the unnecessary distraction I caused the last couple of days.”
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I hate it when a great guy like Willie Randolph gets himself on Sports Center for saying something he never should have said. There’s no cure for it now. He was asked a question, and he made the mistake of answering it. And now his stewardship of the Mets is no longer simply about how he’s running the team but about racism.
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You don’t expect your son to be killed or incapacitated for life from playing baseball or doing any of the normal activities that are part of childhood for us all. So it’s impossible not to feel deeply for the family of Steven Domalewski, the young boy who was sentenced to a life of around-the-clock care by a baseball.
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I’ve written before that if Oscar Pistorius, the double-amputee runner from South Africa, gets a mechanical advantage from his prosthetic Cheetah legs, he shouldn’t be allowed to run in international competitions against able-bodied athletes. But now that the Court of Arbitration for Sport has ruled that there is no conclusive evidence that that is so, all I can say is, “Good luck, Oscar.”
Just the same, the concept of introducing artificial anything into sports leaves me feeling uneasy, and issue of whether the prosthetic limbs give Pistorius an advantage remains unresolved.
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At the age of 37 and still in possession of all her incomparable skills, Annika Sorenstam, the reports say, is going to hang up her clubs. She has other things she wants to do.
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This is what A-Rod gets for canoodling with a woman other than his wife: she tells the world what a wimp he is.
For some reason, Alex Rodriguez agreed to sit down with his wife, Cynthia, for an interview with YES, the Yankees' personal television network. I’ve no doubt the network promised not to ask any embarrassing questions about the story The New York Post broke last year about A-Rod’s dalliance with the proverbial buxom blonde. So A-Rod, poor schmuck that he is, agreed.
So instead of talking about potholes on the matrimonial highway, the interview worked its way to A-Rod, the family man. And his wife volunteered that during the birth of his first daughter in November 2004, the mighty athlete, scourge of the American League and heir-apparent to Ruth and Aaron and BALCO Barry, passed out.
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Somewhere, Roger Clemens’ remaining fans are wondering how their hero could have gotten into so much trouble. He was the perfect warrior, which meant he was also a perfect person, an upstanding family man and staunch defender of traditional family values. That’s what he told us, and fans know that their heroes would never tell a lie.
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