Baseball In The Daytime: 6-22-07
BITD on a Friday is a rare treat and is generally only available when the Cubs host a weekend series. Today on the South Side of Chicago, however, the Cubs will play on a Friday afternoon in road grays. Their opponent? The rival White Sox, in what has become a delicious crosstown war.
Once was the time when Cub fans overwhelmed their White Sox counterparts. The Baby Bears have always been the more fashionable team, with the cooler ballpark in the cooler neighborhood, and the blue-collar Pale Hose got the short end of every stick (especially newspaper coverage, as the Trib owned the Cubs). But two autumns ago the Americans won it all and awakened a sleeping giant in the Windy City. Now it is Sox fans that swagger into Wrigley and act like they own the place. For an outside observer, it's lot of fun.
Neither team has much to get excited about this season. After a brief period in which the Cubs came together and Milwaukee stumbled, the Brewers are back firing on all cylinders. While Lou's dudes are by no means out of the race--we are, after all, talking about the Brewers here--their flaws look congenital once again.
I got to thinking this morning about the White Sox, once again assuming that their superior talent and especially rotation would get them going at some point. Looking at the facts, though, I realized that I've been smoking the rock. The White Sox have deteriorated right before our eyes. The lineup is full of holes, and the rotation is so much shittier than the Indians' and Tigers' it's not even worth discussing. They're lucky to be 11 1/2 out.
With that kind of intro, I'm sure you're fired up to catch this game. It drops at 2:05 Mountain on XM 181 and two DirecTV Extra Innings channels: 734 for the old TVs and 731 for the shiny high defs. No word on a WGN broadcast, but I always kind of hope for The Hawk ("He gone.") to put it on the board, yes. If he's not around I'll just listen to Ron and Pat.
Your starters today are Carlos Zambrano and Mark Buehrle, both of whom could be pitching elsewhere in a month. These guys both have ace stuff but flaky focus, and both have pretty much evolved into grinders instead of virtuoso practitioners of the pitching arts.
7 comments:
blah blah blah ... baseball ... blah blah blah ... Chicago Cubs .... blah blah blah ... daytime.
Jesus, man, LJ may be on the blocks and this is what we bring to the plate. Is this good for the Chiefs or bad? US narrowly defeats Canada on a HORSESHIT call ... has a rivalry been born? It was a Mexican official ... was the fix on? NHL draft takes place NOW. Koby on the blocks ... where to? The NFL commish continues to Gestapo his way through the league.
Gimme somethin' boyz.
-- The Lone Reader
Gestapo. Chuckle.
Yeah, exercising a boss's control over employees, man. What is our system coming to?
The whole notion that somehow Goodell is a power-crazed autocrat overstepping his bounds is, on its face, totally ridiculous.
The NFL isn't the civil service, pal. It is a business. He doesn't have to wait for Pacman or Vick or whoever to make their way all through the justice system's goose. He's totally empowered to act as he sees fit. See: Landis, Kenesaw Mountain.
By the way, what's your prob the Commish, anyway? Pac promise you a rainy evening? Do you rejoice in the act of "keeping it real"?
Oh, and yes. LJ holding out is berry berry good for footballs in Kansas Cities.
I, for one, think your squad couldn't be stronger than they will be this year, with a virtual rookie at QB and a Poor Man's Tatum Bell at RB.
Oh god. Please, please hold out. Please. I want to be able to hear Chiefs Nation gnashing their (few) teeth from my living room.
Hey,
I'm all for a man runnin' his private business. I ain't no fuckin' idiot.
I'm just makin' it clear that he's setting some tough precedents and that he'll need to remain consistent, otherwise he'll get tagged with some sort of bias. Now that he has tossed the legal system aside (which is fine by me), he had opened a HUGE can of worms. At what point does he stop? Where is the burden of proof? If I go to Denver, see Jay Cutler in a bar, call the cops and raise some hell, does Cutler get suspended?
The Commish believes this type of thing won't happen. I don't have that much faith in football fans as a whole. It only takes a few idiots to ruin his plan.
This is just the edge of what CAN go wrong with his approach. I applaud his effort, but fear that his short sight will cause some long-term problems. His tenure is young, and he has already left his mark. I just hope it doesn't end up with raids of players homes, and rumor-mill sentencing. He's not that far off already.
Just a few thoughts/concerns from a long time NFL fan.
-- The Lone Reader
So far, the only bit of Goodell I disliked was the stadium-noise-reduction rumor that has his name stapled to it. And that seems to have died off. I agree with Cecil. It's a business. One hundred years from now, there ain't gonna be any "Diary of Ed Reed" where he and his family were holed up in Baltimore hiding from the commish's crew. Settle down, LR. He's tryin' to keep the image righteous.
Yea, fuck civil liberties.
Civil liberties have absolutely nada to do with this. At all.
Your civil liberties aren't absolute. You have free speech, but can't yell "fire" in a crowded theater.
An NFL player's job is just that, a job. It's not a higher calling. It's not a divine commission. The NFL, as an employer, can make decisions on the status of its employees completely independently of the legal system.
If it turns out that those decisions were illegal, then the NFL would get successfully sued by dozens of rich men. Which would be something that they, as a multi-billion dollar corporation that employs entire graduating classes of lawyers, would work to ensure does not happen. I'm not hiding in Goodell's wastebasket (this week, anyway) but I can guarantee that every potential legal issue with these suspensions has been thoroughly sussed.
As far as burden o' proof, well: in Pac Man's case, 10 run-ins with the cops, some of which ended in assault charges, one of which ended in a man being paralyzed, was probably more than enough to convince Goodell that this particular employee was a problem. If your boss got wind of you behaving that way, in a manner that made the company look bad in public, you'd be fired too.
Unless, of course, you had a bad-ass, ball-breaking union on your side. And NFL players don't have that. They have company men in union suits (not those kind of union suits).
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