Bye-Week Rant II: Talking Chiefs, Broncos, Baseball, and Media with Old No. 7

Technically, we're past the bye week, but regardless of how your favorite NFL team is playing, I imagine most pro-football fans would agree that the bye week is the toughest stretch of the gridiron season. To help kill these 14 days, Old No. 7 and I sat down to talk, among other things, AFC West. And if this chatter interests you, check out our conversation from two years ago, or my Chiefs free-agent post.

bankmeister: This past spring you said you were certain the NFL would miss some games thanks to the lockout. Share with me what your thought process was regarding such conviction. What was your foundation for it beyond the dolla’-dolla’ bill?

Old No. 7: At that time, it seemed to me that the owners were steadfast in their resolve to break the union. To be more precise, there was a faction of hard-line asshole owners who appeared ready to sacrifice the season in order to absolutely crush the players with the new collective-bargaining agreement. They wanted to radically alter the previous arrangement and swing hundreds of millions of dollars their way. The union, to their credit, was unwilling to agree to such a horrendously shitty deal. Thus, I thought we’d miss games.

Fortunately for people who like watching football, those hard-line owners were overruled by more reasonable dudes. Make no mistake: the owners still “won” this negotiation. They got shithauls of concessions, and all they had to give up was some mandatory practice time. Owners don’t care about practice time, and coaches weren’t represented at the bargaining table. It was a moderately bad deal for the players, but they’re still rich, and so are the owners, and we got a season. Hoo-ray.

bankmeister: If you feel that the work stoppage hurt teams, how do you quantify it? It seems that this year has seen all-time highs in terms of season-ending injuries, specifically with ACL and Achilles’ heel blowouts. Explore the theory that a lot of these guys simply can’t be trusted to keep in top shape on their own during the off-season.

Old No. 7: The lockout hurt everyone the same, from the standpoint that no one could work out or sign players while it was going on. Sure, this affected some teams more than others. Veteran teams that brought most everyone back were most likely affected the least due to their continuity, whereas younger teams/players and clubs that fundamentally altered their foundations might have seen more disruption. But what’s done is done, and that’s the cost of doing business in the NFL. They needed a new CBA, it’s clear that both sides needed a doomsday deadline to take negotiations seriously, and we got a deal. Do you feel that the lockout’s impact was not distributed evenly among all 32 teams?

bankmeister: No. I think it seems pretty clear that everyone was hurt on an equal level.

Old No. 7: Right. I would absolutely dispute that we’ve seen more injuries than normal this year, specifically more ACLs or Achilles’es. I recall speculation from almost every season in recent memory about this phenomenon, yet when someone actually digs through the data we find out that it’s not true. It’s football, and guys get hurt. Plus, what little I know about physiology tells me that what’s at risk if players are not in top condition are muscle and tendon (like hamstring) pulls, not ligament tears. ACLs are neither in shape nor not in shape; they just are. They get torn from violent, unnatural movements, not a lack of conditioning. My observation is that the vast majority of NFL players keep themselves in premium condition year round, lockout or no, and I haven’t seen any evidence to the contrary that’s anything more than anecdotal.

bankmeister: Interesting. Obviously, it’s too new still, but tell me about your initial thoughts on being a Denver Broncos season-ticket holder.

Old No. 7: Other than the fact that it sucked up a buttload of money I didn’t have, I love it. I’ve attended one game, which was happily the only game Denver won this year. The weather was beautiful, my kids were well-behaved, and going to a game live is nearly always a blast.

And luckily, I was able to recoup most of my costs for the season package. Friends and family purchased some games, and I sold the rest online. In fact, I parted ways with my final tickets just last week. For this I must thank Our Lord and Savior Tim Tebow. His legions of slack-jawed, inbred disciples have created far more demand for Bronco seats.

bankmeister: Slack-jawed and inbred? You have Chiefs fans in the Tebow fan club?

Old No. 7: Zing! I look at these tickets as an investment for my family. Going to a few games a year will become our traditional ritual, and when my kids are spoiled teenagers this will be one more tedious, embarrassing exercise to be tolerated with their loser dad. I can’t wait! Also, it’s possible that in 15 years the Broncos won’t be terrible.

bankmeister: Speaking of losers, when Josh McDaniels was handed a pink slip, you talked about the lack of importance in finding “the right guy” to replace him, that the team’s problems were huge in terms of personnel, that it was more important to get some quality talent in the building, develop the roster, and reassess the coaching situation after a few seasons. Has that philosophy changed at all or remained the same? How?

Old No. 7: I feel exactly the same.

bankmeister: Tell me about John Fox five weeks in, and what’s the deal with Knowshon Moreno? Is he struggling to stay healthy? Does he really only have 10 carries on the season? What’s your confidence level that he’ll bounce back and be a contributor?

Old No. 7: Fox first: He’s coached five games, and the talent level on his team is atrocious. I’m trying to be patient before passing judgment. Allow me to reveal at this time that right now I’m following the Denver Broncos in a much different way than I ever have. I watch the games, and I consume national football media like Pro Football Talk and ESPN, and I text Cecil and a few other friends, and that’s it. I don’t catch any local Denver media outside an occasional random bit on the evening news. I quit reading Bronco blogs. When it became clear that the only theme anyone covering the Broncos this year wanted to pursue was Tim Tebow, I checked out.

So I have a very limited frame of reference when it comes to assessing Fox and this team other than the results. And I have to tell you, it’s pretty nice. You know me, I normally love all the chatter and speculation and talk-radio soap opera, but I simply can’t do the Tebow thing. It’s an affront to logic. I will say that Fox seems competent, and I’m willing to buy into his commitment to rebuild the team via defense and the running game. The roster does not allow this yet, but I’ll give it some time. I’ve heard sporadic complaints about his conservative play-calling, and I’ve heard yahoos call for his job. But I prefer to ignore the ignorant mob.

As for Knowshon, he’s been hurt a lot. He doesn’t get massive, catastrophic injuries, but he’s suffered an endless string of nagging little boo-boos that cause him to miss parts of games and a couple weeks here and there. This makes it impossible to say with any certainty whether he’s good or not, but I’m just going to speculate that he’s fucking terrible. I think he’s a miserable bitch, a horrible football player, and a bad person.

Look, running backs are the most disposable, replaceable commodity in professional football. There are a few that are special, and everyone else is reliant on scheme, health and luck. Knowshon is not special. He’s fast and athletic, and if he found himself in the right situation someday he might be able to put up some fine numbers. But there is absolutely nothing separating him from about a hundred backup RBs in the NFL right now. I mean, he’s been benched in favor of Willis McGahee, who I’m pretty sure played high school football with Bill Cosby.

bankmeister: Wait. What? Miserable bitch? Horrible football player? Bad person? I thought he was (initially) regarded as one of the best selections y’all’ve made in the last six or seven years.

I’m no draftnik (at least not on the level of Cecil), so I have no idea what the conventional wisdom is or was on Knowshon’s pick. I loved his skills, and when he was drafted I loved the idea of what he might do for the Broncos. I do remember McDaniels justifying the selection by talking about how polished of a receiver Knowshon was for a college RB, but McDaniels’ offense rarely throws the ball to running backs. And again, he can’t stay healthy.

Adrian Peterson was a top-10 pick who was worth it. Darren McFadden overcame injuries to get to that point as well. But by and large, NFL teams have abandoned the idea of burning high picks on RBs. They’re also starting to sour on giving elite RBs big extensions. Given the volatility at the position, I think I’m on board with both trends. Knowshon has not been worth the resources spent to acquire him, although I don’t actually think he’s a bad person. He might truly be a swell dude.

Last year, you said something to the effect of, “Kyle Orton is a beacon of light in a steaming cesspool of suck.” We revisited that topic not long ago, and you seemed to still support the notion. In my estimation, his play seemed solid enough through two, maybe two and-a-half weeks. Did his performance fall off enough to warrant the benching, or is it the ol’ gotta-see-what-the-young-kid’s-got kind of thing?

Old No. 7: Because of my rabid distaste for Tebow, I’ve been accused of being an Orton apologist or even a full-fledged Orton fan. I’m neither. I think he got a raw deal from the fans and the media, but he absolutely played himself out of his job. Orton quarterbacked the Broncos at a reasonably high level for two and a half months last year before sucking and giving way to Tebow. This year, he’s been insanely bad. I still think he could help some team out there in a situation where he is not mercilessly booed by his home fans after every incompletion.

bankmeister: Switching gears, you and I seem to have gone in opposite-baseball directions in the past 18 months. I know you’ve always been a superfan, but you seem to have gone to even another level. Is this accurate, or am I misreading?

Old No. 7: I don’t think the intensity of my baseball fandom has increased at all. If anything, the time demands of my rapidly multiplying offspring have made me follow baseball a lot less. What I’ve done is transformed myself into a much more efficient baseball fan through technology and acquired knowledge.

Sabermetrics is part of this because it allows me to cut through 90 per cent of the romanticized garbage in which traditional baseball coverage traffics. Either this team/player/manager/strategic decision works, or he/it doesn’t. And if he/it works, then the data will prove it. This saves time and eliminates a lot of BS.
I’ve also selected a small group of incredibly talented baseball writers to read and follow on Twitter. And thus I can stay on top of the game, even if I don’t have time to watch a ton of actual games. I’d imagine that this is the same approach you apply to your beloved hockey, no?

bankmeister: Yes and no. I mean, the television is almost never on in our house anymore. Our evenings –- thanks, as you mentioned, to the offspring -– are absolutely slammed, and by the time the dishes are done, it’s pillow-thirty. I do follow the NHL’s feed, a few Blues handles, and good old Buccigross, but Blues games haven’t been televised by my cable provider for a couple of seasons now, so I’m pretty much out of the loop, save the occasional rarity.

What did you make of the Boston Globe article regarding your Red Sox?

Old No. 7: The particular article you reference was horrible. It encapsulates everything I dislike about being a Red Sox fan, namely other Red Sox fans, the Boston media, and the suffocating narcissism of the entire enterprise.
The 2011 Red Sox choked, pure and simple. They choked as a team, and every single element of the team contributed to their demise. Every player, every manager and coach, every member of the front office. I get that when things go this wrong after expectations have been raised so high, heads roll. Terry Francona and Theo Epstein are gone, which is insane to me. You know how I feel about managers and how their impact is completely overvalued. That being said, making Francona the scapegoat for this mess is beyond stupid. He’s eminently competent in that position, as is Theo in his. I don’t know how much of their departures were quitting, or getting fired, but it doesn’t matter. They’re scapegoats for the failures of others.

This is why that Globe article was such an abortion of the dying art of journalism. It threw every tired, disproved stereotype of a losing team into a giant shitpile with no attempt to perform a rational autopsy of the season. It was pure gossip and spite, which is fine from the standpoint that millions of people take the Red Sox way too seriously and they’re angry. But to stick that load of crap under the banner of a reputable American publication was embarrassing. Call me a naïve sap, but I still believe a little bit in the integrity of certain media entities. I know you do, too. I hope you would hold your hometown Star to a higher standard than what appears in that story.

Now, I have one burning question for you, and it’s this:

The way you follow the Chiefs is much, much different from how I follow the Broncos. You live in Kansas City, whereas I no longer live in Denver. You’re immersed in discussion of your team, which of course has its benefits and drawbacks. Prior to Tebow’s arrival in Denver, I loved the constant hubbub of Bronco Nation. I love the year-round speculation about the roster, management, the blind homerism, the definitive ignorance of all of us fools. Because we were all in it together.

As I said, I’ve checked out for a while. I think I’ll be back, but I kind of like stepping away from the nutbag echo chamber that is obsessively following my team 24/7/365. I may consider staying.

How much enjoyment do you derive from following the Chiefs? I’m not talking about enjoying the wins or hating the losses, I’m talking about The Process. What you read in the Star, what you listen to on the radio, what you inhale on the blogs, what you ingest from the dude at the grocery store or the bar. Does all of this make your Chief fandom more or less pleasant?

bankmeister: Bear with me while I draw a long, non-parallel answer up for you: I’m always behind the times. When the world went CD and DVD, I clutched my cassette and VHS tapes as if they were my last possession. I still own zero high-definition televisions, I don’t D.V. the Rs, and my phone, while perfectly functional, is not of the smart variety. There are always setbacks –- some more significant than others –- that go with this stubbornness, but I always seem to hold out for some reason. I tell you that to tell you this: Tweets come to my phone in SMS form when I select this option from particular followers.

By and large, this methodology might be the biggest love/hate relationship I’ve ever experienced. It’s a constant juggle to unselect the phone option on followers that tweet a lot, but not a lot of their tweets are of significant, immediate interest. My latest example would be the almighty Joe Posnanski. Since he moved, he’s no longer talking Royals or Chiefs, or anything of real interest to me. In short, he’s tweeting MLB playoffs, Penn State football, Apple products, and commercials, and it’s driving me insane. In fact, I may, once we wrap this up, unclick that icon on his page.

As I’m sure yours does, too, my phone buzzes a lot. I get texts from friends and family, radio stations, and the SMS tweets. Therefore, many many times since joining Twitter, I’ve wanted to smash the thing on the ground. For example, at that Broncos @ Chiefs game a couple years ago where Denver scored like 17 touchdowns to our two field goals and our wives drank eight liters of Schnapps, I was following your boy Whitlock at the time, and I think he tweeted 20-plus times during that contest.

The point is that I love Twitter, but I have purposely refrained from purchasing a smart phone because I make unhealthy commitments to things that jazz me up, i.e. this blog when we started it, Sports-Talk Radio, Twitter, etc., and then I struggle to adjust. Right now, I don’t really read the Chiefs blogs anymore, but I’ll follow a link if it sounds appealing on Twitter, and I definitely take in every word from the guys at the Star. Also, the Sports Talk stuff has sort of spun out of control for me. These days they announce what times they’ll be doing certain segments and I make significant commitments to try and catch them.

The worst part is that they usually drive me bananas. Translation: I almost always disagree and find myself needing to drive to the nearest playground so’s I can punch a few kids in the neck. The Sports-Talk relationship is just like the Twitter-SMS thing: I might like it a little better if I could find the right balance.

To finally get to an answer, I freaking hate it. Everyone’s an expert. Everyone’s “leaking” stuff. Everyone knows that if the Chiefs would only do things their way, they’d already have a Lombardi being wheeled out to them on a pedestal. It’s absurd, and frankly, nothing sounds better than what you’ve described as your current regimen for Bronco consumption.

Old No. 7: And what is your current take on Todd Haley and Scott Pioli? I’m not asking what the consensus in KC is and how you agree or disagree with that consensus. I’m asking if you think these guys are the right guys for the job and if you think they’ll stick long-term.

bankmeister: It’s really hard to parse through that thought process while avoiding the consensus, but here goes: I like Scott Pioli’s approach, and more importantly, I really liked it when he got here. Right now it’s tough because a lot of his draft picks haven’t panned out, and as I let that thought out, I wonder whether or not that’s simply the case with front offices across the league. I mean, I guess it’d be cool if you had a formula like quarterback rating or one of your sabermetric deal-y-bobs that could translate successful-pick ratios into quantitative form. In the end, much more time is needed. I really can’t see Clark Hunt firing Pioli anytime soon unless things get wicked ugly. And more importantly in my book, I don’t think Pioli should fire Haley anytime soon.

I’ve really come to appreciate his style of coaching. The number of key players that have really thrived under him in two seasons and change is admirable, and he’s got a great sense of humor, too. Also, I can relate to a guy who fails triumphantly to keep his emotions in check. Lord knows I’ve done that a few hundred times only to recognize later how stupid I looked.

Back to you for the wrap: Everyone’s hoping that they’ll win “The Price is Right” showcase that comes with Andrew Luck. Is it too early for you to be thinking 2012? Do you want your team to nab this kid? The good old Stanford Redux? Or are there other guys in the NCAA that would equally suit you? Do you have faith in Fox, etc. to have a solid draft in April?

Old No. 7: Yes, I want Luck. I have very little doubt that he’ll be at least a high-quality NFL QB, and there’s a strong chance he’ll be a franchise player.
There are simply too many moving parts, however, to actually plan or wish for that to become reality. The Broncos would need to lose an awful lot of football games, which, of course, they’re doing anyway. Other teams would have to lose even more. Luck could get hurt. A meteor could strike the earth’s surface. There’s a lot that can happen between now and April. But assuming the current status quo stays in place, yeah, I’m all like Suck For Luck.
Read more

Wednesday Whatnot: The Great Debate

About four months ago, the House of Georges celebrated two years of existence. It was no big deal. We didn't send out invites, hire a clown, or bake any cakes. The date was more so a note upon which the three of us -- aptly named the Iron Triangle -- could sit back and think, Have we really been cranking out these posts for 24 months? The ones we stress and argue over? The ones hardly anyone reads? Yes, indeed, we had. A funny thing happened a few months in, however, and I'd like to share it with you now. Right here. Today. It can be summed up in one succinct word: obsession.

What I mean is, I really, really liked what we were doing. I loved posting. I pored with hunger pangs of verbiage over every word my colleagues wrote. I digressed, frantically trying to devour every word published on the blogosphere. I petitioned other established bloggers for link exchanges. I fumbled hopelessly with teaching myself codes and HTML. I procrastinated on every graduate-school assignment I had. I barely saw my fiancee, and I neglected my then senior citizen dog. I wanted to expand, build a network of blogs, and my first idea...

...had something to do with Andy Dufresne from "The Shawshank Redemption." It had quite a bit to do with dedication, and a lot to do with Pete Rose. I called it Letters to Bud. Dufresne wanted a library for the prison in the movie. He wrote to politicians once a week for some two to five years until they just quit ignoring him, and they unloaded money for building and books for shelving upon him, and the Shawshank Library was a dream no more.

I wanted the lifetime ban from baseball cast upon Rose -- to which he agreed -- by Major League Baseball Commissioner A. Bartlett Giamatti lifted. Let's just say I got my signals a little crossed. For starters, I dove into this vanity side project thinking of it as a team effort. I made phone calls. I sent e-mails. I texted. I thought we were in like the proverbial, only when I pronounced that we were "going streaking" straight to the 31st floor of Park Avenue in New York, I looked behind me and I was the only naked dude inquiring about KFC's hours of operation. The other miswiring was that I incorrectly remembered that Dufresne wrote a letter a day to see his goal through. Mind you, I not only posted these letters on the aforelinked GoreNets, I actually printed a hard copy, signed it with my real name, stamped an envelope, and sent those little scrolls to my pen pal Bud.

And mind you, I got married, moved into a new house, and honeymooned a mere two months prior. Weird thing is, the wife was on board with the thing. My in-laws were like, "Go, son. You write your letters." Or something. People started asking me when I'd get to work what today's letter was about. And the thing took off. I had a head of steam about me with the gig. Cecil said I was nuts but to go for it. Old No. 7 envisioned Selig interns and a famous press conference, all resulting in a House of Georges hookers-and-cocaine party. So I ran with it. For 44 days.

I truly was in over my head thinking that I could keep it and the House of Georges contributions rolling, and work, and sleep, and be a husband. And drink heavily. I was drinking fairly heavily then, so the ol' early-bird-knocks-out-the-posts mantra, uh, didn't exist. It was fun, though. I don't regret it one bit. If I can say two things about it, they are that I tried, and I was sincere. But then I started getting into the Dowd report. I was researching old USA Today articles. I was purchasing literature on the guy. My wife was still on board, but she didn't care for the fact that I was basically filling the trash can with toner cartridges like boogers into a morning Kleenex, and them things ain't cheap. I hit a point where I was studying too much to have time to post, and the wheels came off.

Since then, Rose's name has come up inside the House of Georges a time or two. I stumble across something, I'll link to it, or write about it. My feelings about the ban haven't changed, and to be honest, it kind of took me by surprise the other day when I discovered that the 20-year anniversary of the ban was approaching. I couldn't believe it. I thought, What if I'd kept the Letters to Bud going out? Would it have made a difference? And then some chatter arose about the whole deal. Hank Aaron came out and endorsed Rose. Folks scooted to the edge of their seats. Bloggers came out of their moms' basements (in their underwear) to see if there was anything in the papers. The SportsTalk Radios buzzed. Finally, Selig came out of his wormhole like the cops at a high school party:

"Go on home, you damn kids," nobody quoted him saying. "Take your damn Hamm's and your hip-hop with you, and stay the hell offa my lawn."

And things fizzled.

I was informed this morning, however, about this blog, which I've never read before today, and about this post, which Craig Calcaterra wrote on Monday. It's sort of about Mike Schmidt coming out and saying, in not so many words, that "20 years is enough punishment. Let's lift the ban." But mostly about the author of the post disagreeing with that sentiment by saying, "The headline to Schmidt's piece asks if 20 years is enough. My answer: no, not really."

Now mind you, I'd never read this Calcaterra cat prior to today, and mind you, I never will again. For my money, he's a gosh-darned buffoon. The post, however, was heavily commented upon, and so today, he offered this post, which revisits his post from two days ago, and offers new(ish) insight, provided by none other than our own Old No. 7. In a nutshell, Seven, in his assessment of our recent Hitters feature, took, as he is prone to do, every opportunity to belittle Rose, and make him look like a child molester. Kinda. Calcaterra, buffoon that he is, loved it, and linked to our feature. Picture, if you will, buck-toothed Mike Shanhan, on the sidelines, proclaiming to a horse-faced John Elway, "I'm so proud of you." Oh glorious day.

So if my colleage and his new best pal are the Dark Side in the battle of the Rose Force, I've got myself and my homey Joe Posnanski bringing up Team Good. Some excerpts from the piece:

"Here it is, 20 years after he agreed to a lifetime suspension for gambling on baseball (and, he would finally admit, his own team), and the debate about him is as raw as it ever was. Screaming. Insults. Good journalists such as ESPN's Buster Olney will call Rose 'nothing less than a lowlife,' and excellent writers such as Fox's Mark Kriegel will call him a 'skell' -- which seems awfully harsh. It isn't like Rose mugged people. As far as I know, he hasn't killed anybody or kidnapped anybody or betrayed his nation or bilked senior citizens out of their social security. He bet on his team. He lied about it."

"While writing my book The Machine about the 1975 Cincinnati Reds, excerpted in this week's Sports Illustrated, I was astonished that virtually every player on that team shared a story about the time that Rose said a few kind words when they were in a slump, or the time Rose picked up their check when they weren't making any money, or the time Rose invited them to his house for dinner. Will McEnaney remembers Rose giving him shoes. Gary Nolan remembers Rose believing in him when he was hurting. Joe Morgan remembers Rose pushing him and inspiring him into becoming the Hall of Fame player he became. Ken Griffey remembers Rose being a guy who treated him with respect from the start."

"So how do we get beyond all that and discuss one of the most talked about baseball questions of the last two decades: Should Pete Rose be in the Hall of Fame? I think the question needs the word 'should,' not 'will,' in it, because honestly I don't think he will get in. For Rose to get inducted into the Hall of Fame, two basic things would have to happen:...One, he would need to be reinstated somehow...Two -- even if he WAS reinstated, he would need 75 percent approval from either the Baseball Writers Association of America or the Veteran's Committee (made up of living Hall of Famers)."

From here Posnanski cites but a few of the hundreds of things that have been said against Rose, reasons for keeping the ban in place, reasons for making sure that you, the American public, the lover of baseball, the model of good-versus-evil for any and all children to learn from, understand that Rose committed baseball's cardinal sin.

"And so it goes ... this has been repeated so many times that people have simply come to accept it as undeniable fact. Betting on baseball is the cardinal sin.

Only ... it isn't. Or anyway, nobody REALLY BELIEVES what Pete Rose did is baseball's cardinal sin. If we are using 'cardinal sin' to mean the worst possible thing a baseball player can do or, to be more precise, 'the sin that condemns a person's soul to eternal Hell,' well, I can think of about 200 things you can do on a baseball field worse than gamble on a game."

"But the real point is this: Even under the gambling umbrella, what Pete Rose did is not even CLOSE to baseball's cardinal sin. I would think that taking a large sum of money from gamblers and then purposely playing lousy enough that your team will lose the World Series, yes, THAT might be called baseball's cardinal sin. Nobody suggests Pete Rose did that. Betting on your team to lose and then going 0-for-5 in a playoff game and committing an error with the winning run on third, yes, THAT might be baseball's cardinal sin. Nobody suggests Pete Rose did that either. Purposely performing poorly on the field during a regular season game in order to cash in on bets, yes, even that might be baseball's cardinal sin. Nobody suggest Pete Rose did that either.

Seems to me the cardinal sin would be to AFFECT THE OUTCOME OF GAMES in order to profit on it -- either by gambling yourself or taking money from gamblers.

What Pete Rose DID do -- or at least what we KNOW he did -- is bet on the Cincinnati Reds to win while he was manager of the team. Did he do more? Maybe. But this is what we know and the Dowd Report is clear in saying "No evidence was discovered that Rose bet against the Cincinnati Reds." In 20 years of digging and pinching you would think that if Rose indeed bet against the Reds at any point it would have come out. All you can know is what you know. I think it's probably fair to say that Rose bet on his team to win."

He mentions a series of polls that were up on his blog a few months ago, results from which he deduces that "many of us are good at being against the CONCEPT of gambling on baseball, but not so sure of ourselves when it comes to the particulars."

And finally:

"And there's something about forgiveness in here too. One thing you hear people say is that Pete Rose hasn't EARNED our forgiveness. It's hard to argue the point. Over the last 20 years, he has been brash and dishonest and indiscreet and arrogant. But there's something else. Pete Rose made a lot of people happy playing baseball. He inspired a lot of people to try harder. He cracked more hits than anyone who ever played the game. And anyway, I didn't think forgiveness was supposed to be earned. I thought forgiveness was supposed to be given. I thought that was the whole point."

I'm not about to get on a number-14 soap box here. I've done that once before. I was up there for 44 days, and I, too, think about the notion of foregiveness.
Read more

Baseball in the Daytime: Hump Day Thievery

I am, for the second time this week, stepping in for Old No. 7 in the day-baseball rotation so's that he may complete this week's installment of The HoG 25. On Monday, when I was ungratefully accused of "stealing beats," we had a pair of National League games. Today, it's an American League two-fer.

Now, in order to keep the theme alive, I should attempt to analyze a few things that Old No. 7 has already communicated to me, things that I imagine he would touch on were he in the BitD seat this morning. The first is the ManChild (Editor's Note: Fuck you, Sean Kemp. Fuck you right in the face.) Seth Smith. He, along with other Rockies, i.e. Ryan Spilborghs, and Troy Tulowitzki have come up huge in the past four days. And their pitching continues to look good, too. But, really, it's always been about SethfuckingSmith. Look at his numbers. Well, not all of them. Don't look at batting average. That's for retards. Oh Pee Ess. Now that's the shizzle: he's at .904. Nice, nice. He's slugging .511, has 11 jacks, has only struck out five more times than he's walked, and his BB number, by the way, isn't bad: 37 in 237 ABs. Eleven doubles and three triples, with 35 RsBI? Not too shabby.

Anyway, the Rockies are now two games back of Los Angeles, and it just so happens that their next two contests are at Coors Field, against Los Dodgers de Humberto. If I were Seven, I'd now insert seven other paragraphs that nobody reads. Instead, I'll take us into the jump by saying it'd be rad if Colorado could go into September with the N.L. West lead.

Cleveland @ Kansas City, 1:10 Central: Well, the Royals won a game last night, and stopped a five-game skid, so that was nice, not to mention Zack Greinke's new franchise-record 15 strikeouts. So KC and the Tribe will play a rubber match today at the K. Lefty Aubrey Huff and righty Luke Hochevar are your hurlers. Both are .500. Both could use better E.R.A.s. I heard an interesting tidbit last night, when the Royals were still 47-77: The KC bullpen has given up less than four runs 47 times this year; they've given up four or more in 77 games. Nutty. Anyway, catch today's action live at the Truman Sports Complex, on DirecTV 721, or on XM 176.

Detroit @ Los Anaheim, 2:35: It's righty-on-lefty action again, this time in the form of Edwin Jackson for the visitors, Joe Saunders for the home team. Both are plus-.500 as starters for first-place teams. The Tigers and the Angels have both won six of their last 10, and look to keep distancing themselves from clubs like Texas, Chicago, and Minnesota. DirecTV has this one on 722, 723. XM says 177's a good frequency.

That's your A.L. two-fer for today. Buy your neighbor some peanuts and Cracker Jack, and enjoy the game.
Read more

Saturday Studmuffins: ESPN's Bill Simmons

Old No. 7 tipped me off to the wisely weirdish thoughts of Bill Simmons. Apparently, the Sports Guy hadn't "emptied his mailbag" yet this calendar year. When he did, there were a few doozies in it. Okay, one. Pick up what I'm puttin' down after the jump.

The topic to which I refer came via this post, and I while I don't aim to take it as Gospel, I do accept it, in that it's teeming with positivism, something we haven't had as a theme for Kansas City pro sports for far too long. And yes, Rustoleum, Kansas City has pro sports. I know you're reading and were dying to make that comment. Eat shit, you smashed sack of assholes.

Back to Mr. Simmons:

"By the way, listen to Monday's B.S. Report if you want to hear me make the case for the 2009 Chiefs as a phenomenal bet at 100-to-1 to win the Super Bowl, thanks to my theory that the success of one team can become a sports colonic for that city's fans, turn them from "glass half-empty" to "glass half-full" and ignite every other team in the city. I see the Royals kicking off things by becoming this year's 2008 Rays, followed by an NBA team moving to K.C. in June or July. Then in September, with the pennant race heating up and K.C. fans already delirious, the Chiefs will charge out of the gate with four straight wins … although there's a sobering moment when Joe Posnanski's head tragically explodes as he's crafting a column trying to put everything in perspective. Just be prepared. Wait, you don't believe me?"

Jackpot. Count it.
Read more

Sunday Sermon: Is This Like the Fourth Time It's Been Sunday This Week?

Well, we haven't exactly been post-tastic this week, but everyone's schedule's been a bit screwy. While it would appear that the good games happened yesterday -- nothing like a 3-3 Dolphins/Ravens first half -- there have been some interesting things take place since we last checked in to articulate our thoughts and opinions on the Mike Shanahan firing. After the jump, we'll talk playoff football, the Winter Classic, and more. Please join.

In the universe of things miscellany, I'm a sucker for a good commercial, and the first to criticize a bad one. I happen to enjoy this one:



Now, if interpreting this ad as a prequel to a Manniams porn shoot is wrong, then believe me when I say that I don't want to be right. I will be ready and waiting to pirate that clip.

Regarding the New Year's Day hockey contest at Wrigley Field, I gotta say that it was conceptually awesome. I say conceptually because the outcome sucked, as all Red Wings victories do, but the venue looked spectacular, the fans appeared to really enjoy themselves, and after last year's amazing game at Ralph Wilson Stadium, it would be hard to imagine a better television rating in 2009, but it jumped 12 percent. My prediction for next year is a Rangers-Islanders contest at the new Yankees stadium. Perhaps those won't be the teams, but I feel pretty solid about the location. But enough about hockey, right?

Yesterday's NFL playoff games were awesome. Will Leitch's buzzsaw emerged victorious over Mike Smith, Matty Ice, and the Atlanta Falcons. The contest started strong with a surprising dose of Edgerrin James, and on one drive in particular, James and Brenda Warner's husband collaborated on a flea-flicking touchdown pass -- that culminated with an incredible Larry Fitzgerald catch -- to really set the pace of the game. The Arizona defense did a fantastic job of containing Michael Turner (42 yards), and ultimately, got themselves the win. Ken Wisenhunt's Cardinals established themselves as the greatest show on removable turf, and acquired many a bandwagoneer, myself included. It was a great appetizer to Saturday evening's main course: Marmalard versus Chesning.

(Update: The half has ended, and the Ravens are up 13-3, largely thanks to two Chad Pennington picks. The CBS Halftime Crew just interviewed Jeff Fisher, and showed a great clip of Bill Cowher (then with the Eagles) tackling Fisher (with the Bears) on a punt return play. Fisher, the punt returner, had his leg broken by Cowher, a play Fisher jokingly called dirty, and Cowher responded by saying that they were both "non-athletes; That's why we were on the punt teams.")

I asked Cecil and Seven how a Broncos fan possibly roots in this contest, given that a) though Denver has somehow had New England's number in recent years, the Colts have regularly destroyed them, and b) the Chargers-Broncos rivalry has, in the last two years, become the best in the AFC West, and among the tops in the conference. Seven, once Chesning finally got to the Super Bowl and won it, has gone on record, and admitted that his hate for the elder Manning brother has recently diminished. Add to that that he now hates the Chargers more, as "these things go in cycles," quoth the Hootster. Cecil, however, opted to root for a bomb to be detonated at Qualcomm, but one that only maims both signal callers.

Personally, I rooted for the Chargers. This was so for three reasons: 1) I'm tired of seeing Peyton in the post-season, 2) I'd like to see poor ol' Norv Turner have a few critics get off his back, and 3) the way that Whale's Vagina came back to claim the division from Denver, and vindicate HochuliGate, has got to be one of the best NFL stories in recent years. And by "recent years," I mean ever.

Anyway, much like the Kansas Jayhawks 2008 championship game, I didn't really expect to see this game get tied and go to overtime as the final fourth-quarter minutes approached. When it did, I was pumped for more football, and a Charger chance at Colt elimination. Darren "Webster Coleman" Sproles ripped off 328 yards in quite the performance, and Marmalard hit Gates with key passes in OT, concluding a great day of football, (Editor's Note: save the post-game interview with Rivers; that was quite painful.) which is much more than I can say for this Dolphins game. The best aspect of it thus far is the Ravens defense putting vicious hit after vicious hit on the Miami offense. (Update: Hey look: As I typed that the Ravens clobbered Patrick "Wayne" Cobbs and he coughed it up.)

Once this one's in the books, we'll get Philly-Minnesota. Snore. Now, I'd like to see the Eagles get the win there, just to silence the Viking hype. Brad Childress does not appear to be a great coach. Obviously, Adrian Peterson is an animal, but the quarterback situation there is a joke, and Jared Allen can help himself to a spoonful of bloody stool.

(Update: Mike Cox's least favorite player Le'Ron McClain just scored.)

And now that this game has gotten even more exciting, I'll conclude this random rant, and really not pay attention to it.

(Note: Ed Reed is a freaking animal.)
Read more

Baseball in the Daytime: 7-07-08

Normally, this gig is Old No. 7's. On occasion, Cecil or I will fill in for Seven if his boss is crackin' the proverbial whip a bit too hard, but this is his turf, and I'm blatantly invading it today. I've good reason, though. As I mentioned here, I'm certain that at this very moment, he's frantically putting together an All-Star post. And truth be told, his arthritis can't handle the keyboard work necessary for two posts in one 24-hour period, so just call me the giving tree. On a random note, how freaking bad ass was/is Shel Silverstein? I can't think of any author/illustrator that influenced my young reader mind more than he did. Anyway, I'm also helping out Seven because there's only one contest on tap today, and it features two clubs that don't interest him. See what I mean after the jizzy.

Kansas City @ Tampa Bay, 11:40 a.m.: Okay, I lied. They, if only today, interest Seven in that a Royals win would help his Red Sox narrow the gap between them and the first-place Rays. Thus today, your usual BitD author actually roots for his whipping boy. Never in the annals of written baseball coverage history has one man so frequently ridiculed one club. The countless knee-slappers likening the Royals to a non-big-league squad, the piles of jokes about how their games count slightly less than all of the MLB others, the hilarious assertions that they should move to the minors, or sign Barry Bonds, or whatever the flavor of the day is, never, ever, gets old.

Therefore, allow me to tell you that at the aforementioned Central time, Gil Meche and his Kansas City Royals take the field at the Trop for one last chance to nab a victory from the Rays. In a match of righties, Meche battles Matt Garza who brings seven victories and a 3.47 ERA to the mound, while number 55 has one less win, one and-a-quarter points more to his ERA, but a 24-count edge in the strikeout department. Meche has been historically bad against the Rays, and that was when they were terrible. Garza is coming off a solid performance against the Red Sox, which was after his first ever complete game.

While today's lone reacharound match doesn't hold tremendous weight regarding the season-ending standings, its common element for both clubs is time. For the Royals, time is running out for them to fulfill my year-old prediction of threatening to play .500 ball. Now, they're in a better spot this year than they were nearing last year's All-Star break, but no longer can they afford to ruin hard-earned wins like the two they fought tooth and nail for in the Baltimore series by getting dominated in games like the first and the third of this series with Tampa Bay. For the Rays, they've got nothing but time working for them, and in their favor. Their rotation has been pretty solid, and their bats only seem to keep getting hotter. If they can build on their five-game edge over the Sox, and the Yankees continue to play mediocre ball, the East will almost effortlessly be theirs.

Anyway, those listening from work in the KC area can tune in to 610 on the AM dial, while Tampa-St. Pete residents can crank the knob to either 1250 or 680. Satelliters can zero in on the 178 frequency on the XMs. That's if for this morning. Get out there and kick some devilless ass, Royals!
Read more

Tradition Tuesday: Nothing Worse Than Saying "Bye"

The rough focus of this blog is the rivalry between the Kansas City Chiefs (heralded by Bankmeister) and the Denver Broncos (championed by Cecil and Old No. 7). It may seem unfair that it's two versus one, but once KC gets that second Super Bowl win we'll even out the delegation.

Seven years ago we started The Tradition, in which Bronco fans travel out to the Truman Sports Complex with their team, and Chief lovers return to the Rocky Mountains with theirs. We tailgate, we talk massive amounts of shit, our wives are occasionally assaulted by rival fans, and we almost always watch the visiting team lose. It's a grand old time.

Here at the HoG, we're going to keep The Tradition going with Tradition Tuesday--a weekly state-of-the-rivalry address.

If there's one thing I can't flippin' stand about football season, it's the bye week. It's sort of a semi-hypocritical thing, right? We all cherish our days off, but don't want our teams' players to get any r and r. I say "semi" because most of us --at least the HoG, anyway -- don't play a game for a living, or have to buy bigger homes in which to store our countless piles of dollars. Philosophy aside though, it sucks. The early, afternoon, night and MNF games chug along and none of it involves the only team that matters: mine. So heading into bye-week Sunday, I typically make all of these grandiose plans for projects around the house, none of which get done because -- shocker -- I wind up watching football all day anyway.

And, shoot. By the time MNF airs, one day from when my team takes the field again has already been chiseled away. That, of course, only leads to the worry of how they'll be coming off the bye. Insert any of the season-appropriate questions: Will the momentum of the pre-bye win carry into the post-bye game? Did all the players fly off to various parts of the country to eat drugs and guzzle booze? Did they catch some of the gift that keeps on giving (Editor's Note: see Ron Mexico and Lima Time. Be-LIEVE it!?)

Course, guys like Seven'd say that momentum doesn't exist and all of those factors are horse dookie; get out there and play the game. I, however, cannot. I will not. Prime example: The Kansas City Chiefs, in the 2006 playoffs, take almost three full quarters to get a first down. By the end of the "contest," they'd netted one touchdown and a two-point conversion. Fast forward to this year where they lost all four pre-season games plus the opener and week two. Now, obviously, a lot of time passed in that span, but one must at least consider such an interesting intangible. Conversely, Jason Elam, after his week off, snapped his losing streak and notched another W for Shanny on Sunday night.

And that brings me back to the task at hand: The Tradition. Yes. The Broncos are right back in the AFC West thick of things. In an astonishing bucking of all trends, they'll have consecutive prime-time matchups when they host Brett Favre and the Green Bay Packers on Monday night (Note: Wow. Look at this! This is really neat! They'll have two more Monday night games and a late-season Thursday nighter, too. More than a quarter of their season on national television, a genuine reaping of the rewards for not making the playoffs. Amazing!). And then, they'll tickle the little nephew with Jon 10-win Kitna and the Lions, just before rolling into Arrowhead. This matchup will be the first time in four years that the Broncos have traveled to KC first, which, if superstition is like momentum, may affect their preposterously atrocious winter record at the 'Head. On the other hand, the Chiefs haven't won at InAmVesCapCo since the Iron Triangle members were all single, and by "single," I mean not wed, Cecil's wife.

That said, all you HoGnation loyalists had best be ready to geek out with us here on these old IntraNets. Obviously, by "geek out," I mean that I'll post a solid five better-than-stellar posts, while Seven cranks out a solid post-World-Series orgasm paragraph and Cecil continues to find a random picture to pretty up his monthly appearance. Enough about us, though. Our teams have some interesting developments going on.

Apparently, this guy told Phil Simms and Jim Nantz that he'd be embarrassed if he told them all of the things physically wrong with him that are results of six weeks of football. I say six because he told them this the day before he went out and got tossed around like Lindsay Lohan's poon at a rehab clinic, courtesy of Warren Sapp and the Raiders D. Incredibly unsavory. Simms and Nantz kept talking about the wind during Sunday's game, and I couldn't stop thinking about the countless hours I've spent tossing around the ol' pigskin. I was unable to finger a single memory where my pass was wobbly and eight yards off the mark because of the wind. I love Damon. He's been great for us in 15 games over the last two years. He looked beat up on Sunday, yet managed to get out of some serious jams and hit guys for big plays. I just hope our O-line can get it together and get this guy some protection.

This guy? Oh, yeah. He's back. Granted, he had a couple of negative plays in Oakland, but he also hammered out a crucial eight-yard run late in the game. To each and every one out there that said he'd never make it, that it was all about money, help yourself to a warm bowl of hangover diarrhea. Never doubt three-one. In other news, party in Denver: T-Hizzie's got the hooch; Brandon Marshall will drive and supply the liquor. Woo-hoo! And of course there's Sergeant Shenanigans himself. Yup. He was able to stave off the kharmic fate of the totally legal timeout. Thanks, buddy, for being so smart that you can't even cheat right.

God bless us.
Read more

Dumpiness of Ortiz, Bonds Cause Bits of Baseball States To Flake Off Into Oceans

Well, not really. I only liked the image (courtesy of the Deadspins, via Strange Maps) and saw it as an opportunity to put pretty colors on our page and make fun of Old No. 7's affinity. Read more

Tradition T-Thursday: Calling Out Pro Bloggers

The mighty forces of the Deadspins posted this Kansas City Chiefs "preview" yesterday. While funny, packed with detail and tremendously long, it previewed zero in regards to the upcoming 2007 Chiefs campaign. It did, however, offer a funny snippet that, for those of you that don't feel like reading Dostoyevskyesque shpeels in the morning (or ever), I'll share with you in a moment. Suffice it to say that the gist of the thing was to re-cap the awesomeness of Kansas City miraculously reaching the post-season last year, a feat that Chiefs fans "deserved," says the preview's author.



Yeah. Deserved. Albeit, he meticulously threw in all of the Chiefs' token moments of misery dating back to those last, now-archaic 1993-94 playoff victories, he failed to analyze this season and instead re-capped one bizarre 2006 day of the professional football. The day (New Year's Eve) required: a Chiefs victory over Jacksonville; a Titans loss to New England; a Cincinnati defeat at the hands of Pittsburgh; and an evening demise of the Denver Broncos via the San Francisco 49ers. Tall order to say the least. When three of four had happened, the token, and arguably most far-fetched, match was viewed by anxious Kansas City fans and likely confident fans of Bronco Nation. Thus, the peak of said preview:

"Two giants felled, one to go. The biggest, nastiest, smelliest giant of them all - the hated Broncos, led by the Ferret himself, Mike Shanahan. The most heinous bunch of illegal-cut-blocking, salary-cap-skirting, John-Elway-worshiping dirtbags ever assembled. We hate these guys even more than we envy their two Super Bowl wins. And now all they had to do was beat a second-division team from the NFC at Mile High (did I mention their unfair home-field advantage?) and they'd once again walk off with their arms around our dream.

"Yeah, we don't like those guys."

Good times. Only it wasn't over there. Said previewer rambled on and wrapped up without the most miniscule of mention of either of the following: Croyle/Huard; the return of the Priest; Larry Johnson's holdout; Jared Allen's (redacted) suspension; the sleeper defense of the conference; a virtually impossible to decipher offensive line; a first-round-draft-pick, badly needed wide receiver without a contract; and a bloach loaded with good intentions but suspect in actions and words.

This is a team that's tough to preview. It's easy for Cecil to drop his token annual, now decade-old jokes about whoever our quarterback (especially since he must daily engage in fisticuffs with Old No. 7 over who'll slob the booze-soaked knob of this guy) is. It's typical for TLR to get his pessimistic, armchair-head-coach panties in a bunch over why we should trade LJ, why we should fire Mike Solari. And it's expected of all the four-lettered networks to pick the Chiefs to finish behind the Denver Broncos and San Diego Chargers. It is not, however, professional to not preview a team in a preview.

Allow me to show you a decent preview. Yeah. It's mine, and it's nearly four months old now, but I ain't changin' a thing. The quarterback issue will only be an issue for three more weeks; Herm will know by the end of the second pre-season game that, hey, fuck all this playforthefuture shit, Damon's our guy this year who his gunslinger will be. Peterson will cough up Hunt dollars for LJ; Priest makes the team and contributes; the D is stellar; Bowe will be late and his early-season games will be affected, but he'll come on strong mid-season; the line will be consistent enough to keep Huard healthy; thus an 11-5 record and consequential playoff (playoff?) berth. That's a preview. Put it in your pipe and smoke it, Cheech.
Read more

Baseball in the Breaktime: The Hit Versus the Homerun

Editor's Note: With so little head-to-head baseball, yet so much ado about the game in general going on this week, it's time Cecil and I talk baseball again. This exchange bounces around the notion of Bud Selig's perpetual flailing, conspiracies surrounding A. Bartlett Giamatti, Barry Bonds stealing bases, and of course, Pete Rose.

Bankmeister: I figured our House of Georges project was kicking so much ass that I'd create another one, the sole purpose of which would be to monitor the actual letters I'm sending to baseball's handsome commissioner every week day. It's a very young project, but one I enjoy and firmly believe in, as Pete Rose's contributions to the game had a remarkable impression on my young baseball-oriented mind. Old No. 7 says he's squarely on the fence about Rose's situation/debacle. He says there's no doubt he's Hall material, but he's made a small business (with income) for himself by showering the world of baseball with propaganda regarding his non-election to Cooperstown, not to mention he's acted like an ass for most of his post-baseball adult life. What's your stance on Rose, the ban, the Hall? How does it compare to the Barry Bonds dilemna of today?

Cecil: I'm not gonna lie, Chief, I think you've bitten off a massive hunk with these letters to Bud. Soon, the reading public will start demanding that you live up to the missive-per-day conceit, and you're not gonna have any time to ogle internet boobies, dodge the chores your lovely new bride is assuredly laying on you or even shut your eyes for a few blessed minutes of that sweet, sweet darkness. But I see that you're serious.



And serious for a good cause. Unlike our pal Ol' No. 7, I'm with you on Rose. To my mind, the only thing keeping Rose out of the Hall is his own unendurably crappy personality. Baseball writers and executives loved Bart Giamatti. Rose lying to St. Bart was enough by itself to make a lot of those minds up, and he's only made his own case worse since. That hamfisted semi-mea culpa was just embarrassing.

Betting on the game is serious business, for sure, and I'm not suggesting that Rose be allowed back into the league -- which, ironically enough, is what he really cares about, so he can get another managerial job -- just that a Baseball Hall of Fame without Pete Rose in it is a sham, a piece of revisionist history.

I've said it before on the House: Ty Cobb stabbed a night watchman, climbed into the seats to assault fans, slept with a black orphan under his bed for "luck." Tris Speaker not only bet on baseball but likely consciously affected the outcome of games he played. Both are in the Hall.

I could be wrong, but I doubt that there's any evidence Rose ever tanked anything. He did lie about his original statements, yes, and the resultant miasma surrounding the situation is pretty effin' gamey--but call me naive. Tanking doesn't seem to be in his nature. This is, after all, the guy who earned the sarcastic sobriquet "Charlie Hustle" from Whitey Ford and Mickey Mantle because he ran out groundouts in spring training. Even a hardcore gambler bets with his own innate prejudices. My gut feeling is that Pete Rose would not ever have bet against himself, and thus, his team.

Bonds' situation is a tad different, for two reasons: his cheating is rooted in substance abuse and it took place on the field. While gamblers and gambling abuses have been present in baseball for decades -- and who knows what 1880s-1920s stats are whacked out because of it? -- the notion of our game and its sacred records being vulnerable to Better Athletics Through Chemistry jabs us in a different place. It feels more dishonest, even if, when it's all counted, it really isn't.

I know, it's a hell of a hair to split, but for Christ's sake, this is baseball. Not everything has to make sense. And, even though I feel what Barry (and Sammy and Mark and Rafael) did is a bigger affront to the integrity of the sport, there's no way The Head ain't going to the Hall. He was bound for a bust long before he took his first 'roid...and now that I think about it, that almost pisses me off more than anything. He could have broken Aaron's record without any of it, but did anyway, supposedly because a simple case of professional jealousy. Jesus. What a waste.

B: You bring up some awesome points. Bart Giamatti was quite a figure. He got Rose to "agree" on the lifetime ban. Here's what's odd to me: Giamatti sets up the ban, and Rose allegedly agrees to it. Nine days later, the commish's ticker explodes and he croaks in office, opening the path for his newly appointed deputy commissioner (a previously non-existent job) Fay Vincent, Jr. to step in, continue his pivotal role in crucifying Rose, then resign three years later. In comes Bud Selig, who gets appointed to some random title that might as well be called interim commissioner and he just hangs out for six years until he's finally elected to the actual position.

I mean, talk about crazy. If Jesus hates Cleveland, then God must loathe things that rhyme with "she a hotty." It's a scam. I can't point out exactly how, but it's got scandal written all over it. If Rose agreed, he was probably scared. We've all done that when the cops come knockin'. Nobody's trying to defend his assiness, and yes, the things you've said are, to an undecided degree, worse than Rose's baseball-related flounderings.

I say it doesn't matter. He's the freaking hit king. His record-breaking single left him on first base alone for nine solid minutes. The world of baseball actually stopped functioning to recognize this milestone. The press was different back then, but I wonder if Barry'd hit 756 on that same day, instead of Rose hitting 4192, would, in your opinion, the baseball world've celebrated that feat to the same degree? It's hard to imagine without the InterNets, the masses of media, etc. that we have today. And of course the juice clouds everything, too. But I also am curious about Dan Patrick's interview of Selig Monday.

I didn't hear it, but Old No. 7 re-capped it for me, and basically it sounds like Patrick went off on Selig for not having a stance on celebrating Bonds' upcoming record breaker. Patrick had just announced he'd be leaving ESPN and, therefore, in ONS' estimation, he was free to call it as he saw it. Selig allegedly said he hadn't decided on whether or not he would be there. Patrick pressed the issue, trying to squeeze hints out of Selig that might reveal on which side of the fence he sits. Seven claims that it was ultra-apparent that Selig was pissed and didn't want to be there. Thus, my other question to you is this: How can MLB's commissioner, a guy who floated into the job 15 years ago, a guy who has "no decided opinion" on Bonds/steroids -- yet has been in office for all of the steroids upheaval --, uphold the ban on Rose, a ruling that almost immediately killed the guy that made it and left the dead guy's successor feeling squrimish enough that he resigns?

C: Well, I think the biggest issue is that Selig is a nematode.

How can he, in good conscience -- hell, even bad conscience -- not just nut the fuck up and be there for Barry? He rode shotgun throughout the Steroid era, he colluded in Fehr's strike, he looks like a cross between Stephen Hawking and Hitler.

Everything Selig does, he does wrong: The tie at the All-Star game; pussyfooting around the obvious performance-enhancing drug issues in the sport he's supposedly watchdoggin'; making mealy-mouthed excuses about the same; installing a toothless drug enforcement plan and then preening about it -- everything. He is, as I said recently about Bernie Bickerstaff in an extraordinarily well-read HoG post, the anti-Midas. Whatever his leprositic mitts grab goes fecal.

And what's up with bitching about Giambi's big mouth and then pushing him to testify? I am at a serious loss to understand the inner workings of MLB's management. It's all reactive. They let problems fester until they're huge, pustulent boils and then try lancing 'em with a grapefruit spoon.

Oh, and yeah -- I think there's some Warren Commission shit going on with mysterious croaking of A. Bartlett. I hadn't really even ever thought about it until now...and suddenly...it just seems so reasonable...or maybe that's the ether.

B: Right. Ether will do that. Interesting Warren Commission reference. I dig it. What about the Rose celebration versus the upcoming Bonds one? Which is bigger, from the global baseball fan perspective?

C: Globally? Barry. He's a bigger "star," as it were. It's tough to compare because the era is so different. Who's to say Petey wouldn't have had his own reality show? But even as sport-crazy as we have been in this past century, we're at a place now where people are famous simply because they're famous, ala Paris Hilton. Barry's outsized melon is probably the most recognizable feature of American baseball to a worldwide audience, with a few specific exceptions in Japan and the Caribbean.

And the home run mark is seen as a bigger deal, I think. I personally don't think it is, by any stretch, but I think the roundball cognoscenti tend to believe in 755 as THE record. Eh. Sure, it's only been reached by two guys -- three, if you count Josh Gibson, which you should, even if no one does -- but as I've said before on the House, I think what Rose and Cobb did is more impressive overall.

Of course, since Hank Aaron also had something on the order of 3,800 hits -- exact number I'm too lazy to Google -- it's not hard to put The Hammer at the top of the all-time slugger pack, right ahead of Ted Williams and Willie Mays.

B: You touched on the exact point I was hoping you might. You're definitely right about Bonds being a bigger global baseball figure. From a nuts-and-bolts baseball fan perspective, though, the hit record is way huger. I know from our exchange here you didn't play a lot of baseball. I'm curious how much of the fundamentals -- the actual focus/vision, stance, grip, swing, feet positioning, weight shifting, follow through, etc. -- of hitting a baseball are stored in your noggin.

In 11 years of playing ball, no coach ever told me to go up there and crush one to deep left-center. No coach ever told any kid on any of my teams that. It was all about practicing good technique, seeing the bat hit the ball, making contact, and getting base hits. Now, if you're good at all of those things, homeruns will happen on occasion. Homerun, however, happens to start with the letter "h," as does hype, an idea we're cramming down the throats of all our sports and athletes. The NHL recently changed some of their rules to allow for more scoring. The NFL is constantly altering things like pass interference, which allows for big plays. The NBA has turned into an atrocious no-defense-playing dunk fest, and MLB prays that chicks will continue digging the long ball.

I say fooey on it all. The two-line pass in hockey meant you had to pass crisply and cleanly, not score more breakaway goals. In football, smash-mouth, nose-to-nose grinding was how guys like Dick Butkus and Larry Csonka became legends. Look at Magic, Kareem and Bird. They busted their buns up and down that court every night, and in baseball, getting on base was the fundamental to winning games. Thus, the accomplishments of Williams, Mays and company are always bigger than those of some Head that can't run.



C: And the shame of it is that the Head could run. He actually stole more than 50 bases on at least one occasion when he was with Pittsburgh, but let that all go for the bulk. As far as myself, I wasn't much of a hitter ever, even in my -- let's see, 7 years? 8 years? something like that -- of playing organized ball. I was a pretty good baserunner/stealer, but that had a lot more to do with the fact that catchers could barely reach second base with their throws at that age. In any case, swingin' for the fences was hardly my thing. I was all about contact. Frankly, it was usually all I could do to make contact. I haven't been to a batting cage in years. I should go and see how bad it's gotten.

Besides, in my experience, chicks often dig a shorter, more easily ignored ball.

B: Indeed they do. Keep us posted on those cage results.

Note: This post appeared previously on Letters to Bud. Since Old No. 7 already broke the recycled-posts cherry, we figured, hey, what the hell.



Read more

Baseball in the Daytime: 7-6-07

Today's lone sun-filled matchup involves the first half of a double header between the third- and fourth-place clubs in the American League Central. At 1:05 CDT, Ozzie Guillen's Chicago White Sox will host Ron Gardenhire's Minnesota Twins for bragging rights to the division's most mediocre rotation.

The South Side club has Jon Garland (6-5), their only consistently decent starter -- he's allowed only one base runner to score in his last 14 innings pitched -- slated to take the mound; Twinkies' hurler Scott Baker (2-3) seeks consecutive good outings coming off a 79-pitch complete game in Detroit.



Both of these AL Central pitching staffs have struggled through the first half of the season: The Twins sit barely above .500 (43-41) and are 7 1/2 games behind the division-leading Cleveland Indians. Worse off are the White Sox (37-45) who find themselves in an identity crisis a mere season and-a-half removed from their world championship. The Sox have fared so poorly as of late, they've let the Kansas City Royals threaten to emerge from the AL Central's mid-season basement for the first time since the Hootster met his bride. Rough times.

Lucky for the Twins, they've managed to get some good hitting out of their lineup in the form of 37 homers between Justin Morneau and Torii Hunter, and a total of seven stick swingers hitting .275 or better. Guillen's guys, once known as a slew of sluggers, have struggled to compensate for the team's lack of quality starts. Lucky for them, when they do produce at the plate and get decent outings from their starters, they have the luxury of bringing in the 22-save butterball known as Bobby Jenks, easily the greatest closer I ever saw.

Tickets are still available for both ends of the all-Righty double header; Matt Garza battles Gavin Floyd in an exhibition of recordless pitchers. If you're not down with the South Side's 'hood, however, you can catch the daytime affair on XM 181. I pretended to be interested in looking up the DTV broadcast, but Christ. There's like 500 channels on that network, and I'll, a la Old No. 7, play the lazy card and suggest one look it up one's self.

Read more

Baseball in the Dadtime: Our Pastime's Past Time

Editor's Note: Here at the House of Georges, Cecil and I recently decided that we'd grown tired of listening to Old No. 7 do all the baseball talking. Once we discovered our agreement on the matter, we wrangled up the idea that, sure, when he be talkin', we be shuttin' up; then he leave, we be talkin' again. And so we collaborated, and produced this gem of an e-mail exchange. If you have, or at one time had a) a father, b) a goose-bumpy feeling about the game of baseball, c) a yearning for Old No. 7 to stop talking about it, or some combination of the above, you just might dig on what we came up with.

Bankmeister: I've spoken with Old No. 7 about what, as kids in our generation, we grew up knowing as America's pastime. In our piecemeal conversations, we've agreed that, for the percentage of sports/former baseball fans of the world that soured with the '94 strike/non-existent salary cap/poor management of profit sharing/steriod use, some of them seem to be coming back around on the game. I'd include myself in that category, and I know that you grew up a big baseball fan, too.

What really got me thinking about this subject was your post on the House of Georges that mentioned how 2/3 of the House rolls fatherless. I played ball for 11 years, and came out of the womb a Kansas City Royals fan, 100 percent of which I attribute to my late father. I'd argue that most anyone that knows you would recognize your devotion to the Chicago Cubs. I assume, based on your Denver residency, that you follow the Rockies as well. Tell me about your love for the game, how it developed, and to what extent, if any, you'd pay homage to your late father for said love.

Cecil: I definitely fit that category.

My dad was a lot older than my friend's dads. He was 50 when I was born, in '74. He grew up in California, which at the time didn't have major league baseball, but listened to Cardinals games on the radio -- the Gashouse Gang were his favorites. Ducky Medwick, Pepper Martin, aka "The Wild Horse of the Osage," the Dean brothers, Leo The Lip. His style was dust-covered glovework, small ball, try-harders sliding with spikes up. It was appropriate, since that's how he was as a man -- not gifted athletically, small, but tough as a $2 steak.

As a young child, I loved to play more than watch. The Cubs '84 run was what really did it to me as a fan. I was born in Chicago, and Dad had grown to appreciate the losers on the North Side during our family's tenure there, despite his longtime appreciation of the St. Louis franchise. Before that, my connection to the pro game stopped at the minors with the Denver Bears. I was rooting on Andre Dawson and Tim Raines long before I knew anything about the National League.




He taught me how to play the game. As a tot I'd put on my brother's old Catfish Hunter model glove, which was about three hands too large, and Dad would wing a softball at me.

Once it just smacked me right in the face. Coordination wasn't my strong suit, and sadly, neither was playing baseball. But I tried. I played every summer until he finally went to the hospital for good, sick with Lou Gehrig's disease to the point he couldn't even smoke anymore. Then I just stopped playing altogether.

But oddly, my love and appreciation of the game grew. I would create imaginary players and concoct for them imaginary careers, complete with lifetime statistics. I'd stay up late calculating dream-world batting averages and ERAs. I'd watch every Cubs game, devour each breathless issue of Vine Line. I remember watching Rafael Palmeiro's first game, watching Greg Maddux as a rook. I cheered every one of Andre Dawson's 49 dongs in '87. As dad faded out, baseball faded in.

I went to one big league game with Dad. It was at the old Jack Murphy Stadium in San Diego. It was a huge, empty concrete edifice and he was in his wheelchair at that point, so the memory itself is bittersweet.

But I can't go to a Rockies game -- and yes, despite my loyalties, I do root root root for the home team, as long they aren't playing the baby bears -- without thinking how much he would have loved that park. And remembering how much he loved the game.

B: What a picture. I had no idea you followed Andre Dawson and Tim Raines before they were in the bigs. Total bragging rights. Strangely, those names remind me of one of many baseball traditions I had with my dad. The first one that comes to mind is Topps Sticker Book albums. I loved baseball cards, too, but as a youngster, the cards took a back seat to the sticker books.

I was four and getting ready to thrill the ladies as a kindergarten, mixmastering -- I'm infamously known as the guy that (allegedly with deliberation and repetition) scratched Jill Henderson's Grease record as she played it for Show-and-Tell -- awkward ball of nerd when my folks announced they were splitting up. Part of their deal was that dad would pick me up from school. Most days, he'd take me to my buddy Jason Smith's house, but not before a trip to the Shop N' Go to pick up a packet of stickers.

For those that don't know, the sticker books had the American and National Leagues split up; the sections contained an alphabetized arrangement of each team. Each team had a page, the page was arranged like a baseball diamond with stats and figures around it. The background, naturally, would be a cool image of a key player, like Mike Schmidt fielding a chopper at third on the Phillies page. Each packet came with five stickers, and dad and I would apply them to their appropriate spots, i.e. a shot of Terry Kennedy squatting behind the box on the Padres page. My first album was from the '81-'82 season. At the back of each volume, there were pages for the previous year's post-season. That year was a doozy because the previous post-season was Phillies/'Stros (in their old, bad-ass unis) and Royals/Yanks, the one time out of four in five years that the Royals eliminated the Bombers, and diligently I might add, with broomage.

But there were dramatic pictures of each series and, then a double-page layout for the championship. It was awesome. I almost never got Royals either, which, in hindsight, really helped me learn players from other teams, like Raines and Dawson, back when the Expos kicked ass. My dad built this trunk that I inherited. We plastered it with all the doubles I got and, ironically, there's a few handsome stickers on it like an old Texas Rangers third baseman, guy who calls himself Buddy Bell, not to mention Pete Rose, Phil Niekro, Steve Garvey, Fernando Valenzuela, Jose Cruz and Willie Stargell, just to name a few.

I'm interested to know about Vine Line. Also, what can you tell me about your progression of fandom, if any, once your father was gone? How did it fare in the 90s? Do sons and fathers today share the bonding that baseball awarded us with ours?

C: Sticker albums, huh? That's odd -- for some reason, I don't recall sticker albums at all. And that was the kind of thing I would have just devoured.

All my life I've liked making lists, looking at stats, the kind of brain-numbed semi-autism that marks a baseball fan -- or just a nerd, whichever. Sticker albums would have been right in my wheelhouse. I collected cards.

I still have almost all of them. I sold a few to a collector, a real fat scumbag piece of dogshit, who paid me the handsome sum of $8. Among the few I sold were the Bo Jackson and Mark McGwire Topps Future Stars cards, along with a whole passel of interesting and old stuff. I can't recall why I wanted the cash, but that was right around the time I discovered drugs, so...

Every once in a while I dig them out. They are all still in the two metal filing boxes that dad gave me to store them in. Somewhere, decades back, I scotch-taped Doug Bair, Skip Lockwood and Cliff Johnson -- names otherwise lost to baseball history -- to the inside lid of one box, and there they remain to this day. Skip, in particular, looks like a guy having a bad day. Maybe because he was a grown man whom people still called "Skip."

Ah, and Vine Line. The Cubs fan mag. It's still around, still spreading the hyped-up North Side gospel to eager little fanboys and fangirls who don't get enough puffery from WGN. I can only assume it's chock-a-block with testimonials from old heads who drive to HoHoKam from Saskatchewan, with breathless descriptions of the next minor league star! on the way to the big club (Alex Arias was one from my day -- give him a Google and see how that worked out, Hall of Fame-wise), with fawning personality profiles of this generation's Damon Berryhill or Rick Wrona. I kept my subscription until maybe '89 or '90. Then I told my Mom she could go ahead an cancel, because I wasn't really reading it anymore.



Those were the dark days of my baseball fandom. The Cubs run to the division title in '89 was the last real baseball series I got into for several years, and definitely the last one I consider having shared with Dad. He was fully immobile by that point, dependent on machines for each breath. Both of us watched Will Clark hit that goddamn grand slam, but neither of us let it really hurt the way it might have, I don't think. Partly because, unlike '84, there was never a sense that that team was somehow charmed...and partly because, well, real life was doing a good enough job of hurting everyone by then.

Throughout the '90s I paid attention...but not so much. I enjoyed talking and reading roundball history, going to Rockies games and harassing Lou Piniella with ol' No. 7 and his then-girlfriend following a 3-hour rain delay at Coors, but I didn't feel the soulful connection I once did.

My rekindling came post-strike, but very, very slowly. And, despite his personal ridiculousness, I can thank Stanolzolol Sammy for that. His run against McGwire in '98 not only gave me -- along with everyone else in the damn country -- a "hero" to root for. A non-McGwire, who even then I thought of as nothing more than a bulked-up Dave Kingman. Sure, everyone was dirty. But just spending that one summer getting back into the timeless rhythm, trading 'did you see what Sammy did last night?' with friends and co-workers, that was enough. And you know what else? Fantasy baseball. Seriously. I remember reading about the first rotisserie leagues and thinking: "that's me." And it was. I would have murdered fools in those things as a youth. Stats were my allies. Adulthood has weakened my grip on each and every major league player, but the simple act of researching and building a team is kind of a childhood dream made real. Kind of real, anyway.

I don't think there's that connection with kids, their dads and baseball anymore. Football is where that father/son connect went, from afternoons at the ballyard to watching the NFL at home on Sundays. My guess as to why is the same one I've heard all over: that baseball is an older game, from an older generation, and the guys that love it the most now are the children of the WW2 and Korea vets, the boomers who remember the last catch they had with their Dad. I'm no boomer, but fit that general stereotype...so, I dunno. Whatever the reason, it feel sad that this American legacy -- kids and their dads and baseball and the infield fly rule and popcorn and that glorious, treasured history -- is slowly turning ghostly. But at the same time, I feel duty-bound to do my part as a potential future parent to carry it on.

B: Interesting. I love your take on baseball in the 90s, mostly because you summed it up well, the soulfullessness, etc. That was me all over the place. I'm not sure how long sticker albums were around. I only had two volumes; the next year was such a disappointment, what with Yankees/As and Dodgers/Expos gracing most of the post-season pages, the Royals eliminated early by Oakland.

There were still some badass stickers in those pages, though: Dusty Baker, Ron Cey, Pedro Guerrero, Steve Sax, Fernie V. (damn, those guys were loaded), not to mention Goose Gossage, Ron Guidry, Rickey Henderson, Raines, Dawson, Chris Speier, and, one of my all-time favorite catchers, Gary Carter. That would be the end of sticker books, and immediate baseball with dad, though, as my mom's new marriage took us to Atlanta, where my pops and I prayed for three years for a Royals/Braves World Series.

That's when I started playing ball, though. I was tiny, and I was terrible. By the time we moved back (three years later), dad and I began frequenting the cages where I was finally convinced about keeping my head down and my eye on the ball. He also helped me master the trapping of grounders and perfecting my slide -- I'll never forget how ridiculously proud he was of my first steal, and consequential strawberry.

Ironically, our first year back in KC was '85. He took my sister and I out of school and we had front-row standing spots for the ticker-tape, championship parade. The following year, he took me on a tour of the dugout; I got to meet George Brett, Bret Saberhagen and Buddy Biancalana. That summer, lots of the players would come into the bar he tended (one of three jobs he had at the time), and I would skateboard up there on Saturday afternoons, one of which I shared nachos with Charlie Liebrandt and Joe Beckwith.

In the early/mid 80s, we saw lots of games together. He had this ridiculous, gruff cheer for Willie Wilson that involved him hollering Wilson's first name six times, real fast and real loud. We used to make fun of fat Willie Aikens, chuckle at U.L. Washington's toothpick and stare awestruck at the bats of Brett, Amos Otis, and the glove of Frank White, whom he so unpolitically correctly called "Ain'tso." Dad wanted so bad to get me a souvenir game ball, he once dove over two rows of seats (a real treat on the ol' rib cage) and caught a foul ball in the pit of his elbow. As he was trying to gather himself, some punks snatched it from his arm. He was so pissed that he tried to chase them down, got a beer thrown on him and wound up getting ejected from the stands. Good times. Those days were certainly my baseball haydays.

I still followed ball a bit as the 90s rolled around, but my interest faded quickly. The Royals were terrible, the Yankees and the Braves were boring, and I too, had discovered drugs, and women, and football had all but taken over as my main passion. It wasn't until I returned to Kansas City again (six-plus years in the Centennial State) and again reunited with my father and with baseball. I barely knew anyone on the roster, but I quickly learned as we again resumed attending games.

I'll never forget my last game at The K with my dad. I was panicking in my basement as he honked in my drive way. My Royals hat, the only one I'd ever owned, was missing. To this day, I have no idea what happened to it, but he bought me a new one that night, and it was a magical evening, too. A team known as the Baltimore Orioles was in town, Cal Ripken, Jr.'s last game in Kansas City. There was a massive pre-game deal, extra programs, tributes, etc. I'm sure other parks did the same, but this one was pretty darn cool. The stands were full, and they flickered and flashed with every pitch he faced.

I never in a million years would've imagined that would be my last game with my dad, but I wouldn't trade it for anything. I suppose being back in Kansas City and experiencing baseball with my dad again is what rejuvenated me on the game. I can't help but recall the countless afternoon and evening games of mine in which he corrected my hitting stance from behind the backstop, how elated he was to witness my one career homerun, my lone all-star game appearance (separate occasions, of course).

It does feel sad that it's turning ghostly. I too, feel duty-bound, though, and look forward to continuing a tradition I'm proud to have been a part of.


Read more