Good Morning

Classy, Torii

Jason Kendall Sucks at Baseball

As I watched the dynamic duo of Jon Miller and Joe Morgan ruminate on how bad the Milwaukee Brewers catcher is in tonight's Sunday Night Baseball telecast, I had flashbacks similar to the end of The Sixth Sense remembering just how bad he was on the Oakland Athletics.

He is hitless in 15AB this season. He hit .242 and .246 with a total of 5 home runs in '07 and '08, respectively. He is so bad that I made my friend be Jason Kendell while I was the fake Barry Bonds (Reggie Stocker) in home run derby MLB06 PS2 (I still lost, I am the Jason Kendall of video gamers). Not that I NEEDED validation, but I Googled "Jason Kendall sucks" and here's what I found in some of the first few results:

Danny's Blog: Does Jason Kendall Suck?
In closing, Jason Kendall sucks balls, and will be a giant black hole for the Brewers all year. Or until he is replaced. ..

Cubs Acquire Jason Kendall
Cubs got Jason Kendall for FREE (basically) Rob Bowen was sent to the A's .... Kendall sucks. But if he's better than the other options you guys have then ...

Why the 2009 Milwaukee Brewers Will Suck
Bleacher Nation ...Jason Kendall sucks both at and behind the plate. Bill Hall vanished last year, and now he’s hurt or something, leaving someone like Mike Lamb to start at ..

Baseball Toaster: Catfish Stew : Kid Kendall
My five-year-old daughter decided early in the season that Jason Kendall was ... her dad thinks that player sucks

By the way, Kendall makes $5 million a year

Gooooal

Ovechkin's Hole-In-One

"I swear God. I swear my mom"

Lebron on 60 Minutes

I had forgotten how James fired his agent a few years ago and hired his childhood friends to run his business. Quite an uproar over the move at the time.

The Yanks

Will Leitch tackles the Yankees challenges ahead in this weeks 3,500 word NY Mag feature:

"So while the rest of us are tightening our belts and bracing for the worst, the Yankees are opening a state-of-the-art, $1.6 billion stadium. While the executives at AIG are held out as venal masters of destruction and shamed into giving up their bonuses, the Yankees are spending $423.5 million on three players. While the housing market tanks and nobody will buy so much as a pair of socks unless they’re 75 percent off, the Yankees dished out two and a half times more money this off-season than the rest of the American League combined.

It’s not that the Yankees didn’t take their licks, just like the rest of us have. Last year, the Yankees missed the playoffs for the first time since 1994, when there were no playoffs. But their response was not to cower, or to reevaluate their methods, or to try to play by the same rules as the rest of the world. They did not renounce their ways: They went all-in. Downturn in the economy? Hey, screw that. That’s loser talk. You see those three top free agents they have there? We’ll take all of them, thank you. The Washington Nationals built a brand-new stadium and watched attendance fall to half-capacity by the second game? Pshaw, like we’re the freaking Nationals. The rest of baseball cutting ticket prices and slashing the payroll? More for us, please!"

The Other Side

Sports Illustrated feature story on how so many professional athletes end up broke:

"By the time they have been retired for two years, 78% of former NFL players have gone bankrupt or are under financial stress because of joblessness or divorce. Within five years of retirement, an estimated 60% of former NBA players are broke.

Former NBA forward Shawn Kemp (who has at least seven children by six women) and, more recently, Travis Henry (nine by nine) have seen their fortunes sapped by monthly child-support payments in the tens of thousands of dollars. Last month Henry, who reportedly earned almost $11 million over seven years in the NFL, tried and failed to temporarily reduce one of his nine child-support payments by arguing that he could no longer afford the $3,000 every month. Two weeks later he was jailed for falling $16,600 behind in payments for his child in Frostproof, Fla."

The Lady Terps

Lost in the madness of March for University of Marylanders who had to suffer a brutal loss to the oversized Memphis Tigers in the NCAA Men's Tournament is the superior Lady Terrapins basketball team. I grew up as an unabashed hater of women's basketball. From the brick parade and finals scores that resembled football games, I was quick to dismiss the ladies game as an inferior alternative and easy punchline. My preconceptions could not have been more wrong. It took a National Championship run in 2006 to get me to notice, but once I finally jumped on the bandwagon, I was hooked.

The Lady Terps average more points per game than their male counterparts, shoot better, and possess a better collective personality. During a long stretch in the first half of the second round match-up against Utah, the team hit a slew of pull-up jumpers, fired picture perfect passes to the low post and blocked the living shit out of a sure layup. They draw huge crowds by women's standards and have dwarfed the men's team with three trips to the Sweet 16 since 2006. It's easy to cling to a winner, but there are plenty of winners out there you wouldn't pay a nickel to watch. This team is fun to watch.

So as the team marches ahead in the NCAA Tournament, I'd like to share my appreciation of seniors Marissa Coleman and Kristi Toliver who helped covert an ignoramus into a fan. If you've read this far, check out a piece WaPo's Mike Wise has on the duo's last home game:

"Sixty-five wins, three losses here. Two unbeaten seasons at home. Near-capacity crowds, including a throaty student section last night.

Did we mention the national title banner? It hangs high on a steel beam with the No. 20, worn by the floor leader whose three-pointer in the championship game three Aprils ago brought dead quiet to Duke, and No. 25, worn by the do-everything forward who stylishly cinched the fabric of her jersey together, better exposing the sinewy arms and strong shoulders responsible for more than 1,000 rebounds."

The New Ballparks

Paul Goldberger reviews the new Yankees Stadium and unfortunately named Citi Field in the new issue of the New Yorker:

"A stadium is a stage set as sure as anything on Broadway, and it determines the tone of the dramas within. Citi Field suggests a team that wants to be liked, even to the point of claiming some history that isn’t its own. Yankee Stadium, however, reflects an organization that is in the business of being admired, and is built to serve as a backdrop for the image of the Yankees, at once connected to the city and rising grandly above it."

Last Minute Bracket Considerations

2008	1, 1, 1, 1	Kansas, Memphis, North Carolina, UCLA
2007	1, 1, 2, 2	Florida, Ohio State, Georgetown, UCLA
2006	2, 3, 4, 11	UCLA, Florida, LSU, George Mason
2005	1, 1, 4, 5	North Carolina, Illinois, Louisville, Michigan State
2004	1, 2, 2, 3	Duke, Connecticut, Oklahoma State, Georgia Tech
2003	1, 2, 3, 3	Texas, Kansas, Marquette, Syracuse
2002	1, 1, 2, 5	Maryland, Kansas, Oklahoma, Indiana
2001	1, 1, 2, 3	Duke, Michigan State, Arizona, Maryland
2000	1, 5, 8, 8	Michigan State, Florida, North Carolina, Wisconsin
1999	1, 1, 1, 4	Connecticut, Duke, Michigan State, Ohio State
1998	1, 2, 3, 3	North Carolina, Kentucky, Stanford, Utah

Maryland

Here is a tournament preview I wrote for deadspin, along with some fun facts about the school:

1. Fear la Tortuga. An impressive ACC Tournament performance negated the bad losses to Morgan State and Virginia to send #10 Maryland to face the #7 California Golden Bears in Kansas City on Thursday. The two teams met this past season in football, where the Terps beat the Gatorade out of Cal, 35-27. Junior guard Greivis “Arantxa Sánchez-Vicario” Vasquez, the only player in the nation to wear eye black, leads the team in points (17.2), rebounds (5.5) and assists (5.1) per game. The fiery Venezuelan played high school ball with Kevin Durant at Montrose Christian in Rockville, MD. Eric Hayes, Maryland’s other starting guard, always looks like he’s about to turn the ball over, causing me to yell at my TV and out my window. But then he’ll knock down a big three, and all is forgiven…for now. Oafy, yet lovable Dave Neal, whom Terp alum Scott Van Pelt dubs “The Mayor” for some reason, holds his own despite looking like a cross between Paul Blart and Kevin James. The lone senior leads the team in 3-point percentage and SABs (Smiles After Buckets). He’s the Jimmy Fallon of basketball. Interchangeable parts Landon Milbourne, Adrian Bowie, Sean Mosely, Cliff Tucker and Dino Gregory have had their moments, but the team’s success is dependent on the play of Vasquez. In Maryland’s 20 wins, Vasquez averaged 19.3 ppg; in losses, he averaged just 11.5.

2. Fun Gestapo. Best known for burning couches, Scheyerface, and throwing batteries at Carlos Boozer’s mom, Maryland’s fans can be a little rambunctious. But at least we do it in unison! So it was sad to see our Commie utopia disrupted when the university shot down the contest-winning nickname for the Comcast Center student section. Campus buzzkills deemed the name “Red Army” offensive to Eastern Europeans, proving once again that Native Americans are the only people colleges can still publicly disparage.

3. Midnight Madness. On October 15, 1971, Maryland coach, Lefty Driesell, began the tradition of Midnight Madness in an effort to build up hype around his squad. At midnight, which marked the beginning of the first official day of team practice, Coach Driesell had his players run laps around Byrd Stadium’s track. Reflecting on the day, Lefty said, “I got the word around campus and 500 or 600 people showed up. We didn't have (stadium) lights, so the guys ran by car lights.” Not to be outdone, current coach and R.J. Bentley’s frequenter Gary Williams has carved out his own Madness staple by entering the arena floor in increasingly ridiculous vehicles. A tank is considered a vehicle, right?

Here’s Gary in a Lambo; on a motorcycle; in a tank!

Bonus: The Wikipedia entry on Midnight Madness has redefined laziness in fact-checking:

According to legend, Lefty Driesell, who was the head coach for the Maryland Terrapins men's basketball team, began the tradition in 1970 or 1971.

Let's Dance

The Gift and the Curse

Call me old, but these days the college selection process seems different. With a restructured SAT scoring and emphasis on bullshit community service and bullshit club involvement, there's almost a mechanical formula to getting into college these days. Or perhaps this has always existed and I just bypassed the rigmarole by having four criteria to picking my university: far enough from home where I wasn't tempted to visit old flames, a big student population, south of New Jersey, and, most importantly, a big time athletics program.

The University of Maryland fit the criteria. I wasn't a big fan of the color red or anything blow the Mason-Dixon, line but something about the school seemed right. So right that my mind was made up before I ever stepped foot on campus. Embarrassingly enough, I grew up cheering for Duke. I wanted to go to Duke. But somewhere between a B in Driver's Ed. (ruining my 4.0) and a 2 on my AP Calc exam, I had to readjust my goals for something a little more realistic.

So junior year, I was watching a CBS basketball match up between the Terps and the Blue Devils- the mighty Dukies vs. the scrappy Terps- and it just clicked. The rabid fans. The fiery coach. And the team who emulated their coach with grit and tenacity.

In retrospect, it's kind of stupid to pick your school based on one basketball game. I knew nothing about Len Bias and the harsh sanctions that paralyzed the program for years. I knew nothing about the shit hole, campus-hating town that was College Park. Yet, it felt right. Before I knew it I was stalking the mailbox every day for that letter from Maryland.

It didn't take long to understand what it was to be Maryland Terrapin student and fan. The first day back from winter break and Maryland was up 10 against the Blue Devils at Cole Field House in College Park. At Maryland, we riot, so I was tying my shoes, getting ready to sprint a half mile to the campus fraternity row to burn couches, goalposts, desks, or anything else that takes to a flame. Like a duckling needs only its instinct to follow its mother through the pond, I knew the drill without ever participating in the infamous Maryland riot. Except, it was not to be.

Maryland blew the lead in the most gut-wrenching, heart-snatching way imaginable. Turnovers, missed shots, questionable calls- just eight different ways to punch you in the stomach, kick you in the teeth, and tell you your girlfriend got pregnant by a Duke MBA. Oh and the same thing happened in the semifinals of the Final Four...to Duke.

Well next year Maryland won the National Championship. It was euphoric and cathartic and anticlimactic all in one. The Terps were favored to win, but we still had to win. You would think a national championship would elicit prose and hyperbole, but it didn't. It felt more of a great exhale, a year and a half in the making.

The next year we flamed out in the early rounds of the NCAA tournament. The year after that we shocked the nation by avenging our heartbreaking loss to Duke by rallying back from 14 down to win the ACC Championship. Then we lost and won and lost and repeated through a permutation of huge wins over top ranked foes and awful losses against beatable teams.

And it's been the same ever since graduation almost five years ago. I'm forever locked into a team that will break my heart or make my weekend. One minute I won't care, the next minute nothing can be more important. It's irrational to put so much emotion into the ability of people I will never know scoring more points than the other team based only on the color of the jersey. But such is sports.

I often say i made a deal with the devil (one of many) by trading a championship for a lifetime of annual heartbreaks. But it's nights like these, nights where the Terps beat Wake Forest to likely earn a spot in the Big Dance, where it makes perfect sense to choose a school out of something as trivial as its collegiate athletics.

Bring on the Dukies.

Upset

No, I'm fine, thanks. The upset was in the World Baseball Classic where the mighty Dominican Republic fell to the Netherlands 2-1. The Netherlands?!? The Netherlands. This doesn't mean much to you and me and pretty much anyone now, but moments like this often transform the state of sports in these types of countries. It wasn't long ago that Greek, Italy, and Venezuela were America's whipping boys in Olympic basketball. Those days are over. We had to bring out our superstars to barely squeak by Greece in the Beijing Olympics.

If you gave me a thousand guesses to which countries had teams in the WBC, I wouldn't have come up with the Netherlands. Call me ignorant, but I honestly don't know anything about the Netherlands. And if you haven't visited or wrote a paper on windmills, I bet you don't either. Wikipedia tells me:

It is known for its traditional windmills, tulips, cheese, clogs (wooden shoes), delftware and gouda pottery, for its bicycles, and in addition, traditional values and civil virtues such as its classic social tolerance. The country is more recently known for its rather modern, liberal policies toward drugs, prostitution, homosexuality, and euthanasia. It also has one of the most free market capitalist economies in the world, ranking 13th of 157 countries on one index.

When tulips are one of the first things your country is known for, you're kind of a shitty country. Delfware?? I do hear Amsterdam is nice though. Nice, if you like drugs, whores and canals. Which a lot of people do.

Anyway, Americans shrug during these international competitions. We have the best athletes in the world playing in our professional leagues. The World Series, Super Bowl, etc. will mean more than any silly World Baseball Classic so long as the world's stars play here. But for a country like the Netherlands, this win could mean the world.

Bubble Watch

According to Joe Lunardi:

LAST FOUR IN

New Mexico

South Carolina

Penn State

Arizona

FIRST FOUR OUT

San Diego State

Creighton

Florida

Miami

NEXT FOUR OUT

Davidson

Maryland

Providence

Temple

Maryland Women: ACC Tournament Champions!

For the first time in 20 years, the University of Maryland women's basketball team became champions of the ACC Tournament with a 92-89 overtime victory over Duke. The win locks up a #1 seed for the NCAA tournament.

Duke sent the game into OT with a last second tip in, but Marisa Coleman's three-pointer with 2:53 left in the extra period sealed the title for the Terps. Coleman had a monster game, with 28 points, 15 rebounds and 6 assists.

Here's a nice little piece on the ACC rivalries.

Sports And The Recession

The Wall Street Journal has a piece on the horrific timing for the Yankees, Mets and Cowboys to open new stadiums. With combined construction costs well over $3 billion, the teams have had difficulty selling out luxury suites and personal seat licenses. Companies are hard pressed to justify spending taxpayer money on $250K boxes and multimillion dollar naming rights deals. And forcing fans to shell tens of thousands of dollars for the right to purchase season tickets is putting the strength of the ticket market to the test.

"Season tickets along the sidelines at Texas Stadium used to cost $129 a game, compared with $340 a game for similar seats in the new stadium. To earn the right to buy season tickets, fans must buy "personal seat licenses" -- a one-time, up-front fee that can run as high as $150,000 a seat.

Dallas-area real estate agent Linda Taylor says she was shocked to learn that the $130-a-game Cowboys seats she'd had for years at the old Texas Stadium would jump to $340 in the new building -- and require a $35,000 seat license.

"It just seemed crazy, especially for true fans. It's different if we were a corporation," she says. Ms. Taylor and her family ended up paying license fees of $16,000 per seat for seats that aren't as good as their old ones."

Manny

Book excerpt on the most fascinating man in baseball:

"Manny and Los Angeles fell for each other like teenage lovers. He was enchanted by the city, especially its malls, but also its warm weather and the laid-back, multicultural fan base. Accustomed to celebrities, and hardly as die-hard about their jocks as Bostonians, Southern Californians granted him relative privacy when he left the park."

Unemployment

A new addition to the club

The Sports Executive

Sports Marketing Class, Wednesday, 6:45pm.

Ah, the guest speaker. The graduate school version of flipping on "Good Will Hunting" in lieu of teaching a high school calculus class. A time to wedge your Blackberry between your legs to find something, anything, anyone to distract you from the awkwardness that is an industry executive promoting their trade with a smugness in a suit. They've seen it all- from the slopes of Nagano to the Super Bowl flash seen around the world. They were there, behind the scenes, in the war room, in on those billion dollar transactions for the rights to rule the airwaves.

Except the reality is that sometimes the people in charge aren't particularly good at their jobs. Tonight our class was treated to the VP of Communications at CBS Sports (not pictured, that's just some old guy). He is the gatekeeper to granting interviews of CBS talent and the first responder when something goes awry on air (don't click on that. okay do it). But for tonight's intimate night with a mighty exec, we were treated to a man without a vision and without a clue.

There was an awkwardness in the air from the start. Mr. Comm stood and introduced himself to a class of 16 with a nervousness reserved for an awkward group presentation among randomly selected classmates. Awkward is an awkward word. Awkward aardvark Aeropostale. Anyway, for two hours Mr. Comm umm'd and uhh'd his way through his ESPN bashing and "Big Bang Theory" hyping, leaving us wondering how a VP of communications could be such a poor communicator. I looked over at the southern girl who raved about 'Friday Night Lights' before class and even her "aww shucks"iness turned her southern hospitality into the more familiar and comforting northern hostility. Breaking them Confederates down one disappointing Yankee speaker at a time.

He was everything you wouldn't expect out of television's "most watched network" and rights holder of the NFL, NCAA Tournament, and Masters. Dismissive of the internet's potential, while at the same time touting the Big Dance's online platform. Confused over what a Nielsen rating represented, as he couldn't figure out if one rating point equaled 12,000, 120 million or 120,000 viewers (it represents 1.1 million viewers). There was no charm, no insight. Just a man in a suit bumbling through his notes and his words like Clemens testimony to Congress.

The presentation was comforting and horrifying at the same time. Comforting, because Mr. Comm showed that literally anyone can rise to such a prominent position. Horrifying, because my industry appears to run by a collection of out-of-touch dolts. The juxtaposition of a man in such an enviable position exposed by the inability to provide insight one couldn't find in a WSJ article reinforced my belief that qualification is often measured in years, not qualities.