Barry Bonds Record Baseball(s)

Barry Bonds is such a divisive and polarizing figure amongst baseball fans. I am no fan of Barry Bonds’ character. I think he’s much too cocky and arrogant for his own good. He thinks he’s too good for the media and treats them with extreme disrespect. To his credit, the media probably treats him the same way… but that’s their job. You didn’t see Alex Rodriguez being a dick to the media all last year when everyone was calling for his ass on the trading block and calling him an overpaid, overrated superstar.

In any case, even though I don’t particularly like Barry Bonds as a person, I am still in awe of his accomplishments as an athlete. Those who think that Bonds should not be voted into the Hall of Fame because of all the steroid allegations and the general cloud around baseball during this era are retarded (and if they do have an actual BBWAA vote, it should be revoked). I understand that part of a voter’s consideration for the Hall of Fame is that player’s character, morals, and overall contribution to the well being of the game. But the numbers speak for themselves when it comes to Bonds. He was well on his way to becoming a Hall of Famer before all the steroid allegations came into play. Additionally, if you are going to exclude Bonds from the Hall of Fame becuase of the uncertainty of this era, are you going to exclude every single player from this era? It does not make sense to single out Bonds, although he is probably the easiest scapegoat to do so against. Some guy did a study on Bonds’ record 73 HR season, and made the assumption that steroids could at most give you a 5-10% power boost in distance. He took all 73 HR’s and applied a 5-10% “deflationary” measure and guess how many home runs would not have been home runs? A mere TWO would have stayed in the ballpark. It takes extraordinary skill and plate discipline to rack up a .370 BA and an OBP of .570+ in one season… steroids or no steroids.

Anyways, that was a slight rant off the real topic of this post. It has become well publicized that the two record baseballs that Bonds hit (755 and 756) went for a good deal of money in a public auction. The 755th ball went for something like $150,000 and the 756th ball went for something around $750,000 (higher than the expected half million by auction experts).  Marc Ecko, a fashion designer, was the purchaser of the 756th ball. He has now created a site where you can vote to enshrine the ball, brand an asterisk into it then enshrine it, or put it on a space shuttle into outer space. Some internet/computer guy bought the 755th ball and is using the same idea with a few twists: he’s showing real-time voting and selling adspace for 200 dollars a square.

While I think the second approach with selling adspace is probably more practical and a smarter use of the website, I still fundamentally disagree with both owners of the baseballs and the way they are handling the situation. Marc Ecko, in particular, is just making this ordeal into a huge publicity stunt. Probably a good move for his business and clothing lines – because any publicity is good publicity – but I still think he’s completely disrespecting the game by doing this. Either keep the damn ball, or give it to the Hall of Fame. It’s as simple as that. I hope both balls end up going to the Hall of Fame because for better or worse they are a part of baseball history and deserve to be in Cooperstown. Whether they do or not is up to the… public.

-K

Rick Ankiel, Week 1 of the NFL (and it’s Fantasy Implications), Roger Federer, Tiger Woods, and more

Never forget 9.11.01. I clearly remember the day. It was one of my first days at Lawrenceville as a freshman and I went to the Registrar’s Office to get something changed with my schedule. I heard on the radio something about planes and the World Trade Center and the Registrar’s assistant was just bawling out in tears. I knew something was wrong – just not how bad it really was. Soon after, we were all summoned to Kirby Arts Center and Headmaster Michael Cary gave an impassioned speech about the day’s events. I’ll never forget his demeanor on stage and how I personally felt protected from the outside world just by being at Lawrenceville. First impressions are always important, and my first impresison of Headmaster Cary was strong, calm, and resolute leader. Too bad he left after our sophomore year…

So it’s taken me a long time once again to update this thing – I’m going to try and update more frequently in the future. This time I don’t have an actual legitimate excuse, other than the fact that I’ve been pretty busy tutoring, saying good bye to friends, and helping people move in at Princeton. The weather has been absolutely beautiful for essentially the past two weeks – although the past week has been a little bit on the humid side (where by a little bit I mean I’ve been sweating ridiculous amounts by just walking outside). I’ve been doing a good job of keeping active by playing tennis, golf, and squash the past few weeks and taking advantage of the good weather before October rolls around and it becomes chilly and disgusting. Additionally, I’ve somehow managed to go to the gym 6 days and counting… I’m going to put the over/under on that streak at something like 10, haha. A lot has happened in the sports world the past few weeks, and there are a few other random things that I wanted to write about.

Rick Ankiel

In case you don’t follow baseball or have been stuck in a cave, Rick Ankiel has emerged in the past few weeks to be the feel good story of the year. If you don’t remember (how could you not if you watched this live… I remembered as an 8th grader watching this live on TV and even then feeling so sorry for the guy), Ankiel threw 4 wild pitches in the first inning of his first ever playoff appearance. The promising, young pitching prospect seemed to be ruined for life from that traumatizing experience – and who wouldn’t be? He was sent back down to the minor leagues to rework his mechanics, came up briefly now and then to the majors before being immediately sent back down after bad command and mechanics.

In 2005, Ankiel made a very Ruth-esque switch from pitcher to hitter. He decided to give baseball another shot not as a pitcher, but rather a power-hitting outfielder. And he was damn successful! The St. Louis Cardinals finally called him up to the majors on August 9 and he promptly hit a 3-run home run in his debut. It was such a feel good story (especially after that douchebag Barry Bonds broke the all-time HR record) in a summer marred with refereeing scandals, dog fighting allegations, and steroid questions. So feel good that Cardinals manager Tony LaRussa, one of the least demonstrative managers in the MLB, was in full out tears when Ankiel hit his first home run and emphatically marked his return.

Then came this bombshell late last week. If you’re too lazy to follow the link, the New York Daily News reported that Ankiel received a year’s supply of HGH in 2004 (along with the fact that Troy Glaus did ‘roids, but who the fuck cares about player ‘roiding up these days anyways?). It appears that Ankiel, in the process of recovering from his 182943671 arm surgeries, was legally prescribed HGH to try and help the recovery process.

So many people around baseball – past players, ESPN commentators, bloggers – have lamented about how devestating this story is. Some have even gone as far as to compare this story with the steroid-tainted home run chase by Bonds… calling this one even worse!! The argument there goes “We’ve known all along that Bonds has been tainted, whereas Rick Ankiel was our antitode to that story and we all thought he was clean so him not being “clean” makes this story so much worse”.

I think that’s probably the stupidest thing I’ve heard in a long time and some of the worst logic ever. The guy had been plagued by arm injuries, got reconstructive elbow surgery, and his doctors prescribed him HGH as one of the drugs to help him make a full and expedient recovery. That’s basically his explanation. Especially since at this point in time the MLB had not yet added HGH to its banned substance list – they didn’t add it until 2005 – I don’t quite understand what the whole commotion is all about (unless I’m just completely oversimplifying the issue which I don’t think I am). I still think that Rick Ankiel is the feel good story of the year. So what if he used a LEGAL SUBSTANCE to help aide him in recovery? So what if HGH is banned now by the MLB? … it certainly wasn’t back when Ankiel took the stuff! People need to chill out and stop overreacting to an overzealous newspaper reporting on a confidential doctor-patient relationship.

Week 1 of the NFL

There is nothing more anticipated and hyped than the opening weekend of professional football. Football is, of course, uniquely American and the most popular sport in America. Unless you’re a die hard fan of an MLB team, you’re probably counting the days between the last snap of the Super Bowl and the first pick of the Draft. Well this past weekend, the wish of millions of sports fans across the nation was granted as the Colts and Saints opened things off on Thursday night (leading to a Colts rout). The weekend was full of exciting games, close games, and blowouts. I wasn’t able to watch a lot of the action since I was tutoring almost all day on Sunday (it sucked), but here are a few observations I have.

1. Randy Moss is back after his 9 reception 183 yard 1 TD performance on Sunday. If Moss can even come close to replicating some of the years he had in Minnesota, we should probably just give them the SB rings now. “If you want to crown ‘em, crown ‘em!”

2. The Bears D is sick at stopping some of the most explosive offenses and players in the league (see last year’s NFC championship game and this past weekend’s game against the Chargers). But it looks like their ultimate success will come from sexy Rex Grossman, and based on Sunday, Bears fans should be concerned. Real concerned (yes that’s you DJ).
2a. Can teams start covering LT’s roll out pass play already? How many times does the collective league need to be burned by that play before they start realizing that it’s actually in the Chargers’ playbook.

3. What a dud week for supposedly fantasy RB “studs”. LaDainian Tomlinson had 17 points, but a lot of that was due to the TD pass he threw to Gates. Steven Jackson had an amazing output of 1 point (doesn’t he look like a dumbass for going on SportsCenter a few weeks back and trying to make the case to be picked ahead of LT). Larry Johnson had 8 points in a very rusty looking opener. Frank Gore managed to rack up only 13 points as well. The leading fantasy RB of the week? How about Adrian Peterson… immediate front runner for ROY.

4. The Packers-Eagles game was supposed to be about Favre vs. McNabb. It turned out to be which team sucks vs. which team sucks more. Well Eagles fans… your team sucked more. In a close 16-13 game won by the Packers (I, myself, am a proud Packers fan), 10 of the 16 points scored by the Packers were direct results of bad punt returns by the Eagles. The first blunder by Greg Lewis may have been excusable for a returner with little to no experience. The second miscue by JR Reed, however, was simply mind boggling. In the 4th quarter with less than 2 minutes to go in a tie game, the guy decides to call for a fair catch that he needs to run 15 yards and dive to get to. Thank you JR Reed for giving us the game.

5. Vince Young simply knows how to win.

6. Is Carolina turning a new page and ready to not be the most disappointing team of the NFL? They have loads of talent… let’s see if they can translate that into remaining in a competitive race with the Saints in the NFC South.

7. Is Pittsburgh that good, or Cleveland just that bad? I’ll go with the latter on that one…

8. That was an ugly win for San Francisco, but a must win for a young playoff-contending team. All you can say after one of those victories is “1-0… undefeated”.

9. Why does it seem Peyton Manning is getting better and better each year?

10. Most importantly, thoughts and prayers go out to Kevin Everett, the 3rd year back up tight end from the Buffalo Bills. Everett suffered a severe injury while tackling a Denver player on a punt return. Unfortunately, it looks like his chances for a full recovery are very slim, but you can only hope for the best. Sometimes it takes things like this to happen to realize how unimportant sports really are in the grand scheme of things.

Fantasy Implications

So this week turned out to be a pretty solid fantasy week for me despite a few duds by my RB’s. I played Peter in the Lawrenceville Fantasy League and ended up winning by a margin of 101-61. Here’s my team and their output and Peter’s team and his output.

My Team

Carson Palmer 15
Larry Johnson 8
Carnell Williams 5
Jamal Lewis 2
Reggie Wayne 21
Terrell Owens 20
Kellen Winslow 8
Packers D/ST 17
Neil Rackers 5

Bench
Ben Roethlisberger 22

Peter’s Team

Matt Leinart 7
Frank Gore 13
Cedric Benson 3
Ladell Betts 6
Chad Johnson 15
Anquan Boldin 9
Vernon Davis 0
Broncos D/ST 5
Olindo Mare 3

My running backs sucked big time. Larry Johnson should usually give me 100 yards and 2 TD’s (which would have been 22 points). Williams got injured early on in the game so thats excusable… and Jamal Lewis is such a shit show these days who knows what to expect. My wide receivers were pretty clutch with Wayne and Owens putting up huge numbers (3rd and 4th most out of all WR in fantasy this week). The only mistake I made in setting up my lineup this week was forgetting to start Roethlisberger over Palmer. I obviously think Palmer is the better quarterback (otherwise I wouldn’t have spent my 2nd round pick on him), but Roethlisberger was facing the Browns and Palmer the Ravens. In one you have probably one of the worst D’s in the league, and in the other, arguably the best. Palmer still didn’t make me pay for it too much by only putting up 7 less points that Big Ben, but I need to be more careful with that sort of stuff in the future.

Roger Federer

Does anything more need to be said about this guy? He’s the greatest tennis player to ever play the game and is quickly approaching on Pistol Pete’s record of 14 Grand Slams. On Sunday, with a 7-6 7-6 6-4 victory over 3-seed Novak Djokovic. Djokovic certainly had his chances in each of the first two sets, holding a combined 7 set points, but failed to convert in any. Federer showed his championship mettle by picking up his game at the right time whenever he needed to.

Watching Federer play is a beautiful thing for an amateur tennis player like myself. He makes every shot, every point, every match look so damn effortless. He anticipates his opponents’ shots like no one else in the game, and has the mental toughness to go along with the physical skills. I have always been a Federer fan just because his game is so perfect. One thing that’s surfaced in the recent few months (or maybe it’s that I’ve just noticed it) that is starting to detract from Federer is his arrogance and cockiness. I’m going to compare him with his parallel in golf in just a moment, but here’s a quote from his victory speech at Flushing Meadows:

“New guys challenging me — this is my biggest motivation out there. Seeing them them challenging me and then beating them in the finals”

Could a guy get any more cocky? I think in order to be a truly great champion, you have to have a certain degree of confidence and cockiness. The “I trust my strokes and game and know that I can beat anyone out there” type of attitude. Federer may just be crossing that line slightly at this point in time. I certainly hope he tones down his attitude and comes back down to Earth like the rest of us.

Tiger Woods

Does anything more need to be said about this guy? He’s arguably the greatest golfer ever, and the only records left to break are Nicklaus’ 20 majors and Sam Snead’s 82 tour victories (this intro sounds awfully similar doesn’t it?). At the age of 31, he already has 13 majors and 60 tour victories. His latest tour victory came at the BMW Championship where he shot a final round 63 for a two shot victory over Aaron Baddeley.

Tiger Woods winning is no longer really newsworthy or exciting unless its in a major championship. What I would like to do, however, is to compare him to Roger Federer and some of the remarks Woods made after winning on Sunday.

“I never, ever would have dreamt that this could have happened this soon,” Woods said. “I’ve been out here, what, 11 years? This is my 12th season. And to have this many wins … I just never could have foreseen that.

“I’ve exceeded my expectations, and it’s been a lot of fun to enjoy that whole road, that whole process, to get to 60. It’s been a lot of work. There have been some changes along the way, you know? But I think that’s all been great.”

Please compare the two quotes. Tiger Woods is a true champion… Roger Federer should probably take a few tips from his good friend. Now the real question (which I don’t necessarily have an answer for): Who is more dominant in his respective sport, Tiger or Roger?

-K

Month In Review

So July has been a pretty good month for me personally. Started out with a nice getaway from NJ down to Washington DC and Chapel Hill, a good amount of poker throughout the month, a relaxing trip to the beach, a few trips up to NYC, and then a party this past weekend.

Now what about sports. Was it a good month for the sports world? Well… not so much. In fact, maybe one of the worst months in recent history of the sporting world.

• In baseball, Barry Bonds continued his historic (and probably tainted) run at the most hallowed record in the game. Everyone related to the sports – Hall of Famers, analysts, commentators, current players, former players – all have their own opinion on the whole issue. One of the few people who don’t? The commissioner of the league, Bud Selig. He’s going to be there when he hits the record HR, no he won’t, yes he will, no he won’t. The flip flop act the commissioner has been pulling is absolute bullshit. My opinion? He should be there. He MUST be there. And it looks like he will be. Selig doesn’t want to be another Bowie Kuhn, so regardless of the steroid issue, he needs to be there.
• In cycling, the leader of the Tour de France with 4 stages left, Michael Rasmussen, was removed from the race by Tour organizers because he failed to show up for two pre-race drug tests. Now I’m not a huge cycling fan, mainly because it takes too mother fucking long, but it seems to me the sport and its most storied race will have to try and repair its image over the next few years. This year’s winner, Alberto Contador, should be a good start. The 24 year old Spaniard, riding for Team Discovery (Lance Armstrong’s former team), could lead the charge by young riders to save the sport. Let’s just all hope that another Floyd Landis episode doesn’t occur again this time around. By the way… after the past two years in which multiple superstars have admitted to cheating and doping, why do we continue to worship Lance Armstrong and believe he was able to win 7 Tours cleanly while recovering form a bout with testicular cancer? I’ve always been an advocate of innocent till proven guilty, but there’s something fishy about the whole Armstrong era.
• Oh yeah, there’s that whole Michael Vick thing going on with the NFL as well. If you haven’t heard about the federal indictment of competitive dog fighting and conducting the business across state lines that Vick is currently being charged with, go back to Mars. This is one of the top 5 star appeal players in the league being indicted by the federal government. It’s not like this has happened in another major sporting league in the recent past, right? But this is different, and much more severe, compared to the Kobe Bryant sexual assault case from a few years back. I’m refraining from really going in depth about Vick until this case is brought to trial or a plea deal is met, but it seems like shit is starting to hit the fan with the most recent news that one of his co-defendants has flipped on the plea of “not guilty”, and decided to cooperate with federal officials.
• And finally, perhaps the worst of them all, the betting scandal involving a veteran NBA referee, Tim Donaghy. I’ve written pretty in depth about how big of a deal this is before in this blog, so I’m not going to talk about it directly some more. Instead, I’m going to try and provide my own opinion regarding the impact of this scandal vs. the Vick scandal that Jim wrote about last week.

Jim and I usually have pretty similar viewpoints on many things, but I’m going to have to disagree with him on this one. The NFL, at this point in time and probably for the foreseeable future, has the most viewers by far across the nation. It is truly American, and Americans love to watch it. The Super Bowl has no match in terms of the hype and anticipation it receives from the American public. Why is the NFL so successful? There are many reasons why (including the fact that 95% of games are played on Sundays when no one has anything to do), but one primary reason is that NFL fans are very team oriented. There are more die-hard NFL fans out there than any other sporting league in America. Only in the NFL will you find fans paint their faces in dress up in goth for Oakland Raiders games. Only in the NFL will you find fans take off their shirts, apply body paint to read out “PACKERS”, and cheer all game in below freezing temperatures for the their team. Thus, the Vick scandal, while obviously extremely bad for Vick, the Falcons, and to an extent, the league’s image to the American public, won’t necessarily deter Packers and Bears fans from watching their two teams do battle on the gridiron. I know I certainly won’t be missing any games because of the Vick scandal in the upcoming season. Yeah sure, you might have your random dog-loving PETA member shun the league in the upcoming season and refuse to watch any games because of Vick, but for the most part, I think viewership will either remain constant or go up.

The NBA, on the other hand, suffered some of its worst finals ratings ever this past season. The problem with the NBA is that there aren’t many die-hard fans out there that are team oriented. I agree with Jim, when he says that the NBA is player-oriented compared to the team-oriented nature of the NFL. The problem with player-oriented fans is that they tend to be much more casual fans in the grand scheme of things. Take myself as an example. My favorite team is the Nets and when I can, I will turn on YES and watch their basketball games (no matter how frustrating it is to watch Lawrence Frank fuck up my team by running a slow-tempo half court offense when you have one of the premiere PG’s in the game on your team). I wouldn’t say I’m a die hard Nets fan, but I’m more inclined to watch a Nets game than I am to watch a mediocre individual match up like… Suns (Nash) vs. Hornets (Paul). Because there are many more casual fans who might turn on the TV every once in a while and switch to TNT or TBS to watch an intriguing game, I think the Donaghy scandal will impact the NBA more. The NBA, in my opinion, will lose the casual fans it’s had in the past because honestly, who wants to spend time and watch a game that could be in the process of being tainted by a referee. Those who love basketball… should be watching college basketball. But those who really really love basketball and can’t get enough of it, will keep watching. It’s the casual fans who will view the Donaghy scandal as a violation of the fundamental trust that a fan and its officials share.

Well, at least we have SOMETHING to cheer about. Perhaps the classiest HoF class to be enshrined in Cooperstown in a while. Congrats to Cal and Tony for playing the game right and having tremendous careers.

-K