The Rookies

It was quite the non-waiver MLB trade deadline today, with the White Sox picking up Jake Peavy, the Red Sox landing Victor Martinez and Casey Kotchman, and the Tigers dealing for Jarrod Washburn, among other deals.

However, it was a pretty rough deadline for many of us Blue Jays fans; not only did general manager J.P. Ricciardi trade star third baseman Scott Rolen to the Reds, they also apparently agreed to pay part of his contract and made the trade because he was unhappy in Toronto, making things even worse. Moreover, Ricciardi failed to deal Roy Halladay, the most-discussed potential trade piece; I argued a while back that the team should hang on to Halladay and go for broke next year, but the Rolen salary dump makes it clear that the Jays’ corporate masters are in full fire-sale mode, meaning Halladay’s likely to be traded in the winter. In my mind, it would have been better to deal him now and maximize his value with a year and a half left on his deal than hope you’ll get something later on when he’ll be a one-year rental.
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That's right, two of these are about Buffalo. Deal with it.

I hate fan rules. Fan rules, in general, make me angrier than apartheid and Triple H combined. Don’t say ‘no-hitter’ or ‘perfect game’! You can only have one team you root for in a specific sport! If your team moves, you should still root for them! Are people fucking serious? It’s sports. No, it’s not even sports – it’s watching sports. You know what making rules about watching sports is like? No, you don’t, and neither do I because IT IS REMARKABLY INCONSEQUENTIAL. It reminds me of all the inane conversations that happened at keggers in college about how drunk someone needs to be to actually be ‘drunk’, or what constituted a muscle shirt. (Also, to anyone who went to college with me, or talked to me about college, or has ever seen Animal House: FUCK YOU)

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Where in the WORLD is that song? STUCK IN YOUR HEAD.

Just after midnight, our Kyle Farnsworth Google Alert told us Kyle Farnsworth was not with the Kansas City Royals’ AAA affiliate, which basically set our world entirely off-kilter.

We could only come up with a few places he might have been. Read the rest of this entry →

You're on the list.

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away before the site crashed, I wrote a post about the most annoying fan traditions across teams. I planned to follow it up quickly with another post about some of the most annoying traditions embraced by specific fanbases, but Internet conspirators site issues the 1,001 other things I’ve had to do since then events got in the way.

Until now. Read on to find out what really grinds my gears!
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Sadly, this sort of inspired lunacy may have seen its last official day. The Los Angeles Times is reporting that, due to “safety concerns,” the UCLA Undie Run will be discontinued.

The time-honored tradition dated all the way back to 2002, a time before Facebook, so it will be sad to see such an integral part of the UCLA student experience evaporate. After all, I’m sure there’s absolutely no way any illicit, derrière-flashing dashing will occur on the UCLA campus this fall. Nope. No way. Not going to happen.

College students just aren’t like that.

Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn’t. — Mark Twain

Coming to you live from a theme park in Hong Kong, the Tru Warier explains the Detroit brawl (“I wanted to beat they ass”) with a full-on re-enactment, a series of increasingly lengthy and odd interruptions for pictures with adoring fans, the phrase “bitch slap,” a logo that will haunt your soul, sound effects of all sorts, and a jellyfish t-shirt.

Ron Artest is the most interesting man in the world.

Smiling? Immodest.

Columnisting, which is defined by me as “the moronic convention of sports writers being force to shoehorn an angle and some opinion into a set word length,” is increasingly turning into a race to the most inoffensive conveyance of suburban smarm.

Rick Reilly’s so good at it that he’s almost shark-like: If he smells something even slightly deviant from the country club’s sensibilities, he snaps it up.

If this persists, we’re going to need a bigger blog.

Sore winners

These folks have won a lot. You’d think they’d be better at it.

The writing jokes write themselves! Read the rest of this entry →

Francisco Martinez does his best Failcoeur.

Every year the Mets seem poised for a great season, and…fail. But two Rookies disagree on whether you should feel bad for them. Read the rest of this entry →

The very definition of punchable.

It’s one of the basic rules of being a sports fan that when you turn on SportsCenter or check your favorite sports blogs or (if you’re particularly exotic) open the morning sports section that you’re going to see the same stories come up over and over and over again. It’s just common sense. If a media outlet sees a story that they believe holds a large amount of interest for its audience, that outlet is going to try to get as much out of that story as possible, whether or not people are actually still interested by the time the story plays out. Still, at any given point in the year, you can usually find at least 10 stories that, regardless of who’s covering them or what angle they come up with for it, audiences would be perfectly happy never to hear about again.

Here are five (well, sort of) stories I could really do without having to follow right now. Read the rest of this entry →

On Sunday, your intrepid blogger and some of his more soccer-inclined friends ventured out of the relative safety of verdant Central Jersey for the freeway-striped land of North Jersey, specifically Giants Stadium, for the CONCACAF Gold Cup Final. We knew what we were in for by midnight Thursday night when Mexico beat Costa Rica in penalty kicks, setting up the USA-Mexico final everyone wanted (admittedly this was the USA’s “B” team). We knew the crowd would be pro-Mexican, but we had no idea how pro-Mexican until we got on the New Jersey Turnpike and got stuck in traffic 10 miles before the stadium.

Literally every other car had Mexican flags or Mexican jerseys hanging out the windows. Horns were honking, and cars and minivans were stuffed to the gills with fans of El Tricolores ready to cheer on their team.

As my friend so eloquently put it, “The Mexicans are so much better than us at carpooling.” Read the rest of this entry →