A long season awaits

The good news to be taken from Barry Zito's start in Los Angeles today was that his curveball was working.  Really working.  The few he unleashed looked like those he used to throw five years ago when he was one of the best pitchers in baseball.  The bad news...Zito didn't hit 85 mph with any pitch.  On the other hand, Merkin Valdez who came in for Zito to start the sixth, threw a pitch that hit the screen behind home plate, bounced back, hit Russell Martin's helmet, then was clocked at 86.  So, you know.  

The Acceptable-

-Brian Bocock, in for an injured Omar Vizquel, looked like Omar Vizquel with a better arm.  At the plate he was 0-1 with 2 BB (more than acceptable), but took one huge log of a shit when he was picked off first late in the game.  Kids... 

The Unacceptable-

-Aaron Rowand overthrew two (fucking two!!) cutoff men in favor of plays that weren't very close at all, allowing runners to advance to second both times.  What did we all learn in Not Being A Douche 101?  Hit the fucking cutoff man. 

-After Dave Roberts started the Giants half of the first with a base hit, Bochy put on the hit-and-run, putting Brad Penny back in the windup, killing any positive vibe, and severely hampering any shot at a rally.

-4,000 fans showed up at AT&T Park to watch the game on the HD scoreboard.  Comcast SportsNet, what with being the new broadcast partner for the Giants, unveiled their new sign, simultaneously unleashing a shitload of red, white and blue balloons to celebrate, endearing the Comcast brand forever to the super-environmentalist San Francisco populace.  

Pelosi cluelessness: Example #278

House Majority Leader and California Democrat Nancy Pelosi, on the idea of GWB boycotting the Olympics opening ceremony:

"I think the president might want to rethink this later, depending on what other heads of state do," (emphasis mine). 

Leadership, people.

(cough)

Jesus, Dick Enberg and Jay Bilas are giving Tyler Hanbrough a verbal blowjob at the end of the NC/Louisville game.  It's nauseating.  Hansbrough 83 - Louisville 73, it seems.  

[update]: does anyone else play for this team?

Fox Sports: "Hansbrough wills UNC past pesky Louisville"

ESPN.com: "The Heels were pushed, and pushed hard, by Louisville.  Then Tyler Hansbrough pushed back."

I get it, he's good.  But fucking gag.  "Wills?" 

My 2008 NL Preview

It's probably been written by a lot of people, but your 2008 San Francisco Giants, for the first time in the, probably, last...six or seven years(?) can be rooted for.  

The past such-and-such number of seasons have seen Giants fans, myself included, admit their Bay Area fandom with a throat-clear and wink and a nod and a "Fuck you!  I come to the park to be entertained!" and all the innocence of answering the door with a giant spooge hanging off your ear a la Ben Stiller in "There's Something About Mary."  We had become more defiant over the past couple of seasons though, feeling our boy was bearing an inordinate amount of the juicing focus and punishment.  We shouted back accusations of racism and hypocrisy (remember the '93 Phillies, Phillie fans?  Remember Mark McGwire, everyone else?), re-embraced the chase and didn't care about the spooge on our ear.  We knew it was there.  We were the guy with fucking spooge on our ear.  Like when you see that guy at the bar with the dreads who you've only seen on the street like twenty times as you're driving by and now you are standing three feet away at "Mother's" and he drinks Guinness too and maybe you say a couple things to him and you're going to tell all your friends you saw the guy with dreads at the bar and he wasn't all that bad except he's a giant douche for walking around with dreads and kind of stinks but in your heart, you know, he's more of a fucking stud than you'll ever be because he knows he stinks and is the star of the show anyway and puts up with your little bitch-ass running home to your faggot backwards-hat wearing fraternity wannabe friends to ridicule him and you wish you had the balls to be dreads guy.  We were the dreads guy.  It wasn't always easy.  There was that in-between phase when we just looked kind of stupid and wanted to wash our hair, but goddammit if it didn't make us love our dreads all the more in the end.  The transition from "I need to see proof to believe Bonds did it," to "Yeah, he fucking did it and I don't give a shit," was hard, but made us hard.  We put up with the eye rolls and the condescension, and the douchy self-righteous faggot backwards-hat fraternity wannabe Cub or Red Sox fan, knowing the vitriol, the show of disgust, the national media polls that demonstrated Bonds didn't belong in the Hall or there should be an asterisk on 756, was bullshit, and we laughed at you.  We knew those polls were shit.  We knew if Bonds had done that stuff for your team in your town, you'd be voting to protect what he'd done, that you'd actually explore the whole issue.  We knew the Bonds-hate that overtook the sports nation was an easy, bandwagon-jumping, abandonment of intellectual integrity, and we laughed at you.  We gained respect for the Giants for sticking with their guy; the guy who'd built their park; the guy who'd brought in money and fans and fans and more fans.  In the end, we were the guy in movies that, when coming to the fork in the road, took the one with dead and snarled trees and howling wolves.  You took the other one.  The one with green grass and bunnies.  We've become Tom Berrenger in "Platoon."  You are Jon Cusack in "Serendipity."     

Now the Giants and their fans find themselves changed.  Bonds, of course, is the only big departure, but this is a new team playing in a new era with names like Ortmeier, Bocock, Rowand and Velez.  Introducing Randy Winn as Jeff Kent and Bengie Molina as Bonds.  Columnists, bloggers and anyone else a media organization has subjectively dubbed, "expert," have picked the Giants to finish last in the NL West.  They've thrown insults at the team, hardly batting an eye, writing things about Omar losing a step, or Zito's huge contract.  One blogger, of whom I generally find myself a fan, called predicting a last-place finish, the, "Easiest pick in all of baseball."  The New York Times' Tyler Kepner writes, "If the hitting coach Carney Lansford coaxes runs from this bunch, he's a genius," even managing to sneak in a big Giants nut-kick with the Braves snippet.  We're still laughing.  That anyone at the Times would ever think Kepner's piece knowledgeable is hifuckinglarious.  Nothing about two of the best young pitchers in baseball?  That anyone feels turning a Major League Baseball team full of professionals into a punchline from afar is acceptable is, quite frankly, really, really, super douchy.  But we laugh at the way your articles or posts or snarky little digs trick our minds into thinking we're smelling Massengill emanating from the computer.  Will your 2008 San Francisco Giants finish anywhere in the top half of the NL?  Most assuredly, no.  It's unlikely an offense, built around three 6 or 7 hitters is going to put up runs with any consistency.  Yeah, the Giants are going to lose, but they are going to strike out fourteen of your guys each night doing it, with Lincecum, Cain and Correia.  And we're going to think it all the sweeter when our Giants who were weren't supposed to do shit take two of three from your Cubs or Phillies or Mets and Brian Wilson saves those games and you ask yourself, "Who the fuck is Brian Wilson," and you won't be alone because you and the rest of the baseball world thought all the 2008 San Francisco Giants deserved was a punchline. 

So here are my 2008 NL predictions:

Fuck off.

         

My new favorite quote

Apparently MMA is reaching young age-groups, namely the 8-and-under crowd. Sane parents everywhere, recognize the issues, yet Tommy Bloomer, father of two little scrappers is unconcerned...

"We're not training them for dogfighting. As a parent, I'd much rather have my kids here learning how to defend themselves and getting positive reinforcement than out on the streets."

Did I miss the Apocalypse, then subsequent fallout in which all of society's differences are settled inside Thunderdome? And your options are your kids fighting in your garage for your pleasure or being out on the streets? It cracks me up that the advocates cited in this piece are quick to to throw the "the kids are learning to defend themselves," argument, but also just as quick to point out that there are very strict rules that need to be followed, and the kids "wear protective headgear, shin guards, groin protection and martial-arts gloves. They fight quick, two-minute bouts. Rules also prohibit any elbow blows and blows to the head when an opponent is on the ground." The last time I was in a fight I was, I think, 11, and I'm pretty sure I wasn't worried about violating the other kid's rules.

You give, you get

The worst part about Tennessee's tournament departure?  My bracket, already on life-support, took a hit.  The best part?  No more pictures of Bruce Pearl acting like a fucking clown.  Pearl has become the favorite of all.  Partly because he's okay being the coach not worried about looking too much like the coach, partly because he is very, let's say accommodating, and partly because he's touched and texted Erin Andrews.  And it all really only amounts to Pearl being a flavor of the month.  He's Jamal Anderson, or Anna Kournikova, or Turk Wendell, or any number of douchy highlight attractions whose act got tired when it was slowly recognized that the results did not match the acclaim.  And now, it all just looks silly.             

No 'Lost' tonight

Psshaw. Fuck, I guess I'll watch basketball. In all seriousness, actually watching sports on television, aside from baseball, has become kind of tedious. I'm way more entertained by box scores and fantasy sports. It's something I've worried about, basically all my life, as being less interested in watching sports on television than dissecting information from the game is a clear indication that I'm nearing the dreaded "Ascetic, chai tea-drinking, flower-tending, teetotalling, closet-gay monk," phase of my life. I like watching games live still. Fuck, I'll watch the Chico Outlaws play an intra-squad game. But on television? Meh.

To recap:

Baseball, and maybe college football, on television? Yes.

Anything else? Nah to meh.

Anything live? Yes.

[update]: then it turns out WVU/Xavier is the best game of the tournament.

Fact-checking and the death of us all

Supervisors in Kern County, California have okayed the construction of a corn-powered ethanol plant that should generate a shitload of the fuel each year.  There were, rightly, environmental concerns raised, including questions about the amount of nitrous oxide released by the plant, which will not be within the San Juaquin Valley's air quality limits, though the company running the plant has and will purchase offsets.  I'm still confused about how offsets actually remove polluting substances from the air above the polluted region.  Similarly, I wonder how the offsets help dissipate the super-stink created by ethanol plants.  None of that addresses the main problem with ethanol, which is that treating it as the American fuel-need answer is a fucking joke. "I haven't been as excited about any project since I got on this commission," said Commissioner Wendy Wayne."  Oh god.  

And the Los Angeles Times looks like a joke right now.  The piece they ran first on March 17th, in which Sean Combs was cited as being behind Tupac's shooting, was quickly torn to shreds by thesmokinggun.com.  The craziest thing about the Times' ineptitude seems to be how fallible the sources used so obviously appear.  I mean, fuck dude.   

Hello, omen...

I don't remember what year it was, 1997 or '98 or something close.  The Detroit Tigers held an exhibition against its triple-A affiliate - it seems like it happened during the season - and got waxed.  The score was like 18-3.  I'm not going to look it up.  I was so bad, the score made the Sportscenter scores, back when they actually showed something resembling in-depth highlights and box scores.  Well your 2008 San Francisco Giants last night fell to your 2008 Giants affiliate Fresno Grizzlies, 4-3.  Of course, it wasn't as bad as that Tiger game, and anything can happen on any given Wednesday night in baseball.  But.  Really, it says something about the team the Grizzlies are putting on the field this season.  The bus between San Francisco and Fresno will be mighty busy, not solely because of injuries, but because many of the players in Fresno are AAAA players, ready to replace many of the Giants' AAAA regulars.  

Revisiting an old, failed idea

Readers might recall my once mentioning my old blog, 'Stop the Fistpump,' which later became 'Now I'm Divorced,' which later became non-existent when I scrapped the whole thing in the name of redevelopment (laziness).  Well, 'Now I'm Divorced' has returned, actually, like two weeks ago, to universal acclaim.  blogsquat.com called it, "A scary yet riveting peek at the world from your mother's basement."  blogtasticnation.net called the site, "A scary reality check for basement-dwellers who had, until now, thought about women."  Rolling Stone called it, "The best (or worst) thing to happen to the internet since free porn and iTunes."  Finally, MHR's own Sondog found it, "Like Seinfled, only written by a 13 year-old retard."  Hey man, if I'm getting Seinfeld comparisons, I must be doing something right.

 http://29andsolitary.blogspot.com/

Wednesday's Political Fodder

Let me tell you what I can't stand about Anderson Cooper, if you have a moment... the guy looks like he wants to kick the camera's ass everytime he sends the audience to a commercial break. Seriously, he looks like he wants to fight.

Also, he's a bit of a boob. His tagline on his blog states, "Be honest about what you see, get out of the way and let the story reveal itself... AND LOOK AT MY HUGE FACE THAT WANTS TO FIGHT YOU!!" Or something like that.

Anyways, I enjoyed the Carl Bernstein contribution this morning on Cooper's LOOK AT MEEEEEE blog. It somewhat describes my feelings towards the Hill-Dog. She just doesn't seem to confront the truth very well, and I'm a little tired of the Presidential habit of "don't worry about the truth. It doesn't really matter" philosophy over the last, oh, 16 years or so. That's not to say that I think Obama and McCain are the most honorable and cripplingly honest people in the country, but I just can't trust the words that are coming out of Clinton's mouth like I can the ones coming out of Obama and McCain's mouths. Particularly Obama because, you know, his words are prettier.

I didn't see that coming.

Disappointing.  The Chris Webber experiment is over in Oakland.  W's fans had high hopes for the rebirth of the Webber era, but it became clear early on that the signing didn't really help the team very much.  So GS has Andris Biedrins and Al Harrington, as they had prior to the Webber signing and have since the Webber injury.  Few W's fans were looking forward to Webber's re-re-return, but I don't think anyone wanted to see the guy retire because of injury.