Sadly, 40-year-old pitching arms don’t last forever.
This past Sunday, 40-year-old Blue Jay Ramon Ortiz suffered the worst fate a pitcher could imagine. In the third inning of a start against the San Diego Padres, Ortiz threw a 76 m.p.h. off-speed pitch for a ball and quickly collapsed on the mound.
At first it seemed as though Ortiz's knee simply buckled on him, but when he ignored the catcher's attempt to return the ball it was clear something more serious was happening.
Who says journalists aren’t athletes?
Craig Sager is known as TNT's eccentrically-dressed sideline reporter who is treated more as a courtside jester than an actual journalist.
Via: Jesse D. Garrabrant / Getty Images
This perception might have somewhat to do with Sager's unapologetically horrific wardrobe.
Via: Garrett W. Ellwood / Getty Images
Nice arm, rookie.
Via: Harry How / Getty Images
Via: brooksbaseball.net
Proof that not everyone hates the Yankees.
During the first inning of the Indians/Yankees game yesterday, Nick Swisher (who signed a four-year, $56 million deal with the Indians last December) turned to the right field wall and saluted the Bleacher Creatures — a rowdy group New York Yankees fans who are known for their strict allegiance to the team.
Via: Jason Szenes / Getty Images
The "Swisher Salute" became Nick's signature move during his four-year stint with the Yankees, as part of the Bleacher Creatures' traditional Roll Call, in which the crowd chants the name of each of the Yankees' starting fielders until the player acknowledges the crowd in some way. Here's Swisher:
Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Unless you’re imitating a sieve.
Flowers tend to bloom in spring, which makes Penguins goalie Marc-Andre "Flower" Fleury's nickname ironic considering he wilts like a salted snail during the Stanley Cup Playoffs. After Fleury allowed 14 goals in the first four games of the Penguins' first-round series against the Islanders (and 40 goals in his previous 10 playoffs games dating back to 2012), coach Dan Bylsma wised up and replaced the struggling goalie with veteran Tomas Vokoun, who finished off the Islanders and started the entire second-round series with the Senators while giving the Penguins somewhat of a steady presence in goal.
That is, until Monday. After allowing three goals on 30 shots in Pittsburgh's 3-0 loss to Boston in Game 1 of the Eastern Conference Final Saturday, Vokoun allowed three in less than 17 minutes Monday, including the first goal just 28 seconds into the game.
Bylsma had seen enough, so he summoned Fleury from the bench to relieve Vokoun late in the first period. How do you think that went?
A. Swimmingly
B. Poorly
C. Fleury
D. Both B & C
Well...
Smooth move, Angels fan.
I repeat: Tiger Woods played golf with Kid Rock!
Today, Kid Rock posted a picture on Facebook of himself on a golf course wearing a backwards trucker hat, an untucked see-through shirt embroidered with the face of the devil, camouflaged cargo shorts and Nike Air Max sneakers.
His golf outfit alone could qualify as news on a very slow day, however the real story is the man he was standing next to -- fellow cargo short enthusiast -- Tiger Woods.
Source: facebook.com
Update - Jun. 4, 4:00 p.m., EDT: This confounding round of golf happened at the 15th annual Tiger Jam, a two-day golf and poker charity event in Las Vegas hosted by Tiger Woods on May 17th & 18th. NBA all-star Chris Paul completed the threesome.
And probably the only one, though maybe it will catch on.
This Taylor Lautner look-alike is the No. 2 long snapper in the country and a USC commit. If that's not impressive enough (it's not), he made a trick-shot video to showcase his long-snapping skills, and it's actually quite impressive.
Here are some of the highlights:
Nailed it.
Slight tippy toes action going on, but still solid.
Youzhny SMASH!
In the fourth round of the French Open, Tommy Haas of Germany defeated Mikhail Youzhny of Russia 6-1 6-1 6-3 — a beating that Mikhail did not take lightly. After a lopsided second-set loss, Youzhny decided to take his frustration out on his racket by repeatedly beating it against the bench until it broke.
Which turned out to be extremely difficult.
Nine whacks later, he hid under a towel in shame.
We know all about the Spurs and the Heat basketball-wise. Let’s talk about the other stuff.
Via: Darren Abate / AP
It's settled: Miami Heat vs. San Antonio Spurs in the 2013 NBA Finals. Two basketball teams, playing basketball, trying to win a trophy of a gold basketball. There's already been plenty of actual basketball talk — here's a sample: the Heat are better if Chris Bosh and Dwyane Wade play better! the Spurs need Kawhi Leonard to be huge! LeBron James is very good! — so right now, it's time to cover what could be the deciding factor of the matchup: the INTANGIBLES.
THE CITIES
San Antonio: The Alamo is in San Antonio. This is the only thing I know about San Antonio. If you told me that San Antonio was run by a bear-king and that everyone met in the town square at 3 pm every day to drink iced coffee, I wouldn't believe you, but I wouldn't NOT believe you. I think the rest of the country feels similarly, possibly explaining why Finals that include the Spurs average so many fewer viewers. It must be tough to be the fourth city in a state like Texas; everyone's got so much state pride, but it all goes to Austin and Dallas and Houston, and San Antonio's kind of the neglected kid brother. It's not your fault, San Antonio: you're beautiful.
Miami: During the one week in my life I've spent in Miami, I saw more Bentleys, Maseratis, and Maybachs than I've seen before or since combined. Not only did these cars exist, though — they were all just sitting in the front yards of perfectly ordinary-looking homes, idling, clean as scalpels. I then went out and paid $12 for a Corona. Fuck Miami.
Advantage: San Antonio
THE TEAM NAMES
Spurs: A remnant of an era in which men wore cowboy boots so they could drive their heels into the sides of horses, spurs don't have much place in contemporary America, which features comparatively fewer men on horses. They also seem like a mean thing to poke a horse with, although I'm not intimately familiar with the functionality of spurs or horses, so please forgive me if that's a mischaracterization. I'm just not sure that an American in 2013 has a place for spurs, but they do call to mind the great Argentinian poem El Gaucho Martin Fierro.
Heat: Without heat, there would be no Bagel Bites.
Advantage: Heat
Via: Eric Gay / AP
Crazy badass, that is.
Source: instagram.com
Source: instagram.com
The extra “h” in his name stands for HOT DAMN.
Via: Ben A. Pruchnie / Getty Images
Via: Christopher Lee / Getty Images
LOOK OUT FOR THE GRASS.
Via: Marty Melville / Getty Images
Via: Andrew H. Walker / Getty Images
David Murphy, pitching in relief, works some black magic on the Red Sox.
Carp is offscreen, but you can see the ump punting him sending him off.
The Baltimore Ravens visit the White House and get a presidential congratulations on their Super Bowl win.
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A means to no end, our baseball overlords are doubling down on catching cheaters after the fact. It’s better than nothing, but by how much?
Via: Kathy Willens, File / AP
Let's give Major League Baseball some credit. Nearly 15 years after Steve Wilstein's Associated Press story about seeing a pill bottle labeled "androstenedione" in Mark McGwire's locker awkwardly launched the steroid era, the sport's handling of performance-enhancing drugs is still getting more tragicomically backwards every year.
The latest chapter comes via an ESPN/Outside the Lines report that MLB is about to move to suspend some 20 players, including stars like Alex Rodriguez and Ryan Braun, for PED use. But these players weren't caught by MLB testing or investigated because of information collected by MLB's personnel. Rather, this is all based on information from BioGenesis, an apparently prolific PED-peddling clinic in South Florida, whose documents were uncovered by the Miami New Times and ESPN. MLB, its entire enforcement division having been outworked by a few good reporters, then filed a dubious lawsuit against the lab's proprietor, Anthony Bosch, claiming that he had interfered with MLB's Joint Drug Prevention and Treatment Program and was thus compelled to hand over said info. Now — with their lawsuit against him still pending — they've reportedly accepted his offer to give them information about his former clients in exchange for some promise of protection from federal prosecution.
In other words, MLB's newest hope for clearing its reputation as a playground for the chemically inclined is to deal for info from a huckster with a fake medical degree whom they have already sued. But baseball is an impatient beast on some matters — enhanced instant replay, not so much — so it's apparently willing to drop the suit if Bosch pipes up. If this all sounds very convoluted and sketchy to you, you probably have something in common with the accused players' representatives and lawyers, who are no doubt gearing up for a long appeals process. (Not that these players are looking especially good right now either; even if they're not found to have technically violated MLB rules, it still doesn't say much for their judgment to have their names show up on the records of a fake doctor who specialized in "anti-aging" treatments and had already been credibly connected to steroid shenanigans.)
With more melodrama than a Spanish-language novella, you can't say that MLB's ongoing attempts at whatever it thinks this will all accomplish haven't been entertaining theater. Or even that eliminating steroid use is an unworthy goal. But what it hasn't been is terribly effective, and now another grasp at credibility comes with the caveat of having to partner up with someone like Bosch, a newer-age Victor Conte. Baseball has now become a pastime where an extensive legal background is almost as necessary for understanding the sport's context as identifying box score symbols. What commissioner Bud Selig and his underlings would have you believe, on a very basic level, is that this is a net positive, that anything that helps eliminate potential PED use is worth doing, and I don't necessary disagree. But this tragic comedy has reached such outlandish proportions that it's hard to see how partnering with BioGenesis actually fixes anything. If these players were cheating, then they weren't deterred or caught by MLB testing protocols. Putting the squeeze on a fake doctor after he's blown up by a local gumshoe is not a replicable process. If these players weren't cheating, and it's not as if Bosch's credibility is beyond reproach, then here we go again.
Even in the most optimistic of scenarios — i.e. they doped; they're suspended; ergo, less players dope — no one looks good here. And the sport's "war on drugs"-style approach — occasional scary suspension binges punctuating long periods of doing nothing — is almost designed to create uncertainty. Craig Calcaterra of HardballTalk has written a marvelous piece that delves into this whole debacle from a smart and sensible perspective. (Also required reading: Jonah Keri and Tim Marchman.) What really proves enlightening (and, by extension, frustrating) is how he lays out the ways in which baseball could actually achieve long-term reductions in PED use. MLB will, in all likelihood, not heed his approach in any meaningful way, but if Jose Canseco can find a second life as a writer, then maybe anything can happen.
Via: Richard Drew / AP
But I don't think this latest twist with Bosch and BioGenesis was ever about longterm change. It's about legacy-building for Bud Selig. The commissioner says he will step down after the 2014 season, and much like David Stern, his soon-to-be-departed basketball counterpart who's attempting a little reputation-polishing of his own vis a vis Seattle, it's high time Bud start thinking about history and perceptions. Lucky for Selig, society is built on short memories these days, so they can attempt these kinds of PR-shaded maneuvers and trumpet whatever tangible results they can wrest away and call it a success. Some people will fall for that, but most probably won't care to invest too much emotional energy in such conclusions. This 15-year effort has never truly shown any signs of going away, and the BioGenesis business will, if history has taught us anything, likely represent yet another false coda.
A final aside: My first child, a son, is due later this summer, and when you hear all the proclamations about how expecting a kid changes your outlook on life (and, yes, sports, by extension), do know that it's all very much true. Being a baseball fan of a certain age who has full cognition of The Great Home Run Chase of '98 and all it brought about, every new twist in the Steroids Era has me thinking how I might have to explain this to my son one day, should his baseball fandom come to fruition. My great expectation is that by the time he's old enough to talk about and enjoy and love baseball as I did in my youth, there'll be some sense of finality with regards to PEDs. Not that they don't exist — it's not like I'm going to try and keep him from ever learning about the concepts of cheating and dishonesty — but that there will be a level of science/health understanding, education, and deterrence such that steroids have stopped being such a constant interruption from the most wonderful sport we have.
It's a vain, stupid hope, but it's all I've got now.
How to survive baseball’s dangerous base paths.
Baseball players have a proud tradition of sacrificing their lives in order to save their team an out. However with great sacrifice comes immense pain.
One of the most common places to get injured on a baseball diamond is while recklessly sliding into second base.
What is going on in the NFL?
In case you haven't heard, JaMarcus Russell will work out for the Chicago Bears on Friday. Tim Tebow hasn't sniffed a job since getting cut by the Jets. More NFL teams are interested in a guy who derped himself out of the league via overeating and cough syrup abuse than Tim Tebow, who ran for 5 yards a carry and threw two touchdowns in a playoff game just a year and a half ago. Let that sink in for a second.
Via: Joe Robbins / Getty Images
Sure, Tebow hasn't always been spectacular in the NFL, but he's demonstrated that he can be an effective runner and complete basic passes. There is room for players like this (Brad Smith, Ronnie Brown) in the league. Russell hasn't even played a down of football in the NFL since 2009. So why is JaMarcus getting the tryout over Tim? What do these scouts see in Russell that they don't in Tebow?
Father-son bonding at the baseball game, how sweet…
(According to Geoff Baker)
Via: Otto Greule Jr / Getty Images
This happened in 1988, when Kenny Rogers hung out with guys who looked like him . Jordan should have known not to cross the gambler.
And other intentionally meaningless statistical questions about the series that starts tonight.
The NBA Finals tip off tonight at 9 p.m. Will the blazing Heat or the relentless Spurs come out on top? We took a non-traditional approach to the question, looking each team's playoff success on different days of the week and in different weather conditions. Knowing the Finals' schedule and weather forecasts, we figured out how the teams have done in similar circumstances. See how it might all pan out if the past is any indication of what's to come.
