Oh, COME ON!
Image by Laurence Kesterson / Reuters
As if he wasn't cute enough already.
Source: instagram.com
Source: @TomDaley1994
Source: instagram.com
Source: @TomDaley1994
Via UPS commercial.
So it's pretty obviously unfair that the players at the center of the billion-dollar corporate advertising fustercluck that is March Madness and football bowl season are the only ones not getting paid big bucks. It's not a simple issue, of course: there's certainly no consensus on how a player-payment system would work, and there are plenty of coaches and athletic-department types benefitting from the current system who would also like to see athletes compensated with more than a scholarship. Some of them probably work for the University of Florida. But still: with Florida coach Billy Donovan currently starring in a UPS commercial, above, alongside seemingly everyone associated with the Gators' basketball team that isn't an actual player, did they really have to rub their players' nose in their capitalistic freedom THIS much?
UF's University Relations department confirmed that the other men in the commercial are employees — a few assistant coaches, an assistant to the head coach, and the director of basketball operations. (We wrote back to confirm that UPS paid them for their appearances, and will update apologetically if it turns out they all gave their fees to Darfur charities.) There's no problem with people making money — I'm getting paid to write this very rant, just another guy exploiting the kids. Good for University of Florida getting some free advertising and probably some licensing fees for the ad. Good on Billy Donovan for going out and making a few dollars for himself and his family, and very good on him for getting his assistants in on the action. But really, can anyone be surprised that players try to cash in on their "personal brands" via extra payments when the adults surrounding them — the ones they are supposed to be learning and taking their moral and professional cues from — are so obviously willing to do the same?
The games may not have counted, but these plays did…IN OUR HEARTS.
Via: mlb.mlb.com
Via: mlb.mlb.com
Via: mlb.mlb.com
Via: mlb.mlb.com
Point guard Trey Burke nailed an unfathomably deep 3-pointer to help the Wolverines advance.
Image by Ronald Martinez / Getty Images
Image by Ronald Martinez / Getty Images
Image by JIM YOUNG / Reuters
Not a great day for Junior Cadougan, but it could have been a lot worse.
The Buckeyes can't get it done, and the Big Ten is almost finished.
Source: gifulmination.com
Michigan's Mitch McGary might be the breakout player of the 2013 NCAA Tournament. And based on this play, he also might be magic.
We kid, sort of. He's a great player and a class act on the field. But his psychological hold over GMs has caused fans a lot of grief.
Image by Kathy Willens / AP
When he began spring training by announcing that 2013 will be his final year in baseball, New York Yankees closer Mariano Rivera turned his season into a retirement tour, the likes of which will likely not have been seen since Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's teammates gave him a Rolls-Royce. Rivera will justifiably go down as the greatest relief and postseason pitcher of all time, but he also has a less laudable legacy — changing how closers are paid and bullpens are managed in ways that completely missed the point of what made him so great and successful. The overpayment and misuse of the modern closer might be the greatest bane of the Internet baseball fan, and a lot of it is Mo's fault for being so good.
Rivera was so good, and on such good teams, that it was hard for baseball executives to grasp just how much better (and luckier, in some senses) he was than his peers. Rivera's numbers do his greatness a considerable amount of justice, of course: an all-time best 608 saves and five Rolaids Relief Man of the Year awards (tied with Dan Quisenberry — yes, that Dan Quisenberry) to go with his five rings, plus a 0.70 ERA in 141 postseason innings. "Jimmy, back in my day," we'll say to our grandkids, "there was a man who let fewer men score runs on him in the postseason (11) than have walked on the moon (12)." (Jimmy will want to know why people walked on the moon when the roller coasters on Mars are "so much cooler.")
When you have success on as big a stage as Rivera had, you'll have imitators. And when you produce something like the Yankees did with Rivera or, let's say, what Apple did with the iPhone, competitors will often try to imitate the end product rather than go through the longer and harder task of recreating the process you used to get to it. But hasty imitations of wildly effective and popular items aren't usually successful themselves — Samsung's touch-screen smartphone products haven't sold that well, and they lost a $1 billion lawsuit to Apple for patent infringement. There are a lot of Samsung equivalents among non-Mariano major league closers.
Image by Kathy Willens / AP
Nearly every single major contract given to closers after Rivera signed his own contracts in 2001, 2003, 2007 and 2011 could be seen as a result of the market he set, as teams scrambled to acquire their own knockoff version of him. $10 million a year became the "going rate" for "big time" closers following Mo's first payday, and money has piled up ever since for those lucky enough to accumulate monstrous saves numbers and not fall off the face of the earth until after signing their free-agent contract. Of the eight contracts in the article linked above, for example, only Joe Nathan's and Brad Lidge's could be said to have been worthwhile for their teams, and while the Phillies got a trophy with Lidge closing, they also had to endure his 7.21 ERA the next year. The rest range from epic flops (Toronto's B.J. Ryan, who barely played at all) to solid performers on teams for whom the money might have been spent a lot more effectively elsewhere (Cincinnati's Francisco Cordero). The most glaring example of failed Mariano me-too-ism, though, is — because the Sports Gods feast on the sadness of Mets fans — Billy Wagner's 5 year, $10.75 million-per-year contract from 2005.
Wagner's deal was not-so-coincidentally the highest ever for a closer on a per year basis, topping Rivera's 2003 raise by $250,000 annually. Wagner was brought in to play across the East River from Rivera, a splash signing by splash-signing specialist Omar Minaya, who is no longer the Mets GM because of contracts like Wagner's. Wagner even caused a pseudo-controversy in New York by taking the mound to Mariano's signature "Enter Sandman" riff. His save totals dropped from 40 to 34 to 27 in the first three years of the contract as a competitive Mets team got progressively worse, and then he got injured and traded to Boston. Meanwhile, Mariano was re-signed in 2007 to a 3-year, $45 million contract, and the Yankees won the World Series two years later. The point isn't that Billy Wagner was a bad pitcher, because he wasn't. The point is that those Mets had other weaknesses; their money could have been better spent, and Wagner used effectively in situations besides ninth innings when the team had a lead. The Yankees, without Rivera, would still have been a top-tier team, and they can put as much into their payroll as they feel like — paying, for example, other talented relievers to handle jams earlier in the game, saving Rivera for the finish.
Many Mariano imitators are much worse investments than Wagner, who had a great career. Lots of pitchers can put up a nice ERA and a lot of saves pitching 60 innings in a year; you shouldn't pay them like Mariano Rivera unless you think they can do it sixteen years in a row like he did. ERA fluctuates a lot when you don't pitch that frequently. There are better indicators of consistency, like strikeout-to-walk ratio (Mo's is 4.0397, 4th all time) or baserunners let on each inning (.9998 WHIP, 2nd). And save totals are, of course, a notoriously flaky way to judge a pitcher's quality. Mo's astronomical number of saves is tied to the astronomical number of save chances created by his Yankees teams' consistently superb rotations and powerful offenses, which have allowed them to set up their bullpen for the 7th, 8th, and 9th innings with the lead in quite a few games over the last two decades. The Yankees have had the luxury of being able to win a lot while using Rivera, their best reliever, nearly exclusively in those ninth innings. (They do get credit for being unafraid to bring him into the eighth in big games.)
Mariano didn't pioneer the hyped-up one-inning closer role — we can probably blame that on Dennis Eckersley and Tony LaRussa — but the fact that the Yankees were so successful with Rivera working in that capacity certainly didn't encourage other teams to experiment with their relievers. The Red Sox, to name another team working in the psychological shadow of the Yankees at the time, tried to debut a situational-closer system in 2003 only to torpedo the idea amidst a hurricane of fan and media anger when they allowed a ninth-inning game-losing home run in their first game of the year.
It's understandable that GMs have had trouble grasping just how big the gap between Rivera and other would-be closers is, given that they won't get 90% of his production by paying someone with 90% of his ERA 90% as much. Jerry Rice is probably the major-sport figure closest to being the best ever at his position by the distance that Rivera is. But there are still a lot of other wide receivers in the Hall of Fame. Mo's peers at closer are Trevor Hoffman, Eckersley, some not-quite-Cooperstown types (Lee Smith has gotten more than 50% of the Hall of Fame vote but seems unlikely to get the 75% needed to make it in) and a lot of flashes in the pan.
This is actually a reason for optimism for fans of enlightened bullpens. There are other relievers who earn their big paychecks — the Phillies' Jonathan Papelbon is one, and the Braves' Craig Kimbrel appears set to be — but none that have the psychological hold over the league and its fans that Rivera does. Now that Rivera's status as the Ideal Relief Pitcher toward which all teams aspire won't loom over the league, it will be easier for managers to play around with situational closers, or use their best reliever in the seventh inning, or for GMs to go through a make-or-break offseason without committing $55 million to a wild-throwing retread who happened to spend the last half-season getting lucky in the ninth. It'll be a tough year for Yankees fans, and the playoffs won't be the same without Mo, but everyone rooting for another team (and for more exciting, and forward-looking baseball in general) can find a reason to cheer the exit of the Sandman.
Nick Bond is an editor at The Classical.
Kevin Ware suffered an unspeakably gruesome broken leg in today's Elite Eight game against Duke. WARNING: This video is graphic.
Creating a fake Kevin Ware Twitter account is about as classless as it gets.
Go here for more on the injury.
Image by John Sommers Ii / Reuters
In the time since the account was created, which was around 6:31 pm EST, it has gained over 4,000 followers. This tweet in particular has been retweeted over 10,000 times. What appears to be Ware's real Twitter account, @_Woody23, hasn't tweeted since January 12, 2012. If you scroll through the mentions on this tweet, a number of them are well-wishers — the others are people warning that the account is fake.
Via: @KevinWare_5
lol
Fake Twitter and Facebook accounts have been created to try to build someone a following by pretending to be the injured Louisville player.
Image by Darron Cummings / AP
Since then, though, whoever thought this was a good idea has only gone farther with it.
The Danish pro golfer is competing in European Tour's Trophée Hassan II tourney.
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A justified wave of support as the brutally-injured Louisville guard begins his recovery.
Image by Andy Lyons / Getty Images
Source: @UKCoachCalipari
This is what we talk about when we talk about baseball.
Image by Alex Brandon / AP
Image by Charlie Neibergall / AP
Image by Dustin Bradford / Getty Images
If Kevin Ware were a regular employee, he could be entitled to thousands of dollars in worker's compensation for his injury.
University of Louisville basketball player Kevin Ware's horrific leg injury may keep him out of basketball for at least a year. If he were an employee of almost any other money-making enterprise in the state of Kentucky, he'd be entitled to worker's compensation for the time he didn't work. But because he's a student-athlete, he gets zero.
Worker's compensation [PDF] in Kentucky is based on the employee's average weekly wage. Ware doesn't make a wage, per se — that's another feature of being a student-athlete. But researchers at Drexel University estimated [PDF] the fair market value of college players, based on how much they could make professionally — they estimated a University of Louisville basketball player's market value for 2011-2012 at $1,632,103. An employee making that much in Kentucky would run up against worker's comp maximums, which are pegged to the state's average weekly wage. If that employee were totally disabled for a year from an on-the-job injury, he or she would get $39,139.88.
Worker's compensation benefits are paid by employers themselves. But NCAA colleges and universities have argued in court that their players are "student-athletes," not employees — so when they're injured, the schools don't have to pay.
Ware does get to keep his scholarship, which covers most (though not necessarily all, according to the Drexel researchers) of the cost of attending Louisville. But he'll still be incapacitated for a big chunk of time at an important period for the development a young basketball player. While he's not a top NBA prospect, such a future is not out of the question, and top Division I players of his ilk often go on to earn good wages overseas even if the NBA is unattainable. But any attempt by Ware to make it in the pros will be made more difficult by the time he's losing to injury, not to mention its potential lingering physical effects, and for that he won't be compensated at all.
These pictures are currently blowing my mind.
The writer and director of The Sandlot, David Mickey Evans, posted these pictures of The Beast on his blog with the caption:
"I had several "GIANT THE BEAST PUPPETS" built for the movie. One was a completely articulated "Giant The Beast Head" and another was a full over-sized "Giant The Beast Puppet Suit" brought to life by two brave puppeteers actually inside the suit.
They were designed and built by my friend and puppeteer genius Rick Lazarini."
As bad as Ware's injury was — and it was bad — there are several players who've recently gone on to fruitful athletic careers after such horrific setbacks.
Image by The University Of Louisville / Reuters
After seeing Louisville guard Kevin Ware's lower right leg break Sunday during the NCAA Tournament, it was hard not to think he might never play basketball again. Fortunately, it appears that this armchair prognosis is not correct; although Ware faces a lengthy rehabilitation process, Louisville's sports medicine director, Fred Hina, said he will play again. Indeed, the four young athletes who've suffered injuries as dramatically devastating as Ware's in recent years have all gone on to resume their careers at a high level.
The injury that mostly closely resembles Ware's also happened to a Louisville player, and both Rick Pitino and Hina used it as a reference point for his recovery process. During the opening game of his senior season, running back Michael Bush broke his right leg while being tackled. The injury that Bush suffered, which kept him out for the entirety of his senior season, was so similar to Ware's that Bush said he cried after seeing Ware get hurt on Sunday and called him afterward to wish him well. After being selected in the fourth round of the 2007 NFL Draft, Bush sat out his rookie season and then returned to the field in 2008; he's since played in 74 games over five seasons for two NFL teams.
Devon Clarke will never have to buy another boortsog in Ulan Bator again!
Source: image.cdnllnwnl.xosnetwork.com
Source: sphotos-b.xx.fbcdn.net
It doesn't really look like this dude is going to even come close to dunking, does it?
Source: img59.imageshack.us
