A Bay Area Sports blog. Paying special attention to the San Francisco Giants, Golden State Warriors, and San Francisco 49ers - With occasional remarks about other teams and other topics.
That was an absolute beat down. Reminded me of when the Mets came into The Phone last year and won like 12-1, or 10-1 in the first game of long weekend series. Game like that makes you realize you just don't belong in the same league as these guys. It's some embarrassing shit. And that's what happened last night. The Giants put the Cardinals in their place, said "Know your role, son."
How's about Juan Uribe! Holy hell. What'd that guy put in his syringe for breakfast? Hitting a homerun like that with your team already up a 9 spot in the 8th is like peeing on a girl after you cummed on her tits. In other words, atta fucking babe.
Timmy, what can a man say at this point? Seriously. I want to have your baby. Every fifth day you bring me out of the gutter. You're a saint, an angel. You're a warm light in a cold, steel-black fucking world. I am at your feet.
I have a specialty cocktail recommendation for this summer. Behold the Gin Gimlet. Booyeah! Drinking a Gin Gimlet can make you look super-suave or super-gay. This cocktail's got range. Plus it tastes like candy.
True Romance was released in 1993, Quentin Tarantino's 2nd big-screen project (as a writer), the first being Reservoir Dogs, though the internet claims QT wrote and sold True Romance before Dogs ever existed. In any event, TR stars Christian Slater and an absolutely smoking Patricia Arquette, and features, in no particular order, Christopher Walken, Dennis Hopper, Chris Penn, Brad Pitt, Gary Oldman, Samuel L. Jackson, James Gandolfini, Val Kilmer, Michael Rapaport and Bronson Pinchot, among others, and yet before about 10.30pm last night I'd never even heard of this movie, let alone seen it.
That fact constitutes a minor fucking travesty because True Romance is the absolute tits. Classic Tarantino, through and through. The plot centers on a Bonnie and Clyde like romance between Slater and Arquette and an aborted drug deal that they've unwittingly become party to, all of it interspersed with smoking, smart, cool-as-shit dialogue, and scenes of relentless comic-book style violence. One scene in particular, between Christopher Walken, a Sicilian mafioso, and Dennis Hopper, a retired Detroit cop, is maybe the best - nay, is the best - mob interrogation scene I have ever seen. Talk about getting fucked-up with some truth.
In theory, the cold shower sounds like an excellent choice, particularly on a hot day, or after playing some pick-up hoops, or after playing some pick-up hoops on a particularly hot day. But in praxis, the cold shower almost never satisfies. What's the deal?
You head to the bathroom, soaked in sweat, core temperature a few clicks above stasis, turn on the cold water, and then, if you're anything like me, you take one step inside the shower and you go into near cardiac-arrest. You immediately proceed to turn on the hot water and you end up taking a cool -- but certainly not COLD -- shower. That's how I role, anyway. No matter how intent I am on taking a cold shower, it never works out that way.
Am I alone on this? Do you guys regularly partake in cold showers -- and enjoy them?
Dirty turned in his 3 consecutive stinker last night against the Halos, going just 3 and change, allowing 10 hits and 6 earned, before getting booed off the mound by all ye faithful. His ERA is now 5.43 on the season, with a ridiculous 1.73 WHIP and all sorts of other peripheral stat-lines that make a man want to puke. So what the hell is wrong with the guy, and what do the Giants do about it?
Check it. Sanchez has been awful all season, and in just about every way, but he's been particularly shitty from the 3rd inning on. If you look at his inning by inning splits on Baseball Ref, you'll see that with Sanchez everything gets progressively worse as the game wears along. His strikeout rate falls in a straight line, his walks go up, opposing batters AVE, OBP, and SLG all go up. ERA goes up. Etc. (It seems like the 4th inning is alright for Sanchez, relatively, but the correction is short-lived; the 5th inning is by far Sanchez's worst.)
And guess what? This has been true of his entire career. In particular, Sanchez's K/BB rate starts at a high of 2.76 for the 1st inning and drops all the way to 1.10 by the 5th.
Oddly, Lincecum, Cain, Billingsley, Verlander, Greinke, etc.-- and I'm sure a bunch more starting pitchers in that age range -- ALL peak in the 4th and 5th inning. They tend to have low K rates in innings 1-3, which then spike in innings 4 and 5, and then go back to early game levels in the latter frames. This is probably because these guys take a few innings to get their arms totally loose, get a feel for their pitches, a feel for the opposing team's approach, a feel for the elements, and what have you. This approach has the benefit of allowing these pitchers to go further into ballgames because their not burning all their fuel in the early innings. They also have good enough stuff that they can throw at 85%-90% and still get guys out.
Sanchez, on the other hand, is balls to the fucking wall from the first pitch. His best fastball, his best slider, his best everything, all happens the first time through the lineup.* This works alright for a little while, about 3 and a half innings according to his stats, and then the kid just gets completely gassed. His delivery gets sloppy because he tries to overcompensate for a tired arm by torquing his body. This fucks up what little command he had in the first place. He starts walking guys, starts grooving pitches over the strikezone, and the next thing you know, he's getting yanked.
Here's my suggestion. Put him the bullpen. (What a fucking novel idea!) He's a bullpen pitcher. He's good for a coupla innings every few nights, and that's about all. He can pitch to lefties, he can get K's, and if the Giants need some long-ish relief, they can always turn to him. He'd at least still retain some value.
Or trade his ass. I've been saying this shit since I started this blog. At this point, Sanzhez's value is at an all-time low, but if the Giants can get a half-season of Matt Holliday out of him, then they shouldn't hesitate. Or even Garret Atkins. Something.
*Another argument is that maybe Sanchez is just one of those pitchers who batters need to see once, and then crush him the second time through the order. I doubt it, though. Just based on what I've seen, Snachez becomes a completely different pitcher in the middle of the game. His velocity drops. His command is non-existent. He turns into a complete head-case. But maybe. In any case, the guy still belongs in the pen.
We went rumbling through Chico in the hour of the morning when the birds are out and yelling but before the sun shoots up above the mountains. The mountains looked like a long fog bank way out there to the east -- cold, purple, very wet. Out the sliding doors it went beans, berries, tomatoes, beans, nectarines, dirt, berries, tomatoes, like that for miles. That's what I made of the fields anyway, in the half-light, but who knows what was really growing out there. Then an orchard of tall trees that I couldn't place. I thought apples. Maybe cherries or apricots or some such but Jim said pretty emphatically that he knew them to be olive trees, mostly because of the fingerling leaves. For the oil. Big business, he said. Farmers markets or whatever. All organic and shit.
We would've seen the sun right before we hit Sacramento but we were back asleep by then. Instead Jim shook me awake as we wended through the marshland on the north side of the Benicia bridge. I poked my head out the doors and saw a giant plume of smoke mushrooming over the Exxon refinery in Martinez. The brown smoke extended for miles. It looked like China, with the smokestacks and the brown smoke and the flat bay and the old bridge. Really though, it was just a cloud. Like any other. June Gloom, we called it in San Diego. I've heard the term May Gray before, too. I don't know if this was the same thing or not.
Thirty minutes later we got off somewhere near Martinez where the train had stopped for some reason or another. Jim took his bag without saying anything and hopped off and jogged briskly over the ballast and into a thicket of weeds beyond which the chainlink fence enclosing the yard was twisted and torn. I jumped down after him, trying to keep my knees from buckling under my weight. I hadn't really used my legs in days and they ached. I followed Jim through the weeds, then stepped over the fence where he had. I looked down the adjacent road in both directions but I didn't see Jim anywhere. I called his name. I stood there for a minute, waiting, I guess, for Jim to appear so I could follow him. But it dawned on me that Jim was gone. We were home. I was on my own.
direction is more an abstraction to us than it is to the train itself, the idea of "west" specifically. Or so says Jim. I mention to him the futility of trying to pin down exactly in what way the train -- even granting that it's its own kind of organism -- perceives the "west", whether the train thinks about "west" in terms of the realm of ideas, or if to the train, as Jim is wont to understand things, is merely perceiving of itself traveling contrawise to another polar longitude, by which the air gets gradually dryer through the desert, colder up into the mountains, wet, and then finally all salty once it hits the edge of the coast, where even to god, Jim laughs, "west" is but an abstraction.
But then again, Jim offers back, where does tapioca come from, and who among us has ever seen the shell of a cashew nut?
I suppose we can answer all of these questions via the internet, even the first one. Jim is angered by the availability of this kind of information, thinks it's perhaps the root cause of a future Darwinian-suck of the human brain's capacity to imagine. I, for one, hope not.
Around noon at a stop on some random stretch of track inland from the commercial line, a yard bull with a shiny badge and a hard-hat and by all outward accounts a generally nasty disposition, approached our car, lifted his fist at Jim, put up two fingers (indicating what?), and told us to stay low. We did. He walked on with his mouth pressed against the business end of a walkie-talkie. The trained rolled out of there twenty minutes later, without additional incident. Jim smiled, thinking it a kind of joke. I was nonplussed. I believe I misinterpreted the event entirely -- the bull perhaps not being a bull, or something -- but Jim was already asleep when I went to ask him about it.
So this thought: My efforts at understanding the events of the past days have been virtually without return. It is all one thing leading to another, for sure, but the dots are invisible to me.
Then this: The next afternoon, yesterday, we slowed up past a line of police cars parked up against the catwalk of a particularly high bridge, the officers attending to some guy in a baseball cap and glasses crying and babbling about God knows what and with that wayward, canine melancholy about his eyes. Handcuffs, too. Jim suspected him to be an attempted suicide. Hard to argue with that assessment. But how'd he get up on that bridge? One. And how did the coppers know to find him there? Two.
I'd look to Jim for answers, but again he's asleep.
If you haven't heard of Bryce Harper by now, then I guarantee you will hear about him at some point very soon. Who is he? Only the greatest high-school baseball player who ever lived. Harper is a 6'3", 210 lb. catcher, who put up a slash-line of .569/.689/1.015 in 2009. AS A SOPHOMORE!!! Surpisingly, Harper only hit 3 HRs this year, which belies his outrageous power, as evidenced in the video below.
So why is Harper bumming me out? Because the cat is out of the bag (as whitey would say). After gracing the cover of Sports Illustrated last week under the title, The Chosen One: Baseball's Lebron, Harper has gone from obscure prospect to full-blown super-star.
Ordinarily, I wouldn't really care about this kind of thing -- although I do think it's regrettable for a kid this young to have to endure the Pro Sports Industrial Complex's Hype-Machine -- but now it's a virtual impossibility that I'll be able to get Harper in my fantasy farm-draft. And I'm pissed about that.
Lat year, while doing research for the draft, I came across the above video and this article from The Baseball Analysts, which made me so giddy that I actually had to stop what I was doing and rub one out real quick to calm myself down. When draft day came around, I came this close to taking Harper but decided against it at the last minute, figuring that since Harper was just a sophomore, and the rest of my league tends to be absolutely clueless about anybody who's not on Baseball America's top 100 prospect list, I would have ample opportunity to draft Harper in either this year's draft or even in 2011. So instead of drafting Harper and doming everyone in the room, I drafted the candy-ass Chinaman*, Yu Darvish, instead.
Now, Harper is gonna be, if not the first pick, in the top 5 or so picks next year, and I'll either have to trade up to get him, or overpay with some other prospect. Fucking bush.
*Yes, I know Darvish is Japanese. I just think it's funny to refer to all Asian people as chinamen.**
I had the unfortunate experience of coming across this article on Yahoo's Sports Page this afternoon --Lebron's Childish Act: When a simple show of sportsmanship was called for, LeBron James behaved like an "immature brat.". In it, author Adrian Wojnarowski, who I've never had an opinion of one way or another, joins the swelling ranks of middling sportswriters to come out against LeBron for his refusal to shake hands with the Magic after the last game of the Eastern Conference Finals.
This shit pisses me off to no end, for a lot of reasons, most of them having to do with the fact that Wojnarowski, and his ilk, have completely unrealistic and unfair expectations of sports stars, and that those expectations are very often contradictory. In this case, they expect Lebron to be a remorseless competitor on the one hand (it's no coincidence of diction that we praise our athletes for being "soldiers", or "warriors", or applaud them for their "killer instinct"), and then immediately transform into this gracious and genteel gentleman the very second the horn sounds.
Yes, shaking hands after a sporting event is the right thing to do, and it's probably something one should make great pains to carry-out regardless of how pissed-off he or she may be, but on occasion, even for the most conscious of athletes, the heat of the moment supplants that little part of the human brain that can distinguish war from simulated-war. In this case, Lebron's emotions got the better of him. Not something he should be proud of, but hardly something to get your panties all up in a bunch about. (It's not like this hasn't happened before, and for way sketchier reasons.)
So that pisses me off. But what really angers me [redacted] is the sanctimonious, Mount Pious, bullshit moralizing that accompanies his totally out of place and exaggerated sense of outrage. Here are a few choice quotes that caught my eye:
As it turns out, there’s one thing allowed to happen at the end of a playoff series: Everyone bows down and kisses the King’s ring.
Alright, sure. Completely change your argument. I thought we were supposed to stand in judgement over Lebron's lack of sportsmanship. But this implies an entirely different criticism. Now we're meant to think that Lebron's walk-out signifies arrogance, vainglory, egomania? If we're gonna make bullshit claims, let's at least be consistent.
Here’s the question: Who has the guts to tell him that he sounds like an immature, self-absorbed brat?
[redacted]
Within the Cavs, someone needed to tell James that he embarrassed himself and the franchise, but that won’t happen.
He embarrassed himself? (Maybe, barely.) But the franchise, too!?! Really? Let's put this into perspective. Again, I don't mean to bring up the whole NFL DUI pandemic, but if we're gonna start taking professional-sports entities to task for embarrassing or otherwise regrettable behavior, I think we can do a little better than writing, I am not exaggerating, according to Google News, 866 articles about Lebron James' refusal to shake hands after losing a horribly disappointing playoff series. Give me a fucking break. If this constitutes regrettable behavior then how the hell are we supposed to root for any of these guys? I mean, just, fuck. Fuck is all I mean.
[Wojnarowski now switching gears again to decry the Cavs' pregame ritual] Someone should’ve told James that the pregame Polaroid act was belittling and beneath a championship contender, but it never happened.
Too bad Wojnarowski didn't write this article before the Magic series, because then Lebron and his teammates would've known that their pregame ritual was "beneath" them and they probably would've won. You see, Wojnarowski is just pointing out what sportswriters have always known, which is that athletes are not supposed to have too much fun, because that's considered juvenile and clownish, until they get too somber, like Kobe, at which point they're supposed to have fun again and remember that basketball is just a game. (Let's not also forget that the "Polaroid act" was featured on SportCenter 1,000 times a week, and everyone seemed to get a big kick out of it at the time, probably including Wojnarowski.)
All season, the Cavaliers acted too entitled, too arrogant for a team that’s won nothing.
Unfucking believable. Of course, Wojnarowski never once aired this criticism during the entire length of the season. Never once doubted that James' Cavs would be in the Finals. Never once even hinted that "arrogance", of all things, might be the Cavs downfall. No. Most definitely not. In fact, what strikes me as the most ironic/hypocritical part of this whole thing is that not even a week before writing this article in which Wojnarowski blasts LeBron for his apparently undeserved sense of entitlement -- or whatever the fuck he's complaining about -- Wojnarowski wrote this after Lebron's miracle shot to win game 3 of the Magic series:
“We are playing with history in the making,” Wally Szczerbiak(notes) said. “He’s going to be the best basketball player to ever touch a ball.”
Nearby, Mo Williams still wore his uniform, still a face flushed in delirium.
“What just happened out there?” he asked.
Outside his locker, his knees on ice, LeBron James looked up and offered a knowing nod and smile.
“Just say thank you to the basketball gods,” he said.
The basketball god, LeBron James means.
Once more, he wears No. 23.
Wojnarowski giveth, Wojnarowski taketh away. I guess.
In other news, The Machine is going to see Neko Case on Thursday! Holy shit. I'm freaking amped. I don't think peeps realize just how smitten I am over this girl. She hits me right smack dab in my ever-loving core.
Not a lot to share this week, unfortunately. And I'm tired. And, well, I don't know, just a general malaise. Which all amounts to an admittedly poor effort on my part for the forthcoming.
That caveat aside, this week's Stew comes to you courtesy of Matsumoto's Shaved Ice (via Awkward Family Photos):
-- (Wow. Keifer Sutherland is absolutely butchering his little bit with Ben Stiller on the MTv Movie Awards right now. That was hard to watch. Further proof that Keifer just isn't very talented. The quintessential one-note actor. Dude's career peaked in Stand By Me, btw,in which he played what was more or less a troubled adolescent version of J. Bauer.) --
• I don't think this is supposed to be pornographic, but the ends justify the means. Know what I'm sayin'? Go ahead and kill twenty minutes. Thank me later. LINK.
• Probably should've seen this one coming. But funny anyway.
• An interesting article from the NY Times about Brooklyn hipsters inventing their own sports. I'm sort of torn on this phenomenon. On the one hand, I always thought Calvinball was cool, but then again, hipsters doing hipsterish things usually makes me want to punch people in the face. Reading this article makes me clench my fists more often than it makes me grin.
From the article:
"These sports, like vikingball, class-conscious kickball and straightjacket softball, are supposed to be competitive games, but also art.
Circle rules football, for instance, is intended to highlight the common thread between improvisational theater and athletics."
You get the gist. Basically you have a bunch of non-athletic aesthetes, all of whom most definitely sucked huge balls at sports while in high-school (and/or played non-sports like cross-country or something), doing what they do to everything else -- whether it be the clothes they wear, the music they listen to, or whatever -- which is intellectualize it, by making it ironic. Irony, of course, being these people's stock and trade. Lest you think I'm being harsh, the creator of Circle Rules Football sums up the point for me:
Mr. Manley, who gave up soccer and football for theater in high school, said that making up your own sport leveled the playing field — no one knows the game better than you do — something not possible if artists tried to square off in basketball against people who had been playing for the last 15 years.
In other words, these people are saying, We are not good enough athletes to compete in sports that require athleticism, so we'll make up sports that value things we are good at. Namely, being ironic. Brief, somewhat hypocritical, and tangential aside: What doesn't get mentioned in this article, is that these self-same hipsters do the same thing to actual art that they do to sports. As anyone who's deep into the indie music scene, or really into visual art, or has ever taken a creative writing workshop knows, people who lack the artistic chops to produce work that adheres to traditional aesthetics, almost always end up reverting to irony. It's an effective stance to take, especially when your earnest efforts fail, because irony is funny, and people will forgive a lot for the sake of funny. Don't be fooled, though. Irony is the ultimate crutch for the unimaginative. And, ironically, it's the best ironists who recognize this.
• Yahoo Profile Pic of the Week: Jamie Walker
Three kinds of people have that kind of mustache: Janitors, Pederasts, and Jamie Walker.
• I know Father's Day is still two weeks away, but this story has to be mentioned. Earlier this week it came to the attention of a Knox County, Tennessee, court that a 29 year-old man named Desmond Hatchett (click on his name for video) was behind on child support payments for 21 kids to 11 different women. Just think about that for a second.
I don't even have a joke. As a society, do we laugh? Do we cry? This is absolutely mind-boggling to me. 21 kids! 11 women! The amazing thing about this story (well, one amazing thing -- among 21 other amazing things) is that all 11 of these women knew that Hatchett had other kids with other women. Okay, one other amazing thing: because Hatchett only makes minimum wage (shocker), his monthly payments to his children amount to $1.98 per kid.
BASM Rule of Thumb of the week: The difference between your number of offspring and your age should never be fewer than 10.
• From the Because of a Lack of Other Material for the Sunday Stew Sub-Divsion of the Personal Internet-Drama Department: New Deadspin editor Tommy Craggs is running a weekly feature called Why Your Stadium Sucks, in which he systematically tears down the merits of different MLB parks. His first target is AT&T.
Now, I understand that the whole point of the feature is to be critical -- even unfairly so -- and I also understand that Cragg's tone is at least partly tongue-and-cheek. That said, I fucking love AT&T like it's going out of style. It's like a favorite book, or a favorite restaurant, in that it at least partially defines who I am. Cragg's article was profoundly upsetting to me, not just as a Giants fan, but as a human being. That shit was personal.
Adding fire to the flame (or whatever it is you white people say), I happened to be a little tipsy when I read the article, and therefore lacked my usual level-headed discretion. Rather than simply take a deep breath and appreciate the article for what it was (or dismiss the article for that same reason), I decided I needed to defend AT&T in the comments section. Here's what I wrote, sans the benefit of a proof-read. (Note that after posting this, I was swiftly banned from ever commenting on Deadspin again (yay me!)):
[Quoted bits of the article are in italics. Bold is me.]
This article fucking sucks. Mostly because the arguments therein are utter bullshit.
[Cragg's trying to make some point about AT&T trading on cheap nostalgia and a naive fanbase] This, you're meant to think, as you sip your Chardonnay and lazily check your e-mail via free Wi-Fi and gaze beyond the giant Coke bottle and the giant glove at the moneyed layabouts plying the Bay in their sailboats, I live in enlightened-ass Northern California, the locus of Western Civilization and apotheosis of all things good in an otherwise benighted world, and bully fucking for me for being able to indulge in these luxuries daily -- and, shit, if that ain't a scoop of ice-cream atop my already deee-licious slice of pie, I think I'll enjoy a ballgame while I'm at it -- while shit-eaters like Tommy Scraggs scrabble about on hand and knee praying for a mere pittance of my insanely good fortune.
These throwback ballparks are the brick equivalent of a Ken Burns documentary.
Except in the case of AT&T, which is more like the brick equivalent of some awesome historical epic like The Prestige say, in that its aesthetic is entirely modern, and authentic, but which also happens to be contextually historical -- and so what? because you need to have some context, lest you end up with a totally without merit place like Cellular Field.
Re: the entire "Private Benjamins" section [in which Craggs argues the AT&T, while technically considered privately financed, in praxis is actually the financial burden of muni taxpayers]: Reeeeeeeaaaching. China-Basin used to be a place to get your dick wet if you happened to have a a bit of crack to barter (not that that's a bad thing). Now the place is swimming in taxable cash. The new park has been a gold-mine for city and private citizen alike.
but last year, with Bonds at last off the roster and prevailing sentiment now aligned against them, the Giants all but sandblasted him out of their stadium, taking down the banners and murals commemorating his pursuit of Hank Aaron's record
Yeah, I grant you, that pissed me off something awful. But I ask, What in the goddamn piss hell does the Giants ownership's tacit ostracizing of Barry Lamar Bonds have to do with the quality of the ballpark in question? These seem -- nay, are -- two very different subjects.
the dimensions [were] tailored expressly for [Bonds'] bat
FUCKING FALSE! Do you know how hard it is for a dead-pull lefty to hit a ball out at AT&T? Obviously not, or else you would've never written such a dumbshit sentence. Watch a game sometime, pal. It was only by virtue of Barry Lamar's incomparable hitting prowess (and perhaps some additional supplements, which, to this very day, are merely speculative) that the man was able to do what he did. I mean, c'mon. To say that AT&T's dimensions are favorable to Bonds, is like saying that my nuts belong in your fruit-salad. By which I mean, it makes no fucking sense.
the team's animating philosophy that its loyal fans are a bunch of distracted, slobbering morons
Animating? How the hell does animating logically modify philosophy in that sentence? Good god. What tripe.
Secondly, distracted, slobbering morons? Now that's just insulting. I am miffed. Quite miffed.
[In response to Craggs' "testimonial", in which he tells the story of how he once went to AT&T and hung out with Joe Morgan and therefore has bad memories about the place or something]Testimonial (redux): One time I went to AT&T park and drank a bunch of kick-ass micro-brews, had some garlic fries, ate a chicken bowl from Cepeda's Carribean BBQ, all while watching Lincecum embarras the Dodgers, from my $10 seat in the lower-deck, surrounded by super-hot chicks, with whom I hung-out, watched Bengie hit a dinger, touched one of the super-hot chick's boobs, had some more beers, threw in a dip, then fucking left after Brian Wilson shut the door on that bitch. Thus AT&T was, and is, AWESOME.
That was an absolute beat down. Reminded me of when the Mets came into The Phone last year and won like 12-1, or 10-1 in the first game of long weekend series. Game like that makes you realize you just don't belong in the same league as these guys. It's some embarrassing shit. And that's what happened last night. The Giants put the Cardinals in their place, said "Know your role, son."
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