Three Strikes

Corry has been playing baseball this summer for the high school's freshman team (baseball here is a summer sport, so the team is open to incoming freshman, of which Corry is one). Yesterday, he got the call-up to play with the JV team, playing first base for both ends of a double-header. He played really well defensively and went 1-for-4 in the first game. The second game was quite a bit more ragged for everyone on the team (we're still in triple digits for heat index, I believe), but he still did OK. I have to give him credit - he has really worked hard and improved since last year.

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Corry's club team has its season-ending tournament this weekend, so that will wipe out gaming for me.

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We have only managed to get in two more games of our playoff simulation. Game 5 of the NLCS featured a pretty good pitcher's duel between Randy Johnson and Greg Maddux. Arizona took a 4-2 lead (on 3 hits,1 walk, and 3 Atlanta errors) into the bottom of the 9th, but then gave up 4 runs - capped by a 3-run Rafeal Furcal homer - without recording an out. To add injury to insult, earlier in the game the D-Backs lost Reggie Sanders (RF) and Jay Bell (2B) for the rest of the series after they collided going for the same pop fly. Atlanta is now ahead 3-2; the series heads back to Arizona and will most likely feature Curt Schilling against Tom Glavine in Game 6.

Over in the AL, Seattle pulled to 3-2 with a Game 5 win behind Jaime Moyer. The Mariners got to Game 1 winner Andy Pettite early and cruised to a 7-2 victory. The good news for the M's is that the series now moves back to Seattle. The bad news is that the Yankees will have Roger Clemens and Mike Mussina for games 6 and 7, and Seattle is in the "pray for rain" section of their rotation.

Can We Have a Playoff Yet?

My dad spent the latter part of his formative years in Oklahoma, so I grew up in a Sooner household (which wasn't always easy considering we were in the heart of Cornhusker territory). Even though I root for the Hawkeyes now, the crimson-and-cream remain my secondary team. Obviously, last night's game was a bit disappointing. Still, I have to give credit to Florida's defense. Even though they were the beneficiary of 2 extremely unlikely interceptions, they played a terrific game and kept the Oklahoma offense in check all night.

As tense as it was, though, the BCS title game actually did very little to determine the incontrovertible champion of college football (which, with that being its raison d'etre, makes it something of a failure). Consider the Utah Utes, undefeated (again) and dominating a 1-loss major conference team in their bowl game. Consider the USC Trojans, a 1-loss team who were (arguably, naturally) playing the best football down the stretch. Consider the Texas Longhorns, who beat one of the teams playing in the championship and were only denied a spot in their conference championship because of what a computer algorithm thought.

Of course, this isn't telling anyone who is a fan of the sport of college football anything they don't already know. The problem is that the decisions are made by fans of the business of college football. Until there is extremely unlikely boycott of BCS bowls by the hoi polloi, we will continue to be stuck with whatever bullshit solution is foisted upon us by the conferences, bowl committees and media (all the while telling us they just can't figure out how to do something that works on every other level of college football).

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Since I probably won't be getting a playoff anytime soon, can I least make a simpler request? How about an announcing team that is marginally competent? I don't even know who the clowns on Fox were last night, but when you can't stop verbally fellating Tim Tebow for long enough to figure out what down it is, you have no business being on the air.

Cocks Stuffed in Outback

In what has been the only bright spot thus far for the Big Ten(-ish) conference this bowl season, the Iowa Hawkeyes beat the South Carolina Gamecocks 31-10 in the Outback Bowl yesterday. The game, which was probably extraordinarily tedious to anyone who isn't a Hawkeye fan (and truth be told, a bit tedious even to fans such as myself), wasn't even as close as the score indicated as Iowa lumbered to a 31-point lead before giving up 10 garbage time points to an anemic SC offense.

Now, the bad news - stud running back and Doak Walker award winner Shonn Green announced after the game that he is leaving school to declare for the NFL draft. Naturally.


Also, my apologies to any confused visitors from Google.

I Think That May Have Been Incredible

I don't tend to watch volleyball a lot on TV. It's not that I don't like it - I do - but it's just one of those things that is never on. But, I stayed up way too late last night watching the Nebraska-Penn State match in the women's NCAA national semi-finals. Holy crap was it exciting. Or maybe it's always that good, in which case I really should be watching it more often.

Remembering Barcelona

The Olympics are back again. I'm pretty skeptical towards them this year, but that's hardly an achievement. Taking the scandals of recent Olympic games (doping, rigged judging, etc) and adding the debacle that is Beijing, I'm actually surprised anyone can be optimistic about them. Thinking about the summer games always makes me recall my favorite Olympics - the 1992 games in Barcelona.

There are four things, that I remember most clearly about Barcelona. The first was the most "Holy shit, did you see that?!" moment ever conceived of by an Olympic committee during the opening ceremony:

Seriously, that dude had a flaming arrow!

Speaking of things that are hot, my second lasting memory is Summer Sanders:

Hey, I was 19.

1992 was also the year of the first 'Dream Team'. You remember, the collection of 11 NBA all-stars (and also Christian Laettner) that pulverized their opponents by an average margin of 43.8 points and made a mockery of the entire concept of amateur athletics. I might be alone in this, but I don't actually watch the Olympics to see "the best athletes in the world," or however they usually phrase it. I love to watch the obscure sports that feature athletes that go unnoticed for all but two weeks out of every four years. Athletes that will probably never again be seen by an local television audience, let alone an international one. Athletes for whom the gold medal will be one of the crowning moments of their lives instead of something to do between endorsement deals.

That leads me to my last memory of Barcelona. Derek Redmond wasn't anyone I had ever heard of. He was a promising, but often-injured British sprinter who had to withdraw from the 1988 games due to hamstring problems. In 1992, he was back to world class form and had made it to the semifinal heat of the 400 meters when this happened:

I still remember vividly sitting on the floor of my aunt's living room, watching as it unfolded. By the time his dad helped him start limping towards the finish line, I was in tears. This to me summed up what the Olympics are supposed to mean so much more so than the astoundingly dull cakewalks featuring "the world's greatest athletes" (and also Christian Laettner). Derek Redmond didn't win the gold; he was disqualified, actually. His image has stuck with me for the last 16 years, though, so powerfully that I still sometimes get a little choked up thinking about it.

That's why I'll be giving the Olympics another shot, despite my cynicism. Out there somewhere, someone I've never heard, and will never hear from again, might be waiting to be the next Derek Redmond.