Christian the Lion

This isn't a sports post, but I have posted anything in 11 days and it's the best I've got.

This video is simply amazing.


Apparently 2 guys in England bought a lion cub named Christian. The lion quickly got too big and they decided to have him set free in Africa. They went to visit him a year later and not only did the lion remember them, he jumped all over them and gave them hugs. It's pretty much what you'd expect your cat to do if it was 50 times bigger.

Here's a longer version of the reunion (with narration):

Double Post

Like I said in my last post, I'm traveling. I finally have internet access and some free time, so I'm making up for the dry spell.

I don't know if anyone saw the UVA-Richmond football game on Saturday. It was not easy to see since it was on ESPNU. UVA played like crap and barely won. But that wasn't important to me. What I was excited about were the uniforms. UVA went retro to honor the 1989 ACC championship team and wore the classic orange jerseys with white helmets. This brought back fond memories of my childhood, back when UVA was good and I thought college football players were the coolest people on Earth. My all time favorite player was Herman Moore who played from 1989-1991, and my favorite card of his was a 1991 Fleer Ultra card where he was wearing that uniform.

Also, the UVA band was wearing what I can only describe as orange and blue Super Mario Brothers costumes. They were wearing orange shirts and what appeared to be blue overalls. If they had big mustaches and bowler hats the outfit would have been complete. I can't find a picture anywhere, but if anyone out there reading this can find a picture, please send it to me!

Every Man's Fantasy

Note to readers: the Artist and I apologize for not having posted much recently. The artist just started graduate school and I have been traveling the last 2 weeks. Hopefully there will be more posts to come.

This week represents the culmination of a dream I've been building for about 8 years...my wife got her own fantasy football team.

For the last 5 or 6 years I have run a fantasy football league amongst the astronomers at my institution. Amazingly, we've kept essentially the same participants the entire time, despite people graduating and moving all around the world. A few years ago I convinced one of my wife's (girl) friends to play with us, and she in turn got my wife to be her co-owner.

What started out as a joke quickly turned into an obsession. They were soon doing tons of research, asking me and the other girl's boyfriend for advice, and had even bought Yahoo's instant scoring access ($10/year). They got trounced their first year, but came back with a vengeance last year and dominated the league thanks to the lethal combination of Ladanian Tomlinson, Tom Brady, and Maurice Jones-Drew.

One of the fun things about playing with the same people is that we develop our own loyalties to players who have been good to us. My wife and her friend have had Maurice Jones-Drew since their first year, so when I drafted him this year with the first pick of the second round they just about killed me. But they were able to handle it because they had TOM BRADY. He's everything two girls could want in a QB: good looking, awesome stats, and ultra durable.

You undoubtedly know what happened on Sunday: Brady blew out his knee in the first quarter of the first game of the season. When my wife found out she was furious. I can only imagine what happened when her co-owner found out; she once cried when Randy Moss didn't get a single catch in the second half of a Monday Night Football game because if he had gotten only 9 yards she would have won the week!

By Sunday night they were already beginning to think about tanking the rest of the season to ensure they would get the first pick in next year's draft (we set the draft order based on the previous year's standings). By Monday, they had decided that the best course of action was to start another league with only four people (I was not invited) so that they could all have awesome players. So, tomorrow night at 8:00, my wife will be drafting her second team this season, and her first as sole owner. It appears I've created a fantasy football junky!

Pirates vs. Boras

I don't know if you saw this, but Pedro Alvarez the #2 pick in the baseball draft has refused to sign the contract he apparently agreed to with the Pittsburgh Pirates. The whole thing is a he said-she said kind of affair, but when you read further into it, there are some major implications regarding MLB's granting of the two parties an extension past the deadline which has resulted in the MLB player's union filing a grievance and could possibly end up voiding the contract of Eric Hosmer who was the #3 pick in the draft by the Kansas City Royals. Furthermore, there are rumblings that the whole cause of the case is Scott Boras' ego which can't handle not having negotiated the most valuable contract in the draft (#5 pick Buster Posey got $200,000 more than Alvarez). It's an interesting case, and one I have trouble picking sides on.

But I'm not going to go into that. Instead, this gives me a good reason to rail on the MLB draft. You probably don't know too much of the specifics of the MLB draft process because up until this year, MLB has refused to let there be any live coverage of it, instead conducting it by conference call among the 30 teams. As a result, they've missed years of free advertising from networks like ESPN who, if they televised it, would likely subject us to weeks on end of talk leading up to the draft, and making the top players household names. Instead even hard core baseball fans like me have to double check the article we just read to remind ourselves what the #3 pick's name is. I'm not a big NBA fan, but I can probably name the #3 pick from nearly every NBA draft from the last 15 years, and everyone knows who the #3 pick in the 1984 draft was! Terrible marketing: point #1 against MLB.

Point #2: Teams can't trade draft picks. In every other major American sport, teams can trade their draft picks, both before and after the draft. Not so for MLB. Not only can they not trade draft picks before the draft, they can't trade the players after the draft until they've signed and played one full season. This is often the cause of the "player to be named later" in baseball trades. Teams can't legally trade recent draft picks until after the season, so they agree to a deal, but leave the draft pick to be traded after the season as the player to be named later.

Point #3: The unenforced slotting system. MLB has "rules" (I use the term loosely) which instruct teams how much they should pay the player drafted #1, #2, etc... This is similar to the NBA where, to curb escalating salaries, teams have very little wiggle room for how much they can pay a player. Unlike the NBA, however, there is no enforcement of the rule. The vast majority of major league teams follow it, and if a player is perceived to be likely to demand more than his slot, most teams will pass on him for fear of being unable to sign him. However, there are a few teams (Yankees, Red Sox, and Tigers) who have been willing to draft these players and pay them how much they're asking for. MLB's response is to give them a stern phone call and say "don't do that again".

As a result of #3, couple with #2, the amateur baseball players who are widely acknowledged to be the best in the draft often don't go in the first few picks. In some cases, they don't even go in the first round! Can you imagine LeBron James not getting picked until the second round because teams knew they couldn't sign him? It's ludicrous. But by encouraging teams to follow a slotting system for how much they pay, but then allowing teams to exceed it when they want to while simultaneously disallowing teams to trade the picks, MLB's rules allow wealthy teams to collect massive amounts of talent at the expense of poor/rule following teams. As a result, the Nationals, and quite possibly the Pirates lost their first round draft pick this year. It's not just the teams that pay-the players who are drafted and can't come to an agreement have to wait until next year's draft and do it all over again!

My solution: allow teams to trade draft picks, and enforce a system for draft salaries. Personally I am all for players earning as much as they can because baseball is a for profit business and the money is either going to go to the players or to the already rich owners. I'd rather it go to the poorer (relatively) players who I'm paying money to watch play. However, I really just want to see a set of rules that makes it a fair system for all 30 teams. Either allow players to sign for as much as they can get, or take away all bargaining power and assign values to the draft positions. Regardless of the system, teams will be able to take the best player available. If they have a fixed cost, the team signs the player and he'll quickly be able to join the farm system and begin his career. If they are allowed to sign for however much they want, and it's evident that the player is asking for more than the team is willing to pay, the pick still retains value for the team because he can now be traded.

The essence of sports is their egalitarian nature, that any person or team can win it all given the right circumstances. The way the baseball draft is set up, this is not the case. Certain teams, either because they are wealthier or because they are willing to flaunt the rules, have an unfair advantage. If baseball wants to regain it's perch as the most popular sport in America, it should start by making the draft fair for everyone.

And the winner is...Jamaica?

You can't have an Olympics without talk of medal count, and while on some levels it's an interesting story to watch unfold throughout a given Olympic Games, there's a fairly obvious problem with putting too much emphasis on which country wins the most medals, as only a select few well-populated countries are even in the running for this distinction.

So, as the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics concluded, I began thinking of what a more fair medal count might look like, and I came up with this: If the total medals a given country won were looked at in relation to its total population, who then would come out on top?

Here are the top five:

1. Jamaica (11 total medals won)
2. Australia (46)
3. Cuba (24)
4. Norway (10)
5. Belarus (19)

This wasn't the most scientific study ever conducted, but Jamaica won hands down. I arrived at my findings simply by taking the population of a given country and dividing it by the total number of medals won by that country. A country had to win at least 10 total medals to be considered. The top-5 might have been somewhat different had I looked at more countries (I looked at 23 total), but I don't have all the time in the world and thus had to draw the line somewhere.

Details and pinpoint accuracy notwithstanding, I thought the above findings were pretty interesting. And in case you were wondering: The U.S. finished 19th, which wasn't nearly as bad as China, who finished - you guessed it - dead last.

Whew!

I just watched the U.S. hang on to beat Spain for the gold medal in men's basketball. This was the first game I've watched for more than a few minutes, but from having read recaps of every other game, it didn't go quite like I expected. A few thoughts:

1. The announcers were fawning all over how Kobe Bryant won the game for the U.S. in the fourth quarter. My take is that Kobe put them in that position with his play in the third quarter. Once Spain got it close and the U.S. started getting nervous, Kobe started playing like he was on the Lakers. He started hogging possessions and forced several threes. Even though he made a few of those shots, the U.S. lost the beautiful rhythm they'd been in in the first half. They played much of the second half like an NBA team, with one guy dribbling and four guys watching. Similarly, Carmelo had forced a few bad threes, and him hurting his hand on the backboard ended up being a blessing. It forced Coach K to take him out and got Dwayne Wade back in.

2. Hats off to Spain. Pau Gasol is the only player who could have made the U.S. team, yet they played phenomenally as a team, and made guys like Rudy Fernandez and Juan Carlos Navarro look like the best players in the world. They did just what the announcers said they needed to do: hang around long enough to make the U.S. get nervous. I was hoping for another 37 point blowout, but the possibility of the U.S. losing sure made it compelling for 40 minutes.

3. With that said, the refs played a substantial roll in keeping the game close. Overall I thought they probably made nearly as many horrendous calls for each team. My big complaint was the inconsistency of calls. The whole first half they called ticky-tack fouls which quickly got Kobe and LeBron in foul trouble, and when the U.S. started to pull away in the middle of the second quarter they called fouls on so many possessions (both ways) that it got them out of rhythm and allowed Spain to creep back into it. Then, when everyone had gotten used to the idea that there would be a whistle for just touching your opponent, the refs basically stopped calling everything in the second half. Furthermore, I thought they let a ton of travels go (mostly for Spain), and I can't believe that the Spanish bench never got a technical. The refs must have warned them to back off the court and sit down at least 3 or 4 times, and on one occasion they even threw a towel on the court. With college or NBA refs, I suspect the game would have been much less close.

4. Ricky Rubio is going to be amazing. he's 17 and held his own against the best players in the world. When I heard he was 17 I figured he'd be eaten alive by Jason Kidd, Chris Paul, and Deron Williams. He will be unbelievable when he's 25.

5. Was it just me, or did Michael Redd look like Kanye West sitting on the bench all game?

6. Who do you think David Beckham was cheering for? He played in Spain for years, but currently lives and plays in the U.S. I'm thinking the U.S., but I never saw him react one way or the other. I suspect it was a Jordan/Tiger marketing thing where you remain as neutral as possible about any opinion so as to never alienate potential fans. Or maybe he doesn't know the rules. Who knows.

All in all, I was pleased to see the U.S. win, and enjoyed this team more than any U.S. Olympic team since the Dream Team in 1992. I was so glad to have players who genuinely wanted to play for their country. I openly cheered against the Starbury 2004 team, and really didn't care for the 2000 team (as an aside: I just looked at the 2000 roster. Can you believe that we won the Olympics with Vin Baker, Steve Smith, Antonio McDyess, and Allan Houston on the roster?). It was really fun to watch some of the best players in the world play together and actually play like a team. I hope we can continue to get this kind of commitment and effort in the coming years. I forget where I heard this, but someone talked about how the U.S. basketball team can become like the Brazilian soccer team, in that they are every countries second favorite team because of the way they play. I agree with that sentiment and hope that both Obama and McCain take note. I'm sick of the rest of the world hating our country.

A bit off color

...but I can't resist. So I'm not accused of pirating that image, if you think it's funny, please check out the artist's website. No, it wasn't done by The Artist.

The salvation of Olympic softball?

A lot of talk has been made in the wake of Japan beating the juggernaut U.S. softball team for the gold medal and whether the U.S. loss is actually a good thing for the sport of softball, since it was recently voted out of future Olympic competition due to U.S. dominance in the sport.

"Maybe people will get off our backs and realize that there is some parity in this game," U.S. coach Mike Candrea said after the loss. "I've always felt that the rest of the world is getting better.

I'm sorry, but when did a single loss equal parity?

This summer in Beijing, the U.S. team didn't lose a game until the finals and soundly beat Japan 7-0 and 4-1 before its gold medal game loss. Even with their slim defeat (by a score of 3-1), the U.S. still outscored Japan by a total of 12-4 over the course of those three games. Whats more, the U.S. softball team had beaten its competition by a staggering margin of 108-3 in the past two Olympics. No matter how you slice it, that's utter and complete domination.

So could the U.S. stumble in the gold medal game really save Olympic softball? I hardly think so, unless of course this loss is the beginning of a trend that demonstrates an actual narrowing of the gap between the U.S. and softball teams worldwide. Until that happens, there's no legitimacy to the claim that parity exists in international softball, and little reason to continue the sport in Olympic play.

Lightning Bolt!

We've been talking about Michael Phelps non-stop of late, which is understandable given how amazing his 8 gold medals are. But I've never seen an individual performance like Usain Bolt had tonight (well last night, thanks again NBC) in the 100 meter finals.

Bolt didn't just win and set the world record, he started celebrating with 15 or 20 meters to go and still crushed the competition! My jaw just dropped when he put his hands down and started easing up. He won by 0.2 seconds, which in the 100 meters is an insane amount of time. The announcers tonight were saying that his pre-finish celebration probably cost him 0.1 seconds. Can you imagine what it would have looked like if he had run all the way through to the finish? I don't think there's ever been a race of that caliber that was dominated so thoroughly. Michael Phelps would have had to win the 400 IM by about half the pool to equal what Usain Bolt did tonight.

He said after the race that he didn't care about the time because he already had the world record and just wanted to win the gold medal. Ordinarily I would applaud that sentiment, but tonight I felt gypped. I saw the best 100 meter run ever and the athlete wasn't even trying his hardest!

His attitude makes me wonder if there's more to it than just trying to win the gold medal. Was he playing a psychological game with his opponents, saying "I set the world record without really trying...you'll never beat me."? Was there some financial incentive? Perhaps a sponsor has promised him bonuses every time he breaks the world record and he wanted to leave himself some room to improve. Or the last possibility, the one that I hate to bring up, but is on my (and presumably your) mind every time an athlete does something spectacular now:"Was he cheating?" I'm wondering if he figured that if he'd done a 9.59 he would raise more suspicions about drug use?

I hope I'm wrong. I hope there were no ulterior motives, that he simply was so excited (and confident) that he couldn't hold it in until after the race. But sadly, the state of today's sporting world has caused me to look at everything a little more cynically. So please don't let me down, Michael.

Eating like a champ

I generally have a cup of tea and a bowl or two of cereal (Cheerios with blueberries is the current choice) to get me going in the morning. Michael Phelps, on the other hand, downs three fried-egg sandwiches with cheese, lettuce, tomatoes, fried onions and mayonnaise...

...PLUS one five-egg omelet, a bowl of grits, three slices of French toast topped with powdered sugar, three chocolate-chip pancakes, and two two cups of coffee. And he's only just getting started for the day.

Phelps consumes far more calories in one meal (4,000) than most of us do in three. That adds up to A LOT of calories in one day. Not surprising when you consider the intensity and length of his daily workout regimen, but just thinking about consuming 12,000 calories in a day--regardless of exercise routine--is mind-boggling. Here the rest of an average day of eats for Phelps, courtesy of a recent post in the Wall Street Journal blog:

Lunch: One pound of enriched pasta. Two large ham and cheese sandwiches with mayo on white bread. Energy drinks packing 1,000 calories.

Dinner: One pound of pasta. An entire pizza. More energy drinks.

Can't an all-time great Olympian get some dessert?

Greatest of All Time?

No, I'm not talking about Michael Phelps. I'm talking about Brad Ziegler. Unless you're a huge A's fan or involved in a deep fantasy baseball league, you probably have no idea who Brad Ziegler is. But he might be the greatest baseball pitcher of all time.

Huh?

Ziegler is a 28 year old rookie relief pitcher. He has now pitched 38 innings in the majors and has yet to give up a run, breaking the major league record of 25 innings without allowing a run at the start of a career. What is more, he has yet to even give up an extra base hit! That's right opposing batters are hitting 0.179 against him with a 0.179 slugging percentage.

His story is pretty interesting. He was drafted om 2003 after his senior season of college, but was released by the Phillies after throwing just 6 innings in the minors. He signed with an independent league team but soon thereafter was signed by the A's. After a few decent seasons in the minors as a starter, the A's decided he was unlikely to make the majors as a starter and asked him to changing his pitching style to throw sidearm. So between the 2006 and 2007 learned to throw sidearm and became a relief pitcher. Since then, he has thrown more than 130 innings in the majors and minors without giving up a home run. So far this season, including the minors, he has only given up 1 run, and thanks to a series of disastrous relief appearances by Huston Street, Ziegler is now the A's closer.

Apparently his pitching style is so deceptive and has so much break that hitters just can't hit the ball in the air. He doesn't strike out many guys, but all hitters can do is hit weak ground balls against him. So far in the majors he has gotten the hitter to hit into a double play about half the time that there has been a runner on first with less than two outs. That may or not not sound like a lot to you, but the all time record for a whole season is only about 35%, so he's inducing GIDPs way more than any player in history.

It is unlikely that he'll be able to continue allowing no runs, but it sure is fun to see a guy with (apparently) middling skills pitch like an all time great. I'll be very interested to see if he can sustain his success, and if so, if it will spur a whole generation of guys who can't through 90 miles an hour to try throwing sidearm.

Golds Galore

It seems only fitting to celebrate Michael Phelps becoming the "winningest" Olympic athlete by remembering one of the now second-winningest Olympic athletes, albeit in one of his less than shining moments:


Ohhhhhhhhhh, ohhh-oh-ohhh-oh-ohhh-oh, oh-ohhhhhhh that's bad. So bad it's good, actually, and made even better by former ESPN anchor Charlie Steiner's memorable "written by Francis Scott off-Key" line, uttered while in the midst of one of his patented fits of laughter. Steiner was a personal favorite back in the day before SportsCenter became ObnoxiousAndAnnoyingAndWayTooLoudEntertainmentCenter.

But I digress...congrats, Mr. Phelps!

Thanks NBC

I apologize in advance for writing a rant rather than an informative post, but I just need to vent.

NBC spent tons of time and presumably tons of money negotiating with the Chinese Olympic committee to get them to have things like the swimming and gymnastics finals in the morning so they could show them live in prime time in the United States. But they're only showing it live in HALF the United States. I ask you, what is the point of going through the trouble to make sure it's live when it's not live everywhere?

For the second night in a row, Michael Phelps swam after 10:00 PM eastern time. I live in Arizona, right now we're three hours behind the east coast*. Why couldn't I see Michael Phelps swim at 7:15 PM my time? That's still prime time. I'd come home early from work if I had to to see him swim if it was earlier! But instead, I get it on a 2 hour delay. And then they have the gall to leave the "LIVE" logo up on the screen as if I really am seeing it in real time.

NBC is holding me hostage. They offer something like 2600 hours of Olympic broadcasting streaming online. But if you investigate, it's only sports that aren't on TV. Want to watch swimming? You'll have to wait for it to be on TV. However, they don't show all the swimming events on TV (like the first semifinal of the 200 fly tonight), but because swimming is a TV sport, you can't even see the events they aren't showing on TV!

So my only choice is to wait 2 hours, which means that I can't turn on my computer because the lead story basically everywhere on the internet is what happened to Michael Phelps. To make matters worse, my wife is currently in Maryland and the Artist is in St. Louis. I talked to both of them last night on the phone, and both of them had wanted to talk about the 4x100 free relay. Both of them had seen it in real time, but couldn't talk about it with me because I had to wait my allotted 2 hours. Grrrr!

I understand NBC is doing this to sell prime time advertising, but it seems like they're doing nothing but angering people who are really excited about seeing their product. I talked with 2 people at work today. They are both huge sports fans, and both are thoroughly disgusted with NBC over this. So I ask NBC, is angering 100% of your customers west of Kansas worth the extra advertising revenue?


*Arizona is wacky. We don't have day light saving time, so right now I'm 3 hours behind the east coast, but in the winter I will only be 2 hours behind. To make matters worse, some Indian reservations use day light savings time, and some don't. So there are pockets of Arizona which are always 2 hours behind. And to add insult to injury www.nbcolympics.com knows that I'm in Arizona, and tells me the times for the programs are 3 hours behind the east coast, but then they come on TV 2 hours behind. So if was relying on NBC to tell me when to watch Michael Phelps, I'd still miss it! Not to mention the fact that if I happened to look at the website before it was aired here to find out when it was airing, they would have told me the results before I could get to the TV schedule!

Yao-za!

What a amazing spectacle it was to see the Americans face host nation China in men's basketball! Not that it was a great basketball game from beginning to end, but the event itself was really something to behold. Passing thoughts and observations from the game:

- How cool to be a part of a sporting event seen by over 1 billion viewers worldwide! One billion, wow.

- Was there any more fitting way to start the game than with Yao Ming knocking down a 3-pt FG? And how just how impressive was Yao? He led his team in points (13) and rebounds (9), was 6-6 from the line, played strong throughout--despite grimacing and hobbling a bit after hurting his his right ankle in the second half, and cheered his team like the were up 25 instead of down by that amount in the game's closing minutes. Represented the sport and his country quite admirably.

- Interesting point brought up in NBC's coverage about the popularity of the NBA in China and how other than the Chinese national team itself, Team USA is the squad the Chinese will root for the most. Somewhere David Stern is smiling.

- Team USA's uniforms were stellar. Here they are in white and blue. Very clean and crisp. The tighter fit, very sharp.

- LeBron James was a beast (18 PTS, 6 REB, 4 AST and 3 jaw-dropping blocks, though his post-game interview was a bit uninspired and disappointing) and Dwayne Wade was also impressive--a perfect night shooting (7-7 FG, 5-5 FT) in route to 19 PTS.

- How about Yi Jianlian's one-handed follow-up dunk over Carmelo? Nice play by the youngster

- As impressive as Team USA's defensive pressure and fastbreak finishes were, their outside shooting (surprise, surprise) left a lot to be desired. Let's see, where have we heard this before, hmm....

- And finally, the 18,000 or so fans who helped create an electric, memorable atmosphere for the entirety of the game. Virtually no booing whatsoever--regardless of a given call or who was winning or losing--and a display of genuine appreciation for what they were seeing on the court as well as an excitement for what they were helping to create for viewers worldwide.

Next up for Team USA: Angola, Tuesday, Aug 12, 8 a.m. EST

"Eat, sleep, and swim!"

Given my interest in all things sport, my viewing of the 2008 Summer Olympics thus far has been sporadic and lazy, mostly because I just wasn't that excited about the Summer Games. The reasons for my lack of enthusiasm are multifaceted and range from the impact that globalism has had on my view of nationalism/patriotism to the fact that I tend to be a bit of a contrarian in the face of something carrying mass appeal and thus can often be a sourpuss and overall lame-o. That said, however, I now find myself totally into the Beijing Olympics.

And why? One guy: Michael Phelps. But not because I was rooting for him. I was actually rooting against Phelps as he swam in the 400 IM finals tonight. "Ah ha," I thought, "prime time...NBC...first night of the Olympics...now is the perfect time for Phelps' demise!" It's not that I had anything against him per se; I was just getting tired of the bombardment of hype and media coverage and endorsement spots surrounding his seemingly inevitable quest to break Mark Spitz' record for gold medals won in a single Olympic Games (seven). Plus, it was almost a more interesting story to me if Phelps were to somehow not break the record, given that his doing so was a foregone conclusion.

Well, my cantankerousness has been shed like water off a breaststrokers back and now I'm rooting for Phelps all the way. And how could I not? It's impossible to root against a guy so genuinely human and unpretentious. Granted, not that you can really know someone all that well from a brief pre-race story and post-race interview, but I was shocked to see and hear that Phelps was most unlike who I thought he'd be, namely some combination of the following:

1) Arrogant (in the stereotypical obnoxious American kind of way)
2) Corporate/scripted/personality-less (think: A-Rod)
3) Annoying with a kind of cool "I'm better than you and, yeah, I know it" air about him (like the person who acts as if they have something they don't actually possess and/or have yet to in fact earn)

...but he wasn't any of the three, which was as refreshing as it was surprising.

Reluctant as I was to really get into these Olympic games, I'm hooked. I'll admit it. The Olympic spirit has got a hold of me, and thanks to an athlete I least thought I'd root for.

Much more to come after Team USA faces off against China on the hardwood!

Scrabble vs. Scrabulous

As you may have heard, Scrabulous, a blatant rip off of Scrabble and one of the most popular applications on facebook.com, was disabled for US and Canadian users last week. This saddens me because the Artist and I were two of the estimated 500,000 daily users of Scrabulous.

Competitive stats geeks that the Artist and I are, we have recorded the score of every game of Scrabble/Scrabulous that we have played for the last 3 years or so. We have explored a number of formats: playing together in person, playing online in real time, and playing online as time permits. We play head-to-head, we play teamed with our wives, we play a 4-player game with our wives where we can help our significant others and the scores are combined. We have tried a number of formats and have found that Scrabulous gave us by far the most opportunity to play. The ability to make a turn when you have a free moment allows us to play many more games than having to schedule a free hour and a half or the once a year or so that we're in the same city.

So now I face a moral dilemma: do I boycott the new Scrabble application for exercising their copyright and killing Scrabulous, or do I give in and switch to the new Scrabble facebook application? I understand Hasbro/Mattel's position that they own the copyright plain and simple. I find Scrabulous' contention that Scrabble has been so copied and imitated that it's basically in the public domain to be laughable.

However, I am surprised that the two sides couldn't work out a compromise. Scrabulous has a loyal following, most of whom are upset by its demise, and many of whom own their own Scrabble board game game anyway. Hasbro/Mattel has to date made thoroughly crummy electronic versions of Scrabble. I own the Playstation 1 version which is okay for playing against the computer but you can't play another human. I've tried other licensed versions for the computer but (in the past) they have required you and your playing partner to both own copies of the game and/or to pay an annual fee.

Hasbro/Mattel had the chance to make a deal with Scrabulous: Hasbro/Mattel gets royalties and a well tested, wildly popular product with no developmental costs. Scrabulous gives up some profits, but legitimizes themselves and avoids being shut down entirely and having no profits. Why couldn't they make this work? I have heard rumors that Scrabulous rejected overtures from Hasbro/Mattel, but every source I've read has quotes from Hasbro/Mattel denying this. Regardless of who's at fault, Scrabulous has lost most of their users and Hasbro/Mattel have come out looking like bullies. To add insult to injury, apparently the new Scrabble Facebook application is full of bugs and no one likes it. So in the end, we're all losers.

Whatever I decide regarding the new facebook Scrabble, I no longer have proof that I once scored 158 points with ACETATES. And that makes me sad.

Favre part deux

I know this is setting a bad precedent by copying someone else's blog posting on only my third post, but this really summarizes my feelings on the whole Brett Favre thing. Courtesy of Fire Joe Morgan (see links to the right):

Is there anything more boring, in all of sports, than the Brett Favre saga?

Anything?

Some candidates:

1. Watching the second quarter of an NBA preseason game in slow motion.
2. Watching NASCAR qualifying through your neighbor's window, using the wrong end of a pair of binoculars.
3. A press conference where the Minnesota Wild announce the hiring of a new assistant trainer, and the mics don't work.
4. Reading Peter King's thoughts on Starbucks.
5. SportsCenter. (N.B. may not count as "sports.")

That's all for now. You're unlikely to get anything more out of me regarding Brett Favre. I'm really trying to avoid reading anything about it until it's resolved. I'll pay attention when the season nears to figure out when I should draft Thomas Jones, but that's it. Bring on the Olympics!

A Real Lambeau Leap

I heard that there was some Brett Favre news today.

No, seriously, I heard a little something at some point today about Favre essentially saying that he could no longer see himself playing for the Packers under any circumstances and asking for a ticket out of Green Bay pronto. However close to the actual story that may or may not be, the reason I don't know more specifics is because I haven't sought them out. That, plus I've been busy doing things like hauling furniture in 100 degree heat and going to traffic court to contest a parking ticket I really don't think I should've been given (my fine was reduced by 2/3, which was nice). Anyhow, like most of the world, I'm sick of Favre-a-palooza and welcome a day without it.

My near Favre-free day notwithstanding, over the past several weeks I've heard a lot of talk about Favre's legacy, which is not surprising. After all, when an NFL icon the likes of Brett Favre decides to unretire, that's a huge story and has major ramifications for his career, regardless of the team with whom he ends up playing. What has surprised me, however, is that Favre's legacy has been discussed strictly in terms of his on-field performance. I guess that shouldn't be a surprise really, given that's the nature of sports; you're voted to the Hall of Fame based on how well you played statistically, not because you were a nice guy or treated your organization well. I suppose I'm more disappointed than anything, and I think that for someone as undeniably great as he has been for his entire NFL career, Favre's greatness will in fact be capped--at least in my mind--by decisions he has chosen to make off the field, namely, the whole fiasco that's going down now between him and the Packers.

I know, you're probably saying "slow down" and thinking to yourself how only something of OJ proportions could have a lasting negative impact on Favre's legacy. Fair enough. And actually, I'd agree. Regardless of who Favre plays for or how successful he is throughout the duration of his career, he'll be held in high regard and considered an all-time great NFL QB, and rightfully so. I just think had Favre approached and handled this situation differently, his legacy--which is already cemented as among the most accomplished in NFL history--could have transcended sport and distinguished him as truly great.

Imagine this: What if Favre acknowledged that his unretirement put the Packers in a difficult position as they tried to move forward without him and he accepted the consequences for his actions instead of demanding back (or assuming) his old role with the team? Suppose Favre abided by the Packers' wishes to move forward with Aaron Rodgers and offered to serve as his backup and further help Rodgers grow into the starting role? What's more, say Favre even took a pay cut so the Packers weren't paying $13 million/year for a backup QB? He'd still be on the Packers and he'd still be pursuing a championship and he'd still maintain an integral role with the team; it'd just look different than it had before.

I know all of this probably sounds ludicrous, at least according to today's metrics of greatness and success, but Brett Favre already has the money and he's accumulated all the stats. He's rich beyond belief and a first-ballot Hall of Famer. He wants another ring, and that's understandable, even commendable--he's a competitor and wants to finish what he helped start with the Packers. I would just like to have seen Favre return to football in manner more befitting of true greatness, i.e. setting aside self for the sake of others. Doing so wouldn't be easy--greatness never is--but what a legacy that would have been indeed.

Gar-meen Chee-po-tull!

I'm at the telescope tonight and not only is it cloudy, but it's raining, too. It didn't have to be like this. The weather forecasts had said all day that it would be cloudy tonight. I had planned on looking for furniture for my new office, hitting the "farmer's market" grocery store I discovered this weekend, and making myself a nice dinner tonight. But when I went out at 5:30 to check the weather and reassure myself that I didn't need to worry about observing tonight, the sky was about 80% clear. I still figured it would get cloudy later, but it was enough to sucker me into driving the 30 minutes out to the observatory in the hope of at least getting some data tonight. Halfway here it was getting cloudy. By the time I arrived it was about 90% clouds. Now it's raining.

Unfortunately this got me out of my rhythm of finishing the final corrections on my thesis, but since I'm stuck in a little room with nothing to do but surf the web (or work on those pesky corrections), I now have plenty of time to catch up on the internet. I found this article on ESPN. Yes, both of us hate what ESPN has become, but that's another post for another time. I had no idea it would be as long as it was, and if I wasn't stuck at the telescope I would never have taken the time to read it. I was going to send it to the Artist via email, but decided this was the impetus to start the blog.

It's basically an in depth chronicle of the Garmin-Chipotle cycling team during this year's Tour de France. I find this interesting for a number of reasons. The most obvious is that I like the Tour de France. Though I didn't get to see much of it due to a conference and moving across the country, I saw/read about enough of it to know the general arc of the story. And I knew half the riders names due to a certain Mr. Holladay.

I can remember being aware of the Tour in the 80s when Greg LeMond was winning it, but it wasn't until about 2002 when Lance Armstrong started dominating and I was at the beach for a few days in July with my cousin who cycled in college that I got hooked on it. I love racing as long as it's a test of human strength and endurance, not NASCAR. I'll watch every moment of swimming and running that I can find on TV. (Yes, I'm looking forward to the Olympics!) But until I started watching the Tour, I had no appreciation for cycling. Seeing the strategy (and having it explained to me) that goes in to winning not just the whole race, but individual stages, combined with the magnitude of the physical endeavor really caught my interest. So when the World Wide Leader deigned to have an article on cycling on the front page, I couldn't resist reading it.

I cheered for Garmin-Chipotle this year because they were an American team and especially because they were sponsored by Chipotle. Chipotle is another topic that is worth it's own post, if not it's own blog. My first couple of years of grad school I ate at Chipotle at least once a week, and on a few occasions, twice in one day. I contemplated wall papering my office with old Chipotle wrappers with the weight of the burrito and the date written on each one. Even though it's no longer my favorite item on the menu, I judge the burritos at all other places by how they stack up to the Chipotle chicken with black beans burrito. Once Chipotle gave out coupons for a free burrito on tax day. All you had to bring in was the coupon, which was just a one page printout on regular 8.5x11 paper in black and white. So I made photocopies of it and put them in everyone's mailbox in my department. I think about 30 people had free dinner that night thanks to me. Like I said, I like Chipotle.

It wasn't until later in the race that I realized that G-C had a strict anti-doping commitment. I find this really interesting. In a sport that has nearly killed itself with rampant doping, someone had the idea to form a team around the idea of competing without doping. They understand that it'll be harder to win and that their riders will be subjected to far more inconvenience than other riders. But they were able to find enough quality riders that they could seriously compete and once they proved that, they found sponsors who were willing to support it. And they did more than just participate in the Tour; Christian Vande Velde finished 5th!

This got me thinking to how the concept could be transported to other sports. Baseball has a reputation for performance enhancing drug use far more than any other sport. I find this reputation unfair because football has had far more and more prominent players be caught using PEDs (Shawne Merriman anyone?), and has a much more lax testing policy, but escapes the vast majority of the criticism that baseball takes for PEDs. Again, another topic for another time.

Getting back to the topic at hand, I'm a huge baseball fan, and have never heard a satisfying method for how to rid baseball of PED use. Probably the best suggestion I have heard is to have the players police themselves and make it solely a monetary issue. Guys who get caught have to pay hefty fines (like 90% of their salary) which are then distributed between all the players who test clean. There's more to it than that, but I'll direct you to J.C. Bradbury's blog and book to read the specifics of his plan.

So I'm wondering if the G-C idea could work in a major team sport? What if some moribund team, say the Washington Nationals, decided to guarantee that their players were clean? I'm sure the team would suffer for a while, as players would be hesitant to submit themselves to extra drug testing and potentially alienate themselves from the rest of the players union (which has always resisted increased drug testing due to their conflicting goals of protecting their member's rights and power vs. management while also wanting to "do the right thing" and protect their health). But I think the public would support the idea, and if marketed effectively, I think the team could really become popular and make a lot of money. With a higher profile and money to burn, they could afford to attract better free agents, even if they had to pay them a premium in return for their guarantee to be clean. I suspect that (some) players would be willing to play for them without a premium because it would be good for their image and might bring in more endorsements (David Eckstein anyone?).

If done correctly, the success of the "Clean-Nationals" might convince other teams to follow suit. It would take some time, and undoubtedly some teams would hold out and happily continue to hire anyone (I'm envisioning the Oakland Raiders), but I could see this ridding baseball of the stigma of PEDs in 10-15 years. That's not exactly instant success, but considering it's a $5 billion a year industry, its difficult to change the way it works overnight.

The risk in the plan is that the public wouldn't support a "Clean-Nationals" team any more than they support them now. But I think that would say a lot more about the conscience of the American people than it does about the integrity of baseball.

Welcome

It's been 8 years since we coined the phrase, but the "Artist and the Astronomer" seems just as appropriate now as it did in Paris with los chicos Chacos. The Artist and I have been friends since the second grade. We went to elementary school, middle school, high school, and college together. Since then we've moved to different time zones, gotten married (not to each other), and spent way too much time in school, but have never stopped discussing sports.

We've been talking about doing this blog for some time now. It was really the Artist's idea, and I've been the one who's been too busy to agree to start it. So we've missed out on some pretty good material recently. No doubt we both would have enjoyed hearing the other's take on the 19-0 Patriots (oops), the NBA's gambling ref(s), Roger Clemens and Barry Bonds, and of course the Brett Favre retirement saga. On second thought, we'll still have plenty of opportunities to talk about Brett Favre's "retirement". *rolls his eyes*

I'm not sure where this will go. Our goal in starting it is just to give ourselves a forum for posting our thoughts on current sports events. That will largely be mainstream sports, but it might also be anything else. It will very likely include thoughts on Scrabble, Goal!, and Tecmo Super Bowl. It might also talk about the price of oil or the election process. Who knows. It might be funny, it might be serious. It'll take us some time to hit our stride, but I think we're both hoping for a slightly more intellectual version of the SportsGuy.

So, if you happened to stumble upon this site via the internets, thanks for stopping by. We're really just writing this to amuse ourselves, but hopefully you'll see something you like. And if so, please tell your like-minded friends about us. We wouldn't object to this getting huge and us earning a book deal or something. Hey, it's not like artists or astronomers are breaking the bank these days.