From NBC SportsWorld: Let me say here that I strongly disagree with almost everything in C.J.’s column … but I never thought agreeing or disagreeing was the point. Nitkowski gave us what we crave. He gave us the players’ perspective. He gave us powerful insight into how Major League Baseball players think. This is a gift. The…
Month: September 2015
The Power of Home Field
Got a piece coming in a few minutes on the C.J. Nitkowski kerfuffle — though I don’t use the word “kerfuffle” in the story. Now, though, from NBC SportsWorld: Of course, you can cherry-pick the numbers all you want. But the point here is that this year, I think home-field advantage might play a massive…
Browns Fanhood Week 3
From NBC SportsWorld: How can you not love a story like that? Yes, Mike Pettine is my kind of guy. This is why I sympathize with his seemingly incoherent decision to start 36-year-old mostly backup quarterback Josh McCown against the Oakland Raiders rather than starting the Browns’ first-round pick last year, Heisman Trophy-winner Johnny Manziel….
The Tower of Papelbon
From NBC SportsWorld: What happened Sunday in Washington between Jonathan Papelbon and Bryce Harper (and, by extension, GM Mike Rizzo and manager Matt Williams), well, that was not a family issue. That was not even a dysfunctional family issue. No, that was a PDS — public display of stupidity — and peek into the inner…
To the Royals fans …
From SportsWorld: You could say this comes from winning – bandwagon fans, I’ve heard people say – but I would argue that winning is only part of it. All those years when the Royals were terrible, laughable, ridiculous, sure, it seemed like nobody cared. But it wasn’t so. People cared. There was just no way to…
The Greatest Living Yankee
Over at SportsWorld, I play off George Vecsey’s column in The New York Times naming Whitey Ford as the Greatest Living Yankee. I like George a lot but I find this to be silly. If Greatest Living Yankee is an actual title, then it belongs to Derek Jeter, and I don’t think anyone else is…
The Toronto Trio
I have some fun with numbers when discussing the incredible years of Josh Donaldson, Edwin Encarnacion and Jose Bautista (DEB!) and again make the case for Duane Kuiper in the Hall of Fame. From SportsWorld: To prove this, of course, you can just show the numbers for each of the three. The numbers (entering Thursday)…
Koufax, Greenberg and Yom Kippur
Meant to get this out BEFORE Yom Kippur was over but, you know … From SportsWorld: But there was perhaps a more interesting Yom Kippur World Series decision made thirty years earlier. Hank Greenberg grew up in Orthodox Jewish family, meaning his childhood was very different from Sandy Koufax’s more secular upbringing. Koufax did not have…
Yogi
From SportsWorld: The image that lingers is of Yogi Berra looking at the sky. He wears a New York Yankees jacket and a New York Yankees hat, and he seems to be shivering just slightly, though the air is warm. He looks up at the sky, and it is an unrelenting gray, not a sliver…
Oranges and Tangelos
So here’s Week 2 of what I think will be a weekly update on returning to life as a Cleveland Browns fan — also a discussion of the old orange Browns helmets and the new ones: From SportsWorld: I do not believe in Johnny Manziel. I do not trust him in the least. I do…