follow sports far less than I used to, but I still pay some attention to it, football and basketball more than the rest.  However I'm always game for some stupidity from some jock, ideally on the field.  Or some ridiculous ruling on the field, or from the officials of a sport, or even something really wacky a fan gets up to.

Items of this nature are often commented on in the daily blogs, and from there they make their way to this compilation page.  Entries include the date posted, and more recent ones are added on top.

October 1, 2003

In other ridiculous marathon-related news, some nut who regularly makes a mockery of marathons by running (walking) them in an antique diving suit (average time: five days) is planning to take his diving suit antics to Loch Ness.

Scott, who in recent years has taken part in the marathons of London, New York and Edinburgh clad in his 80-kilogram (175-pound) deep-water diving suit -- exploits which set new standards for the longest times ever recorded in those races -- is embarking on his latest endurance feat to coincide with a marathon around Loch Ness.

Aiming to raise money for a charity that helps children suffering from leucemia -- a deadly form of cancer of which he himself was cured -- he is to make a series of dives each day during which he will trudge along the lake bottom, fed by air from helpers in a boat above. He hopes to cover some five kilometres (three miles) per day.

"I've been told the big copper helmet could give quite a big headbutt to the monster, so it will be quite nice to make his acquaintance," he said, referring to the heavy headpiece of his diving suit.

I have trouble with this story, since I hardly know what to mock first.  The stupidity of walking around the edge of a lake, underwater, in an antique diving suit?  The stupidity of pretending there's some sort of immortal dinosaur in the lake?  The stupidity of acting as though an aquatic life form is so dumb that it would just swim right into some very slow and very stupid human in an antique diving suit?

And yet at the same time, I know he's doing it for a good cause, which makes me feel bad about mocking him.

This kook and P. Guilty are both annoying in that whole, "I desperately want attention so I'll do something really stupid, but get media coverage by saying it's all for a charity cause."  And when you see me wakeboarding down the entire Amazon in about 10 years, all to raise money for AIDS research, while incidentally earning huge media attention just as I have a new novel coming out, you can feel free to mock me too.

Lloyd Scott, 41, poses for photographs wearing an antique deep sea diving suit in Loch Ness, in Scotland, ahead of his underwater marathon world record attempt to raise money for children with Leukemia, September 28, 2003. Scott, a former leukemia sufferer, who also completed the 2002 London Marathon in a diving suit, begins the attempt on Sunday and will take 14 days to complete his 26-mile underwater trek where he will be 30 feet (9.14 meters) below the surface of the loch, the home of the mythical Loch Ness Monster. REUTERS/Christopher Furlong

January 20, 2003

Both teams that I expected to win, won.  And both in basically the fashion I expected them to win in. You'd think that would satisfy me, or have made them more entertaining to sit through. Nope, they were both pretty boring.

Funny the relativity of favoritism in sports.

I'm watching Tampa Bay vs. Philly and rooting for Tampa.  So every time Philly has the ball and is trying to throw, I'm muttering, "God, can't they get any pressure on the QB?  Where's the pass rush?" And I feel perfectly correct in asking that.  Yet when Tampa has the ball, if there's any pressure at all on their QB I'm yelling, "Block, you fat fucks!  Give him time to throw!"  And I feel perfectly correct in demanding that as well.  Because the team I root for should get sacks, while not suffering any.

Who could argue with that?

October 28, 2002

So Sunday night was game 7 of the World Series, which should, in theory, be exciting. I saw the end of game 6, and really enjoyed it.  I didn't really care which team won, but I turned it on and SF was up 5-0 in the 7th inning.  I left it on for a bit, muted, while I was doing some crap on the computer and watching out of the corner of one eye.  Anaheim got a home run and cut it to 5-3, making things more interesting.  I watched the rest of that inning and then muted it again once commercials came on.

Next inning SF went quietly, and then Anaheim got up and started scoring runs, and it was fun to see.  Home crowd going totally insane, everyone getting a hit, pitchers trying and failing... drama galore.  Anaheim pulled it out 6-5, forcing the deciding game 7 Sunday.

Anyway, I watched most of the late NFL game on FOX, and of course they had a promo for Game Seven about every 15 seconds, as well as fucking Malcolm in the Middle's season premiere, where they go to the zoo and hilarity ensues.  I've seen that preview at least 100x in the last three weeks of football on FOX.  Maybe other networks pimp their other stupid shows just as much, but I don't notice it if they do.  FOX is just relentless.  It will be jacket-weather in hell before I ever watch anything on FOX, other than The Simpsons on rare occasions, just to get back at them for their goddamn endless promotions for themselves.

So I had the TV on after the late football games ended, switching back and forth between the FOX postgame show and the local crappy postgame show on CBS.  

The local channel was really hurting, with their hour long Chargers' show.  Chargers were off this week, so they showed highlights of the season thus far (touchdowns only), showed short interviews with some of the star players talking about what they'd be doing this weekend (answer, nothing anyone gives a shit about hearing), and even descended to filling time with virtually unedited live ambush interviews with people loading their cars in a frickin' Home Depot.  "How do you feel about the Chargers?"  Amazing the probing insights you get from guys while they are tying low grade 2x4's to the roof of their El Camino.

All I want to see are some goddamned highlights of the games that day.  I don't care about interviews with coaches or players, I especially don't care about the talking head announcers.  Shut them up, get them off the screen, and hire five more editing guys, so you can run solid highlights.  I don't want to see one-yard touchdown runs or field goals either, unless they come with 1 second left. I want to see every interesting play, hard sack, 20+ yard pass completion, kick return, etc.  Highlight packages almost always suck, IMHO.  Every channel shows the same few plays, and talks way too much. I can (and probably will) read the game summary if I want to hear who won and how much time was left when they scored. All the highlight packages are way too concerned with the coach being mad, the names of the players who did what, etc.  I don't care about any of that; just show the fun plays.

Eventually the world series came on and I watched the first inning with it muted before realizing I really didn't care at all.  So I put put Brotherhood of the Wolf in and watched that instead.  It was actually better the second time than when I first saw it a couple of weeks ago.  The dragging ending didn't seem so dragging this time, and the melodrama didn't seem so melodramatic.  The very last fight was still ridiculously fake, especially that super slinky bone sword thing.  What were they thinking with that?  It's like something rejected from a really bad TV anime series for being too fake.

I had planned on turning the baseball back on eventually, to see the ending, but I forgot all about it.  Turns out there wasn't anything exciting in the baseball game anyway, with the Angels getting up 4-1 early on and coasting from there.  Bad night for the Giants offense to dry up.  Now why couldn't game 6 have been game 7?  That would have been a hell of a fun game to see, tense drama to the very end.  I blame FOX.

Despite living in California, I had no real interest in this LA vs. SF world series.  Anaheim isn't unlikable, they are just anonymous.  Weird to have a World Series team that not only lacks a superstar, but lacks even any semi-stars.  Name one pitcher on Anaheim?  Exactly.  Actually I can name one, their closer Troy Percival, but that's only because the sports shows all showed him getting the last out.

The only reason to hate Anaheim is the Disney connection.  They have that huge cheesy plastic rock pile in the outfield, looking like a left over section of Frontierland, and the highlights showed confirmed asshole Michael Eisner celebrating in typically-overdressed fashion.

SF has a lot of reasons to hate them. #1 is normally Barry Bonds and his perpetual scowl and steroidally-boosted muscles, but in an upset, Dusty Baker's goddamned kid takes the #1 spot.  He was sobbing like... well like a three year old up way past his bedtime after daddy's team lost the game tonight. Good, I hope he grows up to be a heroin-addicted farm-porn tranny. What the hell is Dusty Baker doing with a 3 year old anyway? The man is like 59 years old.  I hope his wife is the age of his first daughter.  Every time the kid is mentioned I keep thinking I misheard them and missed the "grand" before "son".

With Dusty's kid taking the top spot, #2 is therefore Barry Bonds and giant earring.  Batting helmets have a hard exterior and a pad that goes down over the ear on the side towards the pitcher.  For obvious reasons.  This is sort of funny, in that it forces players to wear their huge ear rings on one side or the other, based on which hand they bat with.  Switch hitters must have to do a bunch of ear ring switching depending on which hand the pitcher throws with.  So you see Barry Bonds with his pigeon's egg from the left ear, since he's left handed.  And then Benito Santiago is up next and his ostentatious diamond-studded cross is on the right ear, since he's right handed.  A fair indication of how serious the sport is can be found in how much jewelry a player can get away with wearing while on the field.

#3 would normally be the redneck Jeff Kent, he of the crashing while popping a wheelie and then lying poorly about it.  But he didn't do a goddamned thing during the World Series, so we've forgotten about him by now.

Anyway, I was glad that Bonds finally had a post season where he didn't strike out every time up, since I'm glad for his amazing baseball achievements, no matter how big an asshole he is.  But I'm also glad that his team didn't win. It's somehow more fun if he puts up huge individual numbers and his team still fails.  Though it does deprive us of the chance to see him do post game interviews and try to remember to use the word "we" at least every now and then, if only to break up the "I" train.

Now let us work to forget all about baseball for the next five months. It's never hard.

October 25, 2002

One of the most annoying things in major sports is when players start dragging their kids out onto the field or into the dugout.  The annual farce that is the NFL Pro Bowl always features a lot of that, with players who have no interest in the score spending much of the 4th quarter over at the sidelines carrying around their 2 or 3 or 4 year old kids, who are of course terrified by things. 

Baseball is annoying in that the biggest name players always seem to have their kids trotting around as bat boys.  This is a low skill position that requires nothing more than running out to pick up a bat after the batter has discarded it.  There are real bat boys who are usually in their teens and are paid employees.  Those guys do actual work and are in charge of carrying balls out to the umpire when the supply is getting low, keeping equipment in order, getting all the bats and gloves and helmets out before games, etc.  They'd go out and get the bats after an at bat, but usually some star left fielder has a 6 y/o son who he drags to the ballpark, daddy's little man, and that kid gets the fun part of the job, while the real bat boy does all the actual work.

This has been taken to a ridiculous extreme with San Francisco now, since both the best player (Barry Bonds) and the manager Dusty Baker, have very young boys, and one or the other of them are always underfoot. Half the game there's some camera on the boy(s) in the dug out as they play with gloves, knock over things, eat candy, kick their feet, and generally distract everyone from the task at hand. It's goddamn annoying, and I'm sure the players hate it.  They want to spit and curse and tell dirty jokes, and here's someone's 4 year old crawling around the whole game.

Hopefully we'll see the end of this now, since in tonight's game five of the World Series the manager's near-infant son breaks loose and charges out to the plate in the middle of the game, after one of the SF players hit a double.  Two players are steaming towards home plate at full speed, and the two foot tall kid runs right over home plate.  If the hit had been a single and there was a throw home, we might be looking forward to a funereal at this point.  Luckily the first runner saw the kid and grabbed him up and carried him out of the way, as you can see in the picture linked to above.

The article has all these players saying how much they like the kid and how he's their good luck charm and other stuff, but you know they'd be much happier having him in the stands in mommy's lap during the game.  If the bat boy is far too young to understand when he should and shouldn't be running out onto the field then it's foolish to have him as a bat boy; even aside from him possibly getting trampled by huge players wearing sharp cleats.

October 7, 2002

One thing I'd noticed with the baseball playoffs is the lack of TV time for them. I figured they'd all be on FOX and/or ESPN, since that's where most of the regular season games were (none of which I watched, but I was aware that they had were on TV, if I'd wanted to see them.)  This is not the case in the playoffs.  They are being shown on various ABC channels, which include ESPN and ESPN2, but oddly enough the games aren't on the sports channels, where you'd expect them to be. They are mostly on something called ABC Family, which I've never even heard of and certainly don't have the option of watching with my $13 a month basic cable.  My dad has digital cable with about 300 channels, which basically translates into taking the channel surfer much longer to realize there's nothing on.  For this reason I just don't even bother turning on the TV when I'm at his house, unless I know something is on that I want to watch, usually Lakers or the Sunday night Football game. If they ever allow full cable customization, where you pay some amount each month for each channel, but can pick exactly which channels you want, (the others could be available on a daily, PPV type basis) I'll be a happy man. Of course that will never happen, since most people only watch about 8 channels, while having to pay for 50 or 80 or 300, and that's how the cable companies make their money.

Anyway, the baseball playoffs will clearly be getting their lowest ratings ever, since they're on some obscure cable channel (and the Yankees being out already certainly hurts also).  MLB should just do them on PPV, if all they care about is the money and not a wide viewership.  Given how Baseball is losing attendance steadily, and it's too boring a game to appeal to modern youth, you'd think they'd want it on network to get the widest possible exposure.

I'd been thinking this idly, and read this article on Baseball Prospectus that makes much the same observations, only more so.

MLB, and I'm not kidding about this, needs to swallow their pride when they sit down for their next TV deals. They need the playoffs--as many divisional games as they can manage and all of the League Championship and World Series--on network television, free to anyone who's got an antenna and can manage to stomach listening to Chris Berman pretend he's a broadcaster for three hours.

Take whatever they'll give. If it's $1, sign a short-term deal and write it off. Buy the airtime like Ross Perot if you have to and get someone else to sell the ads. Nielsen Media Research estimates there are just under 107 million households in the country. Pushing from a fourth-rate cable network that gets its ass kicked by FX to a national audience is at least another 20 million eyeballs, and the increase in visibility (low channels = higher viewership) would bring even more.

I'd point out what a better job the NBA and NFL do (the NHL might do better, but I haven't watched Hockey since Gretzky left LA, so I have no idea) but this (Sunday) morning I was hoping for a good early game, before the local team (SD Chargers) plays later today from Denver.  The obvious early game would be Raiders vs. Buffalo, which features two excellent teams, both in the same conference as SD, and the Raiders are their biggest long term rival.  It's not on.

Another good early game is Miami and New England, who are also in SD's conference.  It's not on.

In fact there's no early game on CBS at all, for some bizarre reason.  FOX has an early game on, but they always show the NFC, while SD is in the AFC.  Still, Tampa is playing at Atlanta, and that's a great defense vs. Atl who has the best young quarterback in football, so would be fun to watch.  Not on.

Another possible game is Pittsburgh at New Orleans, which features two good teams.  Not on.

So what is?  New York Giants at Dallas.  True, they are both 2-2, but both are bad, boring teams, very lucky to not be 1-3 or 0-4.  More to the point, they're boring, with no exciting players, and are both in the NFC. Of the eight games on right now, this is the 5th or 6th best match up. Why it's the only game visible in San Diego right now is a mystery, and is probably a leading cause of yard work.

The NFL has weird rules about how many games can be on in each market.  The local team is always on, unless they are at home and don't come near a sell out, and there are always 3 games on total, either 2 early games and 1 late game, or vice versa.  Then there's the Sunday night game, and Monday night game, which are always on everywhere, since that's the only game on at the time.  Sunday night is only on cable though.

They usually do pretty good at putting the more interesting games on nationally, with their priority being teams from your local team's conference (which can be a double-edged sword, if there is a great game on in the other conference and you're stuck watching something else), but have certainly dropped the ball today.  I've got the Dallas/NYG game on with the sound off, but I'm not paying any attention.  It's crap, as expected, only one score so far, and not much offense, and I don't care who wins at all.  Dallas just missed a field goal that hit the upright, after failing miserably on a fake FG earlier.

I'll probably turn it off before half time and turn the set back on around 1 when the late games begin, so I can get some work done in the mean time.  More work than this pre-blogging, that is.

And later, when I did, the late games weren't any good either.  San Diego got splattered in Denver, and the other game on was Stl vs. SF, and it was a slaughter also.  Good day to just turn off the set and get work done.  Pity I'm only realizing that now, as I write this on Monday morning.

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