By Jim Coffman
When Sean Marshall chose Sunday night for the worst start of his career (and what has been a very successful Dodger lineup even without Manny Ramirez finally busted out against the Cubs after scoring three runs in the three previous games), how many viewers even thought of switching to NBC for the Stanley Cup finals? I did, but only because my older daughter, still a little ways short of big-time sports fan status but occasionally hyper-aware of current sporting events, reminded me. I think her brother may have been the one who reminded her but he wasn’t around when we switched from the Cubs to the Cup.

Beachwood Baseball: The Cub Factor The White Sox Report

The NHL in general still isn’t on my radar. Of course the Blackhawks were, but I didn’t watch a whole lot of the playoffs other than their games, and I watched even less non-Blackhawk hockey during the regular season. That was despite the fact that oftentimes during the winter sports months, I’m willing to watch just about anything to avoid the latest lame basketball doubleheader offered up by ES “We’ve made about as much money as we can off unpaid college athletes – now we’re turning more and more of our attention to high school kids” PN.

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Posted on June 1, 2009

By Marty Gangler
The burning question on our minds this week – because we’d prefer to avert our eyes to the Cubs on-field shenanigans – is this: how will Big Z occupy his time during his six-day suspension? Using all historical data available to us by Major League Baseball, we’re pretty sure we’ve got it figured out.
Day 1: Big Z will sit down and talk with the pitching coach Larry Rothschild and will take notes about things to remember. But then his pen runs out of ink, he gets pissed, finds his bat, and crushes the pen.
Day 2: Carlos decides to head to 7-11 for some comfort food. But then he notices that they are out of pepperoni combos and only have the regular nacho cheese ones. So he asks the clerk if there are any more in the back and the clerk says there is no “back” and everything is on the shelf. So he gets pissed, decides to get fun-yuns instead and realizes that fun-yuns suck, so he gets even more pissed, finds a bat, and bashes in the Icee machine.
Day 3: Carlos decides to head out on Lake Michigan and get some relaxing fishing in. But then he gets a big fish on the hook and a guy on the boat screws up netting the fish and it gets away. Carlos gets pissed, completely bitches out the deckhand, and breaks the fishing pole over his knee. Then he finds a bat and breaks that over his knee too. When the Coast Guard arrives to a report of a boater on a rampage, he pretends to eject them from the lake.

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Posted on June 1, 2009

By Andrew Reilly
It’s fun and pleasantly optimistic to compare this year’s Sox squad to last year’s division winners, and in many ways the two cast the same shadow. A division populated with losers; a theoretically potent offense incapable of producing; weird stretches of winning games they should have lost while losing, badly, games they should have only lost in normal fashion.
And yet, all that pining for a magical non-spectacular team aside, the 2009 Sox actually share less with last year’s edition than they do with other boring, non-remarkable squads of the past decade. Imagine Alexei Ramirez in the Jose Valentin role, Carlos Quentin as Frank Thomas, Chris Getz as Willie Harris, and the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim as the plain old Los Angeles Angels.
Some will cry “No!” and insist this team has turned a corner, which would be a sentiment both cool and agreeable were it not for the fact that even with their recent run of good baseball, the Good Guys still sit one under .500 and a full four games behind the Tigers. They can do some good, these White Sox, but they can dig a pretty deep hole just as well, which brings to mind something one of my college professors taught me: the good ones can get out of trouble, but the great ones kept themselves out of it in the first place.

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Posted on June 1, 2009