Chicago - A message from the station manager

By Dan O’Shea
All is not well in the City of Big Shoulder Pads. After one pre-season game, in which he had neither his starting tight end nor his starting running back to throw to, and in which his primary target was a guy whose biggest recommendation as a wide receiver was that he has been “ridiculous!” as a return man, Jay Cutler’s initials were found to actually stand for his own name, and not for “Jesus Christ.”
As a fantasy football team owner (or in any sort of fantasy league), you have to take some cues from exhibition games, but try to avoid getting too worked up about whoever did or didn’t do well in the first game of the pre-season slate. After this one game, I can’t say my opinion of Cutler’s draft position has changed. Yahoo!’s Player Ranker, in which members of all leagues can vote, has him ranked 10th among QBs. I’d put him at 7th, right after Kurt Warner and ahead of Tony Romo, Matt Ryan and Donovan McNabb.

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Posted on August 19, 2009

Behind That Beer Photo

By Mike Conklin
It’s hard to believe the Cubs’ gendarmes identified the wrong man at Wrigley Field last week in arresting that beer-tossing fan. There could not have been a lack of photos of the incident. In today’s world, everyone’s a photographer. Ballplayers cannot hit a loud foul these days without a thousand flashes. The news media has come to depend on this, turning their staff camera people into endangered species.
The Wrigley Field incident brought to mind the most famous beer-in-the-face photo of all time. This was taken in the 1959 World Series in Chicago, when a fan accidentally knocked his glass of beer into the face of White Sox left fielder Al Smith making a vain attempt to catch a home run sailing over the wall. The photo gained worldwide attention, but there are two back stories to the picture that still are not widely known.

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Posted on August 18, 2009

SportsMonday

By Jim Coffman
The guy I worry about in the aftermath of the Bears’ exhibition opener Saturday is our man Devin Hester. No entity has been a bigger fan of the Ridiculous One than The Beachwood Reporter but Hester crammed a bunch of butt-ugly plays into an awfully brief appearance in Buffalo.
Jay Cutler simply couldn’t throw him the ball enough. In what was it -14 plays with Cutler? – Hester appeared to screw up one route, give up on another and fail miserably to even contest the up-for-grabs pass that became Cutler’s interception.

Beachwood Baseball:

  • The White Sox Report
  • The Cub Factor
  • Then again, Hester did run one very good route that could have gone a long way to making up for the others. After the Bears moved inside the 10 during the starting quarterback’s last drive of the night, Hester made a good feint to the outside and got a little separation as he began to cross the end zone.
    But as Fox network analyst Erik Kramer pointed out, Cutler, who some criticized after the exhibition for getting rid of his passes too quickly in order to avoid any chance of being hit and injured, chose this moment to hold the ball too long. By the time he zipped his pass toward Hester, a linebacker had managed to drop back far enough to tip it away. But even if Cutler had delivered the pass on time and Hester had hauled it in, the Bears have to have more consistent execution from their best receiver if their passing game is to click.

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    Posted on August 17, 2009

    The White Sox Report

    By Andrew Reilly
    Preseason football is underway, and not a moment too soon. Not that I’m an especially avid Bears fan, but every second of airtime, every inch of newsprint and every pixel of internet real estate that once set its crosshairs on White Sox baseball can now be focused on more pressing concerns like what some other team in some other sport might achieve. To anyone still invested in the 2009 White Sox, this is a good thing: if they tank the season, no one will notice; if they pull off the “miracle” rally to the playoffs, we can all celebrate their grindiness and general ability to never give up or whichever cliche folks latch on to this time around.

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    Posted on August 17, 2009

    The Cub Factor

    By Marty Gangler
    If you’ve been any kind of Cub fan for any kind of time period you know that there comes a point in almost every season where you “tune out.”
    This occurs when you decide that the Cubs don’t really deserve as much time as you have allotted them.
    Quite a bit of the time this happens around June.
    Sometimes in September and even some years in April, but it happens quite a few more seasons than it doesn’t.
    This “tuning out” typically goes down in three-inning increments. If you usually watch every inning of every game, you’ll start to watch six innings. If you watched around six innings, you will start to watch just three – be it the first three or the last three.

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    Posted on August 17, 2009

    TrackNotes: Exacta Revenge

    By Thomas Chambers

    It was one of those weekends when it all came together.
    Following the game all year. Knowledge of local weather patterns. Quality horses in quality races. And a decent chunk of luck.
    And perhaps most importantly, the time needed to spend studying and handicapping the races. That’s how you win at the track.

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    Posted on August 14, 2009

    Fantasy Fix

    By Dan O’Shea
    Did you give up on Troy Tulowitzki like I did?
    Then we’re both sorry.
    The Colorado shortstop who was skirting the Mendoza line just a couple of months ago (come to think of it, that was right about when his team’s winning percentage wasn’t much better) has hit over .440 during the last couple weeks and hit for the cycle Monday night against the Cubs.
    I gave up on Tulo in early June when he sunk to .216, but he’s now hitting .276 with 21 Hrs and 60 RBIs. He also has 15 stolen bases and six triples. He leads all MLB shortstops in home runs, and that final fact is why he tops our Fantasy Fix Action Ratings this week. Here’s more FFAR talk:

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    Posted on August 12, 2009

    SportsMonday

    By Jim Coffman
    Are you enjoying this baseball season?
    Me, not so much. The team I compel myself to follow has been in contention but is just about impossible to love.
    The Cubs have guys who can club the ball when they get hot and they have pitchers who pitch well more often than not. But they only have one, true all-around ballplayer, don’t have any baserunners who can consistently cause opposing discomfort (although the one all-around guy, Derrek Lee, is capable of a surprise first-to-third or some other clever bit of legwork every other week or so) and don’t have any of the sort of special defensive players who make good games great. And even Lee simply doesn’t send the pulse racing with enough regularity. His averages (on-base and batting) aren’t high enough to earn star billing, he doesn’t have enough power and his defense, while very good, doesn’t make a difference very often.

    Beachwood Baseball:

  • The White Sox Report
  • The Cub Factor
  • Another irritating thing about this Cubs team is that the promising young guys aren’t on the field enough. Heck, they just sent Micah Hoffpauir back down to the minors. Some posited that he had slumped lately but the primary problem was he wasn’t getting nearly enough at-bats. And while Hoffpauir is clearly a first baseman first, he also is clearly as good in the corner outfield spots as either Alfonso Soriano or Milt Bradley. Anyone would have slumped during a last month-plus of the season during which time he was lucky to get two starts in a given week. As for Jake Fox, anything less than every day is less than he should be playing. And it sure would be nice if the Cubs would let Sam Fuld play, I don’t know, three games in a row in center?

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    Posted on August 10, 2009

    The Cub Factor

    By Marty Gangler
    There are certain points in the season that make you say to yourself, “Self, remember when . . . ” Like, remember when we thought Mike Fontenot was going to play second base everyday? And remember when we thought Milton Bradley might be a nutcase, but he’d at least put up some numbers? And let’s not forget, remember when Big Z was just a few mental issues away from a Cy Young run? Well, we here at The Cub Factor are remembering something else these days: Remember when we all kinda thought Derrek Lee sucked? Suddenly, Mr. Lee is not just putting together one of his best years in a while, he’s putting together one of his best years in his life. So, what happened? What got into D Lee? We here at The Cub Factor have a few ideas that may explain why this guy is so good again:

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    Posted on August 9, 2009

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