By Andrew Reilly
Why can’t the Sox beat bad teams?
Are they no match for the inherent craziness and allowable recklessness of a club with nothing to lose?
Do they suffer from some form of El Duque Syndrome, needing the most insane, high-pressure circumstances to surround them before they can channel their inner excellence?
Are they really that scared of the people of Cleveland, perhaps fearing a thrashing of the Indians would drive the good people of the Sixth City to do to the Chicago River what they did to the Cuyahoga?

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Posted on August 9, 2009

By Thomas Chambers
This is my favorite time of the year for Thoroughbred horse racing.
In the spring, you have the inscrutable three-year-olds making their runs toward the Triple Crown series. In November and December, the Breeders Cup is over and it’s difficult to get too excited about the two-year-olds trying to get their feet under them. The Breeders Cup is what it is, but waits for its own intense 10-days of handicapping.
But here in mid- to late-summer, all is well as Saratoga, with stakes races throughout the meet, and Del Mar run their top-quality meets and Arlington gets into the mix with its turf-niche program, the Arlington Million, part of the International Festival of Racing (Aug. 8).
On the simulcasting side, you get exotic locales such as Finger Lakes in upstate New York, the California fairs at Santa Rosa and Fairplex, Emerald Downs in Washington State, the Jersey Shore’s Monmouth meet, Minnesota’s Canterbury Park with its Claiming Crown, and the beautiful turf course at Colonial Downs.

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Posted on August 7, 2009

By Dan O’Shea
There’s a lot to get to this week, so let’s start with a Fantasy Baseball Round-Up and our awards for best performances during July:
MVP of the Month for July: Matt Holliday, OF. His performance was improving when he started the month as an Oakland A, but after being traded to the St Louis Cardinals, things really took off. He had a .477 batting average for the month with 4 hrs, 22 RBIs. He’s now rewarding owners who drafted him early and stuck with him through a sleepy first 75 games.
Cy Young of the Month for July: I’m going to throw a curve ball here, a Cliff Lee curve ball. Wandy Rodiguez was almost unhittable, Mark Buehrle actually was unhittable and both John Lackey and Jorge De La Rosa had 5-win months, but Lee was 4-2 in July with a 2.11 ERA and 3 CG, all of his outings but the last one coming for the second worst team in the majors. He is looking more like the Cy Young winner he actually was in 2008.

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Posted on August 5, 2009

By Jim Coffman
People – repeat after me: Training camp is meaningless. Of course the Bears have to get their work in, but in terms of people watching the practices or media talking to players and coaches and determining anything definitive about the team? Does not happen.
Over the weekend, the news out of Bourbonnais was that the second-year man out of Nebraska, Zack Bowman, who had that one great game last year (a special teams TD and defensive interception) before tearing his biceps and sitting down for the season, looks like the hottest thing since sliced olive loaf out at cornerback (which is especially important now that veteran Peanut Tillman has been sidelined for most of camp by a back injury).

Beachwood Baseball: The White Sox Report The Cub Factor

Let’s see what Bowman does in exhibitions – and even those barely matter because of the dumbed down schemes teams run to avoid giving away anything about what they really plan to do when the games start to matter.

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Posted on August 3, 2009

By Andrew Reilly
Talk about an uncharacteristic maneuver.
Even if the Jake Peavy deal had already been explored, it always seemed like such a non-event, one of those could’ve-been-sweet things right up there with the Maggs-for-Nomar trade and the phantom acquisition of Alex Rodriguez. Of course we just sort of assumed Peavy would never go along with playing for the White Sox anyway, but that stemmed less from what any of knew about Peavy and more from what we know about the White Sox. Because the White Sox, as you may be aware, do not make splashy moves.
Surprise moves, yes.
Risky moves, absolutely.
High upside shots in the dark, without question.
But the Peavy deal suddenly makes the Sox look like a real organization, one which a legitimately good pitcher looked at and said “I will hand over my power in this situation to be a part of what’s going on over there.” Five years ago we were hearing how Randy Johnson didn’t think the Sox could ever win anything and Kenny Williams himself calling the club a 50-cent operation in a dollar-demanding world. Now we have a marquee player (and not one past his prime this time, either!) and a legitimate shot at . . . something. Peavy doesn’t bring a guarantee of anything, but he absolutely brings the possibility of so much more.

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Posted on August 3, 2009

By Marty Gangler
So now we know that the Cubs are most probably going to be in it the rest of the season. And we also know that it’s not going to be anywhere as easy as anyone thought. But do the trade deadline pickups, John Grabow and Tom Gorzelanny, really know what they are getting into? Did they think they just won the lottery by going from the Pirates to the Cubs? Of course, we’re not sure what they are thinking and on top of that they are left-handed and think with a different side of the brain than I do – but we here at the Cub Factor would like to give them a heads-up on a few things about this Cubs team so they know what they are in for:
* Don’t worry about remembering the name of the guy playing second base. Eventually everyone takes a turn playing there. Including you.
* You don’t have to laugh at Ryan Dempster’s Harry Caray impression just to be polite. It only makes him think it’s actually funny.
* It’s okay to think the facilities at Wrigley Field are antiquated and horrendous. But it’s not okay to say it out loud because you’ll piss off a lot of stupid people.

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Posted on August 3, 2009

By Mike Conklin
In between firing Dale Tallon and getting booed at the recent Blackhawks convention, John McDonough found welcome relief at the Union League Club. The occasion was the Ring Lardner Awards, where McDonough gave a speech to toast Harry Caray. The awards are held to celebrate sports journalism in Chicago and raise money for charity, which this year was the Boys & Girls Clubs of America. McDonough, who knows a lot about all of the above, was excellent.
It had been several years since the Lardner Awards were held, owing as much to the closing of the Chicago Athletic Association club, where the dinner was enthusiastically embraced, as the state of the industry. The event always has been fun, a chance for the city’s sports insiders to reminisce in a public setting and outsiders to listen and be entertained. This is exactly how the old Sportswriters radio show, granddaddy of sports talk in Chicago, got started back in the 1970s, when customers at the Billy Goat eavesdropped on Tribune and Sun-Times scribes swapping stories.

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Posted on July 30, 2009

By Dan O’Shea
The MLB trading deadline draws nigh, and it seems quite possible that the biggest deal already has been made. It involved a player named Holliday rather than one named Halladay (totally different name, startlingly similar pronunciation). The deal we speak of is the one that sent OF Matt Holliday from the Oakland A’s to the St. Louis Cardinals. It is still quite possible that starting pitcher Roy Halladay could be moved to Philadelphia, though his Toronto Blue Jays reportedly were holding for too much.
Among other possible moves, the C/1B Victor Martinez could end up at a new address, and any number of smaller deals could be done, but at least as of Tuesday night not much was happening. The only other trade of note in recent days sent 1B Adam LaRoche from the Pittsburgh Pirates to the Boston Red Sox.
The Holliday move must be considered a serious boost for Holliday owners. It takes him out of a ball-eating canyon in Oakland, and puts him in a park friendlier to homerun hitter, and in a line-up stocked with menace.
Here’s a quick take on some recently traded players and other names in the news, complete with Fantasy Fix Action Ratings:

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Posted on July 29, 2009

By Jim Coffman
“Well,” I thought to myself last Thursday afternoon, “I’ll never convince him to be a Cub fan now.” My 10-year-old son Noah had attended Mark Buehrle’s perfect game with fellow campers and counselors from his day camp and it seemed clear the experience would seriously strengthen the foundation of his Sox fandom. His dad the Cub fan wasn’t excited about that of course but the boy had witnessed baseball history – the kind that only happens a time or two every decade.
And Noah is the kind of kid who could at least start to appreciate what he’d seen. As I waited to pick him up, I saw some fellow campers I had met previously and greeted them with things like “You saw a perfect game! There have been only 17 of those in 120 years of major league baseball! Congratulations on witnessing one of the biggest things ever for the White Sox! A few of them perked up a bit but they were also battling the after-effects of a long bus ride back from U.S. Cellular.

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Posted on July 28, 2009

By Andrew Reilly
It’s tempting to use events like Mark Buehrle’s perfect game as a foundation for projecting how the rest of the season might go, an especially stupid proposition considering just how much of an aberration the event really is; you might as well say Jim Thome’s seven-RBI outings show a team that’s finally turned the corner. But what Buehrle’s tremendous achievement does give us is a guarantee of some degree of fond remembrance of the 2009 season.
Even if they keep losing so badly to the teams they’re supposed to beat, the perfect game was still awesome.

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Posted on July 27, 2009