By Thomas Chambers

Back in my rookie days, horse wagering meant going to the track. Living downtown, it’s easy to get to Arlington, location-wise, but other factors make it a real excursion. (I assure you I will get to those factors in a future column.) Why is it that sports management never really makes it easy on the fans?
One day, a solution literally dawned on me: Go to the OTB, the off-track betting “parlor.” Duh! I tried the Mud Bug: See below. I walked in to State Street and immediately walked out: Yecch. Then I ambled down to Jackson Street: The rest is history.

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Posted on February 20, 2009

By Dan O’Shea

Trades, trades and more trades. The NBA trading deadline was only hours away as of this writing, and a handful of deals already had taken plus within the last few days, though probably only one with much fantasy significance. That would be the exchange of Shawn Marion and Marcus Banks for Jermaine O’Neal and Jamario Moon.
By moving from Miami to Toronto, Marion gets back with a team that more willing to play the fast-paced game he was used to in Phoenix during his best years. Does he still have what it takes? He has been managing around 12 points per game and 8.7 rebounds per game this year, off his career averages. With Chris Bosh out in Toronto, Marion takes over at power forward, but center Andrea Bargnani has been doing most of the front-court scoring for Toronto of late.

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Posted on February 18, 2009

By Jim Coffman

The Blackhawks played well in the first period of an actual home game against the Dallas Stars on Saturday night (their first contest back in the United Center after a marathon road trip). They played even better in the second. And it wasn’t just me who was sayin’ it, it was still splendid play-by-play man Pat Foley, who referred to the initial 20 minutes as “good” and the time between intermissions as “great.” But it was the first 2:19 of the third period that provided yet more conclusive evidence that this team is something special.

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Posted on February 16, 2009

By Thomas Chambers

In Playing the Ponies, the Three Stooges traded a depressed 1937 diner (even with the popular menu item of hot water poured through a chicken) to a couple of swindlers for Thunderbolt, a swayback has-been Thoroughbred. Their only angle was that the crooks told them he could really run. On their way out the door, Curly grabs a big handful of chili pepperinos, thinking they were salted peanuts. They get to the track and realize this horse doesn’t want to do much of anything. Curly eats some pepperinos and makes a beeline for the water trough, so they figure, what if we gave these to the horse? So in the end, they give the pepperinos to the horse. With Larry riding, Moe and Curly run a motorcycle and sidecar with a bucket of water like a carrot on a stick to make the horse chase it. They mop up big.
I was reminded of this while watching the first two installments of Jockeys,” a “reality” show now running on the Animal Planet channel. While I never saw Curly carry a horse six furlongs (a huge steamer trunk or a ton of ice, yes, but not a horse), you would have thought these jockeys in the show were doing just that. The old adage, though, is that a good jockey never wins you a race, but a bad one will lose it for you. It’s always about the horse.

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Posted on February 13, 2009

By Dan O’Shea

Major League Baseball was rocked this week by the confession from Alex Rodriguez that he “experimented” with steroids while playing for the Texas Rangers, a span of three seasons during which he had two of the three biggest single-season home run tallies of his career.
I will leave the condemning of A-Rod to others, and let you privately mull whether or not A-Rod’s career is marred beyond repair. It may sound cold (and ironically supportive of steroids usage, though I assure that is not the case), but all we care about in the fantasy baseball world is numbers, and the factors which might affect those numbers.
Can A-Rod be counted on again for numbers that made him the consensus No. 1 fantasy baseball pick for at least the last four seasons?

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Posted on February 11, 2009

By Jim Coffman

This week’s observations were going to write themselves. It started with Monday’s featured game on ESPN, where I was sure I would watch, and then describe, another stellar performance by the Chicago guy who has lifted his college basketball team the highest so far this season. Sherron Collins had done everything during inexperienced Kansas’ surprising undefeated run through the first eight games of the conference campaign. He led the team in points (18 per game) and assists (five) going in. Sure enough, Collins led the Jayhawks to a 14-point lead at halftime over Big 12 rival Missouri.
Later on in the column I figured I would dive into what appeared to be obvious angles regarding the Hawks and the Bulls. Everything was all set. Except it wasn’t. Ah, sports.

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Posted on February 10, 2009

By Thomas Chambers

I am not a gambler. I am a horseplayer.
Horseplayers like to think that through experience, diligent research, finding the key elements of a horse’s past performances and just plain following the game, finding a winner is more intellect than guesswork. But don’t tell me that after a 42-1 shot wires a bunch of $5,000 claimers. After races like that, either your hindsight sharpens to Superman levels or you still wouldn’t have picked him in a million years.

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Posted on February 6, 2009

By Dan O’Shea

First basketball, then baseball.
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The depths of the Pacific Division in the NBA’s Western Conference may seem an unlikely place to find waiver wire bargains, but three players with the bottom three teams in that division had great weeks.
* Eric Gordon, now starting at shooting guard for the L.A. Clippers, averaged 20.8 points per game last week and has been steadily improving of late. Last week, we linked to a post talking about how rookies start to flag around this time of the season, but Gordon is in a zone, as we old-school ballers used to say. He’s only 71 percent taken in Yahoo! leagues.

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Posted on February 5, 2009

By David Rutter

1. You mean that Matt Millen is an analyst? Seeing the man who single-handedly (OK, so he used both hands) destroyed the Detroit Lions being trotted out as an expert football assessor is like, oh, I dunno, like trotting out Bob Davie as an analyst. Oh, wait . . .
COMMENT 11:11 A.M.: Kelly Murphy writes:
Just had to add, Detroit was not very happy about Millen either. Here is a video that shows a scroll during the game.

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See also: “Warning! Matt Millen’s On.”

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Posted on February 4, 2009

By Jim Coffman

How did we ever survive a decade of Super Bowl blowouts? From 1992 to 2001, eight games were decided by 10 or more points – the other two featured seven-point spreads and only one of those games was still legitimately on the line in the final seconds. We’re spoiled now, what with the last eight contests featuring three field-goal wins by the Patriots and the last two big games coming down to back-and-forth “you think that was incredible? Try this!” touchdown drives.
Actually, the Cardinals’ final touchdown was less the result of a march and more a matter of one perfectly executed play. In it, frazzled Steeler safeties were enticed to try to jump intermediate routes run by receivers out wide on both sides and Larry Fitzgerald (who finished another multiple-touchdown playoff game with a just-about insurmountable lead in the “greatest post-season ever by a wide receiver” competition) found nothing but wide open territory in front of him after he turned upfield in the middle. Had the Steelers lost this one, that 64-yard touchdown would have haunted coach Mike Tomlin and his staff for the rest of their lives.

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Posted on February 2, 2009