Sometimes, I Feel the Same Way (PSA)
May 14, 2008
I’ve never had Shiner Bock, nor any other Shiner beers. I have no problem with the brewery, it’s just that the beer isn’t available out here (or, at least, not widely), so I haven’t had the chance to try it. I do appreciate that Shiner seems to be one of those bridge breweries–they make beers that are widely consumed near the brewery, and well appreciated, and, I suspect, a lot of Texas craft beer drinkers moved away from BudMillerCoors thanks to Shiner.
All this, of course, is a long winded way to introduce a commercial and public service announcement from Shiner. Yes, we’re apparently a video blog now.
Enjoy:
Hat tip to Stan Hieronymus.
There will be a new crime drama this fall, on CBS, featuring a psychic detective. The show is called The Mentalist. From Ain’t It Cool:
“The Mentalist” is about a psychic (Simon Baker) who solves crime. It’s not to be confused with “Medium” or “The Dead Zone.” It’s from writer-producer Bruno Heller (”Rome”).
Hercules, of course, refers here to “The Dead Zone”, which was a USA drama starring Anthony Michael Hall as a man who fell into a coma, awaking after six years to discover that he has psychic powers which he uses to solve crime. The show began in 2003 and was canceled in 2007.
Completely independently, of course, is ABC’s drama starring Patricia Arquette as a woman who one day suspects she has psychic abilities, which she then uses to solve crime.
Admittedly, I haven’t seen either show, and I doubt I’ll find any interest in The Mentalist, as I’ve already found the best psychic crime solvers on TV:
It’s like video day around here.
Aint It Cool News: CBS Plans To Rehash Old Shit for Next Year
Like a Robot Made of Nails
May 12, 2008
Paul DePodesta, former LA Dodgers GM, and current Padres front office mensch, has a blog. It’s notable, more or less, because it’s the first time a front office type has started a public blog, and DePodesta is a smart guy, and Padres fans are going to have the chance to have a fascinating insight into the way their club works, thanks to DePodesta.
Now, Depodesta is just getting started, so it’s possible he’ll play hard to get and his blog will never give fans the kind of insights into decisions they wish for, but even if the blog is a failure in that sense, it will succeed on other levels as long as DePo finds things like this to share:
Talk About An Underdog
May 7, 2008
The Flyers, of course, are in the Eastern Conference Finals, the third of four rounds in the Stanley Cup playoffs. ESPN, for the playoffs, has Barry Melrose and the other experts chiming in on who they thought would win each round.
In the first round, everyone picked the Capital to topple the Flyers, except John Buccigross, who held the solitary correct pick for the round.
In round two, Barry Melrose gave the Flyers their kiss of death, as he alone picked them to advance over the Canadiens. Amazingly, everyone but Barry was wrong, and the Flyers now face the Penguins.
So, after getting no respect for two rounds, you’d think a couple people would come around, especially after the Flyers had shown themselves up to the task against the Penguins in the regular season.
Well, no dice:
Well, screw all you guys.
The Dangers of Youth in Goaltending
May 4, 2008
So, as the Flyers finished off the Canadiens last night, 6-4 (and in an outstanding game, no less), I gave thought to young Carey Price, Montreal’s 20 year old netminder. I wondered, specifically, about how he’d rebound from being so excellent during the regular season, and so disappointing during the playoffs. It was clear that Price looked rattled in his last two games of the postseason, games 3 and 5 against the Flyers, letting in soft goals, and being out of position too frequently.
I wondered if there was a history of young goalies allowing their shellackings to get the better of them, and within a few years, they fall out of the league. I know this is, more or less, exactly what happened to Jim Carey of the Washington Capitals a few years ago. In 1994-95, the 20 year old Carey (Jim, that is) played 28 games for the Caps and won 18 of them, posting a 2.13 GAA. In the playoffs, he couldn’t handle the pressure though, and was tuned to a tune of a 4.19 GAA. The next season, in 71 games, Carey had 35 wins, a 2.26 GAA, and led the NHL with 9 shutouts. But, come the playoffs, this 21 year-old was festooned with 10 goals in only 3 games, a 6.19 GAA.
That was the end of Carey’s time as a regular in the NHL. He was traded the next season, only played 10 games the year after that, and only 4 the year after that. And then, he was gone. I was curious if this is common among such young netminders thrust into such taxing circumstances. But, alas, I have no idea how to find such information. Hockey-Reference.com is lovely, but doesn’t yet have the Plax Index feature that it’s older brother (Baseball-Reference.com) boasts.
Thankfully, there’s James Mirtle:
Outside of Patrick Roy, there’s just not much of a track record of success from netminders as young as Price. In the modern era, post-Original Six, only 19 netminders have played in a postseason game at age 20 or younger, and only Roy has won more than six games. Eight finished with a goals against above 3.90, a group that puts Price in good company: Martin Brodeur, Grant Fuhr, Tom Barrasso, Don Beaupre, Roland Melanson and Bill Ranford all went onto great careers after early playoff disappointments.
I’m still expecting big things out of Price.
So, from what Mirtle says (and there’s plenty of reason to think Mirtle knows, more or less, what he’s talking about), we can anticipate, and dread, Carey Price coming back for many years to come to dog the Flyers in the playoffs.
For now, though, we can just sit back and look forward to the Eastern Conference Finals.
Men With Balls
May 2, 2008
Paul Nyman, at THT, breaks down what makes fastballs fast.
The piece is a bit lengthy, but very interesting for anyone who is interested in pitching.
Mechanical analysis (especially of pitchers) has become somewhat popular over the past year or two, really starting with Carlos Gomez’ work at The Hardball Times. Gomez has moved on to be a minor league pitching coach somewhere, and so The Hardball Times has filled the void with Nyman, who appears to be some kind of mad scientist of pitching mechanics. Lots of charts, a few technical terms, and an overwhelming sense wonder–Nyman is a good writer with an impeccable understanding of his subject matter. I could ask for nothing more.
The Hardball Times: Workin’ It Out With That Northsoutheastwest Movement
The Problem With the Debate
April 30, 2008
Last night, Bob Costas hosted a live (or partially live) episode of his HBO show, Costas Now, to address the changing sports media landscape. The press release:
Segment Two: The Internet and Impact of Bloggers. Video package interviews: deadspin.com editor Will Leitch, TV writer and media critic Michael Schur and Washington Post columnist and PTI host Michael Wilbon. Live panel: Pulitzer Prize winning author Buzz Bissinger, Will Leitch and Cleveland Browns wide receiver Braylon Edwards.
So, there was a taped roundtable with Will Leitch of Deadspin, Michael Schur of FireJoeMorgan, and Michael Wilbon of ESPN and the Washington Post, which was followed by a live discussion with Leitch, Buzz Bissinger, and, bizarrely, Braylon Edwards. I haven’t seen the show, but I assume Costas was involved in every segment as well.
The seemingly uniform reaction, at least from blogs (I haven’t found any mainstream opinions on the episode yet), is that Bissinger, simply put, lost his mind. From MDS at the AOL Fanhouse (who had the first reaction I could find):
Bissinger launched into a profane rant against Leitch, Deadspin, blogs in general and “Big Daddy Balls,” the latter being the name that Bissinger incorrectly used for the blogger who goes by the pen name Big Daddy Drew. Bissinger was completely unhinged. Cleveland Browns wide receiver Braylon Edwards, who for some odd reason was on the panel as well, looked frightened.
“This guy, whether we like it or not, is the future,” Bissinger said, jabbing his finger in Leitch’s direction. “The future in the hands of guys like you is really going to dumb us down to a degree that I don’t think we can recover from.”
Of course, Bissinger couldn’t be bothered to cite even one example of anything “dumb” Leitch has ever written. And neither Bissinger nor Costas seemed to know the difference between a blog post and a blog comment.
Summing up: Costas holds a live panel featuring old-head sportswriter Buzz Bissinger, and new-guy Will Leitch. Buzz bashes blogging in the person of Will so fervently that Leitch doesn’t even has a chance to defend himself. Not that he needs to, as the fervor of the attack is absurd enough to sink itself.
Again, I haven’t seen the segment (though I hope someone will post it shortly), so the following comments are based on the idea that the essential uniform reaction from the various commenting members of Blogfrica weren’t, ya know, lying or exaggerating or whatever. Given the tone (somber) and the (unsettling) lack of swearing and snark, I can only assume that we’re all taking this pretty seriously.
Leitch himself checked in this morning with a couple of salient thoughts, most notably, this leading remark:
Here’s the important thing to remember about Buzz Bissinger, and whatever the heck happened on “Costas Now” about two hours ago: Buzz is not alone. Sure, he might be metaphorically alone, raining spittle on the imaginary demons that clearly haunt him. But if you don’t think that almost every single person — with obvious, clear exceptions — who was on all those panels last night didn’t come up to him afterwards and give him a fist pound and a “yeah, we really struck back tonight!” well, you weren’t there. This really is what many of them think. Though most are a little calmer about it.
Leitch doesn’t indicate who those exceptions might be (though I assume “obvious” and “clear” would work nicely for those who saw the program), but it seems that the segment was designed to publicly hang the appointed representative of Blog. If, indeed, many of the other panel member congratulated Bissinger on his rantings, the only reasonable conclusion is that the program was less a discussion of the changing face of sport media, and more a reminder of who’s in charge around here, who’s sitting pretty in the press box, and who’s watching athletes from their mom’s basements. People who share Bissinger’s view possess a mentality of Writers vs Bloggers, Us vs Them.
And there lies the first issue. There is no “them”, or rather, changing perspectives, there is no “us”. Sports bloggers have only a few connecting points. Generally, they all like or love sports. They have personal interest in the topic about which they write. Beyond that, though, I’m unsure what there is. I’m not certain if Orland Kurtenblog and Free Darko have much in common, in terms of content. Kurtenblog (The KB, to you), consists of enthusiastic fandom for hockey as a sport, which is coupled with frequent, short posts to dissect the news of the game while maintaining the lighthearted spirit that helps make the sport, itself, so wonderful. Free Darko is more nebulous, interpreting basketball as something poetic and revolutionary, composing posts as manifestos as though the Atlanta Hawks represent something greater, more significant, than one of the better teams in the NBA. They’re both wonderful blogs, but for totally separate reasons. Any criticism you can apply to Free Darko almost certainly does not apply to the KB, and vice versa.
Criticizing blogs for being inaccurate or inelegant or vulgar on the basis of a few selected posts is like criticizing magazines because of Hustler, or bashing newspapers because of the Weekly World News. I used to work for an environmental company, and was asked to represent the company at a national meeting for a student’s environmental action group. Unbeknownst to me, the group had opinions and did work in non-enviromental areas. One of these areas was (and I assume still is) GLBTQ relations. They argued against discrimination against queers (their umbrella term) by saying that “everyone is queer”. They accomplished this feat–of making everyone queer–by defining “straight sex” as “a man having sex with his wife, in bed, man on top, for the purpose of procreation”. I cannot recall if the procreating has to be successful or not. Anything else, is, at least a little bit, queer. This, of course, is a silly tactic, defining your opponent by using incredible narrow terms.
Of course, this is what Bissinger is doing. He’s trying to reduce the thousands and thousands of blogs out there to some kind of narrow definition of the term, imagining a sports blogger as a Rick Reilly ripoff crossed with cheap tabloid journalism, David Mamet’s vocabulary (but not his plotting), and just a bit of Larry Flint, for flourish. And while many blogs contain one or more of those elements, hardly any contain all of them. And far more blogs focus on elements not included in Bissinger’s narrow view. Blogs, simply put, are far too diverse for any sort of singular criticism to be reasonably applied across most of the board.
Here’s the other problem I have with the apparent nature of the program last night. There is no discussion from the mainstream media about the changing nature of sports writing. Rather, there is only a recognition of something different, blogs, and an immense crush against what these blogs fail to do. For that matter, many blogs, in their criticism of the mainstream media, either ignore or downplay what newspapers do well, and focus instead on what they do poorly, or do not do at all. What needs to occur that hasn’t, I think, is a thoughtful recognition of the successes and failures of both media formats: blogs and newspapers (including online newspapers).
Bissinger isn’t the man to have that conversation, and, even if it ever takes place in a meaningful way, it seems unlikely that Buzz would care for it. If it ever happens, I’m not even sure if Leitch is the guy to represent the vast and vaguely associated legions of sports bloggers out there. He might be, but I’m not sure. But there are significant differences between journalism and blogging, and it would be nice if the mainstream media could come around and think of blogs as something different, instead of something inferior and dangerous.
UPDATE: I just saw the segment in question (or, at least, most of it) on Awful Announcing. Even hearing about it, so much this morning, I found the whole thing somewhat shocking. While haranguing Leitch, Bissinger asks, about blogs, “What does it add? What does it contribute?” I’d love to redirect that question to Costas and Bissinger. What did they add last night, other than bile and venom, to the landscape of sports media? Bissinger’s hysteria seems, to me, akin to the cries of “Witch! Witch!” in Salem, MA. Bissinger didn’t seek to inform anyone about blogs–not even of their faults. He merely evoked the authority of volume and pronounced blogs a retardant of society. And I’m unsure why, exactly.
Other posts about this:
Every Day Should Be Saturday: A Brief Statement on Blogging
Awful Announcing: First Reactions to Bob Costas’ Foray Into Sports Media
Deadspin: Friday Night Blights
Fire Joe Morgan: A Few Words on “The Internet”.
Dan Shanoff: Buzz Bissinger vs Will Leitch: The Day After
Dodger Thoughts: The Rime of the Ancient Sportswriter
The Big Lead: “You’re Like Jimmy Olsen on Percocet” and Bob Costas’ Feeble Attempt to Destroy Blogs
Bloggers For Life
April 26, 2008
A few weeks back, the New York Times wrote a ludicrous article about bloggers dying from, ya know, blogging. For a refresher, here’s a short quote from the piece:
To be sure, there is no official diagnosis of death by blogging, and the premature demise of two people obviously does not qualify as an epidemic. There is also no certainty that the stress of the work contributed to their deaths. But friends and family of the deceased, and fellow information workers, say those deaths have them thinking about the dangers of their work style.
Well, finally, an official rebuttal, thanks to CNN. Apparently, while 3 weeks ago, blogging could kill you, now, blogging can save your life:
James Karl Buck helped free himself from an Egyptian jail with a one-word blog post from his cell phone.
Buck, a graduate student from the University of California-Berkeley, was in Mahalla, Egypt, covering an anti-government protest when he and his translator, Mohammed Maree, were arrested April 10.
On his way to the police station, Buck took out his cell phone and sent a message to his friends and contacts using the micro-blogging site Twitter.
The message only had one word. “Arrested.”
Within seconds, colleagues in the United States and his blogger-friends in Egypt — the same ones who had taught him the tool only a week earlier — were alerted that he was being held.
So, there ya go. Blog at home, and die of a heart attack. But, take that shit on the road, and it’s like a Get Out of Jail Free card. Glad to know that the bloggers, at least, will be safe at the Olympics this year. In all seriousness, we hope Buck’s translator, Mohammed Maree, is safe and sound, wherever he is.
CNN: If One Word Posts Can Save a Life, What Am I Doing All This Typing For?
