The Vig

I watched almost all of the McGwire interview on the MLB Network yesterday.  He had me right up until he said he used “small doses” of steroids.  I don’t believe that for a moment.  I do, however, buy most of the rest of his story.  That is to say, I do believe he believes he could have accomplished everything he did without the juice.  That he believes he was using simply for therapeutic purposes.  I’ll have to go back and look, but I don’t think he was doing his therapy under any sort of medical supervision, but whatever.  I take vitamins every morning in the belief they make my body perform better.  Does it?  Who knows.  McGwire probably thought of steroids in the same way.

What annoys me about this whole thing is we’re leaving entry into the Hall of Fame up to the Baseball Writers Association of America.  Basically once you’re in the association for ten years, you get a ballot.  And you keep getting one whether you still cover games or not.  This is how Canzano stays on their mailing list despite my suspicion that you can count the number of actual games he’s attended in the last twelve months on one hand.  Still he gets to vote and then preen on his radio show, as he did yesterday, that he’ll “never, ever, ever, ever, ever vote for McGwire”.  Why?  Not because of anything he did on the field.  And not even because McGwire admitted he did steroids.  But because McGwire still stands behind the fig leaf that he was only doing it for therapeutic purposes.  For this, Canzano holds back his vote.

Same holds true for Chicago’s Jay Marrioti, who famously turned in a blank ballot this year.  The main subject of any Marrioti column or television appearance is Jay Marrioti.  Nothing else.  He turned in a blank ballot in a transparent “look at me!” ploy for publicity.  Nothing else.  ”I can’t judge any of these guys!” he claims.  Yet there’s no doubt he’s signed off on plenty of guys in the past who’ve done amphetamines or worse.  Why do they get a pass from Jay?  Who knows.

Look.  Jackassery is a long and proud tradition within the ranks of sportswriters.  Writers have held grudges against players for years and vice-versa.  And McGwire is hardly the first player to fall victim to some writers’ self-serving crap.  That said, times have changed.  We no longer only suffer jackass writers in the silence of our morning coffee.  Now they’re on our TVs, in our radios, and clogging up the Intertron.  And as they’ve branched out, their bravado has increased.  And the bravado is starting to spill over into institutions like the Hall of Fame.  It’s got to end.

The Football Hall of Fame, I think, has it close to right.  They have a panel of very serious people who meet and debate various nominees, then they come down annually with their stone tablets and announce that year’s class of inductees.  These are guys who study and know the game inside and out.  And guys who take their responsibilities seriously.  Yes, even Peter King takes his vote seriously.  What’s more, those guys see their positions as an honor, not as a soapbox.  It’s time the Baseball Hall of Fame divorces itself from the BBWAA and gets serious about who they allow to vote.

It was a coin-toss on whether to attend last night’s game.  Those who were there may have noted my absence.  As Dylan B. pointed out on his Twitter feed a week ago, the Hawks didn’t necessarily need to announce their attendance for the Brandon game, they could have just had everyone introduce themselves over the PA.  Last night wasn’t much better.

A friend asked me last night why I wasn’t at the game.  I told her the same story I wrote here last year.  There was a time not so long ago when I would have come to a mid-week game like last night just to see what happened.  I think those days are over.  The Hawks might win, they might lose, but if no one’s there, what’s the point?

Dylan B. got in a gentle dig at this reporter earlier this evening.  It takes real effort for me to be sly sometimes.  Dylan makes it an art.  I’ll take the bait.

Who exactly have the Winterhawks alienated with their price increase?  The same dead-enders who were there every night of the Goldsmith-era were sitting in their same seats last night, and paying 30-percent more.  From Piper’s perspective, what wasn’t to like?  Especially on a Wednesday night in November when the entire town is discussing the pending Blazer implosion.  Piper’ll take what he can get mid-week.

Now, this will be the first Saturday home game in almost a month.  Hopefully the Hawks have been pounding the phones to get folks out there.  They’re in the Rose Garden on a Saturday night against Seattle.  It should be an easy sell, but who knows.  This thing isn’t going to get rebuilt in a day.

In other news, the team is beginning to make Goldsmithian noises about renovating the Coliseum.  A five or six-thousand seat arena inside the Glass Palace would definitely be a community asset.  I wonder how much further this idea would get if someone were to jump on the Green Line and spend an afternoon talking to the folks at PSU about joining in.  The Vikings are in serious needs of new digs; if they were to join together and wrap the whole thing in a big green bow, I bet they could get something done.  It would be a win-win.  Goldsmith never pursued this.  Perhaps Piper will.

Alternatively, I had an enlightening conversation a few weeks back with a longtime observer of the local sports scene.  The subject turned to the new Beaver baseball stadium.  I mentioned they were talking about building the thing at the Clark County fairgrounds in Ridgefield.  I told him I live in Vancouver and Ridgefield was too far to drive to watch a game.  When I mentioned that, his eyes lit up.

“If the Beavers moved there, they would own Vancouver,” he said.  They would no longer be competing with all the other noise in Portland, they could just concentrate on that one location.  He argued it’s too difficult to market minor league sports in Portland.  A move to the suburbs would solve that.

It’s an interesting point and one I hadn’t considered.  This all works for the Hawks as well.  The dead-enders will all gladly make the drive to Beaverton or Vancouver to watch the team.  So they’re really not going to lose anything.  If anything, the team will gain.

Beaverton has its own paper, which you don’t read unless you happen to live there.  We have one up here in The Couv as well.  Either paper would be more than happy to put “their” team on the front page.  And locals would love to go see “their” team.  This theory is working all over the Puget Sound right now with both baseball and hockey.  That one conversation turned my thinking completely around on minor league sports and the suburbs.

Another friend took it one step further suggesting sticking an NHL arena somewhere in Washington County and booking the heck out of it.  The Blazers, for whatever reason, don’t seem at all interested in maximizing the Rose Garden.  They’ve missed out on dozens of shows (AC/DC, Depeche Mode, and Fleetwood Mac…as well as the seemingly never-ending Springsteen tour, just to name a few) that Mike Scanlon would have booked in a heartbeat.  A properly run big-league venue somewhere out Highway 26 could definitely work.

This story makes me incredibly sad.  I’ve known Kathy Adelman Naro since she was just Kathy Adelman.  We’ve had a friendly relationship, if you can call it that, for well over ten years.  Mostly it’s been small talk about basketball or something to do with one of the tournaments I help run during the summer.  I’ve always been impressed by how she works with her players and how upbeat she’s always been with them.  Whenever I saw her on the bench, she always made each one of them feel special.  Having watched hundreds of basketball coaches over the years, I can tell you she’s got a skill with kids that’s rare.

It’s been less than a year since the Trib’s Kerry Eggers wrote up a nice article about Kathy’s battle with postpartum depression.  I wanted badly to reach out to her this summer and let her know how much her story affected me.  Alas I’m shy about such things.  Why I’ll talk about them here and not face-to-face with someone is something I suppose I should work on.  Oh well.

Her family is going to get pounded on in the media for the next few days.  It sucks because I know they’re all much more than just a last name.  There are dozens of stories out there just like the Adelmans’, but none of them makes the front page of the paper.  And in the age of the blog they get the double-bonus of Internet trolls making light of their situation.  Of course they do this because they only know the Adelmans as pixels on a TV or computer monitor rather than as flesh and blood people.  I can’t imagine living something like this out in the media.  I just can’t.

It’s easy and a little trite to say I hope she gets the help and support she needs.  People say that about celebrities and people they don’t know all the time.  In this case, I say this about a friend.  It hurts me to see a friend like this.  I hope to see her in a better time and place soon.

I’m probably the last guy you’d ever think would be a UFC fan. In fact, if you would have told me three years ago that I’d be at a UFC fight tonight, I would have called you crazy. Until probably two-and-a-half years ago, my exposure to UFC was limited. The closest I’d ever come to it was when I was temping in the Comcast (AT&T Broadband in those days) repair department. Saturday nights the phones would light up with guys calling in to pay their bills so we would turn their cable back on in time for them to watch that night’s card. And the calls would come non-stop right up until 7. It was something else.

I was eventually turned on to it by a guy who I would have never guessed was a huge MMA guy. But there he was. And there I was, watching my very first card at the Mall 205 Hooters. It was the night Rampage Jackson beat Chuck Liddell at UFC 71. And I was hooked. Looking back, it wasn’t that bad of a card. In fact, it contained a bunch of guys I saw last night.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

There was a time in college and again in my late-twenties when I was a big boxing fan. I didn’t live it and breathe it, but I certainly enjoyed it. In the late-80s, NBC used to broadcast a fight a month on Saturday afternoons. And my entire dorm would get together to watch those cards. Our favorite guy was a guy named Jorge Paez. He always had some crazy haircut or loincloth shorts or something. He was a heck of an entertainer.

I lost touch with boxing a few years after that. The promoters stuck the entire sport behind a pay-per-view wall and shut out guys like me who would have gladly watched a fight and probably would have gone down to the Coliseum to watch a live card. Alas the Arums and Kings of the world decided to strangle their golden geese in the name of short-term profits.

In my late-twenties, my uncle turned me on to a guy boxing on HBO by the name of “Prince” Naseem Hamed. He was as another flashy showman who could back it up. He hung it up back in 2002 and I don’t think I’ve seen a boxing match since. Oh, I try to get into it on ESPN, but it’s hard to follow. And hard to care. I miss seeing Max Kellerman on ESPN. I guess hes on HBO now, but its not the same.

So fast-forward to 2007. My friend got me hooked on MMA. It wasn’t the sport of barbarians I believed it was. It was actually a very evenly matched fight between two highly trained men. In all the cards I’ve seen on PPV (up until tonight), I’ve never seen an obvious mismatch going into a fight. In other words, when you see a boxing match, you generally know going in who’s going to win and who’s going to lose. The guy with the better record is almost always going to go against a guy with a more journeyman record. This allows the promoter to build his guy up for some big payday down the road.

It doesn’t work like that in UFC. The fights are almost all high caliber fights between two guys with equal records and in equal places in their careers.

Is the result violent? Yes. Are bones broken and blood let? Absolutely. But show me a boxing card that doesn’t involve injury.

It’s with this barbarian image in mind that I kind of cut the local sports media some slack. The two local guys on KFXX, Isaac Ropp and Jason Scukanec, each take immense pride in the fact they rarely leave their homes to attend live sporting events. Oh, they love going to Blazer games because they get in free, but a Portland State Vikings game? A Winterhawks game? Please. They’d rather sit at home and watch stuff on the tube.

Both still suffer from the mindset I had back in 2003 that MMA is just a bunch of knuckledraggers beating each other up to the delight of other knuckledraggers. Scukanec went so far on Friday as to take a couple of good healthy whacks at “MMA fan” during an interview with Antonio Rodrigo Nogueira.. When he didn’t get the response he wanted, Ropp gleefully joined in and got in a couple more digs.

The thing that neither of them understands is their listeners are MMA fans. Single guys, 25-49. Holy crap, who do youthink was at the fight last night? And who do you think PACKS local bars that show the PPV cards? Think I’m joking? Go visit any Buffalo Wild Wings in Portland on September 19 and tell me who’s in there. In fact, Isaac and Suke, the wings are on me. Come down and see for yourself who “MMA fan” really is. I’m dead serious.

The guys on the AM dial weren’t alone in their disdain for MMA. John Canzano got in a couple of whacks of his own. I thought, to his credit, that he would go into the thing with an open mind. He promised UFC President Dana White he would during a radio interview Friday afternoon. White did a tremendous job hyping this thing to local media. Canzano even mentioned his editor’s positive response to White’s pitch. Yet there was zero coverage of the card in the dead-tree edition of The O. Coverage was all handled by Ben’s Olive and his fantastic crew on the O-Live side.

If Canzano went into the evening with an open mind, it didn’t stay that way long. He had his story filed less than an hour after the end of the main event. Just guessing, but I don’t think JC saw either of the nights two biggest fights. Of course he didn’t have to…

Someone is going to die in the Octagon someday. We’re headed straight there, and anyone who saw the damaging blows to the brains on Saturday, including UFC head Dana White, can’t ever say they didn’t see it coming.

I’d say that the state athletic commission needs to stop worrying about entertainment dollars and start putting the safety of the fighter first. And that the UFC referees need to be quicker to stop fights. And that the gloves of the fighters should have more padding.

16-oz gloves, John? You know that’s a pound, right? You think taking a one-pound weight to the face is safer than a 6-ounce weight? Really? You know boxers die every year, right? Every year. How many fighters have died at any level of MMA in North America?

Ballpark it for me…

Answer? One. Thats not a fortuitous accident, John. That’s the result of discipline at all levels.

As for the officiating. This is the major promotion of MMA. It doesn’t get any higher. And with that comes the highest level of officiating. I can tell you because I’ve seen a couple dozen cards now, the four guys you watched tonight are the best at what they do. They protect fighters and will call a fight at the first sign of trouble. If you would have stuck around, you would have seen Herb Dean step in early to end the Silva-Jardine fight, which was the co-main-event. So much for getting my money’s worth.

Another point on officiating and the state. Sportfight is getting ready to put on their 26th show at Spirit Mountain in a little over a month. That’s 26 MMA cards that have flown completely under the radar of the local sports media. Those fights are officiated by guys several notches below the guys you saw tonight. Yet somehow they’ve managed to get through twenty-six cards without a fatality or, to my knowledge, serious injury. Luck? Or good regulation? You be the judge.

I’m looking forward to listening to the two local stations cluck in Monday morning about what happened at the Rose Garden last night. They’re going to focus on the rowdy fans and the blood and the guy who got kicked in the groin. And Canzano will tell the story again about how he watched Chris Tuchscherer turn the wrong way down the halls of the Rose Garden (and seriously, who among us would be able to navigate our way through the bowels of the Rose Garden without having ever been there?) without telling how that story ended. Tuchscherer went back to his locker room, got cleaned up and dressed, then walked right past me and went to the Rose Garden concourse to meet with fans. It happened. I saw it. Out on his feet? Hardly.

Canzano ends his column saying he’ll continue to watch the sport “…mostly just to see if it can continue to evolve.” If you’ve ever played Canzano bingo, then you already know “evolve” is the free square in the middle. So JC is going to be the sports policeman. And I’m sure he’ll write a column or two about it in the next few years as he “checks-in”. He says he’s rooting for brain cells. He’ll actually be rooting for tragedy. It gets better ratings.

The UFC tried last night. They really did. They gave local media all the access they could have wanted. Answered every question that came their way. And they backed it up with a solid show. The UFC got 16,000 people into the Rose Garden despite getting zero local publicity. That number will only rise when they come back in a couple years with lower ticket prices. Here’s hoping the local sports media does a better job covering them when they come back.

This sort of stuff really cracks me up.  What in the hell is Manny going to tell his teammates?

“I wish one of you would have told me how to avoid getting caught”?  If anyone is owed an apology, it’s Ramirez.  There are guys in that clubhouse who were (and are) doing the same exact thing Manny got caught doing.  If they really thought they needed him this season, they would have helped him pass the test.

After Frank McCourt is done kissing Manny’s butt, he can kiss mine too.

I have a really hard time getting worked up over the suspension of Manny Ramirez for taking performance enhancing drugs.  It’s ignorant to believe players in high school,college, and every level of professional baseball aren’t using them.  Why it is we stand agog at baseball’s use of advances in sports science while we turn a blind eye to football, basketball, hockey, and any number of other sports (tennis? golf? soccer?) is something we’re going to have to take a good hard look at.  They’re all doing it.  We should get used to it.

Canzano wonders tonight whether we’re watching an arms race between sports scientists.  What was your first clue?  There are companies out there flaunting it in their marketing.  Don’t believe me?  Go back and watch those Gatorade commercials from about five years ago.  The ones where they had athletes like Peyton Manning and Mia Hamm hooked up to all kinds of machinery to measure their body function during exercise.  Hell, Gatorade even sponsors their own sports science institute.  You’re telling me Mantle and Maris had access to this sort of stuff in 1961?  Or even 1991?  Please.

Sidebar:  Yeah, Canseco’s on that 1991 list, but s regimen was Wheaties and medicine balls compared to what athletes are doing today.

And please spare me this crap about a level playing field.  The field is level.  Everyone has access to everything.  Whether they choose to use it is up to them.

Professional sports long ago quit being about pure athletic competition among players and is now strictly about the Benjamins.  The money is the trophy for these guys.  To believe otherwise is…ignorant.

So let’s all relax about Manny and quit wondering who else is on the juice.  They all are.  And I could care less.

As I write this, the NFL draft is just a few short hours away.  If you read nothing else about the draft, read this.  Deadspin’s Drew “Big Daddy Balls Drew” Magary’s profane analysis of what makes the draft must-see TV is spot-on accurate (make sure you stick around for Rolf, the Nazi shark).

…what I find interesting about the NFL Draft is that each draft pick (particularly those who are invited to attend the event in New York) gets the same kind of treatment before they’ve ever done anything. It’s a premature Hall of Fame ceremony of sorts. It’s the exact inverse of how the real world works, which never stops blowing my mind.

Exactly. You’re going to watch teams take guys tomorrow who in two years we’ll all be wondering what the heck they were thinking. Yet those dudes will be worth eight figures and, depending on who they surround themselves with, will either be colossal failures or set for life. There will be no in between.

The Lions, who pick first, will make Georgia quarterback Matt Stafford the first pick.  After that, the rest of the top-ten is a jumbled mess of linebackers, defensive ends, wide receivers, and tackles.  Who goes where is anyone’s guess.  The kid who’s been rocketing up the draft boards is USC quarterback Mark Sanchez.  Just a few weeks ago Sanchez was projected to be a late first-rounder or maybe even a second-rounder.  I was sort of hoping he’d be around at #12 for my buddy Scott’s Broncos to pick up.  The consensus tonight is he’ll be long gone before then.

Like most everyone else, I had a pretty low opinion of Sanchez.  The kid didn’t exactly distinguish himself at USC, and his great Heisman winning forefathers, Carson Palmer and Matt Leinart, have kind of tarnished the whole Trojan quarterback mystique.  My opinion changed though during a five minute spot he did with radio host Jim Rome back during Super Bowl week.

See there’s this thing called Radio Row at the Super Bowl.  There’s one at baseball’s all-star game too.  Basically it’s a room full of radio hosts broadcasting live from the event and legends of the sport as well as current players work their way through this room and get interviewed all in this one spot.  99% of these guys are brought in by various sponsors and at the end of each spot, the sports jock does a pitch for their sponsor.

So Sanchez comes in and does his thing with Rome.  They talk about USC and why he’s turning pro.  About the controversy with Pete Carroll.  Stuff like that.  At the end of the spot, Rome asks him about his sponsor and Sanchez does his 30 second pitch, he leaves, Rome goes to commercial.  That’s that, right?  Wrong.

Rome comes back from the commercial and spend the next three minutes describing what had just happened with Sanchez.  He explains how he has cheat sheets prepared for each player’s pitch.  The sponsor makes sure each radio jock has a prepared sheet with bullet points the player needs to hit.  According to Rome, he generally slides it over to the player at the appropriate time, the player fumbles over it and thats that.  Not Sanchez.  Rome said when it came time for Sanchez’s pitch, he slid the paper over to Sanchez, who didn’t take it.  Instead Sanchez delivered his 30 second pitch from memory and hit every single point.  It was effortless.

Rome said he asked Sanchez whether he’d spent all night rehearsing that.  He said he had.  Rome went on and on about how professional that was and how Sanchez had taken care of even that little detail.  That’s a professional.  And in case you hadn’t noticed, the NFL is a professional football league.

Why did that moment stick with me?  Imagine any other top-ten quarterback from the last few years or so.  Imagine which of them would have taken the time to do that and which wouldn’t have.  Vince Young?  Matt Leinart?  JaMarcus Russell?  None of ‘em.  You can talk all you want about guys with laser arms and cases full of awards.  That stuff is all meaningless.  It’s what’s between your ears.  Sanchez has it.

If he really goes to Seattle tomorrow, the Seahawks will be very fortunate.  Their fans will hate it.  They believe they should go o-line.  They can do that next year.  They need to get someone to replace Hasselbeck, who’s not going to be around too much longer and QBs like Sanchez don’t come around that often.  He’s the right pick.

Thanks to Cleveland State my Midwest bracket looks like it was set-upon by my old middle school English teacher.  Lots of red.  The Committee obviously tried to warn me by giving them a #4 seed, but did I listen?  Noooooo!!!

So now I’m left rooting for Carolina.

Great.

This is probably old news by now on these here Intertubes, but it’s news to me.  ESPN.com’s Bill Simmons did a two-part a podcast last week with writer Chuck Klosterman.  In part one, the two discussed basketball.  College basketball.  NBA basketball.  Which is more interesting.  What’s wrong with each.  What each gets right.  It was a fascinating exchange.  You can listen to it here (scroll down to 3/12).

Simmons made one comment that really put a lot of pro sports in to perspective.  I don’t know whether it’s true, but he suggested the NCAA makes more money on March Madness than the NBA makes in a year.  True?  Boy, it’s probably close.  Then just after that he made a suggestion for the NBA which would revolutionize the sport and catapult it in popularity.

Get this:

The NBA cuts its schedule down from 82 games to something more in the 65 range, and add a mid-season 16-team single elimination tournament with some sort of reward to the victor.  He suggested maybe a first-round bye in the playoffs.  But something.

Holy crap!  I would sign up for that tomorrow.  Basically it would involve doing away with the home-and-home games between the two conferences.  Instead divisions would alternate playing one another.  The Atlantic division would play at the Pacific but host the Southwest and split the Northwest and so on.  Obviously it would need to be tweaked, but it could be done.  The downside is you’d only see LeBron once a year, but the plus side would be each game would mean more.  82 games is just too damned many.

The mid-season tournament would be the perfect antidote to the February sports doldrums.  Imagine rolling straight out of the Super Bowl and into an NBA tournament.  We could spend days discussing a Blazer first-round match-up with Cleveland or Boston.  Talk about a winner.

Pro sports are headed into some serious uncharted territory in the next few years.  Both the NBA and NFL are staring down the barrel of work stoppages which, in addition to the economy, will kick their sports right in the teeth.  It’s time for both to start thinking of new ways to generate interest.  Ditching the all-star game and going to a tournament would be one way to do that.

Weber State, who twice beat Portland State by double-digits this season, will beat San Diego State in the first round of the NIT tonight.  Weber State has played well on the road all year and will give the Aztecs fits.  You watch.

Meaningless?  Sure.  But it will be further vindication for the Wildcats who should be in the big tournament this season, not Portland State.

Update:  Shows what I know.  I’m also taking Xavier by double-digits.  Adjust your bracket accordingly.