air punching

Part-Timers Sports Podcast: Episode 20: How About a Little Respect for the MVP?

Recorded Wednesday August 6, 2014.

On Andrew McCutchen’s injury, the unwritten rules, and the San Antonio Spurs awesomeness.

0 CommentsLeave a comment

Adam Wainwright Is A Douche Bag!!!

On Episode 14 of PTSP we discussed (among other things) Adam Wainwright‘s deservedness to be the NL’s 2014 All Star Game starter over the best pitcher in baseball, Clayton Kershaw.

Forget the most dominant no-hitter in modern baseball history as well as the 41-inning scoreless streak, as you can see by clicking here, CK has more K’s, a better WHIP, ERA and only one fewer win despite making five (FIVE!) less starts than AW.  The only real, tangible,  advantage AW had over CK was the fact that Mike Matheny, and not Don Mattingly, was the manager of the NL AS team.

Never once during the podcast did we discuss the douchebag-ness factor of these two men but, hindsight being 20/20, I suppose we should have.

For what reason does Wainwright feel the need to say that he “grooved” a couple to Derek Jeter and make baseball fans everywhere, Yankees or otherwise, feel like what we saw happen on the field was inauthentic,  other then that he, Adam Wainwright, must be a supreme egotistical douche bag of the highest order?

After Jeter led off the inning with a fake (as Kershaw would have you believe) double, Mike Trout hits a legit triple then Miguel Cabrera smashes a for reals home run.  Why does Wainwright feel the need to disqualify Jeter’s hit but not the rest?

This is the baseball equivalent of The Undertaker coming out and saying the reason why he is okay to appear on Monday Night Raw the day after a grueling Hell In A Cell PPV match is because wrestling is fake.  Just a completely unnecessary, uncouth and ill-timed comment by Wainwright.  He might as well have said that Santa Claus isn’t real on national TV.

Not gonna’ lie, I think that Wainwright is a douchebag and would have no problem telling him so.  I tried going to Twitter to tell him so but according to Baseball-Refernce.com, he does not have one, so this this will have to suffice.

ADAM WAINWRIGHT YOU ARE A DOUCHE BAG!

(Click here to read the story if you don’t know what I’m talking about)

0 CommentsLeave a comment

The Final 81 Games of My Life as a Yankees Fan: Game #1

They say you always remember your first love…For me that was the New York Yankees.

NYY2

The Bronx Bombers weren’t a team, they were a religion.    For my friends and I, memorizing all the significant names and numbers of Yankees history was way more important than anything we could ever learn in school.  If you called yourself a fan but didn’t know the significance of the numbers 714 or 2,130 or .353/52/130 then you were labeled a “poser” and not considered a “real fan.”

But with Derek Jeter‘s retirement at the end of the 2014 season will also come my “retirement” as a Yankees fan, for reasons I’ll explore later in future posts.

 

Game 1:  Rays 2 (37-49) Yankees 1 (41-41)

It’s not just that the Yankees lose, it’s that they lose in the most boring way possible.  I know this might be an indictment about the state of Major League Baseball as a whole but three hours and 13 minutes to play a 2-1 game?  Really?  I’ve got a 200-dollar-per-month cable bill and more channels than I can count, so why would I want to spend 1/8th of a day watching a baseball game in which only three runs get scored? Sometimes it feels like a chore watching this team play.  And, for the record,  I have no idea why a hitter has to adjust his batting gloves after every pitch, even after the ones he didn’t swing at.

They Yankees wasted a superb effort by SP Hiroki Kuroda by going only 1-9 with RISP and left 8 men on base.  The #4 (Mark Teixeira) and #5 (Carlos Beltran) spots in the lineup, which make $37.5 million between them (or only $7,044,174 less than the entire Astros team makes) went 0-4 between them.

After watching this shit-show I wished I had gotten caught up on all the Ancient Aliens episodes I’ve got DVR’ed instead.

Ancient Aliens

0 CommentsLeave a comment

The New Best Rivalry in Sports

Ladies and gentleman, we have a new best rivalry in sports and it is…the Tampa Bay Rays and the Boston Red Sox! What makes it the best if that there is genuine disdain between these two clubs which has already resulted in several bench clearing incidents this year and it’s just barely June.

 

Jonny Gomes would like to have a conversation with Yunel Escobar

Jonny Gomes would like to have a conversation with Yunel Escobar

But before we talk about the now, I would like to take you on a journey back to the dawning of the rivalry ‘tween these two clubs we now see blossoming right before our very eyes.  I remember it very well because I watched the game.

It was August 29, 2000.  The 15-4 Pedro Martinez (who would win the Cy Young that year) took the mound for the 2nd-place Boston Red Sox against some guy named Dave Eiland who was just helping the team then known as the Devil Rays kill time until the end of another dismal 60-92 season. This would be the 3rd of 10 consecutive losing seasons the Rays began their baseball existence with.

Boston was in Tampa.  Gerald Williams was the Rays’ leadoff hitter.  The count is 1-2 when this happened:

 

 

This was memorable for 2 reasons:

The 1st is, Gerald Williams gets a great shot in on Pedro.  I’d always wanted to see Pedro get punched in the face and now I had.  It was a bonus that Williams was a former Yankee whom I always liked because he played hard.

 

YES!

YES!

The 2nd is because Pedro took a no-hitter into the 9th which would have been a perfect game had he not plunked Williams and, of course, that was all the announcers could talk about. It made for great debate, the possibility of Pedro tossing a no-no but his stupidity costing him a shot at perfection.  I remember sitting there wanting to see it happen.  The Yankees were in 1st and 2004 was four years away so I didn’t care if they won the game because I thought it’d be hysterical to watch the Red Sox player I despised the most throw the most disappointing no-hitter in MLB history.

In the bottom of the 9th Martinez was facing the 8-9-1 spots in the Rays’ lineup which meant that light-hitting catcher John Flaherty was leading off.  He singles.  No-no gone.  It was depressing.  I felt as if Pedro knew that if he completed the no-hitter that the story would forever be the perfect game that wasn’t instead of the no-hitter that was, and decided he did not want that to be part of his legacy.  I honestly felt as if Pedro had willingly given up a no-hitter just to not talk about the imperfect game.

So that is how it began and here are some of the more notable incidents through the years.

Here is another one between James Shields and Coco Crisp from back in 2008.  (Crisp nearly gets his head taken off his shoulders but ducks just in time.)

Here’s another from 2012.

Last year John Lackey and Matt Joyce got unfriendly.

This year we have all this Papi-David Price stuff going on.

A few weeks ago Price hits Ortiz and Mike Carp, tempers flare.

angry ortiz

Then Ortiz proclaims “war” (douche bag) on Price.

Here Price perfectly refutes Ortiz’s moronic war comment and more.

And is the most recent episode of the soap-opera, Ortiz doesn’t think its fair that some pitchers get suspended and some don’t and the Boston Globe agrees.  (AWWW poor baby you love staring at your wittle home runs like you want to fuck them but you don’t like getting hit by the baseballs and its not fair when some players get suspended and the ones you want suspended don’t WAAA-WAAA)

As i said earlier, in case you didn’t know, Tampa Bay-Boston is the best current rivalry in all of sports because there is genuine disdain and vehemence between these two teams who have to play each other 19 times a year.

So if i were you, I’d mark my calender for Friday July 25th which is the next time these two teams will meet again because there is sure to be some lingering issues these team will need to discuss by throwing baseballs at each other.  An extra helping of July fireworks if you will.

0 CommentsLeave a comment

Bad News for Fans of GAME OF THRONES

According to the following article from Entertainment Weekly

http://insidetv.ew.com/2014/06/03/george-r-r-martin-ice-and-fire-publishing-plan-game-of-thrones/

GOT author George RR Martin is now contemplating finishing his A Song of Fire and Ice saga (aka Game Of Thrones) in 8 monstrous novels, instead of the long-planned 7.  This all but guarantees that the fat bastard pictured here

 

Princess-and-The-Queen

will be dead before he finishes the series.

Martin is 65 years-old and looks like one of the “White Walkers” from his stories.  There is no way this guy is losing weight and getting any healthier at this stage in his life.  Uh-uh, GRRM is fat-for-life.

And that’s okay, it’s fine if he chooses to be fat.  I’ve nothing against fat people, I’m one of them.  All I’m saying is, Game of Thrones (the first in the series) came out in 1996.  A Dance with Dragons (the 5th) came out in 2011.  It is now 2014 and book 6 still isn’t finished.  At his current pace, GRRM averages a book every 3.6 years.  At that rate, the 8th and final book would be hitting the shelves sometime in the year 2024 which it more-likely-than-not won’t because it seems improbable that a guy who looks like that at the age of 65 has another good 10 years of productive life left in him.

Keep in mind, the average is 3.6 years per book but that is trending upward because it took him 5 years between book 3 and 4, and 6 years between book 4 and 5.  So who knows how long it will take him to finish 3 more books because Martin is slowing down with age, not speeding up,  while his health is still steadily declining at the same constant accelerated rate which all fat people’s do.  If 10 years is a long shot, what’s 12 or 15?  Fucking impossible, that’s what.

My only hope is that Martin will have the courtesy to give all the key points to HBO so at least they can finish up their series.

 

0 CommentsLeave a comment