You gotta love Christmas

Just for the JFK-assassination-like shock you get when random 50-year-old female family members (in this case, my aunt) bust out freaking sports analogies over the family dinner table. A UFO could have landed in the backyard to pick up Tom Cruise two seconds later and I wouldn't have been as surprised.

I'm the fourth-best creative writer in my Intro to English Composition course

Does that mean that I'm worth $200 million?



http://www.mlbtraderumors.com/2008/12/mark-teixeira-6.html



Let's all just stop here for a second. Mark Teixeira is not the best first baseman in the MLB (Albert Pujols is). He is not the second-best first baseman in the MLB (Lance Berkman is). He is not the third-best first baseman in the MLB (Ryan Howard is). And yet he's apparently ready to turn down a farking $180 million contract even though he's probably worth like half that. He's going to make $7 million more than Albert Pujols in 2009 even though he's a substantially inferior player. Who also has an infuriatingly hard last name to spell.



Say what you want about Scott Boras, but at least he treats his clients well (unlike, say, Rafael Furcal's agent, who cost his best client about $20 million this offseason and should be posting his resume on Monster.com any day now). Jarrod freaking Washburn is going to get a $95 million contract next offseason--from Ned Colletti, of course.

I don't care; my REAL talent is giving singing lessons to scared-shitless 14-year-old girls

For the ten billionth and almost definitely not last time, some NBA team has bid "au revoir, go-pher" to the Master of the National Anthem himself:

http://sports.espn.go.com/nba/news/story?id=3766766

Is Maurice Cheeks a nice guy? Probably. Is he a "class act"? Apparently. Was the same true of, like, Grady Little? Yes. Do you see where I'm going with this? No. (You're an idiot.)

Here's the harsh, but true, point: just being a good guy who used to be a great pro athlete does not guarantee you success as a coach. Best case, you're Gil Hodges; worst case, you're Mo C. How's that for a lasting legacy?

Never mind

The Hot Stove is dead. Forever. Until Manny Ramirez signs or someone gives Gregg Zaun $85 million, I'm ignoring it.

So, until either of those things happens, enjoy the latest TO-vs-Random Quarterback Dating a Smoking Hot Celebrity feud:

http://sports.espn.go.com/nfl/news/story?id=3763209

PS: If I was dating Jessica Simpson, I'd tape $100 bills to the football every time before I threw it and joyfully praise God even after getting my ribs ground into powder by 400-pound defensive linemen.

PPS: That last sentence had nothing to do with the issue at hand. Of course, it's all TO's fault as usual. But you knew that.

I'm officially a blogger now

Thanks to my 600-word bitchfest two days ago about how boring the Hot Stove season is, I've administered the classic blogger "reverse jinx," causing teams to finally wise up and start to spend...and, as everyone knows, "spend" in Yankee-speak means "screw yourself over backwards for a 290-pound starting pitcher coming off a two-year stretch where he combined to throw 494 regular-season innings." Will CC be a good pitcher for at least like three years of his contract? Almost definitely, which is why I think the Yankees adding an opt-out clause makes sense. But will he be lights-out throughout the entire seven-year stretch of his deal? I guess I'd have to see him actually eat a salad before I could say yes to that.

And just like that, the Hot Stove is in full swing again. AJ Burnett (three healthy major-league seasons, 4.07 ERA last year) is going to get $100 million, Derek Lowe (age 35) is going to get a five-year deal, and Jake Peavy (undersized pitcher with violent pitching motion coming off an injury-plagued year that was preceded by a 223-IP season) is going to cost the Cubs their entire minor league system plus Wrigley Field and the Harry Caray statue. Ahhhhh...thank you Yankees. As usual, you've wrecked baseball while also making the winter so enjoyable for non-AL fans.

Jan. 1: The first round of the college football playoffs begins, featuring Oklahoma versus Alabama, Florida versus Texas, and...oh, wait.

(Question before I begin sarcastically tearing the BCS to shreds again: Would it really be so hard to take the winners of all six BCS-affiliated conferences, as well as the two highest-ranking non-conference winners, throw them into a bracket, have the whole thing start on January 1st to keep up with tradition...and still have all the other little minor bowls for the 6-6 teams and the 10-2 teams pissed to be left out of the bigger games, so that college football won't lose like a trillion dollars in sponsorship deals? Yes, it would be too hard? Okay. Let's keep doing things the way we have been and pissing off 99% of the country in the process. Done. On with the bashing.)



Yep, looks like another fun and exciting BCS bowl season where only one game actually matters:

http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/columns/story?columnist=forde_pat&id=3753351&sportCat=ncf

Look, I'm not saying that the non-championship BCS games won't be fun to watch. USC-Penn State, with JoePa versus Carroll and two of the best defenses in the country squaring off? High entertainment. Little Utah trying to knock off big bad Alabama? Mesmerizing. Angry Texas squaring up against perennial BCS loser Ohio State? I'll be watching.

But, seriously...do any of these games matter at all?

If USC beats Penn State, it's basically, "Yeah! We're the #4 team in the country! Imagine if we'd lost; we'd be like the #9 team in the country! Oh, the horror!" And you can apply that to all the other games as well. None of them, with the exception of Florida-Oklahoma, mean shit in the long run. They'll be entertaining, sure, but in the overall scheme of the college football standings they'll mean just as much as the San Diego County Credit Union Poinsettia Bowl. Is that really how you want your playoff system to work?

Why not (come on...WHY NOT???????) have those same enticing matchups, but actually have them mean something instead of just trivial final season rankings? Imagine if Penn State had the ball on the USC 10 with five seconds to go down by six...but a trip to the Final Four was on the line instead of a potential top 7 finish in the BCS standings? Wouldn't that be like a million times more dramatic? January 1st would be like the first day of March Madness, and therefore brackets would be filled out and compared all throughout December, and college football would make millions on the "January Madness" pools that would pop up all over the Internet. Everyone still makes money and everyone's still happy. Why is this such a problem?

Maybe our new president will make sure that gets changed when he eventually takes office. Until then, I'll just have to be content with holding a cold rag to my head on New Year's morning and watching USC crush Penn State by 45 points, earning the #3 ranking in the final BCS standings which will mean essentially nothing. And then my headache will just get worse. Thanks BCS, you've given me New Year's Day migraines and it's only December 9th. Keep it up, idiots.

Sorry, we can't sign him, the economy's in shambles. Now, about my eighth Ferrari...

By the time the winter meetings last year had gotten underway, the best free agent catcher, third baseman, outfielder, closer, and overall player had already been signed. It was the usual entertaining offseason: mediocre guys getting paid like Hall of Famers ($90 million for Torii Hunter????), crappy guys getting paid like All-Stars ($25 million for Luis Castillo over four years, with the Mets hurriedly trying to dump the contract less than four months later) and God-awful players getting paid like Legendary Heroes ($46 million for Francisco Cordero????!?!!!??). Things eventually got to be somewhat predictable, and painful at times (I'm looking at you, Andruw Jones), but still it was another fun and exciting Hot Stove season.

Flash forward twelve months to the dawn of the 2008 winter meetings, and the only notable free agent signing of the entire offseason has been Ryan Dempster for 4 years and $52 million. It's also worth mentioning that the team that gave him that contract, the Cubs, is now desparately trying to shed payroll elsewhere in order to scrape together enough pennies to pay for other ventures (yeah, the Cubs, like the third-most popular baseball team in the world, need to break open piggy banks to pay for high-caliber stars. Right, okay.).

The biggest (pun intended) indicator of how much things have changed has to be the CC Sabathia situation. The Yankees offered CC six years and $140 million in November, and he remarkably decided to wait and see if any offers came in from teams in his home state of California. If this was 2007, the Yankees would have said "Screw it" and offered him nine years and $220 million with player options for $40 million in 2017, 2018, and 2019, and also included a life supply of Big Macs, DQ Blizzards, and Krispy Kreme doughnuts. But now? They're just waiting as CC tries to decide if he wants to go to a California team, which is CC's hidden way of saying, "I fucking hate New York and never want to play there; please, any California team, give me at least an in-the-ballpark offer so the Player's Union won't grind my ass into dust"--only it seems as if no California teams can even put together an actual offer for him. That's just ridiculous, considering that the Dodgers and Angels play in the second-biggest market in the country and the Giants currently have like a $40 million payroll (with $39 million of that owed to Barry Zito, btw). So CC will probably enter the year 2009 without a contract, unless he caves and signs with the Yankees just so that the Player's Union won't plant a bomb in his car.

I understand that the economic crisis is bad, but is it so bad that MLB franchises can't afford to take any chances on any free agents? I used to complain that it was only the Dodgers that were like this because of their penny-pinching ownership team, but I mean, really: has any other team spent the money to improve their situation at all? I have to answer no to that. Sure, this stalemate will probably end eventually, and CC will get his $100 million and Mark Teixeira will get his $180 million and Manny Ramirez will get his 3-year, $69-million contract from the Dodgers with a lot of money backloaded into the last two years (uh, you read this blog right Frank McCourt?). But that time probably won't come soon, and maybe late January will be the new early December this Hot Stove season. And that'll just suck for anyone who enjoys following it.

For the 4 1/2 people that regularly read this blog

I needed a long break headed up to baseball's winter meetings, where $100 million contracts will start flying off the shelves to stiffs like Mark Loretta, Daryle Ward, and Gregg Zaun. So, at your expense, I decided to take the last two weeks off. I apologize for this unannounced absence that undoubtedly caused irreparable damage to you and your families. You can take solace in the fact that I'll be here furiously typing away every time some stupid general manager pays a mediocre free agent $30 million more than he's worth (get used to seeing the "Ned Colletti" tag, in other words).

And just in case you haven't been paying attention, here's a quick recap of the most notable events that happened in sports since I last posted:

1: Plaxico Burress shot himself in the leg at a nightclub.
2-infinity: (blank)