The Brewers Are Still Doomed

Have you ever eaten a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup while sitting on the toilet? It’s an interesting experience to say the least. The sweet, chocolate, peanut-buttery taste caresses your taste buds in their succulent awesomeness, but because of the look of the candy and the place you’re sitting, the thought never leaves your mind that “Oh my God, I think I'm eating a giant sample of stool!” That’s basically how I feel about the 2007 Milwaukee Brewers. It might look and taste good, but after thinking about it, things go downhill pretty quickly.

The positives about these guys are the platitudes: “They play the game the right way,” “they have a lot of youth and enthusiasm,” “the game comes easy to them,” etc. Have you ever actually looked at the way their lineup is constructed? The starting pitching is not that great, and wunderkind Ben Sheets is still an injury waiting to happen. After one more ten strikeout game his arm is bound to explode. Ace-closer Francisco Cordero has been among the NL’s best this season, but this is the player who made a Howard Hughes style meltdown in Texas look like cold feet before marriage. Before you know it, the guy will be blowing saves, throwing up like Willie Beaman in the bullpen before games, and keeping his urine in plastic bags.

"It’s the wave of the future"
The hitting is not much better. JJ Hardy has been playing over his head for a while now, and is due for a regression. Do you really thing he’s going to hit 35 HR’s, and have a slugging percentage around .500? There is no chance the 2nd coming of Alex Rodriguez could play in Milwaukee-- it’s seriously not possible. Besides, the guy is basically the Brady Quinn of professional baseball. Is this the kind of dude you’d really want your team to rely on down the stretch? And speaking of “stretching,” “closing windows”, and JJ Hardy, let’s just say that the one in the upper-deck isn’t the only chute that Bernie Brewer is sliding around in.

“Oh my God you guys, I think I’m getting a clue!”
And speaking of horrific regressions, how about 3B, SS and OF Bill Hall? It seems like last year was the serious aberration, and this season is indicative what Hall can do. This guy’s strikeouts make Mike Cameron look like Tony Gwynn, except thinner and not nearly as black. Not to mention that by the time Hall is finished getting worse, the guy’ll be playing in AAA, and will have by that time committed a fantasy baseball holocaust not even the owners of Andruw Jones have ever seen.

If these things happen (and the way things have gone for the Brewers and their fans, they must) then the team’s division rivals are bound to overtake them eventually. Although it’s generally not a good idea to count on the Cubs for anything other than national embarrassment, the 300 million dollar men are starting to come around as of late, and are only about four games back in the division standings. In addition, the computer projections have always like the Cards in this division, and if Albert Pujols makes up for the time that was lost earlier in the season, and the Rick Ankiel experience gives the team a Josh Hamilton-level boost, then the NL Central crown will be ripe for the picking.

Time to face the facts—the Brewers are doomed. The club right now is hanging by a thread, and is probably a Paris Hilton hookup away from all out implosion. They might have tasted pretty good at first, but all you’ve really been eating is a nice chunk of feces. It might have taken a little longer than I originally projected, but the season is over nonetheless. Enjoy watching the playoffs at home once again, gentlemen, and please watch where you eat.

Too weird not to post.

White Sox Fans-- Your Season is Over

After getting swept by the hapless Cubs, reports are beginning to surface that a fire sale is now being planned for the Chicago White Sox that’ll make the Reds yearly reach-around look like the Mulder-Haren trade, as yet another season ends in ignominious failure. While some bastions of support still exist (generally within the prison population of Illinois) it’s understood that when your club is only a game and a half up on the Kansas City Royals, it’s time to give up the ship. This is a welcome development for most baseball fans, because despite winning a World Series in 2005, the Southsiders haven’t exactly become America’s team.

Outside of Internet phenom Jim Thome and the ever entertaining Ozzie Guillen, there isn’t a lot to like with this brand of White Sox. Ever since Jose Contreras was reunited with his family and was placed in a lower-pressure environment, the guy lost a lot of his good story and drawing power. Any team that values Scott Podsednik can’t be taken seriously, and the media blow-ups the team’s General Manager has with past players leave a bad taste in viewers’ mouths, since the world will remember Frank Thomas long after Kenny Williams is dead. Injuries abound with the 2007 club, and while almost none of it could have been planned or corrected, these kinds of things don’t happen to the Dallas Cowboys of the world. Unless of course you’re Michael Irvin.

This one goes out to Lt. Winslow.
The fact is, outside of a banner World Series victory in recent memory, the White Sox are probably one of the most wretched franchises that’s ever graced the national pastime. Before an 88 year championship drought was extinguished, they were even more pathetic than the Red Sox, but with far worse press coverage. Really, outside of providing misery for their own followers and fodder for the fans of other teams, the most notable thing about the CHW’s were those uniforms with the shorts, which were also some of the historically bad variety. Just like Rutgers football really has no place in the pantheon of great college teams, the White Sox don’t probably belong in the list of great teams and perennial contenders along with the Yankees, Red Sox, Cardinals, A’s, and Dodgers. Ere go, this team was doomed from the start—it was written in the stars.

Now, does this mean things can’t get better? In a macro sense, yes. But good trades of essentially the entire team could put the White Sox in prime position to repeat some semblance of their 2005 success, provided the Twins, Indians, Tigers, and Royals, all get progressively worse as the years go by, and that has a pretty good chance of happening, right?

…………NOT!!

It’s time to revel in glorious schadenfreude, and outside of watching (VaJay)Jay Mariotti poking White Sox fans with a stick through his gilded cage, the greatest thing about the early demise of the White Sox are the wailings of the insidious Ken “the Hawk” Harrelson. If you are a person who believes in “goodness” and “truth” then Harrelson is almost certainly the Joesph Goebbels of a Major League Baseball organization. Not only during his announcing is he out-and-out rooting for the Southsiders, he tells outright lies to keep the fans entertained. Seeing Iraqi Information Minister Harrelson do the play-by-play for one of the league’s worst teams will bring delight to the millions of viewers who can actually see WGN.

Congratulations to the 2007 Chicago White Sox. For about the first month of the season, you guys hung in there pretty well. Unforunately, this would not be the case throughout the rest of the baseball year. The new rallying cry of your team will now be “Let’s not be worse than the Royals.” It’s an accomplishable goal, I think. Probably more so than winning another World Series this century, anyway.

“He Gone.” And by this I mean “traded.”

Jeff Weaver: Back on the Pot

Saturday of this weekend while I was at the NFL draft, Jeff Weaver was losing. This wasn't any kind of losing, though, this dude was getting firebombed like the Germans at Dresden. By the Royals! Kurt Vonnegut, wrote an entire book out of his experience, all I’ll try to do is bang out a few paragraphs.

Everyone knows Weaver smokes pot. We suspected as much back in 2000, when he was a super prospect/best player for the then-hapless Detroit Tigers. A stewardess on a Tigers flight in a lawsuit against an uncomfortable (AKA overly sexy) working environment saw Weaver walk out of the lavatory in a "puff of smoke" and the "smell of Marijuana behind him."* Besides that little tidbit, he’s also from the LBC, which according to some, is where weed was practically invented. Also, is it just me, or does he look like he's high all the time?


He stopped smoking when he was with the Cardinals when he helped them win the World Series. It's the only explanation why such an awful pitcher suddenly turned good. So why is he back on it now? Maybe because Seattle is a dystopian super-structure, whose mocking name of the Emerald City hides the town’s wretched underbelly. Do you know what there is to actually do in Seattle?

1. Drink bad, overpriced coffee and fellate oneself
2. Listen to Grunge
3. Play Nintendo
4. Get in infinitely meaningless arguments over if PC or Macs are better.

Do you know who loses in this kind of situation? Everyone in Seattle. Hence, Weaver losing all his games. It’s a vicious cycle, and when you’re in a vicious cycle, you get back to your roots, and try to do what first made you successful. And considering Dave Duncan’s semi-miraculous pitching tapes self-destructed upon Weaver’s exit from St. Louis, all Weaver’s got left is the ganja.


Seattle manage Mike Hargrove, whose intellectual capacity places him somewhere between John Kruk and an igneous rock on the smartest beings to ever grace the human experience, has decided the best place for Weaver is in the bullpen. This will be, predictably, a disaster, making Weaver the most expensive, ineffective reliever since Kyle Farnsworth (an intellectual midget in his own regard).** Weaver’s last significant experience in a relief role came in the 2003 World Series, where after getting through one inning and giving a fist-pump that made Francisco Rodriguez’s slap-assery look like Sanjuro Yojimbo in comparison, gave up a laser of a homerun that literally dented the side of Dolphins’ Stadium.

Obviously, the Mariners shouldn't have signed Weaver. Hell, no one should have signed Weaver. His very acquisition is a total and abject failure, and this sort of incompetence should surprise no one-- Mariners GM Bill Bavasi has been doing this shit for years. How have Adrian Beltre and Richie Sexon turned out? I hate to make such an easy joke here, but Weaver's probably not the only one on drugs in Seattle.

This, Jamie Kennedy, is how you kick it old school

*This article is impossible to find online without a search via Lexus-Nexus. However, a gentleman at NYYFans.com copied and pasted the entire thing here. Very funny stuff.
**Consult The Dugout for more insight and hilarity.

Danny Almonte, New York Baseball Legend

This was supposed to be a post about the outrage of the New York City government banning metal baseball bats throughout the greater New York Metropolitan area. Assuming MLB doesn’t start paying for wooden bats for young/poor people to use (they won’t) baseball has all but conceded the NY-metro area to basketball and lacrosse. I’ve said my piece on this. New York will probably never produce great players such as Manny Ramirez, Sandy Koufax, or Danny Almonte ever again.

Also, you might think Danny Almonte doesn’t belong in that list of New York baseball legends, but you would be wrong. Fantastically, horrifically, wrong. So what if he did most all his damage against kids half his own age*? That’s not like it stops Orlando Hernandez, and that guy’s at least 60.


For those of you too young, too divested, or too A.D.D. to remember, Danny Almonte was the ace left-hander for the Rolando Paulino All-Stars. Outside of having the most egomaniacal team name in the history of organized sports, and no one on the team being able to speak English, this plucky band played on the outskits of Yankee Stadium which, natually, endeared them to the entire country. When the tournament came around, Almonte was already a phenom, having embarassed opposing teams in regional tournaments across the northeast. Armed with a 75 mph fastball (or roughly half the speed of sound** on a little league mound), a Randy Johnson-esque slider, and the intimidation factor of a man-child who has started masturbating more frequently and not solely experimentation purposes, Almonte annihilated the competition.

The secret to his slider? Hairy palms.
He finished with a freakish stat line of 3 GS, 27IP, 46K, 3 H, 1 R, 0 ER. If that isn't the stuff of legends, then you show me what is. So what if Almonte was at the very least two years older than his competition? And speaking of NYC public school districts, who cares if Almonte didn’t even go to school? It's not like he would have learned anything anyway. I don’t care who you are, if you strike out more guys than Carl Pavano has pitched to in the past two years, you are officially gangsta. If Corey Lidle was still alive, could he put up a stat line like that? I don’t think so.

Regardless of anything remotely sane, by now we should know that age limits don’t mean a thing when it comes to baseball. Albert Pujols has the hairline of a 35 year old. We already mentioned El Duque. Julio Franco helped build the ark. Jessie Orosco is in the majors somewhere, isn’t he? In the Dominican Republic and Cuba, players routinely lie about being younger to seem like better prospects. The only mistake Almonte made was that he lied in the wrong direction. It didn't stop him from marrying a 30 year old, that's for sure. If anything, all of this should only increase his legend status.

Nowadays, Danny Almonte is pitching in for the Frontier League Miners, his legend status witheld from him by a stupid tradition that holds things like "cheating" and "fraud" in disregard. This is wrong! Madness, even. For a stretch of time, Almonte was one of the best young pitchers on the planet. He deserves to be in the pantheon of great ballplayers coming out of the New York area. Let's just hope in light of the new ban that he's not the last.



*Take a look at the old school ESPN site!

You’ve come a long way, baby! Now with obnoxious video.

**Come on, we all need a little lameness in our lives.

Mets Players Can't Drive

I’m not talking about driving the ball. We all know they can do that. Just check out this video from last year’s NLCS.

C’mon, that was funny.

But seriously, it looks like these guys just can’t drive. Not that I blame Mets’ pitcher Joe Smith. Parking in New York is anarchy. This guy gets it about right*, except he forgets to mention the race gangs and cannibalism. Personally, I think it’s like being in Mad Max, except trans-fats are banned and smoking will get you five-to-ten. Not quite Escape from New York, but similar.

Regardless of anything even remotely sane, shouldn’t Mets fans be a little disturbed by this little gem?

"The sign said 'No standing.' Well, I wasn't standing. I was parking," Smith said. "If they mean 'No parking,' shouldn't it say 'No parking?' I mean, I just figured they didn't want anyone standing there. I don't know why."

Uh, dude?

When standing is prohibited by signs or rules, no person shall stop a vehicle, attended or unattended, except temporarily for the purpose of and while actually engaged in expeditiously receiving or discharging passengers.

New York City Trafic Rules 4-08(a)(3)

I’m not saying professional baseball players are geniuses. If you lived in northern Kentucky southern Ohio, maybe there aren’t any real cities where there would be signs like that. We can’t all be Zach Grenkie, writing physics equations in our sleep.



But if a player on my favorite team can’t figure out the meaning behind a “No Standing” sign, my prospects for the season wouldn’t be too great. New York Mets 2007: “Your Season Has Come.”

Start Heilman! Oh wait...

Hat-tip: MLB AOL Sportsblog

*This is behind the Times-Select wall. It’s obnoxious and infuriating. However, if you go to www.bugmenot.com, then they will give you a free password to that, and almost any other site. Enjoy!