Reverse chronology
After struggling in the rotation, the Cubs moved Zambrano to the bullpen, but not before moving him back to the rotation.
How’s that again?
Haven’t we been over this already?
It’s like you people aren’t even listening to me.
This was what AL All-Star CC Sabathia had to say when asked about the disintegration of the 2007 Cleveland Indians team that fell a win shy of the World Series:
"That wasn’t our fault," Sabathia said. "They traded us. That’s on them."
Sabathia went on to say, "If [ownership] had kept everybody for at least two more years, I think we had a chance of having a really good team."
It’s not necessary to tell us who you’re quoting three times in the same quote, you know. But, anyhow, he’s more or less right. The Indians management did trade away (or not re-sign) most of the core of players that got them (almost) to the 2007 World Series.
Is Sabathia delusional? Or is he merely the latest member of the Yankees to "misremember" something?
What did Sabathia misremember? Everything he said is totally true. Management did not attempt to keep that team together. So… it didn’t stay together. Makes sense, yeah?
I’ll submit that neither is the case. Sabathia, you see, is taking advantage of the opportunity the July 2008 trade that sent him to Milwaukee afforded him to divorce himself from all blame or finger-pointing and to feed off the raw emotions of those who have done little to nothing to understand the Indians’ economic position in an unbalanced marketplace.
Oh, right, it’s the UMBALANCE MARKETPALACE that’s to blame. I keep forgetting that. It’s the same reason the Rays, Twins, White Sox, and Rangers aren’t competitive.
Hey, here’s my impression of every article ever written by every AL blogger: whine whine whine yankees yankees nerf nerf unfair
Sabathia says something insipid like, "It’s on them," because he’ll say anything to avoid looking like the bad guy. And this isn’t the first time.
Oh, for fuck’s sake. He’s not the bad guy, stupidshoes. If I work at a box factory, and I’m a damn good boxmaker, and they pay me $8/hour, and another box factory in a bigger city where there’s more demand for boxes offers me $15/hour to come make boxes for them instead, am I a "bad guy" for accepting that offer? Of course not. Don’t be idiotic.
Throughout the phantom contract negotiation process before the 2008 season, when it was clear the Indians were as likely to get Sabathia to commit to a long-term deal as they were to throw a dome on Progressive Field, CC would say things like, "Hopefully we can get something done." Because that was a lot easier and less publicly damaging than saying, "The Indians have no chance of offering me the kind of money I feel I’m worth."
Don’t you just love when people say dumb shit like this? He singles out an instance of CC not being an asshole — explicitly not being an asshole — and then comes up with a way CC could have been an asshole and chastises him for it. Dude, seriously, he didn’t say that. You said that. If you’re going to call him out for saying asshole things, maybe it’s best if you stick to things he said.
In the winter before the ’08 season, when the Indians offered Sabathia around $18 million a year through 2012 — the largest offer the franchise has ever come up with for a player — he didn’t so much as sleep on it. He knew he was gone, and he broke off negotiations before they even started in Spring Training.
And… he eventually got $23 million/year through 2015, right? So that offer wasn’t really very close, right? I mean, it’s not exactly like they offered him a contract that was fifteen bucks smaller and he thumbed his nose at it.
Also, which you conveniently ignore, the 2008 free agent class was extremely focused on length of contracts, since it was clear to everybody that the sky was falling, economy-wise, and they wanted to get the longest deals they possibly could in anticipation of salaries starting to shrink. Remember how CC wouldn’t sign with the Yankees — not even for $23M/year — until they added a seventh year to his deal? Yeah. Maybe if the Indians were that serious about him they should have gone longer than four years. Come to think of it, a four-year deal for a Cy Young winner in his prime is kind of fucking insulting anyhow.
This is the reality. But now, two and a half years later, CC — which, in this case, stands for Clouded Context — is selling a fantasy. An alternate universe in which those heinous, loveless Indians owners cast him out of the place he loved.
"Clouded Context?" Did you borrow that joke from Skip Bayless? You could aim a little higher, man. Maybe steal from Buster Olney instead. And, frankly, the Indians offered him four years when he wanted seven. So… they kind of made it clear they weren’t that in to him. They just wanted to be friends, and he wanted something more. You dig?
Essentially, Sabathia got lucky. Because 50 years from now, Indians fans won’t remember him as the guy who walked away from the Tribe for the big payday elsewhere. He won’t go down with the likes of Albert Belle, Manny Ramirez and Jim Thome. Rather, he’ll be remembered as the Cy Young winner the Indians stupidly dealt in his prime.
Well, because that’s pretty much the case. The Indians dealt him for Matt LaPorta — who is only okay — and a bunch of junk. The Brewers got a playoff appearance and a sandwich pick (they expected two first-rounders, but the Yankees boned them by signing Teixeira too). And are Indians fans really angry that Albert, Manny, and Thom left the team? Holy shit, Indians fans, grow a pair.
Nevermind, of course, that the Indians were forced to deal Sabathia because he was going to walk away three months later and because he and his teammates crumbled upon the weight of expectations in 2008.
ORMG TEH CRUMBLE!
CC was pretty goddamn good for the Injuns in 2008. Not unstoppable, but pretty goddamn good. ERA+ of 112, WHIP of 1.234, 2.3 WAR (in only half a season). That’s not really crumble-worthy. It’s really pretty similar to what he did in 2006 and 2009 (though not in 2007, when he was the god of the universe). And as for his teammates crumbling, well, I think you mean "the ones he had left." Since the Indians had been shedding their 2007 championship players all through the offseason. CC didn’t start the fire, man.
Nevermind that the primary reason that ’07 team — a "good team" in its own right, having won 96 games in the regular season — didn’t ascend to the World Series like it should have was because Sabathia was outpitched in Games 1 and 5.
Yeah, what kind of worthless chokemaster has two bad starts? In a fucking row? Never mind (which is two words, James) that, without the seven wins Sabathia added to the ’07 Indians during the regular season, they’d have just barely scraped their way into the playoffs in the first place. Also never mind that Sabathia’s Game 5 start was a 6+ IP, 4 ER affair that isn’t exactly nightmarish. Also never mind that co-ace Fausto Carmona also got lit the fuck up in that series, getting tagged for 4 IP and 4 ER his first start, and 2 (!) IP and 7 ER his second start.
If Sabathia were being honest with himself and honest with the fans, he would have said, "This is a business, and it’s difficult for a team in a smaller market like Cleveland to afford to keep its core intact. That’s why it’s a shame we weren’t able to take advantage of the special opportunity we had in ’07. And as the ace of that pitching staff, I take the brunt of the blame."
Or he could be honest and admit that he wasn’t responsible for the Indians shedding all their good players — which, clearly, he wasn’t — and not randomly start getting emo about not winning the World Series in 2007. It turns out that 28 other teams also didn’t win the World Series that year, Susan.
Sabathia was treated very well here. The Indians drafted him, gave him a Major League opportunity on a playoff team when he was just 20 years old, helped mold him into a man off the field, taught him to control his emotions on it and groomed him into a Cy Young winner. Lord knows they fed him well.
Then they offered him a very short contract worth five million dollars per year less than he could get elsewhere. You seem to enjoy leaving that part out. Oh, and, nice fat joke. That’s classy.
That’s what makes CC’s comments above so disappointing. They reek of him being another pampered athlete with no grasp of reality or understanding of accountability.
In the original article, the words "another pampered athlete" link to an article by the same writer. Can you guess who it’s about? Did you guess LeBron James? You were right — it’s more crybaby bullshit about how, I guess, athletes owe him something.
CC understands accountability better than you do, dumbshit. He displays this by not heaping lots of teenage angst on himself for decisions he did not make or materially impact — such as the decision by the Indians to get rid of many players not named Carsten Charles Sabathia — or for outcomes not entirely within his control — such as Fausto Carmona getting lit up twice in the ALCS, and the Indians’ hitters scoring 3 and 1 runs, respectively, in his starts.
And, by opting for a contract that fits his needs on a team that doesn’t look like it’s about to implode, CC shows a much better grasp of reality than sniveling sportswriters who expect that watching the games on TV entitles them to personal handjobs by the players. This is the man’s career, asshole. It is his life and it is his passion. Don’t you think he owes it to himself and to his family and to his friends to do everything he can to get as far as he can? Money aside, CC wasn’t winning a ring in Cleveland. The man’s not dumb — by the All-Star break in 2008, it was obvious to everybody that the team was finished for the foreseeable future. Why should he blow his prime years — and only those years, since the Indians weren’t willing to go longer than four — at below-market rate on a team that can’t provide him with the teammates he needs to be successful?
In my view, the player-fan relationship is pretty simple. You earn our appreciation by giving your best effort on the field. Off the field, by all means, seek out your worth, find a place that you find rewarding on a personal, professional and competitive level. Chase every last dollar for you and your kids and your kids’ kids and your kids’ kids’ kids. It’s your right as a talented athlete in a lucrative game.
No, in your view, the players owe you something, and any player who disappoints you must rend his clothes and don sackcloth and ashes and beg your forgiveness. So you fuck right off with your smarmy turn here at the end. We’re not fooled.
But please, whatever you do and wherever you go, don’t insult our intelligence along the way.
It would not be possible for CC Sabathia to insult your intelligence.
Here be dragons
Hey, gang, Dragon Quest 9 is out. Here’s what I’m thinking about, ca. four hours in:
You play as a Celestrian, which is a type of winged asshole. They’re basically angels, except they’re more like what angels would be if angels were self-righteous, whiny, arrogant pricks who look down on other people because of their race. So basically like Torii Hunter. The Celestrians spend their days helping humans out, but only because that’s the only way to get "benevolescence" (which word, regrettably, I am not making up), which they need to gather a bunch of so they can finally stop helping humans and spend the rest of their days in indolence and frivolity. Their nights they mainly spend complaining about how much it sucks that they have to do things to get their reward. So, really, they’re like the celestial version of organised labour; My name is Union, for we are lazy.
Naturally, since the game’s more than forty minutes long, there’s a big crisis, which causes me to reflect on the many ways in which Dragon Warrior 7 was different from every other RPG ever. That game didn’t actually open with a big crisis spoiling the foolproof plans of the hero’s buddies (notably unlike Dragon Warriors 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8 and 9, along with Final Fantasy Everything) and triggering the hero to go on a grand quest to right the wrongsness.
The game uses the same translations for monster names and whatnot as were used in DQ8; this is too bad, since they suck. The old ones were better. "Fireball" was a better spell name than "Frizz," and that’s all there is to it. Especially annoying is that, since "Frizz" sounds not unlike "Freeze," I can never remember if it’s ice magic or fire magic, which sometimes matters. Oh, and, also? "Bubble slime" my aching ass. It’s a goddamn Babble. Get down with that, Square Enix.
It’s so nice being able to see the gear actually reflected on the models. That’s a constant letdown in DQ8; I’d get some awesome new piece of harmour, and the icon would look crazy butch, and I’d put it on and… oh, right. Still in the big yellow Firefly trench coat, huh. Now all I need is to get some gear that doesn’t look like ass, but I suppose that’s what the earlygame is all about.
We seem to be pushing the DS about as hard as it goes, here; there’s noticeable stutter and slowdown at various points. This seems odd to me, since, really, you can’t exactly see all that processing up on the screen. Don’t get me wrong, now; the game looks fine, but it doesn’t look any more fine than many other DS games that don’t stutter. So who knows what that’s all about.
There are emotes, which is wild. You bind them to the B button. It’s pretty much exactly what you’d expect if you’ve played World of Warcraft — the same emotes, basically. I guess they’re mainly there so you can harass other people in multiplayer, though they are occasionally useful in the game itself.
Hey, you can see the mobs on the map before you go into combat! I think that qualifies Dragon Quest 9 to be the ninth best game of the decade. Unlike Earthbound, however, there doesn’t appear to be any value in approaching the mobs a certain way; you can’t sneak up behind them to get a first strike or anything. And, unlike Lufia 2, there’s no suite of commands you can use to interact with and manipulate the mobs. They’re just there, on the map, where you can see them. It’s nice, though, since they do react to player power, and will start running away from you when you’re much higher-level, so you can travel around lower-level zones and not have to deal with fighting endless trash mobs.
Character generation is pretty fun — you get about eight customisation screens, and lots of choices as to which Dragon Ball Z character you want to look exactly the same as. Sadly, Majin Buu does not appear to be an option.
The class system appears to be very much like the one in DW7, with the skill system from DQ8 grafted on to the top of it. Which is really too bad, since the skills were one of the weakest parts of DQ8. At least this time the game deigns to tell you how many points you need to put into a skill to unlock the actual abilities, and which abilities you’ll be unlocking. On the dim side, it just tells you the names and not what they goddamn do. But still. It’s a start.
And it probably doesn’t matter anyhow, since, as far as I can tell, they’re pretty horrible. I have this skill called… something. I can’t remember; it’s some dippy pun or other. But I can use the thing, spend four magic points, and then attack and defend at the same time! Which is great, I guess, except that I can cast Heal for two magic points, and it heals way more damage than defending would prevent. So I guess I don’t see the purpose for this skill. Maybe it’s useful in the late-game, but it’s three points into the tree. Skills that early should be useful early. And, ideally, not compete for the exact same resource I’m using to heal.
The game is kind enough to grace you with the most annoying NPC companion in recent memory in Stella, the fairy. She looks annoying, says annoying things, does annoying things. She even has annoying background music that plays when she’s around. I wanted to smash her. With my boots.
Thanks to the (comparatively) limited space on a DS game card — or perhaps to the timely intervention by the benevolent hand of God — there is no voice acting. Dragon Quest 8 had perhaps the worst voice acting of any video game ever in all of history; it wasn’t just incompetently done, like in Baten Kaitos — it was designed deliberately to be as awful as possible. Every character had some outrageous accent or other, and they were hammed up well beyond the point of acceptability. Sometimes the characters in DQ9 have accented screen text, which makes me love even more that there are no voices.
Wormer, he’s a dead man! Marmalard, dead! Niedermeier, dead! Steinbrenner?
Dead as a doornail. Here’s a true story about that article. When I loaded up the baseball news today, I was on a mobile connection, and didn’t have a ton of bandwidth or rendering power, so it took a while for the complicated header to load, and all I saw was the subhed, which started with "George Steinbrenner poured his heart into making the Yankees winners." And I’m thinking, oh shit, it’s All-Star Day, isn’t it. They have nothing better to write than a big sloppy handjob article. And then the next line is "And that heart finally gave out at 80." My reactions, in order:
1) What
2) Holy shit that’s awful. Awful writing.
3) Wait, Steinbrenner was only 80?
According to Dave, it reminded him of Darth Vader’s death, because it’s pretty awesome in a sense, but then you’re kind of sad to be losing one of the all-time great villains. I can see that, but, frankly, Steinbrenner stopped being an all-time great villain ten years ago or so, when he started getting really senile. I can’t get excited about it, because, hey, even I’m not a big enough asshole to cheer on the death of a doddering old man who needs two attendants to get through the national anthem.
I guess Dave’s reaction is probably pretty much what I’ll be thinking when Ozzie Guillen finally mercifully catches his lunch; sort of a combination of relief and nostalgia.
Shut up, stupid
In case you haven’t heard, LeBron James recently announced — in a big, hour-long ESPN special, no less — that he’s leaving the Cleveland Somethings and signing instead with the Miami Heat. My reaction, like the reaction of all thinking organisms, was: okay. Athletes do become free agents, gang. They do sign with other teams.
A lot of other people — presumably those people who give two shits about the Cleveland Somethings, and perhaps give even sufficient shits to know what the team’s actually called, which I do not — had a more emotional reaction. They were pissed to see a big superstar leave their team, because it means the end (for the near future, anyhow) of whatever small amount of competitiveness they had, and it means a lot less media exposure. They’re upset because it personally impacts them.
And then there’s a third group of people that reacted like complete retards and yelled and screamed about what a slap in the fase this was to them, even though it doesn’t really involve them at all.
I’ll leave is as an exercise for the reader to determine which category Bill Simmons falls into. But to give you a hint — because, hey, No Child Left Behind, amirite? — I’ll walk you through the wall of sheer crazy that’s pouring out of his mouth today, in his article uselessly entitled:
Welcome to the All-LeBron sound-off
Which he will begin by sounding off about Roger Clemens. But that’s fine. We’ll get to that. First things first, though; I’ve noticed the byline announces that this article was written by the estimable "William J. Simmons," which I’m going to assume is the name Bill uses when he wants to sound like he really means business. Maybe also the name he uses when he’s planning to go light on the Karate Kid references, since he’s oddly silent on that subject today.
Five thoughts and then we’ll turn it over to my readers, because honestly, they did a better job of summing up last night’s LeBacle than I ever could:
"LeBacle" is kind of terrible, but we’ll let it slide, since I admire the ambition involved in trying to come up with a joke that isn’t just "LeBrongate." Also because I find it much more amusing that Simmons does my job for me and comes right out and admits that blog comments and reader mail snippets do a better job of reporting on sports than he does.
Not that this surprises me. Good lord no. Blog comments and reader mail are two elements of a very large pool of things that are better at reporting on sports than Bill Simmons, which pool also includes greeting cards, gerbils, and antique wall clocks, though, notably, not Roy S. Johnson. No, the only thing that surprises me is that, while Bill has apparently noticed this, ESPN has not. But, then, they haven’t noticed that John Kruk is the worst analyst in the history of analysis, either.
1. One of my first ESPN.com columns was titled, "Is Clemens the Antichrist?"
Not only did Bill Simmons write that article, he also went on to brag about it years later. This tells you pretty much everything you need to know about Bill Simmons. Well, this and that bit about how even he knows that random internet people are better sportswriters than he is.
It covered how my relationship changed with Roger Clemens as a Red Sox fan — in five years, he went from my favorite baseball player to my least favorite athlete in any sport — and how the turning point happened in 1996, when Clemens signed with Toronto and showed no remorse at the ensuing news conference.
Weird, turgid way of saying "I was mad when Clemens left the Red Sox." And the first clause doesn’t make any sense. Would somebody at ESPN please get Bill Simmons an editor?
I still remember seeing that Blue Jays cap squeezed on his fat stupid face for 45 solid minutes, waiting for him to throw Red Sox fans a bone, waiting for him to say anything that would make me think, "Regardless of how this turned out, the past 12 years meant something to me," or "Just know that this happened because of Boston’s front office, not their great fans." He only threw us a couple of canned comments, the same way someone would throw table scraps to a dog. I remember how angry it made me. I remember wanting to whip my remote control through the television, then realizing that I couldn’t afford a new one. I remember taking down my autographed photo of Clemens’ 20th strikeout against Seattle and sticking it in a closet. I remember thinking that I would never like sports quite as much ever again.
Bill, seriously: you’re an idiot. Roger Clemens is an athlete, not a politician. He’s not a practiced public speaker with a large speechwriting team. And you know what? He was pretty pissed at the Red Sox right about then, since, if you’ll recall, the Red Sox just kind of cut him, with GM Dan Duquette making a pissant remark about how Clemens — who would pitch eleven more seasons — was in the "twilight of his career." All he gave you was "canned moments?" Okay, sure. And twelve years of some of the best pitching in all the history of baseball. You utter moron.
Also, Bill, you have some serious anger issues. What is your problem with remote controls, anyhow?
That notwithstanding, my favourite thing about this paragraph is these two lines:
"I still remember seeing that Blue Jays cap squeezed on his fat stupid face for 45 solid minutes, waiting for him to throw Red Sox fans a bone…"
"He only threw us a couple of canned comments, the same way someone would throw table scraps to a dog."
Metaphors aren’t your greatest strength, are they, Bill. You should probably start reading this shit over before you send it for publication.
So when Clemens went to Toronto, got in shape, won two straight Cy Youngs and forced a trade to the Yankees, really, a column called "Is Clemens the Antichrist?" became inevitable as soon as I found a bigger forum to write it.
Clemens’ first year with Toronto was the best of his career, hands-down. But his second year? Par for the course (for Clemens, I mean, who was incredible). So despite Bill’s ignorant implication that Clemens was fat and lazy on the Red Sox, the data says otherwise. Also, Clemens didn’t force a trade to the Yankees — he originally planned to, but changed his mind. The Jays traded him anyhow. You see how sports work, Bill?
I hated that guy as much as you could hate a professional athlete without things getting creepy.
You hated him more than that, Bill. But isn’t this the All-LeBron sound off? I know I read that somewhere. You think maybe you could stop complaining about Roger Clemens for a while?
What LeBron did to Cleveland last night was worse. Much worse.
No, it was the same. Much same. He left as a free agent and signed with another team.
It’s one thing to leave. I get it. You’re 25. You don’t know any better. You’re tired of carrying mediocre teams. You want help. You want the luxury of not having to play a remarkable game every single night for eight straight months. You want to live in South Beach. You want to play with your buddies. I get it. I get it.
No, Bill, you don’t get it. You demonstrate that when you say that LeBron doesn’t know any better. In the weird world inside Bill Simmons’ head, change is just bad in and of itself, and athletes should be motivated primarily by their fear of change. Fuck winning — that’s not what you’re here for, LeBron! It’s your job to get out there and maintain the goddamn status quo.
It’s funny; it seems like just the other week that I was carping at Andy Dolan for writing that Derrek Lee is staying with the Cubs because he doesn’t want to win, which is, in Andy’s eyes, a terrible thing. And now here comes Bill Stupid saying the exact opposite — that athletes should stick with shitty teams and forget about winning. Aren’t we supposed to think this is admirable, Bill? The Somethings offered more money than the Heat! LeBron James clearly cares about winning more than he cares about his paycheque. And into this mess wades good ol’ Buffalo Bill, angry just for the sake of anger, telling us that athletes shouldn’t care about winning.
But turning that decision into a one-hour special, pretending that it hadn’t been decided weeks ago, using a charity as your cover-up and ramming a pitchfork in Cleveland’s back like you were at the end of a Friday the 13th movie and Cleveland was Jason … there just had to be a better way.
All I said was that he didn’t make any Karate Kid references. I didn’t say there were no tortured pop-culture metaphors in here at all. And did you know that Jason has never been killed with a pitchfork? It’s usually either "stabbed with his own machete" or "drowned," but has never been a pitchfork. So anybody who expected Bill to be right about anything ever is probably pretty sorely disappointed right now.
I blame the people around him. I blame the lack of a father figure in his life. I blame us for feeding his narcissism to the point that he referred to himself in the third person five times in 45 minutes. I blame local and national writers (including myself) for apparently not doing a good enough job explaining to athletes like LeBron what sports mean to us, and how it IS a marriage, for better and worse, and that we’re much more attached to these players and teams than they realize. I blame David Stern for not throwing his body in front of that show. I blame everyone.
I mostly just blame Bill Simmons, who promulgates this idiotic idea about sports being "a marriage" and such. Also I blame ESPN for putting its logo on these screeds, so people who don’t know any better will just assume this shit has anything to do with reality, since it’s endorsed by the "worldwide leader in sports."
Sports are not a marriage. In particular, athlete contracts are not a marriage. They have a built-in expiration, and, when that time comes, there’s no guarantee of a renewal.
Back in the old days of baseball, before free agency was instituted (in 1975 — the National League was a hundred years old by then), there was a situation like Bill apparently thinks there still is. Players were stuck with one team forever, unless the ownership wanted to get rid of them. That was terrible for the players (it’s much of the reason why why great players like Ernie Banks and Ted Williams never won a World Series — they were handcuffed to teams that weren’t any good), and it was also terrible for the sport, since it led to long, boring dynasties. Bill Simmons wants that back because it offends his head when players change teams.
We are already fools for caring about athletes considerably more than they care about us.
We’re not all fools, Bill. Just you.
For LeBron not to understand what he was doing — or even worse, not to care — made me quickly turn off the television, find my kids, give them their nightly bath and try to forget the sports atrocity that I had just witnessed.
This article is having the same effect on me. Though I’m going to skip the "bathe the kids" step on account of no kids. And I’m going to skip the "write turgid prose" step on account of I have some sense of perspective.
He just couldn’t have handled it worse. Never in my life can I remember someone swinging from likable to unlikable that quickly.
He could have had his agent announce it in the middle of the Finals. In fact, he could have announced it right in the middle of game four of the Finals, in some lame attempt to overshadow another team’s accomplishments. But he wouldn’t do that. Only a complete asshole would do a thing like that!
Sports are supposed to be fun, and eventually, this will become fun — for everyone but people in Cleveland — because we finally have a Yankees of basketball.
Dear Bill,
You already have a Yankees of basketball. They are called the Los Angeles Lakers, and they just recently won their sixteenth championship after beating the Boston Celtics — the Red Sox of basketball — in Game 7 of the Finals.
But I will never, ever, not in a million years, understand why it had to play out that way. If LeBron James is the future of sports, then I shudder for the future.
My ears had heard of you but now my eyes have seen you. Therefore I despise myself and repent in dust and ashes. — Simmons 42:5-6
2. One silver lining for LeBron: No other professional athlete in any team sport could have generated the interest that he generated last night. No baseball player, no football player, no basketball player, no hockey player. He truly is the King … of something.
Holy shit, I forgot this was a numbered list. That was all one thought? Don’t worry — all the rest of them are sound bites. We’ll make it through this yet.
And I’m pretty sure that if Derek Jeter called a press conference to announce his upcoming trade to the Red Sox, it would generate more interest than this, Bill. Actually, come to think of it, didn’t the news of Tiger Woods’ affair generate a whole shitload more interest than this?
3. I posted this clip on Twitter last night, but it’s worth posting again: the 1996 Bash on the Beach. I won’t even tell you the context (a reader will explain in a few paragraphs). Just watch what happened, listen to the announcers and choke on the irony.
It’s not clear exactly what Bill’s on about now, but I think he’s comparing LeBron’s signing with the Heat to Hulk Hogan’s betrayal of the WCW. Which, of course, led the WCW to its golden age — interest in the league was never even close to as high as it was during the WCW vs. NWO storyline. It was the best thing that ever happened to the league.
Good work, Bill. You’ve made yourself an airtight case.
4. Michael Jordan would have wanted to kick Dwyane Wade’s butt every spring, not play with him. This should be mentioned every day for the rest of LeBron’s career. It’s also the kryptonite for any "Some day we’ll remember LeBron James as the best basketball player ever" argument. We will not. Jordan and Russell were the greatest players of all time. Neither of them would have made the choice that LeBron did. That should tell you something.
Michael Jordan played for a Bulls team that was stocked with talent. This was a team that had the ability to win, season after season. So, no, Bill, Michael Jordan would not have left the Bulls because he wanted to win. He didn’t need to. Do you get it, Bill? Oh, also, the Bulls paid him what was at the time a record-high salary, and gave him shitloads of special concessions and privileges and treated him like a king. There’s a book about that that you should probably read if you’re going to talk about what a saint Michael Jordan was.
As for Bill Russell, well, he played in the fifties and sixties for a team that won the championship eleven times in his thirteen years. So also: lacking a need to go to a better team in order to win. Even assuming that the NBA had a robust free agent market fifty years ago, which I don’t know whether or not it did. And I’m going to bet you don’t either, Bill.
5. Sports shouldn’t mean this much.
Seriously, Bill, you’re a lunatic. You’re the only one who gets so angry about press conferences that he feels the need to demolish electronics. So don’t get haughty and presume to lecture me about how sports shouldn’t mean this much — not when you’re the one blowing everything out of proportion.
I promise more thoughts later in the month.
I fully expect it will take you the majority of the month to sqeeze any more thoughts out of that crippled old thinker of yours.
See, there’s an incredible basketball story here that really has no precedent: Only when Shaquille O’Neal and Kobe Bryant played together in 2001 and 2002, after Kobe had ascended to top-three status and Shaq hadn’t drifted out of that group yet, have two of the best three NBA players played on the same team.
What? There’s no fucking way you can isolate a "best three" players. That’s completely arbitrary. What if we just look at teams with recognised top-tier talent? Future Hall of Famers, you know? What about Bill Russell and Bob Cousy on those old Celtics teams? Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen? Larry Bird, Kevin McHale, and Robert Parish? If you stop cherry-picking for ten goddamn seconds, Bill, it… actually takes a little bit of the awesomeness out of the story, huh. So… don’t do that, I guess.
I have no idea how Miami will fill out the team, or whether you can win a championship by being so good offensively that defense, rebounding and role players don’t matter. We’re about to find out.
In theory, I guarantee you can. Role players never matter except in that you can’t afford to fill the whole team with superstars. As for defense? Well, if your offense is so unstoppable that you instantly sink a three-pointer every single time you gain possession, you’re going to win every game as long as you don’t foul yourselves out of business. That’s really pretty basic, Bill.
I am not ready to think about it yet.
No fooling.
After this, Bill just posts mailbag bullshit to fill out the article, which is okay, since, as he himself mentions at the beginning, it’s actually better than anything he has to say. They’re even better at being outraged and lacking in perspective, as with the very first letter, which reads: "I think this is the first time in history one man managed to destroy an entire city by himself. Even the Enola Gay had a flight crew."
Think about that, Bill. Your article is more insipid and brainless than a guy who compares free agency with the murder by nuclear bomb of a hundred thousand people.
At least that guy, who is from Ohio and presumably a Somethings fan, can make a claim to being in group 2.
Too much garlic probably
So good ol’ Wario is in a bit of trouble lately. Maybe due to age or rough living, his health has been poor, and the big one finally happened: earlier today, Wario suffered a serious breakdown of some sort, but he was attended to promptly, and, after some quick maintenance and several hours of observation, they have him back to limping, though he’s not close to 100% yet.
Wario is the server perfectlydarien.com runs on. What did you think I meant?
The upshot is that I wasn’t able to roll the new feature I was going to roll today, since the server wasn’t (and still isn’t) working correctly. I’m hopeful that we’ll be back up to speed tomorrow, and I can deploy then. And, hey, I’m not as bad as the dipshit on the status board screaming in all caps that he demands 100% uptime — which is a pretty hefty demand to make from a service that costs like $7/month, Charles.
Stephen Strasburg was a demon child
I’m totally serious. Check out this picture:
Holy shit. He looks like the Chucky doll if you ask me. And I don’t know about you, but I for one am not that easy to fool; it’s going to take more than that to convince me you’re Sting, asshole.
Computers? Bullshit.
So I’m watching some damn thing on the intertubes the other day, right? And then I get a phone call, so I kink my headphones off of one ear so I can hear the answering machine lying for me — since hell if I can be bothered — and I notice something odd. There’s a noise coming from my computer that sounds like some cable or other has drifted into a fan. So I open it up and, hey, all the fans appear to be unobstructed.
So here’s my plan. I’ll start pulling components out and cleaning them, because, hey, they’re pretty dirty. So I take out the PSU, figuring that it’s probably the rear fan giving me issues, and then I discover that it probably actually isn’t the rear fan on account of apparently my PSU ain’t got a fan in that location. So, okay, the other fan. Doesn’t look obstructed. I can spin it around with my fingers. Hmm. So I successfully remember — on the first try! — how to rig an ATX PSU to power on without connecting it to an ATX motherboard, and I don’t even electrocute myself in the process. And, yeah, thing works fine. So it must be some other component.
So now, about an hour into this process, I decide it’s time to do what I should have done in the first place, and test all the fans to see which one is balky. My fan-testing method is what I always considered pretty much the standard fan test: stick a paintbrush into the fans one at a time and see which one makes the rattling noise go away. My wife found this endlessly amusing, though she was a bit unnerved by the huge overheating alarm that began sounding when I stopped the CPU fan. It took about six seconds to find the culprit: the video card.
A quick glance at the calendar confirmed my suspicions: Saturday 3 July.
Is there some sort of federal mandate that says all consumer electronics are required to fail at the beginning of holiday weekends? No sooner is it fourth of July weekend than my PS2 and my faithful, long-suffering GeForce 8800 GT — Alpha Dog Edition, muthafucka, which came with a free copy of some super-popular game that I can’t recall and never played because, hey, it didn’t come with a Steam copy, and who the fuck remembers how to install games off of DVDs anymore? Not me — both suddenly fail to proceed.
That’s the story of how I ended up with this: the GeForce 9800 GTX+. It’s an absolute wanker video card, running a bit over ten inches long and two slots tall. To give you a better idea of how ridiculously overlarge this video card is, I’ve prepared this image. The thing is so goddamn big it even came with a case badge that says "powered by EVGA," since I guess there’s really no reason to own a three-pound video card unless you’re gonna brag about it.
So I have the gigantic video card — which, even in my decidedly non-miniscule case just barely manages not to foul anything, and pushes right up against the drive cage. Also, I have a PSU with a clear fan lit with blue LEDs, but that wasn’t on purpose; the product listing billed it as like a serious rackmount server PSU, and apparently I didn’t click through the pictures to spot the one with the LEDs shouting "HAY RICERZ GET ME FOR UR PHAT SYSTEMZ." Is there any possible excuse for me not to go all-out and just get one of these?
-
This site supports killing Hitler if you ever find yourself traveling back in time to when Hitler wasn’t already dead.
