Well, that's that. It's only August, and not even mid-August at that, but the Blob has officially run up the white flag on its popular, one would almost say beloved, baseball feature, the Battle for the Cellar.
("In your dreams, Blob Boy!" you're saying. "'Beloved'! Get him!")
Anyway ... my cruddy Pittsburgh Pirates continue to plumb new depths of cruddiness, adding some throw pillows and a few abstract paintings to the Cellar as they make themselves cozy there. The Cruddies are now 7 1/2 games behind the next-to-last Reds, see. And it's even worse than that, frankly.
They don't even have Aristides Aquino.
Who, first of all, has a singularly awesome baseball player name. And who, second of all, is giving not just the Reds, but baseball itself, a dazzling fireworks show right in the middle of the dog days, when baseball most needs fireworks shows.
Aristides, you see, is a rookie who was little thought of as recently as a year ago by Reds management. Now he's blowing up the bigs. In his first 12 games in the Show, he's hit eight home runs. All eight have come in his last nine games. He's launching so often it's almost become as routine as the sun rising in the east; if it's Monday, or Tuesday, or whatever, Aristides must have gone sub-orbital.
His numbers as a big-leaguer so far: Eight home runs, 16 RBI, a .429 average, seven dingers in his last six games. He even comes with his own ready-for-prime-time nickname: The Punisher.
And while he Punishes, the Reds rise. They're 6-4 in their last 10 games, and have risen to within 7 1/2 games of first in the ploddingly average NL Central. My Cruddies, on the other hand, have gone 2-8 in their last 10 games and, at 49-69, are a full 20 games under water. Right now only the barely-major-league Marlins have a worse record in the National League.
Of course, they don't have an Aristides, either.
Which I guess is good news for my Cruddies. Or something.
Tuesday, August 13, 2019
Monday, August 12, 2019
Golf fight!
OK, OK. So not really.
Nobody threw down at the Northern Trust tournament yesterday, so if you read the headline above and thought you were going to see a couple of guys dropping the glove and the sponsor cap, pulling the golf shirts up over their heads and wailing away ... no. Golfers don't do hockey fights, or even baseball fights (although that would be fun). To paraphrase Dan Jenkins, somebody might hurt his hand and have to change his grip.
So, no fisticuffs, no Nike swooshes torn in anger from pastel shirts, no rolling around on the ground getting grass stains on their Sansabelts. No Happy Gilmore getting his ass kicked by Bob Barker.
Instead, here's what happened: Bryson "Slo-Mo" DeChambeau, who takes novel-length pauses between shots, apparently was especially laggardly at the Northern Trust this weekend. Before one shot, he actually walked the entire 70-yard distance from his ball to the cup and back, then thought about it some more, then finally stepped up and hit. Elapsed time: About three eternal minutes.
Apparently, someone shot video of this epic bit of Slo-Mo performance art. And of course it went viral. DeChambeau defended himself by saying he's really not all that slow, because he walks quickly to his ball after a shot, and Justin Thomas came out on Twitter and basically said that was a lot of cowflop, and Brooks Koepka, notorious hater of slow play, wondered when the PGA was going to do something about this ...
And, well. Fast forward to Sunday morning, when DeChambeau marched up to Koepka's caddie on the practice green and said if Koepka had something to say, he should say it to DeChambeau's face. And then Koepka showed up and marched over to DeChambeau to ask him what his deal was, bugging his caddy like that.
And, this being golf, that was that. No hockey throwdown. Not even a baseball fight, where a couple of guys swing wildly and then roll around on the ground like big cuddly teddy bears.
Nope, they just chatted a bit. Which is kind of boring. But then, it's golf.
It's a gentleman's game, a call-your-own-infractions game, an I-believe-you're-away game. Kind of like soccer, only without all the running and shameless flopping.
That's a shame. I mean, who wouldn't want to see, say, Bubba Watson and Patrick Reed -- a couple of notorious flaming jackasses -- go to Fist City? Or Dustin Johnson, the rare golfer who doesn't look like anyone you'd want to mess with? And who's married to Wayne Gretzky's daughter in the bargain?
Challenge D.J. and the Great One sends in Mark Messier to fix your wagon. Or Marty McSorley. You'd wind on the DL with Tiger while the docs tried to remove that Titleist from your nether regions.
But, hey. Under the Rules of Golf, you might get a free drop out of the deal.
Nobody threw down at the Northern Trust tournament yesterday, so if you read the headline above and thought you were going to see a couple of guys dropping the glove and the sponsor cap, pulling the golf shirts up over their heads and wailing away ... no. Golfers don't do hockey fights, or even baseball fights (although that would be fun). To paraphrase Dan Jenkins, somebody might hurt his hand and have to change his grip.
So, no fisticuffs, no Nike swooshes torn in anger from pastel shirts, no rolling around on the ground getting grass stains on their Sansabelts. No Happy Gilmore getting his ass kicked by Bob Barker.
Instead, here's what happened: Bryson "Slo-Mo" DeChambeau, who takes novel-length pauses between shots, apparently was especially laggardly at the Northern Trust this weekend. Before one shot, he actually walked the entire 70-yard distance from his ball to the cup and back, then thought about it some more, then finally stepped up and hit. Elapsed time: About three eternal minutes.
Apparently, someone shot video of this epic bit of Slo-Mo performance art. And of course it went viral. DeChambeau defended himself by saying he's really not all that slow, because he walks quickly to his ball after a shot, and Justin Thomas came out on Twitter and basically said that was a lot of cowflop, and Brooks Koepka, notorious hater of slow play, wondered when the PGA was going to do something about this ...
And, well. Fast forward to Sunday morning, when DeChambeau marched up to Koepka's caddie on the practice green and said if Koepka had something to say, he should say it to DeChambeau's face. And then Koepka showed up and marched over to DeChambeau to ask him what his deal was, bugging his caddy like that.
And, this being golf, that was that. No hockey throwdown. Not even a baseball fight, where a couple of guys swing wildly and then roll around on the ground like big cuddly teddy bears.
Nope, they just chatted a bit. Which is kind of boring. But then, it's golf.
It's a gentleman's game, a call-your-own-infractions game, an I-believe-you're-away game. Kind of like soccer, only without all the running and shameless flopping.
That's a shame. I mean, who wouldn't want to see, say, Bubba Watson and Patrick Reed -- a couple of notorious flaming jackasses -- go to Fist City? Or Dustin Johnson, the rare golfer who doesn't look like anyone you'd want to mess with? And who's married to Wayne Gretzky's daughter in the bargain?
Challenge D.J. and the Great One sends in Mark Messier to fix your wagon. Or Marty McSorley. You'd wind on the DL with Tiger while the docs tried to remove that Titleist from your nether regions.
But, hey. Under the Rules of Golf, you might get a free drop out of the deal.
Sunday, August 11, 2019
Gimme an I ... gimme an H ...
The whistle is hardwired to your brainpan now, if you're of a certain age and a certain geography. Every morning it moaned through the predawn darkness across southeast Fort Wayne, down Meyer Road and out Wayne Trace and Hessen Cassel, past Village Woods and St. Henry's and on down to Castle Drive in Eastland Gardens, where I'd burrow deeper under the covers and know my dad had already left the house, black matte lunchbox in hand.
The International Harvester whistle proscribed your life, if you were an IH family. After awhile you'd never even hear it, or you'd hear it and it would flit through your consciousness like a ghost or background static on the radio. There but not there.
You grew up southeast, that whistle was just part of the mosaic, in other words. But you know what?
I'm 64 now and haven't lived in Eastland Gardens in more than four decades. Yet I can hear that whistle still.
So when I saw one of the old ones on display yesterday at the inaugural Harvester Homecoming in Scout Park on Meyer Road, you're damn skippy the sound of it came back to me. Suddenly I was 7, 8, 9-years-old again, lying in my narrow boy's bed, drifting back to sleep just about the time my dad was walking into Dept. 19 for another day in the shop.
My dad, Bill Smith, worked at Harvester for 34 years, from the last year of the 1940s until they closed up shop and moved to Springfield, Ohio, in 1983. Dad didn't want to make that long trek to Springfield, so he took early retirement. Last November he died at the age of 91, so he missed all the fun yesterday. The man would have eaten it up with a spoon.
He was always a sucker for history in all its forms -- he passed that lovely obsession on to his son, I'm happy to say -- and so, on a beautiful Saturday morning, I kept seeing everything through his eyes.
All those restored trucks and vehicles from the Teens, the Twenties, going back as far as 1910. An IH bulldozer. An IH tractor. Every model and permutation of the famed Harvester Scout imaginable. Photos and model IH vehicles and all manner of memorabilia -- including the sign that adorned the IH Scout which led my dad's Civil War re-enactor unit in Jimmy Carter's inaugural parade in 1977.
That one they got from my dad's own collection of IH stuff.
All of it was mute, and not-so-mute testimony to a legacy as deeply woven into this city's landscape as the moaning of the shift whistle. For 60 years Harvester was synonymous with Fort Wayne, and Fort Wayne with it. And for 34 years it put food on the table and clothes on the backs of the occupants of 3029 Castle Drive.
And not without cost, of course. Some of the memorabilia Dad took away from his Harvester years was physical. He lost the tip of one little finger when a tractor-trailer backed into it and crushed it. A fall through two false ceilings left him with a messed-up back that eventually required surgery. It happens -- and none of it ever dimmed his loyalty to IH.
Which, of course, he passed on to his children.
My mom's people, for instance, owned farmland down in Wells County, and I still remember the tractors my granddad had. One was an IH Super M. One was an IH "H" model. We called them the Big M and the Little H.
But time courses on. And so one day I was down at the farm, and I noticed my uncle had at some point bought some John Deere equipment. And of course I gave him hell about it, asking him where in God's name he'd gotten that green crap.
Blew the whistle on him, I guess you could say.
The International Harvester whistle proscribed your life, if you were an IH family. After awhile you'd never even hear it, or you'd hear it and it would flit through your consciousness like a ghost or background static on the radio. There but not there.
You grew up southeast, that whistle was just part of the mosaic, in other words. But you know what?
I'm 64 now and haven't lived in Eastland Gardens in more than four decades. Yet I can hear that whistle still.
So when I saw one of the old ones on display yesterday at the inaugural Harvester Homecoming in Scout Park on Meyer Road, you're damn skippy the sound of it came back to me. Suddenly I was 7, 8, 9-years-old again, lying in my narrow boy's bed, drifting back to sleep just about the time my dad was walking into Dept. 19 for another day in the shop.
My dad, Bill Smith, worked at Harvester for 34 years, from the last year of the 1940s until they closed up shop and moved to Springfield, Ohio, in 1983. Dad didn't want to make that long trek to Springfield, so he took early retirement. Last November he died at the age of 91, so he missed all the fun yesterday. The man would have eaten it up with a spoon.
He was always a sucker for history in all its forms -- he passed that lovely obsession on to his son, I'm happy to say -- and so, on a beautiful Saturday morning, I kept seeing everything through his eyes.
All those restored trucks and vehicles from the Teens, the Twenties, going back as far as 1910. An IH bulldozer. An IH tractor. Every model and permutation of the famed Harvester Scout imaginable. Photos and model IH vehicles and all manner of memorabilia -- including the sign that adorned the IH Scout which led my dad's Civil War re-enactor unit in Jimmy Carter's inaugural parade in 1977.
That one they got from my dad's own collection of IH stuff.
All of it was mute, and not-so-mute testimony to a legacy as deeply woven into this city's landscape as the moaning of the shift whistle. For 60 years Harvester was synonymous with Fort Wayne, and Fort Wayne with it. And for 34 years it put food on the table and clothes on the backs of the occupants of 3029 Castle Drive.
And not without cost, of course. Some of the memorabilia Dad took away from his Harvester years was physical. He lost the tip of one little finger when a tractor-trailer backed into it and crushed it. A fall through two false ceilings left him with a messed-up back that eventually required surgery. It happens -- and none of it ever dimmed his loyalty to IH.
Which, of course, he passed on to his children.
My mom's people, for instance, owned farmland down in Wells County, and I still remember the tractors my granddad had. One was an IH Super M. One was an IH "H" model. We called them the Big M and the Little H.
But time courses on. And so one day I was down at the farm, and I noticed my uncle had at some point bought some John Deere equipment. And of course I gave him hell about it, asking him where in God's name he'd gotten that green crap.
Blew the whistle on him, I guess you could say.
Saturday, August 10, 2019
A nation of crazies
In which the Blob poses a question it's been thinking about all week, but which most of you Blobophiles rarely give a thought to because it's not the NFL, or the NFL Draft, or NFL mini-camps, or NFL training camps or preseason NFL football.
The question is this: Who doesn't love a rodeo?
You've got bucking broncos. You've got bullriding. You've got barrel racing, and rodeo clowns, and guys wearing belt buckles the size of serving trays, and also ... COWBOY HATS!
Oh, yeah. And grown men bashing in the heads of children who don't show proper respect for the national anthem, because Our Only Available President, the Demagogue in Chief, kinda-sorta said that's how Real Americans should behave.
By now everyone's heard about what happened in Montana last week, when a 39-year-old man with apparent mental problems started barking at a 13-year-old kid for not taking his cap off during the anthem at a rodeo. The kid, in the most American reaction possible, told him to mind his own business, though he apparently used some not-to-nice words to do so. So the 39-year-old grabbed him by the throat, lifted him off his feet and slammed his head into the ground hard enough to fracture his skull in several places.
Now the kid lies in a hospital bed, and he may suffer permanent brain damage. The perp's attorney, meanwhile, is selling the notion that his client, who's ex-military, was brain damaged himself in a car accident and considers Our Only Available President still to be his commander-in-chief. And so when OOAP started bashing African-American NFL players for kneeling with their heads bowed during the anthem to protest racial injustice, saying they should all be fired, this guy took it as an order to enforce the proper respect by any means necessary.
Now, OOAP never said to bash in the skulls of those who in his opinion "disrespect" the anthem, although he has been agreeable to protestors at his rallies having their skulls bashed in. But he did suggest those who did "disrespect" the anthem should lose their jobs, which is just about as extremist. So this guy just extraplolated that out.
The only thing he's guilty of, his hired suit says, is being a patriot.
A patriot.
Good. Lord. In heaven.
This has not been a good week for those of you who expect a lot of happy talk about Sportsball World from the Blob. For that, the Blob apologizes. But stuff happens. And among that stuff has been this "patriot" in Montana, and what he says about the country we live in now.
We live in a country now, I keep thinking, where grown men bash in the skulls of children for not being properly "respectful" to a song.
We live in a country where people who do that are called "patriots" by their attorneys.
We live in a country where other "patriots" drive 600 miles to kill a bunch of brown people, because the President of the United States, and his enablers in right-wing media, have repeatedly referred to them as "invaders" and all but openly suggested they're bent on destroying white American hegemony.
We live in a country where the president who says these sorts of things claim his words mean nothing, that they radicalize no one, that they inspire no white supremacist violence even when the perpetrators of that violence say they do.
We live in a country where arresting 600 undocumented Hispanic workers at a chicken processing plant (but not their white employers, of course) is framed as keeping America safe from ... oh, hell, I don't know. Hard-working people just trying to live their lives and feed their families, I guess.
We live in a country where lots of people actually believe this nonsense. We live in a country where you can't call a racist a racist, because then you're being racist yourself. We live in a country where you can't even do that when the President himself is telling elected representatives of color to go back to Africa if they don't like his policies.
We live in a country that used to be America.
The bad news is, I don't know what it is now.
The worse news is, or maybe I do.
The question is this: Who doesn't love a rodeo?
You've got bucking broncos. You've got bullriding. You've got barrel racing, and rodeo clowns, and guys wearing belt buckles the size of serving trays, and also ... COWBOY HATS!
Oh, yeah. And grown men bashing in the heads of children who don't show proper respect for the national anthem, because Our Only Available President, the Demagogue in Chief, kinda-sorta said that's how Real Americans should behave.
By now everyone's heard about what happened in Montana last week, when a 39-year-old man with apparent mental problems started barking at a 13-year-old kid for not taking his cap off during the anthem at a rodeo. The kid, in the most American reaction possible, told him to mind his own business, though he apparently used some not-to-nice words to do so. So the 39-year-old grabbed him by the throat, lifted him off his feet and slammed his head into the ground hard enough to fracture his skull in several places.
Now the kid lies in a hospital bed, and he may suffer permanent brain damage. The perp's attorney, meanwhile, is selling the notion that his client, who's ex-military, was brain damaged himself in a car accident and considers Our Only Available President still to be his commander-in-chief. And so when OOAP started bashing African-American NFL players for kneeling with their heads bowed during the anthem to protest racial injustice, saying they should all be fired, this guy took it as an order to enforce the proper respect by any means necessary.
Now, OOAP never said to bash in the skulls of those who in his opinion "disrespect" the anthem, although he has been agreeable to protestors at his rallies having their skulls bashed in. But he did suggest those who did "disrespect" the anthem should lose their jobs, which is just about as extremist. So this guy just extraplolated that out.
The only thing he's guilty of, his hired suit says, is being a patriot.
A patriot.
Good. Lord. In heaven.
This has not been a good week for those of you who expect a lot of happy talk about Sportsball World from the Blob. For that, the Blob apologizes. But stuff happens. And among that stuff has been this "patriot" in Montana, and what he says about the country we live in now.
We live in a country now, I keep thinking, where grown men bash in the skulls of children for not being properly "respectful" to a song.
We live in a country where people who do that are called "patriots" by their attorneys.
We live in a country where other "patriots" drive 600 miles to kill a bunch of brown people, because the President of the United States, and his enablers in right-wing media, have repeatedly referred to them as "invaders" and all but openly suggested they're bent on destroying white American hegemony.
We live in a country where the president who says these sorts of things claim his words mean nothing, that they radicalize no one, that they inspire no white supremacist violence even when the perpetrators of that violence say they do.
We live in a country where arresting 600 undocumented Hispanic workers at a chicken processing plant (but not their white employers, of course) is framed as keeping America safe from ... oh, hell, I don't know. Hard-working people just trying to live their lives and feed their families, I guess.
We live in a country where lots of people actually believe this nonsense. We live in a country where you can't call a racist a racist, because then you're being racist yourself. We live in a country where you can't even do that when the President himself is telling elected representatives of color to go back to Africa if they don't like his policies.
We live in a country that used to be America.
The bad news is, I don't know what it is now.
The worse news is, or maybe I do.
Friday, August 9, 2019
Cruisin' for a bruisin'
There has always been this mean, rotten place in the Blob that loves a good hard downpour on a festive parade. Nothing like drenched floral arrangements on the President's Trophy float to warm the cockles of its cold, cold heart.
And so we take you to last night, and the first full slate of Games Between Guys You'll Never See Again, aka the NFL preseason.
Here was a headline from all that I saw on ESPN.com this morning: Baker Mayfield, Browns Off To Picture-Perfect Start.
Oh, lordy. Here we go.
Here we go with the elaborate setup, the Hostess Twinkie filled with shaving cream, the flaming bag of dog poop left on the doorstep. The Browns hype, it's gone full red line. And it's cruelty undistilled. Browns fans are Carrie, and, yes, that is a bucket of pig's blood poised to come raining down on them.
Sure, sure. We all get it. The Browns have a quarterback now who from all appearances is not Johnny "Tim" Manziel-Crouch. They've got Odell Beckham Jr. They've got Nick Chubb to gash defenses. They've got a bunch of young guys on defense who look like they can play.
How can they not be bound for the Super Bowl? Or at least the lush expanse of the playoffs?
So cruel. So. Damn. Cruel.
Because, listen, there are all sorts of scenarios in which everything goes sideways, and the cruelest part is, every Browns fan knows every one of them. The catechism of heartbreak goes back decades, and every drunken Dog Pounder who wound up sitting bleary-eye on some street corner after another crushing loss can recite all of it.
The Drive. The Fumble. Johnny Bleeping Manziel, what the hell were they thinking?
But Manziel is in Canada now, or maybe back home in Texas. And the Brownies have Mayfield now, a real quarterback, better than Mike Phipps, even. And they have Odell. What could go wrong?
Easy to forget that the Browns went 7-9 last year. Easy to forget that the Steelers aren't going anywhere, that everyone who's writing them off because they lost Antonio Brown and LeVeon Bell are overlooking the fact they've still got the best QB in the division (Ben Roethlisberger),plus a wideout who caught 111 balls last year (JuJu Smith-Schuster), plus a running back (James Conner) who rushed for 900-plus yards and averaged 4.5 yards per tote.
Plus a lot more cohesive locker room now that A.B. is gone.
So there's that. And there's Lamar Jackson over in Baltimore;, and who knows what magic he'll pull out of the hat this fall. And ...
And, well. This is the Browns we're talking about. The last time they didn't screw everything up, Gary Collins was catching passes from Frank Ryan and Jim Brown was shedding tacklers the way a duck sheds rainwater.
On the other hand, they did beat the Washington Football Club 30-10 last night. Mayfield was 6-of-7 and threw a touchdown pass. And the Browns leading receiver was ... Rashard Griffin.
Fifth-round draft pick in 2016, out of Colorado State. Started one game last year. Caught 39 balls, fifth on the team. Ranked 98th in the league among NFL receivers.
In other words, he's a backup, and no Odell. Who didn't play a down last night, on account of it's preseason.
Which means, technically, that aforementioned headline is inaccurate. The Browns are not off to a picture-perfect start, because nothing's really started. We're still a month out from that.
See? Rain, all over the parade.
Of course, Browns fans are used to that.
Not the parade, though.
And so we take you to last night, and the first full slate of Games Between Guys You'll Never See Again, aka the NFL preseason.
Here was a headline from all that I saw on ESPN.com this morning: Baker Mayfield, Browns Off To Picture-Perfect Start.
Oh, lordy. Here we go.
Here we go with the elaborate setup, the Hostess Twinkie filled with shaving cream, the flaming bag of dog poop left on the doorstep. The Browns hype, it's gone full red line. And it's cruelty undistilled. Browns fans are Carrie, and, yes, that is a bucket of pig's blood poised to come raining down on them.
Sure, sure. We all get it. The Browns have a quarterback now who from all appearances is not Johnny "Tim" Manziel-Crouch. They've got Odell Beckham Jr. They've got Nick Chubb to gash defenses. They've got a bunch of young guys on defense who look like they can play.
How can they not be bound for the Super Bowl? Or at least the lush expanse of the playoffs?
So cruel. So. Damn. Cruel.
Because, listen, there are all sorts of scenarios in which everything goes sideways, and the cruelest part is, every Browns fan knows every one of them. The catechism of heartbreak goes back decades, and every drunken Dog Pounder who wound up sitting bleary-eye on some street corner after another crushing loss can recite all of it.
The Drive. The Fumble. Johnny Bleeping Manziel, what the hell were they thinking?
But Manziel is in Canada now, or maybe back home in Texas. And the Brownies have Mayfield now, a real quarterback, better than Mike Phipps, even. And they have Odell. What could go wrong?
Easy to forget that the Browns went 7-9 last year. Easy to forget that the Steelers aren't going anywhere, that everyone who's writing them off because they lost Antonio Brown and LeVeon Bell are overlooking the fact they've still got the best QB in the division (Ben Roethlisberger),plus a wideout who caught 111 balls last year (JuJu Smith-Schuster), plus a running back (James Conner) who rushed for 900-plus yards and averaged 4.5 yards per tote.
Plus a lot more cohesive locker room now that A.B. is gone.
So there's that. And there's Lamar Jackson over in Baltimore;, and who knows what magic he'll pull out of the hat this fall. And ...
And, well. This is the Browns we're talking about. The last time they didn't screw everything up, Gary Collins was catching passes from Frank Ryan and Jim Brown was shedding tacklers the way a duck sheds rainwater.
On the other hand, they did beat the Washington Football Club 30-10 last night. Mayfield was 6-of-7 and threw a touchdown pass. And the Browns leading receiver was ... Rashard Griffin.
Fifth-round draft pick in 2016, out of Colorado State. Started one game last year. Caught 39 balls, fifth on the team. Ranked 98th in the league among NFL receivers.
In other words, he's a backup, and no Odell. Who didn't play a down last night, on account of it's preseason.
Which means, technically, that aforementioned headline is inaccurate. The Browns are not off to a picture-perfect start, because nothing's really started. We're still a month out from that.
See? Rain, all over the parade.
Of course, Browns fans are used to that.
Not the parade, though.
Thursday, August 8, 2019
That's so Raiders
These are the palmy days for the Oakland/Las Vegas/Wherever Raiders, if such wonders still exist for this pratfall of a franchise.
HBO's "Hard Knocks" is in town, giving the Silver-and-Black some valuable national pub.
Enough people still think Jon Gruden -- the single most overrated football coach in America across the last two decades or more -- can actually coach, or still is interesting enough, to merit the full "Hard Knocks" monty.
And, yeah, even that's not true -- even if Gruden's Chucky persona is so '90s these days, and he's done some dumb stuff like trade away one of the best defensive players in football (Khalil Mack) and his best receiver (Amari Cooper) ...
Well, hey. At least "Hard Knocks" is in town. And at least Gruden's got Antonio Brown now, so who needs Amari Coo--
I'm sorry, what?
He doesn't have Antonio Brown right now?
And that's because ... why?
Yes, that's right, America. The Raiders landed the best wide receiver in football, only to find out he's got "extreme frostbite" in his feet because he didn't wear the proper protective footwear during a cryogenic treatment in France. He hasn't practiced since July 30, no one knows when he'll be back, and his feet look like they belong on Bilbo Baggins.
Extreme frostbite. Seriously. Could there be anything more Raiders than that?
They get one of the stickout offensive weapons in the entire NFL, and it turns out what they actually got was a guy who just crawled off the ice shelf in Antarctica. Jon Gruden, meet Ernest Shackleton. No, no one else in the expedition survived, I'm afraid. But give Ernie some time and he'll be running go routes before you know it.
Yeesh. You know how bizarre this is?
It's so bizarre it sounds like a baseball injury. And those guys wrote the book on bizarre.
So Raiders. So, so Raiders.
HBO's "Hard Knocks" is in town, giving the Silver-and-Black some valuable national pub.
Enough people still think Jon Gruden -- the single most overrated football coach in America across the last two decades or more -- can actually coach, or still is interesting enough, to merit the full "Hard Knocks" monty.
And, yeah, even that's not true -- even if Gruden's Chucky persona is so '90s these days, and he's done some dumb stuff like trade away one of the best defensive players in football (Khalil Mack) and his best receiver (Amari Cooper) ...
Well, hey. At least "Hard Knocks" is in town. And at least Gruden's got Antonio Brown now, so who needs Amari Coo--
I'm sorry, what?
He doesn't have Antonio Brown right now?
And that's because ... why?
Yes, that's right, America. The Raiders landed the best wide receiver in football, only to find out he's got "extreme frostbite" in his feet because he didn't wear the proper protective footwear during a cryogenic treatment in France. He hasn't practiced since July 30, no one knows when he'll be back, and his feet look like they belong on Bilbo Baggins.
Extreme frostbite. Seriously. Could there be anything more Raiders than that?
They get one of the stickout offensive weapons in the entire NFL, and it turns out what they actually got was a guy who just crawled off the ice shelf in Antarctica. Jon Gruden, meet Ernest Shackleton. No, no one else in the expedition survived, I'm afraid. But give Ernie some time and he'll be running go routes before you know it.
Yeesh. You know how bizarre this is?
It's so bizarre it sounds like a baseball injury. And those guys wrote the book on bizarre.
So Raiders. So, so Raiders.
Wednesday, August 7, 2019
Quality control
Maybe I'm not seeing this right. It happens sometimes.
It happens when you're a contrarian who frequently doesn't look at the world in the way normal humans do, or what we like to think are normal humans. Which is to say, things look yea different when you're seeing them upside-down and sideways, with your head cocked way over and your eyes all scrunched up like a hurricane wind is blowing in your face.
And so to the topic du jour: The NCAA's new guidelines for agents wishing to represent NCAA players testing the NBA waters.
The NCAA's new decree is that in order to represent these athletes, agents must hold a bachelor's degree, NBPA certification for at least three straight years and professional liability insurance, and must complete an in-person exam taken at the NCAA office in Indianapolis in early November.
One presumes the NCAA sees this as protecting its "student-athletes" from being exploited by unsavory street agents and fast-buck con artists.
The Blob, however, suspects it's also just another way for a massive corporate construct to safeguard its product. Quality control, if you will -- with the emphasis on "control."
You can get all kinds of pushback by suggesting big-money college athletics operate with a plantation mentality, because all kinds of folks will indignantly fly to the ramparts if you do. Why, how dare you characterize as chattel the athletes who feed the NCAA's revenue stream! They get a free education! They get the best of everything their universities have to offer! They get special treatm--
Oops. Better not go there. It leads to some thorny territory, because then you have to explain why "student-athletes" get their special treatment, and that leads to the uncomfortable truth that they get that treatment because they're ... well ... a valuable commodity.
In other words, they generate revenue. Goo-gobs of it.
And so, yes, there is a whiff of the plantation in these agent requirements, or at least a whiff of its paternalistic attitude toward its workforce ("We're doing this to protect our student-athletes. They're such children, you see.") And it is about controlling that workforce, when you get down to the bare wood of it.
Why else would the NCAA presume to dictate who its "student-athletes" can hire to represent them, and by what criteria? Do they dictate the same to the coaches and other athletic personnel of its member schools? And if not, how is it the NCAA's business who its "student-athletes" hire?
Unless, of course, there's a presumption of ownership there. Or something akin to it.
I know. This is just me seeing things all catawampus again, right?
But what if it's not?
It happens when you're a contrarian who frequently doesn't look at the world in the way normal humans do, or what we like to think are normal humans. Which is to say, things look yea different when you're seeing them upside-down and sideways, with your head cocked way over and your eyes all scrunched up like a hurricane wind is blowing in your face.
And so to the topic du jour: The NCAA's new guidelines for agents wishing to represent NCAA players testing the NBA waters.
The NCAA's new decree is that in order to represent these athletes, agents must hold a bachelor's degree, NBPA certification for at least three straight years and professional liability insurance, and must complete an in-person exam taken at the NCAA office in Indianapolis in early November.
One presumes the NCAA sees this as protecting its "student-athletes" from being exploited by unsavory street agents and fast-buck con artists.
The Blob, however, suspects it's also just another way for a massive corporate construct to safeguard its product. Quality control, if you will -- with the emphasis on "control."
You can get all kinds of pushback by suggesting big-money college athletics operate with a plantation mentality, because all kinds of folks will indignantly fly to the ramparts if you do. Why, how dare you characterize as chattel the athletes who feed the NCAA's revenue stream! They get a free education! They get the best of everything their universities have to offer! They get special treatm--
Oops. Better not go there. It leads to some thorny territory, because then you have to explain why "student-athletes" get their special treatment, and that leads to the uncomfortable truth that they get that treatment because they're ... well ... a valuable commodity.
In other words, they generate revenue. Goo-gobs of it.
And so, yes, there is a whiff of the plantation in these agent requirements, or at least a whiff of its paternalistic attitude toward its workforce ("We're doing this to protect our student-athletes. They're such children, you see.") And it is about controlling that workforce, when you get down to the bare wood of it.
Why else would the NCAA presume to dictate who its "student-athletes" can hire to represent them, and by what criteria? Do they dictate the same to the coaches and other athletic personnel of its member schools? And if not, how is it the NCAA's business who its "student-athletes" hire?
Unless, of course, there's a presumption of ownership there. Or something akin to it.
I know. This is just me seeing things all catawampus again, right?
But what if it's not?
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