The Yellow Stripe

Go Navy! Beat Army!

Will be spending the Army-Navy game at the new PMs house. CAPT is very cool, so I am happy.

In the meantime, have some thinky thoughts about our two topics du jour in sports.

1. The Heisman Trophy, which should go to Ndamukong Suh (DT, Nebraska) who may in fact be better himself than the entire Alabama Defensive line. High praise, since Alabama's D-Line is one of the tops in the nation. Given that Suh does not (A) play a glamor-boy offensive position (B) play for a national title contender (C) have high recognition and hype machine (D) have a name many people can spell or pronounce -- I do not expect him to win. But he might, and it would be awesome if he did. Even if it means they can't retroactively go back and give Eddie George's Heisman to Orlando Pace -- it'll be good to show the trophy can go to any player. Of course it'd also be nice if any team could win a title, but I won't hold my breath.

2. Tiger Woods. Of course, this requires it's own post, because there's a lot to break down. Let's shoot for me having something by Sunday. Nobody reads anything you put out on a Friday Night anyway. Plus, I've got a card game in 15 minutes.

So, took a trip out to Bloomington to visit my former college roommate, now a professor at Indiana University -- went to see the Indiana-Maryland basketball game. (Terps 80, Indiana 68)

IU's Assembly Hall is a cathedral of basketball with the best acoustics I've ever encountered in an arena of it's size. When the crowd's full, and it's a marquee game, this place must be incredible.

Still wondering where the heck Greivis Vasquez' game is at. Perhaps, he left it at home in Venezuela over the summer. Just watched my Terps lose to Villanova with another weak effort from Vazquez - we aren't going to beat anybody good until he steps up is play.

Ah well. I'm alive, even if none of my teams are winning.

From Thomas P.M. Barnett:

Detainees at Camp in Iraq Use Favre To Tease Wisconsin Soldiers

Naturally, Favre becomes a weapon of choice among our enemies in the War on Terror. Like a lot of Islamic terrorist recruits, Favre suffered a midlife crisis and then turned against his adopted homeland, seeking its destruction. I expect the International Criminal Court to eventually step in and indict Favre for his many crimes against Wisconsin's humanity.

Maryland opens the season tomorrow against Charleston Southern, not that I care much yet.

But, exciting news. Have already gotten my tickets for Maryland at Indiana, Dec. 1 for the ACC-Big 10 Challenge game. Assembly Hall in Bloomington is a great place to watch a game.

Next challenge: convincing my former roommate at Maryland, now a Professor at Indiana, to wear a Maryland shirt to the game. Bonus points if he wears the shirt commemorating Maryland's victory over IU in the 2002 National Championship. Major tempting fate manliness points.

On sunday, a wild deer jumped into the Lion Enclosure at the National Zoo, in Washington DC. The National Zoo is located in Rock Creek Park, which has a serious deer infestation these days. The deer had gotten into the park and somehow, selected the very wrong area to investigate. The deer actually escaped - after it jumped into the moat, zookeepers were able to lure the lions inside and get the deer out. Though they ended up putting the deer down due to injuries.

Clips are up on YouTube, and you can hear visitors rooting for the deer. Honestly, I guess it says something about my personality, but I was rooting for the lions. Maybe I'm just a fan of Natural Selection, but I'd want to see the Lions go do their thing. Perhaps, I've just got it in for our ungulate friends. But mostly, I suspect this has to be as much fun as any zoo-bound predator is ever going to have.

World Series
Predicted World Series (Yankees in 5) but it turned out to be Yanks in 6. Correct on the superiority of Rivera vs. Lidge, pushed on Lee vs. Sabbathia, correct on Howard and Ibanez looking like sad kittens vs. Yankee lefties, and missed big time on Chase Utley. Also, was right and wrong on the Yankees line-up, in that the Yanks handled Philly pitching fine -- except that it wasn't the switch-hitters doing it.

Bigger story - baseball needs to expand the use of instant replay. It slots in with the natural pauses of the game, and would probably work much more like the replays in Tennis do. Many of the bad calls this post season were readily apparent within seconds, unlike many Football replays which remain debatable for minutes and require numerous impractical camera angles.

Rewatching old game tape seems to indicate that umpiring is actually as good or better than in the past (the neighborhood play actually gets called now) but can be improved more with HD technology. And as a fan, I don't want to argue about refs - I just want the calls to be right.

Bias
Other issue, saw the Len Bias documentary. First 35 minutes or so were incredibly gripping. Last portion lost some focus. Could have been plenty powerful just hitting on personal recollections. I could listen to people talk about how it made them feel all day.

ESPN has been running an unconnected series of sports documentaries for the past few weeks, in one of their rare moments of actual artistry and genuine depth. So far, the series has been wonderful, even if the individual ones haven't all been. (Peter Berg's one on the Gretzky trade sucked...)

Last week's "Muhammad and Larry" about the Ali-Holmes fight was fantastic. Tonight, at 8 PM, they'll be airing "Without Bias" - a Kirk Fraiser piece on Len Bias. I've written about Lenny before in this space but I guess I can't stop watching even if it still stings as much now as it did 22+ years ago, as it did the last time I wrote it.

Well, I guess I'll be surpressing one of those single manly tears tonight.

Yankees in Five

1. Similar pitching staffs, except Sabbathia and Rivera are better than Lee and Lidge

2. Somewhat similar lineups, except that the Yankees have multiple switch hitters, while Philly's best hitters (Utley, Howard, Ibanez) exhibit terrible platoon splits vs. lefties.

Other than that, I'm kind of rooting for snow seeing as I'm a fan of neither team.

ETA - Actually, Chase Utley has very good Lefty/Righty splits. (As seen last night.) Ryan Howard still looks like a harmless kitten vs. lefties.

Was over at my sister & brother-in-law's house tonight helping them fix their kitchen, and had the opportunity to watch tonight's episode of Gossip Girl.

Interesting throw-away line from, what I'm told, is a minor character. Gossip Girl exists in the same universe as the Friday Night Lights TV show. Assuming, of course, the character was not lying - which I'm told is a very unsafe assumption.

Amusing, though I do not see a tremendous overlap between these two particular shows. I presume the list of people who watch both must be frightfully small.

Congratulations for Kim Clijsters, winning the US Open after a two-and-a-half year hiatus from Tennis. Clijsters apparently felt burnt out and wasn't having fun, took the time off, got married, had a baby. I was rooting for Caroline Wozniacki, the runner up (mostly because she's cute) but Clijsters clearly deserved to win.

She's the first mother to win a major since 1980. (Evonne Goolagong, Wimbledon)

My goodness. Georgia Tech's offense will f'you up. I love the option, especially out of a modified run & shoot passing formation. Their blocking schemes are not to be trifled with.

If you ever wondered what Navy's offense would look like with near-NFL talent, it mostly looks like a lot of huge runs getting broken.

Not a ton going on this week. Am pleased to see my Nats baseball club slowly evolve beyond a sad joke with the signing of #1 pick, Stephen Strasburg. Also got my Maryland Football tickets in the mail, so there's that coming up.

On a discouraging note, my right arm is still acting up. For awhile now (i.e. going back to the 2006 summer) I've had some shoulder soreness when throwing and the mechanics changes I made seem to have not helped. Now, in addition to shoulder soreness, my elbow is starting to bother me. As are both my biceps and triceps.

I hadn't done anything about it because this seemed to only affect me when throwing a baseball or football. But the newer issues are coming up on the regular. Particularly the elbow stiffness. I really don't want this to be a serious issue. OTOH, the season's over and I don't throw in the winter like I used to. So it'll probably clear up.

In the meantime, I think I'll just watch Chad Ochocinco kickoff again. That amuses me. I await the day some team wises up, and uses real athletes as kickers.

Aside from the trade deadline (will be seeing you, Nick!) the big news in baseball was the leaked report that David Ortiz (aka Big Papi) tested positive for Performance Enhancing Drugs in 2003. The testing was supposed to be anonymous - if 6% of the players tested positive, this would trigger a new set of testing rules. Shockingly, despite knowing the tests were coming and the real need to skate them, 103 players failed. As of yet, very few names have ever been released off this list: Barry Bonds, Alex Rodriguez, and now Manny Ramirez and David Ortiz.

( more below the cut... )

The other interesting aspect was Bill James comment on the subject. Noting that, in particular, the effect of the drugs are to prolong playing time by allowing players to stay on the field and counter-act the affects of aging. Which is why they would be used, regardless of side-effects including what we already know but also soft tissue injuries.

It seems to me that, with the passage of time, more people will come to understand that the commissioner's periodic spasms of self-righteousness do not constitute baseball law. It seems to me that the argument that it is cheating must ultimately collapse under the weight of carrying this great contradiction-that 80% of the players are cheating against the other 20% by violating some "rule" to which they never consented, which was never included in the rule books, and which for which there was no enforcement procedure. History is simply not going to see it that way.