Baseball Looms

Spring Training has started, and David Ortiz is all ready to leave camp for Orlando so he can start preparing for the World Baseball Classic (WBC) with his Dominican Republic teammates. Manny still hasn’t shown up and will not play in the WBC, but is expected to report tomorrow (Wednesday) for training camp. Jason Varitek is also ready to depart for the WBC along with the other ten players on the Red Sox that will participate in the inaugural WBC. Questions still loom about the health of Curt Schilling and Keith Foulke who battled injuries all last season.

This off-season a lot of faces have changed on this 25 man roster, first off Johnny Damon will no longer prowl centerfield or sit at the top of the batting order since he is in New York playing for the dreaded Yankees. Kevin Millar’s personality will be missed because it is now in Baltimore as an Oriole, but his production that has slipped ever year since his first season that he wore Red Sox it might be a good thing. Bill Mueller is gone as is Doug Mirabelli, and Edgar Renteria. The additions were ace Josh Beckett, Mike Lowell, Coco Crisp, Alex Gonzalez, JT Snow, etc. Questions still remain about the futures of David Wells, Manny Ramirez, and Tony Graffanino.

This off-season has also brought a lot of talk about how the New York Yankees and the Toronto Blue Jays have gotten so much better and the Red Sox have gotten worse. Tell me how this is possible. Yes, we lost a lot of key guys like Damon, Mueller, Millar, etc. but look at the players we do have. Our pitching staff has improved greatly, we have a staff that could have about a seven starter rotation, and our staff is fairly young minus Schilling and Wells. Beckett is 26 and he has already won a world series with Florida, so he has experience pitching in big game situations. Not to mention his fastball. Our middle relief has improved with the pick up of Julian Tavarez, if you ask me we got a lot better in the pitching department, not worse. As for fielders and hitters, we lost Johnny Damon, you cannot replace what he did for us in his time in Boston, but we picked up Coco Crisp whose numbers are almost identical to the ones Damon had coming into Boston, time will tell with him. Mike Lowell has a swing built for Fenway so I expect his numbers to go up even if he isn’t on steroids anymore. There is no way the Alex Gonzalez will make as many errors as Renteria. And how can you count out a team that has Manny and Big Papi in the third and fourth spots in the line up? You can’t, so to anyone thinking the Yankees and Jays are going to runaway with the AL east don’t forget about the Sox cause they will put up a fight.

So after looking at www.redsox.com there is only one day and 18 hours until the first Spring Training game of the year. Man I love baseball season.

The Wonders of Curling

Ok as much as the winter Olympics are a huge waste of time, think about this little sport called Curling. Nothing is more entertaining then watching grown men and women play around on the ice sliding giant rocks onto a giant target. It is the saddest excuse of a sport I have ever seen and thats including NASCAR, Horse Back Riding, and those girls that sit on the baseline at basketball and football games and cheer on the home team.

Yes, I said it cheerleading is not a sport. There are a lot of things that cheerleaders can do that I can't. Like putting other cheerleaders up over their heads, splits, backflips, etc. that doesn't make it a sport. When a cheerleader is in a competition I will consider it a sport, but when they are simply just cheering on the sideline it is not, but back to curling....

Curling is awesome because it is so unique in being called a sport. I would consider it a skill, but really if you can aim you can curl. Also is it really necessary to have four people on a team? I mean those teammates that just use the brushes to smooth the ice are completely useless, they're like the two middle guys in the four man bobsled, you subtract them from the bobsled equation you have an entirely different event, the two man bobsled. Imagine that...two man curling? The insanity that would follow...

Has anyone else noticed that almost all of the events in the Winter Olympics are a spinoff of some other event that already exists. Some examples include 4 man and 2 man bobsled, Ice Dancing and Pair Figure Skating, The skeleton is really just the luge flipped over and turned around, plus many more spinoff events its like the Law and Order of sports so many series that really are the same thing being on the air at the same time claiming to be something different.

The real reason I love curling is for the Johnson girls of the United States team...and now after researching it I love the whole team because they are the Anna Kournikova of Curling and maybe this entire Winter Games. Sarah Hughes has nothing on the Women's Curling team.

Fight for the Cherry and the White

It is now February and I could not be happier. Temple Men's Basketball is on a roll beating a ranked Maryland Team, they Killed U Mass yesterday, and besides Duke their remaining schedule looks fairly easy. I can't believe last week that Temple was 9th in the A 10 and now they are 3rd. Now there are more then 10 teams in the A 10, but 9th to 3rd is damn impressive. Mardy Collins is playing like he is ready for the NBA, and Dustin Salisbery looks like he could follow in his footsteps next year. Mark Tyndale looks like he loves the game and always has a smile on his face even after making a foul, that's hard to find in a player these days unless his face is lighting up with dollar signs. Antywane Robinson is hitting clutch shot after clutch shot in his Senior season. Nehemiah Ingram is to no surprise a fan favorite after last years St. Joe's game. What else can be said about this team?

Oh, John Chaney how could anyone forget the coach who gives the best quotes currently in college basketball. He is my kind of coach he goes to a press conference tears down his own team and the team in response to the builds themselves back up a little higher than they were the last time. This coaching method can be risky, but with the right group of players it can be very effective as well. The Owls have the right group of players for this coaching style. Chaney is never satisfied and in the game of basketball you can't be. There is always room for improvement, ask guys like Larry Bird who was the first to get to practice and the last to leave. That is the mentality that Chaney has, never be satisfied with what you did in the past because there is always gonna be someone waiting to take their shot at you. My favorite recent quote from Chaney is as follows, "He's they type of guy who could go to a dock at night and run into fifty guys holding baseball bats and he would ask where the game was at." I believe this was about Salisbery but I could be wrong.

By the way...Spring Training starts in a month...Who is excited oh I believe I am!