Got an e-mail from The Marathon Man yesterday, right at this time, with the following notes:

1. Dice-K is throwing a gem through 5 against The Mighty KC Royals.  This means absolutely nothing.
2. Yesterday, Simmons wrote a throwaway line that was, in essence, a retraction of last year’s relentless attack on Zeke over the Balkman pick.  I swear, there may have been 15,000 people in attendance, but we were the only two people to actually watch Balkman at the NIT.
3. I’m surprised your piece on Hamilton got people riled up.  It was the best example of the subtleties of white privilege and modern-day racism.  Every point to the contrary served to merely reinforce your point.
4. The Cubs already stink.  I give up.

 I thought I would throw up a post with some comments real quick on some of the topics mentioned there.  

1.  On Dice-K's gem yesterday - final line 7 innings, 6 hits, 10 Ks, 1 walk, 1 run (on a solo HR by David DeJesus).  Very nice outing.  He overpowered the Royals the first two times through the lineup, but ran into some problems in the sixth inning.  Never the less, it was a good game.  Still, before we get bombarded with "Dice-K for Cy Young" stories, keep in mind that he dominated the KC Royals, baseball's weakest team (by a large margin).  We want to see how he does against good teams, and how he does his second time through the league, before passing judgment.  

We were actually equally as impressed with the job Zach Greinke (our fantasy sleeper, we picked him up last week as a free agent) did against one of the tougher offenses in the league, the Red Sox.  He also went 7 innings, allowing 8 hits, 1 walk, and 1 earned run.  He won't win much in KC, but he's definitely someone you might want to keep an eye on.  Our fantasy rebound stud had the most dominating start of the week: Rich Harden (our darkhorse Cy Young competitor who, along with Felix Hernandez, are the only two pitchers that we think can hang with Lackey in the runner-up to Johan Santana battle.  Maybe Jered Weaver if he's healthy.) allowed only 3 hits in his 7 innings of work, walking 2 and allowing no runs.  Best news?  Total pitches thrown: 94.  Stay healthy, Rich.

2.  Thanks for the headsup.  The line, after a reader (a fan of the SEC, and one of the rare people that actually watched Balkman play in college, which makes three now in total) proposed JoeKim Noah as "a multimillionaire's Balkman" (a good comparison, for both players) was this: 

"The Balkman pick turned out to be Isiah's finest moment other than snagging David Lee."

Ahem.  So Simmons writes a whole draft article topping almost 10,000 words, a good amount dedicated to ridiculing Isiah's choice of Balkman at #20 in the draft.  Some of Simmons' lines include "I'm telling you, we're going to remember the Isiah/Knicks Era the same way we remember things like Enron, the Hindenberg and the Bay of Pigs. It's reached that level."  Now instead of manning up and admit he was wrong about that, he inserts a small throwaway line in a throwaway column.  Weak.

We don't want to come off as Simmons-haters; we recognize what he has done for sportsbloggers, paving the way.  But sometimes we feel the need to call him out, because he doesn't use his influence positively anymore.  Prime example - you may have read about the stunt by Colin Cowherd, which lead to the shut down of The Big Lead (and on the same week they showed us love!  Damn you Schrutebag!).  Where is Simmons speaking out against that?  Does he think that it is okay for a fellow ESPN employee to do what Schrutebag did?  Obviously he can't speak out directly against ESPN per his contract, but he always finds a way to makes subtle complaints about announcers he doesn't like; why not a mention of it?  Even a minor mention of The Big Lead in his post would be enough to earn back his blog creditibility.  But we don't see him doing it....

Simmons also later gives a link to this article on Stan Love (HS prospect Kevin Love's father), and issues a semi-warning on Love.  We find this oddly contradictory; Simmons wrote a whole 4,000 word post on how OJ Mayo represented all that is wrong with basketball, and tried to imply that Mayo is the reason we have Paris Hilton, Super Sweet 16 types, and that he is the representation of all that is wrong with basketball nowadays.  In the same article he mentions how Love is the opposite, he's everything that's right with basketball.  The odd thing was that when he talked about Mayo, he never really talked about his game (seriously, point out what he says about his game - anything about his jumper, his handle, his skills?), instead just about his background problems - how he shows-off, and, um, well isn't that enough info?  

Kevin Love, on the other hand, he does the opposite - he talks about his game, the  great talent he has, and never mentions anything about his background.  We're gonna give that a try now:

OJ Mayo has fantastic court vision, an amazing handle, gets to the basket and finishes as well as any point his age in a long time, perhaps going back to Kenny Anderson.  He a great distributor, setting up his teammates.  He had 11 assists in the championship game.  Kevin Love, he represents all that is wrong with amateur sports nowadays.  He has an overbearing father, like one of those you see at almost every Little League game today.  It is disgusting.  He reminds me of this time in Little League when a father of a player on our team started screaming at the ump after a call; this father of a player on the opposing team yelled at the first father, and soon enough they were trading punches on the mound.  True story.

Also, Kevin Love verbally caught hell from Nike for attending the camp of another sneaker company.  Never has Nike publicly attacked a high school player before for this type of thing - there seems to be more to the story if you ask me.  Seriously, we're willing to bet that if the media cared enough, they would check the background a little more... we wouldn't be surprised if Stan Love (a former NBA player) was on the payroll or something in exchange for his son's loyalty, and that's why Nike took this feud public.  Something smells fishy to us here.  Backdoor big sneaker deals are what's ruining basketball.

See how easy it is to write a piece of with the aim of discrediting someone?   The bottom line is this:  We still don't get the deal with Simmons (and ESPN in general) attacking Mayo.  Something smells fishy.  LeBron did far worse things in his high school career (the Hummer his mom purchased), yet you didn't see these kinds of articles coming from ESPN when he was in high school.  Instead he was highly promoted as the future of basketball....    

3.  Thanks.  I would now like to point everyone over to The Starting Five, a new site that includes two of our faves, D-Wil and TheSportsMediaReview, plus three cats that are new to us, but most be pretty talented if they are in the mix.  Obviously one of the main focuses of the website will be to speak out on media coverage, and the double standards.  We are looking forward to seeing them all on the same site.

Of course, we are little disappointed we didn't get an invite.  The brothers must not have room for a racist Latino who hates everyone equally in the mix, huh?  We're kidding of course.  

Check out D-Wil's piece on "What we can learn from Adam Pacman Jones". ; I am no Pacman Jones apologist (and neither is D-Wil - check out this post for proof) - the man was involved in a shooting that left a working man paralyzed for the rest of his life.  I don't have any respect for felons, and those whose actions lead to endangering innocent people's lives.  The post works because it doesn't comment on Pacman Jones, but uses bits of an interview with an NFL employee on the Jones situation to get at the larger disconnect between the perception of sport athletes by fans (pushed and influenced by the sports media), and the reality of their lives.  

Fans have been buying into the "spoiled rich athlete" bit for a while now; too many never really try to look beyond that, and far too few media people even try to offer evidence to the contrary.  Here's an NFL employee talking about the work that goes into making an athlete (particularly one from a rough urban background - Pacman Jones was raised in Georgia by his single mom and grandmother after his father was shot when he was six years old) "leave their cultural baggage at the door".   He then adds this quote, which deserves to stand on its own:

"The most difficult thing to do is cut those guys loose who had your back when you were growing up. To work with a young man who is trying to change the lives of the others who had his back when he was growing up while changing his own life..."

D-Wil then finishes off the post with an insightful look into what it is like to grow up as an athlete.  Professional athletes generally don't just show up as adults; they have been superior athletes all their lives, and that usually effects how they develop, how their childhood was, compared to the childhood of non-athletes.   I don't know how much of a comparable example this is, but it strikes me as similar to home-schooled kids, or those spelling-bee kids (like in Spellbound), in that they are not having "normal" childhoods like other people do.  Anyway, it's a good read, go check it out.

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