Ken Rosenthal Is Bored, Stirs Pot With Ridiculous Pujols Trade Speculation

Pitchers and catchers reporting is not enough for veteran baseball scribe Ken Rosenthal. In his column today for Fox Sports, Rosenthal felt the need to make stuff up, admittedly so, in an effort to give every St. Louis Cardinals fan a heart attack. To the asinine machine!

WARNING: What you are about to read is pure speculation. It has not, to my knowledge, been discussed at any level. In fact, it is not even my idea.

Harold Reynolds mentioned the possibility Monday on MLB Network. My colleague, Jon Paul Morosi, informed me of it later that night. I then stole the idea from Morosi as if I were Lindsay Lohan in a jewelry store.

Albert Pujols for Mark Teixeira.

And, if that doesn’t work, Pujols for Ryan Howard.

Think it’s nuts? Think again.

Okay, Ken. I’ve thought again. It’s still nuts.

It’s 934 words of pure insanity. The St. Louis Cardinals are not going to trade Albert Pujols, even if this arbitrary deadline comes and goes. The fact of the matter is, the Cardinals have an entire season to figure out a way to keep PujolsREAD MORE

ETHICS: ESPN’S College Gameday Crew Had Super-Secret Nike Deals. Should We Be Concerned?

I’m not really sure how we’re supposed to feel about stories like this anymore. Richard Sandomir of the NYT with the dirty work:

Chris Fowler, Kirk Herbstreit and Lee Corso have deals with Nike that Corso described as a joint arrangement that largely involves speaking engagements for the athletic shoe and apparel company.

After an inquiry to ESPN about the announcers’ Nike contracts, Josh Krulewitz, an ESPN spokesman, said that Fowler, the host of “GameDay,” is “ending his minor association” with Nike “to avoid any potential perception issues.” Fowler was not made available for an interview.

Corso, Fowler and Herbstreit’s deals with Nike were never announced or disclosed to viewers. “We were unaware of these deals,” Krulewitz said.

There are two big reasons why this is news. First, a big deal was made about Erin Andrews signing a deal with Reebok, with some sports media types wondering if it could develop into a conflict of interest for the reporter. Second, and perhaps most importantly, nobody knew about these Nike deals? ESPN’s PR office didn’t even know? That’s crazy, isn’t it?

Or isREAD MORE

DL524: The Rock, Phillies Aces, Pujols, Rooney’s Bicycle, Bordain, Watson, Tough Kids & God’s Plan

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The headline explains enough. Oh, and I promised to link to this video of Wayne Rooney’s insane goal from the Manchester Darby this weekend.

Thanks as always for listening.

Call of the Day: IBM’s Watson on Jeopardy (The Sports Parts)

Yesterday was the much-heralded debut of WATSON on the fantastic game show Jeopardy! (the exclamation point is theirs, not mine). The half-hour program was basically an ad for IBM with a few questions sprinkled throughout, so hopefully the next two nights of man-vs.-man-vs.-machine will be more about the actual game and less about the giant server room that houses the dozens of racks it takes to make Watson intuitive.

The process is pretty neat, and there’s a little bit of that in this video (though I only put that in to show everyone that one of Watson’s initial choices for a question about non-dairy creamer was LPGA golfer Paula Creamer, which automatically qualifies Watson as one of the biggest LPGA supporters on the planet.) Still, there was a category about sports on the show last night, so here are all the sports parts.

Here’s my only issue with this gimmick: I’ve watched thousands of episodes of this show and always assume that every Jeopardy contestant knows at least 75% of the answers (or questions), making ultimate successREAD MORE

Site News: We Have Our Super Bowl Prop Bet Winners, Finally

Folks, sorry it took almost a week to get this figured out but we’ve finally gotten our prop bet winners for our Super Bowl contest. You can thank/blame Jimmy Traina at SI’s Hot Clicks for making me sift through hundreds upon hundreds of entries. Oh, and to those of you who filled out a poll without putting your name or email address…you are idiots. It’s a contest. How the hell am I supposed to figure out who you are if you won?

Idiots. 117 of you are idiots. You know what else? The 17 people who filled out the FAKE FORM I put up after the game started with CLEAR INSTRUCTIONS that the contest had ended and the form was just there as a reference…you aren’t just idiots but I can only assume are cheating idiots. I mean, seriously, folks, read the damn directions.

Now to celebrate those who didn’t just get called an idiot: Nick ended up with 15 correct answers, meaning that you needed to score 16 or higher to be eligible for some prize.READ MORE

DL523: Tom Ziller On Sports Blogs, FanHouse, SB Nation, Writing For Free & Oh, NBA Stuff, Too

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This is almost a two-part episode and the first time, inexplicably, that Tom Ziller has appeared on the show. Ziller is a lead basketball writer for SB Nation, recently leaving FanHouse a few weeks before the walls collapsed. Insider trading? I ask him (answer: no.)

Ziller was in rare Twitter form last week in response to this article by Dave Kindred that quoted FanHouse scribe Lisa Olson thusly:

“In December,” Lisa Olson said, “we were told how great we were doing.” Once a columnist at the New York Daily News, Olson remembered The National strutting on stage in 1990, a national sports newspaper hiring good people from everywhere. She thought of FanHouse that way, a gathering of veterans on a journalistic adventure. “We were all experienced and qualified, not some 25-year-old bloggers,” she said. “The motto was, ‘Go, go, go. Grow, grow, grow.’ And we did. Then, this. It’s devastating.”

Ziller was, at one point, a 25-year old blogger at FanHouse, back when it was good and way before it was being sold off forREAD MORE

Call of the Day: “And The Fans Are Storming The Court At The RAC”

Do you think when Eamon McAnaney and Tim Welsh were assigned Villanova at Rutgers that either of them thought they’d have the game of the day, especially when the day featured Duke-North Carolina and especially when that Duke-North Carolina game featured an epic come-from-behind win by the home team?

Alas, Rutgers upset Villanova with an epic come-from-behind win of its own, down by as many as 13 points, including a ten-point deficit with just over two minutes to play. Then, this happened:

The announcers certainly seem as shocked as the viewers (and, it seems, Jay Wright). An obvious congratulations to Rutgers head coach Mike Rice for getting his first-season signature win, something his team has been knocking on the door of for a few weeks in the Big East. Now, they’ve got it…in the craziest of ways.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t comment on the fans storming the court. I hate the randomness of fans storming the court and do think there should be some unwritten — hell, written — set of rules for doing so. ThisREAD MORE

DL522: Did NFL Do Enough For The Seatless 400? A Debate. Plus: Superhero TV Failures

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I got a comment that was complaining about a post I wrote that suggested the NFL did a lot for those who were totally screwed by the Dallas seat debacle. I wanted to mention it before moving on to some conversations about TV and other non-sports stuff.

Then Nick disagreed. So welcome to the rabbit hole show.

We do talk some TV and try to figure out why the biggest movies every year seem to be Superhero flicks, yet no superhero TV show seems to work (other than Smallville, which had a modest audience on CW and likely would have failed if put on a network that needed better ratings).

Why can’t we get the old Batman or Hulk TV or Wonder Woman shows that would get a good rating? Or even lesser known original characters like NBC tried (and is failing) with The Cape? Wasn’t The Greatest American Hero a great show? Believe or not, it was.

Call of the Day: Mike Emrick + Overtime = Win.

As someone who grew up in New Jersey, right over the bridge from Philadelphia and a few hours south of the Meadowlands, I’ve always hated the Devils. Following a Flyers team that has featured, what, 20 different starting goalies in the last ten years, I’ve certainly always hated Martin Brodeur. So this season, with the Flyers atop the standings, the Devils near the bottom and Brodeur having the worst season of his (grits teeth) illustrious career, it’s actually been a lot of fun following New Jersey.

Still, the one thing the Devils will always have that the Flyers, don’t anymore: Mike Emrick. Sure, Doc will call the occasional Versus or NBC game that might feature the Flyers, and obviously he’s the lead guy for the playoffs so he should get a full dose of Philly games there, but as a kid who got to listen to Emrick call games for the Flyers from 1988-93, it’s always been annoying to hear him do Devils games. Pardon the nostalgia, but the play-by-play tandem of Mike Emrick and GeneREAD MORE

Running Numbers: Translating The Insane NFL TV Viewership Into “Unique Views”

We’ve all read release after release after release about just how good the ratings were for the NFL this season. Just how good, you ask? Well, according to CBS:

Through 17 weeks of the 2010 regular season (September 9, 2010-January 2, 2011), THE NFL ON CBS regular-season games were seen by an estimated 164.2 million viewers, 10% higher than NBC’s 149.8 million viewers, 1% higher than FOX’s 162.1 million viewers and 48% higher than ESPN’s 110.9 million.

Those cumulative numbers were based on total viewers (P2+) who watched at least six minutes of NFL game coverage. Add in record numbers for the playoffs (take it away, FOX):

Ratings climbed to astonishing levels as the [NFC Championship] game progressed, peaking at a 31.5/53 rating and 59.5 million viewers from 5:30 – 6:00 PM ET as the Packers punched their first ticket to a Super Bowl in 13 years. FOX Sports estimates that 80.3 million Americans saw at least part of Sunday’s game.

Let’s not forget NBC winning every Sunday night (and two weeknights) of the season, en route to recordREAD MORE