Note To Super Bowl Media This Weekend: Enough About The Damn Weather

If you’ve been following the Super Bowl run-up as closely as I have, you’ve noticed that everyone in Dallas is talking about one thing: the weather. It’s cold. It’s icy. It’s cold and icy. And windy and snowy and cold and icy and SHUT THE HELL UP ABOUT THE WEATHER YOU ARE AT THE SUPER BOWL.

(Takes deep breath. Continues.)

The Twitpics of your hotel rooftop were cute on Tuesday and there was a time early Wednesday when the ice storm was causing rolling blackouts, creating an actual modicum of news, in that the people who are at the Super Bowl to cover the game may not have had enough power to file their stories, talk on their shows or, gasp, surf the internet.

Today, there’s actual news about the weather as people have been getting hit by sheets of snow and ice falling off the stadium, at least one person critically injured. So by all means, cover that. It’s a terrible situation and it warrants hard-news coverage.

The rest of you? The sportswriters there to cover the game whoREAD MORE

Soapbox: Pujols, Cardinals’ Negotiations Forcing Closer Reading

This is a guest post by Nick from Pitchers Hit Eighth. Check out more of his work at www.pitchershiteighth.com or twitter.com/PitchersHit8th

Writing a St. Louis Cardinals blog means that unfortunately, I am acutely tuned in to the Albert Pujols contract negotiations.  It’s not unfortunate because of the potential to lose perhaps the greatest player of our era from my hometown team, but rather because of the way the negotiations are being carried out between team and player – in as complete a silence as seems possible in today’s media landscape.  Thus the resulting media coverage, particularly national media outlets and writers, becomes an amalgamation of anonymous sources, “understanding” of situations, repeating statements of the obvious, and perhaps most disturbingly – writing that purposely leaves the reader’s imagination or assumptions to run amok.  If you don’t believe me, check out the daily compilations of Pujols stuff that we’ve been accumulating at Pitchers Hit Eighth.

The national media in particular has really been scrambling, and it’s gotten worse in recent weeks.  After all, this is THE story of the MajorREAD MORE

The Redefinition of Perfect

Max is never going to pitch a perfect game.

We learned that yesterday, along with about six billion other things that come with the knowledge that your son has a blood disorder. Max has hemophilia, which is an issue with how his blood clots. In short, it doesn’t — or at least not enough to actually stop any serious bleeding he may have. There’s amazing science going on in our bodies, and thankfully for us, we live within a half hour of one of the best children’s hospitals in the world. It shouldn’t have taken nine months to figure out that Max has hemophilia and it certainly shouldn’t have taken as many issues (we’ll get to that) to figure out that something wasn’t right.

Alas, nine months, four days and about 15 hours after our son was born, we found out he’s not perfect. Max has, as we commonly say to explain maladies, “something wrong with him.”

Your Baby Is Always The Perfect Baby

It’s hard to learn your kid isn’t perfect. Max isn’t perfect. And yes, I understand how obnoxiousREAD MORE

Soapbox: Major League Baseball & Instant Replay, Upon Further Review

[Ed Note: Dash Treyhorn was a regular contributor at The Fightins (RIP). Follow him on Twitter]

Imagine, for a moment, that it’s the final weekend of the baseball season, and two teams atop the same division, both with the same record, are playing for one final playoff spot. It’s late in the game, and the game is knotted at four runs apiece. In the bottom of the ninth, with the go-ahead runner on second, the batter smashes a double that stays just fair down the third base line, which easily scores the runner from second to win the game, and the division, on the final game of the season.

Or did it?

What if the third base umpire made the wrong call and instead ruled it a foul ball, sending the only-moments-earlier-hero back to the box? What if he strikes out, and the visiting team goes on to win it in the tenth inning? What if?

Of course, what I described didn’t actually happen. At least, not in that context. In August, the Florida Marlins were the victim ofREAD MORE

Soapbox: Michigan Needs To Hire A Good Coach, Not Make A Good Hire

(Ed Note: This post comes courtesy of Ty Schalter of Detroit Lions blog The Lions In Winter.)

Bill Martin was, figuratively, standing alone in the rain. He was staring forlornly at the heavy oaken door to Rutgers Castle, just closed in his face. The sloppy wet spatters of New Jersey rain were figuratively pummeling his wispy comb-over as he wondered where he’d turn next. He’d figuratively come six hundred miles, figurative hat in hand, to ask Rutgers’ head coach if he’d take over the winningest program in college football history. Greg Schiano declined.

Martin was in a bind. Lloyd Carr’s storybook national championship farewell didn’t make it past the first chapter. A $226 million dollar Michigan Stadium renovation was already underway. He had a hundred years of tradition, a massive fan base, and an impressive donor list all demanding that stadium house a winner. Martin had publicly blown his chances with the best (and obvious candidate): Les Miles, an SEC coach whose #2-ranked team was about to play for, and ultimately win, a BCS National Championship. Miles,READ MORE

If Jim Harbaugh Becomes NFL’s Richest Coach, Should Current Coaches Hold Out For More?

[If you are a regular to the show, you've certainly heard Nick make reference to "our buddy Mike McKeeman" and the wonderful, if somewhat out-of-left-field ideas he has over email. This is one of those ideas. The words below are his.]

I want to see an NFL coach holdout. I complain all the time about petulant wide receivers who whine that they’ve outplayed the contract extension they signed just two years ago and threaten to sit out training camp and the regular season. But I would love it if an NFL coach decided to take this tact against an owner. I just want to see what would happen.

Could it happen next year? Rumors have Stanford head coach Jim Harbaugh signing a deal with the Miami Dolphins, or two or three other teams, that would make him the NFL’s highest paid coach. Harbaugh has been extremely successful at Stanford, taking over a team that went 1-11 the year before his arrival and leading them to an Orange Bowl victory and a Top 5 ranking four years later.READ MORE

Why Do We Vote In Hall of Famers, Anyway? A Rant.

I’m going to make this quick, mostly because I’m already so annoyed about reading Hall of Fame stories that I feel bad adding one more to the pile. Also because, well, I’m starting this at 1:27 and it’s going to lose some cache in about 30 minutes when we can spend all night debating who did or did not get into the Baseball Hall of Fame.

Here’s my only point in this rant: Bert Blyleven? That’s what we’ve become? We’ve become a nation that debates Bert Blyleven so hotly that we end up hating other members of the media who disagree with our thoughts? Even Jeff Bagwell and the did-he-or-didn’t-he steroid era guys spark so much pundit fodder that it has to make the average baseball fans sick and, frankly, start to hate the sport a little.

Well, I take that back; the debate certainly won’t make anyone hate the sport, but it could make you detest the off-season and it certainly makes you despise some of those sanctimonious jerks who cover the game…especially the ones whoREAD MORE

College Football: Where Every Week Is The Playoffs, Unless You Are (Or Play) A Mid-Major

There is one Big East team ranked in the BCS Top 25 (that is, unless you count TCU) and that’s West Virginia at 22. There are two ACC Schools in the BCS Top 25 with Virginia Tech sitting at 13 and Florida State at 23.

There are six SEC schools in the BCS Top 25, with three of those six placing in the top ten (Auburn 1, Arkansas 8, LSU 10).

There are two Pac-10 schools, both in the top five. There are three Big Ten schools and five Big 12 schools (or four and four depending on who gets to count Nebraska now that the season is over).

By my math, that’s 19 of the 25 BCS-ranked teams coming from “power conferences” with the other six teams being (in order): TCU (3), Boise State (11), Nevada (15), Utah (19), Hawaii (24), UCF (25).

Of the ten schools invited to participate in the BCS this season, just one — TCU — is from a non-power conference, despite the fact that six ended the season ranked higher than Connecticut, whoREAD MORE

The Big Leagues: Sports Blogging as Mainstream Media Business

In 1946, Peter Drucker invented the concept of the “company man” within his landmark book The Concept of the Corporation. His call to decentralize – or as he called it, de-federalize – and to give employees more power was seen as anathema by Alfred Sloan, the all-powerful CEO of General Motors. GM was then the most powerful company in the world, challenged only by Hughes Aircraft or perhaps the U.S. government itself. There were no giant banks. The brokerages on Wall Street were still a specialty industry. Japanese and German auto companies were still in rubble for the most part. Sure, there might have been a few more auto makers than just Ford and Chrysler, but names like Studebaker and Hudson weren’t long for the new post-war world.

By 2009, GM was bankrupt and split up. Pontiac and Oldsmobile were gone, consigned to history like Studebaker and the Edsel. While things seem to be turning around, the cyclical problems of manufacturing continue to make GM a company that may end up in that same dustbin, alongsideREAD MORE

The Geek Shall Inherit … (On Baseball, Bill James, Storytelling & The Simpsons)

Geek met geek when Bill James’ animated self showed up on The Simpsons this weekend. While that was happening, I was at a baseball game.

It might surprise you to know Ryan Howard doesn’t know his VORP.

Roy Halladay didn’t know his xFIP.

Jamie Moyer doesn’t understand BABIP.

The Reds? You think I’m going to ask those questions in Dusty Baker’s clubhouse? Forget it.

While Bill James was drawn yellow and cynical, the Phillies swept the Reds. It was the last time I’ll ever see my name and Baseball Prospectus on the same line of a credential list. I’m okay with that for a lot of reasons. One of them was in the radio booth. Jon Sciambi works for ESPN, doing radio and TV play by play. I met him years ago, actually on the field at Wrigley before the “Bartman game.” He and Len Kasper were working for the Marlins. Broadcasters seem to “get it” more than most when it came to my stuff, so I gravitated to them in the early days.

Sciambi wrote a great article at BPro earlierREAD MORE