Unbearably Bad Baseball

Best World Series game ever? Are you freaking serious?

I have heard that term used at least five separate times already to describe Game 6 of the 2011 World Series from Thursday night, when the Cardinals snatched victory from the jaws of defeat repeatedly in winning the game and forcing a deciding Game 7 with a walkoff home run in the bottom of the 11th inning. And my first thought when I heard that description was "What are these people, four years old?"

Come on guys. Best World Series game ever? A game in which:

The home team gives up a run in the top of the first inning, in a game in which they have to win, or go home.

The road team then follows up by immediately giving up two runs in their defensive half of the first inning, in a game where they had already grabbed a lead that, if it held, would bring them their first world championship in franchise history?

A game with five errors, including multiple crucial missteps by the Rangers in the late innings to blow not one, not two, but three separate leads after the 7th inning?

Not one, not two, but three blown saves by the Rangers? All in one game?

28 hits allowed by the two teams in 11 innings? 19 runs?

Come on, guys. This might have been an exciting game, but please don't fall into the clueless monkey's trap of just calling whatever the most recent game is, the "best game of all time". My lord. I can think of at least five better World Series games than this, just in the past decade or so. Anybody remember John Smoltz vs. Jack Morris in 1991, still the best World Series of my lifetime? Anybody remember the infamous Dodgers - Oakland game featuring Kirk Gibson and "I don't believe what I just saw!" in 1988? I mean, it's not like I'm going back 80 years or something. The list just goes on and on and on of far better ball games than last night's straight-out massacre of the game of baseball itself.

Game 6 of the 2011 World Series was a freaking embarrassment is what it was. And, sadly, it's a microcosm for what this entire World Series has been. In addition to being the least-watched World Series in modern television history, these two teams have butchered what are generally considered the tenets of great post-season baseball over and over again, night after night, like two blind kids with sticks just bumping into each other and swinging blindly game after game. Believe me, as a lifelong baseball fan and especially as a Phillies fan, it has been absolutely painful to watch.

As bad as the Rangers have been about giving up 1st and 2nd inning runs to the Cardinals in this Series and then having to play the rest of the game from behind, you've had the Cardinals' starting pitchers not make it through the 4th inning three times already in six games. I mean, just think about how bad that is! And they've actually won three of these games anyways! It's like these teams are just putting children out there on the mound, lobbing 'em in, and letting the other team just whack away, batting-practice style. They might as well just set up a tee on home plate and play a good old-fashioned 1st grade little league game. As a longtime baseball fan who is used to pretty much always seeing good pitching in the Series, this matchup has truly been an abomination to behold.

You've had the Rangers now with 8 errors in 6 games, including two critical errors in Game 6 to go along with 3 errors from the Cardinals in the same game (the "best game of all time", ha!), with the Cardinals chipping in with five errors of their own over the 6 games so far in the Series. As a general statement, the fielding in this Series has been nothing short of atrocious, with even the big stars on both teams repeatedly costing their teams games by failing to execute the very basics of the game on defense, blowing leads and ruining big chances for either team to grab absolutely crucial wins.

The managing by Ron Washington and Tony LaRussa has been highly questionable to say the least -- enough to make even Phillies' idiot manager Charlie Manuel look smart -- with in particular LaRussa making gaffe after gaffe in an uncharacteristically sloppy show from a guy who is thought to be one of the better managers in the game today. The guy couldn't even figure out how to call for the right pitcher to come in in Game 5, for crying out loud! Is this even real? You would never have believed that bullpen story if you didn't see it with your own eyes. LaRussa has also muffed at least one if not two critical at-bats from Albert Pujols with ill-timed and poorly thought-out steals or hit-and-run calls in very key spots. And meanwhile, Ron Washington is so coked up that he isn't even starting his ace Derek Holland, he of the 16-5 regular season record and the absolute shutdown of the Cardinals in Game 4, on full fucking rest, in Game 7 tonight, in favor of Matt Harrison, who took 73 pitches to get not even through the 4th inning in a Game 4 blowout by the Cardinals, while LaRussa is at least smart enough to take advantage of the extra day off due to the Game 6 rainout and start his ace Chris Carpenter in the deciding game of the Series. Honestly, if you told me to purposefully go out there and manage like an asshole, I'm not sure I would have come up with some of these moves. If Matt Harrison gets shelled again tonight and the Cardinals win the Series, so help me god Ron Washington better get his ass fired, or that franchise will never win a World Series during the lifetime of anyone reading this post right now. They'll be calling it "The Curse of the Cokehead" by the time your great-grandchildren are into baseball, you heard it here first.

So the pitching has been utterly abysmal in this World Series, and the fielding has been almost just as bad. The managers are out there embarrassing themselves and the game of baseball night in and night out. Basically, everything but the offenses have been utterly and completely putrid between both of these teams, now over six games and counting. The baseball audience has been itching for some actual good baseball so badly that in a game with featuring five errors and three blown saves, not just idiot fans but shitheads on ESPN and in baseball are actually trying to claim it's the best World Series game of all time? Oh. My. God. Again, as a fan of easily the best team in the sport during 2011, and one with the greatest pitching anyone has seen in generations, the best I can hope for at this point is that the Cardinals -- who have got to be massive favorites to win the Series tonight -- and the Rangers at least stop insulting the game long enough to play nine relatively clean innings of ball, and that we can declare a winner that, although obviously not really able to say they played "well" in the Series, can at least be able to know that they played better than their opponents by the time all is said and done. But please don't be one of those fools calling Game 6 the best game of all time. "The game where neither team wanted to win badly enough to string together a couple of clean innings of baseball" is about as far as you can reasonably go.

The Cardinals earned every inch of their appearance here in the 2011 World Series, and I'm not even beginning to take anything away from them and you've never heard me say that they don't belong here where they are right now. But my god, the Phillies would have swept this series so badly against the hapless Rangers, they probably would have called it on the "mercy rule" after three games. I hope the Phillies players are out there watching this series and suffering like I am, night after night. Because the play of these two teams just plain sucks.

Chip Off the Old Block

Donovan McNabb's statistics for the five years preceding his trade from the Eagles to the Redskins in 2010:

2009 14 games 60.3% completions 3,553 yards 22 tds 10 INTs 92.9 qb rating

2008 16 games 60.4% completions 3,916 yards 23 tds 11 INTs 86.4 qb rating

2007 14 games 61.5% completions 3,324 yards 19 tds 7 INTs 89.9 qb rating

2006 10 games 57.0% completions 2,647 yards 18 tds 6 INTs 95.5 qb rating

2005   9 games 59.1% completions 2,507 yards 16 tds   9 INTs 85.0 qb rating


Carson Palmer's statistics for the five years preceding his trade from the Bengals to the Raiders in 2011:

2010 16 games 61.8% completions 3,970 yards 26 tds 20 INTs 82.4 qb rating

2009 16 games 60.5% completions 3,094 yards 21 tds 13 INTs 83.6 qb rating

2008 4  games 58.1% completions   731 yards  3 tds  4 INTs 69.0 qb rating

2007 16 games 64.9% completions 4,131 yards 26 tds 20 INTs 86.7 qb rating

2006 16 games 62.3% completions 4,035 yards 28 tds 13 INTs 93.9 qb rating



McNabb's average numbers over the five years immediately preceding his trade:

12.6 games 59.6% completions 3189 yards 19.6 tds 8.6 INTs 89.9 qb rating

Palmer's average numbers over the five years immediately preceding his trade:

13.6 games 61.5% completions 3192 yards 20.8 tds 14 INTs 83.1 qb rating


Adjusting for Carson Palmer's devastating leg injury three years ago, here are McNabb's average numbers over the two years immediately preceding his trade:

15 games 61.4% completions 3735 yards 22.5 tds 11 INTs 89.7 qb rating

Palmer's average numbers over the two years immediately preceding his trade:

16 games 61.2% completions 3532 yards 23.5 tds 16.5 INTs 83.0 qb rating


Donovan McNabb was traded to the Washington Redskins in between the 2009 and 2010 football seasons for a 5th round draft pick.

Carson Palmer just got traded to the Oakland Raiders for a first round draft pick, and a second round draft pick, that itself becomes another first round draft pick if the Raiders appear in the AFC Championship game in either of the next two seasons.

Mark Davis, somewhere your father Al is smiling in his grave that you have decided to so proudly continue his tradition of pure, unadulterated idiocy. Only, your father was old and senile for years...what's your excuse?

Tilt and the Poker Media

With the news today that full tilt has been shut down globally after losing its license to run its online gaming operations, I find myself thinking, as I have often as I've read the increasing number of anti full-tilt posts out in the blogiverse over the past month or so, about the free pass that a great many bloggers and other members of the poker media gave full tilt for the first several weeks following the U.S. online poker ban, and even in many cases that is still happening today. As the full tilt saga continues to take affirmative steps that seem headed for the site collapsing under its own weight and not ever being able to find sufficient funds to pay back the full deposits of at least its American players, I can't help but think how funny it is that basically everyone we know in the poker media, among our blogger crew and everybody else in between out there is now taking credit for having been right all along in their predictions regarding full tilt poker ever since the events shortly after April 15. When meanwhile, in actual reality, six weeks ago, it was just me, one or two other bloggers, and a small handful of posters on 2+2 decrying full tilt (they deserved it), stating that the site had commingled funds and did not have sufficient money on hand to pay out their players (they did not), and predicting that things would get a lot worse for our chances of ever seeing our money before they get better (they most certainly have).

Go check it out. Over the past few weeks, I have read no fewer than five poker writers, bloggers or other posters trying to take credit for having been right all along and seeing this coming with the full tilt situation, when in reality you can very easily look and verify that they were there back in late April, swimming right along with the masses of fish all proclaiming that hey, this is full tilt, owned by the poker pros themselves, they won't screw everyone over, especially not with the WSOP coming up. What a joke. Even when the shit is right there to be proven false, linked right there on these people's own blogs, just inches of screen space away from their lies, they all still want to take credit now for having seen this avalanche coming. Right.

Everybody has to claim to be an insider, in the poker media more than anywhere else. Where six weeks ago it was "I know the full tilt guys, full tilt will come through, full tilt would never commingle our funds with their own, of course full tilt has the money", now with the very same people it's all "I always knew something was up, I could smell a rat from the beginning." Nice try, but no. I smelled a rat right from the beginning. You blindly backed your "friends" in the industry, while day by day, chess move by chess move, your rosy expectations and over-trusting naivete showed themselves more and more clearly for just that. You put your faith in a collection of some of the least trustworthy, most shady people out there, and boy did you ever get burned.

It's one thing to be getting screwed by full tilt here. We're all getting screwed, every minute of every day while we do not get our funds back. I wrote here in black and white a good eight weeks ago now that we all already had been screwed, from the moment it became clear to the unbiased and open-eyed among us that full tilt had in fact commingled our poker funds with their own, to such an extent that they could not now come up with enough money to pay all the U.S. players back our own money. So it's one thing to recognize and admit that you've gotten screwed. But to try to take credit for being out in front of this whole full tilt mess now that your "friends" involved with the company have shown their true colors -- when it was so painfully few of us who actually got it early on -- really adds insult to injury. Just own the fact that you got duped like 99% of the country, and maybe try to learn to be a little more open-minded and objective next time.

It was tough for a while back in May, being one of the only people I could find out there suggesting that full tilt might never pay us back our poker funds from their coffers. That our funds might not even exist. People have a lot of money tied up on full tilt, and many make their very livelihood from the availability of full tilt, so I took quite a lot of shit a couple of months back from the bitterest among the blogging community. Many said I was being needlessly pessimistic. A few attacked my lack of knowledge, or my lack of written substantiation for any concerns I was voicing (as if anyone supporting full tilt back then had any such "evidence", obviously). And many simply insulted and attacked me, without any real reason, for having a view that did not jibe with what they desperately wanted to be the truth, even though their view of the truth never sat well with me or seemed all that likely to happen.

For what it's worth, I don't only chuckle at all those people now who should have seen the truth coming like I did a couple of months ago but whose own world view could not allow them to see the forest for the trees so they are now vainly trying to take credit for having seen this all along when in fact they were major contributors to the lack of seeing this problem for what it really was. I actually think the poker media, bloggers, etc. contributed in a small way to the current state of full tilt's business. Most of the major poker media sites, the bigger poker bloggers and other poker outlets on the Internets basically gave full tilt a pass for the entire first month or more after April 15 of this year, and that I think gave the powers that be at tilt the idea that they could maybe actually get away with screwing everyone and live to tell the tale. When you've got some of the biggest and most widely-read writers about poker, many of whom have written or otherwise worked for full tilt or their largest competitors over the past few years, either remaining more or less silent while one of the biggest heists in online poker history was playing out its first act, or outright coming out in blind support of full tilt with obviously no actual reason to do so, it sent a terrible message to the founders of the site, one that I think has stuck with those people right up to now, as we near the seeming bitter end for what was once everyone's favorite site to play at. Of course nobody out there will own up to having done that now, but that's exactly what mostly everyone out there in the poker media in fact did, and I'm telling you, that collective pass and the rush to trust for everything full tilt was doing for 4-6 weeks after Black Friday contributed to where we're at today.

Just imagine if all the same people who have, say, devoted countless hours, day and weeks of their lives to investigating, reporting on, and just generally telling the world the truth about the UltimateBet / Absolute scandal, had spent the first three or four weeks after Black Friday working just as hard to look into the financial situation at full tilt and to make the truth known to the world, with the same fervor and devotion that they accorded to the UB cheating matter. Or, remember when a couple chips went missing during the WSOP Main Event a few years back? We had two or three professional poker bloggers and writers out there covering almost nothing but that story for days and days on end. And you know what? The shit works! If enough people jump on an issue or a story early enough, if they dig deep enough, and if they stay at it long enough, we've seen cold, hard proof that they can really make a difference. Not just in uncovering the truth when they do, but in actually helping to frame the issues and ultimately contributing in some way to the eventual resolution of the problem.

With full tilt, the poker media in general dropped the ball in my view. Not to blame the media in any way for what ultimately is 100% full tilt's own doing here, but the poker media has done a better job in the past on other issues, and should have followed the lead of the very few such as myself who publicly never thought full tilt's story smelled exactly kosher, and done a similar job here right from the getgo in digging to the bottom of the issues and starting to suggest ways to influence full tilt management to do the right thing. Instead, while all your favorite bloggers publicly came to full tilt's defense and told you over and over again for several weeks that of course full tilt will return everyone's funds, attacking all the while those few voices out there suggesting that maybe all was not roses for the former second-largest U.S. online poker site, management at full tilt saw an opportunity to do things clearly against the U.S. players' interests like turning down Phil Ivey's "White Knight" deal and a few other deals that were offered that would have secured the return of player funds in exchange for giving up control of the full tilt asset, and they jumped on that opportunity with the understanding that the poker media was simply not out for bear from them like they clearly have been for AP/UB, the WSOP and others when other similar controversies have arisen in the past. And I can't help but notice the correlation between that unbelievable (to me) level of trust right off the bat for full tilt, and the fact that now it appears more and more almost daily that full tilt could have gotten us back our own money, but now they probably cannot.

This is one story where I can honestly say, it hurts to have been right all along.

How Can Yankees Fans Live With Themselves?

Well, I'm still here basking in the glory that is Cliff Lee returning to the Phillies, now more than 24 hours after the news shocked the baseball world and sent Phillies Phans around the globe into an absolute tizzy. I've read just about every story on every major media outlet, every blog post from a Philly blogger, everything I could devour since Tuesday's big announcement, and it looks like I'll be taking at least one more day before focusing on what is still missing from this Phillies team before we can pencil in another World Series championship for the Fightin Phils.

Today, my focus is on exactly how all this happened. I mean, ultimately, Cliff Lee had an awesome time in Philadelphia in 2009, he loved the team, the players, the coaches, the stadium, and he loved the area in general, including the home he bought in New Jersey when he was traded to the Phils a couple of years ago, which he never sold even after leaving the team for Seattle, Washington, and then Arlington Texas in the middle of the 2010 season.

But, having lived in New York City all through the past baseball season, I can't help but think that the Yankees fans themselves literally played a big part in why Cliff Lee walked away from 34 million more guaranteed dollars offered by the Yanks to sign a shorter-term deal to return to the city of brotherly shove. For those of you who don't live in the area and/or don't follow post-season baseball like I do:

According to a report in the USA Today on October 26, 2010, while the American League Championship Series was being played in Yankee Stadium, the wife of Texas Rangers ace Cliff Lee was reportedly not happy with how the Yankees fans treated her while she was sitting in the visiting family section at the Yankees' new stadium in the Bronx.

Kristen Lee said there were ugly taunts. Obscenities. Cups of beer thrown. Even fans spitting from the section above.

“The fans did not do good things in my heart,” Kristen says.

“When people are staring at you, and saying horrible things, it’s hard not to take it personal.”

Well there you have it. The comment about the fans "not doing good things in my heart" really sticks out to me for some reason. Does that sound like a woman who would want her husband to turn down $24 million a year to play in the city they both loved, in favor of committing to two more years at around $23 million a year in the city whose fans "did bad things in her heart"?

Is it truly possible that Yankees fans are such fucking pigs that they literally chased away the only chance they had of Cliff Lee coming to play for them?

What must Yankees fans be thinking about themselves right about now?