An American Running Back in London (via WSJ)

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Mostly he walked. He walked all around London. Down narrow streets to Hyde Park, to the Thames River, to bustling Piccadilly Circus, hidden in the crowd like an anonymous tourist. “Just kind of hanging out, man,” Barry Sanders said. He saw “Les Miserables,” which he also saw in New York. He saw another show, but he couldn’t remember which one. Occasionally, somebody would recognize him. But usually they did not. He met some students from the London School of Economics. They talked a little football. American football.

Back home, everybody wanted to know why Barry Sanders had disappeared. … Read More

(via WSJ)

Going to the vault to preview LSU & Florida

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Being in existence for little more than a year, there really isn’t much of an “ALDLAND Vault” at this point, but week six necessitates a new approach to game previews. There wasn’t much in the way of top-25 matchups last weekend, but it’s a different story this weekend. Some highlights, in chronological order:

Ken Burns’ Old Mississippi

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Ole Miss feels a lot like the most literary team in all of college football, and while I can’t put my finger right on the reason for that, I don’t think it’s just because of Faulkner, although there is that. It’s been more than a year since we all noted what I thought was the final chapter of Ole Miss’ mascot tale, although that story’s had an extended epilogue, which probably isn’t surprising. I think “Mississippi” was the first word I remember learning how to spell.

In our America, of course, all great literary things get the film treatment, and the best of them get the Ken Burns treatment. Arguably proving my above-stated thesis, Ole Miss is no exception.


(HT: SB Nation)

Real talk: The media is completely blowing it on the Miguel Cabrera triple crown story

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Miguel Cabrera, the Detroit Tigers’ third baseman, enters tonight’s game against Kansas City, the last game of the baseball season, leading the American League in home runs, batting average, and RBI. The last time a player in either league finished the regular season with the lead in all three categories (i.e., won the triple crown) was 1967, forty-five years ago. This is a huge deal.

It’s a huge deal, and it’s failing to register a commensurate blip on the national media radar, and that’s a shame. This is not a Detroit-complex issue, a simple want of attention and validation (I’ve addressed that concept before), but if Cabrera was a member of the Yankees or Red Sox, to name two teams, Kansas City would be a media circus right now. The game would be on national radio and television broadcasts, and Sportscenter would have a running clock counting down the minutes until the first pitch.

There has been some national coverage this week, it’s true, and the national baseball writers, like Jonah Keri and Joe Posnanski, have been somewhat better about this than their broadcast counterparts, but come on. This is a readily understandable, offense-involving achievement that hasn’t happened in nearly a half-century, and it’s only happened about a dozen times ever. This should be receiving the Tebow treatment, the Brett Favre’s locker treatment, heck, even the Roger Clemens pitching a minor league baseball game treatment. The NFL draft gets more coverage than this story. And what coverage Cabrera’s story gets, as anyone who read the @ALDLANDia feed early this morning knows, is uninformed, manufactured, trite media banter.

Cabrera has been nothing but humble, deflecting, and team-oriented this entire season. He deserves the spotlight, but he’ll never ask for it. Even if he did, it’s too late now, the first pitch of the 162nd game moments away (it’ll be his 161st game of the season). He should be invited to the White House if he secures the triple crown tonight, but even those two are too busy.

Keep reading for update…

ALDLAND Podcast

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ALDLAND is back with its most intense baseball podcast yet.  We have playoff predictions.  We have triple crown coverage.  We even speak about the elusive quadruple crown.  Also covered: a stupid sport with stupid players and owners that isn’t even going to play a season this year.  Someone else needs to step up and listen to this while Pax is in the Alps.  Will it be you?  It better be.

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Download the ALDLAND podcast at our Podcasts Page or stream it right here:

Picking at the Scabs: Week 4

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The NFL’s replacement official charade certainly has become a tired to quite tired act. The volume of written responsive outrage is headed that way, too. While it’s good that the media is heeding Jim Leyland’s call for them to hold officials accountable, there’s only so much complaining you can or want to read. This new, weekly feature takes care of the latter problem for you. Each week, we’ll sift through the glut of hyperbolic, whining responses and pull out the best snippets for you.
As we all know, the real NFL referees were back in action for all of Week 4, meaning that this is yet another of ALDLAND’s short-lived features, though we prefer to think last week’s edition was the precipitating factor for their return. Here’s a sendoff to the replacement officials and this feature, presented, as before, without comment.

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David Roth:

But there is, finally, only one thing to find at the bottom of all this, and it’s worth repeating. This whole florid thing springs from a cold—and, it seems so far, astute—calculation on the part of the NFL’s Rand-oid ownership class. That calculation, which is not precisely new but has a new manifestation over these last three weeks, is that people will watch NFL games no matter what, no matter how slow or poor or wrong or off or dangerous things are allowed to become on the field. . . . That [the owners] haven’t and won’t pay up to make their hugely profitable product palatable says a good deal about them. It says a lot more about how they think of us, and of the game that enriches them.

Lingerie Football League:

Because of the LFL’s perception it is that much more critical for us to hire officiating crews that are competent, not only for the credibility of our game but to keep our athletes safer. Due to several on-field incompetent officiating we chose to part ways with with a couple crews which apparently are now officiating in the NFL. We have a lot of respect for our officials but we felt the officiating was not in line with our expectations.

We have not made public comment to date because we felt it was not our place to do so. However in light of tonight’s event, we felt it was only fair that NFL fans knew the truth as to who are officiating these games.

Foot Locker:

Despite recent allegations, our employees have spent the last few weeks at our stores and not [working as replacement referees] at NFL games.

Mike Florio:

Some have suggested that Commissioner Roger Goodell’s handling of the officials lockout should result in the termination of his employment.  The more accurate position is that he should get a raise.

Roger Goodell:

We are sorry to have to put our fans through that, but it is something that in the short term you sometimes have to do to make sure you get the right kind of deal for the long term and make sure you continue to grow the game.

Pacman Jones:

Guys are going to have to play with a lot of technique now [that the real officials are back].

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Previously
Week 3

Holmes’ Lament

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The AP reports:

A person familiar with the situation says New York Jets wide receiver Santonio Holmes has a Lisfranc injury to his left foot, meaning the team’s struggling offense probably will be without its top playmaker for the rest of the season.

Holmes went down on the first play of the fourth quarter of the Jets’ 34-0 loss to the San Francisco 49ers on Sunday after catching a pass. X-rays on the foot were negative, but subsequent MRI exam results were sent to a foot specialist in North Carolina. The Jets’ fears were then confirmed, according to the person who spoke to the Associated Press on condition of anonymity Tuesday night because the team had not announced the severity of the injury.

Holmes was the best player left on a team that had already lost its best player, Derrelle Revis. That leaves only Mark Sanchez, Antonio Cromartie, and Timothy Richard Tebow as active Jets anyone’s possibly heard of, and they haven’t necessarily heard of those guys for the best reasons.

There’s little argument that Holmes’ departure seals the fate of a team already showing signs of being dead in the water. With their current 2-2 record, the Jets can’t be historically bad, but there’s absolutely nothing keeping them from being epically bad, and they’ve taken more than a few bounding steps down that path. The problem is that the pump arguably was primed for that destiny before the season began, before Revis and Holmes got injured, before Sanchez and Tebow gave us evidence of their stunted development as professionals, before Cromartie donned 2011 Holmes’ locker-room-killing mantle. Now we’ll never know for sure whether this Jets team, fully healthy, still would have been capable of the type of losing they’re in for. Not only does Holmes’ season-ending injury leave us irretrievably in this alternate-1985 reality, though. The real lament is that history will note the injury as an explanation, a rationalization, even a partial justification of what is sure to be a disastrous Jets season when these Jets were capable of such beautiful losing all along.

The DET Offensive: You forgot about J(ustin Verlander)

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As the 2012 MLB season winds down– the Tigers are up three over Chicago with three games to go, all against the Royals– the national focus on Motown thankfully has shifted away from a record that has to be considered a disappointment even if the team makes the playoffs and onto the achievements of Miguel Cabrera, who is well within reach of winning the first Triple Crown since Boston’s Carl Yastrzemski in 1967, and whether those achievements make him a more worthy MVP than Mike Trout.

While it’s interesting to note that Cabrera is doing all of this while having his “worst offensive season in three years,” it’s more interesting that no one is talking about Justin Verlander as a serious Cy Young candidate despite his having a nearly identical season to the one he had last year, when he ran away with the Cy Young and took home the MVP as well. Joe Posnanski elaborates:

Justin Verlander is, in so many ways, every bit as good as he was last year. He’s striking out the same number of batters, walking just a tick more, and allowing fewer home runs than he did last year. He has given up a few more hits. But he leads the league in strikeouts and innings pitched like last year and you can add in most complete games.

It is true that last year he led the league in ERA and he’s second now to David Price … but he again leads the league in ERA+, which takes into account the ballpark where they pitch. Verlander pitches in Detroit, which has evolved into a pretty good hitters park. Price pitches in Tampa Bay, a hitter’s dungeon.
…
The point is that Verlander is basically the same guy he was last year. Only, last year he went 24-5. This year he’s 16-8. And that seems to make all the difference. Last year, he won the Cy Young unanimously and became the first starter to win the MVP since 1986. This year — at least from what I can tell — people hardly seem to be talking about him as a Cy Young candidate. I hear a lot of David Price and Chris Sale and Jered Weaver, and these are all worthy candidates. But, once again, I think Verlander has been the best pitcher in the American League.

It gets, once more, to the issue of sports narratives. Last year, Verlander was superman. He went into the playoffs last year as this force of nature … and the record will show that in the playoffs (an odd playoffs, admittedly, because of rain) he posted a 5.31 ERA and did not throw a single quality start. But the narrative was so powerful that people STILL kept going on and on about how gutsy Verlander was, how extraordinary, how Koufax-like, how he was almost single-handedly keeping the Tigers alive.

This year, the narrative has gone the other way, the narrative has been that Verlander has been, you know, eh, good but not the mega-monster he was last year. The narrative has turned instead into how now Miguel Cabrera is superman carrying the Tigers. Narratives are fun, but they aren’t necessarily true. Verlander really is just about as amazing as he was last year.

Jonah Keri succinctly concurs: “Justin Verlander has posted numbers in 2012 virtually identical to those of 2011, yet he’s somehow considered just one of several candidates for Cy Young and a no-chance-in-hell guy for MVP, after winning both awards last year.”

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Finally, looking as far ahead as I’ll allow myself, the Free Press reports that Max Scherzer sounds like he’ll be ready to go for the playoffs, or even this week if necessary.

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Previously
Get perspective – 9/12
Everybody knows this is nowhere – 8/31
Now it’s just offensive – 8/29
Explode! – 7/23
Halfway at the Half-way – 7/9
Interleague Play – 6/26
Call the Experts! – 5/26
Recipe for a Slumpbuster – 5/2
Delmon Young Swings and Misses – 4/30
Brennan Boesch’s Birthday – 4/12
Tigers open 2012 season with Sawks sweep – 4/9

Ring tones: Two raconteurs battle to tell the tale of Boom Boom Mancini

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Boxing is and remains at the nexus of raw athleticism and raw celebrity, and its literary and musical ties are no less strong today for the decrease in volume of evidence of those ties that reasonably tracks the decrease in the sport’s popularity. I don’t feel any special need to perpetuate the sport except that I would hate to see it go, which is why I try to keep an eye on it here. (Click the “boxing” tag at the bottom of this post for past coverage.)

I was looking forward to reading this interview with Boom Boom Mancini’s latest biographer, and although I did learn some interesting details about the fighter’s life, the interview wasn’t anything special. It did recall an earlier Mancini biographer, though, who gives a crisp, thundering delivery:

(I also think more boxing matches should take place outside.)

Narrow Margin Monday

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Excepting the above-depicted forty gambler-point swing victory by Middle Tennessee State University, the Volunteer State’s biggest school, over Georgia Tech, there were a lot of close college football games on Saturday. Michigan State lost by one to Ohio State. Although the internet’s had a lot to say about that game in the way of eye-gouging, taunting, and the pregame game tape exchange, there’s not much to say about the game itself beyond the observation that OSU’s Braxton Miller is pretty good. Even though it was high scoring, West Virginia only beat Baylor by a touchdown in Morgantown. Of course, it was really high scoring. Like 70-63. Big Ten basketball territory. Other top-25 games, though not quite as close, probably were closer than the winning team would’ve preferred. Alabama beat Ole Miss 33-14 in a game that was in reach for the underdogs (underbears?) in the fourth quarter. Washington State put up 26 against Oregon, which is 26 more than Arizona could do. Texas and Oklahoma State went to the wire, and UGA-UT was a one-score game as well. Clemson got back to its winning ways with a 45-31 win over woeful Boston College.

The pros sang a different tune on Sunday, though, at least in part, when Denver found its legs against Oakland (38-6), New England posted 52 on Buffalo, and San Francisco bounced back with a 34-0 shutout of the dead-in-the-water-not-walking-on-water J-e-t-s. There were some close games in the NFL too, as the Cardinals won by three in overtime to inexplicably stay undefeated, and the Saints lost by one to stay defeated.

On the topic of defeats, the U.S. team absolutely melted down on the last day of the Ryder Cup, surrendering a supposedly insurmountable lead. We now return to our regular golf coverage, which, absent Jungle Bird, is nonexistent.