MLB season preview

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Yesterday marked the beginning of baseball season, as the Seattle Mariners stomped on the Oakland Athletics 3-1 (a 2 run win qualifies as a big win for Seattle). For most teams, however, opening day does not occur until next Thursday. That’s good, because it gave me time to write this preview. Be warned: MS Paint is heavily involved, because I have been playing a lot of Draw Something lately and I want to keep drawing stuff. Also, I just need something to set this apart from any number of other MLB previews out there. Accordingly, after every division preview you will find a graphical representation of the division. I’ll go through division by division and then say who I think will take the various wild cards.  Keep reading…

Hollywood Nights: A Magic Haiku

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Last night, an ownership group led by Magic Johnson bought the Los Angeles Dodgers for $2 billion, the largest amount ever paid for a sports franchise.

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Magic bought the Dodgers.
Media really loves this story,
forgets The Magic Hour.

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Previously:
Hollywood Nights: Z-Bo and Bishop Don The Magic Juan

ALDLAND’s March Madness Challenge: Standings after four rounds

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It’s time for the Final Four in the NCAA men’s basketball tournament. A whole lot of moving and shaking went down in the Sweet Sixteen and Elite Eight.

Looking at the current standings in ALDLAND’s Mad as a March Hare March Madness Challenge, North Carolina’s loss in the Midwest Regional final to Kansas appeared to shake up the standings the most. Out of our twenty-onetwo entries, here’s the current top ten:

Click here to see the full standings.

While Bingo_Bango managed to avoid heartache by persevering in the top spot since our last update, the Tarheels’ loss kicked WrckMTech 2 from a tie for third out of the top ten and dropped FBDOCameron 1 and lranthony1 1 from that position into a tie for eighth. Perhaps even more notable and as the secret formula predicted last week, SemiNOLA’s leveraged bracket collapsed, falling from sole possession of second place to a tie for seventeenth. Ditto for Can we Have Kemba Back?. Vpresben 1 also slipped, going from a tie for eighth to tenth.

All of this provided opportunities for lower entries– picking Kentucky to win it all appears to be the common feature amongst this group– to climb toward the top. Mjpascha 1 hopped from a tie for third into second place. Best-entry-name category nominees Goldbourne Supremacy (T-8 to T-4) and Escaped from a Tchiengang (T-10 to T-6) were two of the beneficiaries as well, and Ifartblackandgold 1 moved in concert with the latter. (Cf. Twombly v. Bell Atlantic.)

The big award of the week goes to Austin_Payne 1 who jumped from nowhere into a tie for fourth. Additional mention is due to our late-arriving, twenty-second entry, AndyGlossner 1, submitted by a frequent commenter on the site and stepping into an outright hold on third place.

Heading into the final two rounds, things look pretty locked up, although an Ohio State win over Kansas could allow AndyGlossner 1 and Austin_Payne 1 to unseat Bingo_Bango and mjpascha 1.

Finally, a nod to Bingo_Bango and Austin_Payne 1 for unorthodox picks (from the state of Kentucky) to come out of the West, although the former’s selection of Louisville now looks better than the latter’s selection of Murray State.

Enjoy the final two rounds.

Hollywood Nights: Z-Bo and Bishop Don The Magic Juan

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Apparently we’re just posting pictures now. This one’s a little less self-evident than the last one, so here’s the accompanying explanation from Chris Ryan, writing about Sunday night’s Grizzlies-Lakers game in L.A.:

Staples Center celeb sightings were pretty fun, if random, last night, with Ashton Kutcher, John McEnroe, David Beckham, and Gerard Butler (gone blond) lighting up courtside with their wattage. But the best appearance of the evening went to a man who seemed to be cheering for the Grizz: Snoop Dogg compatriot Don Magic Juan. Don’t know if there’s ever been a better union of team and fan. Oh, and he seemed to have a preexisting relationship with Zach Randolph, because of course he did.

The Beards of Summer (via The Classical)

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Chris Siriano wants to get the hell out of Michigan. Even on a gorgeous fall day in Addison (population 627), with the leaves turning and the sun bright, Siriano—middle-aged, sporting a gray goatee and ball cap—can’t stop dreaming about the beach. “I raised my daughter by myself and everybody knew that when I got the kid to college, they could reach me in the Caribbean by email,” he says. “I’m done with Michigan winters, basically.”

Two barriers stand between the Benton Harbor native and moving south. The first is not unusual: A few years ago, Siriano married the love of his life, a fellow Michigander who didn’t share his interest in fleeing south. The second is more distinct. Since the mid-1990s, Siriano has owned and curated the House of David Museum, a 4,000-square-foot archive that tells the weird, hirsute story of the most popular barnstorming team in baseball history.

To describe the House of David in such forceful terms is warranted. For two decades in the early 20th century, a band of religious eccentrics from Southwest Michigan was one of the biggest draws in sports, selling out ballparks in big cities and small towns across the country. Baseball fans adored their aggressive style of play, vaudeville flair, and flowing beards—House of David players were forbidden to shave because of an obscure rule in the strict doctrine to which they adhered. More than any franchise of its day, the House of David skillfully exploited the American love of spectacle. Siriano, who has spent much of his own energy and money preserving their largely forgotten story, is convinced the fascinating artifacts he has recovered belong in the Wolverine State. … Read More

(via The Classical)

Scrutiny of the Bounty: An Epilogue

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The prequel and pretension past, along with the run-of-the-mill fodder, we found ourselves– thanks to a reader tip– staring down the barrel of epiloguist Jen Floyd Engel’s perspective-granting long lens in the form of her piece for Fox Sports, “Blaming Saints is height of hypocrisy.” Looking back on the NFL bounty story, Engel seeks to contextualize the thematic strands of that story with those of another and mix in a bit of stern-faced judgment for total effect. Standard-issue English 110.

I can’t specifically recall reading anything of Engel’s before, although I surely have, but the first stumbling point for me came before I even made it to the text. Maybe I still am crotchety after Charles P. Pierce’s bit on this matter, but as someone slightly out of the mold in the nomenclature realm, I have to wonder why Engel goes (presumably) nickname, middle name, last name. If she wants distinction, isn’t Jennifer Floyd Engel the way to do it? For example, Pierce doesn’t use Chuck P. Pierce (although Google suggests he sometimes uses Charlie, but where he does, he drops the middle initial (Google doesn’t know Pierce’s full middle name)). But ok, enough.

After “soak[ing] in all of the moral outrage and denunciations” of NOLA football, Engel shares with us her “first thought”: “Who will play Barry Bonds in this ‘sports tragedy’”?

Huh? Hopefully no one! Why would anyone bring Barry Bonds into this? Watch out sophomore seminar in comparative literature, here comes one now.

Continue reading →

ALDLAND’s March Madness Challenge: Standings after two rounds

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We’re up to the Sweet Sixteen in the NCAA men’s basketball tournament, which means that you’ve probably figured out by now that your approach to predicting this thing has– to be generous– a few imperfections. It also means that we’re one-third of the way through the tournament, and we’ve whittled a field of sixty-eight down to sixteen.

Before the action resumes on Thursday, let’s take a gander at the current standings in ALDLAND’s Mad as a March Hare March Madness Challenge. We had twenty-one entries, and the top ten looks like this:

Click here to see the full standings.

My initial observations upon surveying the field are that the first and second place entries, Bingo Bango and SemiNOLA are a cut above the rest. Even though a 70.5 accuracy rate suggests that SemiNOLA should be pretty good through the rest of the tournament, the fact that s/he already picked FSU to win it all and has a miniscule 520 possible points remaining means that those of you who picked SemiNOLA in the derivative brackets bracket probably are in some trouble. Along those lines, the entries with the best odds, based on past performance and PPR are Bingo Bango (secret formula predicts a first-place finish, currently in first); mjpascha 1 (T-2/T-3); WrckMTech 2 (T-2/T-3); lranthony1 1 (4/T-3); and FBDOCameron 1 (5/T-3). Careful readers will note that ALDLAND writers Brendan and I are not in the top ten, predicting games at astoundingly poor accuracy rates of 19.5% and 25.6%, respectively.

Finally, early leaders in the best-entry-name category go to Golbourne Supremacy and Escaped from a Tchiengang.

Enjoy the games this week.