Fall ball: ALDLAND takes you to the action in Motown

Posted on September 11, 2011 by AD

Tiger Stadium (1912-1999)

This afternoon, the Detroit Tigers will try to sweep a three-game set against the Minnesota Twins at Comerica Park in Detroit. I will be on hand for the game, so stay tuned to this site, twitter, and flickr for updates.

Doug Fister is scheduled to start for the Tigers, and although his record on the year is 7-13, he struck out thirteen in his last start (against Cleveland) and took a perfect game into the seventh inning in his previous start (against Kansas City). The Tigers have won ten of their last eleven games, including a current eight-game winning streak, so this should be a fun one.

Album review: Tedeschi Trucks Band – Revelator

Posted on September 8, 2011 by AD

I have been meaning to review Revelator since before it came out earlier this summer, and I was excited when my vinyl/CD package finally arrived a couple weeks ago. Revelator is the Tedeschi Trucks Band’s first album, though it’s hardly the first release for any of the eleven members of the band.

To understand this band and this recording, you have to know that the named members of the band, Susan Tedeschi and Derek Trucks, were independently successful musicians before they got married in 2001, a matrimonial match made in music heaven. Tedeschi sang the blues with soul and fire as a solo act. Trucks, the nephew of Allman Brothers Band drummer Butch Trucks, has been wowing audiences with his guitar since he was a child, later joining his uncle’s band and leading his own outfit, the Derek Trucks Band. The two did collaborate over the last ten years. The DTB didn’t add a permanent lead singer until Mike Mattison joined for 2006’s Songlines, and Tedeschi sang a track on 2002’s Joyful Noise and 2009’s excellent (and Grammy-winning) Already Free. The two also joined their guitars with Eric Clapton’s as a part of Slowhand’s Crossroads tours. Although they followed the wedding ceremony, these and other collaborations were like musical flirtations or dates between the two, who largely appeared to live separate, if overlapping, professional lives.

Revelator, though, represents the marriage. Keep reading…

Summer of Mailbag V: Passing the Buck (via Grantland)

Posted on September 6, 2011 by AD

Basically, the Tigers give up five runs per start unless Verlander is pitching. They’re 21-8 when he starts and 54-54 when he doesn’t. Fourteen times, he’s followed a Tigers loss by winning the next game. He’s pitched at least six innings in each of his 29 starts. He’s thrown 104 pitches or more in every start. He’s first in wins (20), WHIP, strikeouts, innings pitched; second in ERA (trailing Jered Weaver by just 0.10) and WAR (trailing only Bautista). You can only pick him apart because he’s pitched half his games in a pitcher’s park; that’s why his ERA+ is only 168 (barely ahead of Weaver’s 164). By pure numbers, Bautista’s season is a little more impressive than Verlander’s season, which is why the WAR differential (8.0 for Bautista, 7.3 for Verlander) makes sense.

Then you consider the pressure Verlander faced for five months (and counting) as the ace of a mediocre team. Every time he pitched, he HAD to go seven or more, he HAD to save their bullpen and they HAD to win. What it’s like to fall asleep every night knowing that every teammate, coach and fan is counting on you, that you’re basically holding an elaborate stack of Jenga blocks together by yourself, that you can’t escape, that you can’t have a shitty day, that you can’t check out, that you can’t do anything other than keep pitching at an extraordinarily high level or your team’s entire season is going to fall apart? Is there a bigger responsibility in sports? If Bautista had been “average” this season, Toronto’s fortunes wouldn’t have changed. If Verlander had been “average” this season, Detroit would be headed for fourth place and total obscurity. Instead, nobody in his right mind wants to see Justin Verlander in a seven-game series right now. … Read More

via Grantland

Text messaging competitions: Non-sports vs. no sports

Posted on August 24, 2011 by AD

August is known as a slow sports month, which means it probably isn’t the best time to start a new sports website, but here we are. An NFL labor dispute provided a compressed preseason that offered some contrast to that part of the baseball season right before most people wake up and start watching again (which means it’s exactly when the Tigers will go on a tear (and as soon as I write that, for them to blow it in the 10th against the D-Rays)) and that part of the NASCAR season where drivers are still screwing around, oblivious to the fact that the lack of urgency probably will cost them a spot in the playoffs.

Revelations about the Longhorn Network grew into the second annual Texas A&M-SEC flirtation that again has fizzled, and the news of brazen NCAA violations at UMiami are simultaneously so flagrant and unsurprising that there’s not much to add to Charles Robinson’s initial report. And so we cover year-old mascot news.

On the sports blogging front, famous ex-benchwarmer and blogger of the people Mark Titus of Club Trillion apparently now is writing for Grantland, to no tidings whatsoever. I can’t decide what to think about this. Everywhere but on this site, Grantland has been taking it on the chin pretty badly, and even I’m beginning to find The Triangle’s daily sports update by Shane Ryan unreadable. Titus has been the anti-establishment candidate for as long as he’s been a public figure, and probably longer, so it’s tough to see him alongside the purported literary elite that populate Grantland, even if that site’s natural audience surely must be welcoming his voice.

While that relationship, to the extent it is one, remains in its embryonic stages, a new site lurks on the horizon. The Classical, a conceptual rival to (at least the idea of) Grantland, is slated to get rolling possibly by the end of this year.

Sports bloggers probably fall into two camps: the big time, corporate types viewed as influential but out of touch, and the small time, snarky, critical types viewed as operating on the rumor level as much as the cutting edge. Whether internet sports writers are generally clueless reactionaries or hypercritical gossipmongers, they managed to pull it together for uniformly positive and heartfelt responses to the news that Lady Vols’ basketball coach Pat Summitt was diagnosed with early onset dementia. (See here, here, and here, among many other examples.)

All this to say that, today, I traded the slow sports news for the non sports news when I saw a commercial during the TV dead zone that is 6:30-7:30 pm Eastern for a text messaging contest on Wednesday night. I haven’t been able to locate the details on this particular contest online, but apparently these things happen from time to time.

Texting is not a sport, and neither is gambling, but for someone who likes writing about sports (and, really, writing about writing about sports), gambling on sports has a certain, vague attraction, even if I don’t gamble myself, and so I took in Bill Barnwell’s second dispatch from Vegas for Grantland. Of course, I’d trust Barnwell’s betting advice as much as I’d trust that of former vice presidential candidate Wayne Allyn Root or Danny Sheridan. Barnwell does provide some background information on gambling terminology and strategy, though, and that’s nice even if it isn’t always accurate. What I do enjoy from him are the parts of his submissions that talk about the history of Las Vegas, and about trying to find a way to live there and maintain sanity and financial solvency. Having spent just twenty-six (consecutive) hours in Vegas, I have just enough personal experience to enjoy following Barnwell on his desert adventure. We’ll see how long my jealousy lasts.

Finally, Wednesday saw the fruits of a story I’ve been trying to cultivate since the early days of The Triangle and Google+, which is to say, July. It was then that the unappreciated legacy of Kerry Collins, associated more with memories of problems with alcohol and, per the New York Times’ “Black People” section, misplaced racial epithets, than gridiron greatness, came to my attention:

Collins retired this week, which, considering that I happened to graduate from the same college at around the same time, and considering that he once (rightfully) mocked me in a pizza parlor after I got wildly intoxicated on sambuca, seals both of our journeys from misbegotten youth into adulthood. And while we’re here, I would like to note that Collins has more passing yards than Jim Kelly, Donovan McNabb, Phil Simms, Steve Young, Y.A. Tittle, Johnny Unitas, and Troy Aikman. If he had won the 2000 Super Bowl with the Giants, and then made the Super Bowl with the 2008 Titans, he would be a borderline Hall of Famer. As it is, he has to be considered as the most underrated decent-to-very-good quarterback of the past 15 years.

The author makes a fairly remarkable point here, even excusing his sambuca-driven intoxication, and it’s one that Chris Johnson, Collins’ former teammate in Tennessee, mentioned in my fake interview with him the other weekend. Bill Polian, president of the Indianapolis Colts apparently got the memo too, because he pulled Collins out of retirement as insurance for an ailing Peyton Manning. And there’s the ALDLAND news/non-news cycle. Good keeping up, all.

By 2010 standards, Justin Verlander is having a Cy Young Award-winning season

Posted on August 17, 2011 by AD

During Justin Verlander’s 8K, 1 run, 7 2/3 inning retribution against the Twins last night that ended in a 7-1 Tiger victory, the Fox Sports Detroit crew ran a graphic comparing Verlander’s numbers so far this season with the 2010 final season numbers for Felix Hernandez, the reigning AL Cy Young winner. The comparison looked something* like this:

Verlander became this seasons’ first eighteen-game winner last night, his sixth straight win. There are about five weeks remaining in the regular season, during which time Verlander will try to cement his claim to the Cy Young Award against contenders Jered Weaver and C.C. Sabathia.

* It looked almost nothing like this, but it might if FSD’s on-air talent, Rod and Mario, had to do their own infographics too.

Major League Basebrawl, Round 4,700

Posted on August 8, 2011 by AD

On Friday night in San Francisco, the Giants’ pitcher, Ramon Martinez, hit Phillies CF Shane Victorino, which, in short order, caused a bench-clearing brawl for the forty-seven-thousandth time in MLB history. Martinez’s pitch apparently was no accident; rather, it was some sort of response to the decision by Philly’s previous batter, Jimmy Rollins, to steal second after his two-RBI single put the visitors up 8-2 in the sixth.

I don’t know whether this episode is dumber than the Angels-Tigers spat about which I wrote last week. It’s a tough call: benches didn’t clear in the Detroit incident (hardly an “incident” by that town’s standards), but the unwritten rules supposedly violated– admiring a home run and bunting during a no hitter– were much tougher to justify in the circumstances; in SF, benches did clear, but stealing second up six in the sixth at least is closer to jerk-move territory. Keep reading…

Could A-Rod be the 21st century’s Pete Rose?

Posted on August 4, 2011 by AD

From the front page of the USA Today sports section:

The New York Yankees third baseman is being investigated by Major League Baseball for participating in illegal poker games and could face suspension.

“We take this very seriously and have been investigating this matter since the initial allegation,” MLB spokesman Pat Courtney said in a statement. “As part of the investigation, the commissioner’s office will interview Mr. Rodriguez.”

The first allegation came early last month when Star Magazine published a story that several people saw Rodriguez playing in poker games that were also attended by celebrities such as Leonardo DiCaprio, Ben Affleck and Matt Damon.

…

Wednesday, RadarOnline.com alleged that drugs were used in one game, and that another game organized by Rodriguez ended when a fight not involving the slugger nearly broke out. RadarOnline.com cited unnamed “eyewitnesses.”

One subsequent article states that A-Rod faces a risk of suspension, while others report questioning of the initial story by A-Rod’s publicist and others.

In the big game of baseball legacies, Rodriguez already has two strikes against him and is fouling off pitches due to admitted steroid use, a soft reputation on the field, and a sometimes misguided personal life away from the diamond. But what if it was a gambling problem that actually knocked him out?

While there are no allegations A-Rod gambled on baseball or any other sport, it’s Pete Rose’s gambling issue alone that’s keeping him out of the hall of fame. (For more on the baseball hall of fame’s potential anomalies, click here.) Charlie Hustle has all sorts of support, even given his gambling issue. It’s tough to imagine many people clamoring in A-Rod’s defense were this yet-unexplored potential gambling issue to blow up for him. If gambling put Rodriguez out of the game and the hall, it would be the only thing he and Rose had in common.

Justin Verlander: Right on the mound, wrong on the bunt, but the kid is alright

Posted on August 3, 2011 by AD

Sunday at Comerica Park in Detroit featured a premiere MLB pitching matchup between the Los Angeles California Angels of Anaheim’s bemulletted Jered Weaver and the Tigers’ Justin Verlander. Although the Tigers won, it was Verlander who took heat for some of his post-game remarks. Keep reading…

Ty Cobb as Detroit (via Grantland)

Posted on August 2, 2011 by AD

Like those who romanticize Cobb’s meanness, Detroit’s cheerleaders try to balance negative press by powering uncomplicated positive stories: a café opened here, an art installation opened there. Unfortunately, this is a story too simple and stagnant to be honest.

Ty Cobb can be a cruel man, and at the same time be a misunderstood hero. Detroit can be both a ravaged, bleeding city and an inspired place where creative people are imagining new ways for an urban center to be successful. In fact, that’s exactly what is true. … Read More

via Grantland

The Toronto Blue Jays have eyes in the skies

Posted on August 1, 2011 by AD

From ESPN New York:

New York Yankees manager Joe Girardi said his team needs to use multiple signs even when there is no one on base at Rogers Centre because the Blue Jays “could be” stealing signs using illegal methods.

“Sometimes we have inclinations that certain things might be happening in certain ballparks and we are aware of it and we try to protect our signs,” Girardi said.

What author Andrew Marchand did not mention was that the Jays’ record as of the day he posted that article was 47-48, good enough for penultimate place in the AL East. Yes, Yankee pitcher Bartolo Colon’s meltdown was somewhat epic (and arguably somewhat epoch), but you’d think they’d be winning more if this was their strategy. After all, the Patriots went 18-1 in 2007-2008.

Maybe it’s a new strategy and they want to make a run in the second half. With the Yankees, Red Sox, and D-Rays, Toronto’s division is a tough one, but they knew that going into the season. Why wait so long?

(UPDATE: The Jays now have eked above .500, with a 55-53 record, having gone 8-5 since that game. They nevertheless remain in fourth place in the division, twelve back of Boston.)

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