Hello everyone, welcome back to Life, Love… Sport (the censored Edition). As per orders, today’s article will be squeaky clean; no offensive jokes, no rude opinions, and no making fun of ex-presidents.
Was it me, or did the All-Star game feel slow? I understand that the game is in Las Vegas and there are more important things to do then to play basketball, but at least put forth an effort. The various other story lines made more of an impact than the actual game.
Tim Hardaway’s comments on gays got him banned from the weekend. Britney Spears ended up shaving her head sometime during the weekend, which places the actual game somewhere on the bottom of the list of “most interesting stories from Las Vegas on All-Star Weekend.”
Returning to the wonderful world of hockey, the Penguins are somehow in the top half of the conference. Many of you probably don’t care much for hockey, but this is significant. When you acquire three top picks in a draft, the expectation is that you will be better. However, better is a relative term. This year, the Penguins were expected to make the playoffs, no more, no less.
Add that to the fact that they have had some ownership issues, and you get an extremely difficult environment to operate a franchise.
However, Sidney Crosby has led them to the brink of contention for the Stanley Cup. Provided that the Pens don’t collapse over the stretch, it’s foreseeable to see them in June.
I would like to get a word in about NASCAR. The Daytona 500 was on this weekend. And you couldn’t miss it-ESPN was covering it like it was (place your own joke here).
I have no problem with NASCAR getting their own channel to broadcast all their races and whatnot, but interrupting a regular SportsCenter broadcast to talk about the height of cars in a qualifying race is a big no-no. Memo to NASCAR, no one cares! Also, it takes away time from the coverage of real sports, which makes everyone angry.
Football is back in business. With the beginning of free agency and the scouting combine, the NFL is truly a league that never sleeps.
Perhaps the biggest story came from New England golden boy Tom Brady. Apparently he and Bridget Moynahan are expecting a child. Here’s to hoping that being a dad will not affect his play. Although with the receiver that he had to work with last year, I doubt anything affects him anymore.
The list for the week deals with baseball. Specifically, the biggest stories of spring training. More specifically, stories that made fans of the respective cities grit their teeth in frustration and could cause mass hysteria come mid-July.
1 – A-Rod and Jeter not being nice to each other. Guaranteed to be the biggest, most overplayed story of the spring, only because Jeter is free from blame and Alex can’t buy himself any respect from the media. Boston fans, rejoice.
2 – Barry Zito with the Giants. What a match, a button-down, straight-laced organization filled with old guys meets a young, laid-back pitcher. If you thought that the controversy over his new delivery was big, wait till July when Barry doesn’t want to start on three days rest.
3 – Daisuke Matsuzaka and the Red Sox. As if Fenway tickets weren’t hard to get already, now there will be hordes of new fans trying to get into Red Sox games, which is good for the team in terms of exposure, but this just adds fuel to the argument in favor of a new ballpark. One in which there will be more than 33,000 seats and all the seats will face home plate.
4 – The Cubs and their $300 million investment(s). Let’s be clear here, this has to work, otherwise the people of Chicago will rise up and someone might get hurt. Alfonso Soriano Also, Lou Piniella is back in the dugout, expect bigger and better tantrums.
5 – How bad will the NL be this year? Regardless of the fact that St. Louis won the World Series, the rest of the league has to pick up the slack.
6 – Hookers. Just because.
Final Fact
Pitcher Joe Nuxhall of the Cincinnati Reds hurled his first major-league game in 1944. Nuxhall, the youngest pitcher in major league baseball, was only 15 years, 10 months and 11 days old when he pitched that game against the St. Louis Cardinals.
Maystrovsky’s article appears weekly.Maystrovsky is a member of the class of 2009.
