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djokovic on losing

Sure, Tiger has his knee problems, but here's some cross-sport support for the kernel of truth in his Nike ad about mental toughness, Wimbledon third seed Navat Djokovic on losing to unseeded Marat Safin.

In the end, this is another reason to show to the people that this is a very mental game. ... Even though you are feeling great in certain moments and feeling a lot of confidence and motivation, everything can blow away in a second if you are mentally not ready and prepared for the challenge. Today, I had just a block, a mental block.

knapp on bonds

Chronicle sports columnist Gwen Knapp on the Bonds indictment:

If Bonds is guilty, the best outcome would be a plea agreement, requiring him to say aloud what really happened. The BALCO prosecution started with the mission of cleaning up sports, and a long jail term can't match the effect of a confession from a superstar.

sooo tacky

NYTimes: "Boras made his announcement by e-mailing The Associated Press during the World Series game."  Just as soon as everyone figured out that Lowell would win MVP.  You stay classy, A-Rod.

it's his

George Vecsey in the New York Times (behind the Select paywall; isn't that going away?) on Barry Bonds hitting number 756.

It’s his record. What is baseball going to do, come up with some magic formula to pare down his home run totals? They are all his, every one of them. Victor Conte of notorious Balco didn’t hit them. Greg Anderson, the trainer guarding Bonds’s secrets in a California jail, didn’t hit them. The people who made money off Bonds and the union officials who blocked testing didn’t hit the home runs. Barry Bonds hit them, all 756 of them.

madden on walsh

More on Bill Walsh.  John Madden is on the Bay Area's KCBS every morning at 8:15; this morning he talked at length about the genius.  (Dear KCBS, I wish you had better permalinks for each of the shows.)

the genius

The San Francisco Chronicle's Ray Ratto on Bill Walsh; worth quoting at length:

He was also a complex man, well-read, solicitous, and curious about things beyond the 6,400-square-yard box in which he made his living and his reputation. Yet, at his core, he was the prototypical man of combat. He loved boxing, he was an avid reader of books about generals, and believed in the inherent truths of competition. That flew in the face of his reputation, largely unfair, that he was an effete, ethereal poser, not made of true coach's cloth.

Well, truth is he did like to cast the image of the grander thinker, the great conceptual artist, the whistled humanitarian, even the wry comedian. But he was very much a coach, with a coach's eye for skills, both ascendant and waning; for personalities, dominant and compliant; for the separate pieces and the greater whole; for strategies and tactics, for grace and brutishness  --  all the things that separate football from a bar fight. He built, dissembled and rebuilt with cold, remorseless precision, and his ruthlessness did not always sit well with those pointed toward the door.

game of shadows

Being a Giants fan, this probably isn't the best way to get ready for the season, but while the boys of summer are enjoying spring training, I've been reading the new paperback edition of Game of Shadows: Barry Bonds, BALCO, and the Steroids Scandal that Rocked Professional Sports. Two things of interest / note...

First, I kind of followed the coverage in the Chronicle as the story broke, so I knew the general outline of the story with Victor Conte, Barry Bonds, Jason Giambi and the rest of that illustrious crew.  But I didn't know the extent to which Conte, Greg Anderson and the other BALCO hangers on were such sycophants, clutching at the hems of not only the baseball stars, but also the doping Olympic track and field stars.  Nor did I know the extent to which those athletes relied on Conte and BALCO; I guess this speaks to the lack of an open, transparent market for undetectable performance-enhancing drugs.  If you're Marion Jones, you can't fire your dealer just 'cause he's creepy.

Second, Fainaru-Wada and Williams do a great job of presenting the Bonds stats that back up their case that what has happened in the latter stages of his baseball career is, frankly, insane.  Appendix Two of the book is full of analysis (charts and graphs!) of Bonds' career, homeruns per at bat, comparing composite careers before and after steroids, etc. It won't be enough for the sabremetrics crowd, but it was enough to help bolster the reporting...

If you're a baseball fan (or a track and field fan, for that matter), you owe it to yourself to pick it up.

customer hostile programming, again

Another fall Sunday, another afternoon spent shaking my fist at the geniuses at the NFL.  This time it was the Eagles / Cowboys game being shut out by the Niners / Raiders.  Customer hostile programming continues.

Until a few days ago,

Until a few days ago, I would have loved to have seen a Red Sox / Cubs World Series. But after the debacle of the AL's game three and Dusty Baker's press conference tonight, I'm not so sure. Even if the Sox and Cubs defy the odds, I'm starting to get that 1994 feeling in the back of my throat...

First, the Yankees / Red Sox fiasco. Those were very well paid grown men going at each other's throats on national television. And regardless of the bragging rights, bonus dollars and emotions involved, outbursts like that don't belong in a pennant race. Adding insult to injury, Ramirez, Zimmer, Martinez and Garcia were fined by the league for their behavior, but without any public acknowledgement by the league of either (a) why they were being fined or (b) the amounts of the fines. Memo to Selig: these are the playoffs, not some mid-June three-game road trip. Transparency into the disciplinary workings of MLB would go a long way towards re-establishing trust that the league actually cares about behavior like this.

Second, the foul ball. What a goddamned shame. Here's a guy, clearly a Cubs fan -- complete with hat and headphones -- lucky enough to have a seat along the third-base line. Foul ball comes his way, and he does what any fan would do -- he goes for the ball. Alou misses the catch, gets upset, and neighboring fans (the ones wearing identical Cubs hats) start pelting the poor bastard with beer and hotdog remnants. It's one foul ball, one that would have been meaningless had the Cubs not gone on to blow the rest of the inning with subpar pitching and a critical error by Alex Gonzalez. (And for those of you not following along at home, the Cubs go on to lose the game, 8-3.)

Hey, it sucks to lose. And it sucks to lose if you're a Cubs fan, if only because they've had so much practice. But the way this is being handled by the press is irresponsible, and even dangerous. In the broadcast immediately following the game, ESPN's SportsCenter anchor essentially blamed the fan for the loss, and joked about whether he'd be safe inside the city limits of Chicago. At this moment the front pages of ESPN.com, The Chicago Tribune, Yahoo Sports, The New York Times and MSNBC all feature that heartbreaking photo. But the insult on top of the injury was Dusty Baker's comments at the press conference after the game. When asked about the foul ball, Baker shook his head in disbelief and muttered that the guy -- the one in the bright blue Cubs hat and headphones along the third-base line -- must have actually been a Marlins fan.

I know it would be naive of me to tell these guys "hey, relax, it's only a game," since professional sports are anything but. For me, though, the images of Zimmer on the ground, the Cubs fan wiping beer from his face and Dusty Baker crying "fan interference" have tarnished baseball. Nine years after the World Series that wasn't, it's starting to feel like 1994 all over again.

Update: Andy Baio posts a summary of how The Smoking Gun and the Chicago Sun-Times have outed the fan's name, his age, employer, little league team and neighborhood. He's also tracking photoshop remixes of the photo. What a shame.

Update #2: Some quotes from Cubs players. Pitcher Mark Prior got it right...

"We didn't lose the game because a fan jumped in (Alou's) way," he said. "Ninety-nine percent of the people here in that situation would have done the same thing. You can't blame him. Hopefully, most people understand that. We didn't lose the ballgame because of that."

First baseman Randall Simon did, too...

"If something happens to that kid, it's going to hurt us as a team. I am going to be praying tonight for nothing to happen to that kid."

But Moises Alou hedged...

"I kind of feel bad for the guy," Alou said. "Every fan in every ballpark, the first reaction they have is they want a souvenir. They don't think about the outcome of the game or what could happen. Unfortunately, it happened. The guy saw a shot at having a baseball, and he went for it. Hopefully, he won't have to regret it for the rest of his life."

Update #3: The Dead Parrots Society has links galore, including this Editor & Publisher interview with Sun-Times editor-in-chief, Bob Steele's piece at Poynter.org about the Sun-Times' naming decision, and a link to a supposed eBay auction of the guy's business card, which has since been pulled.