This is Why Your Auto-Spellchecker Is Not Enough.

The Minimalist's Thirty-Million-Dollar House

Near the end of May 2013 it was reported that New York Yankees third baseman Alex Rodriguez’s Miami home had sold to an unnamed buyer for $30 million, making it one of the most expensive home sales in the city’s history.

Rodriguez bought the property for $7.4 million in 2010, and spent roughly the same amount on building the house, which was finished about a year later. Less than four years after starting construction, Rodriguez was able to sell the house for a profit of somewhere near $15 million.

Now, we don’t object to making a profit—in fact, if we someday sell our own home for an extra fifteen million dollars, then so be it. That bothers us even less than it bothers us for ESPN.com to describe a 20,000-square-foot house—one with nine bedrooms, eleven bathrooms, home theater, and an outdoor kitchen (as well as the more mundane indoor gourmet kitchen)—as “minimalist.”

See if you can guess which of these houses is the quaint,
minimalist bungalow formerly owned by Alex Rodriguez.

We do admit, however, to being a little puzzled. In one of the worst housing markets and worst overall economies most living Americans have seen—or at least can remember clearly—this house was sold after less than four years for twice its previous price. What kind of luck is that?

Honestly, who on Earth gets paid tens of millions of dollars in order to get something that’s just going to sit there, inert, doing nothing but getting older and more and more run-down, and may well have been built using illegal materials in the first place? 

What?

 Hey—

  
Oh wait—

Yeah, we remember who now. Alex Rodriguez.

A Young Man's Dream Come True

Czech-born hockey forward David Krejci had to have been excited when, on April 2, 2013, his Boston Bruins traded for his childhood idol, twelve-time NHL All-Star and two-time Stanley Cup champion Jaromir Jagr. It’s hard to imagine a young athlete who doesn’t dream of one day suiting up with his or her favorite athlete, and not only has gotten to play with his idol, but also is (as of this afternoon) only two wins away from winning a championship with him. That has to be exciting.


As it turns out, Krecji isn’t the only Bruin who gets to skate with the favorite player from his childhood:




Getting to hit the ice with Jaromir Jagr has to be a dream come true for Jaromir Jagr, even if the guy hardly ever passes him the puck or even looks him in the eye.

The best comment we’ve seen so far on this comes from Yahoo Sports:

“In Jagr's defence, who would he have named as his favourite player anyway? When hockey was invented, he was nine.”¹

NOTES
1. We’d probably find this even funnier if we weren’t just barely younger than Jagr, and weren’t getting awfully thin-skinned about our impending decrepitude. But, hey, this is the internet; we can hardly expect people to pass up the low-hanging fruit of an “old guy being old” joke. Besides, have you seen the guy? He’s forty-one years old—shouldn’t he have, like, died by now?²
2. See what we mean? Low-hanging fruit. Cheap jokes. Internet.

And Now, One Reason to Dislike Hockey Players. Or At Least the Crazy Ones.

To be fair, we have never heard of this happening anywhere else on Earth, so we choose to view this as less of an indictment of hockey players in general and more of an exhibit that even people that seem perfectly normal on the outside can, on occasion, do something absolutely batshit crazy.


For more information on this especially bizarre story, follow this link to the article on Deadspin.com, which includes gem of understatement:
 

As it turns out, Rogue Squadron has won every game this year in which one of their players didn’t poop inside an opponent’s equipment.

The World's Deadliest Drinking Game

About a week ago, we more or less accidentally discovered the deadliest drinking game in the history of human civilization.

We realize this is a bold statement to make, and one that requires a certain amount of qualification. We admit that it is, in fact, possible to create a drinking game more deadly than the one we’ve discovered. Some examples that we absolutely recommend you do not ever, ever try include:

1. That drinking game where you take a shot every time you breathe.
2. The game where you take a sip every time somebody writes something offensive or stupid on the internet.
3. That one that involves turpentine.
4. The one where you re-create a day in the life of Oliver Reed.

The difference here is that the above games are obviously deliberately designed to kill you, whereas our discovery, is intended to be fun and entertaining, with your unavoidable death being merely an accidental if unfortunate side effect.

The single rule of this game is as simple as it is devastasting: listen to Mike Emrick talk, and take a shot every time he says something weird.

Hockey play-by-play announcer Mike Emrick, wo earned the nickname “Doc” after having graduated with a PhD in Phraseology from Thesaurus State University in 1976, is well known among America’s six dozen hockey fans for his enthusiasm for the sport and for his unusually wide-ranging vocabulary. So when this drinking-game rule demands that you take a shot when Emrick says something weird, it doesn’t mean talking (or, God help us, dressing) like Don Cherry. It means, rather, that you should have a drink whenever Emrick uses a puzzling or intriguing replacement for some of the sport’s more mundane verbs.

Let’s face it, there aren’t that many ways to describe propelling or directing a puck with a hockey stick—not for most of us, anyway—so we tend to stick with a small, meat-and-potatoes variety of verbs: Shot. Sent. Passed. Pushed. Bounced. Deflected, flipped, tipped, fed, held, lobbed. That’s about it for most people.

Not for Mike Emrick, though. Emrick seems to view this linguistic limitation as a challenge, and throws out a cavalcade of synonyms as easily and naturally as we might down an impossibly large number of alcoholic beverages.¹

Lest you think we’re exaggerating, the following is a mostly-complete² list of words used by Emrick during his call of the March 10, 2013, NHL game between the New York Rangers and Washington Capitals. Words used more than once are indicated by the numbers in parentheses:

• Knifed (4)
• Careened (2)
• Filtered (6)
• Ricocheted
• Swatted (2)
• Kicked (2)³
• Rocked (2)
• Jammed (3)
• Sailed
• Spiked (4)
• Banked (4)
• Pushed
• Tucked (2)
• Corralled
• Speared (4)
• Chipped (2)
• Nudged (4)
• Squirreled⁴
• Floated (6)
• Plucked
• Popped/plopped (3)
• Flagged (2)
• Muscled (3)
• Cancelled (2)
• Punched (3)
• Hoisted⁵ (5)
• Reversed (2)
• Pitched (3)
• Brushed (2)
• Ripped
• Jabbed (2)
• Stymied
• Dealt (6)
• Paddled (2)
• Batted
• Blistered
• Shuffled (2)
• Shanked (4)
• Padded (2)
• Hacked
• Rattled
• Squibbed
• Lugged (2)
• Trigger-pulled⁶
• Steered (3)
• Chopped
• Scooped
• Spiked
• Slugged
• Shaken
• Twisted
• Angled

Conspicuously absent from this list is “scaled,” which we know from viewing experience is one of Emrick’s favorites. Also worth noting is that near the end of the game, a clearly exhausted and mentally drained Emrick describes a puck as going into the corner. Even the greatest have limits.

So, at the rate of one shot per oddball word,  you have now just consumed 116 shots in the span of a single three-hour game on a Sunday afternoon. Congratulations! You are now dead, unless of course you are Oliver Reed . . . in which case, congratulations! You are now dead.


NOTES
1. When we write “we” here, what we actually mean is “you.” We can stop any time we want. You’re the one with a problem.
2. For some reason, our wife and houseguests seemed to think it was appropriate to talk about hockey when there was a hockey game playing on the TV in our living room, so we were somewhat distracted and can’t guarantee that this list is comprehensive or 100% accurate. But given how little headway has been made in the scientific study of Mike Emrick’s vocabulary, we’re satisfied with our results.
3. As stated above, all of these terms were used to describe propelling or directing a puck with a stick, and not to describe any of the hundreds of other actions possible on a hockey rink, including but not limited to kicking. So in this case, the puck was not kicked in the traditional sense—that is, with, you know, a kick—but rather not-kicked with a stick, in a non-kicking motion.
4. See note 3, above. To the best of our ability to tell, enhanced by repeated slow-motion replay, the puck in question was not, in fact, propelled or directed in any way by a squirrel.
5. In some cases, Emrick may have used the word “foisted.” We are aware that the word “foisted” rarely makes any sense in a hockey context, but that doesn’t mean Emrick didn’t use it.
6. Emrick did not, in fact, use this phrase in the more conventional arrangement of “he pulled the trigger,” but rather as written, along the close lines of “the puck is trigger-pulled down the ice.”

Another Good Reason to Like Hockey Players

ESPN, a colossal ESPN-centric entity that splits its time between savvy self-promotion and the occasional sports broadcast, has long received its fair share of criticism from multiple angles and various sources with axes to grind. Some of this criticism is significant and newsworthy in itself—such as when First Take’s Rob Parker got roasted, suspended, and then eventually let go for suggesting that Washington Redskins quarterback Robert Griffin III was insufficiently black.

RGIII’s whole left sleeve
white. Rob Parker was right!

We find it interesting that a discussion of race involving a team named the Redskins can, even in this day and age, have absolutely nothing to do with the team being named the Redskins, for God’s sake, but that’s a topic for another day on a different, much more mature blog.

Our gripe with ESPN, the Worldwide Leader in Sports and Also ESPN-Related ESPNiness^TM, is far less socially significant and more centrally located in most people’s “who really gives a shit” category: that is, its tendency to occasionally and/or systematically forget that certain sports and/or leagues, such as the National Hockey League, actually exist.

There are dozens or perhaps hundreds of other sports that also get shortchanged when it comes to national news coverage, but that’s fine because nobody gives a shit about them.¹

The NHL, despite Gary Bettman’s apparent best efforts, still really does exist, although fans are hard-pressed to find evidence of it on ESPN. Since 2004, for example, the network has broadcast the Scripps National Spelling Bee—by far the most athletically taxing of all spelling bees—seven times, and broadcast zero NHL games.² In 2011, “the ESPN family of networks aired thirty-six hours of Main Event coverage”³ of the World Series of Poker—which is probably more like a sport than a spelling bee, but less so than, say, darts—and, again, zero hours of live NHL hockey.

And in the “In Memoriam” section of SportsCenter’s 2011 Year in Review, there was no mention of the deaths of Derek Boogaard, Ryan Rypien, or Wade Belak (the first two being active NHL players at the time of their deaths), or of the forty-three members of Lokomotiv Yaroslavl in a plane crash in Minsk.⁴

Does this make the folks at ESPN bad people? No. Well, kinda, but not really. It does mean, though, that the network has a lot of work to do to make it up to, or even stay relevant to, American fans of hockey.

We view the following as an encouraging step in the right direction. Our wife, Dr./Mrs. Some Gal, would probably agree for very different reasons.⁵










NOTES
1. We were going for kind of an irony angle here; not sure if we’ve quite pulled it off it not.
2. In ESPN’s defense, they only stopped broadcasting NHL games when it became apparent that they were going to continue to have to pay for it.
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Series_of_Poker#WSOP_television_coverage
3. http://sports.yahoo.com/nhl/blog/puck_daddy/post/disgrace-espn-sportscenter-year-in-review-snubs-hockey-tragedies?urn=nhl,wp20822
4. We understand that many, many athletes have died without making an ESPN end-of-year memorial segment, some of them likely being well-known and having played popular sports, but to overlook a disaster on the scale of the Lokomotiv Yaroslavl crash is a bit galling. We don’t have a scrap of evidence to back this up, but we have managed to convince ourselves that the Marshall football team’s plane crash got more press than Lokomotiv in 2012, and that happened more than thirty years ago.
5. We are big fans of hockey and Muppets; the doctor/missus is a big fan of Henrik Lundqvist’s dreamy Swedish eyes. So everyone wins here.

The $5,300 Toilet

In what almost certainly provided a pleasing "hey, it's not just us" moment for the United States military, in November 2012, Ontario lawyer Jim Vigmond paid more than five thousand dollars for a toilet. Yes, really. It wasn’t just any toilet, though—it was a dressing-room toilet from Toronto’s historic Maple Leaf Gardens.

In other words, it’s very much like any other toilet. While it’s well established that people are willing to spend a tremendous amount of money on things that do little little more than create poop, it’s a bit more unusual to spend anything more than hardware-store-standard prices to collect an object that does nothing but collect poop. While one can, in fact, easily spend a couple grand on amazing space-age shitters, five thousand dollars seems like an especially outrageous price for a normal one, even if it has, in its heyday, been on the receiving end of some of the most distinguished shit in the annals of Canadian hockey.

Some fun historical facts about Jim Vigmond’s costly crapper:

• On February 6, 1976, Darryl Sittler took an astounding ten dumps into this toilet in one sixty-minute span, setting an NHL record that may well never be broken. If someone does come along and break it—we’re still talking about the record here, but the same goes for the toilet—we don’t want to know about it.
• Hall-of-Fame center Mats Sundin used this toilet exclusively for the bulk of his Maple Leafs career. Unfortunately, during that span, the shitters to his left and right were rarely any good.
• Dion Phaneuf never got to use this toilet, as the Leafs stopped playing at Maple Leaf Gardens in 1999 and he first joined the team in 2009. Had he ever used it, though, Sean Avery probably would have claimed to have gotten there first.
• We would like to add a fourth bullet point right about here, but are forced to admit that we don’t know all that much about the Toronto Maple Leafs. We should have done more research, by which we mean stealing jokes from Down Goes Brown.

Our biggest disappointment here is that, had we posted on this topic back in November when it was relevant, and when the National Hockey League was in the throes of yet another stupid and contentious lockout, we could have wrapped this all up with a joke about how Jim Vigmond could look into his $5,300 toilet and see the remains of the 2012-2013 NHL season.


But then we remembered that Vigmond is a Maple Leafs fan, and when he takes a look into the shitter, he can see every season since 1967.

If You're Going to Embarrass Yourself, Why Not Do It While Everyone's Watching?

We here at Bowling in the Dark are not Jets fans, but neither are we Jets detractors—except in an general way that, based on their recent accomplishments, they clearly deserve. Thus, we can objectively say that this play from late 2012 may be both the funniest and saddest things we’ve ever seen happen on a football field:




If Mark Sanchez ends his career as a Hall-of-Fame quarterback, a five-time Super Bowl MVP, the guy who solved U.S. debt crisis, and the discoverer of the cure for the common cold, Americans will still remember him as the Butt-Fumble Guy. You can’t buy that kind of publicity, even if for some weird reason you wanted to.


Sorry, Butt-Fumble Guy. Good luck in wherever town you’re playing next season. Keep your passport current, just in case.

Nike Takes a Courageous Stance Against Certain Kinds of Cheating

Tiger Woods, professional golfer

Tiger Woods, immediately after bombarded
by gamma radiation.

Moral misstep: slept with a woman who was not his wife, and then—having decided that that was pretty awesome—went on to sleep with five, nine, eleven, or 121 others, depending on which disgusting internet source you choose to believe.

Marketability: while his popularity may not be what it once was,¹ he’s still a well-known and much-discussed athlete in what is inexplicably one of the world’s most popular sports. While he’s not playing up to his usual standards of late, he has the potential to continue to golf at a very high level for the next five to twenty-five years, making him a huge boon for any company with the right amount of moral fiber to stick with him through a few thousand minor marital indiscretions.

Nike’s stance: Everything’s swell. The Tiger Woods Center at Nike’s headquarters remains, as you may have guessed, named after Tiger Woods.

Kobe Bryant, shooting guard, Los Angeles Lakers (NBA)

Kobe Bryant, having briefly forgotten that the name
that matters to him is the one on the back of the jersey.

Moral misstep: accused of rape by nineteen-year-old Katelyn Faber; while the charges were dropped after Faber refused to testify, Bryant later publicly stated that while he “truly believe[s] this encounter . . . was consensual,” he “now understand[s] how she feels that she did not consent to this encounter.” So viewed in the best possible light, he had sex with a woman who was not his wife. Given the competition in this category, one single adulterous affair seems positively quaint, but it’s still not a particularly decent thing to do.

Marketability: remains active as the most popular player on the Los Angeles Lakers, one of the NBA’s most popular teams, with potential to make Nike oodles of money for at least another four to six years.

Nike’s stance: no problems here.

Ben Roethlisberger, quarterback, Pittsburgh Steelers (NFL)

Moral misstep: accused of sexual assault in 2008; no charges filed. Accused of sexual assault in 2010; no charges filed. After the second accusation, he served four games of a six-game suspension and lost his Fathead endorsement. A spokesman for the company stated at the time, “We named our company Fathead, not Fat Asshole.”²

Marketability: Two-time super Bowl champion, marquee quarterback on one of the absurdly popular and marketable NFL’s most popular and marketable teams. While his career may not last more than another five to six years or two to three allegations, even mediocre players and backups  sell jerseys.

Nike’s stance: Are we under oath, here? No? Then what he may have done would have been bad, and we’re definitely going to cut him loose any day now. Honest.

Lance Armstrong: cyclist, seven-time Tour de France winner

Have you ever spent a lifetime sitting on a bicycle
seat? Trust us, you’d look this grouchy too.

Moral Misstep: despite his repeated and strenuous statements to the contrary, Lance Armstrong may well turn out to have been something of a cheater in the otherwise squeaky-clean world of competitive cycling. He joins the very brief list of cyclists who have tested positive, admitted to doping, or been sanctioned for doping that includes—and is absolutely, almost definitely, probably limited to—barely-known racers such as Marco Pantani, Jan Ullrich, Roland Meier, Alex Zuille, Laurent Dufaux, Abraham Olano, Richard Virenque, Bjarne Riis, Christophe Moreau, Roberto Heras, Richard Virenque, Francisco Mancebo, Igor González, Óscar Sevilla, Raimondas Rumsas, Levi Leipheimer, Alexandre Vinokourov, Iban Mayo, Ivan Basso, Michael Rasmussen, Floyd Landis, Alberto Contador, Alejandro Valverde, Mikel Astarloza, Bernhard Kohl, Christian Vande Velde, Fränk Schleck, Tadej Valjavec, and Tyler Hamilton.³

Marketability: one of the best-known figures in the world when it comes to providing emotional, physical, and financial support to survivors of cancer, a disease that has to some degree, directly or indirectly, affected pretty much every person on Earth. Ever. On the other hand, he’s retired, and he participated in a sport that nobody in Nike’s U.S. demographic gave a shit about before Lance Armstrong came along.

Nike’s stance: Screw you, Lance Armstrong.

In the past, Nike has cut ties with sports figures such as Marion Jones (for her alleged and later admitted use of performance-enhancing drugs), the late Joe Paterno (who, of course, technically didn’t do anything but also, of course, didn’t do anything), and Michael Vick (who was coincidentally reinstated with Nike once he’d become popular again).

We’re not going to say that Nike should have maintained its ties with Lance Armstrong, regardless of whether the doping charges against him were (or are) ever proved or definitively disproved—that’s completely up to them. And we’re not saying that Armstrong’s admirable work with his foundation gives him a pass if he is, in fact, a big fat blood doper—although this raises the interesting question of whether it’s better to be a great guy in your sport but a turd in your personal life, or the reverse.
 
We’re simply a little disappointed that the message we’re all getting from Nike here seems to be “if you’re gonna get caught cheating, it’d better be on your wife.”⁴



NOTES
1. Except perhaps in the limited circles in which he was always apparently popular—after all, ladies, he’s single now. Rawr.
2. No, of course we made that up.
3. The part about these guys being “barely known” is just us being sarcastic. While we recognize only a handful of their names, all of them have finished in the top ten of the Tour de France at least once in the last fifteen years.
4. We realize that Ben Roethlisberger doesn’t fit the “cheater” theme here, as he was not married when he was accused of sexual assault. Twice. He does, however, still have a valid place in this piece, thanks to its overarching theme of “pro athletes who are definitely or at least probably dicks.”

NFL Broadcaster Cliché Bingo 2

A week or two after we posted our initial NFL Broadcaster Cliché Bingo card it occurred to us that, having created only one card, we had doomed our legions of bingo-crazy readers to play against each other using the exact same phrases. Folks would be filling out all the same spaces at the very same time, with only minor variations based on deafness, channel-flipping, or bathroom breaks, so virtually every bingo game would end in a tie.

While it’s heartwarming to think that such an oversight might inadvertently foster a sense of teamwork and cooperation among our readers—and, eventually, among football fans and then people of all creeds and colors from all walks of life—we think it’s a bit silly to even bother playing a game you have virtually no chance of winning. 

That’d basically be like playing for the 2008 Detroit Lions, and nobody deserves that—except maybe for the 2011 Indianapolis Colts.

Don’t be like those losers.¹ Be a winner—pick up a bingo card, find a game on TV, and kick some ass, bingo-player style.

. . . okay, we admit that we don’t have any idea how playing bingo could possibly have anything to do with the notion of “kicking ass.” But we’re willing to admit that it’s probably technically possible, and we’re sure you’ll do your best. Go get ’em, Sport.

 

NOTES

1. That is, coordinated, strong, famous, and rich.

Previously published on December 10, 2011. Bowling in the Dark has gone green, proudly recycling old crappy content and turning it into fresh new crappy content that looks pretty much the same. Please show your support by rereading, or, alternatively, sending us a ton of money.

NFL Broadcaster Cliché Bingo

Do you find yourself with no legitimate reason to continue watching your favorite football team more than five or ten minutes after the opening kickoff? (Colts, Jaguars, Dolphins, Browns, Panthers, Rams, Jets, Seahawks, and Cardinals fans, we’re looking at you.)

Don’t lose hope yet, and by all means don’t get off the couch and try to live a productive life. You can use your local team’s broadcast—assuming it hasn’t been blacked out in your area thanks to lack of interest—to have fun the way old ladies at the local church do. Except you get to do it on your couch, with a beer in your hand!¹

NOTE

1. We do not intend to imply that all old ladies play bingo, or that all bingo players are old or even ladies, or that all churches play or even allow bingo. We merely intend to imply that you are a fat, lazy drunk.

Previously published on November 7, 2011.

After Months of Respectful Silence, Is the World Finally Ready to Make Jokes about Tiger Woods?

Peyton Manning Bobblehead Getting Awfully Tired of All the Jokes

 

“Come on, guys, it’s not funny anymore,” comes the muffled voice of
Manning’s head, which has probably rolled under the bed or something,
barely audible over the hard laughter of bad people.

 

San Diego Chargers Starting to Wonder if Ryan Leaf Will Ever Pan Out

Hopeful fans wanted to give him five more years. Turns out the judge thought the same thing.

Marc-André Fleury Updates His Facebook Profile Photo

Above: Pittsburgh Penguins goaltender Mark-André Fleury.

Augusta National Softens its Stance on Excluding Women

Billy Payne, dodging questions.

Georgia’s Augusta National Golf Club, site of the prestigious annual Masters Tournament, appears to be reconsidering its longstanding and controversial policy of refusing to admit female members. With the tournament entering Round Two this morning, the club released the following statement to the press:

The Augusta National Golf Club, in keeping with this nation’s noblest traditions of extending equal treatment to many different kinds of people that we find acceptable, hereby announces that as of Friday, April 6, 2012, we will open our membership to any woman who can prove empirically that she psychologically, physiologically, and genetically male.

We sincerely hope that our progress toward equality among all the right kinds of people doesn’t go unnoticed among our sponsors—many of whom employ women, so we’re told—or our television viewers. Because many of those folks who watch our sponsors’ ads this weekend will be women, and you know how women love to shop! Boy howdy!

All kidding aside, folks, we here at Augusta National are proud of our accomplishments in racial and gender equity. Why, for decades we ensured that black men, while certainly not good enough to play here, would nevertheless find gainful employment carrying white men’s clubs.

And hell, it’s been more than thirty years now since we admitted our first black member, way back in 1990. What a time that was, with our humble little Augusta National Golf Club leading the charge for civil rights, not even four decades after the Montgomery Bus Boycott!

In conclusion, the Augusta National Golf Club looks forward to welcoming its first female member, assuming, once again, that she is actually a man.

And also preferably not, you know, a Jew.

 —Augusta National Golf Club
April 6, 2012

 

Ubaldo Expedition Concludes Two-Year Expedition to Locate Elusive "Strike Zone"

“Nice pitch, man! But where did you mean to throw it?”

George Mallory and Sir Edmund Hillary had Mount Everest. Robert Falcon Scott had the Antarctic. Rear Admiral Sir John Franklin had the Northwest Passage. Robert Kenneth Wilson had the Loch Ness Monster. Roger Patterson and Robert Gimlin had Bigfoot.

And for the past twenty-one months, Ubaldo Jiménez of the Cleveland Indians has pursued an obsession as wily and elusive as any of those: the Strike Zone.

Jiménez leapt into the national consciousness in 2010, starting off the year for the Colorado Rockies with a 15-1 record and a sparkling earned-run average of only 2.20, a performance that earned him a starting spot in major league baseball’s 2010 All-Star Game.

After that game, however, his performance fell to Earth, and then swiftly began to dig: He went 10-16 in his next thirty-six games with the Rockies, struggling with his command, velocity, and (according to some) motivation. He was traded to the Cleveland Indians on July 21, 2011, and finished that season with a 10-13 record and a 4.68 ERA.

Baseball analysts suspect that Jiménez’s problems stemmed not from mechanical issues, a shortened 2011 Spring Training, or cuticle problems on his pitching hand, but rather from his obsessive, Ahab-like pursuit of something that—at least for him—may not exist at all: the Strike Zone.

The Strike Zone—artist’s conception.

“I’ve been searching for the Strike Zone for almost two years now,” says Jiménez.“People don’t believe me, but I know I can find it if I keep at it. I’ve looked high and low for it. High and tight, lately, but low and away, too. Low and way away, even.”

Each red point on this map indicates an attempt by the 
July 2010-September 2011 Ubaldo Expedition to locate the Strike Zone.

The Ubaldo Expedition traveled to dozens of American cities from mid-2010 through spring 2012, desperately trying to find the mysterious Strike Zone. What does Jiménez remember from those trying times?

“Walking. Lots and lots of walking. Seems like it was nothing but walks sometimes—it’s enough to make you a little wild once in a while.”

“Sometimes I wondered if this Strike Zone thing was totally made up, arbitrary. It made me wonder if I was just throwing everything away.”

Things reached their worst for the Expedition in August 2011, when the pitcher began casting his eyes toward the sea.

 

“I even thought about searching the ocean for the Strike Zone, since I couldn’t find a trace of it anywhere else,” says Jiménez. “But then in Detroit my catcher told me that I couldn’t hit water if I fell out of a boat, so I guess I wouldn’t have been able to try it. That was nice of him to save me all that time.” 

Jiménez’s optimistic outlook is refreshing, but the arduous twenty-one-month trek has clearly left him physically drained and mentally fragile. Psychologists note that Ubaldo recently compared being in Cleveland to being in heaven, and while they hesitate to use the word “delusion,” the evidence is hard to ignore.

It’s not heaven. It’s not even Iowa.

 

The Ubaldo Expedition’s Spring 2012 campaign hadn’t started off any better than 2011’s had ended—with a 1-4 record and an ERA above 7.00 through the end of March—until Jiménez, much to everyone’s surprise, suddenly located the Strike Zone right inside Rockies star Troy Tulowitzki’s rib cage.

The Ubaldo Expedition’s Strike Zone map, spring 2012.

 “It’s funny—inside Tulowitzki is always the last place you look for stuff,” he says with a shrug. “But I’m excited about looking for it there again and again, as soon as I get another chance.”

That chance may not arrive for a while, however. Authorities in charge of the Ubaldo Expedition have decided to give him a five-day break from his job as a reward for his efforts, and with the Indians playing in the American League rather than the Rockies’ National League, there’s a chance that Jiménez may not encounter the Strike Zone again for several more years.

Eli Manning No Longer his Family’s Fredo Corleone

For New York Giants quarterback Eli Manning, perhaps the most thrilling aspect of his team’s February 5, 2012, victory over the New England Patriots in Super Bowl XLVI is the fact that he is now, undeniably, no longer the Fredo Corleone of the Manning family.

“I can handle things,” said Manning in a postgame press conference, his knuckles white as he gripped the Vince Lombardi Trophy. “I’m smart! Not like everybody says . . . like, dumb. . . . I’m smart and I want respect!”

Manning—now not only a two-time Super Bowl winner but also a two-time Super Bowl MVP, and one of only eleven quarterbacks to win the game multiple times—has spent the bulk of his seven-year career in the dual shadows of his more famous (and, in most ways, undeniably more accomplished) brother—the Indianapolis Colts’ Peyton Manning—and their father, Don Vito “Archibald” Manning, a respected quarterback in his own right and two-time Pro Bowler.

After eldest brother Cooper’s injuries put an end to his career, Peyton took over and led the family to heights beyond anything his father could have imagined—pain-free games, winning records, playoff berths, and a legitimate front as one of the nation’s largest importers of olive oil.

Horrific injuries rendered Cooper only barely more mobile than his younger brothers.

With his brother occupying a place of respect in the NFL, Eli Manning was taken with the first overall pick in the 2004 draft, sparking immediate discussion about whether his high selection was based on his abilities or on the shady influence of his powerful family.

Giants starter Kurt Warner “voluntarily” voided of his contract after the end of the 2004 season and signed with the Arizona Cardinals, leaving Eli to be declared the team’s starting quarterback. This raised further suspicions, especially given Warner’s statement that it was “probably better to play for Arizona than sleep with the fishes . . . I guess.”

The NFL’s formal investigation into the Warner Incident came to a stumbling halt, however, after anti-Manning crusader Senator Pat Geary  announced in the middle of the hearing that 

”I can state, from my own knowledge and experience, that Mannings are among the most loyal—most law-abiding—patriotic, hard working American citizens in this land. And it would be a shame, mister chairman, if we allowed a few rotten apples to bring a bad name to the whole barrel,”

before exiting suddenly and leaving the committee without one of its most important members.

Since then, Eli Manning’s seven-year career has revealed sporadic signs of greatness amid long stretches of mediocrity, with his performance in the 2008 playoffs being almost dismal enough to qualify him to play for the rival New York Jets. His best single-season quarterback rating is less than Peyton’s career average rating, he throws significantly fewer touchdowns per game and more interceptions per game, has scored far fewer rushing touchdowns than his brother despite having superior mobility,¹ and, of course, failed to protect his father from a vicious (albeit eventually unsuccessful) assassination attempt engineered by Virgil “The Turk” Sollozzo.

That said, though, Eli has accomplished enough in his career to no longer deserve to be compared to the real Fredo Corleone:²

• Eli effectively stole the thunder from his brother’s longtime rivalry with the other premier quarterback of this generation (Tom Brady’s Chin of the New England Patriots), upstaging Peyton by beating Brady twice in the only game that really matters. Peyton has failed to even meet Brady in a Super Bowl.³

“Every time I put a ball in the air I said a Hail Mary,
and every time I said a Hail Mary, they caught the ball.” 

• In 2011 Eli compiled more passing yards than Peyton Manning has ever managed in a single season, and it’s probably only a coincidence that this happened in a season in which harsh language counted as pass interference. It’s quite likely, though, that Peyton would have put up similar numbers had he not had to flee the country and live incognito after murdering Virgil Sollozzo and corrupt police captain Mark McCluskey.

Peyton, master of disguise, went undetected in Sicily.

• Eli, ever the ladies’ man, crossed Moe Greene in Las Vegas by “banging cocktail waitresses two at a time,” preventing players from getting drinks at their tables. We’d like to see Peyton try that.⁴

• And of course Eli has won two Super Bowls, to Peyton’s one. As if winning one Super Bowl were even that hard. Heck, all sorts of forgettable quarterbacks have won one Super Bowl: Jeff Hostetler, Trent Dilfer, Mark Rypien, Dan Marino, Jim McMahon—so really, for Peyton to hang his professional reputation on one measly Super Bowl ring⁵ is awfully silly.

So clearly, Eli Manning deserves every bit of praise he receives, as long as, you know, it’s not too much. He has proven beyond doubt that he’s one of the best quarterbacks in his immediate family, and his brother certainly won’t mind being momentarily upstaged in his home stadium.

Still, it might be wise if Eli were to skip the family’s annual Lake Tahoe fishing trips for a while.

“I know it was you, Fredo. You broke my heart. You broke my heart.”

NOTES
1. In much the same way that a drifting continent is more mobile than, say, a dead turtle.
2. Who is, of course, not technically real.
3. Purists and nitpickers might attempt to bring up that Peyton Manning has not and never could face Tom Brady’s Chin in the Super Bowl, because they play in the same conference, but we’d like to respectfully point out that we never asked for their stupid snotty opinions.
4. We don’t really mean this. In fact, there’s nothing on Earth we’d rather not see.We mean it—stop calling us, Peyton.
5. That is, one Super Bowl ring plus his mastery of every measurable criterion of quarterbacking excellence, with the one minor exception being the ability to outrun a toddler.

Today in Hockey History: Mike Ricci's Head Suspended Two Games for Conduct Unbecoming a Face

February 10, 1997: Immensely popular Colorado Avalanche fan-favorite Mike Ricci (above) appealed the decision, but it was rejected on the grounds that nobody could figure out what, exactly, was Mike Ricci’s appeal¹ in the first place.

NOTE

1. Get it? It’s a pun!

This is You Taking the National Football League Far, Far Too Seriously

 

 

What can we say about bearded men dressed as women dressed as pigs—
dressed as beauty-pageant contestants—that hasn’t already been said?
Something, probably, but we’re damned if we can think of what it might be.

 

Show us a pimp that’s actually a Bengals fan,
and we'll show you the world’s crappiest pimp.

 

Hulkamania still lives on in certain parts of the frozen American north.

 

No, really, he isn’t, he’s just a football player.
Although a tight spiral coming from the Broncos’
backfield could be considered a miracle.

 

Q: What’s more intimidating than Dolphins? A: Creepy clowns.

Q: What’s more intimidating than creepy clowns? A: Everything else.

 

Hey, the whistles are our favorite part of the game too.

 

Hell no, we’re not going to make fun of the Barrel Man. The guy was a
Colorado institution. That little leprechaun dude, on the other hand. . . . 

  

. . . yeah, he kind of creeps us out.

Raiders fans have been a bit listless, even depressed,

ever since Frodo destroyed the One Ring in the fires of Mount Doom.