Strike Zone Channel -- Greatest. Invention. Ever.

For the second night in a row, I'm sitting in front of my TV watching the free preview of the baseball Strike Zone Channel on DirecTV. I wasn't planning to buy the extra tier of service that DirecTV is hawking this year for the first time with the Extra Innings package.

Plans change.

Now, it's not as if this is a new idea. DirecTV did the same thing with its NFL Sunday Ticket package, where they had the Red Zone Channel, which bounced around from game to game, taking you to wherever a team was about to score. And it worked for football. But it works even better for baseball because it's so slow moving. That probably seems counterintuitive to say, but the thing is every time there's a lull in one game, they find something happening elsewhere. In the span of the last couple minutes, I've seen Albert Pujols, Torii Hunter and Miguel Tejada hit.

I don't recognize the guy they have hosting. But no doubt they screened all of the applicants for this job for ADD, because this would be a nightmare for someone who has trouble staying organized. He's a traffic cop, taking you from one game to the next, setting up each situation, which must be real fun when there are 10 games going on at once. He's not bad, though. MLB is going to launch a 24-7 cable network in 2009, and I don't know what they have planned for evenings, while games are being played, but Strike Zone Channel should be it. They can just migrate this coverage over onto the MLB channel. Of course, it's the nucleus of the $40 per year add-on package on DirecTV, so that's probably not likely.

To me, it's stuff like the sports packages where the 500-channel universe shows its true value. Most of the channels on my DirecTV are a complete crapfest. Does anyone need Lifetime Movie Channel? Do I need six Discovery channels? But the ability to watch a dozen baseball games simultaneously? That's the way the world should be. Watching the teams I want to see -- that's what I love about it. I'd love to see it extended to more than just sports. I'd still watch the local TV stations from Pittsburgh if I could, even though I don't live there anymore -- a little slice of home. Yeah, I know there are all sorts of rules that prevent it. Screw 'em. It's the information age. The Internet has broken down the barriers for newspapers. Let's let the 500-channel universe break them down for TV.

In the meantime, I'll be watching the Strike Zone Channel this summer.

Piss on politicians: A tale of two stadiums

A story started circulating in the last week or so that has me seriously thinking about getting into politics. Because if the buffoons who are responsible for this can be in positions of power, a stupid schmuck like me can do it too.

Apparently, officials from Washington, D.C. are talking about trying to woo the Washington Redskins to relocate back into the city. For those who don't realize it, the Redskins play at FedEx Field in Landover, Md. Been there for 10 years after leaving behind the miserable hell hole known as RFK Stadium. FedEx is one of the jewels of the NFL -- the largest stadium in the league at just under 92,000 seats, more than 200 luxury boxes. But the fact that seemingly has eluded the good mayor of Washington and some of his cronies on the city council is that the Redskins' tyrannical owner, Daniel Snyder owns FedEx Field. So even if the city somehow induced him to move back into town, he'd have to unload the stadium he's already got. And nobody is going to buy a 92,000 seat stadium that has no tenant. The mayor of D.C., by the way, is the same guy who repeatedly opposed funding of the new Nationals' stadium while he was on the city council.

Maybe if Starfleet Command called the starship Enterprise back into Earth orbit, they could beam FedEx Field into the District. Even then, you're looking at myriad problems with the utilities and infrastructure ... you know, sometimes even the easy solution can't work.

I don't live in D.C., so maybe I'm not permitted to comment on things like this -- I'm part of the country that taxes those poor people without representation, after all. But if I did live there, I would be disgusted that anyone in power thinks trying to lure the Redskins back to town is a good use of time. You mean you've got nothing better to do? How about focusing on the development of the area around the new Nationals' stadium? How about doing something about the crime that runs rampant and spills over into the surrounding counties?

The Redskins left. It happened. You had the chance to keep them there, but it didn't occur to you to do anything about the hell hole you had them playing in. And now, a decade later, you want to try to fix it. Too late. Move on. Be lucky you have a baseball team. They play literally 10 times more home games every year than the Redskins. That means if you create the right kind of neighborhood around that ballpark -- retail, dining, clubs -- you're going to have a major boom for the city's economy. Focus on that. Don't just make it good. Make it the best ballpark neighborhood in the nation.

Do that and you'll all have plenty of cash to bankroll a few luxury suites at FedEx.

Tech notes

So I've lost one of the outlets for my witless ramblings about sports media and tech. Things change. What are you going to do? So I guess I'll try to start using this space to do what I'd been doing elsewhere. And I'll be using more words here. Because it's my blog, and I can.

• XM and Sirius are trying to merge. Tell me you didn't see this coming. I remain addicted to satellite radio. I listen on the way to work, which fortunately doesn't take as long as it used to -- nothing like the office moving closer to your house. I listen all day at work. I listen as I'm falling asleep. There's always something on worth hearing. So I'm looking forward to what happens when the two systems come together. Mel Karmazin, the head of Sirius, claims they're not going to raise the subscription price for the new company. I'll believe that when I see it. Actually, I'll sort of believe this whole merger when I see it. I think it's still 50-50 whether it gets regulatory approval. I like what I've seen from the Sirius music channels. Every time I've been in Best Buy and messed around with a Sirius radio, they always seem to have multiple channels playing music I like. And I love the idea of having access to all the sports broadcasts. But it sounds a lot like they're going to create different programming tiers and charge more money to get the sports content. That sucks. Hopefully I'll be pleasantly surprised with the new lineups and prices, but I'm preparing to pay a few bucks more per month.

• NBA Street Homecourt came out a couple weeks ago. I messed around with the demo and it seemed pretty good. The tricks weren't impossible to learn, which was refreshing. There's nothing worse than being unable to really play the game the way it's supposed to be played because you can't master the button mashing. I had a chance to talk to Sue Bird, the former UConn star now with the Seattle Storm of the WNBA. She's one of six WNBA players included in the game, which marks a first for women's basketball players. There wasn't room for me to use most of what I talked to her about, but it was an interesting conversation. She's got the hottie factor going for her. One Web site I saw referred to her as the Anna Kournikova of the WNBA, which I'm not sure is really a compliment, considering how infrequently Kournikova wins. Bird seems to take her off-court celebrity in stride. She doesn't seem to mind the idea that her appearance may bring guys to WNBA games, saying that the quality of the game will make an impression, even if that's not what brought someone in the door to begin with. And she understands that people either appreciate the women's game or they don't. But she was a little frustrated by the fact that there's a double standard when it comes to endorsements. She pointed out that a good-looking male athlete won't get those opportunities unless he achieves something on the field. And, of course, it didn't work that way for Kournikova. The really interesting part of the conversation, to me, was that she still hasn't had a chance to actually see herself in the video game. I figured at some point EA Sports would have given her a demo to check out. No such luck. She spends the winter playing in Moscow (which must be great fun, because that's where I want to be in the dead of winter). She came back to the U.S. to attend the NBA Street launch party in Las Vegas, a couple days before the NBA All-Star game. But there was a snow storm that week and she got stuck in New York and never made it. And she had to turn around and head back to Moscow because her team had a game. It must be a strange experience to see yourself in a video game. And even stranger when the game is out there and people are playing as you and you haven't had a chance to see it yet.
  
  
• SportsLine is gearing up for lots more of its live coverage of big events. Their March Madness on Demand set records last year as the most-viewed live event in Internet history. And they're going to be showing live coverage from the Masters on the Web too. I think this is a model other sports could follow. The reason this stuff works is because it's during the work day, when millions of office drones are tethered to their desks -- the perfect captive audience. The idea of playing sports events during the day is from a bygone era. For years, everything has been at night because that's when the TV networks can get their best audiences. But is the same thing going to happen for Internet broadcasts? The time to maximize the audience for a Web cast is in the middle of the work day. Now, it's true that the NCAA Tournament and the Masters are marquee events, and perhaps much of the interest is the result of their importance in the sports world. Would a routine regular season game draw an audience the same way? Probably not. But isn't that what everyone said about Monday Night Football at the beginning? It became a must-see event because it was packaged properly. And the same thing could be done on the Web.

DJ

When Dennis Johnson's life was cut short by a heart attack last week, the scribes and pundits all came gushing forth with the predictable response: Dennis Johnson, Mr. Under-appreciated.

He was only under-apprecaited by people who didn't watch him play. It's easy to make that interpretation if you only know him by his stat line. He was never the highest profile player on his teams, and so it comes as something of a shock when you see how much he scored -- especially in the playoffs. You don't average 17.3 points per game in the postseason without being a hell of a player.

What you remember about him if you watched those Celtics teams of the 1980s was how great he was in the clutch. You remember how relentless he could be. You remember him shutting down Magic Johnson in the 1984 Finals. Larry Bird called him the best he'd ever played with. He was the perfect point guard for those Celtics teams. He understood his role on a team with Larry Bird was to make sure Bird had the ball. How many other point guards wouldn't have been able to assimilate into that Celtics lineup and make such a critical contribution?

It's unfortunate that he's not been recognized for his achievements. He belongs in the Hall of Fame. And at some point he'll be inducted. And more people who didn't appreciate his game until after he died will write about how great he was.

Some of us knew it all along.

Super Bowl rebroadcasts: It's about damn time. And while we're at it ...

Finally, finally, finally, they heard me. For years I've been complaining to anyone patient enough to listen about how short-sighted it is of the NFL to be so tight-assed about its game broadcasts. They were the only pro league that didn't allow ESPN Classic to show old broadcasts, not that it matters now, because all ESPN Classic seems to show anymore is World Series of Poker and old bowling tournaments. But the NFL always deferred to its NFL Films division and didn't allow any "classic" programming that would compete with what Ed and Steve Sabol do. And I don't say that to disparage NFL Films. They do great stuff. But there's no substitute for watching a TV broadcast of an old game. It's a historical document. A moment captured in time.

Little by little, the NFL has loosened up. They started re-running condensed versions of the previous weekend's games on NFL Network this past season. And in January they finally heeded my call (I'm sure they were listening all this time) and started airing the network broadcasts of several Super Bowls. Apparently, they still don't have clearance from the networks to air them all. But a few is better than none. This afternoon, they'll air Super Bowl XXIII, featuring the Niners' dramatic last-minute drive to beat Cincinnati in 1989. That's one of my favorite Super Bowls. There are many of the greatest athletes who I never saw play. But I'll always be able to say I saw the greatest quarterback ever, Joe Montana, and I vividly remember watching one of his best performances -- the final drive for the game-winning touchdown in Super Bowl XXIII. And tonight they're airing the NBC broadcast of Super Bowl III. All I can say is, it's about damn time.

After last season, the NFL released a DVD package of the Steelers four postseason games that included the video from the CBS broadcasts. But they used audio from the Steelers radio network. Unfortunately, it was a year to late for that to include Myron Cope, who had retired after the 2004 season. And as much as it's cool to hear Bill Hillgrove and Tunch Ilkin, I'd rather have the TV broadcasts intact.

So while I'm at it, here are a few other sports media things I'd like to see. It may be a while before any of these things happen. But, hell, I waited out the NFL on the Super Bowl broadcasts. After that, it feels like anything is possible:

• Not that I expect the NFL to make any more moves anytime soon, but how about putting out Super Bowl or playoff game TV broadcasts on DVD? The NHL, NBA and MLB have all done it. I own the 1979 World Series. You telling me that every fan in Steelers Nation wouldn't buy a boxed set of the Steelers five Super Bowl appearances? You could sell a set to Dallas fans. Another one to Patriots fans. Another one to Broncos fans. How much does it really cost to press and package a DVD? And then think of how much more you can charge. Cha-ching!
  
  
• While I'm at it, let's pile another one on the poor old stodgy, crusty NFL. Actually, this one applies to the rest of the leagues too. How about selling out-of-market TV packages a la carte? I love NFL Sunday Ticket. But what I really want is to be able to see the Steelers even though I don't live in Pittsburgh. I can't watch nine games at once, and I don't really care to try when the Steelers are on. Some people want all those games. Some people (like me, occasionally) want to be able to watch guys on their fantasy teams. But would more people be willing to pay for an out-of-market package if they could pay a little less money to see just the team or teams they want to see? I'd still pay $100 a season to see the Steelers and nothing else. Of course, perhaps the first thing to work on when it comes to out-of-market packages is keeping them available to as many people as possible. Senators Specter and Kerry are calling DirecTV's exclusivity into question on Sunday Ticket and Extra Innings. These packages need to be available to everyone.
  
  
• I'd like to see leagues embrace their past by officially licensing video games with classic teams. This has long been done without licenses on baseball games for the PC. And word came this week that 2K Sports is working on an unlicensed pro football game that is rumored to include retired players. And EA Sports' Madden series has included classic teams for years. But in Madden, they don't use player names, and in many cases they don't use the right uniform numbers either. The leagues should get with their players' associations and alumni associations and work to get these things licensed. Gamers in their 30s, like me, will love the nostalgia. And younger gamers will be exposed to the history of sports that they weren't around to see.
  
  
• Once MLB and DirecTV finalize their deal to carry Extra Innings, the stage should finally be set for a 24-7 baseball channel. Word is that working out the details of the channel are the final sticking point. It's been a long time in coming. They've been talking about it since 2004. And it's a natural fit for baseball. If you count spring training, the season is eight months long. They can cover the minors. They can cover the summer college leagues. They can cover the Arizona Fall League. If they were really ambitious they could get deals to televise the Caribbean World Series. There's no shortage of programming options. And as you might have guessed, I'd approve of classic games too. They're talking about launching it on DirecTV in 2009. They should make it happen ASAP.
  
  
• I'm in love with satellite radio, and it's great to listen to all the play by play and sports talk. But sometimes what I'd really like to hear is the local perspective instead of the national stuff. If they can give us all those local game broadcasts from around the country and even the feed of stations like WLW (which is on XM) it would be great to have local sports talk stations too. They do it on satellite TV. I can get Fox Sports Pittsburgh (and every other regional sports net). So why not do the same thing on the radio? ESPN Radio and Fox Sports Radio are already carried, so why not some of their affiliates from around the country?
  

One year

I'm pretty sure I've moved past the point of being overly sentimental about anniversaries, but for some reason, I logged back into this flight of fancy today after many months of not having done so, and I realized that it's been one year to the day since I started this whole sleigh ride.

A few things have changed. No Super Bowl repeat for the Steelers. And no more Bill Cowher. And I guess there have been some changes in Washington too. The Dems are in control. That's good. But Bush is still the decider! We're never getting out of Iraq. And it's looking like we're going to bomb Iran while we're at it. Why not? It's fun making piles of rubble in the sand.

And I'm watching a lot of hockey. That's different. I got into a fantasy league and I'm starting to get hooked on Sidney Crosby. Unfortunately, the Penguins may not be in Pittsburgh for much longer if the city and state can't figure out how to build them an arena. For reasons that pass understanding, the state gaming commission denied the slots license to the company that would have built a new arena at no cost to the city. Of course, the idea of the state putting itself into a position where it's beholden to a casino may not have been such a good thing. But the Pens have a good young team. Here's hoping the city and state find a way.

Aside from that, I'm working, I'm freelancing, and that's about it. So you can bet my witless ramblings in 2007 are bound to be so much better than the ones from 2006.

XM Nation

I can't listen to regular radio anymore. Two-plus years of subscribing to XM Satellite Radio has spoiled me. It took a little while for it to grow on me, but I'm addicted to it now. I've found out how addicted in the last few weeks. Due to a subscription snafu, I've been without my XM for a while. The drives to and from work never took so long.

I guess I initially got interested in XM for the music -- non-stop, no commercials and lots of obscure stuff that Clear Channel won't let on the air, which means nobody ever hears it because Clear Channel has taken over every terrestrial station known to man and programmed them all with the exact same playlist. But XM's other stuff grew on me. Sports -- lots of sports -- talk, comedy. And perhaps best of all, there are 24-7 traffic reports for the nation's largest metropolitan areas -- a feature I'm not sure I totally appreciated until this week.

As I was sitting in traffic on I-95 a few days ago, creeping along trying to get to work, taking an hour to make a trip that should last 25 minutes, I finally broke down and put on the radio -- the regular radio -- to see if I could get a traffic report. I put on old reliable 1500-AM, which used to be WTOP, Washington's main news station. The Washington Post purchased it not long ago and now it's Washington Post Radio. And despite the fact that it serves one of the most intensely congested areas in the country, the new management apparently decided that traffic reports were expendable.

I listened for more than half an hour. No traffic. This from a station that used to break every 10 minutes for "traffic and weather together on the 8's." Even in the middle of 9-11. I know because my office didn't have a TV at the time, so we had to listen to the defining news event of our time on the radio. Welcome to the 21st Century. The world was coming apart at the seams, but WTOP was still taking time every 10 minutes to tell people that the inner loop of the Beltway was slow from St. Barnabas Road to the Wilson Bridge. Stop the presses!

ESPN: Jumping the shark -- and beyond

There once was a time when I couldn't get enough sports. Couldn't get enough ESPN. A lot of it had to do with the fact that my parents refused to get cable TV, so I grew up with about four or five channels, most of which didn't come in all that well. I learned to play paddycake with the rabbit ears and didn't see a clear picture on ABC until I went away to college.

But back in those heady, early days of cable, the concept of a 24-hour sports network made me drool. I can remember looking at ESPN's listings and wishing I could watch all the time. And when I finally did leave home and get cable, ESPN was everything I'd hoped. In the early 1990s, the network was at its height. SportsCenter became part of the national consciousness at that time. Baseball Tonight and NFL PrimeTime were practically appointment TV.

To say the least, things have changed.

ESPN has expanded, and as it has fattened its imprint on sports media it has become often insufferable. Watching or reading any ESPN content is to subject yourself to a master class in self promotion. They're either plugging their own horribly ill-conceived shows (Bonds on Bonds) or plugging their own horribly ill-conceived technology (Mobile ESPN) or they're acting as though they were the first to report every story that comes along. To be sure, they do have good reporters working for them. But it says a lot that most of their top "insiders" are former print reporters who made the transition to broadcasting and brought the best of their skills with them, transforming ESPN into something far more than it had been.

There are now four ESPN TV networks (ESPN, ESPN2, ESPN Classic and ESPN News). And all of them have morphed into something other than where they started. Everything is debate and argument -- sports reporters and ex jocks mouthing at each other. And ESPN Classic? What the hell happened to that? It's a great concept, giving fans a chance to see games from the past, get a little nostalgia. But all they seem to run anymore are old bowling tournaments and World Series of Poker reruns. And today I was channel surfing and they were running -- no shit -- the World Series of Darts. Darts! What the hell is that? Actually, I was transfixed. One of the announcers was Scotish, I think, because he sounded like Mike Myers in the Saturday Night Live sketch, "If it's not Scottish ... it's crap!"

I guess with all those hours of TV to fill, it was natural for them to reach a little. But what crackpot decided poker belonged on TV? Poker, golf, bowling ... fucking darts? They put that on, but people say soccer is boring. Go figure.

It's just nice to see that things blow up in ESPN's face as often as they work. That Barry Bonds show was like a million pound anchor. They let that arrogant bastard take up their air time with his weepy, "nobody understands how much I hurt" bullshit. And Mobile ESPN -- what a joke. They introduced a phone for $399. Then the price dropped to $99. Now they're giving it away for free when you sign a contract. The monthly fees are too expensive and nobody needs access to that much sports information on the go. And if there is anyone like that, I certainly wouldn't want to be driving anywhere near them.

All ESPN needs is to end up getting sued after some moron causes an accident because he can't wait until he gets to the office to check on his fantasy team.

Party like it's 1979

When people ask me about how I got to be a sports fan, or how I decided to go into sports media, I tell them about growing up in Pittsburgh. Really, I'm too young to remember the city's best of times. The Pirates were one of the best teams in baseball during the 1970s, though they only managed to get to the World Series twice in six trips to the playoffs during those 10 years. The Steelers ... were the Steelers, plain and simple. But in 1979, when the Steelers won their third Super Bowl and when the Pirates won the World Series, I was only 7. So I barely remember. What I recall is the hype, the way the buzz from all that winning seemed to be on everyone's mind. And I suppose I ended up wanting to be a broadcaster or a writer because those were the people who told me about what was going on. I spent more time hearing about the games from them than I did actually watching the games being played.

The Pirates teams of that time period will always hold a special place for me. I don't want to wax too dramatic about it, lest I start to sound too much like Bob Costas or Thomas Boswell. OK, nobody is ever going to confuse me for either one of them. But I do think I got caught up in the romanticism of baseball's every-day presence in the lives of its fans. As Boswell has said, it's not that you have to watch or listen to the game every day. You can miss a few and when you go to come back to it, you know it's there and available every day. Baseball players seemed larger than life because of that daily presence. To me, none were larger than Willie Stargell, who had moved from left field to first base in the late stages of his career by the time I grew to know who he was. Willie Stargell was my boyhood idol. At the time, it was because he was the Pirates' leader on the field. But then I came to understand his meaning to the team off the field. His quiet dignity, his leadership. I actually got to interview him once, when I was working in Morgantown. I sat in the Pirates' dugout in Three Rivers Stadium, talking to my boyhood idol. Man, I was scared shitless. I'm fairly certain he had no recollection of me at all after that conversation, but it meant the world to me.

All of these memories have come flooding back the last few days because I just got my hands on a boxed DVD set of the 1979 World Series. Major League Baseball has done something I've long wished for all the leagues to do by releasing DVDs of the TV broadcasts of historic games and series. Actually, baseball and the NBA have been doing it for a couple years now. The stodgy, crusty old NFL will never do it. They don't call it the No Fun League for nothing. But baseball is releasing a few World Series a year over the next few years. The '79 Series is just out, all seven games in their entirety from the ABC network feed.

It's wonderful nostalgia for me, since I didn't actually watch the games when they were played. I knew the players and their statistics by heart from their baseball cards. But now to see them come alive in living color -- a lot of color -- is really something. In the late 1970s, the Pirates sported a gaudy color scheme -- nine possible combinations of black and gold and pinstripe tops and pants, which they would mix and match indiscriminately in a practice Sports Illustrated referred to as "multi-hued anarchy." Some of the combinations were just flat out hideous, like the getup Dave Parker was sporting on the cover of a 1977 issue of Sports Ilustrated. In the 1979 World Series, the team wore four different uniform combinations in seven games.

Despite all of those difficult uniform decisions, the Pirates managed to come from 3 games to 1 down to win the series, 4 games to 3. Stargell redeemed himself for a horrendous performance eight years earlier in the 1971 World Series by hitting three homers in 1979 and winning the Series MVP. I know all of the facts. I've known them for years. But watching it happen, seeing the old stadium and the shots from the camera they had in a helicopter above the city, it all made me think back to that time and that place. I tried to picture myself at 7 years old and what I was doing that October while those games were being played. Even now, even though I don't live in Pittsburgh anymore and probably never will again, whenever I tell someone I'm going home there's part of me that's thinking about that place -- thinking about a cool, bleak autumn day and the rivers and the bridges and the rolling gray hillsides, a place where everything was black and gold and sports were still larger than life. That will always be where home is to me.

There is no justice

Just when you think there might be such a thing as hope -- just when you think that sometimes the little guy can topple the big guy every once in a while -- something happens that makes you realize life is all about getting kicked in the balls and laughed at by the big guy while he watches you writhe around on the ground in pain.

OK, that's overstating it more than a little bit, considering what prompted me to write this. But as a baseball fan I'm so goddamn sick of the New York Yankees I can barely see straight.

Tonight, the Yankees were tailing the Texas Rangers 10-2 at one point. Yes, of course, I know the Rangers pitching staff is notoriously pathetic. And so it was that you could have easily predicted what was to come. The Yankees made a comeback and Jorge Posada blistered a two-run homer over the right field fence in the bottom of the ninth to give New York a 14-13 victory.

I'm so sick of the Yankees. I'm so sick of their limitless payroll and the way they go out and buy whoever they need -- often getting the team they rape in the deal to agree to keep paying a good chunk of the salary of whatever rent-a-player they pilfer. I'm sick of their YES Network and the ungodly smug Michael Kay ... the other day I listened to him bitching about how some team the Yankees were visiting set off a bunch of fireworks before the game and it made the stadium smoky. And he kept whining about it and said, "the Yankees drew four million fans last year and they didn't have to set off fireworks." Well, you know Michael, maybe if every other team in baseball could afford to field an all-star at almost every position nobody would ever have to put on any promotions of any kind. But until that day comes, the rest of the groveling little peasant teams still have to figure out some ways to put asses in the seats. So, we're sorry if we annoy you with our circus-geek freakshow routine. Why don't you leave the peon teams alone and go buy a few more all-stars?

It's getting to be that time of the season that the Yankees start giving serious thought to their next player personnel conquest. I mean, you've got Hideki Matsui on the DL until at least August. Gary Sheffield is supposed to be back in the lineup soon, but he's been hurt. Randy Johnson is looking every bit of 42 years old, finally. They were so proud of themselves for getting Carl Pavano last year and they threw a bunch of money at him on the basis of one good season, and he's done just about nothing for them. So, while there may truly be no justice, Yankee haters can take a certain sense of satisfaction from the fact in spite of all their vast resources and continued acquisitions over the last few years, it all seems to have been for naught. They still haven't won the World Series since 2000. They lost to the freakin' Diamondbacks and Marlins. The Marlins! Of course, it should be quickly pointed out that the Marlins won their two World Series by demonstrating every bit of the championship-by-cash arrogance that makes the Yankees so incredibly distasteful. I guess we should be thankful for such poignant irony.

There's a long way to go in this season and the Yankees are easily playing in the toughest division in baseball. The Red Sox aren't going anywhere, and if A.J. Burnett can get healthy, the Blue Jays might have something to say. But it's only a matter of time before the Yankees buy themselves an outfielder to take Matsui's spot in the lineup. As miserable as my beloved, star-crossed Pirates are, I'm halfway hoping the Yankees talk them into giving up Jason Bay -- which would be just enough to put Pittsburgh out of its misery. It would be a mercy killing. And perhaps that might just be baseball's cruel way of delivering a little justice after all.

Farewell

The final episode of The West Wing aired earlier tonight. There are few television shows that reach out and grab you, and even fewer that do so because of their intelligence and their wit. The West Wing was a seven-year ride of brilliant dialogue and story development and easily ranks among the best political fiction of any kind. Unfortunately, many of us wished it could have been more than fiction. When Bush won the White House, the weekly look at the Bartlett Administration was a refuge from reality.

There is no disputing that The West Wing took a downturn after the end of the fourth season when Aaron Sorkin and Thomas Schlamme left. It took the show a good two seasons to find its footing after that, but this last season it became a great show again. Deadlines, of course, have a way of bringing out the best in everyone, and with the series ending, there was a rush of energy in the last dozen or so episodes. It would have been great to see the early days of the Santos Administration.

The West Wing, no doubt, took shape from the remnants of Sorkin's film The American President. The similarities between the two are unmistakable. There is no equal for the dialogue of Aaron Sorkin. The thing about The West Wing was that it seized your attention right from its first minutes on the air. By the time the opening credits of the pilot episode roll over John Spencer's arrival and walk-and-talk through the White House, the show has you moving at breakneck pace, and it kept up that speed for four seasons. When the first episode ended, you couldn't wait for the next one to air. You knew you were seeing something unlike anything else.

It's easy to nitpick, to make disparaging remarks about what happened after Sorkin left, or to complain that the timeline of the show skipped a whole year in between the end of season 5 and the start of season 6. But even at its worst, it was still better than anything else on network TV. It will be a long time before we see anything like it again.

No phones

In spite of my devotion to technology, I am not a fan of cell phones. I was the last human being on the planet to get one -- funny what being stranded along the side of I-95 will do to a person. But it's been two years since then and I still barely use the thing. I'm about to downgrade my plan to fewer minutes.

I don't get people who insist on using their cell phones everywhere. I don't get these people walking around with headsets, talking to the wind. They look like idiots, and they're the only ones who don't know it. They have these Bluetooth things now that are tiny and mostly unobtrusive, but a few weeks ago I was in the Target and saw a guy wearing what looked like one of those headsets the football coaches use on the sidelines. I wanted to walk up to him and tell him, "call a draw play -- the defense won't expect it."

But what happened today took the cake.

I walked into the restroom in the building where I work and another guy came in just after me -- one of these guys who you can tell is trying a little too hard to be Mr. 21st Century Man. He's a multi-tasker, always on the go, always connected, can't take a minute of downtime in the dog eat dog business world. So basically, the kind of guy who makes you sick to your stomach.

Anyway, he goes into a stall, drops his newspaper on the floor, takes a seat and proceeds to, uh, let's just say he made a lot of noise. And then, seconds later, he's on the phone!

"Yeah, it's me, I just sent that fax, so it should be there. No, I've been in the office all morning. I'll ask them about it....."

The entire time he's talking, he's continuing to take just about the loudest shit I've ever heard in my life. I guess I should credit him with one thing, though. As he's talking and shitting, he's also working in an impressive number of courtesy flushes. So he has no regard for what the person on the other end of the phone is hearing, but at least he's not so crass as to make the rest of the folks in the bathroom endure his byproducts. Who is this guy and where did he learn that it's OK to engage in a business call while taking a dump? Because that's a job I want. I want the job where you can subject people on the other end of the phone to the sounds of explosive bowel movements and the repeated "Bawooosh" of the toilet. That's for me. Nothing like a casual workplace attitude.

So Mr. Mystery Shit finishes his very important call, and just before he picks up his newspaper off the floor, I notice it's The Washington Times ... which goes a long way toward explaining how he got so full of shit in the first place.

Bonds, bombs, roids and the rage of 14 years

So, Barry Bonds was a rampant steroid user ... stop the presses!

It's been 14 years since he made that half-assed throw from the middle of left field that was offline and needed one hop to get to the plate and failed to beat Sid Bream, the slowest man in baseball history. Maybe if Bonds had been using steroids back then, the throw would have a little more oomph on it and the Pirates would have made it to the World Series. We'll never know. I still thought Bream was out anyway.

But I'm not bitter about it or anything.

Not much.

The poor, miserable star-crossed Pittsburgh Pirates. Seems like every guy who leaves Pittsburgh goes on to bigger and better things elsewhere. Bonds is the ultimate example of that trend. He has 710 home runs as of this writing, the most recent of which came last night. I realized today, perhaps for the first time, that he's going to surpass Hank Aaron. He needs 45 more. It may take him until next season, and I think he'll come back next year if he's anywhere close, his weeping "nobody understands me and my pain" schtick on his preposterous ESPN show notwithstanding.

The furor over the Bonds steroid allegations has died down somewhat since Game of Shadows was released. There will be more. He's going to have to answer to the IRS and it looks like he'll be facing some perjury charges. But it feels like the damage is done. When he passes Aaron, I'm not sure anyone is going to know how to celebrate the occasion. It will be anticlimactic, awkward. But he brought that on himself.

Meanwhile, the Pirates have been lost since that night in Atlanta in October 1992. They are miserable yet again. They lost today by a run. Seven losses in a row. They've scored 12 runs in those seven games. Been shut out twice. It's not even May and the season is already over.

Only another three months until the Steelers start training camp!

Snow Job

OK, so it's been a while since I've had anything to say here. I've had better times. But today, Tony Snow was named the new White House press flak. And this is the kind of thing people who aren't in the media find alarming. One minute, he supposed to be a news commentator and now he's the White House's mouthpiece. So much for any witless fantasy that he might have displayed any objectivity. Is it any wonder so many people don't trust the media?

Now, to be sure, nobody ever was confused about Snow's politics. He's a commentator, not a reporter, and he's a Fox News Channel guy -- or should we call it Fox Republican Propaganda Channel? I was disgusted by a story that circulated not long ago about how Dick Cheney requests the TV's in his hotel rooms to be tuned to Fox News Channel when he gets there, as if he'd shrivel up and melt like the Wicked Witch of the West if he had to be exposed to a less-partial perspective. I won't make the mistake of thinking there's no bias on channels like CNN and MSNBC. There's just a lot less of it there than there is on Fox.

I've always thought it an impossibly irreconcilable paradox that Fox spews all of this conservative bile on its news broadcasts, but its entertainment offerings are often liberal (The Simpsons) or push the edges of the envelope (Family Guy) or are just outright trashy (Cops, The OC, 90210, Melrose Place, Temptation Island, Married With Children, I Want To Marry a Millionaire ... hell, every show they've ever aired!).

So anyway, I guess we get to spend the next couple years listening to smug Uncle Tony tell us how we're winning in Iraq and how the economy is great how the President really does care about high gas prices.

Good thing many of us already are in the habit of not believing anything he says.

Kirby

I don't know if I like the word "idol." Especially when it's applied to athletes. But at the moment, it's a word that comes to mind.

One of my boyhood idols died today.

Kirby Puckett -- Minnesota Twins outfielder, Hall of Famer -- went before his time. He could have lived 1,000 years and still not been done milking the marrow out of life. He was an exuberant ambassador for baseball. And now he's gone.

Glaucoma cut short his playing career. He played his last game in 1996. He gained a lot of weight. He was in the news for the wrong reasons -- something about a woman he mistreated -- the kind of stuff that makes you realize we dole out that word idol way too easily.

But on the field, his career was the stuff of hero worship -- a 5-foot-9, 220-pound barrel chested bundle of unbridled enthusiasm. He was short and pudgy and hit the snot out of the ball. A .318 career average. One of the most dramatic home runs in World Series history to end Game 6 in 1991. And a ridiculous leaping catch against the wall that kept the Twins alive in that game.

A smile on his face. Always.

Bob Costas once astutely suggested that Puckett's small stature made him a fan-favorite with children. His free-swinging style at the plate should have made him a favorite of opposing teams as well. He once said he never saw a pitch he didn't like.

Rest in peace, Kirby. We'll miss you.

Gimmie a V-Smile for video games

I love video games. And I hate them. I love to play them when they're easy. And for me, they rarely are.

More than likely, I just don't have very good hand-eye coordination. But I'll always chalk up my inability to excel in the digital domain to the fact that I never had a video game system when I was growing up. All of my friends did. All of them. But not me. Video games weren't educational enough for my parents. I think it's hilarious every time I see TV commercials for this thing called the V-Smile -- it's supposedly the "educational" video game system. And you know that the poor, miserable, pathetic little bastard that ends up with a V-Smile is the type of kid who's regularly on the receiving end of atomic wedgies during recess.

The sad thing is, that would have been me. I would have been the V-Smile kid. That's what my parents would have gotten for me instead of the Nintendo that every other kid in the free world had.

Anyway, I digress. I don't want to turn this into a rant against my parents. There's plenty of time for that.

The first time I got a video game system was 1993. I was in college and bought myself a Sega Genesis -- primitive by today's standards, but I played that thing into the ground. NHL '94 absolutely rocked. Ever seen Swingers? Then you know the game. But my system came packaged with a game called Streets of Rage 2. There wasn't much to it. You walked down the street and beat the shit out of whoever came along at you. After a whole bunch of weak little guys who died after a couple of punches, you came up against a "boss" who took a merciless pummeling from you before he finally died. And that was it.

There were lots of games like that. Streetfighter. Double Dragon. Shinobi. But as the video game systems became more advanced, the games changed. They got a lot more complex. More buttons on the controllers, more levels to the games. I dumped my Genesis for a Playstation in 1997. And then hopped on the PS2 bandwagon in 2000. But over the years, the sports games were the only ones I could manage to play. Madden football, of course. Soccer, I love. I've never been able to master basketball. Hockey still rules.

But what bugs me is the lack of walk down the street and beat the shit out of people games for these new systems. Every so often I'll go on a search for some -- I happened to find one this week and I've been having some fun with it.

I've had Grand Theft Auto III for a few years. And while it's fun to just pick up a baseball bat or a 2 x 4 and walk along beating passers by on the street into a bloody pulp for no reason, you get bored with it after a while because the point to GTA III is to complete the missions -- go to certain places, perform certain tasks.

The one thing I'll give to GTA is that at least you know what you're supposed to be doing. I like the concept of big adventure games, where you have to explore vast environments and do a little thinking. But they're not a lot of fun to play because you spend most of your time trying to figure out what to do. I had a game for the Playstation called Akuji the Heartless -- one of those adventure games. And there was one room in that game that must have taken me half an hour to figure out how to get out of. I explored every part of that room systematically and I still couldn't get out. Finally, out of total frustration, I just started randomly hitting buttons and the analog stick on the controller and I just happened to notice a target way up near the ceiling that I hadn't seen before. I can't explain the sense of relief I felt to finally get the hell out of that room.

And as much as I love playing video games, I don't want to have to do shit like that. I don't want to solve puzzles. I don't want to have to press all sorts of maddening button combinations to get my guy to do what he needs to do. I don't want to run around in circles for 20 minutes trying to figure out where the fuck I'm supposed to go next.

Just let me walk down the street and beat the shit out of someone.

Kira and Yukon

Some people have children. I have dogs.

I try to be conscious of the fact that I tend to talk about my dogs the way a lot of people talk about their kids. And as someone who's not a parent, there is nothing more annoying to me than some stupid schmuck who won't shut up about every last mundane minutiae of his child's existence. Mike Greenberg of ESPN just wrote a book called "Why My Wife Thinks I'm An Idiot," and I saw a comment on a message board from someone complaining that Greenberg fell into the trap of writing as if his wife "is the only woman in the world who's ever given birth." Or something to that effect. The point being that nobody gives a rat's ass about most of what happens with other people's kids. I mean, you never hear anyone strike up a conversation with someone, like:
"Say, Dave, how did your little Bleetus do on that social studies test? He didn't get tripped up trying to remember all the key exports of Kazakhstan, did he? Oh, that's too bad. And his soccer season is over? That's terrible! You'll have to let me know when his basketball season starts."

I'll give you a moment to quit wretching.

Better now? Good.

So, I realize talking about my dogs could get on people's nerves. But I think it says something about a person when they love animals enough to have one as a constant companion. Or two, in my case.

Kira and Yukon ... Abbott and Costello, Laurel and Hardy .... Dumb and Dumber. They're my two idiots. Kira is a golden retriever/border collie mix, and she got the worst of both. There's the constantly shedding golden retriever coat and the constantly hyper border collie personality. She came from the pound at about nine months old. Yukon is a chocolate lab who I've had since he was a puppy. He's pure bred and dense as drywall. You look in his eyes and you can see he's got a brain like a blunt instrument. I tell people (who no doubt get annoyed listening to it) that if Yukon could talk he'd sound like Milton from Office Space:

"I was told that I would be fed at some point today, but there is no food -- no food -- in my bowl."

Kira is an attention hound, who would spend most of her time in my lap if I'd let her. She's one of those dogs that'll poke her nose under your hand and demand to be petted. Yukon is a little more independent. But he often wants to sit right next me even if there's no room, and instead of giving me the nose poke, he'll stand there with this poor, miserable look on his face and stare at me until I feel sorry enough for him to move and give him some space. I always start out resisting, figuring he'll eventually go find somewhere else. And then I always cave. He's got a bit of a stubborn streak. I'm always amazed at the amount of time he'll stand there waiting.

They're both middle aged now. She just turned seven, he'll be six later this year. They get hyped up when I have people over (which keeps me from having people over!) but most of the time they're pretty mellow, all things considered. It's a far cry from when they were younger. Man, what a circus. Hours would go by and they'd be bouncing off the walls non stop. Thankfully, those days are history.

Sometimes I think about what it would be like if they weren't here. I have to get home at the end of the day to let them out and feed them. It's a commitment. But they're part of my life and have been since 2000. I'm not sure what it would be like without them. The other day I was in the bookstore and saw a book written by a journalist about the life, and eventually the death, of his yellow lab. First of all, I figure if he can write a book about his dog, I can post a blog entry. But putting that aside, for whatever frustrations I sometimes have with them, I can't imagine what it would be like without them.

And bearing that in mind, my co-workers better hope I never have kids. No doubt I'll give annoying a whole new meaning.

Olympics and NBC: Broken rings and a not-so-proud peacock

What if they held the Olympics and nobody gave a rat's ass?

Well, I suppose we're in the process of finding out. I'm not sure which is worse, trying to get interested in not-so-ambiguously gay figure skaters and sports that were invented five minutes ago for the X-Games or listening to media people pretending they're interested.

It's not that I dislike the events or that I care whether Johnny Weir is gay or not. I've got no problem with snowboarders or gays. I guess what bothers me is that it's disingenuous of the media to bombard us with coverage of events that they neither know anything about, nor would care about if they didn't have the word "Olympics" attached to them. But such is the price we pay for living in a 500-channel universe. All that air time demands something to blab about, and right now, this is what there is. Poor NBC -- the network of the Olympics. They're stuck with this crapfest. The other day I watched the increasingly annoying Katie Couric interview Dick Button about men's figure skating on the Today show. We've got insurgents setting off bombs every day in Iraq and the Vice President shooting people in the face and a midterm election coming up later this year and NBC is spending every waking minute on this frenzied, sickeningly self-promotional clucking about the Olympics.

By the way, if Katie gets the big chair over at the CBS Evening News -- as has been the rumor for months -- Edward R. Murrow will roll over in his grave.

As much as I like NBC, they don't have much of a track record when it comes to Olympic coverage. Remember in 1992 when they tried selling people on three pay-per-view channels of Summer Olympic coverage? It worked so well they never tried it again. But that was a long time ago. NBC's problems with these Winter Games are many. There's the fact that nobody follows any of these sports, for starters. But then there's the little problem of the six-hour time difference in a world of instant information. No Internet in 1992. No live stats on the Web. No 24-hour ESPN News Network. Every day, NBC's people -- like IDIOTS -- are telling you to look away from the screen while they flash the results of events they're not going to show for hours.

News flash: It doesn't work anymore. Nobody is going to wait if they're at all interested. To me, it's the same concept that doomed the Star Wars prequels. The idea of waiting three years to find out what happened to Luke Skywaker worked in 1977. But not in 1999. And Jar Jar Binks didn't exactly help the cause either. But we were a more patient society 30 years ago. And, of course, back then we had an enemy to defeat at the Olympics. No more Soviets, no more drama.

Today, for drama, we look to American Idol and Dancing With the Stars -- proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that it doesn't take much to keep us entertained.

I shot the sheriff, but I did not shoot no Texas lawyer

So, the vice president shot a guy. Should we be surprised? Al Franken did a bit at the beginning of his show yesterday talking about how if it had been Bush that Cheney had shot, Bush probably would have tried to shoot back. And they would have ended up blasting at each other like a scene from a Tarantino movie. I'm just surprised Vice President Pace Maker didn't have a heart attack from the shock of the moment. What does it say about us that the No. 2 person in our government is running around in a field with a rifle and apparently not looking too closely at where he's firing? It's not enough for him that he and his cronies turned Iraq into a pile of rubble, he's got to go hunting on top of it. If he wants to shoot guns so badly, he should catch the next transport to Baghdad.

I pity the fool that don't eat my cereal!

OK, I'm in a bit of a weird mood tonight. I'm thinking about snow and cereal and Mr. T -- I watched an old rerun of The A-Team on TVLand today. Don't ask me why.

Like I said -- a weird mood. And to top it off, I've got the Olympics on TV, but it looks more like the X Games, because I'm watching snowboarding right now. When did snowboarding become an Olympic sport? I guess if curling made it, anything is possible.

So it snowed a good foot and a half and they still haven't brought a plow down my street yet. I'm hoping to get to work again sometime before the end of this month. It's so much snow, everyone on my street quickly ran out of places to shovel it all, and a fight almost broke out this afternoon over it because some moron got all territorial when one of the neighbors started dropping snow where he'd just shoveled.

The other day I was in the grocery store, and people were buying up bottled water and bread because they don't know what to do with snow here in Maryland. And I walked down the cereal aisle and stopped in my tracks when I saw -- I'm not making this up -- Pirates of the Caribbean cereal. It's chocolatey and it's got marshmellows, and I'm thinking, what the hell does this cereal have to do with the Caribbean? Shouldn't it be tropical fruit flavored? I think this was just Kelloggs' excuse to put out another cereal full of chocolate and marshmellows and enough sugar in one serving to put a healthy 200-pound man into a diabetic coma. Who the hell came up with the idea of putting marshmellows in cereal in the first place? Marshmellows! There's a food that just screams breakfast.

Then I noticed another thing in the cereal aisle. First, I saw Yogurt Burst Cheerios, where you get pieces coated with yogurt. And then I saw Yogurt Crunch Life. So obviously this is now the latest thing in cereal. You didn't know that? Yeah, I guess I missed the memo too. So look out for Yogurt Raisin Bran and Yogurt Chex Mix and Total with Yogurt.

And maybe even Pirates of the Caribbean with Tropical Fruit flavored Yogurt -- official breakfast cereal of the Winter X Games ... er, Olympics.