I used to collect baseball cards when I was a kid because, well, every dude does at some point. I am a HUGE baseball fan and some of my fondest memories were opening up a pack of 89′ Donruss and seeing a cool new Rated Rookie, and a Will Clark or Mark McGuire. I studied the stats like a nerd, and compared collections with my friends. I started keeping track of a lot of player’s careers, and learned a ton about the game.

I stopped collecting over time because I grew pubes and started being more interested in trying to get girls to let me touch their boobs and actually playing baseball then looking at a bunch of pictures of adult males on cards. But today I was in a candy store and saw a pack of Topps, and decided I was going to re-live a bit of my youth, so I bought it.

First of all it was 2 fucking dollars! Bull shit! I don’t want to sound old or anything (but I’m old as fuck) but when I bought cards they were 75 cents. But whatever, it’s been a while. But then I opened up the pack and there was a grand total of SEVEN cards inside. SEVEN! RIP OFF!!!

So I paid about 28 cents per card and got a couple of mildly decent ones, but in general I feel ripped off. When I have a kid I ain’t shelling out 2 bucks a pack for that shit. I’m telling his ass to get on the tube and watch Baseball Tonight on ESPN and learn from Peter Gammons’ old ass.

I did get a piece of bubble gum that was surprisingly fresh though, which I’m chewing now, so it wasn’t a total loss I guess.

Atlanta Braves pitcher John Smoltz, who in addition to being one third of the 3 sure-fire Hall of Fame inductees to come up with the team during the 80’s (Tom Glavine and Greg Maddux being the other two) also rocks one the longest running beards in all of sports, and he may be done pitching forever as of today.

The 21 year vet who has spent his entire career with the same team said his shoulder has been troubling him all year and he just can’t take it anymore. He is going to have immediate surgery by Dr. James Andrews, who has operated on pretty much every pitcher at one point in their career. After watching the news conference footage on ESPN I got the feeling that he thinks he isn’t going to pitch anymore, and that he would be happy just to be able to lift his arm above his head.

I’m not a Braves fan or anything, but they have been doing it about as right as a team can do it for the past 20 years or so. They have held on to all of their stars for a as long as they could without ever crippling the franchise by over paying to keep them, they made the playoffs for over a decade straight, and in the age where managers get fired like Taco Bell employees, they have held on to Bobby Cox since I didn’t even know how babies were made, so I root for him to pull of a miracle.
I doubt Smoltz can come back from major shoulder surgery at 41 years old. But the dude has more scars on his pitching arm than a cutter goth chick and he’s been able to come back from all of his previous surgeries successfully, so who knows?
I don’t know why he would want to come back though. The guy is so rich he has to move money out of the way just to take a shit. But even the greatest athletes have a tough time knowing when to hang it up. *cough! Michael Jordan! *cough!

I’m a Giants fan, so I naturally hate the Dodgers. And even though the Giants are the current owners of the worst contract in all of sports (see Barry Zito’s $136,000,000 fiasco) the Dodgers don’t have a lot of room to laugh. This off-season they signed Andruw Jones to a 2 year, 36 million dollar contract to patrol center field and to add some power to their impotent offense. It was a risky signing to start with, considering the fact that he only hit .222 last year with 26 home runs (which is tied for his lowest total since he started playing full time) last year and he was healthy. The market was totally dry for him because he had a terrible 07′ and he turned in to kind of a fat ass, and the only reason he signed with the Dodgers in the first place is because they were literally the ONLY team that were willing to offer him a two year deal worth a shit (everybody else was either offering one year for big money, or several years for shit money). So the fact that he is not only having an even worse year this year (he’s batting .165 with TWO home runs and only SEVEN rbi’s in 43 games!!!!! WHAAAAAAT?!?!?!), but he is now on the shelf for 4 to 6 weeks after having knee surgery earlier today makes me laugh until I piss down my own leg.
The Dodgers also signed away the Giants best pitcher, Jason Schmidt, before the 07′ season giving the then 33 year old with a declining fast ball a 3 year, 47 million dollar deal that most people thought was a pretty big risk at the time as well. He almost immediately blew out his shoulder (which was no surprise to any giants fan that watched him pitch through the 06′ season) and in two years has pitched in all of 6 games, amassing a 1 - 4 record with a 6.31 era.
The team is currently hovering around .500 with a 26 - 24 record coming in to play today, which makes them a huge disappointment considering their stacked pitching staff, and with Nomar Garciaparra, Andruw Jones, and Jason Schmidt all on the disabled list for quite some time the future doesn’t look too bright.
As a Giants fan I couldn’t be happier.

A couple years back a 12-year-old kid got hit just above the heart on the mound with a line drive in a rec league baseball game. The boy’s heart stopped beating and his brain was deprived of oxygen for over 15 minutes, resulting in disastrous bodily harm. Two years later, the family of the wounded child is now suing the bat manufacturer (Hillerich & Bradsby Co., maker of the 31 inch, 19 ounce aluminum Louisville Slugger), Little League Baseball for sanctioning the bat (even though it wasn’t a Little League game) and the Sports Authority for selling the bat at their store.

This is quite the lawsuit. The whole basis of the family’s case is that the bat is unsafe (too light, basically). But the reality is that bats of these whip like caliber have been in use for years on end. In my personal opinion, they are too light, but the durability of aluminum forced out wood bats at the youth league level long ago. Considering these factors, I think this seems to be an unfortunate case of a devastated family that simply is looking for someone to blame for a very tragic accident. This is not Little League’s fault, nor Louisville Slugger’s, nor the sporting goods store.

I do believe that the incredibly lightweight nature of aluminum youth league bats is consistently dangerous (that’s why they changed oz. rules to -3 for high-schools near the millennium), but until parents and leagues are willing to pony up the cash to switch back to wood, aluminum bats will remain what they are.

Hearing all this BS about a Roger Clemens / Mindy McCready tryst amidst his defamation of character suit against former trainer McNamee, I realized that I have never sat down and watched a baseball game in a decade, and that I have never listened to one of Mindy McCready’s songs. So here’s to rectifying the latter.

Yeah… It’s fair to say that I like Nashville’s Pop Radio sensations as much as I like watching baseball. That is, this much:

Which I guess makes me Un-American. C’est la vie.

Former Senator George Mitchell’s report on the widespread use of steroids in Major League Baseball was finally released today. Over 409 pages it basically says what most people already know, that most any decent baseball player of the last two decades was so juiced on roids that his balls were probably the size of seedless grapes:

“Everyone involved in baseball over the past two decades - commissioners, club officials, the players’ association and players - shares to some extent the responsibility for the steroids era,” Mitchell said. “There was a collective failure to recognize the problem as it emerged and to deal with it early on.”

For added lulz, the report named names, listing 75 players who were shown to have used Performance Enhancing drugs, including Roger Clemens, Miguel Tejada, Kevin Brown, Benito Santiago, Lenny Dykstra, Chuck Knoblauch, David Justice, Mo Vaughn and Andy Pettitte. LENNY!!!?? Say it ain’t so! Full list after the jump:

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