On any given Sunday (or Monday, or Thursday), your NFL Run & Shootaround crew will be gathered around multiple televisions, making inappropriate jokes and generally regressing to the mean. Catch up on all the NFL action right here.
Everything, Everything
I don't know if something as unabashedly macro as the Super Bowl could ever be considered a microcosm for anything, but here's what I'd say: It seems almost stupidly fitting, after a season in which the NFL's commissioner displayed an uncharacteristic surplus of political ineptitude, that the league could not manage to keep its own power on. And it seems just as fitting that one of the more entertaining NFL seasons in recent memory climaxed near the goal line, with a quarterback who represents the possibilities of the future ultimately in charge of the game's result. The NFL is great, and the NFL is dysfunctional. It lives in the light, and it lives in the dark. — Michael Weinreb
On any given Sunday (or Monday, or Thursday), your NFL Run & Shootaround crew will be gathered around multiple televisions, making inappropriate jokes and generally regressing to the mean. Catch up on all the NFL action right here.
RG3 and Newton's Law
In a lot of ways, the Cam Newton–Robert Griffin comparison makes sense. Each is an athletic, dynamic quarterback capable of making plays with his arm or his legs. Each has a Heisman Trophy to his credit, and each emerged from relative anonymity to claim it. And after yesterday’s 40-32 win for the Redskins, each has a stunning NFL debut to his credit.
The baseball season is a long and lonely road. To preserve his sanity, Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter keeps a diary. These are excerpts from The Captain's private journal.
Wednesday, August 29: vs. Toronto Blue Jays
Baseball is a truly global game, uniting both players and fans across countries, across continents, across the entire world. (Can you say the same about football? You can't. No one outside of Wisconsin really cares that much about it.) Today, we got a special visit from the Ugandan Little Leaguers, the first team from Africa to make the Little League World Series. The kids watched BP from the dugout — it must have been a thrill for them to see Andruw Jones smoke one into the second deck in left field, then sit down at home plate for a couple of minutes and take a few bites of an Almond Joy to build up his energy for his next swing. Not a lot of people get to see those kinds of "inside baseball" moments up close. But more exciting still was the clubhouse tour Joe Girardi gave the team. These are young players from very modest circumstances, so the opportunity to splash around in the Evian whirlpool while ordering custom-flavored Gatorade from the robo-clubbie had to have been a great time. And inspiring: They learned that if you believe in yourself, and work hard every day like all the major leaguers they met besides all the bullpen guys, you can one day be good enough at baseball to possibly avoid conscription in one of those awful child armies you see people talking about on YouTube all the time. They sky's the limit for these kids. If I can survive living in New Jersey for the first four years of my life, anything is possible.
The baseball season is a long and lonely road. To preserve his sanity, Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter keeps a diary. These are excerpts from The Captain's private journal.
Wednesday, August 18: at Chicago White Sox
I've always had a pretty friendly relationship with the media. After each game, good or bad, I've been willing to meet them in front of my locker and answer every last question. I never cut the sessions short to hit the showers until the last reporter has walked away with all the sound bites he requires regarding my thoughts on always giving your best effort, the importance of winning, and trying to play the sport the right way. Some nights I'll say those things 10, 20, 30 times. Do you hear me complaining? You don't, because complaining's not a part of the job. But answering the same questions over and over again for 17-plus seasons is. So you take it one microphone at a time, and at the end of the day, you hope that the quotes are there.
The baseball season is a long and lonely road. To preserve his sanity, Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter keeps a diary. These are excerpts from The Captain's private journal.
Wednesday, August 15: vs. Texas Rangers
Baseball is a sacred trust. For some people, it's almost a religion. (For the record, I was raised Catholic, but you hate to talk about your belief system publicly; your faith is a matter best kept between you, your God, and whatever Hall of Famers up in the Cooperstown section of Heaven you quietly pray to for guidance during difficult slumps. That's nobody's business but your own. And possibly St. Scooter Rizzuto's.) So to knowingly betray our great sport feels like a sin. Baseball's been around since the dawn of time, and in the early days of The Game, cheaters were punished like sinners: They were forced to wear jerseys made of sackcloth, sit in bottomless chairs in front of the local field, and be struck in the genitals with a pair of wet rosin bags tied to the end of a rope. Some might consider this barbaric, but it sent a powerful message about the importance of integrity in our sport. These days, you get a 50-game suspension the first time you're caught cheating with steroids. Is that more or less "barbaric"? I don't know, I don't feel qualified to make that call. But I will say that if you really love the game, if you've got baseball religion, losing a third of a season should give you the same kind of queasy feeling in your lower abdomen as being repeatedly racked with a torture rope. You wonder if Bud Selig was reading a lot of Torquemada when he was figuring out how to replace those old punishments with ones that would hurt as much, but not violate the CBA.
The baseball season is a long and lonely road. To preserve his sanity, Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter keeps a diary. These are excerpts from The Captain's private journal.
Wednesday, August 8: at Detroit Tigers
People will tell you that there's no such thing as an "ugly win," that a W's a W, no matter how you get it. There's some truth to this: The W is always the most important thing, the thing you want so much that you wake up in the middle of the night, sweating through the silk sheets Reggie Jackson recommended for your custom-made, interlocking-NY-logo-shaped, alkaline-waterbed, and immediately head to the rooftop batting cage to get in some extra swings, knowing that a few more cuts in the 3 a.m. Manhattan moonlight could be the difference between a seven- or an eight-game divisional lead in mid-August. If it feels like I constantly write about winning in this diary, it's because winning consumes me, defines me, quiets the nagging voices in my head that whisper, "Derek, no one questions your effort, talent, or almost superhuman dedication to greatness. But let's go win some more, champ." Winning is oxygen, winning is life. Winning is the moment before you need more winning.
The baseball season is a long and lonely road. To preserve his sanity, Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter keeps a diary. These are excerpts from The Captain's private journal.
Wednesday, August 1: vs. Baltimore Orioles
After winning, the thing I care most about in life is protecting my privacy. Yes, it's a distant second to winning, and the third thing I care most about is also winning, so you can see just how important keeping my off-the-field activities private really is. Imagine, then, how it feels when I wake up in the morning, sit down to a delicious breakfast of healthy, wholesome foods my personal chef has prepared for me, and open the paper to discover that Page Six has written yet another story about who they think I'm dating. You hate to let a gossip column get to you, but it can ruin your entire day. You don't even want to finish your wheatgrass smoothie and turkey bacon, it's so upsetting.
The baseball season is a long and lonely road. To preserve his sanity, Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter keeps a diary. These are excerpts from The Captain's private journal.
Wednesday, July 25: at Seattle
A baseball team is 25 guys. No one player can win a game all by himself, not even the Captain, whose job is to go out there and do his best with whatever combination of future Hall of Famers, superstars, current All-Stars, former All-stars, guys who will soon be All-Stars, and random, interchangeable bench/bullpen guys the manager surrounds him with on any given night. Look at the W itself: It's like two V's stuck together, symbolizing teamwork, something that's greater than the sum of its two V-parts. I'm not going to speculate on the symbolic meaning of the L, because that letter is not a part of my vocabulary. To even recognize its existence to make a larger point about the beauty of a team coming together in the name of winning makes me physically ill. As soon as I'm done with this sentence I'm going to pause and eat some five-grain toast to settle my stomach. OK, I'm back now.
The baseball season is a long and lonely road. To preserve his sanity, Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter keeps a diary. These are excerpts from The Captain's private journal.
Wednesday, July 18: vs. Toronto Blue Jays
There's nothing better and more satisfying than a sweep. It felt amazing to take all three versus Toronto, even if tonight's game was called early for rain. You never like a rain-shortened win, they feel a little bit like cheating, but it was coming down so hard we couldn't even play that game where the veteran guys ball up some hundred-dollar bills and toss them out onto the tarp and make the rookies slide out there to scramble for them during the delay. Always big laughs, especially when they figure out they're just one-dollar bills, and they're all soaking wet for no reason. They learn a good lesson: Don't be so greedy — you should be flopping around on the tarp like an undignified, drunk seal for the love of the rain-delay game, not for money. Maybe they had parents who put cash prizes at the end of their Slip ’N Slides when they were kids. That would explain a lot.
The baseball season is a long and lonely road. To preserve his sanity, Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter keeps a diary. These are excerpts from The Captain's private journal.
Now that the All-Star Game is in the rearview mirror, I guess it's safe to tell the truth: Any player who's already been to more than one of those things would rather have a couple extra days of vacation than have to show up for it. Except me, naturally — it's always a huge honor to be selected and to play alongside the best in the league, especially now that we're out there battling for home-field advantage. I'm not going to be one of those ingrates who complains about how he could be in St. Barts, or Bora Bora, or recharging his batteries at his 30,000-square-foot compound in Florida. Playing baseball for a living is a blessing, and it would be crazy not to appreciate every single bonus moment of competition you're lucky enough to have the fans impose on you while most of your teammates were left home to nurse their sore hammies or strained obliques so that they can come out of the gate strong for the second half. You have to savor those extra innings you're asked to play in the sweltering mid-July heat, for a manager you're probably going to face for the pennant. It's a great gift every time. Especially when you're a veteran who doesn't know how many more chances you might get to re-experience something you've done 13 or so times before.
Over the weekend, news broke that the New York Knicks were dragging their feet in matching the Houston Rockets' $25 million contract offer to point guard Jeremy Lin. As the nervous laughter of Knicks fans ("Ha, this is hilarious ... can you imagine? No, but really, guys. Sign him") turned into acts of hair-pulling and fist-shaking and full-blown Twitter meltdowns, our fearless leader, Bill Simmons, posed the question: If the Knicks, following the apparent financial advice of Carmelo Anthony, turn their backs on the most exciting, well-liked player to rock blue and orange since [insert beloved Knicks player Sprewell, Starks, Ewing ... Renaldo Balkman], would New York fans be wise to turn their backs on the team and become fans of the other New York franchise, the Brooklyn Nets? Simmons certainly thought so. We asked several members of the Grantland family, some of whom count themselves as Knicks supporters, for a verdict.
The baseball season is a long and lonely road. To preserve his sanity, Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter keeps a diary. These are excerpts from The Captain's private journal.
Sunday, July 1: vs. Chicago White Sox
Hot day at the Stadium, man. Hot day. Speaking of hot, Robbie Cano's going nuts right now. "He makes it look so easy," everyone likes to say about him. It's true, but "making it look easy" is a double-edged bat. (Yeah, bats are round and don't have edges, but sometimes to make a boring old saying baseball-specific you have to put aside geometry and logic for a minute to get to an essential truth like that, and we don't use swords.) When you make baseball seem "too easy," you wind up "looking lazy" when things are not going well. As captain, I should probably work on that with him, help him put a little strain into his game, because you hate to see a guy as good as Cano get criticized for the occasional yawn in the batter's box. Sometimes the brain just needs oxygen. You can say, "He's yawning, he's really bored," or you can say, "He's involuntarily trying to stop his brain from suffocating." I'll go with the latter, because it's a medical fact, and you'd change your tune pretty quick if a guy were having fatal seizures at home plate.
Oh yeah, it's All-Star Selection Sunday, so we found out the rosters after the game. Here are the starters selected by the fans:
Here is how you fix the Home Run Derby: Start with an aircraft carrier. Matter of fact, whenever you are "fixing" anything, "start with an aircraft carrier" is always a good jumping-off point. Now you take said aircraft carrier and anchor that bad boy about 350 feet from shore. Not just any shore: Make it a bay that somewhat mirrors the dimensions of a major league baseball park. You see where I am headed with this, don't you? Yep, you're right, the guys on the aircraft carrier have to hit the balls back to land in order to get credit for a home run. Not a bad idea, huh? Well, we aren't done pouring extra awesome sauce on this yet. Every single ball that gets hit off the aircraft carrier has a dollar value, so if you retrieve the ball you can turn it in for a cash prize. Some are worth $500, some are worth $1,000 and the "money ball" is worth $10,000. Now you don't only have the spectacle of the baseballs flying off an aircraft carrier onto the beach, you have the battle for the balls as well. I know what you are thinking: Won't this get ugly? I don't want to watch people tear each other's arms off over a baseball on national television. Fear not: The whole event is recorded, and the stealing of baseballs from the rightful owner (he/she who caught it) will be policed. Are you really going to read this and tell me that this wouldn't drastically increase your interest in the Home Run Derby? If you don't like this idea, you are basically taking a stance against beaches, bikinis, free money, and the United States military. Don't take a stance against beaches, bikinis, free money, and the United States military. That would be dumb.
— David Jacoby
The baseball season is a long and lonely road. To preserve his sanity, Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter keeps a diary. These are excerpts from The Captain's private journal.
The baseball season is a long and lonely road. To preserve his sanity, Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter keeps a diary. These are excerpts from The Captain's private journal.
Wednesday, May 30: at Anaheim
Whew. We avoided a sweep. No one likes to get swept. It's the baseball equivalent of that thing barbarians do when they raid a town and impregnate all the women before burning the place down. You definitely want to be the ones doing the impregnating, not the ones who have to lug around bastard barbarians your whole life. So it felt really important for us to take this one and avoid that kind of unpleasant pregnancy scenario. You definitely want to have kids on your own terms, when you're ready, after retirement. I really need to stop talking about this. We won. That's what matters. The invasion thing doesn't really hold up when the home team wins anyway.
