This Has To Stop

Friday night, Yankees-Royals. 2-1 Kansas City, bottom 8. Two on, two out, two strikes on Giambi. Now, keep in mind that I'm rooting for the Royals here. But Giambi takes maybe 1/8 of a swing. Not even close to going around, no matter how you define it. I don't even know if Buck was going to ask for an appeal.

Home plate umpire calls it a swing, inning over. Way to be, Ed Montague.

This just happened again (Joba! is pitching, how could I not watch), with the feared Mike Aviles at the plate. Today's version wasn't nearly as egregious-- it was hard to tell on the replay, although I don't think he went-- but that's not the point.

Is it a power thing? If you're the HP umpire, you have to be pretty much positive before making that call. You are taking away the opportunity for someone with a much better angle to make it. It is essentially like an NBA ref 50 feet away from the play overruling the ref who was 10 feet away, and getting it wrong.

I guess this is probably unrealistic, but wouldn't it be cool if the batter could appeal? Just like the catcher does, the batter can ask to get a ruling from the 1B/3B ump after a bad call on one of these. This would make sense because, well, they have a better angle.

Photo: MLB.com.

This Is Pathetic

I happened to, accidentally, see the cover of this week's ESPN The Magazine today. Here is the top third*:


*The issue I have in front of me actually says "The 7 Smartest Super Bowl Bets (And 1 That Could Break Your Heart)", but that's far from the point.

Naturally, I was intrigued by the top headline. This sounded vaguely familiar, so I looked through it. Not surprisingly, on page 50 they have a collection of wacky Super Bowl props, including "Length of National Anthem", and "Will Tom Petty Perform 'Free Fallin' At Halftime".

Sure, it's strikingly similar to my post (which did appear on freaking Hashmarks), but I'm over that. My issue with it is this- it's terrible.

First of all, the Tom Petty thing is idiotic. There is no line on this, and where they have put the line for other props they say, "LINE: Technically there isn't one, but go find yourself a Radiohead fan and see what he'll give you". Cute. They then proceed to explain why Tom Petty is going to play "Free Fallin" as part of his 12-minute set. Revolutionary. I know this song, of course he's going to play it at some point. There are odds on the first and last songs everywhere- why not use those?

Also, if you're going to write an article on Super Bowl bets, you should at least have a basic understanding of odds. For their MVP section, they have Brady at 1-2, Moss at 4-1, Welker at 5-1. These make sense.

But for their "First Team To Score A Touchdown" writeup, they have the Pats at 2-1. And "First QB To Throw A Pick" has Eli at 5-2. Both of these are completely wrong. You can bet $1 to win $2 on the Pats scoring a TD first? Really? Of course you can't. The line is 1-2. Same for the Eli line- it's 2-5.

If you are going to write an article that is essentially the same as my post, fine, coincidences happen (maybe). But at least do at decent job on it.

What An Upset!

This annoys me:


No. This is wrong. When a team that was favored by two wins, the word "upset" is not appropriate. Even ignoring the line, is it really that surprising that Arizona, at home and with Jerryd Bayless in the lineup, beat Washington St.?

By the way, check out what the Cats have done with and without Bayless. When you take out that 1-3 stretch, they look pretty good.

In the interest of fairness (not that I'm particularly interested in being fair), the word "upset" was not included in ESPN's headline. They went with "topple".

1:29am Update: Nevermind the fairness part. The bottom right corner of ESPNEWS has the same headline as Yahoo!, and John Anderson referred to it as an upset on SportsCenter.

Friday Update: Fine, ESPN. You win: