Sunday, August 25, 2013

Being told I'm full of crap (and maybe I was)

When I posted my blog post about Danica Patrick on Twitter earlier today, I tagged the person I was writing about, because I thought it would be really weak if I wrote about her behind her back with no way for her to see it or respond.

Well, she saw it, and she responded.

To review, this is what I based the post on.
However, she said there was more to it than what I saw, so here it is.

It was someone else who made the jealousy crack, but otherwise, it was all me.

And we've been having a conversation ever since.





And yes, during the conversation, I asked the question ... and she replied.
Kudos to her for that.

I said it in the conversation, and I'll say it here. If there was something I missed, that led me to the wrong conclusion ... I'm sorry.
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Chickening out

There was this very odd incident in the NASCAR race at Bristol last night when Danica Patrick was coming off pit road just as a restart happened, and were it not for some evasive action, there could have been a huge pileup.

I don't think Gluck would be offended if you said he was skeptical at best about Danica's NASCAR career to date and her prospects going forward, but there have been a few times where she has done something well and he has given her credit for that much. I am also well aware that such relative open-mindedness is not universal, and since I sometimes enjoy exploring human nastiness, against any semblance of good judgment, I decided to read the replies to Gluck's post.

Where I found this.
I have been known, once in a while, to start an argument or two or 1,000. Most lately have been about Alex Rodriguez, but I even got into it with someone lately over whether a team from Westport, CT, should represent New England in the Little League World Series.




There was more, which I'll spare you, but we ended on a more-or-less friendly note.

But as much as I wanted to (and as much as Mrs. Last Honest, who hates when I argue with people, wanted me to), I couldn't start what could have been quite the argument with the question I was dying to ask ...
... Who is teaching your daughter to think that way?
Saying a woman belongs in the kitchen, meaning that's all she's good for, is one of the most sexist things you can say about a person, along with saying all she's good for is sex.

I don't think all of the criticism of Danica Patrick is because she's a woman. I'm sure there are people who legitimately feel her accomplishments-to-attention ratio is skewed -- although they should probably take that up with the broadcasters, particularly Fox, as it seems that TNT and ESPN have not played her up as much -- but for some reason, it's more personal when it comes to her. Can't imagine why.

(Multiple times, I have asked critics, including Kyle Petty, what they would do if she ever got good. The rare times I do get an answer, it's "She never will," which avoids the question for what I think is the same reason I have trouble engaging critics on Twitter ... too many questions.)

So why did I chicken out in the face of what looked like completely obvious sexism?

Because it involved her daughter.

A friend of mine home-schools his children, and we were having a discussion of it one day, and I made the point that while in the public schools the teachers have to be licensed, it's not required for home-schooling. Since it's his wife that teaches their kids, he took my comment VERY personally, and the conversation got kind of ugly for a few minutes.

If I had asked the question I wanted to ask last night, not only would I have called her out as sexist (which is personal enough), I would have pretty much stated that she or the girl's father was a bad parent. I don't know the woman or the girl's father; they may be outstanding parents other than one awful comment.

And that's what stopped me from pulling that trigger, not that everyone had that problem.




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Monday, August 19, 2013

Confessions of a bad fan

So ... some stuff happened in the Yankees-Red Sox game last night.



This nutter from Joe Giradi is one of the best I've ever seen. Joe
Torre would have sat on his behind and hoped the power of his
calm would make everything stop.

 From that moment on, I wanted the Yankees to get even, even if it meant CC Sabathia would have been immediately thrown out, thanks to the stupid way umpires implement the warning rule, which has the effect of giving one team a free shot ... or two, or three, or four.


I've made my thoughts on David Ortiz known more than once (and had a heated chat with my Red Sox fan mother-in-law about it over lunch yesterday), so I'll spare another rant. Instead, I'll leave it to The Captain's Blog.

I shouldn't be proud of wanting to see a player I don't like on a team I don't like getting hit by a pitch and being upset when it didn't happen. (Even though I understand there really was no right time during the rest of the game to do it, I'm a believer that if you wait until the "right time," that time may never come up.)

But that wasn't the worst part. The worst part was when, during the middle of the game, I turned to Mrs. Last Honest and said ...
"I don't even care if the Yankees win this game. I just want to see Ortiz get hit." 
Yes, I prioritized retaliation over winning a game, a game that would have won a series over the Yankees' bitter rivals, at a time of the season when the Yankees need every win they can get. Mrs. Last Honest didn't really say much of anything, but I could tell by the look on her face that she thought I had lost my mind.

And I kind of had. In that moment, I became the guy I hate, the guy I wrote about at the end of the game, when the Yankees were on their way to victory.

I'll try to be better next time.

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Thursday, August 15, 2013

Coincidence? I think not

Before its college football preview, this week's Sports Illustrated had a story about "Glimmer Twins" Byron Buxton and Miguel Sano, whose presence in the Minnesota Twins system was likened to having Mike Trout and Bryce Harper in the same organization.

If all goes according to plan, Buxton and Sano will lead the Twins for years to come, although an interesting sidebar to the story listed the other five times since 1990 that one organization had two position players in the top five of Baseball America's prospect rankings: Alex Gonzalez and Carlos Delgado (1994 Blue Jays), Ruben Rivera and Derek Jeter (1995 Yankees, and Rivera was ranked higher), Paul Konerko and Adrian Beltre (1998 Dodgers), B.J. Upton and Delmon Young (2004 Devil Rays) and Justin Upton and Stephen Drew (2006 Diamondbacks).

Out of that group, Rivera is the only outright bust, but Jeter is the only surefire Hall-of-Famer in the bunch, and the Konerko-Beltre pairing is the only one where you could say both became stars ... but not both for the Dodgers at the same time.

Something more subtly interesting, however, at least to me, was writer Albert Chen's description of Sano:
"Sano is a 6'4", 200-pound man-child, the kind of physical specimen that would have SEC coaches breaking NCAA recruiting rules."
Not "college football coaches," "Big 10 coaches," "Pac-12 coaches," "Big 12 coaches" or coaches from any other conference.

You can't tell me that wasn't intentional, that anyone reading that sentence doesn't understand exactly what Chen was getting at. But had they forgotten by the time they got to the college football preview itself, which had seven SEC teams in the top 25?

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Tuesday, August 13, 2013

Hollander's handbooks and a trip back in time

I don't really know why the New York Times decided to publish a story today about Zander Hollander, but I'm glad they did.
"From 1971 to 1997, Hollander edited sports yearbooks, brick-like tomes known as Complete Handbooks, which in the pre-Internet era were almost holy objects to a certain type of sports-crazed youngster. Here, in one glorious place, was information — statistics, team rosters, records, schedules, predictions for the coming season and more — freed from the restrictions of newspaper column inches and far beyond what a still embryonic cable system was providing."
I was actually thinking about the Hollander handbooks not long ago, remembering for some reason the story in the 1980 handbook (like the others I had as a kid, long lost to time and cleaning, so I'm working somewhat off memory here) about Nolan Ryan being the first player to sign a contract for more than $1 million per year, and how the story about his contract and all the others totalling $1 million fit on a single page, including the box listing all of them.

Actually, thinking of the handbooks I read as a kid reminds me of how different things were ...

... how they told you about every player in the NBA, right down to the last man on the bench, and the brutal honesty about them contained in a couple short paragraphs. Now, you can find out more about any end-of-the-bench player (I chose Fab Melo of the Celtics as an example) than you could ever imagine.

... how "fantasy football" meant the stories in my friend Kenny's NFL handbooks about a team of current stars playing a collection of greats from the past, or Super Bowls years in the future, including as I recall an American team taking on one from the Soviet Union.

... how the handbook was probably the definitive preview of your favorite team's season. Now, you can find previews everywhere, like the one my friend Rob did the other day on the San Diego Chargers that he asked me to review. (I told him, "You probably could have gotten away with five versions of 'Can they stop being undisciplined dumbasses?' and been fine.")

... how enthralled I was reading the handbook for the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, with the picture of an Eastern European team handball player soaring above a defender to shoot or a photo of the Soviet Union's Uljana Semjonova taking a hook shot. My preteen self wondered how a woman could ever be that tall. Now, people complain when the prime-time hours of the ungodly amount available on TV or online aren't live.

Thinking of the handbooks also made me think about how there has never been a better time to be a sports fan, and how that doesn't seem like enough anymore.

There are more ways to see more sports and read more about sports than there ever has been, and much like I think of my younger self as having lived in the Dark Ages, kids today will probably think of 2013 as a time when dinosaurs roamed the Earth.

If you're willing to spend the time and effort, and sometimes the money, you can watch just about anything you want. During the Stanley Cup finals, I had a grand old time chatting with a Blackhawks fan from Chicago, and have struck up a Twitter friendship with a New England Patriots fan who lives in Miami.

Last night, after reading a terrific piece by Alyson Footer, I had a conversation with her about it. (To be clear, the Harwell example she gives is something positive, not part of the worst anyone did to her.)




All of that is great, but I fear it has the effect of not much being special anymore. Maybe the Super Bowl (although that may be as much a cultural event as a sporting one) or a rare instance of going to a game, but because so much sports is available so often, it becomes disposable. Miss one game? There's another one on today ... or tomorrow ... or the next day.

So most importantly, thinking about the handbooks reminds me of how good we sports fans have it today.
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Thursday, August 1, 2013

Three of my favorites


On his new blog, Joe Posnanski is asking people to write about their favorite athletes in 100 words or less.

I've already written about mine, Don Mattingly, in far more than 100 words, but I'll give it a shot with three others who are favorites both because of their greatness and because of the connections they have led to.

* * * * *

Jerseys of two pretty good players ...  and Diana Taurasi
For me, Diana Taurasi is women's basketball.

I never followed it until I started dating the future Mrs. Last Honest, who is a massive Connecticut fan, and so it was that one of the first games I watched was the UConn-Tennessee game Dec. 31, 2000. when Taurasi, a freshman, sparked the Huskies off the bench.

It was love (basketball love, that is) at first sight.

And there's so much to love: her shooting, her passing, her fun, her devilish sense of humor. And by the good fortune of when I started dating my wife, I've been there from the start.

* * * * *
Gilmour ... Dougie Gilmour
My junior and senior years in college, we only took breaks from hockey on the Sega for several things: classes, eating, sleeping, the radio station, going out occasionally ...


One of the stations we got locally aired the CBC, which meant Saturday night hockey, which usually meant the Toronto Maple Leafs. Hard as it may be to believe, the Leafs were really good in those years, and Doug Gilmour was the leader of the pack, passing, scoring, hitting and throwing his body all over the ice.

Me and my boys couldn't get enough.

* * * * *
I wish I could have seen more of these.
When I was growing up, my father and I watched baseball. As I got older, he drifted away from baseball and toward Michael Jordan, who I hated.

Then he got into NASCAR, and drew me into it. It gave us something to talk about, and since Dale Earnhardt was his favorite driver, he became mine. A thrill of my first NASCAR race in Dover was seeing Earnhardt come out for second-round qualifying, which he rarely did back then.

We didn't see him win like he did in his best days, but we had Bristol, Talladega and, of course, Daytona.






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