StumpTownSports

I don't have time this week to do a recap of last weekend and it is almost the next weekend anyway, so I'll just toss a few things out there: 1. Are people fired up about the baseball playoffs? Are there any compelling stories? Howard with the Phils I guess, maybe. I don't know. Maybe I'm just still bitter about the Giants, but I can't get into it. 2. Speaking of the Giants, why is no one talking about the fact that in September, with his knee finally recovered, Barry is hitting balls out like he was when he was allegedly juicing. Doesn't that cast even more doubt on the whether we should care if these guys are roiding? I'm not saying it doesn't matter at all, but maybe the reasons it matters have nothing at all to do with stats or performance...at least with Bonds. 3. More great NFL matchups this weekend. I'm really looking forward to Chicago and Seattle on Sunday night. Can the Seahawks win with Hasslebeck throwing 45 times? I think we ...

It’s time for another weekend recap. One of the really nice things about football season is that almost all meaningful sports happenings take place on the weekend, so it makes it easy to keep track of it all. You just put in the intense time over the weekend and you have almost a full week to digest and recap. Of course now that we have college football on Thursday, Friday and Saturday and Pro football on Monday and later on Thursday and Saturday, it is becoming harder and harder, but it’s still mostly a weekend sports world right now. When the NBA season starts I may just have to give up sleeping all together. Anyway, here are my thoughts about the weekend: 1. Friday was a great day for sports because I got to play basketball for the first time in longer than I care to admit. I would play basketball every day for as long as my body could take if I could find a way to make it work, so the fact that I haven’t played regularly in a while really bothers me. But Frid...

I know it’s Thursday and you’ve probably already taken more time than you should to digest what happened in the first full weekend of football of the year, but I have to throw out some of my thoughts before this weekend rolls around. 1. Going back a full week, nice performance by the Beavers on the smurf turf of Boise St. Apparently the traveling secretary (who George Costanza thinks does a bad job), left in their playbook for the last time these two teams met and forgot to put in the new gameplan. How else can you explain the Beavers going up by two tds AGAIN early in the game and then getting absolutely shamed for the rest of the game. There are beatdowns, then there are humiliating blowouts and then there is what Boise did to OSU. Nice work Beavers, way to represent the conference. I guess being a baseball school was good enough. 2. 3 great college games last weekend in terms of significance (to me) and I have to say something about all 3. First, th...

Here's a few random thoughts after last night's game: 1. My 6 year old son loved the Pink intro. Me not as much. Is that the new intro? Really? To every game or just that one? How did they decide on Pink? I mean what says football more than an already past her prime female pop-"star" with the name "Pink?" Ugh. Maybe next week, we'll get Fiona Apple. 2. Why did they let Andrea Kramer come on after a 4 day bender? What happened to her? I gasped in shock when she first appeared on my screen. Sometimes, it doesn't pay to have a big TV. Yikes. Maybe, stop letting todlers cut your hair. I know that's mean, but something had to be said. I'm sorry it had to be me. Let's just let her gracefully exit and give her job to the great Peter King. 3. Culpepper looked as bad as a big time QB has looked since any of Bret Favre's games from the last 2 years. Just throw to your own team for crying out loud. Dolphin fan should be ver...

With the season kicking off tonight, every where you look in the paper, on TV or on line people are making their predictions. Well, I’ve read enough, so now I need to share with you what’s really going to happen. These aren’t predictions, this just simple fact. Here are some of the things that will happen in football before Tuesday morning: 1. Deuce McAllister will post better numbers than Reggie Bush this week, but Bush will do something that will remind us all of Sanders and Vick. I see one of those 6 yard runs that takes 2 minutes where about 8 guys miss tackles. 2. The Niners will not be as bad as everyone predicts and the game against the Cardinals will be close 3. TO will have a big game and everyone will act like nothing ever happened and the Cowboys (especially the Tuna) are geniuses for signing him. In 3 weeks when he really melts down, the media will forget everything they said and act like Dallas is the stupidest franch...

Turns out that “giant sucking sound” is not NAFTA afterall, but rather the sound my fantasy team is most likely to make. After weeks of anticipation, we had my fantasy football draft last night for the Boyz Near the Hood fantasy league that I run with a college buddy of mine. I’m sure you are all busting to find out what happened and so for that reason and for the therapeutic benefit that it might have I’m going to purge my inner doubts and fears and tell you what happened last night and why I did what I did. Enjoy. After having spent most of the day at the office getting absolutely nothing work related accomplished, I decided to leave early. It’s not that I didn’t have work to do or that I didn’t want to do it, it is just that I couldn’t really think of anything not related to football and that just doesn’t allow one the sort of concentration one needs to do legal work. I got home about 5 and spent the next hour rearranging my man room, hooking up the computer to my projector, ch...

Team USA and Fantasy Football One day until my fantasy football draft and it can’t get here soon enough. Unlike many of my buddies who share my love for football and fantasy, I only play in one football league. Every year it seems I get invited to play in others, but to this point I have turned them down. I’ve gone the multi-league route and it has some good points but in the end what I love most about fantasy is the “gives you something to root for” quality it brings to the season. In multiple leagues it inevitably works out where you have a guy in one league and you play against him in the other and then who to root for just becomes too complicated. I like to keep my sports rooting simple. So the league I run, Boyz Near the Hood (a link to which is at your right) is the only league I do and the draft is tomorrow. I have the 5th overall pick in a keeper league. Last year I drafted Deuce McAlister in the first round thinking he was going to have a big year and would also make an ...

Tiger I just noticed that Tiger is leading at the WGC Invitational and I wonder if Phil Mickleson got Clyde Drexlered. As a Blazer fan, I remember all too well the SI cover and article that came out calling Clyde the second best player in the NBA and making all kinds of comparisons to MJ and even suggested that there were some aspects of the game where Clyde was better. Anyone who knows anything about the MJ era in the NBA already knows what happened next. This was right before the Blazers met the Bulls in the NBA finals and reporters were just trying to make a story. Instead, they made MJ feel like he had something to prove and he spent the remaining games before taking home the title, demolishing Clyde and the Blazers. A few short months ago there was all this talk about a Mickleslam and Lefty catching up and maybe even passing Tiger as top player in the world. Then Tiger's Dad died and Tiger went away and then missed the cut at the Open and the people talked Phil up even mo...

Team USA and Football I am a bona fide NBA junkie. I follow it closer than any sane person should. I read out of market papers I watch replays of old games, I can tell you off the top of my head that the NBA channel is 601 on Directv and don’t get me started on how much I love/need my NBA league pass. So, that may make it easier to understand that I have watched ever minute of every game that has been televised anywhere that the current Team USA has played. Frankly, I don’t get why this competition isn’t a bigger deal over here. Here’s what you get with the FIBA World Championships: 1. An NBA all-star team playing games that really matter. We all love the NBA all-star weekend in spite of Stern’s ridiculous refusal to incorporate a huge game of H-O-R-S-E into the weekend. We love watching all those great players on the same court together. We watch our favorite start on their own teams all the time wondering, what would it be like if D Wade was finishing that sweet dish from LB...

August Blues August is a tough month in the world of sports. You basically have Baseball, the PGA Championship and the unfulfilled promise of football. The PGA championship is fine, but it has the downside of being golf. For me, watching golf can actually be fairly entertaining but it really requires Tiger to be in the hunt. I’m an unapologetic bandwagon Tiger fan. I don’t so much like Tiger as I enjoy his dominance. I just like watching Tiger set records and dominate the sport, so if he’s in contention golf is pretty fun, but if not…it’s just golf. So the PGA has a chance to be interesting, but you can’t really count on it. I’m a baseball fan, but mostly I’m a Giant’s fan, so like Tiger and golf, I’m mostly only interested in baseball if the Giants are good. If you follow baseball at all you know the Giants are..ummm…how should I put this….awful. That’s it, they are awful. And that would be bad enough, but to make matters worse they have this Bonds guy, maybe you’ve heard of ...

The Magloire Trade Apparently Steve Patterson and Kevin Pritchard are reading my blog and thank goodness. I guess they heard my plea for NBA action in the sports dessert that is the summer. Now that Landis has managed to ruin the short lived joy gleaned from the Tour de Lance (that name is sticking, at least here), and the Giants have managed to squander some pretty good talent and a very weak division, I need something to supplement my growing football fever. So, even though most of my sports reading these days is about football, the action is still in hoops. The Blazers made their 7th trade of the offseason this past week when they sent Ha, Brian Skinner and Steve Blake to Milwaukie for Jamal Magloire. Frankly, I think this is probably a win/win, but I really like the trade for the Blazers, even though it is a bit surprising. What they gave up – 1. Ha – Ha is huge. I mean really big. Not only is he a legit 7’4 or 7’5, but he is pretty th...

More Canzano... I admit, in part to see if my first response from Canzano was just the computer generated response it appeared, I emailed him back asking about Darius Miles and whether there was even a whisper of a rumor about what the plan is for him. Somewhat to my surprise, Canzano responded. He said: "They're having real issues. Nobody wants him." Not exactly the answer I had hoped for, but pretty much what I expected. Who would want him? But more importantly, I have to give Canzano credit for answering my emails. I have to say after this experience and previous experiences with Jason Quick, also of the Oregonian, those guys are pretty responsive. I don't always, or even often, agree with them, but at least they return their emails.

I just got an email back from Canzano. I have printed the entire text word for word below. I think he makes some really good points and while I didn't see anything to make me change my position, he did give us all some good things to think about. What I like most about this email is that even though he is an important writer for Oregon's most important paper, there is no way this was written by an intern or generated autmatically. "Thanks for the note. I appreciate it. JC" Seriously though, I appreciated him taking the time to at least give some response to the ramblings of some random fan.

Today, John Canzano, a sports writer for the Oregonian wrote an article suggesting that the Blazers should trade for Allen Iverson. I think this is, to say the least, a terrible idea. So, I wrote to Canzano about it. Below is the email I sent him. I will post any response I get here. Good morning John. I'm a long-time Blazer fan and NBA junkie. I read and listen to you fairly regularly, but today you got my attention a little bit more than usual. Maybe, that was the only intent. Maybe, you noticed how much run stories on possible AI trades get on line and thought you would toss it out there to get people talking and, of course, talking about your article. I couldn't fault you for that, but in case you actually meant what you said, let me throw a few things at you in response. I'm sure you get a lot of emails, but if you can find the time to respond, I would appreciate it. First, Philly would not do this deal. John Hollinger on ESPN threw out 5 scenarios that work better...

I never want to live in New York City. I just don’t think I could stand the local sports fans and sports media. Not only are they the most obnoxious in the country, there is no one even close. I know this is a well established fact, so I’m only bringing it up because this business over A-Rod is so ridiculous. NY fans are now booing him on a regular basis. The second best player in the major leagues….booing him. Why? Because of some scandal? Because of steroids? Because he spoke out against the team or the city or the fans? Because he’s a bad teammate? No, no, no and no. They are booing him because he’s had a bad week. He’s made a bunch of bad errors and been pretty awful at the plat for a whole week. Never mind that he was player of the month in May or that his on base percentage and OPS are first among 3rd basemen in the AL, his 21 HRs are second, his RBI are first, just like his base on balls. Nah, forget all that, forget he’s the reigning league MVP or that he’s a goo...