This page is a Monthly Archive of entries from August 2008 listed from newest to oldest.
This Saturday, the Burial Ground of Champions is welcoming the most talented dirt horse in America. That’s right — Curlin is going to race at Saratoga. The four-year-old chestnut is slated to run in the Grade I $500,000 Woodward Stakes. If he wins the race, Curlin will raise his earnings to $9,796,800, surpassing Skip Away’s record, and have only the mighty Cigar standing in his way of becoming the richest American Thoroughbred in racing history.
The American League Central continues to be a tight two-team race heading into the last month of the season, as the Chicago White Sox lead the Minnesota Twins by two games heading into tonight's play. That got me thinking, how many times over the years have the Twins and White Sox finished first and second at season's end? Surprisingly (or maybe not if you consider each franchise's spotty record of success over the years), it's only happened five times, and only one of those times was before 1991. As you'll see, if history is any indication, Minnesota has the advantage when they square off against Chicago in a pennant race. Let's jump on the Baseball-Reference Express and see where it takes us...
It’s beginning to feel as if I’m saying the same damned thing every week, but once again, the Cardinals are still hanging in there. They’ve been either winning or splitting their series all week, just like they’re supposed to. The problem is, that really isn’t good enough anymore because time is running out, or at least beginning to run out.
What makes it even tougher is that even though they just took two out of three from the Braves, it wasn’t good enough. In almost any other year, it would be considered fine, but the Braves aren’t exactly stacked with talent this year and it’s really a situation where they needed to sweep. Splitting a two game series with the Pirates isn’t really anything to brag about either.
Last week I declared that the Cubs would be making the playoffs. This week, I thought I’d write a little bit about who else might be there from the National League. Here’s what I’m thinking:
NL East
This thing is still wide open. I’m going to go with the Phillies. But here’s another prediction. The team that wins the NL East will not advance past the first round of the playoffs. Philly and the Mets just don’t have the horses. The Mets bullpen is a mess and Philadelphia’s acquisition of Joe Blanton was too little too late. In many ways I still think the Fish from Miami are the best team of the bunch, but their young sticks and arms seems to have fallen off.
No offense to Pyro, but I was pretty surprised when he was named the 7–2 morning-line favorite of the $1 million Travers Stakes set for this Saturday. Maybe the bettors are feeling the field is pretty wide open, as the race is yet another virtual “best of” the Triple Crown contenders, with some exceptions. Come post time, I have serious doubts the winner of the Louisiana Derby will still be the odds-on favorite. Among Pyro, Colonel John, Tale of Ekati, Cool Coal Man, Da’ Tara, Macho Again, Court Vision, and Tres Borrachos, I think the horse to beat is an outsider—one Harlem Rocker.
The pressure is officially on.
Once tagged as the "Baby Boilers," Matt Painter's squad of young overachievers are no longer a Cinderella story. Picked in the Top Ten of almost every pre-season poll, the newly minted Big Ten favorites were tapped to host the first round of the annual pre-season bash known as the NIT.
While the name is synonymous with the "almost-rans" and "has-beens" in March, their place at the front of the season is firmly cemented: most every team that emerges victorious at Madison Square Garden in late November finds themselves dancing come tournament time.
August is a month that can make or break a baseball team's season. It's officially too late for a team that's hanging around .500 to legitimately have a shot at the postseason, unless said team plays in the NL West. There's also the possibility for even more distance to be put between the haves and have-nots, as teams who shipped out their veterans at the trading deadline tank, and the contenders who benefited from those fire sales beat up on their weaker sisters. In that way, it's telling to look at which players in the AL Central are putting it together this month, and which are falling apart. For your reading pleasure, we've divided them into two distinct groups, "HOT" and "NOT."
I write this from vacation in Wisconsin. On the way up here I was listening to 670 The Score in Chicago. Boors and Bernstein (not my favorites, I'm a Murph guy) were discussing what the Cubs should actually be focusing on in these last few weeks given that they were going to make the playoffs.
When fans would call in about Milwaukee possibly passing the Cubs for the division lead, Bernstein would whine back at them saying, "It doesn't matter! The Cubs are in!"
He was suggesting that even if Milwaukee did overtake the Cubbies, which he didn't believe would happen, there was no way the Cubs wouldn't at worst qualify for the playoffs via the wildcard.
Now I can't remember the last time anyone, let alone cynical Chicago sports radio, thought the Cubs had a postseason spot locked up in early-mid august.
But the truth is, I think he's right.
Last Friday, a couple years of controversy slipped away into the static of television. On the morning on August 15, channel 66 on the now Comcast-controlled cable service became the Big Ten Network.
I awoke and turned it on to find a replay of a bad football memory for me: Purdue at Iowa, 2002. The Boilers let the game slip away in the final two minutes of regulation, as Brad Banks outsmarted the Purdue line to toss a five-yard touchdown to receiver Dallas Clark, putting the Hawkeyes up for good, 31–28.
Does this type of backdated reporting sound silly? Even, perhaps, obsessive? It is.
For those of you who can't get enough Illini football pre-season analysis, this item will probably be redundant, but for the rest of you who don't want to be caught off-guard by office conversations revolving around Juice and Zook and the like, here are some links to several reputable season previews:
It seems like most prognosticators have the Illini slated somewhere between #10 and #30 in the Football Bowl Subdivision (rolls off the tongue, doesn't it?). What do you think about their chances? Will they continue their improvement, take a step backward or stay put?
Don't look now, but the baseball season is almost three-fourths over, and the AL Central is a two-team race. According to the Baseball Prospectus Postseason Odds Report (the folks that said there was a 99.89 percent chance the Mets would win the NL East in mid-September last year), there's less than a three percent chance that the Detroit Tigers will come back and win the division, so we'll ignore them for the sake of this analysis. Either the Minnesota Twins or the Chicago White Sox will win the Central, so let's break this sucker down by position and see who's got the upper hand.
I’m really growing to hate the Cards/Cubs series. The games are usually pretty close and lately the Redbirds seem to be barely coming out on the wrong end of the good score. Honestly, I’m not sure this series was all that important as far as the division race goes. St. Louis is pretty much in a position where they have to rely on a wild card birth if they are going to see post season.
According to the Sun-Times, the Chicago Cubs' oldest living fan is being denied his request to throw out the first pitch in a game at Wrigley this season.
Deadspin has a take on this too, which seems a little reactionary, but I guess that's what they're here for. But in all honesty, if they let Pete Wentz do it, it can't be that exclusive of a club.
I went to a Danville Dans game last Friday, and they had a novel solution to this problem: just let a bunch of people throw out the "first" pitch. There must have been 15 people lined up on the mound, from five-year-olds to middle-aged men, and they had three catchers rotating through to retrieve their errant offerings. That way everyone could realize their dream, and they don't have to wait until they're 104 to do it.
Big Brown won the Haskell. So why am I not thrilled? In fact, why was I just about sick to my stomach after the race was over? On the bright side of things, we witnessed a new side to the Kentucky Derby and Preakness winner last Saturday. Never before had the champ been on his belly and been forced to dig deep to pull off a victory. There was no overpowering romp in this race. And while asking for Big Brown to once again blow away his competition might be asking too much of him, the Haskell raises even more questions than when the champ was first entered in the race.
I'm taking a break from in-depth analysis this week and checking out the parallels between the canine and Central worlds to reveal some shocking similarities. Some of these aren't so much physical resemblances as compatible personalities, so bear with me, and I hope you enjoy.
Chinese Crested Dog and A.J. Pierzynski (Catcher, Chicago White Sox)
Since his ill-advised dye job a couple of weeks ago, A.J. has looked even more obnoxious. According to Wikipedia, Chinese Crested males "can become slightly aggressive as they age." A.J. has been slightly aggressive since he passed age seven, as Miguel Olivo of the Royals can attest. I'd love to link to video of the "fight," but MLB has shut down all of the YouTube links for copyright claims.
The poltergeist inhabiting Jamar Smith's lanky frame looks a lot like the freshman phenom who never missed a shot. But looks are deceiving. That Jamar died, a long time ago.
It's hard for us, his friends, fans, admirers to accept that the younger, vital Jamar is gone, forever. Wraiths, demons, vampires often affect onlookers this way — because they physically resemble the persons they once were.
But if we got today's Jamar on the court, he would disappoint. He would show flashes of brilliance, as he did at the Ubben all summer. He would alternate cold-spells, and moments of seeming ineptitude. His performance would recall to us his sophomore year, when his statistics dipped into human range, then kept falling.
Stepping Up
What a difference a week can make. Your Chicago Cubs were able to gain four games on the Milwaukee Brewers and two on the Redbirds to move the trailers to five and six games back, respectively. It all started with the huge four-game series at Miller Park, where the Cubs shocked all of baseball and Baseball Tonight's Buck Showalter by sweeping the Beermakers in their own backyard. As I posted last week, I really felt like the key was forcing Sabathia, Sheets and Parra to throw deep into counts, raising their pitch count early in the game and forcing the Brewers to use their overworked, sub-par bullpen. Let’s take a look:
One of the more rewarding elements about coming to play basketball for the Illini is the local celebrity that follows a successful career at Assembly Hall. Of the most notable names to pass through in the past decade, a couple of them have taken it upon themselves to offer their services by teaching kids the thing they know how to do best: play basketball.
Unlike Damir Krupalija , whose parents opened up shop selling used cars upon their son's minor success on the court in the 90's, both Dee Brown and Brian Cook have started basketball camps in Champaign-Urbana during the summer months on various courts in town.
It’s been a pretty obvious grumble since the Triple Crown, but I’m more convinced now than ever that the connections of Big Brown don’t deserve him. Anyone who has been following this horse knows about his corporate ownership by International Equine Acquisitions Holdings, Inc. (IEAH), his big mouth trainer with a bigger ego, and finally, his scatterbrained jockey who embarrassed him in the Belmont. If there’s one single person in Big Brown’s camp that we can cling to, that person is Big Brown’s closest human friend, his exercise rider and assistant trainer Michelle Nevin.
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