- I was a baseball fanatic when I was nine years old. And lately, my forty-year-old love for the St. Louis Cardinals has outweighed my contempt for the rest of the sport, although I must confess to actually watching my first non-Cardinal World Series in ten years with the unlikely success of the Tampa Bay Rays. But I wouldn't be caught dead watching a Yankees/Red Sox game, or any regular-season non-Cardinal game, for that matter.
Baseball has ZERO salary caps. That means that unbelievably rich owners like Hank Steinbrenner can run roughshod over everyone else, signing greedy free agents willing to sell their souls to leave their small-market fanbases to go play for Satan's Team.
This year, enraged by the fact that the low-budget Rays won the AL East (the only division in baseball that matters, according to ESPN), Steinbrenner has turned loose of nearly a half-BILLION dollars to sign C.C. Sabbathia (up yours, Brewers fans), A.J. Burnett, and Mark Texeira.
Fans of baseball, the sport, does that make you want to puke?
The only reason I'll be paying even the slightest bit of attention to baseball news this year at all is because what you pay for is what you get.
A team full of high-salaried "superstars" that no other teams could afford?
It would take a Joe Torre to effectively coach that gargantuan mass of ego and turn it into a team.
And Steinbrenner has run Joe Torre off. :-D
- I paid a little attention to the NBA when I was about twelve years old. More recently, Michael Jordan's Bulls also piqued my interest.
But in 1997, some idiot (don't want to give him any credit by naming him) choked his coach. In fact, his teammates had to pull him off of the man. What did the NBA do about it?
A ten-day suspension.
If trying to kill your coach doesn't count as a lifetime ban, what does?
Well, at least he didn't bet on his team.
- Another idiot, one that San Francisco Giants fans loved, but hardly anyone else (and now, even Giants fans don't love him), didn't play baseball last year.
Why? Was he banned because of horribly tainting the sport by bulking up to the size of an NFL lineman by taking steroids?
Nope. The sports owners (even Steinbrenner) showed some brains and, dare I say it, a little class, by ignoring his free agency.
Of course, baseball, the business, has no problem with him. His home run records stand.
- China has been flaunting the rules in Olympic-type sports since the Russian Empire crumbled. But nobody does anything about it.
After all, we don't want to do anything to offend the world's suppliers of cheap crap that is sold at Wal-Mart, now do we?
