play ball!

Baseball kicked off today as it always has - a week before April at the crack of dawn, live from the Tokyo Dome! With advertisements patched on to the uniforms! Ah, tradition.


But hey, the Sawks won. What right do I have to complain. Best recuhd in basebaahl! Nomah!

who are these idiots?

I had my fantasy baseball draft tonight. As per usual, it was with eleven other people who I have never met nor will ever meet. This is what these morons let me get away with in my first seven picks:

1. David Wright (6th overall pick)
2. Alfonso Soriano (19)
3. Mark Teixeira (30)
4. Brian Roberts (43)
5. Troy Tulowitzki (54)
6. Russell Martin (67)
7. Corey Hart (78)

The league uses your standard 5x5 scoring system, but for some reason these guys were just craving pitchers. One guy's first three picks were Santana, Peavy and CC Sabathia. In a year where pitching is really deep, I can't emphasize enough the idiocy of this strategy. My philosophy: let them have their pitching wars while I commit grand larceny on hitters. Going by my rankings, I got the #4, 14, 17, 30, 31, 34 and 42 hitters with draft selections nearly twice those numbers, as you can see above.

The downside, of course, of waiting until the 8th round to take a pitcher in a league infatuated with them (Tim Lincecum went in the 5th!), is how you put together a decent staff with only leftovers. With my next eight selections, I got: Rich Hill, James Shields, Chad Billingsley, Rafael Soriano, Ben Sheets, B.J. Ryan, Clay Buchholz, and Brian Wilson. That's five starters with #1 type stuff and three closers. Pretty good, I think. Sheets and Ryan are both big injury risks, but taking them in the 12th and 13th rounds made them worth it.

Rounding out my team are: Nick Swisher (somehow still available in 16th round), Evan Longoria, Tom Gorzelanny, Kelly Johnson, Adam Jones, Jonathan Broxton, and Felipe López.

All in all, I'm very pleased with this team. I feel like I can finish first in runs, RBI, home runs and stolen bases, and Swisher might be my only guy to hit below .290. Pitching? Hard to tell, but I certainly think I will "field" a very competitive staff, at least for ERA, WHIP, and K's.

Edit: I forgot to mention that my team name is the FedEx Popes, named after the "worst" character to ever appear on Late Night.


Cheers!

i think the Ice Age people may be reading Earth's timeline upside down

Will Ice Age 4 be called "The Trouble with Trilobites?"

tom's recliner of rage

If you watch Conan O'Brien regularly, you may have seen a segment called "Pierre Bernard's Recliner of Rage," where the aforementioned makes nerd-culture complaints, all from the comfort of a recliner. This is my version of that.


I do my grocery shopping at a Giant located near my law school. It's a very big store, and you'd think it'd carry everything you'd want. Well, not when 90% of your snacking comes from Quaker Oats crunchy granola bars and Lance cream cheese & chives crackers, and your beverage of choice is sparkling white grape juice. Nowadays, I can only get Quaker Oats chewy granola bars, I have to buy a variety pack of eight crackers just to get two cream cheese & chives, and the only sparkling juice is apple-grape. Bottom line, America?

/adjusts recliner, points finger at camera

I shouldn't be reduced to going to Target for good crunchy granola bars (Nature Valley tastes like cardboard), I should be able to get all the cream cheese & chives I want without wasting my money on sorry excuses for crackers like "smoke house cheddar," and if you're going to combine every juice with apples and cranberries, at least leave the single-fruit juices for us non-spastics!

the upside

We lost. Again. NIT bound. Whatever.

What's important now is that the recruiting class to end all recruiting classes is coming to Wake. Tony Woods is the #11 center in the country. Ty Walker is the #4 center. Best of all, Al-Farouq Aminu is the #2 small forward. Teaming these guys with JJ and Chas should mean we sleepwalk into a dominant rebounding game. Add in Teague doing more of his stellar Randolph Childress impersonation and we will be a very dangerous team. Right, coach? Right.

Non-Wake upside: baseball that counts is only ten days away. Sweet, sweet baseball.

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P.S. So I was gone for two plus weeks. Stop sending in your e-mails whining and complaining for more posts. /sarcasm. Seriously, this blog is mostly a substitute for talking to real human beings and lately that front hasn't been its usual bleak self.

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Update - Holy cow how bout Georgia. Two wins separated by about eight hours. That is absolutely incredible.