Not a proud moment

We caught this strange and ugly scene on Bill Simmons vehicle, Grantland. Georgetown University and a local Chinese team, against whom they are playing an exhibition game, got in an ugly bench clearing brawl. It lasted less than a minute, but the visuals are disturbing. The crowd boos and throws plastic water bottles when the Georgetown team exits the court. Grantland links to the Washington Post's article here, which reads like a wire report: making no attempt at explanation or understanding. Just the facts ma'am.

Was there anything else going on beyond a roughly contested basketball game here? Anything regionally or locally that was relevant? Was their a strain of anti-Americanism here?

America ought be very careful about pissing off the Chinese holders of almost all of our sovereign debt.

Baseball, the year of the pitcher

When is it just a bit outside, Mr. Uecker?

The year of the pitcher is full swing. Although it must be noted, aside from the number of no-hitters, most of the early season hype was overclaim. The Rockies Ubaldo Jimenez is not going to win 30 or even 25. Nobody is coming anywhere near Bob Gibson's legendary 1.12 ERA. It is nevertheless a pitching centric year. Team ERAs are down across the board, run scoring is at a nearly two decade low. Home runs titles are back to the forty dinger neighborhood.

The question that has reverberated around the game is why. We know steroids and PEDs have been on the run for the last couple of years. So why the quantum leap for pitching this year? The whispered wisdom in the clubhouse is that is the lack of "Greenies," or amphetamines that were so popular in baseball for many years. Baseball's rulers have finally eliminated the use of Greenies. Players, whose schedules include tons of travel and games twenty-nine out of thirty days at times, have long used amphetamines to aid in rapid recovery, especially for a day game after a night game. No more. They miss them.

The other equally significant factor is the extension of the outside corner. Umpires are calling the outside strike this year like they haven't in ages. Students of the game will recall that this was the initial response to PEDs. When the umpires realized that Bud Selig and the powers that be were going to look the other way on performance enhancers, they took matters into their own hands in the early 90's. Gradually, things got so far out of wack that when the Atlanta Braves of the Glavine era took on the Kevin Brown led Florida Marlins in the 1997 NLCS that strikes were being called literally a foot off of the plate. Things are nowhere that ridiculous this year, but there is a determined and consistent effort to expand the outside corner. Even an inch or two off the corners of the plate, if given repeatedly, makes a tremendous difference to the pitcher's benefit. The Clarion Content has watched a ton of baseball this year and most assuredly the umps are giving the pitchers that extra inch or two. Consequently, ERAs are down, run scoring is down, homers are down, slugging is down. In our view, games are more fun, they have more tension and filled with subtleties and nuance.

While it is not 1968 (again baseball mimics and parallels real life; things are topsy-turvy, but it is not 1968) the year of the pitcher is in full effect.

Two interesting notes from the Nats

Two interesting notes from last night's Washington Nationals game, a rather mundane 3-1 victory over the Arizona Diamondbacks on the road. The first one sports related, Nationals catcher Ivan Rodriguez became only the fifth catcher ever to reach 300 homers with his second dinger of the season. He joined a very short list featuring Johnny Bench, Yogi Berra, Carlton Fisk and probable juicer Mike Piazza. All of them, save for Piazza, are in the Hall of Fame.

The other note from the game was political. A small group of fans in left field caused a delay the first inning by draping a sign addressed to Diamondbacks owner Ken Kendrick over the outfield wall to protest the new immigration law in Arizona. A law, it should be noted, that the libertarians at the Clarion Content strongly oppose. Government should not have the power of racial profiling. Plate umpire Angel Hernandez halted the game when he saw the large sign that read: "Mr. Kendrick ... Stop the hate. Say no to SB1070." It is unclear why he felt compelled to do so. The Diamondbacks and their owner sent a security guard to pull the sign off of the wall. Ironically, Hernandez, widely considered one of the very worst umpires in baseball, is Cuban.

College Football Consolidation

The BCS was always BS...

Talk of the consolidation of college football's major conferences has been all the rage this week. Today it looks as if it is becoming official, with University of Colorado's announcement that it is joining the PAC-10 and the University of Nebraska announcement that it is bolting the Big 12 for the Big 10. This will very quickly make the Big 12 no mas, as most of the remaining teams will seize the opportunity to make the PAC-10 a sixteen team league.

As wily observers know this is all about the haves and have-nots amongst the college football power players. The expansion of PAC-10 to a sixteen team league will be followed in short order by the Big-10 and SEC expanding to sixteen team leagues. The ACC will also be reluctantly forced to do so to ally with the college football superpowers. This will allow these four conferences to sideline the NCAA, as well as the BCS and have their own college football playoff. It is all about the dead presidents and there is no reason for the college football programs with the juice to split the Division I-A college football revenue pie one-hundred and eleven ways when they can reduce that split to sixty-four.

There is an interesting analysis about how this came about by Dan Wetzel of Yahoo Sports here. However that is looking backward, the Clarion Content is more fascinated by how things will turn out going forward. Our prediction is it will not be long before the Big East is a basketball only league again. Villanova, St. John's and Georgetown will not mind. The question is what happens to the storied and not so storied programs from the current BCS conferences that end up on the outside looking in at the money. Our speculation on the schools that might end up on that list would include Kansas, Kansas State, Iowa State and UConn. These schools along with the already jilted: Utah, Utah State, Boise State and Fresno States of the world may be made enough to actually get congressional action this time.

Have the college football commissioners warned the university presidents that their radical schemes for the future might bring about anti-trust lawsuits and Department of Justice maneuvering. President Obama signaled way back in the election campaign that he was pro-college football playoff, but by any means necessary?

The Clarion Content is pro-college football playoff too, but it is easy to feel genuine concern that money has distorted the system so badly that these schools are losing track of their education mission to their student bodies and their duty to the college athlete. And maybe this was already so under the corrupt and co-opted NCAA, but will this consolidation make it any better? Quien sabe?

Interesting Sports links

We have a couple quick interesting sports links for your perusal, dear readers. They both come from the New York Times. The first was sent our way by a reader, recently returned to the Durham area from a sojourn to Boston. He must of known it would hit our spot, because the article is both about politics and the Yankees!

Did you know that the Yankees last eight World Series victories took place on the Democrats’ watch, during the terms of Presidents John F. Kennedy, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton? Or how about that they never won the World Series during the terms of President Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, Bush I or Bush II? Remarkable coincidence? We dunno, but we might have changed our baseball predictions had we heard this stat preseason. It surely makes sense that an Obama presidency would propel a Yankees run to the title.

Read the article by King George II's former press secretary, Ari Fleischer here in the New York Times.

From an article by a Jewish guy, to an article about a Jewish guy, the Times published an interesting piece about (believe it or not) a Jewish boxer fighting for the World Boxing Association championship at 154 pounds Saturday, on the undercard of the Manny Pacquiao-Miguel Cotto match at the MGM Grand casino in Las Vegas.

Yuri Foreman is 27-0 as a professional fighter. He lives in Brooklyn, but has traveled a long road, growing up poor in Belarus and immigrating later with his family to Israel. He learned to box in the slums of Haifa. Readers of the late Red Smith will attest that Foreman is neither the first, nor the best Jewish boxer ever. Who can forget "Battling" Levinsky, Charlie Gellman, Abe "the Little Hebrew" Atell, Slapsie Maxie Rosenbloom, Barney Ross and Ruby Goldstein? It has however been a long minute, the Golden Age of Jewish boxers was before WW II, since we heard that one was fighting for a world title.

Read the whole story here.