THE SHIFT

Jets vs. Steelers ... An Afterthought #TheShift #NFL #Sports

2011-01-24T04:22:00.003-05:00

Sometimes as a sports fan you have to lick your wounds and move on...such was the case for me as a Jet fan last night as I watched the Jets lose a second consecutive AFC Conference Championship last night in frigid Pittsburgh. So before I go any further I would like to tip my hat to the Steelers and their organization on a job well done. The way I saw the game the Jets had their chances to win this game even though they were non-existent in the first half. Our defense had no answer for Mendenhall...that 1st 9 minute plus drive by the Steelers literally had our defense asking each other questions on the field in regards to coverage. If you hadn't seen this game and you picked up a newspaper and looked at Roethlisburgers' numbers you would have thought the Steelers lost the football game. The strip-fumble on Sanchez near the end of the first half was a dagger to be sure. Our special teams were also nowhere to be found. When your safeties lead your team in tackles you know damn well your linebackers were exposed. To be quite honest with you I was following the game both on Facebook and Twitter...and on the Twitter side I found out who the true Jet fans were...let's just say alot of folks were ready to snap off their tv's at the end of the first half. But this game WAS a game of 2 halves in every sense of the word. I have to give credit to Coach Ryan and his staff for making the necessary adjustments at halftime to get this team back in the game...the Steelers didn't score a solitary point in the 2nd half. But enter the 2nd dagger...after a splendid time consuming drive that got the Jets to the Pittsburgh 2. First and goal...and we couldn't do it...that was the moment that could have helped send us to Dallas...after all the talk...all the hype...the Steelers D zip-locked LT. But the safety that came immediately after gave us hope. 24-12...and a TD to Cochery took it to 24-19...could it happen? Everything was in place for another storybook comeback win. But it just wasn't meant to be...we never got the stop we needed to get the ball back...and to add insult to injury a rookie reciever put us to bed with a fantastic catch. Our DB's had shut down some of the biggest names in football all year...but we lost track of one Antonio Brown. Believe me...I was smellin' a 26-24 Jets victory...but it just wasn't meant to be. I am VERY VERY proud of this team and this franchise...the last 2 years have been a whirlwind for me as a fan...I've been one since I was 8 years old. I saw the only Super Bowl the Jets ever won...and it's my hope I'll see another in my lifetime. It will be interesting to see how this loss effects this team...this was supposed to be the year.

Derek Anderson-STFU !!! #TheShift #NFL #Cardinals

2010-11-30T04:09:00.004-05:00

Well...well...well...lookey who's laughing on the sidelines again...Derek Anderson! Last night as I watched the MNF game (Go Niners) John Gruden made a few observations in regards to Cardinal quarterback(?)Derek Anderson.He had a pitiful game against the San Francisco 49ers. Anderson went 16/35 for 196 yards and 1 INT and had a QB rating of 51.6. He led his team to only 8 first downs and was missing receivers all over the field.Gruden called out Anderson for enjoying a laugh on the sideline after such a poor performance and not showing his team leadership you would expect from a quarterback...and after the game at the presser Anderson was called out by a reporter in regards to Gruden's comments...here's what he said:

Now...lets me say THIS about THAT! This IS NOT the first time this clown has made light of the fact that his team was getting its brains kicked in...I distinctly remember that same chuckle when he was on the sidelines with the Cleveland Browns. How do I remember it? Because it bothered ME like it bothered Gruden I guess. This guy actually went to the pro bowl when he played with the Browns...and once he signed his big contract his playing went right into the tank...not surprising in this day and age. The fact of the matter was he was caught like a rat...and he blew up accordingly. By the way, here is a video of the part of the game where Chuckie made his comment:

Arizona coach Ken Whisenhunt said he didn't see Anderson smiling, and didn't want to comment until he saw the tape.

"I didn't see that. I'd be disappointed if that was the case," Whisenhunt said. "I didn't sense from talking with Derek in the fourth quarter or talking with our offensive line that that was the case. Until I would see that, I would be hesitant to say anything about it."

Atta boy Whis...well played politically correct answer...in case you haven't noticed your team flat out sucks! I feel sorry for someone like Larry Fitzgerald...who in his bus interview with Gruden was very gracious when asked about Warner's departure and why his receiving totals had gone down. Gruden had a hard-on for Anderson before the game ever started...and he had the perfect chance to bring it to the forefront with Anderson's pitiful performance. The smiling on the bench just lit Chuckies fuse...you don't know how bad I wish he was coaching the Cardinals last night.The bottom line for me is this...it's not the first nor will it be the last time Anderson pulls this stunt...he may lay low for awhile but he is what he is. To all the Cardinal fans out there...my heart goes out to you...it really does.

The NFL-Parity City? #TheShift #NFL

2010-11-29T06:55:00.003-05:00

One more game tonight and Week 12 of the NFL is history...and to be perfectly honest with you I have NO CLUE who is going to be in the Super Bowl. Usually at this point in time we have some finite seperation as far as the teams go...but not this season. The safest way to assure a playoff appearance seems to be to winning your division...the wild-card scenario is going to be an absolute mess. As a Jet and Niner fan I'm living proof of the highs and lows one can experience as a fan. But over the 45 years I've followed both these teams I've had MANY highs and lows. So where does Week 12 leave us...let's talk about it shall we?

I am VERY impressed by the Atlanta Falcons this season. Legit? You bet your ass they are...balanced running and passing...and a tough defensive unit. Add to the mix the fact that Matt Ryan is Superman in the Georgia Dome. I'm also impressed by the Chicago Bears...it seems as though Jay Cutler has finally got it down. Should I give Mike Martz creds too? I'm not willing to go that far...I think what we are seeing is Cutler going through a maturation process. The Bears defense certainly stepped it up against Vick and the Eagles yesterday. I will say this Mr.Martz...the Bears game plan was very balanced yesterday...even though Cutler passed for 4 TD's the ground game performed exceeding well too...and we all know Martz is pass happy! Last nights Colts-Chargers game made me try and understand how Norv Turner does things...he's on the skids early every season and then comes the bona-fide comebacks. Their defense TOTALLY rattled Peyton last night...he looked rushed and uncomfortable in the pocket. It looks like the Chargers and the Chiefs game on December 12th will determine the division winner if they meet tied...there will be no wild-card coming out of the NFC West. It looks like the 5-6 NFC West division-leading Rams have found a winner in Sam Bradford...it AMAZES me how well this kid has shortened the learning curve...but he IS a very articulate young man.It's not like NFL defenses are easy to learn...you can tell this kid does his homework. And YES...the Seattle Seahawks are also tied for the NFC West with the Rams...I'm not a big Pete fan...so I'll leave it at that with him. I am baffled as to who will be the NFC's representative in the Super Bowl...ask yourself who is the best team..Giants? Bears? Eagles? Falcons? stay tuned...the best is yet to come! The AFC is in the same stead...Jets,Patriots,Steelers,Ravens,Chargers...seem to be the cream of the crop right now. I feel bad for Jeff Fisher...his club has dropped 4 in a row...his owner has a man-crush on Vince Young...and Cortland Finnegan is making his case to change careers on go to the UFC ranks. If I'm Fish...I'm outta there after this season. The Dolphins continue to surprise as a road team...traveling coast-to-coast usually doesn't bode well for a team...their defense totally shut down the Raiders offense yesterday. Once again...I can't get a handle on who will come out of the AFC either. If the Jets go to Foxboro and complete the season sweep of the Patriots I'd have to put them in the drivers seat...but they have to stay a game ahead of the Ravens who own the head-to-head tiebreaker if both have the same record. Picture Buddy Ryan going to B-More for a playoff game! That's all for now...so far it has been a very enjoyable season...and it's going to get even more exciting! Enjoy your day!

Be Thankful! #TheShift #Sports

2010-11-24T17:32:00.002-05:00

My two blogs...The Shift...and The Plastic Waffle cover sports and music respectively...but today I sat done and decided to do a post about being thankful since it is Thanksgiving. I am VERY thankful for the chance to do these blogs every day...they kind of give my life some purpose aside from my duties of being a husband and a father and grand-father. Consider them my selfish little escapes if you will...but I do them to make other people like you happy too. But let's put both aside for this post and concentrate on being thankful for what it is we have during our so very short stay on this Earth.

Be thankful that you don't already have everything you desire. If you did, what would there be to look forward to?

Be thankful when you don't know something, for it gives you the opportunity to learn.

Be thankful for the difficult times. During those times you grow.

Be thankful for your limitations, because they give you opportunities for improvement.

Be thankful for your mistakes. They will teach you valuable lessons.

Be thankful when you're tired and weary, because it means you've made a difference.

It's easy to be thankful for the good things.

A life of rich fulfillment comes to those who are also thankful for the setbacks.

Find a way to be thankful for your troubles, and they can become your blessings.

Everything happens for a reason. Nothing happens by chance or by means of good or bad luck. Illness, injury, love, lost moments of true greatness and sheer stupidity all occur to test the limits of your soul. Without these small tests, if they be events, illnesses or relationships, life would be like a smoothly paved, straight, flat road to nowhere.
If someone hurts you, betrays you , or breaks you heart, forgive them. For they have helped you learn about trust and the importance of being cautious to who you open your heart to.

If someone loves you, love them back unconditionally, not only because they love you, but because they are teaching you to love and opening your heart and eyes to things you would have never seen or felt without them.

Make every day count. Appreciate every moment and take from it everything that you possibly can, for you may never be able to experience it again.

Talk to people you have never talked to before, and actually listen. Hold your head up because you have every right to. Tell yourself you are a great individual and believe in yourself, for if you don't believe in yourself, no one else will believe in you either.

You can make of your life anything you wish. Create your own life and then go out and live it.

Work hard at what you like to do and try to overcome all obstacles

Laugh at your mistakes and praise yourself for learning from them

Pick some flowers and appreciate the beauty of nature

Say hello to strangers and enjoy the people you know

Don't be afraid to show your emotions laughing and crying make you feel better

Love your friends and family with your entire being they are the most important part of your life

Feel the calmness on a quiet sunny day

Find a rainbow and live your world of dreams always remember life is better than it seems

Be thankful for every single thing you have in your life...far too many people in this world take too much for granted as if life OWES them something. I can honestly tell you without reservation that everyone I come in contact with in my life has touched it in some way or another...both good and bad. But all those experiences teach you something...care folks...we're all we got! Have a wonderful Thanksgiving !!!

Feats...or Famine??? #TheShift #Yankees #MLB

2010-11-23T11:44:00.004-05:00

Well well well...it looks like Thanksgiving is right around the corner and it appears that the Yankee ownership isn't bringing the cranberry sauce. But I have to admit that both sides are doing some distinct posturing for this meal. While our little pilgrim Brian Cashman is baking Cliff Lee a nice pumpkin pie Derek Jeter and Mo Rivera...two stalwarts for so many years...are left to wonder if they will also be invited to the feast. I have been a Yankee fan for 45 years now and when I first started following this team in the mid-60's they absolutely sucked. let's just say I did my time waiting for something good to happen...which it did in the 70's and again in the 90's and so on. As any fan of baseball will tell you...once you get a taste of winning in your mouth you want that sweetness every single year. I FULLY expect ownership of any team that I follow to do whatever needs to be done each year to bring a title to the franchise. And yes yes...I know...I'll get the buying titles bit...but there are other MLB teams that are viable players in the free-agency market too.(i.e. Boston, Texas (now),Anaheim,etc. The Yankees would be absolutely foolish not to pursue star players if they have a chance to get them. Who wants to lose? It's time that some fans of the other teams take a good hard look at their ownership and determine how much of the monies the fans pay to see a winner are being diverted into said ownerships'pockets before bitching about us. Which brings me to the standoff between Hal,Jetes,and Mo.

I would think in ANY negotiation in sports as well as in life a certain amount of leverage comes into play...and who has it and who doesn't. I fully get the loyalty bit and what a player has done for the team over the years. But those deeds have been done...the champagne has been sprayed...and the trophies are in the trophy case. The real question should be...what can ownership do to assure us as fans that they have done everything possible to let us relive all those great emotions again. It appears that Hal is looking at it both fiscally and for the future. As far as the leverage part of it goes I would think that Mo has more than Jeter at this point in time. But 18 million dollars for 60 or so innings of relief is a helluva lot of money to lay out. As for Jeter his range is in question as well as his abilities as an offensive force. But it's not hard to understand why Jeter and Mo are probably looking at Burnett's contract along with A-Rod's...and the monies being offered to Cliff Lee. Any normal human being would say "where's mine"? If Jeter were let go...I don't think the effect would be as bad for us as fans as if Mo left. And before we even think about Soriano he'll be scoffed up already. I don't see how the Yankees CAN'T give Mo what he wants...a look at his numbers justify his stance. And I'm sick and tired of the fans that keep bringing up " the economy ". What economy? All these players...or the better part of them...are millionaires...they aren't affected by "the economy"...WE ARE! All I know is this...Yankee Stadium's attendance figures are quite healthy thank you. I keep getting flashbacks of the Torre negotiations in regards to Jeter...I just have this strong feeling that ownership deems him as expendable. The really sad part about all of this is that the hard feelings going on right now are being brought about by other teammates salaries and things that have happened in the past...who can forget the ransom we paid to Clemens to come and pitch for us for a half-season? Jeter has been paid roughly one quarter of a billion dollars in his 15 year tenure in pinstripes...he's certainly not hurting for money. But my question to ownership is this...how much money did the franchise MAKE from Jeter's tenure...I would bet quite a bit more. Ask yourself this...has A-Rod paid off? If you were ownership and you could opt-out of his deal would you? ALL athletes are prone to having off years and seasons...it happens to the very best of them in the business. And I have seen the word arbitration popping up...know why? Because Hal wants to do 1 year deals...he would love that...ain't gonna happen. Yankee ticket prices rose about 20 percent last year...how long will it be or how far can it go before baseball contracts totally shut life-long common fans like you and I from even being able to attend a game? Pass the gravy please...

How will this all pan out? Will Jeter and Mo still be in pinstripes? Just Mo? Neither? Your guess is as good as mine at this point in time. Going back to my leverage point I made earlier...Mo seems to have much much more than Jeter at this point in time...Jeter's leverage is US...the fan. I'm a huge Jeter and Rivera fan...I as a die-hard Yankee fan appreciate EVERYTHING they both have brought to me all these years. But in the end...it doesn't matter what WE want folks...ownership will do what THEY deem as fit. Look for Lee to get a 6-year deal...he's 33...so if we don't get the full six years out of him we'll eat his salary just like we did for Pavano. Don't think the 40 million he scammed off of us isn't lost on Mo and Jetes. How bout Nick Johnson? I see people saying "Oh don't be worried...they'll be signed". But I am worried...aren't you?

Colts Make Bettor a $10K Bodog Parlay Jackpot Winner #TheShift #BoDog #Gambling #NFL

2010-11-13T11:31:00.003-05:00

Craig A. may live in Wyoming, but you can bet that right now he is a bigger fan of the Colts than anyone who might live in Indiana. That’s because Indianapolis’ 30-17 victory over Houston on Monday night was worth around $14,000 to Craig as he was the sole winner last week of Bodog’s weekly $10,000 Parlay Jackpot Contest.

You know the drill by now: All bettors at Bodog have to do is drop $5 on the 10-team parlay. You can choose all NCAA football games, all NFL games or a mixture of both. Craig A. stuck with all NFL and it was a rather wise decision.

Craig was a perfect 9-for-9 on Sunday but didn’t even realize it at first.

“It was blind luck,” he said. “I picked the games Friday or Saturday. I didn’t realize I was still in the money … I saw at about 5:30 p.m. on Monday and had the Colts minus-5.5 (against Houston).”

Really the actual game Monday was never in doubt as Indy took a 7-0 lead and was up as big as 24-3 early in the third quarter. That’s not to say Craig wasn’t still sweating the result.

“Needless to say I was on the edge of my seat the whole game,” he said. “Nervous isn’t the word for it.”

Houston did mount a bit of a comeback, pulling within 27-17 early in the fourth quarter. Craig said he couldn’t really relax until shortly after Indy kicker Adam Vinatieri nailed a field goal to make it 30-17 with about seven minutes left.

“Until there were about 5 minutes left and the Colts were up 13, I finally started to feel comfortable,” he said.

Craig says he doesn’t really have a system, although he generally sticks to the NFL.

“I saw this promotion three weeks ago on the website,” he said. “I said, ‘What the hell,’ so I put $5 on it every week since. I just go through and think this team’s better, this team will cover. It was a bonus to qualify for the bonus.”

Craig has been a long-time bettor at Bodog, nearly 10 years, but this was by far his biggest win.

“I’ve been playing about 10 years,” he said. “I don’t really bet on anything but football. I’d guess guessing $50 was my biggest win. I do it basically to make the games more entertaining to me. I generally put in about $100 every season and usually come out ahead.”

So what will Craig do with all that money? Buy a car? Take a trip? It’s around $14,000 because he gets the $10,000 on top of his normal parlay payout.

“I will pay off debt,” he said. “Wish I could say it’s more exciting than that. … And I will roll the dice every week now (on the parlay contest) guaranteed.”

You ready to possibly win $10K? Then get your picks in on Bodog’s Parlay Jackpot Contest

Margarito-Pacquiao Who Wins? #TheShift #Boxing

2010-11-12T09:18:00.004-05:00

One more day...just one more day for the fight that no one wanted...Pacquiao-Margarito. All of us who are boxing fans at all wanted Pacquiao-Mayweather...that fight would have broke all kinds of records if it would have come off. But pretty-boy Floyd was far too busy on Ustream dissin' Manny and tweeting us pictures of stacks of money to consider it. And let's not forget getting arrested for beating on his ex. It's been my contention that Floyd doesn't want a blem on his record...or his face. So we are basically stuck with this fight. I'm sure Jerry Jones is very happy that his gazillion-dollar stadium will be hosting something...it certainly won't be the Super Bowl will it? Will I pay for this fight? Absolutely not...although I can understand why some people would. We only get fighters like Pacquiao once in a blue moon...to see him perform in his prime is worth the cost...but not for this guy. So what can we expect in this fight? Let's have a go of it shall we?

First of all I'd like to say that I hope The Home Depot trucks aren't seen anywhere around Cowboy stadium delivering bags of Quikrete for the inside of Margarito's gloves...leave your mason's trowel at home Antonio! Secondly...what was with you and your shaking hands? You said that it wasn't a pop-shot at Freddy Roach (who has Parkinson's Disease)...you said it was just you playin' "fake-scared". This is all kind of funny to me...it seems like your camp welcomed the chance to play the bad guys...but once you got that attention you spent your time back-pedaling to the contrary. Oh trust me Antonio...you will be back-pedaling in this fight. Making fun of someone with a serious disease is typical of the street-punk you are. So I'm not really that surprised by your actions.

I FULLY expect Margarito to try and turn this into a street fight...I don't think he thinks Manny packs any power behind his punches because he is smaller. But remember something folks...your power comes from your legs...and Manny's are more than adequate to deliver a knock-out punch. If Margarito sticks with the brawl tactic he'd better be ready to get peppered with an onslaught of Pacquiqo's best shots. Manny is a very versatile fighter...and he can bring it at many angles. Pacquiao is too fast up the middle. Margarito is tailor-made for his style because he’s going to be too wide open after he throws his punches.I don't have to tell you that hand speed is a HUGE part of boxing...and I just don't see Margarito as being able to keep up with Manny's. Don't get me wrong...Margarito is coming into this fight as the bigger opponent...probably the biggest guy Manny has tackled to date. There is a distinct chance that Margarito can cause problems early in this fight until Manny adjusts and ends up winning this with his speed...he's cleary outsized in this fight...but the hand speed is a HUGE advantage...and Pacquiao will use it to win this match by a TKO in the 8th round. And hey Jerry...I hope you'll have a great seat...maybe T.O. can bring the popcorn. Below are some highlights of Pacquiao's and Margaritos's past fights...enjoy the fight!!!! Don't forget to watch how open Margarito leaves himself at times because of his style.

Need Some Memorabilia? #TheShift #Collectibles #Auctions #Sports

2010-11-10T09:32:00.006-05:00

As a sports fan I have always wanted to have a piece of the action as it were...something that I could display proudly in my home that was associated with someone in the game. To date my most prized piece is an signed baseball by Sandy Koufax.Strange for a Yankee fan huh? But here's how it came about...I worked in sales in the building materials trade for my over 20 years before I became crippled from rheumatoid arthritis...the last place I worked at the owner was an avid golfer...and as fate would have it he got a chance to golf with Sandy Koufax and Dick Tracewski...whom he knew already. So I asked him if I bought a ball if he could ask Sandy to sign it...if you are familiar with Koufax at all you know he is a very tough sig to get...he just doesn't do it. He agreed and that one ball to sign became three...I purchased 2 other balls to give to contractor friends of mine that were life-long Dodger fans...needless to say those 2 guys were totally floored when they recieved them!

Anyway...if you like to collect I came across a place called American Memorabilia who has a vast array of things you can bid on auction style or purchase. Here is what they are about:

Our Mission - Our Code of Honor
American Memorabilia strives to lead the memorabilia industry by creating memories for generations, while providing the highest quality authentic memorabilia, client satisfaction, industry integrity & trust while sharing a portion of our success back to the community.

History
American Memorabilia is the West Coast's Premiere Sports & Celebrity auction house. President & CEO, Victor Moreno, formed the company in 1994. A former resident of Pittsburgh, PA, Mr. Moreno started the company with his own personal collection. Back in his hometown Moreno owned and operated a clothing establishment "Our Father's Son Boutique" that sold contemporary clothing and specialty accessories. His establishment was very popular among the players of both the Pittsburgh Pirates and Steelers. It was Moreno's idea to put the fish in Steeler Frenchy Fuqua's shoe, which was publicized nation wide! The store also gained the popularity of visiting baseball and football clubs due to the outrageous one of kind apparel. It became a common practice for Mr. Moreno to trade clothing for sports memorabilia and equipment with the players. Many of which became his personal friends. From this, he accumulated a very significant collection.

Mr. Moreno moved to Los Angeles, CA to pursue his ambitions of being a professional musician. After the success of four LP's and 2 videos (Is Love Still In Style, Any Thing I Want) with the V-Band , and a tour of the U.S. and Europe, he decided to leave the music business and move to Las Vegas, NV. With his vast collection he formed American Memorabilia Inc.

Successes
Since the Corporations inception we have aligned ourselves with high profile sales and collections.

Mickey Mantle's 500th home run baseball to a private collector for an undisclosed amount.

American Memorabilia Inc. has auctioned off the Babe Ruth's 702nd Home Run Bat Signed by the 1934 Yankee's Team for over $99,000

In 2000, they signed a contract with the agent of Mickey Mantle, Greer Johnson, giving them exclusive rights to Mickey Mantle's collection, now known as the "Greer Johnson Charitable Trust Collection". This collection consists of limited edition and many one of- a- kind pieces. They sold over $500,000 from this collection.

Other collections include: retired National League Umpire Bob Engel; Blackie Powell, prominent retired casino host (Sahara Hotel); Denny Eskin, private collector and glove repair representative for Major League Baseball; Sports Figures, Rick Moser, Frenchy Fuqua, Dock Ellis, Amos Otis, Craig Morton, Bob Bourne, Mickey Mantle's Brother Ray Mantle to name a few.

Celebrity
Due to Victor Moreno's, singing/songwriting career and Vice President/CEO Kieta's acting/modeling career they have vast connections with the Hollywood Scene. (Kieta has been featured in Alice Cooper's Video's, Married With Children, Full House & Wayne's World.) American Memorabilia comes across KEY feature Celebrity items. Included was the only known Beatle's Nempix photo inscribed and autographed by each Beatle's member to Kenny Roger's drummer. This graced American Memorabilia's back cover in 2002. In addition, we feature movie props ranging from Al Pacino's "Scarface" Oozie Gun, to Archie Bunker's Hats he wore in the TV Series. In addition, their connections with the Rock-n-Roll world have landed them items such as Keith Richards Guitar, and Never published or seen before Frank Sinatra original photos and negatives. American Memorabilia's connections do not end in obtaining key Celebrity items, but carries over into obtaining key Clientele and Bidders.

Today American Memorabilia, has one of the largest customer lists in the industry. Through very successful advertising campaigns designed specifically for each individual auction, their number of active Bidders continues to grow. Currently, we send catalogs out to over 50,000 customers and the catalog hits news stands and bookstores.

The success of our past auctions have also established a steady increase in consignors along with an increase in purchases. Our "Auction 2000," which was held live at the Las Vegas Hilton Hotel on December 19, 1999 set two worlds records. These items were a "Ronald Regan Single Signed Baseball from the 1989 All Star Game," and a "Mickey Mantle Autographed Game Used Bat from 1963-64." The finest Mickey Mantle Game Used from his 1965-1966 season, These record-breaking sales have prompted HBO to feature footage from "Auction 2000" on its weeky program "Real Sports" with host Bryant Gumble. The show aired on January 24, 2000.

American Memorabilia has worked diligently with the FBI in a collected effort to "clean up the industry". As a result American Memorabilia is recognized as a leader and affiliate in bringing and keeping integrity in the memorabilia industry. When people buy from American Memorabilia they can buy with assurance they are purchasing the real deal!

You can check them out here >>> http://www.americanmemorabilia.com/Default.asp Have fun collecting!!!

Stadium Authority Approves Franchise Sale #SWBYankees

2010-11-10T08:45:00.001-05:00

The Lackawanna County Multi-Purpose Stadium Authority agreed Tuesday to move forward with the sale of its Triple-A franchise to SWB Yankees LLC, the first step in a process intended to preserve professional baseball in Northeast Pennsylvania.

The authority board voted 4-0 to approve a memorandum of understanding to sell the franchise for $14.6 million in a deal that will require SWB Yankees to take on a 30-year lease of PNC Field in Moosic, home of the New York Yankees' top minor league ballclub.

As part of the package, the state has committed $25 million toward a $40 million makeover of the aging stadium.

SWB Yankees, a joint venture between the New York Yankees and Mandalay Baseball Properties, said it looked forward to being a part of the region for decades to come.

"It's a place we wanted to be, and we have no intention of leaving," Larry Freedman, Mandalay executive vice president, said.

The authority's decision, which came 24 hours after the county commissioners publicly outlined the terms of the revised agreement with SWB Yankees, was made with little fanfare.

"I think this is the best choice right now - what we are going to do," board member James Timlin said before joining Anthony Zaleski, William Jenkins and Joseph DeAntona in approving the enabling resolution.

Mr. Zaleski, board chairman, said afterward that whatever reservations the authority had about the franchise sale were trumped by the belief it was the right thing to do.

"People feel strongly about baseball remaining the way it was, but things change in 22 years," he said, referring to the length of authority's ownership of the franchise. "We need to move forward to keep baseball here in Lackawanna County. This agreement allows it to stay here for at least 30 additional years."

A pair of 10-year renewal options could extend the lease to 50 years.

With the authority's approval, the memorandum now returns to the commissioners, who will draft the definitive agreement with SWB Yankees. Authority solicitor Frank Tunis said there will be a public hearing before the board ratifies the final document.

Mr. Freedman said he expects the agreement to be signed within 60 days, "give or take."

"Sixty days seems reasonable," he said. "It wouldn't surprise me if it went more. It wouldn't surprise me if it went less."

Former authority solicitor John McGee, who was instrumental in securing the franchise in the 1980s and is steadfastly opposed to its sale, questioned the authority about what would happen at the end of the 30-year lease.

Although the proposed agreement gives the authority or its assignee the right to repurchase the franchise at fair market value, Mr. McGee said there is no guarantee Minor League Baseball would approve the transaction.

Mr. Tunis agreed there were no guarantees.

"And that, sir, is why you don't sell the franchise," said Mr. McGee, who advocates selling the management rights as an alternative.

Attorney Gene Hickey, representing William Gilchrist, who donated the land for the stadium, urged the authority to include strong language in the agreement that ensures the ballpark remains a "multi-purpose" facility - not just a home for professional baseball.

SWB Yankees received an option to purchase the franchise as part of the 2007 agreement, negotiated by former Commissioner Robert C. Cordaro, that brought the Yankees' Triple-A club to Moosic. The current commissioners contend the negotiated terms of the new agreement would make it more difficult for SWB Yankees to relocate the franchise.

Mr. Freedman said while SWB Yankees' ultimate goal was ownership of the franchise, along with a first-class, state-of-the-art facility for the players and fans, the organization also made clear "from day one" it wanted to be in Northeast Pennsylvania.

The concessions made to the county in the new agreement are evidence of that commitment, he said.

Contact the writer: dsingleton@timesshamrock.com

Jets Need To Get Better #TheShift #SportsTalk #Jets #Lions #NFL

2010-11-06T13:29:00.004-05:00

No...it won't be snowing on the inside Sunday when the Jets invade Motown this Sunday to play the paltry Detroit Lions. But it can be a long cold flight home if the Jets don't start looking like the team they are capable of being. I STILL am upset over that 9-0 loss to Green Bay last weekend...but when your running backs and receivers pull a Roberto Duran move on you your offense is going to become one-dimensional. Everyone is praising Capers and his defensive strategy against us as a blueprint for other teams to use...I'm not buying it. Turn some of those drops around and the Jets chalk up their 6th straight win. This game worries me on some fronts...the Lions have lost 42 of their last 47 games...no doubt they are a very beatable team. But if I were the Jets I wouldn't allow them to hang around as McNabb and the Redskins found out last week. The Lions are ranked 30th in the NFL in the rushing department...so look for Ryan to be running numerous blitz packages all day long...I fully expect our defense to do the marvelous job it has done so far this year.But our offense...let's take a look at it shall we?

We are 37 of 97 on 3rd down conversions...that has to get better. Sanchez' completion percentage is 53%...and his QB rating is a paltry 78.8. But again these figures don't show all the stone-handed drops that have plagued this offense this year. Santonio Holmes has 10 receptions for 131 yards and 0 TD's...I know he came back late but he has to step his game up. Keller and Edwards have combined for 763 yards and 9 TD's so far this season. This offense is anemic considering the talent we have. LT is having a great year so far... 544 yards rushing and 144 receiving with 5 TD's under his belt. Needless to say we have to establish the run to help along the passing game. If I were Rex I'd have Edwards and the rest of the dropsie corp working with a football throwing machine set as high as I could set it. It has to be ultra frustrating for the defense to allow 10 and 9 points and lose games. (Ravens and Green Bay losses)

This team needs to stop the bragging...realize their potential...and bring it to the field...PERIOD!

R.I.P. Sparky #TheShift #SportsTalk #MLB #Reds #Tigers

2010-11-04T15:53:00.005-05:00

Sometimes it's not a lengthy resume of past success that gets one a job, it can be intangible qualities the separates one candidate from another. Such was the case in 1970 when the Cincinnati Reds hired little known Sparky Anderson to become their manager, feeling his managerial style would best compliment their players and offset his lack of managerial experience. Their hunch proved correct as the Reds achieved immediate success and Anderson began a career that would make him one of the most successful managers in baseball history.

As is the case with many managers, Sparky Anderson had a brief and non-distinguished playing career. He toiled in the Dodger minor league system for six years before being traded to the Phillies in 1959. Philadelphia gave him the starting second baseman's job, but Anderson was hardly up to the task batting a lowly .218 and driving in just 34 runs without a home run for the last place Phils. That would turn out to be his only big league opportunity as he returned to the Minor Leagues and eventually gave up his playing aspirations for managing, taking a Minor League job with Toronto in 1964. He skippered for a total of five Minor League years and then returned to the Major Leagues as a coach with the expansion San Diego Padres in 1969. He was set to begin the 1970 campaign in a similar post with the California Angels, but also interviewed for the vacant Reds managerial job.

Cincinnati had finished third in the National League (NL) West in 1969 and boasted a world of talent with players such as Pete Rose, Johnny Bench and Tony Perez. Reds General Manager Bob Howsam liked what he heard from Anderson in their interview and decided to roll the dice and hire Sparky. "I'll always gamble…if I believe in the man I'm gambling on. I needed a leader, somebody to get all that ability out of our players" said Howsam. Anderson's special rapport with his players began right away. "I remember that day in spring training when he told me, I'm here to win, and I want you to help me. Right then he had everybody. We wanted to win for Sparky," recalled Perez. The gamble paid off as Cincinnati stormed out of the gate winning 70 of their first 100 games and ran away with the NL West Title in Anderson's first year at the helm. The Reds then swept the Pirates in the Championship Series to bring Cincinnati its first pennant since 1961 and secure a date with the Orioles in the World Series. A controversial home play call hurt the Reds in Game 1 of the Series and they never recovered dropping the Fall Classic to Baltimore in five games.

Cincinnati slumped to a fourth place tie in 1971 but, bolstered by the acquisition of Joe Morgan from Houston, Sparky returned the Reds to winning ways in 1972 and once again won the pennant. But in the World Series they ran into a young, upstart Athletics team, and Oakland went on to edge Cincinnati in seven games, winning their first of three straight World Championships. Another division title was won in 1973, but the Reds were upset by the underdog Mets in the NLCS. Still Cincinnati had found a winning formula, powerful offense and a starting pitching staff that did just enough to turn it over to a bullpen used to perfection by manager Anderson. He was dubbed "Captain Hook" for his many pitching changes, and manipulated the relievers masterfully to get the matchups he wanted. An example of his authoritative managing style was that pitchers were not allowed to speak to him on his mound visits so that his thought process would not be swayed. "Players have two things to do. Play and keep their mouths shut" said Sparky.

In 1975 the Reds, ignited by a regular season lineup change of moving Pete Rose to third base and inserting George Foster in left field, returned to glory winning 108 games, capturing the NL West Title, and sweeping the Pirates to advance to the World Series and face the Red Sox. In one of the most dramatically played series in baseball history, Cincinnati bounced back from an emotional sixth game loss, and came from behind to beat Boston in a seventh game and win the Fall Classic for the first time since 1940. The Reds followed up their 1975 championship season with a splendid 1976 campaign, winning another pennant and sweeping the Yankees in four straight in the World Series. "The Big Red Machine" of 1975 and 1976 is often mentioned when discussing the greatest teams of all time. The Reds slipped to second behind the Dodgers in 1977 and 1978, and following the 78 season Anderson was fired after refusing managements suggestions for changes on his coaching staff. He left behind in Cincinnati team records for wins (863) and winning percentage (.596).

Sparky returned to managing in 1979, taking over the American League's young and improving Detroit Tigers. He proceeded to lead the Tigers to the next level and brought Detroit its first division title since 1972 when the Tigers roared out to a 35-5 mark and cruised to win the AL East. Detroit had little trouble with Kansas City in the ALCS, sweeping the Royals, and then pounded the San Diego Padres in five games to capture the World Series. Detroit won another division title in 1987 and came within a game of another in 1988, but then fell on hard times losing 103 games in 1989. It was Anderson's first losing season since 1971, and a year Sparky suffered a nervous breakdown and left the team for a period of three weeks. Detroit's lack of success continued into the 1990's and Anderson left the Tigers following the 1995 season. He flirted with a managerial comeback with the California Angels in 1997, but eventually retired from managing for good.

Sparky Anderson's career managerial record is one of the finest ever and perhaps the greatest of anyone who piloted teams in both leagues. He stands third all time in wins (2194), behind only Connie Mack and John McGraw, and 23rd in winning percentage (.545). He won seven division titles, five pennants, and three world championships. He was the first manager to win 800 games with two teams, Cincinnati and Detroit, and the first to win 100 games in a season and win Manager of the Year in both leagues. He was elected to The Baseball Hall of Fame by the Committee on Baseball Veterans in 2000.

***Hat Tip to Baseball Almanac***

Here are a few tweets about Sparky from Twitter this afternoon:

RIP #Sparky Anderson. Well before he became a manager he spent a season (1959) as the #Phillies second baseman. More to come tonight. #MLB

I will miss Sparky Anderson.Class act, pleasant personality.Sparky was the kind of guy who never looked young, but never acted old. #Sparky

@DailyFungo: Video: Sparky Anderson on "WKRP in Cincinnati" --> http://bit.ly/bZ8wDF #Tigers #Sparky

#Sparky quote "Just give me 25 guys on the last year of their contracts; I’ll win a pennant every year.”

#RIP #Sparky #Anderson... Led the Detroit Tigers to the 1984 World Series Title...you are one of the best coaches in Detroit Sports history.

"Being nice to people is the only thing in life that will never cost you a dime...” #Sparky

Even though he tore my heart out in 1976 when his "Big Red Machine" swept my Yankees 4-0 in the World Series and then I had to deal with him after that in the American League with the Tigers I have as a baseball fan ALWAYS admired his class and style of managing. Rest in peace Sparky...baseball has lost another legend.

The SF Giants Secret Weapon? #TheShift #SportsTalk #SFGiants

2010-11-03T07:55:00.003-05:00

There is no doubt that the San Francisco Giants have a marvelous young pitching staff that should keep then in the running for more World Series trophies in the future. But raw pitching talent needs to be nurtured and what better a person than he of ex-Yankeedom Dave "Rags" Righetti? Throughout all the hub-bub that was the NLDS, NLCS, and the World Series and post-game I really didn't hear very many props hurled his way...which is kind of a shame in a way. I would like to see the Yankees have him back as a pitching coach in a heartbeat. That being said...let's take a look at his tenure shall we?

One of baseball's premier pitching coaches returns for 11th season in San Francisco, becoming 1 of just 5 individuals since 1900 to serve as Giants coach for at least 10 years, joining Larry Jansen (12 years, 1954 and 1961-71), Bob Lillis (11 years, 1986-96), Wes Westrum (10 years, 1958-63 and 1968-71) and current bench coach Ron Wotus (1998-present)...10-year run is 2nd-longest in San Francisco history among pitching coaches, behind only 11-year stint logged by Larry Jansen (1961-71)...has been integral part in helping coach 2-time Cy Young Award winner Tim Lincecum, who has established himself as one of games top pitchers...during time at helm, SF hurlers have posted 4.10 ERA, 4th-best among all NL staffs and 5th-best in majors...only Los Angeles Dodgers (3.91), Atlanta (3.93), Oakland (4.01) and St. Louis (4.09) boast lower ERA's since 2000...led staff to 2nd-place finish in NL for ERA in both 2002-03, marking 1st time Giants team finished in top 2 in consecutive years since 1959-61...team also placed 2nd in majors in ERA in 2009 with 3.55 mark, behind Dodgers' 3.41 figure...Giants starters have amassed 589 wins and .525 winning pct. to rank 4th and 5th, respectively, in senior circuit...bullpen, too, has consistently performed under his tutelage...SF relief corps is tied for 3rd in NL with 266 wins over last 10 years, while ranking 3rd with .536 winning pct....Giants' pen ranks 3rd in league with 428 saves, and 6th with 3.98 ERA...SF has been stingiest long ball staff in NL since he took over pitching reigns (1,433 total).

2009
Staff posted 2nd-lowest ERA (3.55, 571er, 1,446ip) in majors, their highest ranking since 2002 (2nd - 3.54)...staff led majors with 1,302 strikeouts, marking 1st time in SF-era history that club has paced majors in strikeouts and just 3rd time since 1900...San Francisco's 1,302 strikeouts established franchise record for single season, surpassing 2008 total of 1,240...Giants registered 18 shutouts in 2009, by far most in majors and tied for 2nd-most in single-season in SF-era history (also 18 in 1976).

2008
Giants finished 9th in NL with 4.38 ERA (701er, 1,422.0ip) and tied for 2nd with 12 shutouts...SF ranked 7th with 41 saves, but placed 3rd in save pct. (68.3% - 41-for-60)...SF pitchers established single-season franchise record with 1,240 strikeouts on season, 2nd-most in senior circuit (behind Chicago - 1,264).

2007
Giants were 5th in NL with 4.19 ERA, club's lowest mark since 2003 (3.73)...oversaw starting rotation that ranked 4th in league with 4.24 ERA, while leading senior circuit in innings (968.2) for 1st time since 1968...rotation also tied for 2nd in loop with 86 quality starts, while amassing just 5th 700-strikeout campaign in SF history (also 1964 and 1967-69).

2006
SF staff ranked in league's top 5 for ERA during majority of campaign...Giants were 5th in NL with 4.24 mark on Sept. 9, but pitchers were touched for 7.67 mark over last 19 games...SF starters ranked 7th in senior circuit with 4.58 ERA, while finishing 2nd with both 982.2 innings pitched and .258 avg. against.

2005
Did tremendous job under trying circumstances, as 24 pitchers employed by Giants marked 3rd-most in franchise history...only 1990 club (26 hurlers) and 1995 edition (25) sent more players to mound...SF had 3.58 ERA after All-Star Break, 4th-lowest in senior circuit.

2004
Starters owned NL's 2nd-highest winning pct. at .592 (61-42)...under his tutelage, Jason Schmidt won career-high 18 games and established SF record with 251 strikeouts, while Noah Lowry fashioned 2nd longest career-opening winning streak in Giants franchise history at 6-0.

2003
Guided SF staff to 2nd place finish in NL ERA race (3.73), despite using 13 starting pitchers, most starters used by SF since 1991 club gave 15 different hurlers starting assignments...helped guide Jason Schmidt to 17-5 mark with league-best 2.34 ERA, campaign that resulted in 2nd-place finish in NL Cy Young voting.

2002
Directed best Giants pitching staff in 13 years, as club's 3.54 ERA ranked 2nd in NL and was club's lowest since it posted 3.30 mark in 1989...also marked 1st time SF had finished in top 2 of league for ERA since 1987, when it led circuit with 3.68 ledger...tutored rotation that boasted 5 different 12-game winners, becoming 6th quintet to do so in franchise history and 1st in 79 years...Russ Ortiz (14-10), Kirk Rueter (14-8), Jason Schmidt (13-8), Ryan Jensen (13-8) and Livan Hernandez (12-16) joined NY Giants staffs from 1905, 1906, 1910, 1917 and 1923...with Hernandez (216.0 innings), Ortiz (214.1) and Rueter (203.2), Giants also had 3 different hurlers top 200-inning plateau in same season for 1st time since 1991 (Bud Black, John Burkett and Trevor Wilson).

2001
Completed 2nd year as SF pitching coach, overseeing staff that finished 7th in NL with 4.18 ERA.

2000
Marked 1st year on Major League staff...guided pitching staff to 4th-best ERA in NL (4.21)...Livan Hernandez (17-11), Shawn Estes (15-6), Russ Ortiz (14-12), Mark Gardner (11-7) and Kirk Rueter (11-9) became only 4th SF team to have 5 different 10-game winners (1968, '73 and '82)...Giants posted 3.45 ERA (264er, 688.0ip) during 2nd Half, best in majors.

1999
Returned to Giants organization, serving as roving minor league pitching instructor...served as SF's interim pitching coach May 3-5 in Pittsburgh, while Ron Perranoski visited his ill mother.

Playing Career
During his banner 16-year big league career, stylish left-hander made stops with Yankees (1979, 1981-90), Giants (1991-93), A's (1994), Blue Jays (1994) and White Sox (1995)...posted 82-79 record with 3.46 ERA and 1,112 strikeouts in 718 career games (89 starts)...with 252 career saves, ranks 27th on Major League Baseball's all-time save list...ranks 2nd on Yankees' all-time charts for saves (224) and games pitched (522)...began career as starter, then converted to reliever in 1984...earned American League Rookie of Year award in 1981 after going 8-4 with 2.06 ERA (2nd-best in AL)...played major role in Yankees' trip to World Series in 1981...earned 2 victories in Division Series vs. Milwaukee, winning Game 2 as starter and Game 5 in relief...was also winning pitcher as starter in Game 3 of ALCS vs. Oakland...had no-decision in only appearance vs. Dodgers in World Series...while wearing New York pinstripes, tossed no-hitter against Boston Red Sox, July 4, 1983...was 1st Yankee no-hitter since Don Larsen's perfect game in 1956 World Series...in 1984, notched 31 saves in 40 chances during 1st campaign as reliever...was named to American League All-Star squads in 1986 and 1987 while with New York...established then-Major League record with 46 saves in 1986...finished 4th in Cy Young voting and 10th in AL MVP (BBWAA) balloting that year...was named to AP post season All-Star squad while also earning Rolaids Relief Man of Year and The Sporting News Fireman of Year awards...won 2nd straight Rolaids AL Relief Man award and tied for Fireman of Year in 1987 with 31 saves...signed with Giants as free agent, Dec. 5, 1990...ranked 5th in NL with 24 saves in 1991...total was 2nd best in Giants history at time, trailing only Greg Minton's 30 in 1982...notched 1,000th career strikeout April 29, 1991, fanning St. Louis' Felix Jose.

A Giant in the Community
Serves on Board of Directors for Jean Weingarten Peninsula Oral School for the Deaf (JWPOSD), having done so for last 15 years...is involved with various Cerebral Palsy organizations and El Camino Health Care...contributes to Ronnie Lott's charitable foundation as well as Boys and Girls Clubs of America...has been involved with Leukemia Society...has lent his image to Organ Donor Awareness Day player cards...in 2005, visited veterans home in Yountville, CA...has been fixture at KNBR/Giants Winter FanFest.

Personal
San Jose (CA) native was All-League baseball player at Pioneer High School...also attended San Jose City College...was named state Junior College Player of Year in 1977...brother, Steve, played in Texas organization from 1977-79...father, Leo, was star shortstop in Pacific Coast League while playing for San Francisco Seals...married (Kandice, February 11, 1989)...3 children (triplets Nicolette, Natalee and Wesley, July 19, 1991)

Needless to say...GREAT JOB RAGS...I'm proud of ya as a Yankee fan!!!

The New York Jets-A Look Back 68-69-70 #TheShift #Sportstalk #Jets

2010-11-02T19:12:00.004-05:00

1968: After coming of a successful 8-5-1 season the Jets hoped they could finally win their division, and play for the AFL Championship. The Jets would get off to a flying start winning their first game over the Kansas City Chiefs thanks in part to ball control in which the Jets held the ball the final 5:56 of the game. Two weeks later in their home opener the Jets would pull off another last minute win as Emerson Boozer scored a TD to give the Jets a 23-20 win over the San Diego Chargers in front of an AFL record crowd of 63, 786 at Shea Stadium. With the Jets cruising towards the AFL Championship game their November 17th game in Oakland against the Raiders set itself up as a possible AFL Championship preview. The game was a back and forth affair as the Jets scored a Touchdown with 1:05 left in the game to pull in front 32-29. However, the high scoring game was taking a while to play, and NBC executive began to sweat it out as the game was heading close to the 7pm start of the Children's movie Heidi. NBC programmers decided that the game was over, and decided to pull the end of the game off the air to show Heidi on time and in its entirety. With in seconds thousands of irate football fans began calling NBC, and their affiliates. Meanwhile the Raiders stormed back and scored two Touchdowns in 42 seconds to win the game 43-32. Millions of fans on the East Coast were left in the dark, and assumed the Jets had won; the outrage forced NBC to apologize, and sent a massage to Television Programmers that Pro-Football was a force on Television. The game would forever be known as "The Heidi Game". After finishing 11-3 the Jets easily won the Eastern Division and found themselves in a Heidi Game rematch with Raiders for the AFL Championship at Shea Stadium in front of 62, 627 fans. . The Jets took a 20-13 lead into the 4th quarter thanks to jumping out to a quick 10-0 lead in the 1st quarter. The Raiders would not go down easily and would take a 23-20 lead midway through the fourth. However, Joe Namath and the Jets would not be deterred as he drove the Jets down the field and threw a six yard pass to original Titan Don Maynard for his third Touchdown pass of the game which a gave the Jets a 27-23 lead the would not relinquish. The win would earn the Jets a trip to the AFL-NFL Championship game, which for the first time was officially being called the Super Bowl.

Super Bowl III: Going into Super Bowl III the Jets were 18-point underdogs to the powerhouse Baltimore Colts. In fact the Super Bowl was considered a mere exhibition since the NFL's Green Bay Packers won the previous two encounters easily. The game had an ironic twist for Coach Weeb Ewbank in that he was facing his former team, and he was staring at Don Shula the man who replaced him five years earlier as head coach. However, the match-up of Ewbank, and Shula became a mere after thought after Joe Namath guaranteed the Jets would win. The guarantee was thought of as a joke, the Jets did not have a chance, and now they were looking arrogant. Many old school traditional football fans still had not accepted the presence of the AFL, and were pulling for the Colts to shut the brash young Quarter Back's mouth. Meanwhile AFL fans and players were pulling for the Jets, as their shot at finally being accepted as a legitimate football league against this back drop Super Bowl II, finally brought mass attention to the Championship Game. When game time arrived finally al the talking was done, and the Jets and Colts began to play what would become the most important game in Pro-Football history. After one quarter of play the Jets had held the powerful Colts to a stale mate as they harassed starting Quarterback Earl Morrall all through out the opening period. In the 2nd Quarter the Jets finally got on the board taken a 7-0 lead with Matt Snell scoring from four yards out. The Jets would continue to hold the Colts off the board late in the 2nd Quarter when Morrall drove the Colts deep into Jets territory. However, in one of the biggest blunders in Super Bowl history Morrall throws an interception into double coverage while WR Johnny Orr was waving his hands all alone near the endzone. The game would go to halftime 7-0. The Jets would extend their lead to 10-0 after a long drive that opened the second half. Meanwhile the Jets would continue to frustrate Morrall into mistakes, and would go into the 4th Quarter leading 13-0 after another Jim Turner Field Goal. In the 4th Quarter Turner would extend the lead to 16-0, and fans began to realize the Jets might actually have a chance to win this one. However, the Colts would not go down without a fight. With Morrall being ineffective Don Shula decided to replace him with Johnny Untias, the all-time great Quarterback who had been hampered all season with injuries, but had the experience to get the Colts back into the game. Unitas would take the Colts down the field, and put them on the board 16-7, and when the Colts recovered the on-side-kick all of a sudden they were in business. However, Unitas did not have enough magic in his right arm and was picked off late in the 4th Quarter. The Jets had done they had won the Super Bowl, the AFL finally had legitimacy, and as the game ended Super Bowl MVP Joe Namath ran off the field and into the locker room holding up his finger saying "Were Number 1".

1969: The Jets flight to a second straight Super Bowl hit turbulence even before the start of training camp when Quarterback Joe Namath suddenly retired, rather then sell his interest in the nightclub Bachelor's III. NFL commissioner Pete Rosell who now had jurisdiction over the AFL teams and players demanded Namath sell the bar because of unsavory characters that were partners in the ownership group. Eventually Namath would come to his senses and sell the nightclub, and would rejoin the Jets just in time the preseason. With Namath back in the saddle the Jets would finish 10-4 and would cruise to their second consecutive Eastern Division Title. That year the Jets needed to win an extra game to get to the AFL Championship, since an extra round of playoffs were added. In the interdivisional round the Jets faced the Kansas City Chiefs at Shea Stadium. The Chiefs defense was able to shut down Broadway Joe all game forcing him into thrown three interceptions. The Jets managed to stay close keeping the game tied 6-6 into the 4th Quarter, but the Chiefs were too much and would pull out a 13-6 win to advance o the AFL Championship Game, and eventually on to Super Bowl IV, which they won easily.

1970: The merger, which was instigated by the Jets signing of Joe Namath, and expedited by their victory in Super Bowl III, is finally completed. Pro-football is now completely housed under one league with the AFL fully joining its once rival league, and three NFL teams joining the AFC to give both conferences an equal number of teams and divisions. Along with the merger, 1970 saw a few other firsts that have become a regular part of the NFL, and the Jets were right in the middle of these changes. First came on opening day September 21st when the Jets faced the Brows, (who recently moved to the AFC from the NFL) in Cleveland for the first Monday Night Football game in NFL history. The Jets would end up losing the Monday Night inaugural 31-21. The merger also brought to the AFC the Jets Super Bowl III opponents the Baltimore Colts. Not only did they join the AFC, but joined the AFC east meaning they were guaranteed two match-ups against the Jets every year. In the first match up against the Colts on October 18th the Jets season took a sudden down turn, as Joe Namath fractures his wrist in the 29-22 loss. The Jets would go on to finish with a disappointing 4-10 record while Namath sat out the sidelines unable to play. However, the season would see another first as regular season inter-conference play is introduced. The highlight of the season comes when the Jets face the Giants at Shea Stadium on November 1st in front of a sold out crowd. The Jets would grab an early lead, but without Namath could not hold as the Giants took the first regular season math-up 22-10.

Hat Tip to http://www.sportsecyclopedia.com/

A Pretty Classy Bunch! #TheShift #SportsTalk

2010-11-02T16:53:00.003-05:00

Even though I am a life-long Yankee fan and they didn't make the World Series this year I thoroughly enjoyed seeing the journey the San Francisco Giants took to get there and win it. Needless to say two teams that no one thought would be there made it...and even though it was a ratings bust just watching this young pitching staff less Zito was well worth my time. As I have posted on this very blog before I'm a big fan of Tim Lincecum...and how can you not be? His performance throughout the playoffs was absolutely amazing! I know Renteria won the MVP but I think beating Cliff Lee twice should have garnered The Freak a Co-MVP award at the very least. It will be interesting to see what this home-grown bunch of pitchers can accomplish in the future...I would think there is a strong chance Sanchez might be used in a deal to fortify the offense a bit. I don't think Renteria will be brought back...and quite frankly if I was him I'd tip my hat and retire on top. The Giants can't afford to get rid of Zito...they still owe him quite a bit of money. But Giants fans are going to want more now that they have the title...we'll see how that goes. Having Buster Posey to anchor that staff is another strong plus...this kid is only going to get better and better. This group of ball-players was quite the scrappy bunch indeed.

What really impressed me over and above their play was the humbleness of everyone that was interviewed in the post-game ceremonies...to a man they boasted about everyone but themselves...team was the concept...and it worked. Nothing is more refreshing to me in any sport than to see a team pull together as one for a common goal. Even the management staff was humble. Very classy orginazation to be sure. It will be interesting to see what a taste of success does for this club...and if they can become a constant threat to return to the Fall Classic again. To the Giants...their fans...and their organization...I commend you on a job well done!

A New Baseball League In The Offing? #TheShift #SportsTalk

2010-10-30T19:36:00.002-05:00

If you look to the right you'll see what must in my opinion seperate the men from the boys anymore in ALL sports...and let's not forget the women from the girls too. And yes...I know...this is probably the 80th million article typed up about it. As a sports fan of over 45 years now I have lived through enough eras to have sat back and watched the progression of this...from the days when players worked and trained hard...to the days where more money and less work is only a dripping syringe away. The chemist are so far ahead of the testing it's ridiculous! And Bud thinks we have the situation in hand right?

Well...rather than me sitting here and trying to figure out a solution to something that obviously can't be solved why don't we just relent and start a new baseball league that allows the abuse of all these illegal enhancers? We could group all these cheaters together in a seperate league or maybe even clone them huh? Then we could pit the roiders and HGHers against the regular MLBers for a winner-take-all series. The weird thing is I'd probably pay to see that series...ah...no I wouldn't...I can't afford to go to a game now. That's about it for now...lets watch a clone baseball game shall we?

C'mon David !!!! #TheShift #SportsTalk

2010-10-29T09:15:00.003-05:00

Take a good look at this picture of Rajon Rondo of the Boston Celtics because you won't see it again anytime soon...why? Because good ol' NBA commish David Stern has decided that HE doesn't like it. Effective this season no NBA player can wear their NBA headband upside down...a habit that Rondo began and many others started to follow. I watched the Celtics and Heat game the other night and I honestly thought Rondo was hurt for the Celtics...I couldn't find him on the court. So if you didn't think things like what he does don't lend a certain "brand" to him you are sadly mistaken. This whole thing began when Rasheed Wallace used to wear his headband inside out so that the logo wouldn't show...that mode of dress was quickly squashed by Stern...so Rondo decided to make Jerry West (a.k.a."The Logo" face south instead of north.Most people would say no, but those people aren’t the brain trust that runs the NBA. Probably because of Rondo being on the Celtics, and the national exposure that comes with it, the league, for some strange, albeit petty, reason, politely asked Rondo not to wear his headband in that manner. You’d think the NBA would have bigger fish to fry, but no, apparently Rajon Rondo’s upside down headband was a major concern.

This whole branding thing makes my eyes bug out anymore...EVERYTHING is sponsored to the nines with a corporate logo on it...towels, chairs, rafters, backboards, you name it...it's there. Perhaps Dave should concentrate on more legitimate problems than that of a simple headband.

Whats Next San Fran? #TheShift #Sports

2010-10-28T09:42:00.002-05:00

I read yesterday where a place called Releaf Herbal Center in San Francisco had a promotion whereas when the Giants hit a home run hit during the World Series, they would donate one doobie to each Giants fans present at the local marijuana dispensary in San Francisco. What exactly is going on here in baseball the last few days? First Bud Selig dumps 102 grand on stock in the largest cat-litter producer in America and now free hooch? It seems like we've moved well beyond the steroid era and regressed back into the Haight era huh? Watching the game last night I saw countless references to Timmeh Lincecum and his use of marijuana. And by the way his first inning went it would seem he had twirled one before the game started. But all turned out well for the Giants as they cruised to an 11-7 victory over the Texas Rangers. I'm still baffled by the Selig stock move...I checked into the company and found that he is a director...to be honest with you I am tracking the stock now to see if what I think is going to happen will. I'll keep you posted in future posts. I would think the Rangers have no choice but to move Lee up to Game 4 on short rest...although rain is scheduled out that way...a rainout would put him back on schedule.The Giants appear to be a team of destiny this year...when they took the division on the last day of the season it started a magic carpet ride for this bunch...they look like a team that nothing can go wrong for right now. Even though my Yankees aren't in the fall classic I thouroughly enjoyed Game 1...I hope it goes 7!

The 6 Letter Word Social Media is Missing #TheShift #Sports

2010-10-27T11:06:00.004-05:00

Being a sports-kook as I am it goes without saying that I have fully embraced the current technology made available to me in this day and age. It seems like every time I watch a sports event of any significance anymore my trusty TweetDeck is fired up to see what everyone has to say about what is going on. Long gone are the days (and I lived through them) of waiting for 5 commercials to see what was going on during a game...everything is instantaneous anymore...it's almost anti-climactic to a degree. There are no more secrets...the Facebook and Twitter police are constantly on the scene to bring us our fix...whether it's right or wrong at that moment...it fuels our craving for sports news doesn't it? The need for a marriage for social media and sports is a real one...but where do we go to find it?

You may answer the question I just asked a number of ways...Facebook, Twitter, Forums, Chats, Tweet-Ups...all fit the criterion that we seek. As sports fans we have a strong desire to both express our opinions...and to agree or debate them with others. We bleed our faithfulness...we get physically ill over defeats. It's all about the word PRIDE...and we wear it like a Purple Heart. To be honest with you I have sat here countless times brain-storming for a way to fit all that satisfaction under one roof so to speak...because I truly believe that heaven on Earth doesn't exist...we find ourselves tweaking several seperate apps or electronics to get the result we want. I guess what I'm really saying is that I'd like to throw all those things in a blender...hit the puree button...and quaff a glass of it.I truly don't believe we are there yet sports fan...are we?

And perhaps I'm missing the boat because I don't belong to Facebook...where I'm sure numerous communities and fan pages are set up for fan interaction. I primarily use Twitter during games...and I must admit the best part of it for me is not only to tweet with fans of the same ilk...but to develop friendships beyond that. Oh well, as I said earlier, maybe this all-in-one option doesn't exist...but one thing is for sure...it sure would be great to have it! If you have any comments on this please leave them!

2011 #MLB Free Agents #TheShift #Sportstalk

2010-10-27T07:17:00.007-05:00

Well...here we go baseball fans...one of my favorite parts of the baseball off-season...trying to figure out what our favorite teams are going to do to address the reason(s) why they weren't hoisting the World Series trophy. Now granted; alot of teams won't have the capital to acquire the big name players...or at least that's what they'll say to their fan bases. And of course all the talk will come up about teams buying titles. Please not that the following list cannot be guaranteed to be perfectly correct...but for our sake we'll use this one as a conversation point. This is where I need YOU as a baseball fan to interact and comment on this post and give your ideas about what you think your teams GM would do or what you would do as a GM. So without further delay...let's have a look-see at the list:

Potential Free Agents for 2011
The following players have contracts expiring or should have the six years of service necessary to become free agents after the 2010 season.

* - player whose current contract includes 2011 option

Player Club
First Basemen

Lance Berkman NYY *
Russell Branyan SEA
Adam Dunn WAS
Jason Giambi COL
Troy Glaus ATL
Aubrey Huff SF
Nick Johnson NYY *
Paul Konerko CWS
Mark Kotsay CWS
Derrek Lee ATL
Adam LaRoche ARZ
Mike Lowell BOS
David Ortiz BOS *
Lyle Overbay TOR
Carlos Pena TB
Mike Sweeney PHI
Jim Thome MIN
Ty Wigginton BAL

Second Basemen
Willie Bloomquist CIN
David Eckstein SD
Mark Ellis OAK *
Orlando Hudson MIN
Adam Kennedy WAS
Akinori Iwamura OAK
Jose Lopez SEA *
Julio Lugo BAL
Kaz Matsui COL
Aaron Miles STL

Shortstops
Orlando Cabrera CIN *
Craig Counsell MIL
Alex Gonzalez ATL *
Cristian Guzman TEX
J.J. Hardy MIN
Jerry Hairston Jr. SD
Omar Infante ATL *
Cesar Izturis BAL
Derek Jeter NYY
Jhonny Peralta DET *
Edgar Renteria SF *
Jose Reyes NYM *
Jimmy Rollins PHI *
Juan Uribe SF
Ramon Vazquez HOU
Chris Woodward SEA

Third Basemen
Garrett Atkins FA
Adrian Beltre BOS *
Geoff Blum HOU
Miguel Cairo CIN
Jorge Cantu TEX
Eric Chavez OAK *
Pedro Feliz STL
Bill Hall BOS *
Brandon Inge DET
Maicer Izturis LAA
Melvin Mora COL
Nick Punto MIN *
Aramis Ramirez CHC *
Miguel Tejada SD
Chad Tracy FLA
Omar Vizquel CWS

Catchers
Brad Ausmus LAD
Rod Barajas LAD
Josh Bard SEA
Henry Blanco NYM
John Buck TOR
Ramon Castro CWS
Ramon Hernandez CIN
Reed Johnson LAD
Gerald Laird DET
Jason LaRue STL
Victor Martinez BOS
Chad Moeller NYY
Jose Molina TOR
Miguel Olivo COL *
A.J. Pierzynski CWS
David Ross ATL
Yorvit Torrealba SD *
Matt Treanor TEX
Jason Varitek BOS
Gregg Zaun MIL *

Outfielders
Alfredo Amezaga LAD
Rick Ankiel ATL *
Rocco Baldelli TB
Pat Burrell SF
Frank Catalanotto FA
Carl Crawford TB
Coco Crisp OAK *
Michael Cuddyer MIN *
Johnny Damon DET
Jim Edmonds CIN
Jody Gerut SD
Jay Gibbons LAD
Vladimir Guerrero TEX *
Jose Guillen SF
Bill Hall BOS
Willie Harris WAS
Brad Hawpe TB
Eric Hinske ATL
Brad Hawpe TB
Andruw Jones CWS
Gabe Kapler TB
Austin Kearns NYY
Jason Kubel MIN *
Hideki Matsui LAA
Kevin Mench WAS
Xavier Nady CHC
Magglio Ordonez DET *
Corey Patterson BAL
Jay Payton COL
Scott Podsednik LAD
Manny Ramirez CWS
Matt Stairs SD
Fernando Tatis NYM
Marcus Thames NYY
Jayson Werth PHI
Randy Winn STL

Starting Pitchers
Bronson Arroyo CIN *
Erik Bedard SEA *
Kris Benson ARZ
Jeremy Bonderman DET
David Bush MIL
Chris Capuano MIL
Bruce Chen KC
Kevin Correia SD
Doug Davis MIL
Jorge De La Rosa COL
Justin Duchscherer OAK
Jeff Francis COL *
Freddy Garcia CWS
Jon Garland SD *
Aaron Harang CIN *
Rich Harden TEX *
Hiroki Kuroda LAD
Cliff Lee TEX
Ted Lilly LAD
Braden Looper MIL
Rodrigo Lopez ARZ
Noah Lowry SF
Kevin Millwood BAL
Brian Moehler HOU
Jamie Moyer PHI
Vicente Padilla LAD
Carl Pavano MIN
Brad Penny STL
Andy Pettitte NYY
Nate Robertson PHI
Ben Sheets OAK
Ian Snell SEA *
Jeff Suppan STL
Hisanori Takahashi NYM
Javier Vazquez NYY
Brandon Webb ARI
Jake Westbrook STL
Dontrelle Willis SF

Chris Young SD *

Relief Pitchers
Jeremy Affeldt SF
Grant Balfour TB
Miguel Batista WAS
Joe Beimel COL
Joaquin Benoit TB
Randy Choate TB
Jose Contreras PHI
Jesse Crain MIN
Elmer Dessens NYM
Octavio Dotel COL *
Scott Downs TOR
Chad Durbin PHI
Kelvim Escobar NYM
Kyle Farnsworth ATL
Pedro Feliciano NYM
Randy Flores MIN
Frank Francisco TEX
Jason Frasor TOR
Brian Fuentes MIN
Chad Gaudin NYY
Kevin Gregg TOR
Matt Guerrier MIN
Mike Hampton ARZ
Aaron Heilman ARZ
Mark Hendrickson BAL *
Trevor Hoffman MIL *
Mike Lincoln CIN
Mike MacDougal STL
Ron Mahay MIN
Guillermo Mota SF
Will Ohman FLA
Darren Oliver TEX *
Chan Ho Park PIT
J.J. Putz CWS
Chad Qualls TB
Jon Rauch MIN
Dennys Reyes STL
Arthur Rhodes CIN
David Riske FA
Mariano Rivera NYY
J.C. Romero PHI *
Bobby Seay DET
Scot Shields LAA
Brian Shouse TB
Rafael Soriano TB
Jorge Sosa FLA
Russ Springer CIN
Matt Thornton CWS *
Koji Uehara BAL
Jeff Weaver LAD
Dan Wheeler TB
Kerry Wood NYY *
Jamey Wright SEA

So there you have it...what moves would you make???

November 16th ??? #TheShift #SportsTalk

2010-10-26T19:03:00.003-05:00

Just another quick status report in regards to my progress with bringing The Shift sports-talk show of mine back on the air at Ustream. I'm currently in the process of making sure that my feed will be properly directed once the curtain goes up again. As I said before in a prior post so much has changed since 2005 when I first started podcasting...the social media scene is upon us in a big way. And to sit back and disregard it would be plain stupidity. Those of you who know me know that I don't have a Facebook account nor do I plan to have one...I just don't feel very comfortable with the whole concept of it or the nightmarish stories I have heard about it. So no Facebook...PERIOD. I'm not coming back to be in a popularity contest so to speak...I want to do this if I do purely out of my love of sports. I DO still want to air the show exclusively on Ustream...I haven't seen anything that I like better. I still don't have a time slot worked out...that seems to be an obstacle at the moment. There is still much to be done...and my health will play a major part in it. In the meantime I will do posts here on a fairly regular basis...to be perfectly honest about it I have been spending a great deal of time working on The Plastic Waffle. Ummm..that's about it for now...thanks.

Chucky...errr...John Needs Work #TheShift #NFL

2010-10-26T11:13:00.002-05:00

Last night I decided to sit down, relax, and do something I wouldn't do if I had another option...I watched two teams that I can't stand play on Monday Night Football. As a Niner fan I have very good reasons for my dislike of the Giants and Cowboys because of things that have happened in the past. Plus my neighbors on both sides of my homes are Giant fans. Enough said about that. So I figured I'd sit back and watch these teams kick the crap out of each other and enjoy it. Needless to say I got my wish. I hope this clavicle break doesn't affect Tony Romos' golf swing too too badly.

But aside from that I took strong notice of John Gruden...and how thoroughly his insight was applied to the game. Not to mention his fervor for it also. He sounded like a man without a country...so many ideas and suggestions in his head...but nowhere to apply them. And as I looked at Wade Phillips and Jerry Jones in his billion-dollar perch it quickly hit me that Gruden may very well be suited to pace the new digs as the Cowboys next head coach. I seemed to feel a parallel between he and Jimmy Johnson in the fire and brimstone department...and believe me...the Cowboys could use ALOT of that right now. When I turned the game on the Giants were losing 20-7...we all know what happened after that. So what do you think Cowboy fan? Do you think Chuckie is a good fit for you? Here's why I do...

The billion-dollar crib needs an attraction...let's face it...Phillips doesn't have anywhere near the ego to take the Cowboys back to its title of "America's Team"...Gruden LOVES the limelight and drives the ego meter right off the scale. The Dallas clubhouse is in need of a coach that will get in peoples faces and not back off...ding-ding...Gruden gets my pick there too. And just think of the fodder that will undoubtedly go on between Jones and Gruden...I would pay willingly for that ticket. The Cowboy offense certainly has the tools it needs to perform far far better than it has been. Wade Phillips has been an example in frustration...another instance of a person who is far better suited to be a D-Coordinator than a head coach. The reason Jerry Jones is sticking with him is no doubt his ardent affection of marionettes. He has to feel like he is in control of the whole enchilada all the time...anything less is not acceptable...(i.e.-Jimmy Johnson and Bill Parcells)

The bottom line is this Jerry...I know you had all kind of aspirations of getting your face on that humongous screen that sits above the hallowed blue star at mid-field on Super Bowl Sunday...but the stark reality is that your season is OVER! Over and done...with half a season left to play no less! And although I have no reason to puff my chest out or gloat being a 1-5 Niner fan I am. It is Halloween this Sunday...and you've been tricked since Phillips signed on the dotted line. Why don't you give your Cowboy denizen a treat and sign Chuckie?

#Yankees #Rangers Game 6- Trick...or Treat? #TheShift #SportsTalk

2010-10-21T16:07:00.003-05:00

I have to admit it...Game 4 is STILL bothering me. Overall I think the A.J. thing went very well...he gave us way more than I expected out of him to be perfectly honest. If we should get beat in Arlington in Game 6 I am going to keep thinking back to Game 4 and why Girardi didn't pull the trigger on Burnett a little quicker. The deep fly ball to center and the almost-wild-pitch were red flags to me in that inning. THAT GAME was pivotal as far as I was concerned...there's a big difference between being down 3-1 to being tied 2-2. Even in the presser after the game Girardi seemed too easy-going...too lackluster. It seems to me that Joe doesn't like to take any chances... (i.e.Billy Ball when he managed the A's) I saw today that C.C. would be available for about 50 pitches if need be in Game 6...but if Phil can keep the ball down and bust the lower part of the strike zone we shouldn't have a need for the big guy at all. And I have harped about the way we have been pitching Hamilton...he doesn't look like his ribs are completely healed at the plate...if we pitch him down and away and make him reach we can negate his power. I have watched the results on Tivo when we do that...he doesn't like reaching out to hit and when he did the results were weak efforts at best.Each day that passes lets him get a little bit stronger to be sure. We also have to keep Andrus from being a nuisance at the top of the order...he always seems to get things going for the Rangers.

I expect the bullpen to look like a free cheese giveaway Friday night...my hope is that Girardi takes the time to throw away the stat cards and manage with his heart. I hate like hell to keep having to go to the Billy Martin drops but Billy had that instinct to manage impulsively AND to stir things up if he had to. I've never really been a Girardi fan but by the same token Mattingly would have been a less productive choice at the time that it happened. But it's going to be be Girardi at the door when we as fans come Trick or Treating on Friday night. Hopefully we get some sweets instead of long cold Winter of what-ifs.I'd really like to see us play some small ball instead of relying on all power...we have been pitiful in the RISP department. One more thing...it utterly AMAZES me how few MLB players can effectively lay a bunt down. Fundamentals are the keys to playing great baseball. This team doesn't have them all. GO YANKEES !!!

Is AJ a JA ? #TheShift #SportsTalk

2010-10-13T07:44:00.005-05:00

Some things in life are just pure coincidence and others make you scratch your head and wonder. As we approach the beginning of the American League Championship Series on Friday it seems as if this is one of those latter feelings. Joe Girardi and his World Champion Yankees begin their quest for back-to-back World Series titles and a 28th overall crown in Arlington. And what every Yankee fan has been dreading is going to happen. A.J.Burnett is going to be in the rotation as it expands to a 4 pitcher format. Coincidentally...it is also the release date for the movie "Jack-Ass 3-D" at a favorite cinema near you. How ironic is that? And it further begs to be asked...are we going to get the real A.J. or the Jackass version?Does Johnny Knoxville know something we don't?

All the bad signs are there...he was drafted by the Mets...signed to MLB baseball on the 13th...and has spent more time this year keeping Alcoa and Cool-Whip in business than he has pitching solid baseball. The whole issue here is that we NEED AJ to get to #28. He HAS to come through big for us in this ALCS. His strikeout total is 50 less than it was in 2009...in 2010 he has yielded more HR's than he has in any year of his pro career. And a 10-15 record and 5.26 ERA is hardly what we paid for when we made him a mega-millionaire along with CC. CC has held up his part of the deal...AJ has been a JA. I have been harping about this guys mechanics all year long. He hasn't been right and the strange thing is no one seems to know why. Add to that his propensity for fighting with doors and showing up with shiners and one would wonder if he choose the wrong career path. It's probably a good bet that he couldn't get anyone out in his simulated game too! I'm worried.

It is to the Yankees favor that we don't have to face Cliff Lee in game 1 of the ALCS...and even though I know in my head that we are going with a 4 man rotation I can't acknowledge it...I'm still thing of it like this: "Ok...let's see here...if CC, Pettitte, and Hughsie win we can afford to absorb the inevitable loss by Burnett. And to have think like that folks is quite frankly...SAD at best. It's like I'm penciling in AJ for a loss before the game even starts. And I'm a glass is half-full personality. If that DOES happen and we make it to the World Series anyway to face Philly for example we are going to have to have EVERYONE sharp. The sad part of all this is HOW IMPORTANT it is that AJ throws well and wins. We signed this guy and we are married to him for better or worse. As I said earlier...Jackass 3-D comes out this Friday...we may be looking at a sequel sooner than you think.

No Nuggets In The Pan #TheShift #Sports #49ers

2010-10-11T13:03:00.003-05:00

Sometimes it is very hard to be a sports fan. The highs and lows we experience as a fan rival ANYTHING that comes our way in live. If you are a TRUE sports fan I would think you can totally relate to the statement I just made. Such is the case with me and a 49er team I have embraced since 1964. John Brodie was quarterbacking in that era. Don't get me wrong...I've basked in the glory of 5 Super Bowl titles with this team so I don't expect any pity from the Niner haters out there. But I'm a bit embarrased at what is going on with this years edition of the team. Back in the days of "The Gold Rush" prospectors used to use pans and go to the various creeks in search of the golden nuggets...the pan Mike Singletary is using right now is coming up full of dirt...nothing more. Let's have a talk about this ok?

This morning I see Jed York, owner of the 49ers, sent a text to ESPN stating that they were going to WIN the division. Oh really Jed? I remember one time watching David Copperfield on TV make the Statue of Liberty vanish right before my eyes...your claim or prediction would certainly rival that stunt. Why did you say it? Was it a need to show us that you REALLY exist? Are you turning the screws on Singy? Are you on drugs? Fact of the matter is that NO team has EVER started 0-5 and made the playoffs. So I think what we are seeing here is you giving Singy the goal he can't possible attain so that when you fire him the paramaters have already been set. Let's face it Jed...you and your family own a very proud franchise...and since you've owned it it has totally regressed. It's a safe bet to say that things are no where near the way they were during the time Eddie and his family ran the team. Do me and the rest of the 49er fans that live and die with this team every year a favor...keep your mouth closed and go hang out at a wine tasting party. It's more your style isn't it?

Alex Smith has to go...the experiment is over...DONE. What makes me really sick is the year we chose him #1 in the draft we could have chosen Aaron Rodgers. Granted...who knew how much better Rodgers would be...but he would have been a viable pick that day. This guy just doesn't get it. I watched Singy get in his face twice last night and I was happy about it...it was long overdue. But this guy is as mobile as a car with square tires. When he gets hit he divorces himself from the ball faster than Elizabeth Taylor went through husbands. A strong step for this franchise would be to divorce themselves from him also. I would say BUST is becoming a very suitable term to use in any further sentences with Alex Smiths name in them. I remember Jeff Garcia doing an interview on Fox Sports Radio where he was asked if he would be interested in the Niner QB job. You KNOW what his answer was...but instead the Yorks decided to ride it out with Smith. Poor choice needless to say.

I must also say that more than the offense problems the defense has me in a haze...this unit was expected to be top-notch...it hasn't. When I see the defense failing like it is it immediately throws up a red flag for me. It makes me think that there is an effort going on to get Singy fired...or they are so digusted with the offensive unit they are throwing in the towel already. It's not bad enough the defense has there own jobs to do...now they have the added task along with the special teams of carrying this pitiful offense. I see a mutiny starting...or perhaps it HAS been going on. Very sad with all the expectations this team had coming into the year. To be honest with you I didn't expect them to be clutching the Lombardi Trophy...but I did think winning the division was a viablr goal to attain. Especially since Kurt Warner had retired, Carroll was new in Seatlle, and Bradford was a rookie QB in St. Louis. That's EXACTLY why York is being so bold with his text message to ESPN...he know the NFC WEST is pretty morose at best.

This team is in deep trouble...Smith is pitiful...Gore has fumble-itis along with Smith...the defense is ill and lackluster...and the pan in the creek is coming up empty. It is going to be a long year Niner fans...hang in there though...we're fans...and we play the Raiders this week by the way.

Ya Gotta Love "The Freak" #TheShift #Sports

2010-10-08T09:36:00.002-05:00

Well folks, here we are two days into the ALDS and NLDS and it looks like the Yankees, Phillies, and Rangers have the brooms in hand to sweep away the likes of the Twins, Reds, and Rays. Out of thos three teams at a disadvantage I think the Rays may have the best chance of a comeback...the other two look like they are being a little down-trodden. Pitching has been phenomenal so far. But instead of reviewing all these series I need to take a detour.

Even though I've been a Yankee fan since 1964 and have never wore any other colors than theirs I find it time to make an exception. And the exception is the young fellow pictured above. I have followed "The Freak" since he came up and I have been a fan of this kid for quite some time now...I stayed up last night after the Yankees win over the Twins to watch Lincecum pitch for about 6 innings against the Braves...and this kid is simply AMAZING when he is on his game. Not to mention the fact that he's won the Cy Young Award already. I have NEVER seen mechanics like his...I'm pressed to wonder how he hasn't blown out his arm yet. I interviewed 1974 NL Cy Young winner Dr. Mike Marshall a few years back (audio on this blog) and I'm half tempted to call Mike again to get his take on how this kid pulls this off. he was in strike out mode last night with 14K's and just 2 hits and 1 walk. I picked the Giants to win this series in 5...with the staff the Giants have it might end sooner than that...the reason I went 5 in the first place is the inability at times of the Giant's bats to generate any runs. But 5 games I picked...5 games I stay with.

Ok...back to Lincecum...as I said earlier everything I have in my home is Yankees...the ONLY exception is a signed baseball I have from Sandy Koufax. And quite frankly folks...who wouldn't want one of those??? But I think I'm going to add two more items to my stash...an autographed Lincecum baseball and one of his Giants jerseys to wear. YES I said wear. I admit...it will feel weird donning anything but Yankee gear...but that is how big a fan of this kid I am. And SO WHAT if he gets stoned...doesn't matter to me in the least. In fact...he looks stoned in the pic I posted here. All I know is I'm a fan of baseball...and this kid has got the goods. Hey...ya never know...maybe he'll be a Yankee some day!!!

Reds spend evening in the "Halladay Inn" and more #TheShift #Sports

2010-10-07T11:38:00.004-05:00

If you know me well you know I am a life-long Yankee fan. But on the first day of the playoffs i enjoy the chance to sit back and enjoy watching the other teams play without having to deal with the inherent stress of watching the pin-strippers hovering over me. Even though I picked the Rays in my last post to win their series with the Rangers I was not surprised that Cliff Lee hurled a gem at the Trop. At least I THOUGHT it was a gem. After the Rangers dispatched the Rays little did I know what I was about to witness.Enter the Reds visiting Philadelphia for Game 1 of their NLDS best-of-5 series...and Roy Halladay. Needless to say I'm very familiar with Halladay for all the grief he has caused me as a Yankee fan while he was with the Toronto Blue Jays. But no where near the damage he was about to deliver to the Reds. I make my next statement with no reservations...In all the years I have watched and loved baseball Halladay's outing has to have been one of the best performances I have ever seen...and I've seen quite a few. It's not bad enough he was filthy when he was in the American League...he adopted a new pitch this year in his arsenal...a change-up. He used that pitch 15 times last night and the results were awkward looking swings for strikes. he commanded both the inside and outside of the plate. I don't have enough adjectives to describe it...he was 1 pitch away from his 2nd perfect game of the year. The Reds NEVER had a viable chance. And let's be honest here...the Reds bats are formidable. So without turning this post into a love-fest I just want to tip my hat to Halladay...that was one KICK-ASS performance.

As is my ritual at night with my RA sleep schedule I usually have the radio playing low on the night stand with Fox Sports Radio. So I usually catch The Tony Bruno Show and then JT the Brick. Most times I doze off but JT was interviewing Rick Eisen from the NFL Network about the Moss trade and the fact that Rich is now doing a sit-down-with-athletes podcast...kind of similar to what Chris Myers does on the weekend on his show CMI. And it got me thinking about how the whole podcast scene has changed since I began doing it in 2005. It is like night and day how much things have changed and how people get their information...not only about sports...but about everything that is going on in the world. we have become a society that seeks instant gratification...we are not a patient denizen anymore when it comes to news. What used to suffice just doesn't cut it anymore. Take for example the ESPN ticker I have at the top of my blog...I've been toying with the idea of removing it completely because who wants old news? With Twitter,Facebook, and countless sports applications it has become an after-thought. It seems everything needs to be interactive.But I also believe that "old-time radio" still has a place in this enviornment. To that degree I will try and keep that in mind when my sports-talk show comes back. It has been almost 2 1/2 years since I have done my show...I honestly don't know what to expect but I'll be ready to give it hell as I always have. I also run a music blog called The Plastic Waffle which I enjoy doing...in all honesty it has been occupying alot of my time and energies. I have been working on both blogs design-wise so both will always be in flux. My main hold up to not being on already has been my health...RA is a cruel disease. But I will as I've said before keep everyone posted. Enjoy the rest of the ALDS and NLDS...I will try and keep posting on a regular basis.

AL Playoffs-Where's the fife and drum??? #TheShift

2010-10-06T07:57:00.006-05:00

Well...here we go folks...the annual ritual with baseball fans as the American and National Leagues prepare to do battle in the playoffs starting today. And to be perfectly honest with you as a Yankee fan I'm kind of worried...I'm a big believer in the merits of pitching and my team has a question mark attached to it in one Andy Pettitte. Andy has NOT looked good since he has come back and we NEED him to be spectacular the rest of the way. i still don't think he is right...but you know damn well Andy isn't going to say a word even if he isn't. I'm kind of in the mindset that we will go only as far as CC's arm will take us. If CC fails...we may be miserable for the rest of the baseball post-season. As for Phil Hughes...he has had a propensity for giving up the home run this year. That also causes me a great deal of stress. Make no mistakes about it people...if we are going to win #28 it is going to be a long long road to the Canyon of Champions this year.

Okay...with that said let's look at the whole picture here. All of the American League teams in this post-season party are like the walking wounded compared to the National league. And add to that the fact that the NL has home field advantage in the World Series. (I guess that All-Star game WAS important huh?) Everyone and their brothers are crowning the Phillies the champs already...they are currently a 2-1 favorite to having Chase Utley come up with another F-Bomb salute to the City of Brotherly Love. All that being said...the National league staffs look way more imposing than their American League counterparts. Whomever limps out of the ALCS will have quite a mountain to climb in the World Series.After playing the final Sunday of the season, the Rangers have the best record of late. They’ve won eight of their last 17 games. The Twins have won two of their last 10; the Yankees have won three of their last 11; and the Rays have won three of their last eight. Needless to say, none of these teams are going into this like a house on fire...but SOMEBODY has to win! Baseball is not a light switch on your wall...it doesn't happen that way. That being said...it looks to me as though the National League has a little more going for it than just home field advantage in the World Series...wouldn't you say???

Alrighty then...here's where I look like a guru or a total horse's ass. Here are my picks for the playoffs:

Yankees in 4
Rays in 5
Phillies in 4
Giants in 5

I am a #Yankee fan BUT..... #TheShift

2010-10-02T07:34:00.004-05:00

Good morning everyone! I always tell myself that I am going to sleep in on Saturdays...after a long week it seems like the logical thing to do. But due to my RA my sleep schedule is ANYTHING but stable. I'm usually up several times a night due to pain or discomfort. But they bright side to all of this is that I totally enjoy the quiet that early morning brings...it's the curtain of a new day being raised for us to challenge. That being said...I've been a Yankee fan since the mid-60's...not exactly a good time to embrace the team. It's was more of a drought time for Yankee fans to be perfectly honest with you.But be it good or bad...I embraced baseball with open arms...let's just say the love affair started then and has been and will be with me until I become a marker at some cemetery. So better for me to expound my views while I'm here right? I was tweeting to a broadcasting friend of mine on Twitter last night whom I had the pleasure of meeting in my TPSRadio sports-talk days and he tweeted a question for all the denizen in regards to baseball and who was the best hitter ever in it. Well...I think we have all either heard or tried to answer that question at some point in time. The first 3 names that jumped into my head were Ted Williams, Pete Rose, and Tony Gwynn. Now that's not to say that my choices are the definitive ones...I'm sure 10 different people would give ten different answers. I say Ted Williams because his numbers are scary enough to begin with. Can you imagine what they would be if he hadn't had to fo and serve our country? I kind of chuckled because being as fervent of a Yankee fan as I am I shouldn't even be SAYING the words Boston Red Sox let alone be writing about one of their star players right??? But sometimes in respect to the game you have to remove your blinders to get the real picture. It's all part of being a purist.Well Brian, @SportsMatters on Twitter if you want to follow him, directed me to an article to read in regards to the aforementioned Ted Williams which was written by a gentleman named John Updike in 1960.(I was 3 years old at the time)I want you to take the time to read it if you've never done so. It's the view of this gentleman as a baseball FAN...and I believe FAN is the keyword here. DON'T read the article in the frame of mind that you HATE the Boston Red Sox...if you do you'll be wasting the true gist of the piece. Be part of the story...live it through the words...I guarantee you'll be a better fan for it when you are done. So without further adieu...here it is.

Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu

Fenway Park, in Boston, is a lyric little bandbox of a ballpark. Everything is painted green and seems in curiously sharp focus, like the inside of an old-fashioned peeping-type Easter egg. It was built in 1912 and rebuilt in 1934, and offers, as do most Boston artifacts, a compromise between Man's Euclidean determinations and Nature's beguiling irregularities. Its right field is one of the deepest in the American League, while its left field is the shortest; the high left-field wall, three hundred and fifteen feet from home plate along the foul line, virtually thrusts its surface at right-handed hitters. On the afternoon of Wednesday, September 28th, as I took a seat behind third base, a uniformed groundkeeper was treading the top of this wall, picking batting-practice home runs out of the screen, like a mushroom gatherer seen in Wordsworthian perspective on the verge of a cliff. The day was overcast, chill, and uninspirational. The Boston team was the worst in twenty-seven seasons. A jangling medley of incompetent youth and aging competence, the Red Sox were finishing in seventh place only because the Kansas City Athletics had locked them out of the cellar. They were scheduled to play the Baltimore Orioles, a much nimbler blend of May and December, who had been dumped from pennant contention a week before by the insatiable Yankees. I, and 10,453 others, had shown up primarily because this was the Red Sox's last home game of the season, and therefore the last time in all eternity that their regular left fielder, known to the headlines as TED, KID, SPLINTER, THUMPER, TW, and, most cloyingly, MISTER WONDERFUL, would play in Boston. "WHAT WILL WE DO WITHOUT TED? HUB FANS ASK" ran the headline on a newspaper being read by a bulb-nosed cigar smoker a few rows away. Williams' retirement had been announced, doubted (he had been threatening retirement for years), confirmed by Tom Yawkey, the Red Sox owner, and at last widely accepted as the sad but probable truth. He was forty-two and had redeemed his abysmal season of 1959 with a—considering his advanced age—fine one. He had been giving away his gloves and bats and had grudgingly consented to a sentimental ceremony today. This was not necessarily his last game; the Red Sox were scheduled to travel to New York and wind up the season with three games there.

I arrived early. The Orioles were hitting fungos on the field. The day before, they had spitefully smothered the Red Sox, 17-4, and neither their faces nor their drab gray visiting-team uniforms seemed very gracious. I wondered who had invited them to the party. Between our heads and the lowering clouds a frenzied organ was thundering through, with an appositeness perhaps accidental, "You maaaade me love you, I didn't wanna do it, I didn't wanna do it . . ."

The affair between Boston and Ted Williams has been no mere summer romance; it has been a marriage, composed of spats, mutual disappointments, and, toward the end, a mellowing hoard of shared memories. It falls into three stages, which may be termed Youth, Maturity, and Age; or Thesis, Antithesis, and Synthesis; or Jason, Achilles, and Nestor.

First, there was the by now legendary epoch when the young bridegroom came out of the West, announced "All I want out of life is that when I walk down the street folks will say 'There goes the greatest hitter who ever lived.' " The dowagers of local journalism attempted to give elementary deportment lessons to this child who spake as a god, and to their horror were themselves rebuked. Thus began the long exchange of backbiting, bat-flipping, booing, and spitting that has distinguished Williams' public relations. The spitting incidents of 1957 and 1958 and the similar dockside courtesies that Williams has now and then extended to the grandstand should be judged against this background: the left-field stands at Fenway for twenty years have held a large number of customers who have bought their way in primarily for the privilege of showering abuse on Williams. Greatness necessarily attracts debunkers, but in Williams' case the hostility has been systematic and unappeasable. His basic offense against the fans has been to wish that they weren't there. Seeking a perfectionist's vacuum, he has quixotically desired to sever the game from the ground of paid spectatorship and publicity that supports it. Hence his refusal to tip his cap to the crowd or turn the other cheek to newsmen. It has been a costly theory—it has probably cost him, among other evidences of good will, two Most Valuable Player awards, which are voted by reporters—but he has held to it from his rookie year on. While his critics, oral and literary, remained beyond the reach of his discipline, the opposing pitchers were accessible, and he spanked them to the tune of .406 in 1941. He slumped to .356 in 1942 and went off to war.

In 1946, Williams returned from three years as a Marine pilot to the second of his baseball avatars, that of Achilles, the hero of incomparable prowess and beauty who nevertheless was to be found sulking in his tent while the Trojans (mostly Yankees) fought through to the ships. Yawkey, a timber and mining maharajah, had surrounded his central jewel with many gems of slightly lesser water, such as Bobby Doerr, Dom DiMaggio, Rudy York, Birdie Tebbetts, and Johnny Pesky. Throughout the late forties, the Red Sox were the best paper team in baseball, yet they had little three-dimensional to show for it, and if this was a tragedy, Williams was Hamlet. A succinct review of the indictment—and a fair sample of appreciative sports-page prose—appeared the very day of Williams' valedictory, in a column by Huck Finnegan in the Boston American (no sentimentalist, Huck):

Williams' career, in contrast [to Babe Ruth's], has been a series of failures except for his averages. He flopped in the only World Series he ever played in (1946) when he batted only .200. He flopped in the playoff game with Cleveland in 1948. He flopped in the final game of the 1949 season with the pennant hinging on the outcome (Yanks 5, Sox 3). He flopped in 1950 when he returned to the lineup after a two-month absence and ruined the morale of a club that seemed pennant-bound under Steve O'Neill. It has always been Williams' records first, the team second, and the Sox non-winning record is proof enough of that.

There are answers to all this, of course. The fatal weakness of the great Sox slugging teams was not-quite-good-enough pitching rather than Williams' failure to hit a home run every time he came to bat. Again, Williams' depressing effect on his teammates has never been proved. Despite ample coaching to the contrary, most insisted that they liked him. He has been generous with advice to any player who asked for it. In an increasingly combative baseball atmosphere, he continued to duck beanballs docilely. With umpires he was gracious to a fault. This courtesy itself annoyed his critics, whom there was no pleasing. And against the ten crucial games (the seven World Series games with the St. Louis Cardinals, the 1948 playoff with the Cleveland Indians, and the two-game series with the Yankees at the end of the 1949 season, winning either one of which would have given the Red Sox the pennant) that make up the Achilles' heel of Williams' record, a mass of statistics can be set showing that day in and day out he was no slouch in the clutch. The correspondence columns of the Boston papers now and then suffer a sharp flurry of arithmetic on this score; indeed, for Williams to have distributed all his hits so they did nobody else any good would constitute a feat of placement unparalleled in the annals of selfishness.

Whatever residue of truth remains of the Finnegan charge those of us who love Williams must transmute as best we can, in our own personal crucibles. My personal memories of Williams begin when I was a boy in Pennsylvania, with two last-place teams in Philadelphia to keep me company. For me, "W'ms, lf" was a figment of the box scores who always seemed to be going 3-for-5. He radiated, from afar, the hard blue glow of high purpose. I remember listening over the radio to the All-Star Game of 1946, in which Williams hit two singles and two home runs, the second one off a Rip Sewell "blooper" pitch; it was like hitting a balloon out of the park. I remember watching one of his home runs from the bleachers of Shibe Park; it went over the first baseman's head and rose meticulously along a straight line and was still rising when it cleared the fence. The trajectory seemed qualitatively different from anything anyone else might hit. For me, Williams is the classic ballplayer of the game on a hot August weekday, before a small crowd, when the only thing at stake is the tissue-thin difference between a thing done well and a thing done ill. Baseball is a game of the long season, of relentless and gradual averaging-out. Irrelevance—since the reference point of most individual games is remote and statistical—always threatens its interest, which can be maintained not by the occasional heroics that sportswriters feed upon but by players who always care; who care, that is to say, about themselves and their art. Insofar as the clutch hitter is not a sportswriter's myth, he is a vulgarity, like a writer who writes only for money. It may be that, compared to managers' dreams such as Joe DiMaggio and the always helpful Stan Musial, Williams is an icy star. But of all team sports, baseball, with its graceful intermittences of action, its immense and tranquil field sparsely settled with poised men in white, its dispassionate mathematics, seems to me best suited to accommodate, and be ornamented by, a loner. It is an essentially lonely game. No other player visible to my generation has concentrated within himself so much of the sport's poignance, has so assiduously refined his natural skills, has so constantly brought to the plate that intensity of competence that crowds the throat with joy.

By the time I went to college, near Boston, the lesser stars Yawkey had assembled around Williams had faded, and his craftsmanship, his rigorous pride, had become itself a kind of heroism. This brittle and temperamental player developed an unexpected quality of persistence. He was always coming back—back from Korea, back from a broken collarbone, a shattered elbow, a bruised heel, back from drastic bouts of flu and ptomaine poisoning. Hardly a season went by without some enfeebling mishap, yet he always came back, and always looked like himself. The delicate mechanism of timing and power seemed locked, shockproof, in some case outside his body. In addition to injuries, there were a heavily publicized divorce, and the usual storms with the press, and the Williams Shift—the maneuver, custom-built by Lou Boudreau, of the Cleveland Indians, whereby three infielders were concentrated on the right side of the infield, where a left-handed pull hitter like Williams generally hits the ball. Williams could easily have learned to punch singles through the vacancy on his left and fattened his average hugely. This was what Ty Cobb, the Einstein of average, told him to do. But the game had changed since Cobb; Williams believed that his value to the club and to the game was as a slugger, so he went on pulling the ball, trying to blast it through three men, and paid the price of perhaps fifteen points of lifetime average. Like Ruth before him, he bought the occasional home run at the cost of many directed singles—a calculated sacrifice certainly not, in the case of a hitter as average-minded as Williams, entirely selfish.

After a prime so harassed and hobbled, Williams was granted by the relenting fates a golden twilight. He became at the end of his career perhaps the best old hitter of the century. The dividing line came between the 1956 and the 1957 seasons. In September of the first year, he and Mickey Mantle were contending for the batting championship. Both were hitting around .350, and there was no one else near them. The season ended with a three-game series between the Yankees and the Sox, and, living in New York then, I went up to the Stadium. Williams was slightly shy of the four hundred at-bats needed to qualify; the fear was expressed that the Yankee pitchers would walk him to protect Mantle. Instead, they pitched to him—a wise decision. He looked terrible at the plate, tired and discouraged and unconvincing. He never looked very good to me in the Stadium. (Last week, in Life, Williams, a sportswriter himself now, wrote gloomily of the Stadium, "There's the bigness of it. There are those high stands and all those people smoking—and, of course, the shadows. . . . It takes at least one series to get accustomed to the Stadium and even then you're not sure.") The final outcome in 1956 was Mantle .353, Williams .345.

The next year, I moved from New York to New England, and it made all the difference. For in September of 1957, in the same situation, the story was reversed. Mantle finally hit .365; it was the best season of his career. But Williams, though sick and old, had run away from him. A bout of flu had laid him low in September. He emerged from his cave in the Hotel Somerset haggard but irresistible; he hit four successive pinch-hit home runs. "I feel terrible," he confessed, "but every time I take a swing at the ball it goes out of the park." He ended the season with thirty-eight home runs and an average of .388, the highest in either league since his own .406, and, coming from a decrepit man of thirty-nine, an even more supernal figure. With eight or so of the "leg hits" that a younger man would have beaten out, it would have been .400. And the next year, Williams, who in 1949 and 1953 had lost batting championships by decimal whiskers to George Kell and Mickey Vernon, sneaked in behind his teammate Pete Runnels and filched his sixth title, a bargain at .328.

In 1959, it seemed all over. The dinosaur thrashed around in the .200 swamp for the first half of the season, and was even benched ("rested," Manager Mike Higgins tactfully said.) Old foes like the late Bill Cunningham began to offer batting tips. Cunningham thought Williams was jiggling his elbows; in truth, Williams' neck was so stiff he could hardly turn his head to look at the pitcher. When he swung, it looked like a Calder mobile with one thread cut; it reminded you that since 1953 Williams' shoulders had been wired together. A solicitous pall settled over the sports pages. In the two decades since Williams had come to Boston, his status had imperceptibly shifted from that of a naughty prodigy to that of a municipal monument. As his shadow in the record books lengthened, the Red Sox teams around him declined, and the entire American League seemed to be losing life and color to the National. The inconsistency of the new superstars—Mantle, Colavito, and Kaline—served to make Williams appear all the more singular. And off the field, his private philanthropy—in particular, his zealous chairmanship of the Jimmy Fund, a charity for children with cancer—gave him a civic presence somewhat like that of Richard Cardinal Cushing. In religion, Williams appears to be a humanist, and a selective one at that, but he and the Cardinal, when their good works intersect and they appear in the public eye together, make a handsome and heartening pair.

Humiliated by his '59 season, Williams determined, once more, to come back. I, as a specimen Williams partisan, was both glad and fearful. All baseball fans believe in miracles; the question is, how many do you believe in? He looked like a ghost in spring training. Manager Jurges warned us ahead of time that if Williams didn't come through he would be benched, just like anybody else. As it turned out, it was Jurges who was benched. Williams entered the 1960 season needing eight home runs to have a lifetime total of 500; after one time at bat in Washington, he needed seven. For a stretch, he was hitting a home run every second game that he played. He passed Lou Gehrig's lifetime total, then the number 500, then Mel Ott's total, and finished with 521, thirteen behind Jimmy Foxx, who alone stands between Williams and Babe Ruth's unapproachable 714. The summer was a statistician's picnic. His two-thousandth walk came and went, his eighteen-hundredth run batted in, his sixteenth All-Star Game. At one point, he hit a home run off a pitcher, Don Lee, off whose father, Thornton Lee, he had hit a home run a generation before. The only comparable season for a forty-two-year-old man was Ty Cobb's in 1928. Cobb batted .323 and hit one homer. Williams batted .316 but hit twenty-nine homers.

In sum, though generally conceded to be the greatest hitter of his era, he did not establish himself as "the greatest hitter who ever lived." Cobb, for average, and Ruth, for power, remain supreme. Cobb, Rogers Hornsby, Joe Jackson, and Lefty O'Doul, among players since 1900, have higher lifetime averages than Williams' .344. Unlike Foxx, Gehrig, Hack Wilson, Hank Greenberg, and Ralph Kiner, Williams never came close to matching Babe Ruth's season home-run total of sixty. In the list of major-league batting records, not one is held by Williams. He is second in walks drawn, third in home runs, fifth in lifetime averages, sixth in runs batted in, eighth in runs scored and in total bases, fourteenth in doubles, and thirtieth in hits. But if we allow him merely average seasons for the four-plus seasons he lost to two wars, and add another season for the months he lost to injuries, we get a man who in all the power totals would be second, and not a very distant second, to Ruth. And if we further allow that these years would have been not merely average but prime years, if we allow for all the months when Williams was playing in sub-par condition, if we permit his early and later years in baseball to be some sort of index of what the middle years could have been, if we give him a right-field fence that is not, like Fenway's, one of the most distant in the league, and if—the least excusable "if"—we imagine him condescending to outsmart the Williams Shift, we can defensibly assemble, like a colossus induced from the sizable fragments that do remain, a statistical figure not incommensurate with his grandiose ambition. From the statistics that are on the books, a good case can be made that in the combination of power and average Williams is first; nobody else ranks so high in both categories. Finally, there is the witness of the eyes; men whose memories go back to Shoeless Joe Jackson—another unlucky natural—rank him and Williams together as the best-looking hitters they have seen. It was for our last look that ten thousand of us had come.

Two girls, one of them with pert buckteeth and eyes as black as vest buttons, the other with white skin and flesh-colored hair, like an underdeveloped photograph of a redhead, came and sat on my right. On my other side was one of those frowning, chestless young-old men who can frequently be seen, often wearing sailor hats, attending ball games alone. He did not once open his program but instead tapped it, rolled up, on his knee as he gave the game his disconsolate attention. A young lady, with freckles and a depressed, dainty nose that by an optical illusion seemed to thrust her lips forward for a kiss, sauntered down into the box seats and with striking aplomb took a seat right behind the roof of the Oriole dugout. She wore a blue coat with a Northeastern University emblem sewed to it. The girls beside me took it into their heads that this was Williams' daughter. She looked too old to me, and why would she be sitting behind the visitors' dugout? On the other hand, from the way she sat there, staring at the sky and French-inhaling, she clearly was somebody. Other fans came and eclipsed her from view. The crowd looked less like a weekday ballpark crowd than like the folks you might find in Yellowstone National Park, or emerging from automobiles at the top of scenic Mount Mansfield. There were a lot of competitively well-dressed couples of tourist age, and not a few babes in arms. A row of five seats in front of me was abruptly filled with a woman and four children, the youngest of them two years old, if that. Some day, presumably, he could tell his grandchildren that he saw Williams play. Along with these tots and second-honeymooners, there were Harvard freshmen, giving off that peculiar nervous glow created when a quantity of insouciance is saturated with insecurity; thick-necked Army officers with brass on their shoulders and lead in their voices; pepperings of priests; perfumed bouquets of Roxbury Fabian fans; shiny salesmen from Albany and Fall River; and those gray, hoarse men—taxidrivers, slaughterers, and bartenders—who will continue to click through the turnstiles long after everyone else has deserted to television and tramporamas. Behind me, two young male voices blossomed, cracking a joke about God's five proofs that Thomas Aquinas exists—typical Boston College levity.

The batting cage was trundled away. The Orioles fluttered to the sidelines. Diagonally across the field, by the Red Sox dugout, a cluster of men in overcoats were festering like maggots. I could see a splinter of white uniform, and Williams' head, held at a self-deprecating and evasive tilt. Williams' conversational stance is that of a six-foot-three-inch man under a six-foot ceiling. He moved away to the patter of flash bulbs, and began playing catch with a young Negro outfielder named Willie Tasby. His arm, never very powerful, had grown lax with the years, and his throwing motion was a kind of muscular drawl. To catch the ball, he flicked his glove hand onto his left shoulder (he batted left but threw right, as every schoolboy ought to know) and let the ball plop into it comically. This catch session with Tasby was the only time all afternoon I saw him grin.

A tight little flock of human sparrows who, from the lambent and pampered pink of their faces, could only have been Boston politicians moved toward the plate. The loudspeakers mammothly coughed as someone huffed on the microphone. The ceremonies began. Curt Gowdy, the Red Sox radio and television announcer, who sounds like everybody's brother-in-law, delivered a brief sermon, taking the two words "pride" and "champion" as his text. It began, "Twenty-one years ago, a skinny kid from San Diego, California . . ." and ended, "I don't think we'll ever see another like him." Robert Tibolt, chairman of the board of the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce, presented Williams with a big Paul Revere silver bowl. Harry Carlson, a member of the sports committee of the Boston Chamber, gave him a plaque, whose inscription he did not read in its entirety, out of deference to Williams' distaste for this sort of fuss. Mayor Collins presented the Jimmy Fund with a thousand-dollar check.

Then the occasion himself stooped to the microphone, and his voice sounded, after the others, very Californian; it seemed to be coming, excellently amplified, from a great distance, adolescently young and as smooth as a butternut. His thanks for the gifts had not died from our ears before he glided, as if helplessly, into "In spite of all the terrible things that have been said about me by the maestros of the keyboard up there . . ." He glanced up at the press rows suspended above home plate. (All the Boston reporters, incidentally, reported the phrase as "knights of the keyboard," but I heard it as "maestros" and prefer it that way.) The crowd tittered, appalled. A frightful vision flashed upon me, of the press gallery pelting Williams with erasers, of Williams clambering up the foul screen to slug journalists, of a riot, of Mayor Collins being crushed. ". . . And they were terrible things," Williams insisted, with level melancholy, into the mike. "I'd like to forget them, but I can't." He paused, swallowed his memories, and went on, "I want to say that my years in Boston have been the greatest thing in my life." The crowd, like an immense sail going limp in a change of wind, sighed with relief. Taking all the parts himself, Williams then acted out a vivacious little morality drama in which an imaginary tempter came to him at the beginning of his career and said, "Ted, you can play anywhere you like." Leaping nimbly into the role of his younger self (who in biographical actuality had yearned to be a Yankee), Williams gallantly chose Boston over all the other cities, and told us that Tom Yawkey was the greatest owner in baseball and we were the greatest fans. We applauded ourselves heartily. The umpire came out and dusted the plate. The voice of doom announced over the loudspeakers that after Williams' retirement his uniform number, 9, would be permanently retired—the first time the Red Sox had so honored a player. We cheered. The national anthem was played. We cheered. The game began.

Williams was third in the batting order, so he came up in the bottom of the first inning, and Steve Barber, a young pitcher who was not yet born when Williams began playing for the Red Sox, offered him four pitches, at all of which he disdained to swing, since none of them were within the strike zone. This demonstrated simultaneously that Williams' eyes were razor-sharp and that Barber's control wasn't. Shortly, the bases were full, with Williams on second. "Oh, I hope he gets held up at third! That would be wonderful,'' the girl beside me moaned, and, sure enough, the man at bat walked and Williams was delivered into our foreground. He struck the pose of Donatello's David, the third-base bag being Goliath's head. Fiddling with his cap, swapping small talk with the Oriole third baseman (who seemed delighted to have him drop in), swinging his arms with a sort of prancing nervousness, he looked fine—flexible, hard, and not unbecomingly substantial through the middle. The long neck, the small head, the knickers whose cuffs were worn down near his ankles—all these points, often observed by caricaturists, were visible in the flesh.

One of the collegiate voices behind me said, "He looks old, doesn't he, old; big deep wrinkles in his face . . ."

"Yeah," the other voice said, "but he looks like an old hawk, doesn't he?"

With each pitch, Williams danced down the baseline, waving his arms and stirring dust, ponderous but menacing, like an attacking goose. It occurred to about a dozen humorists at once to shout "Steal home! Go, go!" Williams' speed afoot was never legendary. Lou Clinton, a young Sox outfielder, hit a fairly deep fly to center field. Williams tagged up and ran home. As he slid across the plate, the ball, thrown with unusual heft by Jackie Brandt, the Oriole center fielder, hit him on the back.

"Boy, he was really loafing, wasn't he?" one of the boys behind me said.

"It's cold," the other explained. "He doesn't play well when it's cold. He likes heat. He's a hedonist."

The run that Williams scored was the second and last of the inning. Gus Triandos, of the Orioles, quickly evened the score by plunking a home run over the handy left-field wall. Williams, who had had this wall at his back for twenty years, played the ball flawlessly. He didn't budge. He just stood there, in the center of the little patch of grass that his patient footsteps had worn brown, and, limp with lack of interest, watched the ball pass overhead. It was not a very interesting game. Mike Higgins, the Red Sox manager, with nothing to lose, had restricted his major-league players to the left-field line—along with Williams, Frank Malzone, a first-rate third baseman, played the game—and had peopled the rest of the terrain with unpredictable youngsters fresh, or not so fresh, off the farms. Other than Williams' recurrent appearances at the plate, the maladresse of the Sox infield was the sole focus of suspense; the second baseman turned every grounder into a juggling act, while the shortstop did a breathtaking impersonation of an open window. With this sort of assistance, the Orioles wheedled their way into a 4-2 lead. They had early replaced Barber with another young pitcher, Jack Fisher. Fortunately (as it turned out), Fisher is no cutie; he is willing to burn the ball through the strike zone, and inning after inning this tactic punctured Higgins' string of test balloons.

Whenever Williams appeared at the plate—pounding the dirt from his cleats, gouging a pit in the batter's box with his left foot, wringing resin out of the bat handle with his vehement grip, switching the stick at the pitcher with an electric ferocity—it was like having a familiar Leonardo appear in a shuffle of Saturday Evening Post covers. This man, you realized—and here, perhaps, was the difference, greater than the difference in gifts—really intended to hit the ball. In the third inning, he hoisted a high fly to deep center. In the fifth, we thought he had it; he smacked the ball hard and high into the heart of his power zone, but the deep right field in Fenway and the heavy air and a casual east wind defeated him. The ball died. Al Pilarcik leaned his back against the big "380" painted on the right-field wall and caught it. On another day, in another park, it would have been gone. (After the game, Williams said, "I didn't think I could hit one any harder than that. The conditions weren't good.")

The afternoon grew so glowering that in the sixth inning the arc lights were turned on—always a wan sight in the daytime, like the burning headlights of a funeral procession. Aided by the gloom, Fisher was slicing through the Sox rookies, and Williams did not come to bat in the seventh. He was second up in the eighth. This was almost certainly his last time to come to the plate in Fenway Park, and instead of merely cheering, as we had at his three previous appearances, we stood, all of us—stood and applauded. Have you ever heard applause in a ballpark? Just applause—no calling, no whistling, just an ocean of handclaps, minute after minute, burst after burst, crowding and running together in continuous succession like the pushes of surf at the edge of the sand. It was a sombre and considered tumult. There was not a boo in it. It seemed to renew itself out of a shifting set of memories as the kid, the Marine, the veteran of feuds and failures and injuries, the friend of children, and the enduring old pro evolved down the bright tunnel of twenty-one summers toward this moment. At last, the umpire signalled for Fisher to pitch; with the other players, he had been frozen in position. Only Williams had moved during the ovation, switching his bat impatiently, ignoring everything except his cherished task. Fisher wound up, and the applause sank into a hush.

Understand that we were a crowd of rational people. We knew that a home run cannot be produced at will; the right pitch must be perfectly met and luck must ride with the ball. Three innings before, we had seen a brave effort fail. The air was soggy; the season was exhausted. Nevertheless, there will always lurk, around a corner in a pocket of our knowledge of the odds, an indefensible hope, and this was one of the times, which you now and then find in sports, when a density of expectation hangs in the air and plucks an event out of the future.

Fisher, after his unsettling wait, was wide with the first pitch. He put the second one over, and Williams swung mightily and missed. The crowd grunted, seeing that classic swing, so long and smooth and quick, exposed, naked in its failure. Fisher threw the third time, Williams swung again, and there it was. The ball climbed on a diagonal line into the vast volume of air over center field. From my angle, behind third base, the ball seemed less an object in flight than the tip of a towering, motionless construct, like the Eiffel Tower or the Tappan Zee Bridge. It was in the books while it was still in the sky. Brandt ran back to the deepest corner of the outfield grass; the ball descended beyond his reach and struck in the crotch where the bullpen met the wall, bounced chunkily, and, as far as I could see, vanished.

Like a feather caught in a vortex, Williams ran around the square of bases at the center of our beseeching screaming. He ran as he always ran out home runs—hurriedly, unsmiling, head down, as if our praise were a storm of rain to get out of. He didn't tip his cap. Though we thumped, wept, and chanted "We want Ted" for minutes after he hid in the dugout, he did not come back. Our noise for some seconds passed beyond excitement into a kind of immense open anguish, a wailing, a cry to be saved. But immortality is nontransferable. The papers said that the other players, and even the umpires on the field, begged him to come out and acknowledge us in some way, but he never had and did not now. Gods do not answer letters.

Every true story has an anticlimax. The men on the field refused to disappear, as would have seemed decent, in the smoke of Williams' miracle. Fisher continued to pitch, and escaped further harm. At the end of the inning, Higgins sent Williams out to his left-field position, then instantly replaced him with Carrol Hardy, so we had a long last look at Williams as he ran out there and then back, his uniform jogging, his eyes steadfast on the ground. It was nice, and we were grateful, but it left a funny taste.

One of the scholasticists behind me said, "Let's go. We've seen everything. I don't want to spoil it." This seemed a sound aesthetic decision. Williams' last word had been so exquisitely chosen, such a perfect fusion of expectation, intention, and execution, that already it felt a little unreal in my head, and I wanted to get out before the castle collapsed. But the game, though played by clumsy midgets under the feeble glow of the arc lights, began to tug at my attention, and I loitered in the runway until it was over. Williams' homer had, quite incidentally, made the score 4-3. In the bottom of the ninth inning, with one out, Marlin Coughtry, the second-base juggler, singled. Vic Wertz, pinch-hitting, doubled off the left-field wall, Coughtry advancing to third. Pumpsie Green walked, to load the bases. Willie Tasby hit a double-play ball to the third baseman, but in making the pivot throw Billy Klaus, an ex-Red Sox infielder, reverted to form and threw the ball past the first baseman and into the Red Sox dugout. The Sox won, 5-4. On the car radio as I drove home I heard that Williams had decided not to accompany the team to New York. So he knew how to do even that, the hardest thing. Quit.

Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieuby John Updike© 1960
Fenway Park, in Boston, is a lyric little bandbox of a ballpark. Everything is painted green and seems in curiously sharp focus, like the inside of an old-fashioned peeping-type Easter egg. It was built in 1912 and rebuilt in 1934, and offers, as do most Boston artifacts, a compromise between Man's Euclidean determinations and Nature's beguiling irregularities. Its right field is one of the deepest in the American League, while its left field is the shortest; the high left-field wall, three hundred and fifteen feet from home plate along the foul line, virtually thrusts its surface at right-handed hitters. On the afternoon of Wednesday, September 28th, as I took a seat behind third base, a uniformed groundkeeper was treading the top of this wall, picking batting-practice home runs out of the screen, like a mushroom gatherer seen in Wordsworthian perspective on the verge of a cliff. The day was overcast, chill, and uninspirational. The Boston team was the worst in twenty-seven seasons. A jangling medley of incompetent youth and aging competence, the Red Sox were finishing in seventh place only because the Kansas City Athletics had locked them out of the cellar. They were scheduled to play the Baltimore Orioles, a much nimbler blend of May and December, who had been dumped from pennant contention a week before by the insatiable Yankees. I, and 10,453 others, had shown up primarily because this was the Red Sox's last home game of the season, and therefore the last time in all eternity that their regular left fielder, known to the headlines as TED, KID, SPLINTER, THUMPER, TW, and, most cloyingly, MISTER WONDERFUL, would play in Boston. "WHAT WILL WE DO WITHOUT TED? HUB FANS ASK" ran the headline on a newspaper being read by a bulb-nosed cigar smoker a few rows away. Williams' retirement had been announced, doubted (he had been threatening retirement for years), confirmed by Tom Yawkey, the Red Sox owner, and at last widely accepted as the sad but probable truth. He was forty-two and had redeemed his abysmal season of 1959 with a—considering his advanced age—fine one. He had been giving away his gloves and bats and had grudgingly consented to a sentimental ceremony today. This was not necessarily his last game; the Red Sox were scheduled to travel to New York and wind up the season with three games there.

I arrived early. The Orioles were hitting fungos on the field. The day before, they had spitefully smothered the Red Sox, 17-4, and neither their faces nor their drab gray visiting-team uniforms seemed very gracious. I wondered who had invited them to the party. Between our heads and the lowering clouds a frenzied organ was thundering through, with an appositeness perhaps accidental, "You maaaade me love you, I didn't wanna do it, I didn't wanna do it . . ."

The affair between Boston and Ted Williams has been no mere summer romance; it has been a marriage, composed of spats, mutual disappointments, and, toward the end, a mellowing hoard of shared memories. It falls into three stages, which may be termed Youth, Maturity, and Age; or Thesis, Antithesis, and Synthesis; or Jason, Achilles, and Nestor.

First, there was the by now legendary epoch when the young bridegroom came out of the West, announced "All I want out of life is that when I walk down the street folks will say 'There goes the greatest hitter who ever lived.' " The dowagers of local journalism attempted to give elementary deportment lessons to this child who spake as a god, and to their horror were themselves rebuked. Thus began the long exchange of backbiting, bat-flipping, booing, and spitting that has distinguished Williams' public relations. The spitting incidents of 1957 and 1958 and the similar dockside courtesies that Williams has now and then extended to the grandstand should be judged against this background: the left-field stands at Fenway for twenty years have held a large number of customers who have bought their way in primarily for the privilege of showering abuse on Williams. Greatness necessarily attracts debunkers, but in Williams' case the hostility has been systematic and unappeasable. His basic offense against the fans has been to wish that they weren't there. Seeking a perfectionist's vacuum, he has quixotically desired to sever the game from the ground of paid spectatorship and publicity that supports it. Hence his refusal to tip his cap to the crowd or turn the other cheek to newsmen. It has been a costly theory—it has probably cost him, among other evidences of good will, two Most Valuable Player awards, which are voted by reporters—but he has held to it from his rookie year on. While his critics, oral and literary, remained beyond the reach of his discipline, the opposing pitchers were accessible, and he spanked them to the tune of .406 in 1941. He slumped to .356 in 1942 and went off to war.

In 1946, Williams returned from three years as a Marine pilot to the second of his baseball avatars, that of Achilles, the hero of incomparable prowess and beauty who nevertheless was to be found sulking in his tent while the Trojans (mostly Yankees) fought through to the ships. Yawkey, a timber and mining maharajah, had surrounded his central jewel with many gems of slightly lesser water, such as Bobby Doerr, Dom DiMaggio, Rudy York, Birdie Tebbetts, and Johnny Pesky. Throughout the late forties, the Red Sox were the best paper team in baseball, yet they had little three-dimensional to show for it, and if this was a tragedy, Williams was Hamlet. A succinct review of the indictment—and a fair sample of appreciative sports-page prose—appeared the very day of Williams' valedictory, in a column by Huck Finnegan in the Boston American (no sentimentalist, Huck):

Williams' career, in contrast [to Babe Ruth's], has been a series of failures except for his averages. He flopped in the only World Series he ever played in (1946) when he batted only .200. He flopped in the playoff game with Cleveland in 1948. He flopped in the final game of the 1949 season with the pennant hinging on the outcome (Yanks 5, Sox 3). He flopped in 1950 when he returned to the lineup after a two-month absence and ruined the morale of a club that seemed pennant-bound under Steve O'Neill. It has always been Williams' records first, the team second, and the Sox non-winning record is proof enough of that.

There are answers to all this, of course. The fatal weakness of the great Sox slugging teams was not-quite-good-enough pitching rather than Williams' failure to hit a home run every time he came to bat. Again, Williams' depressing effect on his teammates has never been proved. Despite ample coaching to the contrary, most insisted that they liked him. He has been generous with advice to any player who asked for it. In an increasingly combative baseball atmosphere, he continued to duck beanballs docilely. With umpires he was gracious to a fault. This courtesy itself annoyed his critics, whom there was no pleasing. And against the ten crucial games (the seven World Series games with the St. Louis Cardinals, the 1948 playoff with the Cleveland Indians, and the two-game series with the Yankees at the end of the 1949 season, winning either one of which would have given the Red Sox the pennant) that make up the Achilles' heel of Williams' record, a mass of statistics can be set showing that day in and day out he was no slouch in the clutch. The correspondence columns of the Boston papers now and then suffer a sharp flurry of arithmetic on this score; indeed, for Williams to have distributed all his hits so they did nobody else any good would constitute a feat of placement unparalleled in the annals of selfishness.

Whatever residue of truth remains of the Finnegan charge those of us who love Williams must transmute as best we can, in our own personal crucibles. My personal memories of Williams begin when I was a boy in Pennsylvania, with two last-place teams in Philadelphia to keep me company. For me, "W'ms, lf" was a figment of the box scores who always seemed to be going 3-for-5. He radiated, from afar, the hard blue glow of high purpose. I remember listening over the radio to the All-Star Game of 1946, in which Williams hit two singles and two home runs, the second one off a Rip Sewell "blooper" pitch; it was like hitting a balloon out of the park. I remember watching one of his home runs from the bleachers of Shibe Park; it went over the first baseman's head and rose meticulously along a straight line and was still rising when it cleared the fence. The trajectory seemed qualitatively different from anything anyone else might hit. For me, Williams is the classic ballplayer of the game on a hot August weekday, before a small crowd, when the only thing at stake is the tissue-thin difference between a thing done well and a thing done ill. Baseball is a game of the long season, of relentless and gradual averaging-out. Irrelevance—since the reference point of most individual games is remote and statistical—always threatens its interest, which can be maintained not by the occasional heroics that sportswriters feed upon but by players who always care; who care, that is to say, about themselves and their art. Insofar as the clutch hitter is not a sportswriter's myth, he is a vulgarity, like a writer who writes only for money. It may be that, compared to managers' dreams such as Joe DiMaggio and the always helpful Stan Musial, Williams is an icy star. But of all team sports, baseball, with its graceful intermittences of action, its immense and tranquil field sparsely settled with poised men in white, its dispassionate mathematics, seems to me best suited to accommodate, and be ornamented by, a loner. It is an essentially lonely game. No other player visible to my generation has concentrated within himself so much of the sport's poignance, has so assiduously refined his natural skills, has so constantly brought to the plate that intensity of competence that crowds the throat with joy.

By the time I went to college, near Boston, the lesser stars Yawkey had assembled around Williams had faded, and his craftsmanship, his rigorous pride, had become itself a kind of heroism. This brittle and temperamental player developed an unexpected quality of persistence. He was always coming back—back from Korea, back from a broken collarbone, a shattered elbow, a bruised heel, back from drastic bouts of flu and ptomaine poisoning. Hardly a season went by without some enfeebling mishap, yet he always came back, and always looked like himself. The delicate mechanism of timing and power seemed locked, shockproof, in some case outside his body. In addition to injuries, there were a heavily publicized divorce, and the usual storms with the press, and the Williams Shift—the maneuver, custom-built by Lou Boudreau, of the Cleveland Indians, whereby three infielders were concentrated on the right side of the infield, where a left-handed pull hitter like Williams generally hits the ball. Williams could easily have learned to punch singles through the vacancy on his left and fattened his average hugely. This was what Ty Cobb, the Einstein of average, told him to do. But the game had changed since Cobb; Williams believed that his value to the club and to the game was as a slugger, so he went on pulling the ball, trying to blast it through three men, and paid the price of perhaps fifteen points of lifetime average. Like Ruth before him, he bought the occasional home run at the cost of many directed singles—a calculated sacrifice certainly not, in the case of a hitter as average-minded as Williams, entirely selfish.

After a prime so harassed and hobbled, Williams was granted by the relenting fates a golden twilight. He became at the end of his career perhaps the best old hitter of the century. The dividing line came between the 1956 and the 1957 seasons. In September of the first year, he and Mickey Mantle were contending for the batting championship. Both were hitting around .350, and there was no one else near them. The season ended with a three-game series between the Yankees and the Sox, and, living in New York then, I went up to the Stadium. Williams was slightly shy of the four hundred at-bats needed to qualify; the fear was expressed that the Yankee pitchers would walk him to protect Mantle. Instead, they pitched to him—a wise decision. He looked terrible at the plate, tired and discouraged and unconvincing. He never looked very good to me in the Stadium. (Last week, in Life, Williams, a sportswriter himself now, wrote gloomily of the Stadium, "There's the bigness of it. There are those high stands and all those people smoking—and, of course, the shadows. . . . It takes at least one series to get accustomed to the Stadium and even then you're not sure.") The final outcome in 1956 was Mantle .353, Williams .345.

The next year, I moved from New York to New England, and it made all the difference. For in September of 1957, in the same situation, the story was reversed. Mantle finally hit .365; it was the best season of his career. But Williams, though sick and old, had run away from him. A bout of flu had laid him low in September. He emerged from his cave in the Hotel Somerset haggard but irresistible; he hit four successive pinch-hit home runs. "I feel terrible," he confessed, "but every time I take a swing at the ball it goes out of the park." He ended the season with thirty-eight home runs and an average of .388, the highest in either league since his own .406, and, coming from a decrepit man of thirty-nine, an even more supernal figure. With eight or so of the "leg hits" that a younger man would have beaten out, it would have been .400. And the next year, Williams, who in 1949 and 1953 had lost batting championships by decimal whiskers to George Kell and Mickey Vernon, sneaked in behind his teammate Pete Runnels and filched his sixth title, a bargain at .328.

In 1959, it seemed all over. The dinosaur thrashed around in the .200 swamp for the first half of the season, and was even benched ("rested," Manager Mike Higgins tactfully said.) Old foes like the late Bill Cunningham began to offer batting tips. Cunningham thought Williams was jiggling his elbows; in truth, Williams' neck was so stiff he could hardly turn his head to look at the pitcher. When he swung, it looked like a Calder mobile with one thread cut; it reminded you that since 1953 Williams' shoulders had been wired together. A solicitous pall settled over the sports pages. In the two decades since Williams had come to Boston, his status had imperceptibly shifted from that of a naughty prodigy to that of a municipal monument. As his shadow in the record books lengthened, the Red Sox teams around him declined, and the entire American League seemed to be losing life and color to the National. The inconsistency of the new superstars—Mantle, Colavito, and Kaline—served to make Williams appear all the more singular. And off the field, his private philanthropy—in particular, his zealous chairmanship of the Jimmy Fund, a charity for children with cancer—gave him a civic presence somewhat like that of Richard Cardinal Cushing. In religion, Williams appears to be a humanist, and a selective one at that, but he and the Cardinal, when their good works intersect and they appear in the public eye together, make a handsome and heartening pair.

Humiliated by his '59 season, Williams determined, once more, to come back. I, as a specimen Williams partisan, was both glad and fearful. All baseball fans believe in miracles; the question is, how many do you believe in? He looked like a ghost in spring training. Manager Jurges warned us ahead of time that if Williams didn't come through he would be benched, just like anybody else. As it turned out, it was Jurges who was benched. Williams entered the 1960 season needing eight home runs to have a lifetime total of 500; after one time at bat in Washington, he needed seven. For a stretch, he was hitting a home run every second game that he played. He passed Lou Gehrig's lifetime total, then the number 500, then Mel Ott's total, and finished with 521, thirteen behind Jimmy Foxx, who alone stands between Williams and Babe Ruth's unapproachable 714. The summer was a statistician's picnic. His two-thousandth walk came and went, his eighteen-hundredth run batted in, his sixteenth All-Star Game. At one point, he hit a home run off a pitcher, Don Lee, off whose father, Thornton Lee, he had hit a home run a generation before. The only comparable season for a forty-two-year-old man was Ty Cobb's in 1928. Cobb batted .323 and hit one homer. Williams batted .316 but hit twenty-nine homers.

In sum, though generally conceded to be the greatest hitter of his era, he did not establish himself as "the greatest hitter who ever lived." Cobb, for average, and Ruth, for power, remain supreme. Cobb, Rogers Hornsby, Joe Jackson, and Lefty O'Doul, among players since 1900, have higher lifetime averages than Williams' .344. Unlike Foxx, Gehrig, Hack Wilson, Hank Greenberg, and Ralph Kiner, Williams never came close to matching Babe Ruth's season home-run total of sixty. In the list of major-league batting records, not one is held by Williams. He is second in walks drawn, third in home runs, fifth in lifetime averages, sixth in runs batted in, eighth in runs scored and in total bases, fourteenth in doubles, and thirtieth in hits. But if we allow him merely average seasons for the four-plus seasons he lost to two wars, and add another season for the months he lost to injuries, we get a man who in all the power totals would be second, and not a very distant second, to Ruth. And if we further allow that these years would have been not merely average but prime years, if we allow for all the months when Williams was playing in sub-par condition, if we permit his early and later years in baseball to be some sort of index of what the middle years could have been, if we give him a right-field fence that is not, like Fenway's, one of the most distant in the league, and if—the least excusable "if"—we imagine him condescending to outsmart the Williams Shift, we can defensibly assemble, like a colossus induced from the sizable fragments that do remain, a statistical figure not incommensurate with his grandiose ambition. From the statistics that are on the books, a good case can be made that in the combination of power and average Williams is first; nobody else ranks so high in both categories. Finally, there is the witness of the eyes; men whose memories go back to Shoeless Joe Jackson—another unlucky natural—rank him and Williams together as the best-looking hitters they have seen. It was for our last look that ten thousand of us had come.

Two girls, one of them with pert buckteeth and eyes as black as vest buttons, the other with white skin and flesh-colored hair, like an underdeveloped photograph of a redhead, came and sat on my right. On my other side was one of those frowning, chestless young-old men who can frequently be seen, often wearing sailor hats, attending ball games alone. He did not once open his program but instead tapped it, rolled up, on his knee as he gave the game his disconsolate attention. A young lady, with freckles and a depressed, dainty nose that by an optical illusion seemed to thrust her lips forward for a kiss, sauntered down into the box seats and with striking aplomb took a seat right behind the roof of the Oriole dugout. She wore a blue coat with a Northeastern University emblem sewed to it. The girls beside me took it into their heads that this was Williams' daughter. She looked too old to me, and why would she be sitting behind the visitors' dugout? On the other hand, from the way she sat there, staring at the sky and French-inhaling, she clearly was somebody. Other fans came and eclipsed her from view. The crowd looked less like a weekday ballpark crowd than like the folks you might find in Yellowstone National Park, or emerging from automobiles at the top of scenic Mount Mansfield. There were a lot of competitively well-dressed couples of tourist age, and not a few babes in arms. A row of five seats in front of me was abruptly filled with a woman and four children, the youngest of them two years old, if that. Some day, presumably, he could tell his grandchildren that he saw Williams play. Along with these tots and second-honeymooners, there were Harvard freshmen, giving off that peculiar nervous glow created when a quantity of insouciance is saturated with insecurity; thick-necked Army officers with brass on their shoulders and lead in their voices; pepperings of priests; perfumed bouquets of Roxbury Fabian fans; shiny salesmen from Albany and Fall River; and those gray, hoarse men—taxidrivers, slaughterers, and bartenders—who will continue to click through the turnstiles long after everyone else has deserted to television and tramporamas. Behind me, two young male voices blossomed, cracking a joke about God's five proofs that Thomas Aquinas exists—typical Boston College levity.

The batting cage was trundled away. The Orioles fluttered to the sidelines. Diagonally across the field, by the Red Sox dugout, a cluster of men in overcoats were festering like maggots. I could see a splinter of white uniform, and Williams' head, held at a self-deprecating and evasive tilt. Williams' conversational stance is that of a six-foot-three-inch man under a six-foot ceiling. He moved away to the patter of flash bulbs, and began playing catch with a young Negro outfielder named Willie Tasby. His arm, never very powerful, had grown lax with the years, and his throwing motion was a kind of muscular drawl. To catch the ball, he flicked his glove hand onto his left shoulder (he batted left but threw right, as every schoolboy ought to know) and let the ball plop into it comically. This catch session with Tasby was the only time all afternoon I saw him grin.

A tight little flock of human sparrows who, from the lambent and pampered pink of their faces, could only have been Boston politicians moved toward the plate. The loudspeakers mammothly coughed as someone huffed on the microphone. The ceremonies began. Curt Gowdy, the Red Sox radio and television announcer, who sounds like everybody's brother-in-law, delivered a brief sermon, taking the two words "pride" and "champion" as his text. It began, "Twenty-one years ago, a skinny kid from San Diego, California . . ." and ended, "I don't think we'll ever see another like him." Robert Tibolt, chairman of the board of the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce, presented Williams with a big Paul Revere silver bowl. Harry Carlson, a member of the sports committee of the Boston Chamber, gave him a plaque, whose inscription he did not read in its entirety, out of deference to Williams' distaste for this sort of fuss. Mayor Collins presented the Jimmy Fund with a thousand-dollar check.

Then the occasion himself stooped to the microphone, and his voice sounded, after the others, very Californian; it seemed to be coming, excellently amplified, from a great distance, adolescently young and as smooth as a butternut. His thanks for the gifts had not died from our ears before he glided, as if helplessly, into "In spite of all the terrible things that have been said about me by the maestros of the keyboard up there . . ." He glanced up at the press rows suspended above home plate. (All the Boston reporters, incidentally, reported the phrase as "knights of the keyboard," but I heard it as "maestros" and prefer it that way.) The crowd tittered, appalled. A frightful vision flashed upon me, of the press gallery pelting Williams with erasers, of Williams clambering up the foul screen to slug journalists, of a riot, of Mayor Collins being crushed. ". . . And they were terrible things," Williams insisted, with level melancholy, into the mike. "I'd like to forget them, but I can't." He paused, swallowed his memories, and went on, "I want to say that my years in Boston have been the greatest thing in my life." The crowd, like an immense sail going limp in a change of wind, sighed with relief. Taking all the parts himself, Williams then acted out a vivacious little morality drama in which an imaginary tempter came to him at the beginning of his career and said, "Ted, you can play anywhere you like." Leaping nimbly into the role of his younger self (who in biographical actuality had yearned to be a Yankee), Williams gallantly chose Boston over all the other cities, and told us that Tom Yawkey was the greatest owner in baseball and we were the greatest fans. We applauded ourselves heartily. The umpire came out and dusted the plate. The voice of doom announced over the loudspeakers that after Williams' retirement his uniform number, 9, would be permanently retired—the first time the Red Sox had so honored a player. We cheered. The national anthem was played. We cheered. The game began.

Williams was third in the batting order, so he came up in the bottom of the first inning, and Steve Barber, a young pitcher who was not yet born when Williams began playing for the Red Sox, offered him four pitches, at all of which he disdained to swing, since none of them were within the strike zone. This demonstrated simultaneously that Williams' eyes were razor-sharp and that Barber's control wasn't. Shortly, the bases were full, with Williams on second. "Oh, I hope he gets held up at third! That would be wonderful,'' the girl beside me moaned, and, sure enough, the man at bat walked and Williams was delivered into our foreground. He struck the pose of Donatello's David, the third-base bag being Goliath's head. Fiddling with his cap, swapping small talk with the Oriole third baseman (who seemed delighted to have him drop in), swinging his arms with a sort of prancing nervousness, he looked fine—flexible, hard, and not unbecomingly substantial through the middle. The long neck, the small head, the knickers whose cuffs were worn down near his ankles—all these points, often observed by caricaturists, were visible in the flesh.

One of the collegiate voices behind me said, "He looks old, doesn't he, old; big deep wrinkles in his face . . ."

"Yeah," the other voice said, "but he looks like an old hawk, doesn't he?"

With each pitch, Williams danced down the baseline, waving his arms and stirring dust, ponderous but menacing, like an attacking goose. It occurred to about a dozen humorists at once to shout "Steal home! Go, go!" Williams' speed afoot was never legendary. Lou Clinton, a young Sox outfielder, hit a fairly deep fly to center field. Williams tagged up and ran home. As he slid across the plate, the ball, thrown with unusual heft by Jackie Brandt, the Oriole center fielder, hit him on the back.

"Boy, he was really loafing, wasn't he?" one of the boys behind me said.

"It's cold," the other explained. "He doesn't play well when it's cold. He likes heat. He's a hedonist."

The run that Williams scored was the second and last of the inning. Gus Triandos, of the Orioles, quickly evened the score by plunking a home run over the handy left-field wall. Williams, who had had this wall at his back for twenty years, played the ball flawlessly. He didn't budge. He just stood there, in the center of the little patch of grass that his patient footsteps had worn brown, and, limp with lack of interest, watched the ball pass overhead. It was not a very interesting game. Mike Higgins, the Red Sox manager, with nothing to lose, had restricted his major-league players to the left-field line—along with Williams, Frank Malzone, a first-rate third baseman, played the game—and had peopled the rest of the terrain with unpredictable youngsters fresh, or not so fresh, off the farms. Other than Williams' recurrent appearances at the plate, the maladresse of the Sox infield was the sole focus of suspense; the second baseman turned every grounder into a juggling act, while the shortstop did a breathtaking impersonation of an open window. With this sort of assistance, the Orioles wheedled their way into a 4-2 lead. They had early replaced Barber with another young pitcher, Jack Fisher. Fortunately (as it turned out), Fisher is no cutie; he is willing to burn the ball through the strike zone, and inning after inning this tactic punctured Higgins' string of test balloons.

Whenever Williams appeared at the plate—pounding the dirt from his cleats, gouging a pit in the batter's box with his left foot, wringing resin out of the bat handle with his vehement grip, switching the stick at the pitcher with an electric ferocity—it was like having a familiar Leonardo appear in a shuffle of Saturday Evening Post covers. This man, you realized—and here, perhaps, was the difference, greater than the difference in gifts—really intended to hit the ball. In the third inning, he hoisted a high fly to deep center. In the fifth, we thought he had it; he smacked the ball hard and high into the heart of his power zone, but the deep right field in Fenway and the heavy air and a casual east wind defeated him. The ball died. Al Pilarcik leaned his back against the big "380" painted on the right-field wall and caught it. On another day, in another park, it would have been gone. (After the game, Williams said, "I didn't think I could hit one any harder than that. The conditions weren't good.")

The afternoon grew so glowering that in the sixth inning the arc lights were turned on—always a wan sight in the daytime, like the burning headlights of a funeral procession. Aided by the gloom, Fisher was slicing through the Sox rookies, and Williams did not come to bat in the seventh. He was second up in the eighth. This was almost certainly his last time to come to the plate in Fenway Park, and instead of merely cheering, as we had at his three previous appearances, we stood, all of us—stood and applauded. Have you ever heard applause in a ballpark? Just applause—no calling, no whistling, just an ocean of handclaps, minute after minute, burst after burst, crowding and running together in continuous succession like the pushes of surf at the edge of the sand. It was a sombre and considered tumult. There was not a boo in it. It seemed to renew itself out of a shifting set of memories as the kid, the Marine, the veteran of feuds and failures and injuries, the friend of children, and the enduring old pro evolved down the bright tunnel of twenty-one summers toward this moment. At last, the umpire signalled for Fisher to pitch; with the other players, he had been frozen in position. Only Williams had moved during the ovation, switching his bat impatiently, ignoring everything except his cherished task. Fisher wound up, and the applause sank into a hush.

Understand that we were a crowd of rational people. We knew that a home run cannot be produced at will; the right pitch must be perfectly met and luck must ride with the ball. Three innings before, we had seen a brave effort fail. The air was soggy; the season was exhausted. Nevertheless, there will always lurk, around a corner in a pocket of our knowledge of the odds, an indefensible hope, and this was one of the times, which you now and then find in sports, when a density of expectation hangs in the air and plucks an event out of the future.

Fisher, after his unsettling wait, was wide with the first pitch. He put the second one over, and Williams swung mightily and missed. The crowd grunted, seeing that classic swing, so long and smooth and quick, exposed, naked in its failure. Fisher threw the third time, Williams swung again, and there it was. The ball climbed on a diagonal line into the vast volume of air over center field. From my angle, behind third base, the ball seemed less an object in flight than the tip of a towering, motionless construct, like the Eiffel Tower or the Tappan Zee Bridge. It was in the books while it was still in the sky. Brandt ran back to the deepest corner of the outfield grass; the ball descended beyond his reach and struck in the crotch where the bullpen met the wall, bounced chunkily, and, as far as I could see, vanished.

Like a feather caught in a vortex, Williams ran around the square of bases at the center of our beseeching screaming. He ran as he always ran out home runs—hurriedly, unsmiling, head down, as if our praise were a storm of rain to get out of. He didn't tip his cap. Though we thumped, wept, and chanted "We want Ted" for minutes after he hid in the dugout, he did not come back. Our noise for some seconds passed beyond excitement into a kind of immense open anguish, a wailing, a cry to be saved. But immortality is nontransferable. The papers said that the other players, and even the umpires on the field, begged him to come out and acknowledge us in some way, but he never had and did not now. Gods do not answer letters.

Every true story has an anticlimax. The men on the field refused to disappear, as would have seemed decent, in the smoke of Williams' miracle. Fisher continued to pitch, and escaped further harm. At the end of the inning, Higgins sent Williams out to his left-field position, then instantly replaced him with Carrol Hardy, so we had a long last look at Williams as he ran out there and then back, his uniform jogging, his eyes steadfast on the ground. It was nice, and we were grateful, but it left a funny taste.

One of the scholasticists behind me said, "Let's go. We've seen everything. I don't want to spoil it." This seemed a sound aesthetic decision. Williams' last word had been so exquisitely chosen, such a perfect fusion of expectation, intention, and execution, that already it felt a little unreal in my head, and I wanted to get out before the castle collapsed. But the game, though played by clumsy midgets under the feeble glow of the arc lights, began to tug at my attention, and I loitered in the runway until it was over. Williams' homer had, quite incidentally, made the score 4-3. In the bottom of the ninth inning, with one out, Marlin Coughtry, the second-base juggler, singled. Vic Wertz, pinch-hitting, doubled off the left-field wall, Coughtry advancing to third. Pumpsie Green walked, to load the bases. Willie Tasby hit a double-play ball to the third baseman, but in making the pivot throw Billy Klaus, an ex-Red Sox infielder, reverted to form and threw the ball past the first baseman and into the Red Sox dugout. The Sox won, 5-4. On the car radio as I drove home I heard that Williams had decided not to accompany the team to New York. So he knew how to do even that, the hardest thing. Quit.

Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieuby John Updike© 1960

I hope you enjoyed it...I certainly did. And oh yeah...please excuse my blog at the moment...I'm working on it on the fly so it is a little unkempt right now because I am planning on bringing back my sports-talk show after about a 2 1/2 year hiatus due to my health. You can follow me on Twitter @GoShift I hope everyone enjoys the playoffs and I hope your team makes it far! Have a FANtastic day!!!

The Shift..where I'm at...where I'm going #TheShift #SportsTalk

2010-09-25T12:36:00.003-05:00

Hello sports fans!!! Just sitting here on a terrific late September day brain-storming about my comeback to the sports-talk arena after an over 2 year hiatus due to my health. I have to say that SO MANY things have changed since I began doing this in 2005. The whole social media scene has come on like gangbusters. back 5 years ago I had nowhere near the tools I have now to get the word out. But while that is a GOOD thing it also makes one have to think about how they want to attack the brand so to speak. I had to ask myself if I wanted to really do this again...the writing...the prep-work...all of it. And to be perfectly honest with you there have been days when the answer was a resounding NO! But not because I suddenly hated sports...that will NEVER happen. It was more health related...having rheumatoid arthritis sometimes puts you in a mood where the LAST thing you want to do is deal with people. Everything...even the simplest tasks...become tiring and cumbersome. Other days I'm ready to jack-knive off the diving board and go at it full throttle. All that being said here is where I am at with this right now...

I've always had this niche about everything being done correctly with whatever it is I set out to do. I cannot tolerate half-assed efforts from myself. So if I don't have things the way I want them I won't proceed. Let's face it people...I'm not in this for money or fame...just for the love of doing it. All the ads you'll here...and you won't see many...are products or causes I whole-heartedly believe in. I don't take monies from ANYONE for ad-clicks and the such. Doing things this way makes me have control over the site...not it over me. I am designing this blog on the fly...it will be tweaked constantly to try and make it both informative and user-friendly for you the fan. I will do my very best not to be biased towards my own teams...but rather have strong opinions about them both good and bad.

Right now I am in the process of lining up my new voice-over work for my live show...as always Bryant Scott will be in charge of the main work...Fox Sports Radios Deb Carson and Robin Austin will also be doing some VO work for me to add a womans touch to things. As soon as I get all the new bumpers, intros, outros, drops, and other things done (like this site) I'll be ready to take the next step. All my live shows will air EXCLUSIVELY on Ustream Tv ...I see no reason to change anything there. But in a nutshell...that's where I'm at right now. I do also have a music blog at www.pwaffle.blogspot.com that takes up a fair amount of my time too. so in the meantime...I'll be doing posts here and working on the site. See you on air very soon!

Gettin' "grabby" in Philly

2010-09-08T06:05:00.003-05:00

The human touch...it's a beautiful thing...or is it ???

Pacquiao vs. Mayweather...You decide 9-3-10

2010-09-03T08:53:00.005-05:00

Well...it seems like Floyd Mayweather felt the need to go on a rant about Manny Pacquiao while he was on Ustream. Let me set everyone straight on how I feel about Mayweather....I hope dude gets pummeled by Pac-Man. I've taken some time to get out of the way of all the garbage talk and watch some highlights of both fighters. Mayweather is 41-0...and it seems that if anything is holding him back from this fight aside from fear it is that zero in his loss column. He hangs his hat on the fact he hasn't been defeated. I have watched both fighters...to me Manny seems far more capable of taking multiple shots to the chin...May...not so much. Let's not forget that Mosley had him hurt in Round 2 of their fight but couldn't put together the combos to finish the job. If Manny tags him with his left you WILL see him put Mayweather away. Below are highlight films of both fighters...watch them and decide for yourself. Then vote on the poll question in the upper left corner if you would. This fight is bound to happen...it's just a matter of time. Excuse my blog...I'm in the process of revamping it so it will be changing as I go along. As far as my live sports-talk show on Ustream goes...not ready to come back yet. I will keep everyone informed. I will, however, be blogging on a more regular basis. Have a great Labor Day weekend everyone!!!

Here goes !!! 8-30-10

2010-08-30T09:26:00.003-05:00

Well...here we go! It is time to give this blog a complete makeover. I finally came across a template design that I liked and now comes the task of getting everything where and how I want it. So as you visit here it will be going thru changes on the fly. I also have my website to contend with..I'm not sure if I am going to keep it or not...I deal with Go Daddy and quite frankly the whole experience with them has been frustrating to say the least. I may just stick with this blog...I've used it since 2005...and I see no need to spread myself out all over the place. As far as my sports-talk show goes it has not yet come back..perhaps now that the kids are back in school I will have more time for it. I've made many announcements about comebacks...they all fell thru due to my health. That being said...it will be back when it's back...bout all I can say about it.

I HAVE to document this!!!! 4-8-10

2010-04-08T07:27:00.002-05:00

Well, The Masters has begun this morning...and I wanted to document this in case I ended up being right. My "hunch-pick" to win this years Masters is none other than one of my favorite golfers throughout the years. He exudes class both on and off the golf course. My pick? None other than Freddy Couples! I have heard his constant back problems are behind him and he loves playing Augusta. That and the fact that he has won 3 tourneys in a row on the senior circuit coming in. He also outdrove Tiger all day yesterday out of the tee box. Also...he was at 50-1 at Bodog to win it all. I slapped a twenty on him. I he wins I also pocket a cool thousand dollars for the win! Let's see what happens! By the way, the show will be back very soon as planned. Have a great day!!! - Bob Merc

Things are moving along...slowly...but surely! 03-23-10

2010-03-22T23:13:00.002-05:00

Just a quick update...things are happening in regards to the show...not at break-neck speed...but I'm happy with it. I had the weekend from hell from my RA...my abdomen area totally went haywire. With the affliction I have I always have to worry about Lupus rearing its ugly head into the picture. It's bad enough to have my bone-density decreasing...I just don't want my internal organs involved in the mix. So...please to bear with me. I'm doing the very best I can given the unique circumstances I deal with every day of my life. Talk to you all soon! =)

TS031710

2010-03-17T08:37:00.004-05:00

Tony Bruno Show love for my @GoShift sports-talk Twitter account!!!! The Tony Bruno Show is heard nation-wide every night on Fox Sports Radio. Shameless pub!!!! Hahaha!

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Wanna lose some weight FAST! Then read on! 03-14-10

2010-03-14T03:31:00.002-05:00

To lose weight, try eliminating white food from your diet. "White food" is shorthand for simple carbohydrates, the kinds of foods that are typically high in calories and low in nutritional value. Simple carbohydrates elevate your blood sugar, cause cravings and make it hard for you to lose weight. You can eliminate all white foods at once, or choose one category of foods to eliminate at a time. Eliminating all white foods at once will be challenging, but will also reduce your cravings and help you lose weight more quickly. Allow two to four weeks for carbohydrate cravings to vanish completely.
Step 1
Eliminate white bread and foods made with flour from your diet. This includes bread, bagels, rolls, cake, pastries, cookies, crackers, pretzels and pasta.
Step 2
Eliminate white sugar from your diet, along with any foods with added sugar. This includes most cereals, candies, fruit juices, desserts and a number of beverages. Avoid sugar in all forms, including high fructose corn syrup and brown sugar. Sugar substitutes can make it hard for you to break your cravings for sweets.
Step 3
Eliminate white potatoes from your diet, along with foods made with potatoes. This includes potato chips, french fries, baked potatoes and any food containing potato starch.
Step 4
Eliminate white rice from your diet. Brown and wild rice, along with other whole grain products, can be eaten in small amounts.
Step 5
Choose skim or fat-free milk and reduced-fat cheeses. Avoid full-fat dairy products such as cream, whipped cream or half-and-half.
Step 6
Choose meals and snacks containing lean protein, non-starchy vegetables and healthy fats. Add non-starchy fruits back to your diet once carbohydrate cravings have been eliminated.
Step 7
Stay hydrated by drinking plenty of water every day.

***UPDATE*** 8-30-10 As of this date my weight is at 168lbs...I've lost 40lbs. using this method and haven't starved a bit...it's just a matter of making intelligent choices in your diet.

The relaunch? 03-08-10

2010-03-08T15:55:00.003-05:00

Some people have asked me when http://www.goshift.net/ is going to be back...there is a "Coming Soon" sign at the website. Let me address that right now for you all. My website consists of 5 pages...so there is much to be done there. I am not a HTML or CSS guru...so it is taking me a little time to get things set up. There ARE pre-made templates there to use...but they are friggin' terrible looking. That being said...I am not committing to a day or date...when I get done I get done. I want the site set up in a certain way...it will be well worth the wait and work for both of us. If you haven't done so yet you can follow me on Twitter @goshift Hang in there! It won't be long...and thanks for your patience. What the hell..I've been idle for 2 years soon..what's another month?

Ya found it!!!! 03-03-10

2010-03-03T20:49:00.002-05:00

Ok...here's the deal..I am currently working on getting my site at www.goshift.net back up and running...it is going to take a little bit of time as I am not a HTML & CSS wiz..but I'll get by. My voice over guy has his computer back and that is in the works too! So check back often! All updates will be posted here until the website is back up. If you would like to follow The Shift on Twitter go to www.twitter.com/goshift Thanks!!!! And talk to you all soon!!!!

Thanks for your patience!

2009-01-29T01:17:00.002-05:00

Hey all...just letting you know that I STILL plan on bringing the sports-talk show back...the current plan is in March...I thank you all for your patience in this matter. My health has been a real bitch this past half-year!

NO....I'm NOT DEAD!

2008-09-02T17:01:00.003-05:00

Hey all...Just to let you all know a few things, especially my listeners. I have not been on the airwaves with either a podcast or a live show since April due to my health. But I am coming back and all indications are strongly pointing to this month. Just keeping everyone up to speed. I miss you guys, and I'll see you all soon. Bob Merc

THE SHIFT IS BACK-4-15-08!!!

2008-04-16T08:15:00.001-05:00

*On this edition of The Shift*...
Has another great-white hope emerged?
For 61 years it should have fit...does it?
Is the system all messed up?
Divorce is a shady game!
The winners of Merc Madness!
And much, much more!!!

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THE LATE SHIFT WITH BOB MERC ON TPSRADIO.NET 3-7-08

2008-03-08T14:04:00.001-05:00

*On tonights show...
* It's time to "Shuffle" off...and not to Buffalo!
* Can Tiger be stopped? This guy says yes!
* What's to have faith in anymore?
* NFL 2008 Draft-DE's
* And much, much more!!!

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THESHIFT LIVE ON TPSRADIO.NET 3-4-08

2008-03-05T11:18:00.001-05:00

*On todays show...
*Hmmm...no grassy knoll
*Steak anyone?
*AB is striking out!

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THE LATE SHIFT LIVE ON TPSRADIO.NET 2-15-08

2008-02-16T04:10:00.001-05:00

On The Late Shift...
*CC...Will he say C-Ya?
*Cleveland's TRUE heroe
*I liked what I heard Kobe!
*Daytona 500 preview!
*And more!!!

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THE SHIFT LIVE ON TPSRADIO.NET 2-12-08

2008-02-13T13:08:00.001-05:00

On The Shift...
*Room 2154...it ain't at The Hilton!
*Where did this guy come from?
*The Ring of Fame?...Does it mean rings?
*Talk about misery!
*Aristotle vs. Jerry Garcia Jr.
*And more!

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THE LATE SHIFT ON TPSRADIO.NET 2-8-08

2008-02-09T15:56:00.001-05:00

On The Late Shift...
*B-More Blues
*And the rockets red glare
*Will this marriage work?
*Always listen to your doctor!
*And more!!!

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THE LATE SHIFT SUPER BOWL 42 PREVIEW SHOW ON TPSRADIO.NET 2-

2008-02-02T14:21:00.001-05:00

Tonight on The Late Shift...
*Bob Merc, Ron Cozby, and Brian Wilmer take you on a 3-hour journey to give thier thoughts and analysis on the big game!

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THE SHIFT LIVE ON TPSRADIO.NET 1-29-08

2008-01-29T21:07:00.001-05:00

**Today on The Shift...
*Johann is Gohann!
*Cooperstown sadness
*Marry me?...Please!
*49 pages of desperation!
*What color WILL it be?
*Late Shift announcement
*And more!!!

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THE LATE SHIFT ON TPSRADIO.NET 1-25-08

2008-01-26T13:26:00.001-05:00

On The Late Shift...
*Raiders fans...I feel sorry for ya!
*Jim Brown should just stay out of it!
*Dana the swiller!
*And more!!!

**Important Note: At about the 20 minute mark on this podcast you will hear a buzz-like sound and the show goes off for about 30 seconds...then it comes back on. Sorry, such is the nature of live radio!

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THESHIFT LIVE ON TPSRADIO.NET 1-22-08

2008-01-23T10:08:00.001-05:00

Tonight on The Shift...
*AFC-NFC Title game reviews
*Yankee Fan Club Radio's Uncle Joe Colarusso

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THE LATE SHIFT ON TPSRADIO.NET 01-18-08

2008-01-20T00:17:00.001-05:00

**On The Late Shift this week...
*No legs an advantage?
*AFC-NFC Title Game talk?
*Call-ins from Dakota in Wisconsin and
Spug in Ohio!

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THE SHIFT LIVE ON TPSRADIO.NET 1-15-08

2008-01-16T09:40:00.001-05:00

Tonight on The Shift...
*Crying in football Part II?
*Divisional Playoff thoughts
*What happened to the Cowboys?
*And more!!!

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THE LATE SHIFT ON TPSRADIO.NET 1-11-08

2008-01-12T14:44:00.001-05:00

ON THE LATE SHIFT...
*Unlikely Atlantic City meeting
*Don't expect our pity now!
*Dirt nap licensing
*The NFL Divisional Playoffs
*And more...

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THE SHIFT LIVE ON TPSRADIO.NET 01-08-08

2008-01-09T10:15:00.001-05:00

On todays show:

*This Goose is flying north!
* Has anything really changed?
*Crying in football?
*What the Puck winner announced
*A new contest...and more!

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THE SHIFT LIVE ON TPSRADIO.NET 12-18-07

2007-12-19T17:25:00.001-05:00

*Tonight on the show:
*The Mitchell Report...And Clemens
*NFL Playoff picture
*Bowl winners

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THE SHIFT LIVE ON TPSRADIO.NET 12-11-07

2007-12-12T10:04:00.001-05:00

*On todays show:
* A new contest for The Shift listeners!
*The Mitchell report...is it the whole story?
*Was Vick's sentence enough?
* A hero passes away
*And more!

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THE LATE SHIFT 12-07-2007

2007-12-08T12:26:00.001-05:00

*Einstein? Pythogoras? Vince McMahon?
*You'll understand once you join me and my call-in guest Ty Hildenbrandt from Yankee Fan Club Radio!
*And so much more!

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THE SHIFT LIVE ON TPSRADIO.NET 11-27-07

2007-11-28T02:06:00.001-05:00

Tonight on The Shift:
*Live by the sword...die by it too?
*A nice BCS sandwich to sink your teeth into
*Green Bay-Dallas- I'll help you out
*And much more...on TPSRadio.net!

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THE LATE SHIFT 11-23-07

2007-11-24T05:15:00.001-05:00

*Tonight on The Late Shift:
* BCS banter with Da Spug
* How DO YOU beat the Patriots?
*9/11, Pearl Harbor, Alcoholics, and Abuse

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THE SHIFT "LIVE" ON TPSRADIO.NET 11-20-07

2007-11-21T02:00:00.001-05:00

On this weeks edition of The Shift:
*Steelers road woes?
*Bill Simmons-Part II
*Melrose...insert foot please!
*And much more

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THE LATE SHIFT ON TPSRADIO.NET

2007-11-17T04:25:00.001-05:00

* Bob Merc, Spug, and Bryant Scott throw their 2 cents in on the multi-million dollar world of sports*
*The Late Shift is a show where people's opinions come first! Another Exclusive of TPSRadio.net...The Peoples Sports Radio Network...Please join us!*

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THE SHIFT LIVE ON TPSRADIO.NET 11-13-07

2007-11-13T21:26:00.001-05:00

Yes, The Shift is back!!!
*NFL Talk
*Don't expect a miracle here!
*Does this guy even matter anymore?
*A brush with hockey

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THE SHIFT "LATE NIGHT" ON TPSRADIO.NET 10-05-07

2007-10-06T14:54:00.001-05:00

Tonight on Late Night Spug Guy and Tony Oberstar review the MLB Playoffs and this weekends NFL battles...and much more!

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THE SHIFT "LATE NIGHT" ON TPSRADIO.NET 9-22-07

2007-09-23T05:55:00.001-05:00

Tonight on Late Night...Spug, Grash, TPSRadio owner Ray Garcia, Adam Martin, and his brother Alex tackle all the sports topics of the day. Make room on your I-Pod! This baby goes for 3 1/2 hours! But what did you expect from The Shift?

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THE SHIFT "LIVE" ON TPSRADIO.NET 9-18-07

2007-09-18T18:59:00.001-05:00

*NFL Week 2 recap
*Juice anyone?
*My Pa. MLB team
*And much more

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TSL997SU

2007-09-09T12:36:00.001-05:00

*Join Bob Merc, TPSRadio.net owner Ray Garcia, host of Punishment Radio Adam Martin and future host Da Spug Guy as we do a late show version of The Shift with an "open mic" twist!!!*

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THE SHIFT "LIVE" WITH BOB MERC ON TPSRADIO.NET 8-28-07

2007-08-28T21:08:00.001-05:00

ON TODAYS SHOW:
*How to hate the Red Sox
*The divisional races are red-hot
*NFL unis...who has the best
*Details on how you can win an NFL SUNDAY TICKET package from The Shift
*A Michael Vick call-in defender

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THE SHIFT "LIVE" ON TPSRADIO.NET 8-17-07

2007-08-18T03:23:00.001-05:00

*On a specail Friday night edition of The Shift we will discuss.....
*Oprah in the booth?
*Kia...No not the car!
*Mike, Tim, Jason, and more
* A special announcement!

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THE SHIFT "LIVE" ON TPSRADIO.NET 8-14-07

2007-08-15T09:56:00.001-05:00

A special tribute show to honor the passing of Yankee Hall of Fame player and broadcaster Phil "The Scooter" Rizzuto

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THE SHIFT LIVE ON TPSRADIO.NET 08-07-2007

2007-08-07T21:27:00.001-05:00

Tonight on The Shift....NFL TALK finally...and much more!!!

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THE SHIFT "LIVE" ON TPSRADIO.NET 8-2-07

2007-08-04T10:32:00.001-05:00

*ON A SPECIAL THURSDAY EDITION*
*Bill Walshes passing
*When sports news was about sports
*FFL Draft 2007-Some help for you
*Sports cards...can you afford them?
*Atlanta's apathy

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THE SHIFT LIVE ON TPSRADIO.NET 7-24-07

2007-07-25T08:44:00.001-05:00

*Finally, a good story!!!
*Please don't ruin it Balco!
*How DO refs fix bets?
*What was this guy thinkin?
*BQ's love letter to Cleveland

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THE SHIFT "LIVE" ON TPSRADIO.NET 7-12-07

2007-07-13T02:16:00.001-05:00

*A-Rod...Let's figure this out!
*Sports rivalries...can we live without them?*Scott Winkler...a hero!
*A weird call-in
*And more!

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THE SHIFT "LIVE" ON TPSRADIO.NET 7-2-07

2007-07-03T09:12:00.001-05:00

*Yankees woes continue!
*Nice shirt Cynthia!
*Bonds an All-Star...our fault?
*How does JaMarcus Russell compare?
*The lost Ray Garcia audio
*And more!!!

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THE SHIFT LIVE ON TPSRADIO.NET 6-26-07

2007-06-28T11:36:00.001-05:00

Wrestlers are dying way too young!
How to get that baseball
NFL...The New pastine?
Does the ball make a difference?
And more!
****You can only listen via the silver player...problems with the server as far as downloading the MP3 I will keep you posted as to when this problem is resolved***

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THE SCRANTON PA. SPORTS SHIFT 6-8-07

2007-06-09T08:44:00.001-05:00

*See ya Paris!
*Can Denny 3-peat?
*Why I'm going to heaven!
*Bad calls...they still hurt!

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THE SHIFT "LIVE" ON TPSRADIO.NET 6-5-07

2007-06-06T11:51:00.001-05:00

*Athlete's do it...can't they
*It's on on July 4th!
*Were you surprised the Pistons lost?
*Should the yanks opt-out?
*And more!

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THE SHIFT "LIVE" ON TPSRADIO.NET 5-29-07

2007-05-30T20:03:00.001-05:00

*The Shift and Yankee Fan Club Radio meet!
*Do you really care about Clemens?
*A 2007 vs. 2004 comparison!
*Soap opera anyone?
*The NHL's big mistake!

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THE SHIFT "LIVE" ON TPSRADIO.NET 5-22-07

2007-05-23T14:00:00.001-05:00

*464 Votes...1 overwhelming result!
*Mother's Day passed...didn't it?
*Is baseball in a "crisis" mode?
*Friday the 13th...revisited!
*To glove...or not to glove?

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THE SHIFT LIVE ON TPSRADIO.NET 5-15-07

2007-05-17T08:06:00.001-05:00

*The Home Run...what's your favorite?
*What's in a team name?
*Cheese rolling anyone?
*He'll never change!
*Top 5 pitching flukes
*And more!

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THE SCRANTON PA. SPORTS SHIFT 5-11-07 #83

2007-05-12T08:07:00.001-05:00

*"Abraham's Angle debuts!"
*Eat your Wheaties 1st...ok?
*13 is an unlucky number Juice
*The Hall of Infamy
*Want my handicapped placard?

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THE SHIFT "LIVE" ON TPSRADIO.NET 5-08-07

2007-05-09T08:54:00.001-05:00

*Clemens is back!
*Free Suns Tickets anyone?
*MLB Draft on TV?
*MLB All-Star game...some thoughts
*And much more!

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THE SCRANTON PA. SPORTS SHIFT 5-05-07 PODCAST 82

2007-05-05T20:11:00.001-05:00

*Culinary prowess
*The Oakland A's are smart!
*Cuban thrashes me...big deal!
*It's coming...what a bummer!
*E-Mail is a great thing...right?
*And more!

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THE SHIFT "LIVE" ON TPSRADIO.NET 5-1-07

2007-05-02T08:43:00.001-05:00

*Are you blindly loyal to your teams?
*Biggest NFL Draft busts
*Josh Hancock's death...should we care?
*Did you vote yet?

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THE SHIFT "LIVE" ON TPSRadio.net 4-17-07

2007-04-19T10:18:00.001-05:00

*Virginia Tech shootings*
*NBA Playoffs...should they be changed?*
*Quinn and Russell...could one or both fall out of the 1st round of the draft?*
*Finally...the phone works!*

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THE SCRANTON PA. SPORTS SHIFT PODCAST #81 4-13-07

2007-04-13T15:49:00.000-05:00

*Imus in the morning...NOT!!!*

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THE SHIFT "LIVE" ON TPSRADIO.NET 4-10-07

2007-04-10T19:15:00.000-05:00

The Shift "Live" on TPSRadio.net 4-10-07
*Elsie does it!!!
*Gambling-Are you at risk?
*Types of sports fans

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THE SHIFT "LIVE"..."NOT" ON TPSRADIO.NET 3-27-07

2007-03-29T17:51:00.000-05:00

* The "Machine" gets shut down!!!
* Baseball Extra-Innings...do you have it?
* Surveys...are they a pian in the ass?
* All this and so much more!!!

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THE SHIFT "LIVE" ON TPSRADIO 3-13-07

2007-03-14T18:25:00.000-05:00

*March Madness tips
*Was Syracuse jobbed?...and much more!

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THE SCRANTON PA. SPORTS SHIFT PODCAST#80

2007-03-10T18:49:00.000-05:00

* News for local AAA Yankee fans
* HGH...The Holy Grail?
* Curt Schilling has a blog!
* A hard working Yankee beat writer
* Ross Macciocco garners 500 wins
* Chris Simon is scum!!!!

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THE SHIFT "LIVE" ON TPSRADIO.NET 3-06-07

2007-03-07T14:17:00.000-05:00

THE SHIFT "LIVE" ON TPSRADIO.NET 3-6-07
* BLING-BLING!
* IS MONTOYA "BUSCH-LEAGUE?"
*THE BEST 2 SPORT ATHLETE EVER
* BACK TO MY CHILDHOOD
*GEPETTO IS ALIVE AND WELL

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THE SCRANTON PA. SPORTS SHIFT "LIVE" 3-02-07 #79

2007-03-02T12:15:00.000-05:00

THE SCRANTON PA. SPORTS SHIFT 3-2-07 #79
* Why do pro athletes need guns?
* How to buy pro sports tickets
* Will Manning own all the records?

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THE SHIFT "LIVE" ON TPSRADIO.NET 2-27-07

2007-02-28T09:55:00.000-05:00

*ESPN2 Comes to Scranton
*Should MLB reside in YOUR town?
*Tips to win the NCAA bracket pool
*Have the Texans given up on David Carr too soon?

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THE SCRANTON PA. SPORTS SHIFT "LIVE" 2-26-07 #78

2007-02-26T13:35:00.000-05:00

The Scranton Pa. Sports Shift "LIVE" 2-26-07
Podcast #78
* Depressed over your favorite sport being over?....I can help!
* The 3-Strike idea...will it work?
* Can NASCAR stop the cheating?
* www.goshift.net

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THE SCRANTON PA. SPORTS SHIFT PODCAST#77 2-16-07

2007-02-17T11:55:00.000-05:00

The John Ameachi, ESPNRadio, Tim Hardaway debacle....my views

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THE SHIFT "LIVE" ON TPSRADIO.NET 2-13-07

2007-02-14T13:59:00.000-05:00

* The hardest coaching job...ever!
* Time Tunnel visits this quintet
* Should baseball park giveaways be over?
* What I think affects parody in the NFL
* What's up with that statement Mo?

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THE SCRANTON PA. SPORTS SHIFT 2-9-07 PODCAST#76

2007-02-09T13:27:00.000-05:00

*New website update
* Selena Waters
* Crybaby Jerry
* The Chase

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THE SHIFT "LIVE" ON TPSRADIO.NET 2-6-07

2007-02-07T09:39:00.000-05:00

THE SHIFT "LIVE" ON TPSRADIO.NET 2-6-07
*Saturday Indigestion
*Snickers
*SB41 Recap
*Top 10 QB's list

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THE SCRANTON PA. SPORTS SHIFT-PODCAST #75 1-27-07

2007-01-27T20:21:00.000-05:00

ON TODAYS PODCAST:
*MY ALL-TIME SUPER-BOWL TEAM
*THE TIME TUNNEL
*IS THIS GUY THE BEST ATHLETE...EVER?
*WHAT I HATE ABOUT SPORTS

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THE SCRANTON PA. SPORTS SHIFT-PODCAST 74 1-19-07

2007-01-19T19:30:00.000-05:00

THE SCRANTON PA. SPORTS SHIFT-PODCAST 74 1-19-07

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