Big Hypocrite

Who here likes old school baseball?

Because I sure do.  Hell, if I'm a pitcher (and a damn good one too) and you're a hitter and you tag me for a couple of home runs in the playoffs you can rest assured you are going to get plunked the next time I see you.

It would be disrespectful for me not to hit you.  There have been too many great players in this great game that have understood how it goes and carried on anyways.  Nobody is bigger than the game and the great ones truly understand that.  Derek Jeter still goes to bed every night thanking his lucky stars that he gets to play short-stop for the New York Yankees, as his job, and then he proceeds to ravage whatever super model he wrangled that night.  Good for him and we all tip our caps to him.

It's an honor and a privilege to play the game of baseball and it's also a weird fraternity that has weird rules that date back before the invention of refrigerators.  Unless you are Shane Victorino who stands exactly on top of the plate while batting you have a few reasons why you were just hit by a ball thrown by the pitcher:

1. He's throwing erratically and it was bound to happen anyways.
2. You are Alex Rodriguez.
3. It's baseball, you should have seen it coming and that's why we make pads now, jackass.

There it is.  It's really quite simple.

Then you have players like David Ortiz who just really doesn't understand why he's the biggest hypocrite in baseball and if it weren't for Donald Sterling it would be all of sports.

The Tampa Bay Rays have an ace pitcher, his name is David Price, and he owns a Cy Young award.  They only give those out to the best pitcher of each league each year.  The Rays played the Boston Red Sox last year in the playoffs and David Ortiz hit two home runs off of David Price.  By the way, the Rays did not win that series.

The first time David Price saw David Ortiz this year he plunked him with a pitch to pretty much his ass region.  Clearly this was not trying to invoke injury as Ortiz has quite the padded posterior since he spends most of his time on the bench.  As a designated hitter he is only required to hit and not do half the stuff that everybody else on his team is doing.  This wasn't malicious of Price.  This was baseball.  This was 'you beat me pretty good last year now take your lumps and let's move on'.

Only Ortiz didn't see it that way.  He took exception to the beaning and when you are the King of Beans your voice gets heard by ESPN.  Ortiz said he no longer had any respect for David Price and that this game that children play on the regular in suburban parks with Popsicle breaks had now become 'war'.  War?  Really?  Have you seen war?  Because I feel like you haven't.  You wouldn't use that word for a baseball game if you knew what it meant.  A guy throws a baseball at your ass and it's a declaration of war?  No congress would ever substantiate that decree.

David Ortiz put on his tiara and little pink Tutu and yelled, "Mommy, that guy hit me!"

David Price came back and said, quite simply, that David Ortiz thinks he's bigger than the game--which is strange because you never really find a lot of pretentious behavior coming out of Boston...(cough cough)

Let's now flash forward to tonight's game between the Rays and Red Sox in which Ortiz was facing three-year man Chris Archer.  Archer started the third inning with a walk and a base hit to let two men on for Ortiz in a scoreless game.  Archer struck out Ortiz in the first inning with a change-up and I was fearful he would try it again in the third.  Alas, my fears came true when Archer threw the change-up and Ortiz sent it over the wall for a three-run home run.

Here's where I take issue:  Ortiz hits the home run, flips his bat, stands there and stares at the dugout, turns, and then leisurely trots around the bases as if he just hit the home run that cured cancer.  It's as if he almost forgot that he was in Tampa, in the third inning of a game that goes at least nine, and that his team was in last place and putting up their starting pitchers on the trading block as the hours ticked by.

Look, there's a lot of rules in baseball that are hard to follow and get misinterpreted as the years go by but I think it's pretty rudimentary that if you hit a home run and stand there and taunt the team that gave it up that you better be prepared for some sort of retaliation.

David Ortiz is ridiculous.  He expects the baseball world to bow to him while he pisses all over their backs.  It's ridiculous how brainwashed he has people too.  Even the great Carl Yastrzemski thinks that Ortiz is a better hitter than him and is only second to Ted Williams.  I just puked.

Yaz is obviously slipping in his older age and it makes me sad.  Yaz won the triple crown, he has 3,419 hits, 452 home runs, and oh by the way has seven golden gloves which they only give to people THAT PLAY IN THE FIELD!  David Ortiz shouldn't even be allowed to say Edgar Martinez' name without feeling ashamed of himself, let alone Carl Yastrzemski giving credit to someone who won't even appreciate it.

The rest of the game goes by without incident for some reason.  I didn't get it at the time but afterwards I can only imagine it's because we're going to let David Price do the dirty work when the Rays welcome the Red Sox back to the Trop in late August.  When interviewed after the game Archer just pointed to Price and said that he was right when he recognized that Ortiz thinks he's bigger than the game.  Ortiz simply just made fun of how little time Archer has spent in the major leagues...just like the classy guy he is.

For someone who boldly took the face of a city in the midst of a tragedy just a year ago to act the way he has this year is absolutely appalling.  I don't know about the rest of you but I like my heroes to not be cry babies.

David Ortiz is apparently okay with rules as long as they don't apply to him.  I'm okay with never letting David Ortiz see another pitch from any Rays pitcher again...so long as it hits him square in the back.  We'll have the pity party meeting him at first base.

Float on, graceful swans.

Five

July is always special to the Studly Pastures and this July we start our fifth year!

Five!  Booyah!  Take that, Google Ads!  You could have had some of this sweet five-year matured nectar but you ditched us for the classier stallion and you still probably made the right choice, you business savvy bastards!

Look, I never needed an Internet Trends Adviser to let me in on the biggest little secret on why the ol' SP isn't exactly the cream of the world wide crop.  I curse, I'm small-minded, I make broad accusations on wild theories that don't even make sense, I almost always reference pop culture in a sarcastic tone, I never really pay attention to true grammatical standards despite my natural journalistic background, and I write so sporadically that if you do read this blog you are probably just as surprised as my blog that a new posting is available.

What can I say?  It's been a hell of a ride.

I curse in my writing because I curse in my talking and I write like I talk.  Duh.  And I've never been too keen on there being words that one shouldn't say.  This is one I'll kick the soap box over for though.  I don't walk up to strangers in my everyday life and say, "What the fuck do you want?"  I would love to but it's uncouth.  I understand that there's a certain threshold of words that are widely accepted in social interactions.  With that said, now you're in my house, and the unicorns seem to respond to offensive language...bitches.

Besides, I don't know if I could come up with a curse word that would accurately describe the feelings of the fans of the Brazilian national team and it's mostly because I don't speak Portuguese.  I've had a favorite team be on the 'please sir, no more' side of a beating and I think I yelled some gibberish in utter frustration at one point but that's nothing like this.

This was on the world stage, on your home turf, in the semi finals, and in a sport where you've won the most world wide titles...and you got completely embarrassed.  Brazil was dissected, analyzed, and pinpointed for every weakness in the span of less than the time you could have switched over from some crap American day-time television.  Not even Judge Judy could have yelled fast enough.

Germany was textbook Germany.  They came out and methodically passed the ball and waited for mistakes and then took advantage of them.  What they didn't expect was a Brazil team that would show up already defeated.  There was talk before the match that the Brazilian nationals would have an excuse to lose without best player Neymar and team captain Thiago Silva playing in the match.  I guess the Brazilian nationals took that as an excuse to not even attempt to play the Germans.


And I guess I appear small minded because if you write about sports long enough you'll catch yourself writing about the same damn thing over and over and over...

When we started in Year One the biggest story of the summer was The Decision and where Lebron James would take his talents.  I painstakingly took the time to bunk or debunk every team and finally whittle it down to two choices: Miami Heat or Cleveland Cavaliers.  I inevitably picked the Cavaliers and was proven wrong a few days later.

Now we stand, four years later, on the bright and beautiful cusp of a new year...and yet again I'm forced to choose between whether Lebron James will play for the Miami Heat or the Cleveland Cavaliers.  Listen, if there's anything I've learned in the last four years and would like myself to know four years from now when we recycle this bullshit...it's simply this:

This kid is not Jordan.  He's not even goddamn Pippen.  He's Lebron James, he's selfish, and he'll do whatever it takes to keep that spotlight right on his receding hairline.  I hate attacking a man for his premature balding but he's forcing my hand!

James doesn't care about winning titles, or establishing legacy, or even being the best player of his generation.  He only cares about tv time.  How long did they talk about me on Sportscenter today?  The worst part is that ESPN is more than happy to oblige.  The greatest player to bridge the gap since Jordan is Kobe and the next to carry the torch is Kevin Durant.  Lebron is just going to wind up with a lot of people confused about how he carried himself.


Now!  About this broad accusations on wild theories, I have to say, I don't even know where that one stemmed from.

Bill Belichick and the rest of the higher ups on the New England Patriots knew that Aaron Hernandez committed a double murder and still gave him a pay raise.  They say that blood is thicker than water but that saying doesn't make sense in this day and age because money is thicker than blood.  In fact, you can soak up a lot of blood with cold hard cash and there's nothing that brings in more money by the truck loads than winning a Super Bowl.

Hell, even going to a Super Bowl these days will at least pave the streets with some sort of platinum knock-off.  I mean, what's your soul worth?  Are you even using it?

Is it so far off the oblivious path to suggest that a team that had already been found guilty of spying on other team practices in order to gain an advantage on the field that they wouldn't engage in other unsavory activities?

By the time the Patriots drafted Aaron Hernandez he was already a bargain basement deal...why not, right?  Why should it be on them that a double murderer would commit, wouldn't you know it,  a third murder.  What a dick.  He ruined everything.


Five years in and nothing has changed.  I'm the same, you're the same, and sports hasn't changed a lick.  I could have sold out two years ago and I stuck around for this shit...

Float on, you graceful whatevers.