Busy Time

How can the sports addict keep up with the news? Bronson Arroyo stifles the Sox in Florida today. Was it 'Be Nice to Bronson' day? Maybe it wasn't exactly the Red Sox 'A' lineup in there either.

Julian (WWE) Tavarez gets a ten day suspension. It must have been pro-rated for weight. Imagine if Wily Mo had landed one on Joey Gathright. Joey would have been 'Joey Gath'LightsOut' forever.

And the NFL bans celebrations? What's excessive? A hard spike, or an overly exuberant booty shake. The NFL (No Fun League) is currently working on a new penalty 'signal' combining the Touchdown signal, with the fist pump, and throat slash, meaning 'excessive celebration' 15 yards. Why not just give the guy a 5000 buck fine and let him buy his own celebration?

And then there's the NHL. Nothing to celebrate there.

The Celtics have been looking for a hard-driving guard for years. Now we've got Orien Greene, and we're complaining. Well, you meant driving on the court, not on the highway? Danny Ainge has fined Orien 10,000 pushups, 5,000 Stadia (stairs), and 15 bucks. He'll be too tired to spend any of the money anyway.

Does it seem like baseball season is just around the corner? Have you signed up for a Rotisserie League? Remember how everybody, all the pundits, hated ROTO because it took away from the purity of the game? That was of course, pre-Moneyball, and pre-money in it for all the people running Roto leagues, magazines, and so on.

Who haven't we heard enough about this spring? Dustin Pedroia went from almost ready for callup to The Invisible Man. Somehow I hope that Alex Cora gets a good amount of playing time this season. Cora just seems to know how to play the game (okay, I'm seeing with my eyes and not the stats).

My favorite player? It's already Jon Papelbon. Last season he was tipping his pitches (I'll never tell how), but the message got through and that went away.

Oh and there's the Duke University Lacrosse (and Criminal Acts) team. A patient came well-connected with BC, who said that he had spoken with a former administrator at Duke about the cleanliness of the Duke programs. The administrator said that in the few instances where conflicts arose over academics and athletics, athletics ALWAYS won out. So it's not the sanctimonious Dukies attitude that rankles me, it's the hypocrisy attached to it.