It’s Time to Welcome the NHL Back Into Your Lives

Alexander Ovechkin is what the new NHL is all about: speed, power, aggression, and desire. 

I know people turned their backs on the NHL after the lock-out a few short years ago, and in many cases even before then, as the game had lost some of its luster since its heyday in the ’80s with Gretzky and Lemieux leading the way.

But, people, it’s back. 

NHL hockey, while still sorting itself out since coming back from missing the entire 2004-2005 season, is good again.  There is an abundance of exciting young players, and in any given game you are likely to see a great fight, beautiful passing, and incredible effort. 

Quite simply, these guys play hard. 

I would venture they play harder than any other sport day-to-day and play-off hockey is absolutely insane.  It’s like watching marathoners sprint the entire 26.2 miles.  Every team is stocked full of Brian Westbrooks–guys who care only about winning and will sacrifice anything and everything to do it.

There’s a lot more going for hockey than Sidney Crosby these days.  Just tune in and watch a game sometime and you’ll understand. 

Hockey’s back, it’s time you came back to it.

To help you get started, click here, here, and here to catch up on some of the happenings in the game these days.

An Even Bigger Sham Than Baseball’s Drug Testing: The Draft

Aside from watching the blossoming of the steroid era from his lazy boy, Bud Selig’s biggest mistake has been not fixing the draft. 

The Major League Baseball Amateur Draft, the lifeline of each and every franchise in our favorite anti-trust-exempted monopoly, is a sham.

Draft picks are not tradeable in baseball and there is no slotting system for the contracts signed by draftees as in basketball.  This means chaos and inequality.

The Pittsburgh Pirates, a perennial loser in a small market, have no chance. 

Fans and journalists often cry for a salary cap, claiming that small market teams have no chance to compete against the big boys in New York, Boston, Chicago, and L.A.  They’re almost right, but as you may have noticed over the past few years, small market teams like Colorado, Florida, and Arizona have found themselves making deep runs into the play-offs.

These teams primarily haven’t achieved such success by signing the best free agents available, but instead have built from within.  The problem is that they had exceptional front office personnel running the show and managed to find some great young players DESPITE a terrible system. 

This brings me to my first example, the Pittsburgh Pirates.  Now led by new jefe Neal Huntington, a former employee of Bud Selig, they have almost no shot.  Unless Huntington is willing to pay above the suggested slot money the office of the commisioner comes up with, the Pirates will continue to draft pitchers with chances to develop into “#3 starters,” as they have done in the recent past, instead of studs like B.J. Upton or Andrew Miller.  (I believe it was Bryan Bullington, the 1st overall pick in the 2002 draft, who then GM Dave Littlefield christened with such high expectations.)

This is not to say that a team willing to do what it takes to win has no shot, the evidence says otherwise; but, the team that won’t stray from league orders doesn’t.  This should not be an issue.

The Players Union has never truly cared about the high-paid bonus babies that are selected in the draft and would seemingly have no problem creating a logical slotting system.  Shouldn’t the guy the Rays take in the top 5 make more than the guy the Red Sox take with the 29th pick?  Furthermore, trading draft picks just plain and simple makes sense: it creates for extra intrigue and has proven quite effective in every other major American sport.

It’s strange that this flawed system has been allowed to continue unchanged under Selig’s watch, especially considering he used to own the small market Milwaukee Brewers.

So, instead of calling for a salary cap and the inevitable nuclear winter that would come (most likely an NHL style work stoppage), all those who love the game should clamor for a slotting system and the right to trade draft picks.  Once that happens, Pirates fans won’t have to wonder where their money is going.

Roger Clemens and Barry Bonds: Pre-PED Qualifications

What’s the difference between the greatest hitter and pitcher of the steroid era?  It’s as obvious as an intentional walk. 

I have no moral issues with Performance Enhanching Drugs.  I don’t particularly feel like telling other people what they should do to their bodies in order to achieve happiness.  I would certainly prefer that no one take PEDs because of the unknown harm that can be done to the mind and body, but this is not my decision.

Roger Clemens and Barry Bonds almost certainly engaged in some serious PED use.  This was quite obvious well before the Mitchell Report (which is quite the dubious document, as some references were very poorly corroborated; check out this Peter Gammons article for an example), but has now become acceptable to talk about in terms of Clemens, who got by for years without much written suspicion until this past Thursday.

I’m not going to further address whether or not voters should check off a box next to a known PED user’s name, but one interesting topic I will address is this: would Clemens and Bonds have been Hall-of-Famers had they never decided to “cheat?”

First, let’s talk Bonds.  His career numbers as of 1998 were incredible.  He was an all-time five tool player who had 416 steals and 439 homers, ridiculous on-base abilities, a few Gold Gloves, and some MVP awards.  The guy was already in Cooperstown because of his talents, not chemicals.  Pantheon athlete?  Not yet, but on his way to reaching that status at only 33 years old.

On the other hand, what about Clemens?  While thought of as a dominant pitcher well before he left Boston, he was most definitely NOT already a Hall-of-Famer before he “resurrected” his career in Toronto, New York, and Houston…oh, and New York again, sort of.

Clemens was 192-111 in his time in Boston.  He had a career ERA of 3.06 and struck out a solid 8.4 per 9 innings.  That sounds like a pretty good pitcher to me.  But not necessarily a Hall-of-Famer.  Realistically, given how well Clemens pitched over the remainder of his career, and given he developed his devastating splitter later in his career to off-set a decline in his other pitches, Clemens certainly would have reached 260 wins with ease had he pitched until 40 year old.  290-300 was also quite possible. 

275 wins means Hall-of-Fame.  Not the guy that some have called the greatest pitcher of the modern era, but still damn good.

Why is it then, that the media and fans alike have treated the two so differently over the years, even though they basically are each other’s hitter/pitcher parallel? 

Undoubtedly Bonds must own up and share some of the blame for being generally so repugnant as a human being, but lest we forget, Roger Clemens used to have issues with carrying his own bags, was accused of being a fat, lazy bum, and allegedly wouldn’t sign autographs for kids unless they paid for it (this is not necessarily true, but it has been said amongst fans, and was held against Clemens in the Boston area for years). 

Dan Shaughnessy summed things up well last May for the Boston Globe when Clemens signed with the Yankees once again. 

So why is there such a difference in the way we view these two legends? 

Take a look in the mirror.