Ah, the smell of the fresh cut crack of the bat

Well, baseball is back just in time. My bracket sucked,and the seven months of NBA/NHL playoffs are about to start dominating sportscenter, so thank God baseball is here. Forget for a minute that ESPN realized that the Sunday Night Baseball* team was horrible and then thought to themselves "Hmmm, how can we make this more horrible?...I know, Steve Phillips!" Let's just focus on the good things, like Johan Santana at one o'clock today and Ricky Nolasco hopefully coming through for 3 different fantasy teams of mine.

*I think maybe I'll use a Pozterisk** here to mention that I no longer believe a word Joe Morgan says. He can be talking about anything and I just think "No, he totally made that up. He pulled that out of his ass. This guy's an idiot." Like he said that Chase Utley had trouble on breaking balls last year due to his nagging hip injury, and I thought "No. He made that up. Even if that's true, there's no way in hell Joe Morgan knows that." And Jon Miller's lengthy explanations of OPS in the first inning were just downright insulting. Thankyou so much, Jon, for explaining that, but there's really no need as I have been sentient for the last 10 years.

**Read some of this guy's posts to understand.

Anyway, let's get some predictions going for the baseball season. I was pretty terrible at this last year, but I've got a good feeling this time around:



AL
EAST: Red Sox. Fuck this team and their racist mongoloid fans.
CENTRAL: Indians. The Twins were a fluke, the White Sox are old, the Tigers have meh pitching, the Royals suck. Therefore, the mediocre Indians win a mediocre division.
WEST: A's. Fuck it why not. The Angels let Teixeira walk and thus have a shitty offense. Lackey, E. Santana, and Escobar are hurt at the moment. I'm going out on a limb and saying that the A's young pitching comes through and the Holliday-Giambi-Cust combo is enough.
WILD CARD: Rays. I will never pcik the Yankees, and though their rotation is awesome, I don't think their lineup is amazing, especially with Anabolex out. I think the Rays are all-around solid and that Matt Joyce will have a huge breakout year (just fucking with you LCT).

MVP: Grady Sizemore. Division winner, good player, Jeter black.
CY YOUNG: Jon Lester. If he's really good, the cancer* thing will push him over the top.
ROY: Matt Wieters seems to be some sort of combo of Johnny Bench and Jesus, so we'll go with him.

*Ok, so AIDS was the disease of the 90s and cancer has been the disease of the 2000s. What will be the disease of the next ten years? The leading contenders would probably be heavyweights like alzheimers and autism, but I can't help but root for an underdog like harlequin ichthyosis.



NL
EAST: The Mets of New York town. 4 awesome players + better bullpen - Willie Randolph + Daniel Murphy's unbridled intensity + Gary fucking Sheffield - Aaron Heilman - Scot Schoeneweis = who fucking knows, but I'm not picking the Philthies.
CENTRAL: Cubs. This is definitely the most obvious choice. Why do they even have this division any more?
WEST: Dodgers. Solid lineup, ok pitching. The D'Backs aren't bad and neither are the Giants somehow, but the Dodgers lineup is deep and Chad Billingsley will be awesome (I hope, for fantasy purposes).
WILD CARD: Phillies. Ugh. Braves have a good rotation, but the goddamn Phillies just will not go away.

MVP: Raul Ibanez. If it's not Pujols, it generally goes to the 4th or 5th best Phillie hitter.
CY YOUNG: Johan. The man, the legend.
ROY: Tommy Hanson. I think that's the Braves pitcher who will probably come up at some point. I don't really know. Who cares really? Ben Grieve once won one of these.

Ok, that is all.

The Week in Sports

We're gonna do this 'rithmetic style

Aaaah! Iz colder than Green Bay!

+

I iz good GM now please?

+

I iz in big big twubble

And it all = one of the best sports weeks in recent memory. I put up a Giants pic of the Super Bowl for Boyce's sake, but it's not really about the Giants winning so much as it is the Patriots losing that feels so good. Let's make fun of them and their fans as much as possible while it lasts.

Johan is a Met...

...fuck...yes!

Well, the terms of the deal are still foggy at this point. It looks like a 6 year extension at about $22 mil per year, on top of this year (with a 7 mil boost this year). All told that's seven years of Johan, and that's alright by me.

The more I think about this trade, the more I like it. For most of the offseason I was kind of against a trade for him, because it would essentially be gutting our farm system for the right to pay Santana $150 million. Now that it's done, and the Mets held on to F-Mart and Pelfrey, it really looks awesome. This 08 mets team has a great rotation, should have enough arms to put together a solid bullpen, and if MLB will let us use a three-man lineup (i.e. bat Reyes, Wright, and Beltran over and over again) we should be able to score enough runs.

"If I play my cards right, I can get siete platanos and a pot of sancocho for that young man"

Hey, Omar! Fuck your...er...eh, I'll let him off for a little while. I don't think Omar Minaya is a very good general manager, but his ability to make this Santana deal at least proves to me that he is not completely and utterly useless. He still made one really, really bad trade and signed Luis "the Gimp" Castillo to a 4-year deal. This team has some flaws at 2nd (although Gimp's decent OBP should save him this year), Catcher (fucking plumber), RF (Jew-hater) especially when lefties are pitching, and LF (b/c Old-Man Alou is guaranteed to break a hip at some point). Delgado better return to 06 form, and Jose can't shit the bed at the end of the season again. All that said, I like the Mets chances this year.

At least Omar got rid of most of the young guys in the organization, so Professor Willie won't get too confused.

Where's Mota?

Joe Buck: "Mets, Diamondbacks. Santana, Haren. Martinez, Webb. It's the NLCS, next on Fox."

Holy Fucking Shit!!!!

Johan is a Met!

Goodbye to Phil Humber, Carlos Gomez, Deolis Guerra, and Kevin Mulvey. I hope you all amount to nothing (sort of).

I'm a little torn, but generally pretty fucking excited about the 08 Mets.

Johan
Pedro
Ollie
Maine
El Duque/Pelfrey

That looks pretty good to me.

I Will have a more in-depth post about this later, and hopefully so will Boyce.