Weekly Sporties

-The Red Sox season of turmoil continued this week when Yahoo Sports had a report that several prominent members of the team, including Adrian Gonzalez and Dustin Pedroia, had a heated conversation with Red Sox ownership at the end of July concerning manager Bobby Valentine. Since the report came out Sox management has denounced it, calling the report both exaggerated and inaccurate. Red Sox CEO Larry Lucchino gave an interview a couple days later where he emphatically said that Valentine would finish the season as manager. If you think about it, that isn't really much of an endorsement. I mean, of course Valentine will finish the season. You could easily argue that there is no point in firing him now. It is not like the Red Sox are going to suddenly have a fire lit under them and go on a run to the playoffs. Frankly, they are too far back in the wild card chase to bother making a change. Still, I think the way Lucchino phrased his endorsement makes it pretty clear that Valentine will not be back next year. It sounds like he has lost the locker room and you can't replace all the players as easily as you can one manager. With that in mind I actually go the other way and think the Sox should just fire him now and get it over with. Not only will this clear the air in the locker room, it will also turn the fans' focus back on the players, which may be a good thing for ownership. They don't have much cache thanks to last September's collapse, so a couple months of making them sweat couldn't be the worst thing heading into the offseason. Either way, I think it is pretty clear the team is looking forward to 2013. The goods news is that next year has no where to go but up.

-For years I have been screaming that baseball needs to expand instant replay. I don't want it in place for all balls and strikes because that would take far too long, but they at least need to implement it for outs and foul balls. I mean, it is one thing for an umpire to make the occasional mistake, but this year has been full of blunders which have shown that Major League Baseball has a serious problem on their hands. Mercifully, late in the week came word that they will expand replay... maybe. Two separate systems are being installed at the Yankees and Mets' ballparks which will determine whether or not balls down the line land in fair or foul territory. One works in a similar fashion to the flight camera used in golf and the other is like the system used down the lines in professional tennis. While they won't be used to correct any bad calls this year the data collected will help determine how accurate they are, which system is better and how fast the replay can be called up. (God forbid a 4 hour baseball game last 4 hours and 5 minutes with all the calls being correct.) The data will then be analysed and voted on at the owners' meetings in November. If that seems like kind of a long process, that is because it is. Most sports see a wrong which needs to be corrected and they fix it (hell, hockey will create a rule between games of a playoff series), but baseball was never much for rash decisions (at least about important stuff). Frankly, the fact that it took them this long to get to this point is practically criminal. However, I'm going to file this under "better late than never" and hope the owners don't screw this up by voting against it at their meetings because if they don't do it this time who knows how long it will take for the issue to come up again.

-Of course, I may be giving MLB too much credit in assuming they would get replay right to begin with, because they haven't shown they can get the policies which have been in place for years to operate correctly. A couple days ago San Francisco Giants outfielder Melky Cabrera was suspended 50 games for testing positives for performance enhancing drugs. While one or two guys popping positive every year shouldn't be seen as a larger issue, Victor Conte, whose BALCO lab was at the center of the Barry Bonds steroid allegations and was found to supply drugs to sprinters like Marion Jones, has said that the number of guys who are cheating the system is far greater. Despite MLB's claims that baseball has a very good testing policy, Conte estimates close to 50% of MLB players are on some kind of steroids and just haven't been caught. Now, you could easily point out that Conte is essentially a drug dealer and a scumbag. However, what is abundantly clear from his years of testimony is that he is not a liar. Much like Jose Canseco, people may not want to listen to him because they think he has an agenda (and he does), but they can't deny that Conte has been right about steroids a hell of a lot more than people whose job it to investigate this kind of thing. Considering baseball still hasn't figured out how to treat the statistics from last group of confirmed steroid users the last thing they need is another generation of stats that the average fan thinks are inflated. The only people who can be pleased with this report are confirmed steroid users, because it might be the only thing which ever gets them into the Hall of Fame.

-One of the funnier "controversies" to come out of Cabrera's positive drug test is the question of what to do about home field in the World Series. As you probably know, a few years ago MLB put in a policy stating that whichever league won the All-Star game would get home-field advantage for the fall classic. The thought was that after years of going through the motions, players and managers might take the event a little more seriously if they thought they had a legitimate prize at the end. At the time it was panned because of the concern that a player from a teams which had no shot at the playoffs could determine a fairly important factor, especially given the way American League teams use their DHs. But, baseball quickly pushed ahead as they always do with bad ideas and while people complained, they eventually accepted it. However, this year Cabrera was the MVP of the game, which was won by the National League 8-0. Some people have questioned whether this means the American League should be given home-field instead. First of all, this is the kind of thing you have days to debate when you play 162 games in a season, half of which don't mean much in the grand scheme of things. And while I happen to think you should given home-field advantage to the team with the most wins (make all those games they slogged through actually count for something), I don't think one guy testing positive for steroids in an All-Star game means you should automatically reverse the decision. After all, it wasn't like the National League won by one run in extra innings on a Cabrera homerun. They won because Justin Verlander barely made it out of the first inning and even though the Detroit Tigers probably won't make the playoffs, in MLB's eyes that is seen as a perfectly legitimate reason to give the National League home field, steroids or not.

-Just last week I mentioned that Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt wanted to try and make the jump to the Premier League to play for Manchester United. At the time I said Olympians should stay in their lane (so to speak) and if they need that kind of attention all the time they should take up sports where people care for more than two weeks every four years. So, you probably expect me to blast the Patriots for sign US 4 x 100 meter silver medalist Jeff Demps to a contract on Friday, except I won't. The difference is that Demps was a football player who just happened to be fast enough to run track, not the other way around. Demps played tailback at Florida and left the school as the 8th leading rusher in Gator history. As much as I like to poke Florida fans about Tim Tebow, there is no denying the program has produced some studs in their time, so that is no small feat. Demps probably would have been drafted last April, but told teams he wanted to focus on training for the Olympics and if there is one thing NFL coaches hate it is people with interests outside of football. I actually love this signing for the Patriots because they could use a boost in the return game and despite what guys like Chris Johnson say, Demps will probably be the fastest guy on the field from day 1. The saying in basketball is that you can't teach height. Well, in football you can't teach speed, you can only point it in the right direction. Demps is a fast football player who just happened to be good enough to run track. Bolt is a sprinter who dabbles in soccer. There is a big difference, which is why Demps has an NFL contract and Bolt is still waiting for that Manchester United try-out.

-Golf has a long history of gimmicky events, from celebrity pro-ams to tournaments which mess with the scoring system just to be different. So when it was announced that Tiger Woods would face world #1 Rory McIlroy in a one-on-one match-up in China at the end of October, many people dismissed it as nothing but PR. I tend to agree. With no real stakes this is nothing but a way to sell more advertising space and get publicity for Nike, Titleist and whatever investment firm is sponsoring the event while adding another zero on to each player's already sizable bank account balance. But, you know what else? I don't care. As soon as Rory won his second major last week the golf world started calling for Tiger vs Rory at the upcoming Ryder Cup. Due to the fact that the respective captains have to submit their line-ups independent of one another, the odds are fairly slim we would actually get to see that. One of the reasons people love events like the Ryder and President's Cups is that we see guys compete against one another instead of the golf course. It is closer to the kind of competitions most people are used to. It won't really tell us who the better golfer is, just the better golfer that day, but I'm still going to be very interested to see how Rory does one-on-one with Tiger under the spotlight. So, while this won't carry the importance of a Ryder Cup and the two golfers will probably be more friendly than combative, this is about as close to a duel as we will see between them unless they are paired together on the last day of a major with no one else within shouting distance. Given how Tiger has been performing at Majors lately that is unlikely to happen, so we'll just have to take what we can get.

-Before the preseason coaches poll for college football came out, USC head coach Lane Kiffin said he wouldn't vote for USC because he didn't think it was right to vote for your own team. However, Kiffin had to remove his foot from his mouth when a report in USA Today revealed that on his ballot he had done exactly that. A couple days later, Kiffin resigned his vote. (Didn't matter, as USC was the preseason #1 anyway.) Once again, sports proves it is never the crime, it is the cover-up which does you in. Personally, I don't see anything wrong with voting for your own team as #1. If you don't believe you are the best team in the land than why should anyone else? Honestly, any coach who doesn't vote for themselves should probably be fired. But secondly, I actually believe Kiffin when he said he wouldn't do that because there is an above-average chance he didn't fill out his own ballot. The coaches' poll has an inglorious history, full of stories which contend most times the ballot is actually filled out by some intern in the sports information department because the coach doesn't have time to pay attention to how other teams are playing. It is entirely possible Kiffin wouldn't vote for his own team but didn't tell whomever was actually filling out his ballot that and had no idea what teams were in what order, which makes the fact that it is used to determine part of the BCS match-up all the more insane. The good news is that we only have two more years of this before the BCS is done away with and we have a playoff system to determine the best college football teams in the land. I just hope once that happens they can find the interns some different work to do.