Weekly Sporties

-You would think the news that a group of umpires had huddled and reversed call for the first time in the history of the World Series would be the biggest story to come out of Thursday's Game 1, but the fact that they got the call right and everyone outside of St. Louis' dugout could see that (manager Mike Matheny's argument against the reversal appeared to begin and end at, "Yeah, but I liked it better when you guys got it wrong") essentially assured the story didn't have much legs. What everyone was talking about instead was a Tweet from a Cardinals minor league pitcher named Tyler Melling, who sent out a screen-grab of that night's telecast in which Red Sox pitcher Jon Lester was seen tapping a discolored spot on his glove before a pitch along with a message wondered if the lefty was using Vaseline on the ball. Apparently is is rather common for pitcher to swap pine tar for Vaseline once the weather gets cold because both substances are thought to give the pitcher better grip and thus more control. Lester said that while he understood why Melling might think it looked suspicious the substance he saw was actually rosin, which is a drying agent and is totally legal. But what I found the most interesting was the reaction from the rest of the baseball world, who seem to have accepted this with a shrug of indifference. In fact, many hitters who spoke on the issue later said they hoped Lester was putting something like Vaseline on the ball because new baseball are very slick and Lester routinely throws in the 90s, so anything which would give him a better control in the cold weather and reduced the chances of a pitch slipping and catching a batter in the head is fine with them - they are willing to swap a strike out for not getting their eye knocked out of its socket. (Analyst John Kruk went a step further and said he thinks baseball needs start allowing people to put Vaseline on the ball and the only reason they don't is because too many people have seen "Major League" and think putting anything on the ball is cheating, when that clearly isn't the case.) In fact the one who appears to be catching the most grief for this is Melling. Apparently this is another one of those famous unwritten rules of baseball - it's not cheating if we all do it, so no one talk about it (and baseball wonders why it had a steroid problem). I think it speaks volumes that Melling's Tweet has since been deleted, most likely because someone in the organization told him to. This has been and always will be the problem with unwritten rules - there is no way to know if you are breaking one until it is too late.

-Normally a manager who has guided his team to the National League Championship Series can expect to have a fair amount of job security. However, that is not the case for Los Angeles Dodgers manager Don Mattingly. Mattingly's contract was set to expire after this season but winning the first round of the playoffs automatically triggered a one-year extension clause and now Mattingly wants to sit down with the Dodgers and hammer out a long-term contract. The problem is that due to some questionable decisions he made during the playoffs as well as the fact that the Dodgers got off to such a slow start to this season there was a rumor Mattingly was going to be fired in June, Dodgers' management doesn't seem in any particular hurry to commit to him long-term. This resulted in one of the more awkward press conferences I have ever seen this week as Mattingly and Dodgers GM Ned Colletti were sitting at the same table but still as far away from one another as possible. Colletti's position is that Mattingly has a contract and that should be good enough, but I am totally with Donny Baseball on this one. First off, the team has been spending money like water so they can't exactly claim funding is an issue at this point. But more importantly than that, not having long-term security kills any authority a manager may have with his players, because those guys will figure they can go right to the GM with any complaints since there could be a coaching change at any moment. And if there is anything we have learned from the Red Sox turnaround this season it is that having a manager the players respect makes a world of difference. That is why I am making what could seem like a radical suggestion for the Dodgers - they need to fire Don Mattingly. Look, it is pretty clear from their lack of enthusiasm about him that they don't really want him to manage their team anymore. If that is the case they may as well just get it over with now because if the team gets off to a slow start he's going to get fired anyway, so why prolong the inevitable? A couple weeks ago I told you how crazy and disorganized the Philadelphia Flyers looked for firing their coach 3 games into the season and firing Mattingly 20 games into next season would be just as useless. Either give him an extension beyond next season or bring in the guy who you think should be running the team in 2015. Leaving him to play out the season next year is just a waste of time and baseball takes long enough as it is.

-Even for a sport like football in which injuries are accepted as the cost of doing business, last weekend's NFL injury report was especially brutal. There were many long-term or season-ending injuries, even a couple which could end up costing guys their careers. And while St. Louis Rams' quarterback Sam Bradford is likely to recover from the torn ACL he suffered last week there are question if he will ever play for the Rams again. Bradford was the last of the big-money first overall picks and has yet to justify being one of the highest-paid quarterbacks in football, so cutting him and starting over with a cheaper alternative could be the best course of action for the Rams. But before they get to that the Rams need to get through the rest of this season, one in which they are still in the thick of the wildcard hunt. Obviously this week they will play the quarterbacks they already have on their roster, but if they honestly thought guys like Kellen Clemens gave them the best chance to win he would have started over Bradford. That lack of faith lead to a report this week which claims that the Rams reached out to Brett Favre's agent and wondered if their client would be interested in coming out of retirement. I would have expected this to be a slam dunk considering that just a couple of weeks ago that same agent was telling anyone who would listen Favre could suit up for the NFL and still be effective, plus as the ultimate "run-and-gun" quarterback he would be well-suited for this kind of situation in which he was just asked to sling the ball all over the field and not worry about learning the system. That is why, even though he is 44 and hasn't played in the NFL since 2010, I am kind of surprised Brett turned the offer down. But, what this phone call is really about is the lack of better, younger options. For all the talk that quarterbacks are more ready than ever to play in the NFL coming out of college, GMs and scouts would rather take on proven commodities rather than take a chance on a guy like Matt Leinart or Vince Young, who never had the career of a guy like Favre but also come with less wear-and-tear on the tires. If I were a young team like the Rams I certainly would be more inclined to have those guys in for a try-out before I called someone who is closer to their Hall of Fame induction ceremony than the last time they put on pads. Then again, maybe the Rams were just fishing for some free Wranglers.

-Unlike many Celtic bandwagon fans who will disappear into the night and not return until the team has a team ready to compete for a championship, I am actually looking forward to seeing how the Celtics rebuilding project goes this year. I think the team will surprise a lot of people with how well they play and it could be very entertaining. Still, I have to admit that this season I am going to miss the big regular season games. So much of the NBA season is a slow grind filled with games against teams who are on cruise control that those random statement games against the Miami Heat on a cold March night were special. While I think those games could still be surprisingly competitive this season they certainly won't carry the same weight as they did over the last few season. Instead, all that Heat hatred has gone down to Brooklyn with Kevin Garnett and Paul Pierce. In fact, both sides have wasted little time in introducing the Net fans to the rivalry when LeBron James said that Pierce, Garnett and former coach Doc Rivers owe Ray Allen an apology for all the things they said about him when he left Boston for Miami. James thinks those statements were rather hypocritical considering how things have worked out and on the surface I would tend to agree with him. I though the way Garnett claimed he had lost Allen's cellphone number was petty and I never joined the (small) chorus of fans who labeled Allen as a traitor, mostly because I remembered that the NBA is a business and Allen saw a chance to compete for a championship on a team which would not ask him to play major minutes in a state with no income tax. Any impartial observer would have to admit they would have done the same thing in his position. However, what James fails to realize is that Pierce and Garnett's circumstances were different from Allen's. They thought the Celtics had one last run in them and felt that by joining the Heat, the team which had just beat them in the playoffs, Ray had turned his back on them. Had he signed with any other team the anger would have subsided very quickly. Also, it is one thing to leave via free agency versus the two of them being traded to New Jersey, which only happened because GM Danny Ainge was determined to not let this roster decay before his very eyes. Besides, James has a rather large decision regarding his own "Big 3" coming up after this season, so maybe he should wait a year and see if the view is any different before telling others what they should be doing. We all know the fans of Cleveland could offer some pretty loud opinions about his level of loyalty if he asked them.

-It took almost two years, but this week the NCAA finally concluded its investigation in the Miami Hurricanes program, which was alleged to have allowed former booster Nevin Shapiro to run wild, showering recruits and players with money and gifts. For its part Miami was willing to admit they had some rather large problems in their athletic department and imposed a two-year bowl ban on itself (conveniently the team was not in consideration for a major bowl in either season). Well, after an exhaustive examination of the program the NCAA concluded Miami was guilty and handed down their punishment - for the next three years the football team will lose nine scholarships and the basketball team will lose three. Additionally the former basketball coach will be suspended from his new job at Missouri for five games and another assistant coach was hit with a two-year "show cause" penalty, meaning any school which wants to hire him must get NCAA approval. All across college athletics this announcement was met with a collective, "That's it?" There is a pretty substantial amount of evidence that Miami was guilty of everything they were accused of, so many people thought the NCAA would drop the hammer on them. The problem with that theory is that during the investigation we learned that many members of the NCAA team had engaged in practices which were just as shady (if not worse) than anything Miami was accused of doing. NCAA investigators reportedly paid Shapiro's former attorney for access to his files, then turned Shapiro into a snitch and wrote a letter asking the judge to grant him leniency so he could continue to tell them all the things he had done as a booster. Not only did the NCAA blur a lot of ethical lines here, they flat-out erased some. That is why for all the people who think Miami got off lightly, there are just as many people who are surprised they got penalized at all. To me this is very familiar to the NCAA's slap on the wrist to Texas A&M quarterback Johnny Manziel, who was suspended for the first half of a game against Rice for allegedly getting paid to sign memorabilia for a collector. After making a big stink about Manziel for weeks the NCAA was lucky to get him to agree to any suspension at all and after declaring the Hurricane program crooked for two years NCAA officials would likely admit they dodged a bullet when Miami announced they didn't plan to appeal the ruling. You know I like to give the NCAA crap and this is just another nail in their coffin. They are only around to keep these programs in line and increasingly they can't even accomplish that, so I have to wonder why they continue to exist. I guarantee you I am not the only one who wonder this.

-Even though golf's new wrap-around format for their regular season started two weeks ago, most of the big-name golfers won't be teeing it up until 2014 unless they are playing in an event run by one of their major sponsors. That means the golf writers can take a couple weeks off and mail in a few of the easiest columns of the year - the final season grades. Every sport has these, in which the writers hand out As through Fs depending on how they thought a player's year went and what is especially nice for the writers is the entire thing is subjective, so no one ever questions what grade they give. All they have to do is not say anything too controversial and it will be the easiest 1,000 words they have ever turned in. Too bad no one told player-turned-Golf-Channel-analyst Brandel Chamblee that one simple rule because a couple weeks ago he wrote his "Final Season Grade" column and in it he gave Tiger Woods an F. If it seems strange to give a guy who won 5 times and was named Player of the Year an F, that is because it is. Chamblee's logic was that all Tiger's victories should be invalid because he has several questionable rules violations during the year. Basically, Chamblee was calling Woods a cheater, which is the worst thing you can call a golfer because golf is the only sport where players are expected to police themselves and call their own penalties. Now, I paid no mind to this because Chamblee is the Golf Channel's version of that guy at work who has lived in Boston his entire life but roots for the Yankees just to be difficult. He acts like zinging Tiger is his job, so I just assume this was another attempt by him to poke at Woods. However, Tiger's agent didn't quite see it as that innocent and raised the possibly of suing Chamblee for libel. Later this was softened to a rumor Tiger would just boycott the Golf Channel going forward (not surprisingly, Chamblee eventually apologized). To me either action would be a serious misstep for Woods. After years of his reputation taking a beating due to his off-course issues, Woods finally appears to be back on the right path in the minds of most casual golf fans. He's even started to let down some of the walls he had built up by allowing cameras to capture him laughing with his kids and new girlfriend. Suing an analyst for saying mean things about him or boycotting the place most golfers turn for their news would undo all that progress and make Woods look like the ultimate thin-skinned baby, not to mention give Chamblee more attention (which is probably what he was hoping to accomplish with all this anyway). He certainly has spent more time defending his column than he had to spend writing it.

-Few sports institutions have the reputation of Texas high school football. There are some who would contend playing high school football in the state of Texas is tougher than certain college conferences and when you hear stats such as 10 of the 32 quarterbacks who started in the NFL last week played high school football in the Lone Star State it is kind of hard to argue with them. That being said, they aren't all football factories. The law of averages says there is always going to be one program which just can't compete with the rest thanks to lack of funding, poor coaching or the fact they won't reconfigure town lines to get certain players on their roster and when they run into the programs that have those things it is going to get ugly. One such meeting took place last weekend when powerhouse Aledo took on Fort Worth Western Hills and ended up beating them by a score of 91-0. Reportedly Aledo did all they could to not run up the score too much, taking starters out by the third quarter and running the ball as much as possible to keep the clock moving, but there is only so much you can do when there is such a wide talent gap. That really should have been the end of it, but then some parents from FWWH filed a formal complaint against the Aledo coaching staff, accusing them of bullying. Because bullying is such a hot-button issue in schools right now there is a rule in place which mandates all claims of bullying must be investigated with a formal hearing, so the Aledo coaches were called before their school committee and defend their actions (they were quickly cleared). Look, as a terrible athlete I know how much the feeling of staring down a superior opponent and knowing that no matter how hard you play there is not going to be anything you can do to win sucks. After a while you're just hoping the massacre doesn't get too out of hand. I would often feel embarrassed in these situations but do you know what I never felt? Bullied. I was the one who volunteered to play these sports despite knowing I was not good at them and fully aware of what could happen. I'm sure these parents think they are just protecting their children but they are doing them more harm than good because they will never be able to stand up for themselves if their parents keep interfering. To me this complaint is just another sign of parents who cannot accept that maybe their kids aren't awesome at everything. Bullying is a serious issue and I'm glad a rule demanding allegations of it be investigated is in place but not if it is going to be abused by parents as a way to cover up the real issue, which is that they won't admit that maybe little Johnny won't make the NFL anytime soon.