A big part of getting good seats at baseball games is the feel of being near the field, a better chance for a foul ball, and being on television. When I worked at Wrigley Field in the seats closest to the field, my grandmother used to look out for me in the stands. She said she always knew I was at work because she could see me a couple of times a game.
This is particularly true in New York at Yankee Stadium. With the $2,500 per seat tickets and the “need” to be seen by the movers, shakers and mover and shaker wannabes, getting on television is the ultimate “all publicity is good publicity” moment.
But not for Andrew Rector. He was filmed sleeping in the stands during an April Yankees – Red Sox game and has caught some grief from the announcers. Instead of taking it like a man and laughing at the whole incident, this meathead has of course filed suit. Rector filed a defamation lawsuit in New York against ESPN, John Kruk, Dan Shulman and MLB Advanced Media for showing him slumped in his chair, eyes closed and mouth open during the April 13 broadcast. Since the television networks have lots of money, this loser is of course seeking $10 million in damages, according to Courthouse News Service.
The compliant says “in the course of watching the game, plaintiff napped and this opened an unending verbal cascade against the napping plaintiff.” It continues that game commentators made fun of Rector while the camera showed him sleeping, using such words as “‘stupor, fatty, unintelligent and stupid’ knowing and intending the same to be heard and listened to by millions of people all over the world, including people who know the plaintiff or interacted with the plaintiff in person.”
Hey Andrew – get over it. There have been lots of people who were witnessed falling over falls after foul balls, What about the guy who crashed off of the ski jump on the intro to ABC’s Wide World of Sports all those years? He became a lasting image and he even enjoyed his infamy/ But not you Andrew. You took umbrance (which I guess is par for the course considering that everyone in this country seems to be 1 second from being pissed off about something), and instead of letting the situation blow over (like the famous Steve Bartman whose perfectly reasonable attempt to catch a foul ball changed his life), you have to sue.
I personally hope that the judge has a good laugh and takes 30 seconds to throw this preposterous litigation out of court.

Other than the asinine rulings of the Supreme Court this week, the most depressing thing about life in this country was the $100 million earned by Michael Bay’s latest piece of cinematic excrement: “ Transformers: Age of Extinction.” Despite replacing current celebrity magazine bad boy Shea LaBeouf for Mark Wahlberg, I have already heard about Bay’s usual incomprensible plot, lack of realistic human characters, and filling the screen with more CGI effects than the mind can comprehend without exploding.
Don’t young adults have anything better to do than give the world’s worst director an excuse to make another crappy movie by giving him $100 million? With the general improvement in storytelling on televisions series, one would think that people would demand better from their films.
I love genre pictures as much as anyone: Godzilla, well done comic book films, James Bond, have always been personal favorites, but I think I’d have to be Malcolm McDowell in “A Clockwork Orange” – strapped in a chair with my eyelids held open and someone putting drops in my eyes to keep them moist – for me to waste my precious time (almost three hours! – seriously?) watching this crap.

As I write this, the USA Soccer Team is about to play Belgium in an elimination game at the World Cup. While I was on vacation, I did watch a few minutes of the US – Portugal match match, and I must admit that it was exciting with lots of scoring opportunities at both ends of the pitch, but in my experience, this was a rarity. Most of the play is in the middle of the field; with chances as commonplace as intelligent thinking in the GOP.
Yes, the World Cup brings together the very best soccer players in the world, and one would expect the very best play in the world. And the decades of playing soccer has many Americans sincerely “into” the World Cup. Many thousands of spectators are at Soldier Field and elsewhere watching this elimination match. Some stupid restaurant owners are refusing to serve “Belgium” waffles (not Belgian waffles, which again shows how dumb they are).
But I’m not among them. I have many thousands of things that I would rather do than watch a soccer match. Even the World Cup.

Who knew that LeBron James would taking losing the NBA Championship to the San Antonio Spurs so hard? So hard that he has opted out of the remaining years on his Miami Heat contract to become a free agent, setting up “The Decision, Part 2.” Of course, the first “Decision” and television show to announce his leaving Cleveland for South Beach was a PR disaster, not just in Ohio, but nearly everywhere outside of Florida hated James with a passion. So, is this just a plot to get Heat GM Pat Riley to get more help or a legitimate opportunity for other teams to get a shot at James.
Moreover, fellow Three Amigo Dewayne Wade also opted out of the rest of his contract, leaving the lesser piece of the group, Chris Bosh the only one so far who has not opted out of his contract. Why Wade, who is much closer to the end of his career would opt out is obvious: this is his last contract and he left money on the table with the Big Three signed six years ago. With kids to support, a new wife, and a severely insane ex-wife, Wade probably needs to maximize his earnings sooner rather than later.
The biggest non-LeBron news was Carmelo Anthony also opting out of his contract with the Knicks, and while James may be the better player, there seems to be more interest in Anthony. He is visiting the bulls today, Houston later in the week, with more stops of Anthony’s itinerary than an NBA team schedule.
And all of this player news does not even call into account the story of Bulls’ guard and fromer MVP Derrick Rose. Will he play or won’t he? Is he now too brittle for the game? So far this week, word has come out that he may not play for the USA National Team this summer as had been advertized. He is becomming more of an enigma than almost any other player.
Finally, the Brooklyn Nets appear to be imploding. Earlier this week, the Nets apparently swapped head coach Jason Kidd to the Milwaukee Bucks in exchange for two second-round picks, The trade leaves a lot of questions – why did Kidd want out of Brooklyn, a layoff team last year, to go to a lottery team with some young talent and no idea whether these kids can combine to be a good team. Was it a power struggle? No one is talking openly.
However it appears that Brooklyn’s problems aren’t limited to office politics and power struggles. There have been reports that the Nets may have lost over $100 million last season as a result of owner Mikhail Prokhorov and general manager Billy King’s careless spending and neglect of the league’s luxury tax which has led to the massive loss.
Of course in light of the colossal overpayment of the Clippers, what would a New York team be worth now, so the Russian billionaire probably doesn’t care about the loss, but with a very old team on the court, one has to wonder about the stability of the franchise?
For a former NBA fan like myself, I have to say that even I’m curious what is going to happen.

Evilopinion is taking a week off. I’ll be back July 1st.

Rich people aren’t like normal people. For one thing, of course, they can buy almost anything they want. The people around them don’t dare tell them no. As a result, they believe that the entire world can’t rebuke them in any way, and today’s oligarchs really believe that they are above all law and rules of civility.
Daniel Snyder, owner of the NFL Washington franchise has been under mounting pressure over the past few months to get rid of the nickname “Redskins” because it is offensive to Native Americans. Fifty U.S. Senators sent him a letter asking him to change the name, but according to an SI.com column discussing an interview conducted by human slug Jim Rome with NBC Sunday Night Football announcer Al Michaels, Snyder has said that he will change the name “over his dead body.”
The United States government may have him thinking that a death sentence is coming: the U.S. Patent Office has canceled trademarks belonging to the Redskins football team, saying they are offensive to Native Americans in response to a suit brought by five Native Americans. In a decision released today, the office’s Trademark Trial and Appeal Board ruled that “these registrations must be canceled because they were disparaging to Native Americans.” The Patent Office said it will continue to treat the patents as valid while the team appeals the decision. There is a two month deadline to do that, but honestly, with lawsuits and appeals, the whole process could take years.
The decision, if upheld, would make it harder for the team to claim ownership of its brand. For example, if the team sues a counterfeiter making T-shirts with the team’s logo, the team would have to illustrate that they have always used the logos, rather than relying on official trademark registrations.
I see the Fox News crowd now – “Obama is forcing a (white) business owner to change the team’s name.” The “tyrant” is forcing political correctness on the rest of the country. Of course, most of these people have been blaming the president for everything that goes wrong in their lives and the world: hurricanes, tidal waves, the price of gas, dog crap on the sidewalk. In the same interview on Jim Rome’s Showtime program, Michaels said that he didn’t understand the problems:
“I mean all of a sudden — I mean, for 70-some odd years this was a zero issue, and then it became an issue. I understand we live in this politically correct environment. It’s crazier than ever; you know, senators want to weigh in on this, like there’s nothing better to do in Congress. This becomes a big issue. I mean, I just think it’s nuts,” Michaels said.
Well, let me say that Al Michaels is either oblivious or disingenuous – I have read and heard Native Americans complain about the nickname for decades, as long as there have been calls for the end of Chief Knock-A-Homer in Atlanta, Chief Wahoo in Cleveland, or Chief Illiniwek at the University of Illinois. These mascots have either been severely toned down or completely eliminated. The calls have intensified in light of the Donald Sterling incident, but that doesn’t mean that it has just suddenly appeared.
The Native Indian population has suffered so much (and continues to contend with poverty, lost land, drug and alcohol abuse, and substandard education and job opportunities), they have a right to not want to be insulted on a regular basis. I know that I wouldn’t be very happy with a team named the “Nashville N***gers.”
To Dan Snyder and Al Michaels, how would you feel about the Washington Whiteys? Or the “Washington Honkies?” Perhaps if Snyder really wants to make the team his in name also, perhaps they can be the “Washington Spoiled Rich Arrogant Bastards?”

Don’t get me wrong, the Kings deserve the Stanley Cup. they defeated my Blackhawks in the Western Conference Finals and stomped the Rangers in the finals. What I mean is that the City of Los Angeles does not deserve the Cup.
Yesterday, the City held it’s championship parade, and the crowd was estimated at 300,000. That’s 300,000 in a city of 3,904,657 according to Wikipedia. Wikipedia shows 16.4 million people in the urban area and 17,786,419 in the Combined Statistical Area. Let’s compare that to the Stanley Cup parade in Chicago last summer. The estimated crowd that day was over 2 million and for comparison, Wikipedia says that 2,718,782 people live in Chicago and 9,522,434 live in the metropolitan area.
Chicago has 58.1% of the metro population of Los Angeles, but for our parade, 21.0% of the population of the entire metro area were at the parade (not to mention how many people like myself were able to see the parade from work). Using the metro area figure to be consistent, 1.8% of the population of the Los Angeles area attended the Kings parade.
Since weather is generally not a factor (and it appeared to be another sunny day in LA yesterday), the standard argument is that the sports fans in LA have other things to do. Like what? The Lakers are a pale shadow of their glory teams; the Clippers have Donald Sterling, and they were eliminated last month. The baseball season is nearly at the half way point, and while both local teams are in contention, there are still months of baseball left to play. The Dodgers are 37-34, 6 1/2 games behind their hated enemies, the Giants. The Angels are 37-32 and 5 games behind Oakland. Let’s not forget that LA has not NFL team.
So, what better things do the “fans” of the Kings have to do? Here in Chicago, we are sports fanatics; last night, an estimated 100,000 people gathered in Grant P{ark to watch the USA-Ghana World Cup soccer match. I was talking with some co-workers and we agreed that we could get 300,000 people to show up just by announcing that the Hawks’ Jonathan Toews and Patrick Kane were signing autographs.
But LA isn’t a hockey town you say? Well, they certainly are now, with two championships in three years. They are young and talented and should be good for a long time to come (much like my Blackhawks). Yes, Chicago is an Original Six city with decades of history in the NHL. Los Angeles has Wayne Gretzky, Rogie Vashon andother than these two championships, not much else. But winning is supposed to solve all of that. In a city filled with all of the vapid celebrities and those that want to be celebrities and those who chase and want to be celebrities, winning should have Jack Nicholson in the front row and every star in the vacinity waiting to be photographed at the games, and celebrating championships.