I had the opportunity to spend the last few days in Pittsburgh, and it is a nice little city. It’s very pretty, on the three rivers, with the bridges. Downtown is nice in spots, but it is spread out between nice places. It even has a very nice up-and coming restaurant/shopping district called South Side Works. I preface this blog to say that this is not a knock on Pittsburgh.
However, earlier this week, I got the chance to watch a game at PNC Park and it brought back to me a tough truth: a new ballpark in a small market only forestalls the inevitable: the team is doomed to move or contract, just 10-15 years later.
Tuesday night, I walked from my hotel across the Roberto Clemente bridge, past a huge statue of Willie Stargell, and went to the box office. I wanted one ticket, and got one, right behind home plate, 20 rows off the field for a very reasonable $27. I couldn’t have done that in Chicago: the Cubs are sold out until Armageddon, and you can’t get the really good seats for the White Sox – they’re owned by season ticket holders. Two cheeseburgers and a beer cost me $17.75 (again reasonable), and I got to my seat which was right behind the baseball scouts. Of course, there were more scouts than usual because in was July 29th, just two days before the non-waiver trade deadline (more about that later).
PNC is a beautiful little park that holds only 36,000 and has the oddities of one bullpen for both teams, and an odd corner down the left field line where seats jut out toward the field of play and can cause some odd bounced on doubles hit down the third base line. I watched the Colorado Rockies take an early 3-run lead in the first inning, but, to their credit, the Pirates came from behind, eventually winning the game 6-4 in front of an announced crowd of 17,507.
Honestly, it didn’t look like there were more than 15,000 in the park. Of course, the Pirates have one of the lowest payrolls in the majors; hasn’t won a World Series since 1979; haven’t been in the playoffs since the 1980s when a non-steroidal Barry Bonds and Andy Van Slyke patrolled the outfield in old Three Rivers Stadium.
Little did the few people at PNC know on Tuesday night that we were watching one of the last games of the Pirates’ best player Jason Bay. By Thursday, Bay, who ranks eighth on the All-Time Pirate home run list, would be part of a three-way trade, allowing the big market Dodgers to get the Red Sox former problem child Manny Ramirez; Bay going to the Red Sox and four minor leaguers coming to the Pirates.
Ramirez had finally burned all of his bridges in Boston; his wacky behavior that had been funny or eccentric before, had become more aggressive toward the team’s front office and the team was worried that Ramirez wasn’t hustling on the field anymore. In L.A., Joe Torre will have to deal with him.
As for Bay, I’m happy for him. After toiling in Pittsburgh for years, he will get a chance to be on a team in a pennant race and if he performs well, he will become beloved in front of the Fenway faithful.
The Pirates will get four youngsters that few will have heard of. The Pirates, never realistically in the pennant race almost from the start, 50-58 and 14½ games behind the big market Cubs, flew the official white flag, trading the team’s best and most identifiable player for four guys who won’t bring any more people to the team’s beautiful ballpark. And there is the problem – the Pirates can’t compete with the big market clubs, and end up developing young players who either leave for big bucks that the Bucs can’t match in free agency or the team trades them for more prospects. It’s a vicious cycle, and with the decline in the steel and manufacturing industries, perhaps Pittsburgh, history aside, isn’t big enough to support 82 home baseball games?
The whole area is Steeler crazy, and it is easier to attend 10 home games (2 exhibition and eight regular season games) than 82 expensive baseball games. Of course, the NFL has two things that major league baseball doesn’t: real revenue sharing, and a much more lucrative television package.
To my way of thinking, the only thing that would save the Pirates would be if someone ultra-rich, someone who could survive losing $5-10 million per year, owned the team. The team needs to sign a big money free agent to energize the fan base and bring people to the park; but how many people want to constantly lose money and can afford to
Which brings me back to the stadium: it’s beautiful, as every stadium since Camden Yards in Baltimore was built; but did the taxpayers of the area need to spend good money on it? The Pirates may be doomed, one of the franchises that was considered for contraction just a few years ago, but the stadium assures that the team will exist in Pittsburgh for another 10-20 years. Is that worthwhile – to spend millions of dollars of taxpayers money to temporarily keep a team in town for a few years? It’s like a patient in intensive care in a hospital: if the situation is terminal, how long do you keep the machines on?
It’s sad, and I feel for the area and the people of Pittsburgh, but the writing may be on the wall for the Pirates.

The Chicago White sox are my team, but they drive me crazy. This season, they have been in first place for over 110 days, but never without drama. This week, they won two of three from the Tigers in Detroit, but lost 3 of 4 from their nearest competitors, the Minnesota Twins. As of this writing, the Twins are ½ game behind the Pale Hose (and how does this team do it? They must have the smartest, more shrewd evaluators of baseball talent in the game, because, as another small market team like the Pirates, their best talent end up leaving town via free agency or trade, but the replacements fill in and become All Stars. Amazing!)
Anyway, before yesterday’s loss, the White Sox made the other big splash on trade deadline day – acquiring Ken Griffey, Jr. from Cincinnati. Junior of course signed the largest contract in the game when he “went home” to Cincinnati a decade ago, but injuries limited his playing time, and kept him from remaining at the pinnacle of baseball’s elite. Still, Griffey has over 600 home runs and a ticket to Cooperstown eventually.
I just want to say that I admire what Sox’ GM Ken Williams with the permission of owner Jerry Reinsdorf have done: go out at the trade deadline in an attempt to improve the club. Some of the trades have worked; others like the David Wells deal were disasterous. But, at least they are trying, which has not been an obvious trait among Chicago Sports team owners.

Speaking of doing all that a team can to win, the Blackhawks did something that may be almost as important as any on-the-ice moves they have made. The team hired Scotty Bowman as a special advisor to the team. Bowman, already inducted to the Hockey Hall of Fame, a man who has coached teams to nine Stanley Cups, was intrigued by the challenge of improving a young team, for a franchise that has the longest current streak without having won a Cup, 45 years. So, he left Detroit to work for their dreaded foes, the Blackhawks.
Of course, it doesn’t hurt that this gives Bowman a chance to work with his son, Stan, who is the team’s assistant general manager for hockey operations.
Whatever his reason for coming to Chicago, I like having Scotty Bowman’s hockey knowledge and acumen on our side instead of on Detroit’s.

Before we begin, let me apologize. It has been a hellacious week at work, and something had to suffer, so it was our little party. Hopefully, it will get better and I’ll be more regular.

Call me old-fashioned (happens all the time); call me a traditionalist but I remember a day when you checked ESPN News scroll at the bottom of the screen to find out what happened in games played that particular day. In those halcyon days of yore (say 5 years ago or so), you could go to the sports news channel and in a couple of minutes, you could find out the score of the game you were looking for.
Over time, it took longer to find your score as each game listed the winning pitcher, game winning hits, etc. Since I don’t have the time to be in a Fantasy League, I personally don’t much care about who did what in any particular game; I just want to know if the White Sox won or lost. I can get details of all of the games in a quaint little invention called the “newspaper” which is delivered to my house every day. If I need to know more immediately, I can pull out my computer and look on ESPN.com or SI.com or any of billions of other sites dedicated to sports. But the scroll has ballooned, now it is so big and takes so much time to go all the way around, you might as well pull out your computer or wait until tomorrow.
Case in point, yesterday, the Indignant Family and I spent most of the day at the zoo. The Indignant Daughter loves the zoo and we hadn’t been in a few weeks. So, I knew that the White Sox were going for a sweep in Detroit against the Tigers. I just wanted to know the score of the game. I didn’t need to know (at that time) who the pitchers were, or who homers or scored, I just wanted the score. I went upstairs to check (the family was using the downstairs set), and I turned on ESPN News. I saw the end of the National League scores. Ho-hum.
Then, it went to the WNBA scores and mini-box scores; then there was tennis; and the obligatory Brett Favre story. Fifteen minutes had elapsed and I didn’t even see the American League upcoming. The ESPN Newscasts are 30 minutes long, but the scroll was going to be longer than the show. This happens to me all the time.
I admit that part of this may be that I am unlucky. I seem to always be checking just as the final AL score is being posted, or smack dab in the middle of the NL, which comes after the AL alphabetically. But why does it take so long to scroll though the day’s sports news? I know that ESPN is headquartered in Bristol, Conn., which makes it one of the chief perpetrators of the New York/Boston “we’re the center of the universe” BS. But, here in the po-dunk Midwestern town known as Chicago, we have two baseball teams, both of which are in first place; you would think that we would get cycled? And, of course, you would have an easier time finding heterosexual men at the “Sex in the City movie than find hockey results on ESPN, which holds a grudge against the NHL despite the fact that the network refused to re-sign the NHL after the lockout.
Please ESPN news, take a page from Jack Webb on the old Dragnet radio and television shows: “Just the facts Ma’am, just the facts.”

I have long supposed that it was eventual that we would have a brawl in the WNBA, despite the “fairer sex” and all of that. Yes, there is much less testosterone flowing on the court, but when you have professional athletes, no matter what their gender, trying to win a game, competition often wins out. At first, I thought that this is just a bad old joke having the fight take place in Detroit. The city gets maligned (often correctly, sometimes wrongly) for being a violent place, and of course, the Palace was the location of the brawl between the Pistons and the Indiana Pacers; the famous “Ron Artest” brawl.
With five second remaining in the Los Angeles Sparks/Detroit Shock game, emotions that had been boiling for awhile erupted. Candace Parker, originally from Chicago before being the first pick in this year’s draft out of Tennessee, showed some anger and had to be restrained from Detroit’s Cheryl ford fouled her. On the next possession, Parker was entwined with Detroit’s Plenette Pierson, both players falling down. Reportedly, Pierson deliberately ran into Parker and a melee ensued.
On closer look at the incident, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised considering who was involved. Parker, Pierson, Ford and DeLisha Milton-Jones were ejected, with Ms. Milton Jones ejected for punching Shock assistant coach Rick Mahorn. Yes, the Rick Mahorn that was one of the keys of the “Bad Boys” Pistons of the 1990s. Mahorn gave more hard fouls than points scored or rebounds and helped turn what was a beautiful game into a war of attrition. And what merited Mahorn getting punched? Reportedly, Mahorn shoved Sparks star and future basketball Hall of Famer Lisa Leslie to the court in the fight.
What’s even funnier, who stood up for Mahorn as a “peacemaker” in the fight? His boss, Shock head coach Bill Laimbeer. Yes, Bill Laimbeer who was as instrumental in the Pistons brutality as Mahorn. It’s worse than the fox guarding the hen house; it’s like electing an oil man and expecting gas prices to fall.
So, it appears that the Detroit Shock are learning a lesson in basketball from two of the worst ambassadors the game has ever seen. I know that the ladies would hardly be a match for Mahorn and Laimbeer, but next time, I suggest hitting one or both of them with a chair. Michael Jordan, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and almost every player of the NBA during that time would pitch in an pay any fine they received.

Because it has always been a local program, it was big news in Chicago when it was announced today that Richard Roeper would no longer be on the long time movie review program “At the Movies with Ebert and Roeper.” Of course, the “star” of the show, Roger Ebert, has been off the air for a couple of years with cancer of the jaw and assorted complications, but Roeper has remained on the air. However, it should be noted that Roeper has never been a good reviewer, and him leaving the show has been about as important as changing the color of the chairs. (Ebert, it should be noted, is a long-time e-mail chat buddy of mine and a man I’ve run across many years at the Toronto Film Festival.)
When Gene Siskel died, several guest hosts sat in the opposite chair, and it was many people in the industry’s hope that they would find someone who would be Ebert’s equal in love of film, history, but able to keep a “down-to-earth” feel about the reviews. I like to read Pauline Kael and Dave Kehr, but a show with two erudite (see pompous), foreign movies only, type critics would turn everyone off including myself.
Instead, the people at Disney who own and produce the show, decided on Richard Roeper, a mediocre columnist with the Sun-Times, who had no knowledge of film, no appreciation of great film, and no pedigree other than the fact that he saw a movie or two. It has been said that Roeper was picked by Ebert so that Roger would be the “star;” the writer with the Pulitzer Prize paired with the yahoo, but Roeper had a DECENT “look” for television and I could see why the “suits” would like him. However, as a serious watcher of film, I had big problems: what Roeper knew about film could be fit into a thimble with enough room for a very large thumb. I continued to watch the show, but I called it “Fat Man and Little Boy” after the 1989 Paul Newman movie (and Ebert lost a great deal of weight, showing the punch line of the old joke is fitting: I can lose weight, but you will always be stupid.)
Now, Ebert says that he has cut all ties with the program. Ebert had never been able to come to agreement with the studio when his contract expired, so, the studio got rid of the “Thumbs Up or Down” that had been trademarked by Siskel and Ebert, and had no plans on bringing Ebert back to the show. Now, contract negotiations with Roeper have broken down. Is this the end of the show? I don’t know. Is there a place for a show of its kind? Yes, as long as “serious” movies get reviewed along with the studio “tentpoles” and as long as undue influence isn’t placed on the reviewers. Overall, however, Richard Roeper was a bad choice as a movie reviewer and generally won’t be missed by this movie fan.

I must admit that I never felt much about the role of “Sports Psychologists.” Snake-oil salesmen, insurance and car dealers were on the same rung in the job hierarchy in my opinion, but maybe Greg Norman needs one, or, more likely, needed one a long time ago.
“The Shark” had never won a major tournament, and many of his losses were the “wheels coming off the truck,” horrendous, variety. But, Norman was at or near the top on the leaderboard of last week’s British Open for three days, but, as he has done so often, he had a horrendous round on Sunday and finished third.
So, is Norman the ultimate “choke artist?” Why is it that I, a person who pays as little attention to golf as possible unless this guy named Tiger is playing, even cares about this old guy? Let it be said, I have always rooted for Greg Norman, arguably the best player in the history of golf who has never won a major tournament. Why? It’s not like Norman is poor – he has turned his celebrity into multi-millions of dollars; so many that he can buy off his ex-wife with a $140+ million settlement and then turn around and spend a couple more millions to marry Chris Evert recently. Maybe it’s because of his failures on the Sundays of major tournaments that has made him a sympathetic character; and he has always lost with class, even though the failures have to eat him up inside. And perhaps it is because, at 53-years-of-age and a part-time player, this may have been Greg Norman’s last chance to win a major. Maybe Chrissie will get him that psychologist?