Take Out The Trash Day

I refer you to my earlier post about the concept behind "Take Out The Trash Day."

It's official, I am a full blown supporter of the use of instant replay in professional sports. I think the technology we posses today is too good to not utilize it. I don't believe that instant replay, if used correctly, will bastardize sports either. With the exception of U.S.A.'s elimination this past Saturday, I have been in World Cup heaven. That being said - the officiating has been absolutely AWFUL. While instant replay should not be brought in on fouls called by the referees, there is no reason for it to not be used on every goal scored...make that possibly scored as has been the case in this World Cup. The NHL does that, there's a lot more scoring in hockey, and yet it doesn't slow down the game. Heck, I don't know of any sporting event that has more "traditions" than the Championships Wimbledon, and they even use instant replay. Fanhouse.com has a good article on how the World Cup should use instant replay.

I have no problem at all with Stephen Strasburg pitching in this year's All-Star game, should he be selected. My motives here are 100%, unabashedly self-serving in this. I am sick of the American League winning. Even if it is only for one inning, that is most likely one less inning the AL will be able to score on us. (By "us" I am referring to the National League and all of us fans around the world who prefer REAL baseball.) I don't care that he hasn't served a lot of time in the league yet. I think in this case, it's an advantage, because most AL players haven't faced him yet. He's a weapon the NL has, and they would be well off if they used it.

Consider this my official joining of the Cincinnati Reds bandwagon. Every year, I look for a team that has been struggling but is able to use home-grown talent to try to turn their team around. In years past, I've been very impressed with the Minnesota Twins, Milwaukee Brewers, Detroit Tigers, and the Tampa Bay Rays. I love that the Reds are competing this year. The Reds hold a special place in my heart, because the first professional game I attended was the Cubs & Reds at Riverfront Stadium in Cincinnati, back when Pete Rose was managing the Reds and Don Zimmer his counterpart with the Cubs.

As I mentioned the other day via twitter, I have decided that I will not read Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows again before seeing both parts of the movie. When Sarah and I paid to see Half-Blood Prince in 3D IMAX, I left the theater pretty upset after the movie. WIth the increasing price of movie tickets, we've had to become more selective in what we see in the theater, and multiply that for IMAX. Yet only the first 15 minutes or so of the movie were in 3D. But to make it worse, the movie was, in my opinion, drastically different from the book...and Half-Blood Prince is my favorite book in the whole series. So in an effort to be able to enjoy the final movies as much as possible, I don't want to use the book as a reference and compare the two. I really want to enjoy it, so I hope this works.

"If you don't toot your own horn, who will?"

On May 28, 2010, I posted the following tweet: [@machaffin] is considering beginning a campaign to get the Marlins to dismiss Fredi Gonzalez so that he'd be available for the Braves to replace Cox.

And what happened yesterday? The Marlins fired Fredi Gonzalez. Now while I didn't have anything to do with his dismissal, it does give me hope for next year.

I have a feeling that the top two candidates to replace Braves manager Bobby Cox are going to be Gonzalez and current hitting coach Terry Pendleton.

Consider yours truly part of the Gonzalez supporters. I have nothing against TP, I've met him and I think he's a great guy and could do a good job. But while he has interviewed multiple times for a managerial position and even withdrawn his name from consideration once, and has been a coach in the Braves organization for a long time in addition to his playing career, he lacks the most important part of a resume that Gonzalez has: experience.

Gonzalez took the Marlins manager job and turned out to be the winningest manager in team history, according to MLB.com. (see linked story above) Under his leadership, the Marlins went from finishing 5th in the NL East in 2007 to 2nd in 2009, albeit with a minimal payroll.

If the Braves decide to go with Pendleton, I won't hold it against them. But if he's still available next season, I think Gonzalez would be way to go.

You were doing so well...where'd you go?

Yeah, I had a really good month of May in posting regularly, but the past couple weeks have been very different in "life-scheduling" so there's been an adjustment curve taking place.

On June 7, I began my internship at Turner Sports, working in Business Ops with NASCAR.com. It's already been a challenging two and a half weeks, but I'm VERY happy to be here. My first week I got a crash course (pun halfway intended there) in website SEO and helped construct an HTML sitemap for NASCAR.com. What's the point? To make NASCAR.com come up at the top of the list whenever someone performs a NASCAR-related search with Google, Yahoo!, Bing, or any other search engine.

Then last week, I missed a couple days as Sarah and I travelled to Tennessee for a funeral. The rest of the week I spent researching International Speedway Corporation and Speedway Motorsports Inc. These are the two companies that own and operate the various racetracks that host NASCAR events. I also spent a good deal of time learning about Bristol Motor Speedway, and it looks like I'll have the opportunity to go to BMS for the August "Night Race." I'm pretty excited about that.

For the first time in a very long time, I am working normal business hours, but I'm starting to get used to it. As you might have read on my dear wife's blog, we're also in the process of trying to paint the inside of our house.

I really enjoyed getting back into the blogging routine and am happy to get back at it. With the World Cup in full swing, I'm looking forward to pulling some material from that, as well as my Braves are in the midst of putting together a pretty darn good season.

The Perfect Game

Anyone who has had the fortune of watching a professional pitcher throw a perfect game got to witness one of the rarest occurrences in sports. According to Baseball-Reference.com, 37,279 players have pitched in a professional baseball game dating back to 1871. Of that number, only 20 have successfully pitched nine innings and faced 27 batters without allowing one of them to reach base. To put it another way, only 1 out of 1,864 pitchers will throw a perfect game, statistically speaking.

That is what makes the fact that two pitchers have accomplished the feat within the last month, and that fact that we saw a third get taken away last night absolutely astonishing, even moreso if you agree with me that the hitters are given every advantage possible over the pitchers.

I'm a big baseball fan. I'm not the biggest baseball fan by any means, I'm not even the biggest fan I know. But I'm a big fan. I consider myself a baseball "purist." I like day games. I hate the designated hitter. I don't like Interleague play and the only times the National League and American League should play each other are the All-Star Game and the World Series. The All-Star game shouldn't have any bearing whatsoever on home-field advantage in the World Series. I like the "human element" of umpires making the call on the field.

But even though I consider myself a "purist", I think Major League Baseball was victimized last night by its decision to lag behind on the use of instant replay.

I don't fault umpire Jim Joyce for blowing the call last night, and keeping Armando Galarraga from becoming the 21st pitcher to throw a perfect game. Umpires are human and they will make mistakes. Everyone involved last night knows this and acknowledged it. Galarraga, Tigers Manger Jim Leyland, and Joyce himself all handled last night's unfortunate events with utmost class and professionalism. But the whole experience could have been avoided if the tool of instant replay had been available for Joyce to utilize.

As of today, instant replay is used by MLB for home runs only - whether they are in fair or foul territory, and if the ball actually left the playing field or was interfered with.

Every ballpark in the league has the equipment in place to make instant replay a viable resource on a questionable play. Instant replay should never be involved in calling balls and strikes, and in every play, the umpire on the field should have the final say. But I think there's a good chance that if he had the option of doing so, Joyce would have welcomed the chance to make sure he got the call right on the field by checking himself with instant replay. I have to think that anyone who takes pride in their work, whatever it may be, wants to utilize every resource available to do their job the best it can be done.

Commissioner Selig, it's time to make the resource of instant replay available...REALLY available.

Who Stepped Up? (May 28, 2010)

For the second installment of my weekly "Who Stepped Up?" post, the winner is Jordan Romero.

At just 13 years old, Jordan became the youngest person ever to summit Mt. Everest this past Saturday. According to his website, Jordan and his family are on a quest to knock off the 7 Summits, and now that they have checked off Everest, all that remains is Antarctica's Mt. Vinson.

Everest as long been a fascination of mine, the high point being when I was introduced to Jon Krakauer's book Into Thin Air. One day, I hope to have the opportunity to hike to Mt. Everest's base camp, but I have no grand illusions about attempting to climb it. Nonetheless, mad props to Jordan and his family for such an impressive feat.

If you are of the opinion, however, that the idea of letting a 13-year-old climb a mountain like Everest, you're not alone.

Take Out The Trash Day

If anyone who reads this is familiar with the show The West Wing, you might recognize the title of the post. "Take Out The Trash Day" was an episode title from Season 1 where the staff would use one day to throw a lot stories at the press in an attempt to overwhelm them and prevent the press from being able to focus on one.

This post is of that spirit in that I'm going to just fire a few quick, unrelated items at you, but not devote a blogpost to each one.

Leading off - the idea of the Atlanta Falcons getting a new open-air stadium. I cannot describe in full detail how against this I am, but I'm VERY against it - if it involves just 1 cent of public money. This comes from some columns I recently read on AJC.com. The Falcons play in the Georgia Dome which opened in 1992, also knows as the year I moved to Atlanta. Out of 31 NFL stadiums, 29 are younger than the Georgia Dome. I can understand looking around and seeing the majority of the league with new stadiums and not wanting to fall behind, but the Falcons are fine with what they've got. The GA Dome is in good shape, even surviving a tornado, and yeah it may not be brand new, but it's not like we're talking about Shea Stadium, the old home of the NY Mets. By and large, I really appreciate what Falcons' owner Arthur Blank has done for the franchise and the city as a whole. But there can be no justification for asking for taxpayer dollars for a new stadium when Fulton County just axed 400+ teachers and is hacking school programs left and right, including elementary music and orchestra. The Falcons have a good home that will likely be paid off in the next few years. They need to be happy with that.

Unless you're living in a cave, I have to believe you've heard SOMETHING about Arizona's new immigration laws. Well in the previous round of the NBA Playoffs, the Phoenix Suns decided to make a political statement in opposition by wearing jerseys that had "Los Suns" on them. This idea did not come from the players, but rather the owner. That is what blows my mind, and is what bothers me. The only thing for him to gain by doing this was dividing his fan base, alienating those fans who didn't object. It's a political matter and he should have kept the team - as a business - out of it. If players want to act on their own and on their own time, I'm OK with that. But it is not the responsibility of a professional franchise to dictate political policy and force its fans to decide wether they will continue to be a fan because of a public political stance. One other note on that - if the leagues are going to allows their teams to act in that manner, then they cannot go to Capital Hill and and tell the government what they do and don't need to legislate.

Let's end on a positive note. I came across another sportsmanship gem this past week, thanks this time to ESPN's Rick Reilly. The short version: Marshall Community's JV Softball team was playing its first ever game against Roncalli, a school riding a two-and-a-half year winning streak. Marshall barely had enough equipment for its team, and questions asked by the players before the game included "Which one is first base?" and "How do I hold this bat?" After just an inning and a half, Roncalli would offer to forfeit the game so that they could spend that time working with, helping, and teaching the Marshall players. Roncalli's team didn't stop there, and I hope that you will click here and read the rest of this wonderful story.

Write the Future

Found this short by Nike Football.com this morning. It's not an official World Cup ad, but but I love the mix of soccer and pop culture. Very well done in my opinion.