C.C. and A.J. - One Hell of a Payday

C.C. Sabathia doesn't take his glove off to eat. He uses it as a food shovel. I wouldn't give a shit about table manners either if I made $23 million a year.

So the New York Yankees recently went out and spent a quarter of a billion dollars on two pitchers.

C.C. Sabathia – 7 years, $161 million.
A.J. Burnett – 5 years, $82.5 million.

Think about that for a minute…….

You’re probably thinking that A.J. is pretty goddamn jealous of C.C. right about now. And you’d probably be right. “Is that guy really twice as valuable as I am? I mean, as a human being?”

Now think about the sheer magnitude of these Steinbrenner-esque salaries.

Why should C.C. and A.J. get all that dough? You want that kind of payday too – especially in this economy. With that kind of money, you could scoop up some seriously sweet real estate deals, and probably get some bankrupt small businesses on the cheap. But you also say that you’re too old, or fat, or uncoordinated to throw a baseball 95 mph.

This is all very true. Although I wouldn’t exactly call you fat. You’re more “pleasantly plump.” Don’t be so hard on yourself.

In any case, there is something you can do.

And I’ll tell you exactly what you’re gonna do. You’re gonna start teaching your kid how to throw a baseball. Or start having kids so that you can teach them how to throw a baseball. Or, if you’re one of my youngest readers, start bugging your parents to teach you how to throw a baseball.

The riches that these players reap nowadays compare favorably to winning Mega Millions or Powerball.

Fact: The odds of winning Mega Millions is approximately 1 in 175 million. The odds of making it to the Major Leagues, if you’re a healthy American male who doesn’t totally suck at all sports, is probably around 1 in a million at the worst – and likely quite a bit better than that. That’s at least 175 times better odds than the lottery – and for essentially the same return on your investment.

So don’t waste your energy with dreams of winning the lottery. Have a kid. And if it’s a girl, have another one until you have a boy. And if you already have a boy under the age of 10 or so, then teach him how to throw a baseball. Preferably teach him how to throw left-handed, even if it stunts the growth of his dominant right hand.

On second thought, maybe you should just keep having kids until you have a left-handed boy. All the hard work is likely to pay off, especially if you have a couple hundred thousand male children.

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A Night With The Yankees

I went to see the Yankees play the Blue Jays on Tuesday night - the special occasion being that I was one of the first to respond to an email that went around work with an offer of free baseball tickets.

I've always been one of the quickest draws in town when it comes to email responses - especially when free sports tickets are on the line. I'm also lightning quick to respond when invited to dinner, offered free air travel, or notified that my car is parked illegally.

And so it came to pass that I was blessed with some pretty sweet seats to see Joba Chamberlain start his first Major League game.

Robinson Cano throws totally like a girl during warm-ups, but then slowly transitions to throwing more like a man as the game wears on.

So I'm not exactly a big Yankees fan. But I'm also most certainly not a Toronto Blue Jays fan. Under normal circumstances, I'd be rooting hard as hell for the Yanks. To throw a wrench into the works this time was the fact that Roy Halladay, the starter for the Jays, is my top fantasy baseball pitcher.

The seats would have been much better if they came with a catheter. so you didn't have to get up at all during the game.

I needed him to pitch a good game, and get the win, and strike out 20 Yankees batters - including A-Rod 5 times, and Jeter 5 times. And somehow hit a few home runs even though the pitchers don't bat in the American League.

Technicality.

I had to covertly root for my fantasy pitcher, while outwardly cheering the home team. Anything else would be disrespectful to those who gave me the tickets, and to the fans around me.

You can almost see the guilt in my eyes as I secretly cheer for the Blue Jays.

To add to the realism of my fictitious fandom, I decided to boo the shit out of Scott Rolen - former 3rd baseman of my hometown Phillies, and current player for the Blue Jays. He had a serious falling out with Phillies management several years back and refused to re-sign with the team for any amount of money.

The general manager of the Phillies at the time was Ed Wade. I can only imagine what sour memories Rolen has of Wade. I think it got pretty ugly during their break-up.

So I screamed "ED WADE!!" each time Rolen came to bat. If you watch a replay of the game, you'll hear it pretty clearly - especially during the 7th inning, by which time my vocal cords had been thoroughly lubricated with beer.

Rolen went 1 for 5 with a strikeout.

Mission accomplished. I got inside his head.

But for the most part, it tore me all up inside - this internal conflict. Cheering for someone, yet secretly wishing for failure. I was Hillary Clinton, to Joba and the Yankees' Barack Obama.

How do you resolve this kind of fantasy/reality incongruity?

The only way would have been to bench Halladay, or not go to the game.

With Halladay pitching lights-out over his past few starts, and the aforementioned super-sweet seats being offered up for free, neither of those was about to happen.

So the answer is - as Shaquille O'Neal once famously said, "...it's like the Pythagorean Theorem. There is no answer. "

What Shaq meant by that is, well, sort of unclear. But what we can all learn from his unintentional wisdom is that, just like Pythagoras, we need to persevere until we find an answer to our problem - fantasy sports-related or otherwise.

In the end, I got my fantasy baseball win and had a great time at the game. But to all those thousands of true Yankees fans who joined with me on the cheers for Jeter and the boos for Rolen, I have to say I'm sorry. Please forgive me. I can't promise I won't lie to you again, but I assure you that it will only happen if the fantasy baseball stakes are very high.

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The Pope Comes To Town

(My weekly column from The Love Of Sports. It's not every day that the Pope comes to your town. Unless you live in The Vatican. And even there, it's not like it's very easy to get on the pontiff's schedule - even for a friendly game of bowling. I hear Benedict loves bowling. So now that he's in New York for a visit, I had to throw something out there on the topic.)


We all have our own special way of rooting for our favorite teams and players – fantasy or otherwise.

Sometimes, we find ourselves crossing our fingers when a beloved player is up to bat with runners in scoring position.

Other times, we cover our eyes and bite down on our hand during potentially pivotal plays - like I did during the 1993 World Series, whenever Mitch “Wild Thing” Williams was pitching. Depending on the importance of the particular play, blood may have been drawn.

With me, if you look closely, you can still see the bite marks.

We all want to believe that our cheers and our rituals will have some effect on the outcome of a game. And inevitably, we experience that occasion when we cheered real hard, and, lo and behold, our team won the game, or our guy hit a home run. So we keep doing it, no matter how ridiculous it may seem to a non-sports-fan observer.

- Hold your breath until the opposing team’s power play is over?

- Chug a 32-ounce beer every time your team scores a touchdown?

- Paint a big blue letter on your chest and stand outside in subzero temperatures, shirtless. During a blizzard.

- Sleep outside your favorite tennis player’s house for weeks on end, and not shave or shower until he/she wins a Grand Slam tournament.

Despite this seemingly irrational behavior, it all comes down to something called faith, no matter how you slice it.

And as illustrated above, each of us has our own brand of faith that we subscribe to when it comes to sports.

This begs the question - Does God/Jesus/Zeus/Buddha/Allah etc. really want our team to win more than anyone else’s?

And don’t you think the Yankees are taking it a step too far this year?

Pope Benedict’s visit to the Stadium – “The House That Ruth Built”, and I don’t mean the biblical Ruth - has been billed as just another leg of the pontiff’s journey through America – our first papal visit in almost 10 years.

Yeah right.

My theory?

The Steinbrenners arranged for the Pope’s entire trip in order to get him to bless their team – at their home stadium. After all, we know the Yankees are searching for something, anything that could help them return to the pinnacle of baseball – and dominate those damn, dirty Red Sox once again.

And although the Yanks couldn’t get Johan Santana, they did get Pope Benedict XVI. He might be the next best thing.

You might think that Pope Benedict is only good at blessing things, and spreading peace, love, and all that jazz. However, I’ve been told by senior Vatican officials that the current pontiff not only fires a fastball that lights up the radar gun at 99 mph, but he’s also got a knee-buckling overhand curve – which is a fantastic change of pace pitch.

He looks to be a solid number 2 or 3 starter – which is just what the Yankees need to get over the hump.

Pope Benedict's curtain call, after tossing 8 innings of shutout ball. He struck out everyone he faced, and miraculously turned Gatorade into Orangina - his favorite soft drink.

They’ve got the offense. They’ve got the defense. They just need some pitching help. And a little lift from the hand of God. With Pope Benedict, they get a bit of both.

Only time will tell if the Yankees radical strategy will work.

All I’ll say is – to all of you Red Sox fans out there – you should PRAY that it doesn’t.

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