Hall Of Fame Triangular Table

If you aren't Hall of Famed out just yet, SportsCenter anchor and former Max Kellerman Show co-host Brain Kenny had Rob Neyer and Joe Sheehan (of Baseball Prospectus) on his radio show to discuss the results of the voting yesterday. They call it a roundtable, but there's only three of them.

It's just a quick 10 minute segment and although all of them are generally grounded in sabermetrics, there isn't any groupthink going on. Although I don't wade too deeply into the HoF discussions, I like the fact that everyone has a slightly different idea of who should be in.

A Fitting Send-Off For The Big Unit

Randy Johnson's retirement announcement was originally supposed to take place today at some point. However, neither Randy nor any of his advisors realized that the Hall of Fame voting was also planned for this afternoon. As a result, they scrambled to rearrange the event for 7:00PM last night.

I happened to be watching the end of SportsCenter at that point and they directed people to ESPN News for the announcement, which I foolishly assumed would be some sort of a press conference. Instead, it was just a conference call. And a particularly disorganized one at that.

Randy came on just after 7:00 but in a moment of poetic justice, reporters kept joining the call, drowning out his official announcement with a series of beeps and at one point, a phone ringing in the background. They broke the call for a couple of minutes and then re-started it at about 7:05. He seemed all too happy to announce that this would be the last time he would take questions from MLB reporters and said that he didn't regret the way he treated other people during his career but did regret the way he was portrayed, as if those two weren't inextricably linked.

The horror stories about Johnson you'll hear from members of the media are numerous so it's sort of fitting that his aversion to them (holding a conference call) overshadowed what should have been a fairly significant announcement. Not many tears are shed over the way athletes treat reporters but the consensus is that Johnson was one of the worst.

Of course, Yankees fans don't have very fond memories of the Big Unit. Perhaps I was more naive about baseball back when they acquired following the 2004 season, but I expected him to be pretty awesome when he came to the Yankees. I think most people were in the same boat. The gap between the AL and NL didn't seem so large at that point and our view of aging players was badly skewed by steroids, even if we didn't fully realize it yet.

Johnson came to symbolize the worst of what the Yankees were about this decade - a guy who they acquired just past his prime who was still being paid like he was in the middle of it. Even with his flat sliders and surly temperment, Johnson wasn't that bad in 2005, picthing 225 innings to a 3.79 ERA. But he stumbled out of the gate a bit, giving up 15 runs in his first four starts, including 5 in a loss at Fenway Park. Although it probably wasn't fair, Yankees fans expected immediate dominance and instead they got mediocrity, starting off the relationship on the wrong foot.

The Big Unit finished out his '05 season with 5 consecutive wins but gave up 9 hits and 5 runs in 3 innings against the Angels in Game 3 of the ALDS. The following year started off better for Johnson but went downhill fast, a herniated disc in his back sapping his once legendary velocity and action and dragging his ERA down to an even 5.00. He made a start against the Tigers in the '06 ALDS but was tagged with the loss after allowing 5 runs in 5 2/3 innings.

Shortly thereafter, Johnson was headed back to the desert in exchange for Ross Olhendorf, Luis Vizcaino, Steven Jackson and Alberto Gonzalez, an impressive haul for a 42 year old pitcher with a back injury coming off a poor season.

Taking off the Pinstriped glasses, it's hard not to appreciate the uniqueness of Johnson's career. He has the most strikeouts per innings pitched of all-time among pitchers with 1000 IP and 100 decisions. Four consecutive Cy Young awards.

He was stiltishly tall and awkward, almost bird-like in his wingspan. By his 26th birthday he had accumulated all of 10 career wins but somehow managed to reach 300. He walked 416 batters from in the three years from 1990-1992 but only 978 in his final 16 seasons. He was a menacing presence -more feared than respected - but that's how he wanted it to be.

A-Roid & Gammons Interview Reactions (With A Special Guest Appearance)

Not sure if anybody caught this, but it looks like Serena Roberts really has been stalking him. Check it out.
I know. It's pretty bad. But there really aren't that many pictures of her to choose from and no good place for her to be "hiding".

Some notes about the interview:

• I love how before he mentioned Selena Roberts by name he referred to her as "that lady from Sports Illustrated"
• He said she actually tried to break into his house and had documentation from the Miami Police to prove it, but Gammons didn't even ask to see it.
  
• He only apologized to his fans in Texas. Um, fuck that. You better feel sorry that you dicked over all of your Yankee fans over too. Because when you are cashing in $5M of our money for every legend you pass on the home run list, it's just going to dredge this shit up. If the Yankees were drafting your contract this offseason, they'd take those milestone clauses out in 2/3 of a second.
• Fiji Water? Nice choice.

• I originally thought that the reason he said he didn't know what exactly he was taking is that it was illegal at the time, and didn't want to incriminate himself. However, Craig from Shysterball was nice enough to answer my email and set me straight:

Me: Quick Question: Would there be a legal reason that A-Rod isn't admitting he knew what he took? Because they are/were illegal, etc... It sounds pretty stupid otherwise.

Craig: Quick Answer: No real legal reason I can think of. Even if he was doing crack, the statute of limitations on 2003 using would have run by now. My guess is that, in the permissive 2003-era, it was simply a matter of guys saying "give me some juice" and not really knowing what, exactly, they were taking beyond broad categories such as HGH or steroids.

Makes sense. Listening to the full interview, you get the feeling that he might have been trying to seem innocent because saying "give me some juice" is a lot more "naive" than talking about stacking Primobolan.

Anyway that was some quality television and despite the ribbing I've given him, he did come across as pretty genuine and remorseful and handled it pretty much as well as I could have hoped for. We're on the right track. Before the 2007 season, he got that pathetic Jeter friendship "issue" out in the open and had a banner year. It's a new season, in The New Stadium, and it's an odd numbered year. I'm predicting big things for Professor Purple Lips this season.

The Many (Awkward) Faces Of Alex Rodriguez

This was too easy. For one thing, I sort of stole the idea from The Sports Hernia.

But really, any person on planet Earth would make a ton of retarded-looking faces when they are being grilled on SportsCenter in front of tens of millions of people about something of this magnitude. Luckily for most of us, we won't have to answer those questions and if we did, some asshole probably wouldn't take the time to take pictures of it with their digital camera off their HDTV, resize and crop them and upload them on to their shitty blog.

However, my job is to not take any of that into account and instead use these screen grabs to make fun of him on these here internets. I watched it in slow motion to select the proper frames, and he looked like he was literally being tortured.

Anyway, here it goes. These pictures make it look like just he recorded the most emotional Proactiv testimonial ever given. I omitted any further snarky comments because they're honestly not even necessary.

It has been far and away our most colorful day here at Fack Youk. Apologies to our black and white traditionalists (Schiff), but it was all original content.