Boss Man

Since he passed away yesterday morning, there have been myriad articles, blog posts, photo galleries, obituaries, numerical synopses, quote collections, timelines, video compilations, fan reaction pieces, rapper's reflections, and other various attempts at capturing the legacy of George Steinbrenner written by everyone from Fay Vincent to TMZ to Megan McArdle to Deadspin to Joe Posnanski to Maureen Dowd.

There was a moment of silence at the All-Star game last night, impromptu tributes at Yankee Stadium and there will many more attempts at remembrance when the MLB regular season resumes, from some sort of public memorial service that Yankee fans can attend to a moment of silence at Fenway Park to the patches the Yanks will wear on their uniform in honor of him (and Bob Sheppard) for the rest of the season.

As was the case with Sheppard, we knew the passing of Mr. Steinbrenner was on the horizon. He had been shielded from the public eye for quite some time and when he did make appearances, it was only for a moment, behind dark sunglasses and without any communication beyond perhaps a wave to the crowd. Even behind his shades, he looked alternatively sad, confused and lost. The man who seemed to do everything purposefully and with great vigor was now vacant and adrift.

Control over the team had officially been transferred to his sons in 2007. Howard Rubenstein would release statements on his behalf, but they lacked any of the customary bite that had been the trademark of his heyday. In a lot of ways he was already gone.

It's not uncommon for someone in their late-70's to lose their mental faculties, but for Steinbrenner, who enjoyed the spotlight and demanded attention so forcefully, his fade into oblivion was hardly inconspicuous. Because of who The Boss was in his prime it was impossible not to notice his absence in recent years.

We've all had an employer at some point in our lives that was capable of being so overbearing, so demanding, so demeaning and such a mega-alpha male that they inspired incredibly fierce emotions in you and your co-workers on a daily, if not hourly basis. You probably talked about them and their tyrannical ways endlessly with your fellow corporate captives when they weren't around. You likely rejoiced when they left the office early or took a Friday off so you could breathe easy and do your work without them stopping by to meddle and micromanage.

But every so often, perhaps during a one-on-one meeting or during some downtime on a business trip, the conversation would slip into something beyond the daily grind of business and you'd crack the surface. Usually, a person that maniacally-driven and focused at their given profession also contains something intensely likable and endearing about them, if you ever get close enough to catch a glimpse of it.

Of course, without fail, the following week, they'd make a decision or a comment or send an email that would make you want to leap over their desk or through the computer and fucking strangle them to death with the cord of their office phone. And then you'd forget all about those fleeting moments when they seemed somewhat compassionate and human and go back to thanking your lucky stars you were just their employee and not their child.

Yes, I'm shrouding my personal experiences with a previous boss in a flurry of impersonal pronouns, but I'm guessing most of you can relate on some level. I'm quite sure plenty of people who worked for the Yankees over the years can. In a lot of ways, what made Steinbrenner such an unbearable asshole also made him a good boss. As employees, we point to those that we like as people as our best bosses, but in reality, it might be those who can inspire fear in us who get their workers to perform at the highest level possible.

He was alternatively responsible for some of the Yankees' best and worst years but in the end, George was driven by his uncontrollable selfish desires, most notably a World Champion baseball team as soon as possible, always. Sometimes it backfired, but certainly not for a lack of trying.

As evidenced by his abundant charitable work and the frequent good deeds he did for his employees, there was obviously a sensitive part of him that cared deeply about the people who helped him get what he desperately wanted, but it wasn't big enough to keep him from treating them with disrespect whenever he pleased. That will be forever part of his legacy, but will always be mentioned as a side note to his numerous personal accomplishments and considerable impact not just on Major League Baseball but on American sports and popular culture. And because of the amount of success he attained, I suspect he'd probably be alright with that.

Game 88: Mostly Tha Voice

We knew it was coming. Most of the obituaries that finally got published on the internet today and will be printed in the newspapers tomorrow had been written months, if not years ago. That's what happens when you are one of the most successful and identifiable people in your profession and very nearly make it to the century mark.

As he gradually stepped away from the team and his health deteriorated to the point that he was no longer able to make it to Yankee Stadium, no matter how grand the occasion - not even the opening of the new one - it became increasinly clear that Bob Sheppard's number was about to be called, just like he had called out so many numbers in the past (twice).

But no matter how long the gradual decline lasted or how incredible a life was, there is still a forlorn finality to someone's passing. The Voice of God was excruciatingly dignified and proper, but not pretentious. His style was understated ("clear, concise, correct"), the opposite of many of his contemporaries, but he gained worldwide recognition for it.

The Yankees still have to wrap up the final game of this series against the Mariners and wait out the All-Star break, but on Friday night, when Derek Jeter leads off the bottom of the first inning, we'll hear The Voice again. And when people look up reflexively upon hearing it, it really will be coming from above the clouds. Rest in peace, Mr. Sheppard.

It's mostly tha voice, that gets you up
It's mostly tha voice, that makes you buck
A lot of rappers got flavor, and some got skills
But if your voice ain't dope then you need to [chill... chill... ]

-Lineups-

Yankees:

Derek Jeter SS
Nick Swisher RF
Mark Teixeira 1B
Alex Rodriguez 3B
Robinson Cano 2B
Jorge Posada C
Marcus Thames DH
Curtis Granderson CF
Brett Gardner LF

CC Sabathia LHP

Mariners:

Ichiro Suzuki RF
Chone Figgins 2B
Franklin Gutierrez CF
Jose Lopez 3B
Casey Kotchman 1B
Justin Smoak DH
Josh Bard C
Jack Wilson SS
Michael Saunders LF

Ryan Rowland-Smith LHP

Remembering Ernie Harwell

Good morning Fackers. Pope Paul VI died on August 6, 1978. Phil Rizzuto was calling the Yankee game that night, and delivered the news as only he could: "Well, that kind of puts a damper on even a Yankee win".

I thought of that story last night for two reasons. First, because Rizzuto's sentiments about the passing of the pope 32 years ago are an apt expression of my feelings in the wake of Ernie Harwell's passing at 92 last night. And secondly, because Rizzuto, who we lost nearly three years ago now, was as beloved by Yankee fans as Harwell was by Tiger fans. Such announcers are literally a dying breed, and so long as the Yankees continue to employ the likes of Michael Kay and John Sterling as the voices of the team, we won't ever again have the luxury of such a beloved announcer.

I touched upon Harwell briefly last September, when he announced that he had inoperable bile duct cancer and just months to live. As a Yankee-centric baseball fan, I'm having a tough time putting my finger on why it is that the passing of Harwell, who had no ties to the Yankees, is registering with me. I have virtually no connection to him. I barely recall listening to him at all during his broadcasting days. I know I read one of his books when I was younger, and I remember liking it a lot, but not enough to remember which one of his works that it was.

But as the reactions to Harwell's passing pour in from around baseball and blogosphere, I suppose I'm not alone in my sentiments. There are several others out there, who like me, have little or no connection to Harwell, but who are nonetheless saddened by his passing. Harwell was as good an ambassador as the game has ever had, a humble and dignified man throughout his career, and over the past several months, in the face of his impending death, spent his time doing more to console those who would mourn him than he did thinking about himself.

As I thought about this last night, with the Yankees post-game show on in the background, Joe Girardi held his post-game session with the media. There, Kim Jones asked Girardi for some thoughts on Harwell. It was only then that Girardi found out the news, and he became somewhat emotional as he shared his limited memories of Harwell. I suppose that's as representative a reaction as any: someone with no specific ties to Harwell, but with ties to the game of baseball, understands that the game has suffered a significant loss.

Here are far more poignant remembrances of Harwell:

An extensive obituary by John Lowe of the Detroit Free Press

A remembrance by our friend Craig Calcaterra of Hardball Talk, who grew up in Michigan, falling asleep to the sound of Harwell's voice.

Joe Posnanski re-runs his Sports Illustrated piece on Harwell from last September

Rob Neyer met Harwell just once, just over ten years ago

Larry from Wezen-ball digs up an article that Harwell wrote for Baseball Digest about Ty Cobb and the manager who discovered him.

Tyler Kepner of the New York Times excerpts Harwell's famed Cooperstown speech from 1981, when he was given the Ford C. Frick Award.

CYC does Kepner one better, reprinting the speech in its entirety.

'Duk at Big League Stew says it best: Stevie Wonder, Smokey Robinson, Levi Stubbs, and Marvin Gaye can step aside. Harwell had Motown's sweetest voice.

Jason at IIATMS

Bleacher Report's Tim Cary recalls growing up to the voice of Harwell

Sam Walter Foss' "House By The Side of the Road", the poem that helped a young Harwell overcome his stuttering problem. He would later pepper his broadcasts with references to the poem, and the line that closes four of the poem's five stanzas seems to have been a mantra for Ernie:

Let me live in a house by the side of the road,
And be a friend to man.

We'll leave you with this video, from Harwell's night at Comerica Park last September.

Moment Of Truth

The first time I ever heard a Gang Starr song, it was from an unlikely source. I was watching a skate video called VG8 with my buddy Sampson and this dude Billy Prislin's segment was backed by "You Know My Steez". I had to look up the name of the video and who the skater was, but I'll never forget the imprint that song left on me.

It was one of those tracks that I fell in love with the first time I heard it. I didn't know much hip hop beyond what was on MTV and the radio at that point, but it was immediately apparent that what I was listening to was something different, deeper and more complex than what I thought rap music could be. Gang Starr was underground back then, and even though I probably didn't really understand what that meant, I liked the sound of it.

You Know My Steez is a typical DJ Premier track that has an bouncing, addictive beat punctuated by high tones that runs behind the verse. The chorus consists of mashup of a bunch of spoken parts from other songs (most notably Method Man saying the title, sampled from this tune) tied together with turntable scratching. Subliminally, I'm sure that caught my ear, but what initially stood out were the lyrics.

Guru rapped over the tracks with a steady flow and clever wordplay, dropping ear-grabbing lines without so much as raising his voice. He often referred to his own style as monotone - which was technically close to the truth - but his verses were never boring or droned on like the word tends to connote.

We were about 14 at the time and did what you did back then when you liked a song: went out and bought the CD it was on as soon as humanly possible. Obviously, the way we consumed music was a lot different back in 1998. If you heard a song you liked, you couldn't just bring up YouTube, listen to it again and click your way through the better part of the group's catalog. So there was a period of several days or possibly a week during which I couldn't get the song out of my head but couldn't yet buy the CD.

Maybe that waiting period made me enjoy it more than I would have if I discovered it now. It could just be the fact that we tend to cling to the music that we listened to during our adolescence. But I still think that Moment of Truth, with Premier's intricate tracks and Guru's melodic rhymes, raises a hip hop of a level of high art and is one of the finest albums the genre has to offer.

That original Moment of Truth CD is long gone. It was scratched beyond repair after a couple of years of heavy play and I bought a second copy. That one is gone too, misplaced sometime during college and that too was well-worn. I bought it off of iTunes after that, but maxed out the amount of computers I could link my purchases. I finally downloaded it again, hopefully for the last time.

Gang Starr had plenty of good material before that album and Guru and Premier have each produced a ton of it afterwards, but Moment of Truth is the one creation of theirs that boxed me right in the ears and changed the way I listened to music forever.

The reason for this post is that Guru, whose real name was Keith Elam, passed away yesterday after a battle with cancer (there's a more complete bio if you click the link). About a month ago, he was hospitalized after a heart attack, but made a full recovery and was released. I was hoping I wasn't going to have to write this post for a long time, but unfortunately he was fighting another battle that he couldn't quite conquer.

RIP Guru.

Actions have reactions, don't be quick to judge,
You may not know the hardships people don't speak of,
It's best to step back, and observe with couth,
For we all must meet our moment of truth.

15 Days Until Spring Training: Thurman Munson

Aside from the natural ability to hit and play the position, Thurman Munson had plenty of characteristics that perfectly suited him to be the Yankees' catcher. He was pugnacious, rugged and passionate, willing to sacrifice his body on any given play. He was simultaneously proud and humble, holding the game of baseball in the highest regard. Furthermore, he had a mean-ass mustache and hated the Red Sox. Boy, did he hate the Red Sox. I'd like to think that if he was alive today, old Squatty Body would have rather liked the name of this blog.

The above sequence is from a game at Fenway, on August 1st, 1973. Stick Michael was up to bat in the top of the 9th with the score tied, and failed to make contact on a suicide squeeze, unleashing Munson down the third baseline towards Sox catcher Carlton Fisk. Munson led with a left forearm and Pudge went low, sending the two tumbling over home plate. Fisk held onto the ball, Munson was out, and they quickly got to their feet and began exchanging blows.

Munson and Pudge had a contentious rivalry which extended beyond your typical rival hatred. Although some elements of the feud may have been exaggerated in Munson's biography written by Christopher Devine, there was a legitimate dislike between the two that was exacerbated by the teams they played for.

Perhaps the seeds of Munson's hatred of Boston were planted, like mine, in the time he spent there as a young man. In the summer of 1967, Joe "Skippy" Lewis, manager of the Chatham A's of the Cape Cod Baseball League offered Munson a spot as their starting catcher, along with a side job with the Chatham Parks Department for $75 a week. In 39 games that summer, Munson hit .420 as a catcher, .65 higher than any other other player in the league and was named MVP of the league. Now, the winner of the CCBL batting title receives the Thurman Munson Award.

It was during his time on the Cape that he was discovered by the Yankees. They selected him with the fourth overall pick in the 1968 Amateur Draft, gave him a $75,000 signing bonus and a $500 per week salary.

Munson made his debut in 1969 but appeared in only 26 games. In 1970, he won Rookie of the Year, netting 96% of the vote after batting .302/.386/.415. While remaining solid behind the plate, Munson had two years in 1971 & '72 where he was above league average, but unspectacular offensively.

Although it was not recognized as such by the MVP voting, 1973 was Munson's finest year as a hitter. He raked 29 doubles, 20 homers and hit .301/.362/.487, good for a 141 OPS+. That season was also the beginning of Thurm's three year Gold Glove and six year All-Star appearance streaks. In each of those six years, Munson placed in the MVP voting and played 144 games or more behind the plate.

He was named Yankee captain in 1975, claiming a post that Lou Gehrig vacated with his farewell speech in 1939. In 1976, Munson clocked 17 homers, 27 doubles, drove in 105 runs and was rewarded with the AL MVP, receiving 18 out of a possible 24 first place votes. A testament to his hard-headed, competitive nature, that year he stole 14 bases but was caught 11 times. In fact, over his career, he was actually caught more than he was successful, stealing only 48 bases in 98 tries.

Munson was behind the plate for Ron Guidry's legendary 1978 season, where he went 25-3 with a 1.74ERA. Guidry later said about Munson, "I went through the whole year never shaking him off one time. He always knew when to say something, and when to shut up."

Munson had three children who lived with his wife in Canton, Ohio, where he grew up. He often grew homesick and decided to take flying lessons to make it easier to commute back and forth to see his family. On August 2nd, 1979, he was practicing take-offs and landings at Akron-Canton Regional Airport when he met his untimely end.

On the approach to the runway, Munson dropped the flaps on the wings of his Cessna Citation I/SP, but waited too long before giving the plane more power. As a result, the aircraft came up well short of the intended target. Munson had failed to fasten his shoulder strap, was paralyzed during the initial impact and trapped inside the cockpit when the plane finally came to a rest after rolling and sliding for over 500 feet. His flight instructor, David Hall and his friend Kenny Anderson attempted to free Munson, but the plane caught on fire and they were forced to retreat. His last words were "Get me out of here! Please get me out!" A tragic and powerless cry for help that in no way reflected the way he lived. He was 32 years old.

Munson's funeral was held four days later on August 6th in Canton, Ohio. Lou Pinella and other Yankees spoke while Bobby Murcer delivered the eulogy that morning. That same day, the team took the field back in the Bronx to face the Orioles. Ron Guidry started but through the top of the 7th, the Yanks were down 4-0. Then with two outs in the bottom half of the frame, Bucky Dent worked a walk. Willie Randolph followed with a double, bringing up Murcer. Facing Dennis Martinez, Murcer blasted a three run shot, bringing the Yanks within one.

Guidry remained in the game, holding the O's at 4 through the tops of the 8th and 9th. Just as it was in the 7th, Bucky Dent reached base on a walk in the 9th, putting the tying run on base. Next up, Willie Randolph laid down a bunt in an attempt to move Dent over but Tippy Martinez made a throwing error that allowed the runners to advance to second and third. This brought up Murcer once again and he poked a single to left which drove in the tying and winning runs. Guidry got a complete game win and Murcer drove in all five runs for the Yankees.

Despite it's brevity, Thurm's career was one of constant success. In each of his nine full seasons as a player, he captured either the Rookie of the Year, Gold Glove, MVP, or a World Series Championship.

When someone dies young, they are enshrined in our minds in their youth. There is a different legacy left than when we watch a person decline with age, grow frail and forget people's names. We see the sad portrayal of modern day Muhammad Ali, but only remember the dynamic vibrance of a prime Jimi Hendrix.

Munson's number was retired immediately after his death and an empty locker with the number 15 was kept in the Yankees Clubhouse through the closing of the Old Stadium. Written by George Steinbrenner, his plaque in Monument Park reads:

Our captain and leader has not left us, today, tomorrow, this year, next ... Our endeavors will reflect our love and admiration for him.

The 30th annual Thurman Munson Awards dinner will be held tonight at the Grand Hyatt in Manhattan and will honor Joba Chamberlain, Darryl Strawberry and Lou Pinella, among others. The foundation has raised over $10M for children and adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities since its inception.

Mondays With Curtis

Mitch Albom is very good at writing about "life". Life in quotation marks is inspiring and fits neatly into books which sell lots of copies and get turned into TV movies. "Life" teaches you important lessons about compassion and morality and kindness and faith and - most prominently in Albom's books - death. Unfortunately, baseball has little to do with "life" and everything to do with reality, so Mitch isn't very good at writing about it.

In his column in the Detroit Free Press yesterday, Albom tries to talk those Tiger fans who are distraught about the loss of Curtis Granderson down from the ledge. It's an admirable goal since Detroit lost the de facto face of their franchise and a guy who is by all accounts a very likable person. Except Mitch chooses to pretend that Granderson was never good in order to do so.

What did we know about Curtis Granderson? He had a great smile. He had a foundation. He made a few highlight plays in centerfield and had a good first half and a not-so-good second half in 2009.

That's what someone who is a casual fan of say, the Marlins knows about Curtis Granderson. We (as the supposed audience of this column - Detroit Tigers' fans) actually know a lot more about him than that. We know that in 2007 he hit 23 triples, 23 home runs and stole 26 bases while being caught only once which is pretty fucking amazing. We know that he's hit 94 home runs over the past 4 years which is great for a center fielder. We know that he is a pretty awesome player who doesn't cost that much money, neither of which are things that Dontrelle Wills, Jeremy Bonderman or Nate Robertson can say.

He'll also be 29 years old. Been an All-Star once.

Well he is 28 years old, so like anyone else who is under the age of 29, if he doesn't die tragically he'll be 29 years old eventually. And guess what year he made that All-Star team? This year of course, which was by far the worst of his previous three.

Only once has he hit 30 home runs or batted .300.

Another way of saying that would be "He has both hit 30 home runs and batted .300 before, although in separate seasons" which doesn't sound like the degradation that Albom tries to make it out to be.

He hit .095 in his lone World Series.

My favorite part of this sentence is the fact that Albom uses the word "lone" as if the fact that he made it to a World Series in his four full seasons as a pro was a knock against him. All the while, Albom is seemingly oblivious to the fact that 21 at bats over six games probably isn't a sufficient sample size to draw an actual conclusion from, especially when Granderson hit .313/.378/.719 in the ALDS and ALCS that same year.

Last year, he was benched occasionally against left-handers.

Could you be a little more vague here, Mitch? You know that they track statistics based on what hand a pitcher throws with, right? You could cite something called a "platoon split" if you wanted to make the case that he couldn't hit lefties.

Granderson was as close to a star in this town as the franchise had, mostly because Justin Verlander is too low key (and plays once every five games), and guys with flashier numbers -- like Miguel Cabrera or the 2007 Magglio Ordoñez -- seem eminently distant. They bolt town the minute the season is over. They seem... rented.

That is impossible to fathom. You mean to tell me that two players from the beautiful tropical nation of Venezuela return to that country to spend time with their families instead of staying in Detroit in the fucking dead of winter?

But baseball-wise, he was no Derek Jeter, a guy justifiably adored in New York for achievement and personality. He was no Albert Pujols in St. Louis. He was more like the closest thing we had to those guys, which says something about the Tigers.

Yes, it says that they have not been lucky enough to develop and retain an incredibly gifted franchise cornerstone player who has pretty much already punched his ticket to the Hall of Fame. Look around the league right now, who else fits this mold? Um, no one? Choke on that one Curtis Granderson... You may be an above average baseball player and an overall class act, but like everyone else in the MLB, you are not Derek Jeter or Albert Puljos!

"It's sad, but most likely you're not gonna see players in the same uniform for 10, 12, 15 years anymore," manager Jim Leyland told me last week. Leyland understood fans' frustration. He said Granderson was everything good about baseball. But he fell short of saying "we're losing a great talent" or "the heart of our team."

I know it would probably be futile to try to explain this to someone who cited a player's batting average in six games as a crucial stat, but the Amount of Praise Lavished Upon a Player By Their Manager After They Have Been Traded (APLUPBTMATHBT for short) is not a very good measure of their value.

What's surprising is how thin the "beloved superstar" tag has become for the Tigers over the past decade. Pudge Rodriguez? How connected was he to Detroit, really? Todd Jones? Bobby Higginson? Hardly superstars. We liked their longevity.

Considering the team lost 83, 96, 106, and 119 games in each of the first four years of the decade, it's really not that surprising at all. And just for fun, Bobby Higginson only hit 30 home runs and batted over .300 once and he played left field during the steroid era.

Granderson became someone to embrace, at least a bit, the way we once embraced Gibby or Tram, even if he wasn't that caliber player here, nor did he win the things they won. Good talent. Great guy. But I wonder if we don't lament the idea of him leaving as much as the departure itself.

But don't worry guys, Curtis Granderson the sixth person you'll meet in heaven.

An Athlete's Memoir David Foster Wallace Might Have Enjoyed

One of the most insightful things I've ever read about sports was written by someone who was never thought of as a "sports writer". It was tucked away behind wandering but focused first-person accounts of the Maine Lobster Festival and Adult Video News Awards, an in-depth look at conservative talk radio through host John Zeigler, a short essay about experiencing 9/11 from woman's living room in Bloomington, Illinois and six other works of varying lengths on a variety of other topics.

Like many pseudo-intellectual non-English majors, my first foray into the work of David Foster Wallace was through Consider the Lobster. Had it not been bundled with those nine other essays, I don't know if I ever would have discovered How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart. The piece was originally published as a book review on August 30th, 1992 in the Philadelphia Inquirer (when I was 8 years old), so I certainly wasn't in position to catch it when it originally appeared in print. I'm not a huge tennis fan and Tracy Austin reached the apex of her game years before I was born so it wasn't the type of subject matter I was likely to seek out after the fact. But when I did stumble upon it 16 years after it was written, it still resonated.

So how did Tracy Austin break David Foster Wallace's heart and why did I find it so interesting?

Austin did her part failing miserably to deliver on the promises made by her autobiography Beyond Center Court: My Story. "The inspirational story of Tracy Austin's long struggle to find a life beyond championship tennis", a note by the publisher on the inside of the glossy cover flap claimed. Wallace was a big fan of Austin, and although he followed her meteoric rise through from child tennis prodigy to U.S. Open champion and was an admitted sucker for sports memoirs, he was left dumbfounded by the emptiness of her supposedly candid book. "The book is inanimate because it communicates no real feeling and so gives us no sense of a conscious person", Wallace explains.

The reason I was captivated by Wallace's reaction was that he not only exposed the comical superficiality of the writing by Austin and her co-author Christine Brennan (and there are few things I enjoy more than making fun of bad writing), but he also found much deeper and broadly applicable meaning through its vapidity.

After reciting some of the more obviously vacant quotes from the "as told to" autobiography, DFW offers a theory as to why this genre is so popular and alluring despite the fact that they are "almost uniformly poor as books":

[Note: In lieu of blockquotes, I've embedded clips from the audio version of the essay.

No text version exists online and it's a whole lot easier than transcribing them.]

Wallace then goes on to recount the reasons that Austin's life had an almost classically tragic story arc but note that almost none of what was truly fascinating about her career was ever adequately described in the book. Austin chose to craft her life story to fit the conventions of the stereotypical rise to glory/fall from grace fairy tale to such an extent that at times it ceased to be believable.

She never addresses the fact that her compulsive work ethic and tireless effort caused her body to slowly atrophy through injuries like hamstring and hip flexors pulls and tendinitis. Austin mentions that her career was finally undone when the car she was a passenger in was blindsided on the JFK parkway literally on the way to the US Open in 1989, but instead of explaining how agonizing or iniquitous it was for her freakish natural athletic ability to be effaced by a freak accident, simply says, "I quickly accepted that there was nothing I could do about it."

In a final flourish, Wallace tries to explain why athletes can seemingly never describe what it's like to be a physical genius. He attempts to rectify how it is possible for one to excel against the highest level of competition under immense pressure but never sufficiently convey it to anyone else:

Wallace is essenitally referring to the psychological concept of flow, which explains that to be fully immersed in any sort of task - "in the zone", to invoke a trite cliche - necessitates a singular focus. And as he points out, it's not specific to Austin, but relevant for any athletic pursuit. I've heard that over-thinking is the greatest enemy of an athlete in competition by broadcasters and writers alike, but never deconstructed with such effortless eloquence.

The reason that I bring up a work that's so old it was published on a day when Sam Militello started for the Yankees, is because of the recent release of an autobiography by an different tennis player. This athlete, partially because of a domineering parental presence - just like Tracy Austin - turned pro before he was able to drive. He too ascended through the professional ranks with incredible speed en route to two US Open titles but hit a wall at an age when he should have been entering his prime.

However, for all the similarities between the backgrounds and careers of Andre Agassi and Tracy Austin, their books couldn't be any different. While Austin declares that her mother "did not force her into tennis" at age three (as if she could remember either way), Agassi admits that his father used chase him around the house with a racket to take any trophy that Agassi received for something less than winning (e.g. sportsmanship) and smash it to pieces. Both hustled adults in matches when they were only children, but only Agassi admits being complicit in the scheme. As opposed to Austin, who flatly denied knowledge of match tanking or drug usage despite both being rampant during her time as a top pro, Agassi candidly admits that he partook in both activities.

We can question the motivations of Agassi and even assume that the reason he was so frank in Open lies somewhere between the narcissistic desire to tell his story in the most public of forums and achieve the goal of selling as many books - and therefore making as much money - as possible. But those were the ostensible goals of Austin, too. The difference is that Agassi delivered on the promise of a tell-all memoir. He truly pulled back the curtain and told the audience things that they never would have known had he not chose to reveal them.

Unfortunately, if you are familiar with David Foster Wallace, you know that he'll never read Agassi's book because he took his own life a little over a year ago. He battled with depression for his entire adult life and, in the process of trying to ween himself of the anti-depressant that enabled him not just to function but to pen brilliant works like Infinite Jest, hanged himself in his California home while his wife was out running some errands.

The most probable reason Wallace read all of those sports memoirs and why he said - however playfully - that Tracy Austin "broke his heart" with hers, was that he deeply wanted to go inside of the mind of a great athlete. It showed up in some of his other work, particularly the profile of Roger Federer he wrote for the New York Times. One of the main story lines in Infinite Jest revolves around the tennis-playing Hal Incandenza and there was even a character reminiscent of a young Tracy Austin. Like many of us, Wallace was a good but not great athlete in his youth and I think he desperately wanted just once, for someone who ascended to the very top to reveal what it was - what powerful mental process - that made them so magnificent.

But as he came to realize in reading Beyond Center Court, that kind of athletic genius could never be revealed in a book. Those innate gifts can't be put into words. In Open, Agassi offers the opposite. Instead of trying to explain what made him so great, he exposes the interior struggles that made him human. That is something that has always been able to be conveyed by prose, but the desire to do so for someone who has achieved unquestioned success is rare indeed.

Back Where It All Begins

Shortly before Christmas last year - on December 23rd to be exact - I was sitting down for lunch/dinner at my company's holiday party at the 21 Club, cutting into a piece of prime rib when I felt my phone vibrate. I didn't want to be rude but I fished my phone out of my pocket with my non-fork hand and stole a glance at the incoming text message. It was from my friend Joe: "Yankees close to signing Teixeira".

My face must have betrayed something when I read the message because my co-worker Greg nodded his head towards me and went, "What's up?".

I replied, "Holy shit, I think the Yankees are going to sign Mark Teixeira".

I put down my knife and fork and stared at the middle of the table shaking my head. I honestly couldn't believe it. Maybe it was just a rumor. They had already locked up CC Sabathia and A.J. Burnett. Did Brian Cashman and the Yanks really have the balls to orchestrate an eleventh hour coup for the most coveted position player on the market? Over the next hour or so, the texts kept flowing in from friends and cousins and college roommates, each one more certain than the last.

After the party, the other big Yankees fans from my office and I huddled up at the bar downstairs, having drinks on the company tab as groups of people would stand up and take turns belting out Christmas carols printed on a Salvation Army pamphlet they must have been handing out in exchange for donations outside. Between the renditions of Frosty the Snowman and sips of Macallan 18, we tried to get our heads around the fact that, amidst the faltering economy, the Yankees had just sent a message to their fans and to the rest of baseball: "We want to win a World Series that badly"

I got up early the next morning to head back upstate for Christmas with the family. I loaded up my car in the near-freezing rain, drove up the Westside Highway and crossed the George Washington Bridge, thinking I was going to beat the traffic upstate. I turned onto the Palisades Parkway and was met with a sea of taillights which bluntly informed me that this wasn't going to be a smooth getaway I had envisioned. The highway was a sheet of ice.

After 15 minutes of not moving one inch, I put the car in park, unbuckled my seatbelt and took out my iPhone to thumb through my Google Reader. At that point I needed something - anything - to keep my mind off the fact that I was hungover and stuck in standstill traffic in New Jersey to which there was no end in sight.

One of the first posts I came across this one from Shysterball and suffice it to say, it sort of blew my mind. An incredibly poignant blockquote from Will Leitch about Dock Ellis' no-hitter on acid and two beautifully dovetailed paragraphs from Craig summing up what writing about sports should really be about. It couldn't have been more up my alley.

And that's when I decided that I was going to start a blog. Well, I had technically already started one. I reserved a domain name wrote one post about trying to decide who to root for when the Red Sox played the Rays in the ALCS a little while back but that was the only thing on there.

Then on Christmas Day, after our visiting relatives had departed, I sat down and pounded out 1000 words on the Yankees most recent acquisition on my laptop. I drafted an email entitled "The Fack Youk Manifesto" to five or six of my friends informing them of my intentions, and said:

I realize that there is like an 85% chance that this never really goes anywhere, then dies a slow death from neglect, but there's that 15% that we can carve out this little space for our thoughts, all contribute and make it interesting/entertaining enough for some other people to check it out. I talk enough sports with you guys and hear interesting stuff worthy of a blog post and it makes me think that we could put that stuff to use and concentrate it here.

A lot has changed since then. Joe and Will don't really contribute much anymore because of the demands of studying for the bar exam and fascist corporate internet policies. I got unimaginably lucky to find Matt in the comments section, who, is not only a talented writer with a great sense of the history of the Yankees, but a great dude with similar musical tastes.

On the shortest of notice, I handed him the reigns to the blog for almost a full week back in May when I left for a road trip, which coincided nicely with a 9 game winning steak by the Yanks. He didn't miss a beat - which was far more than I had any right to expect - and the site has been markedly better ever since.

In the months since then, we've previewed and recapped every game (except for the three against the Blue Jays 4th of July weekend) and churned out almost 800 posts between us, which is very nearly 5 per day, including weekends.

I'd be lying if I said there wasn't a huge sense of personal validation involved in the Yankees winning the World Series for me. Since the playoffs began, our work has been recognized by a lot of people and we've more than doubled our average daily traffic. We've received even more kind emails and insightful comments from you guys than usual, which makes this all seem worthwhile. We've got some other recognition from well-respected baseball writers that I really couldn't have imagined when I wrote that first post on the signing of Mark Teixeira.

I've devoted what can only be described as an unhealthy and perhaps inadvisable amount of time reading about baseball in order to make my writing for this site as good as possible.

Unfortunately, that not-so-indirectly led to me getting laid off from my last job - the one that brought me to that company party in the beginning of this post. I wasn't going to regret the decision either way because I've spent the last six months doing something that makes me want to get out of bed in the morning as opposed to smothering myself to death with my pillow like my last job.

I highly doubt I have a career ahead of me as a writer, but seeing someone like Craig, whose work I have a lot of respect for, make that jump just two days ago is quite inspiring. Regardless of where it goes from here, I'm incredibly proud of what we've managed to do with this site in terms of traffic and recognition but mostly in terms of content. 105,000+ unique visitors and 270,000+ pageviews later (and counting), here we are.

When I first moved down to New York City, I didn't have a real job. I played online poker compulsively until the point that I was consistently profitable at it; enough so that I could afford to live in a sick apartment on the Upper West Side with my lifelong best friend. Eventually the slimy legislative tactics involved with the SAFE Port Act dried up the new money flowing into the online poker sites and the games got harder. A lot harder. Eventually I had to get a real job.

Now I'm back in Albany, not far from where I grew up, living with two of my good friends from high school, doing something that's barely profitable at all which in no way shape or form is a real job, despite the fact that I treat it like one. In some ways, it has come full circle.

Tomorrow, Matt, a few of my buddies and I are going down to the parade, so if you are going to be there and want to meet up, use my email address on the left side of the site.

After that, I don't know. This blog isn't going to disappear regardless of what happens, but we're going to have to scale back the content here if I ever want to get my shit together. There will be still be posts - probably much more off-topic material - but they won't be going up at 9:00, 11:00, 1:00, 3:00 & 5:00 all offseason, obviously.

If you've made it this far, I'd suggest you subscribe to our RSS Feed via Google Reader (164 people can't be wrong!). It will tell you when there is a new post so you don't have to come to the site to check. It will hurt our pageviews but help your sanity.

So thanks for reading this year. Thanks for your great comments and signed baseballs and for filling in the gaps where our knowledge is lacking. Thanks to those other bloggers who were kind enough to link, especially Joe from River Ave. Blues, Craig, Jason from IIATMS, Kevin Kaduk from Big League Stew, Ross from New Stadium Insider, Pete Abe, Rob Neyer (once), and even A.J. Daulerio, you know, back when Deadspin used to link to other blogs. A big thanks to Cliff who helped me a lot behind the scenes and Boston Bren who is mostly responsible for the site layout. There are others I'm forgetting, so I apologize for the omissions.

So, before we all disperse, there of course has to be a song. And it's only fitting that what is probably the de facto band of Fack Youk provides the soundtrack to this post.

See you around.

Jay

Say you want to be a rolling stone,
Get your sail out in the wind,
Get out on the highway and let 'er roll on,
Roll on back to someplace you ain't never been.

When I was younger I was hard to hold,
Seem like I was always goin',
Whichever way the wind would blow,
Now that travelin' spirit calls me again.

Callin' me back to where it all begins.

How High The Moon

Yesterday, on the long drive out to Darien Lake (which is just outside of Buffalo) to see Phish, I was tooling around on my iPhone and came across the unfortunate news of Les Paul's passing on Baseball Musings. I only say "unfortunate" because when someone dies, it's always unfortunate, but Paul lived a fantastic life and died at the ripe old age of 94.

If you're a guitar player or fan of rock music, you probably recognize his name from the famous line of Gibson guitars he endorsed, played by legends such as Duane Allman, Dickey Betts, Warren Haynes, Pete Townshend, Peter Frampton, David Gilmour, Keith Richards, George Harrison, Slash, Jimmy Page, Neil Young and Frank Zappa, to only skim the cream of the crop. Chances are, if fancy yourself a guitar player, you either have a Les Paul or have wanted one badly.

If his only accomplishment was pioneering the solid body electric guitar by crafting it out of a four inch thick piece of a railroad track, he would have had an incredibly successful career in the music business. However, that was only the tip of the iceberg. He also invented multi-track recording, which allowed multiple instruments and vocal arrangements to be stacked on top of each other, which is how virtually every album is recorded in the modern day. A musician in his own right, Paul played his regular gig at the Iridium Jazz Club in New York city until within just months of his death, a performance that we urged you all to experience and one I'm ashamed to say I never did.

To learn more about his long and rich life, head over to the Gibson website for a full scale tribute.

There is also a great PBS special on him, which I'm guessing will be re-aired in the near future. Keep an eye out for that as well.

Last night at the Phish show, they stopped briefly before setbreak to acknowledge Paul's passing, explaining that if he hadn't decided that guitars weren't just for background filler in a band, rock and roll as we know it may never have come to fruition. They played a short version of "How High The Moon", which was perhaps Paul's biggest hit and led into Golgi Appartus, a song replete with lead guitar and a beautiful quiet jazzy solo, a signature of Paul's own music. It was a great moment and I thought of all the other concerts going on simultaneously with similar tributes prompting burts of cheers in outdoor amphitheaters across the country and around the world.

The video below was captured during the advent of multi-tracking at which point it was still a novelty, not the standard industry practice. Most songs don't have 26 tracks (except maybe this one) but this video depicts a man far ahead of his time, bright an vibrant, which is exactly how he should be remembered. Rest in peace, sir.

Somewhere there's music,
It's where you are,
Somewhere there's heaven,
How near, how far.

The darkest night would shine,
If you would come to me soon,
Until you will, how still my heart,
How high the moon.

Game 31: Hey Mama

I wanna tell the whole world about a friend of mine,
This little light of mine, and I'm gonna let it shine,
I'm fixin' to take y'all back to them better times,
I'm fixin' to talk about my mama if yall don't mind.

I feel bad for Joba Chamberlain today. In light of the recent legal troubles his mother has had, it's probably a tough day to take the mound. Based on the fact that he is still pitching despite a ruptured blood vessel in his thumb, it would have probably been harder for him not to.

If you haven't, you should read this profile of Joba's mom written last September in the Lincoln Journal Star. It's easy to be an asshole and make fun her mugshot, but reading that story might actually give you some understanding into her problems, and make you appreciate your relationship with your mom a little more. 

Like most of us, I think I have the best mom in the world. A quick example: Back in college, she came out to visit me and took my roommate Kevin and I out to dinner. All of Kev's cousins had gone on Semester at Sea, and he was planning on carrying out the tradition. As he was explaining what the trip entailed, my mom turned to me and said "So, why aren't you doing this?" I ended up going, and it was the best decision I've ever made. 

She's smart and thoughtful and she worries and nags (I mean, is nice enough to remind me of things), which probably makes her a lot like your mom. She stayed strong through some really tough times and even though everyone told me I would have to be the man of the house, I knew that wasn't the case. 

A long time ago we were talking about religion and life and she said "I believe in doing good things for the benefits they reap in this lifetime". Regardless of your beliefs, I think those are words that we can all live by.

So Happy Mothers Day, Mom (and also to the maximum of one or two other mothers who read this site). We appreciate you, even if we don't always act like it. 

Fall From Paradise

[Non-Sports Content Alert!!! This one is extra credit. I know we've gone pretty heavy on the music lately, but I hope that I'm introducing you to new stuff once in a while and that you enjoy a little audial field trip.] 

Every once in a while, you come across a song at just the right time. A couple of the lines resonate perfectly with what you are going through, and you want to listen to it over and over again. Great songs can bond with parts of your life irreversably. I can still remember listening to Feel The Real on a trip to Ireland junior year in high school in my shitty old Discman that skipped every 8 seconds. It wasn't enough to keep me from playing it repeatedly. 

Only a few of the Fack Youk faithful would remember this, but a while ago I wrote a post on a white rapper from Halifax named Classified. I found him via a pretty random connection through a BitTorrent site and have been a fan ever since. He produces all of his own stuff and used to have to keep a full-time job to be able to afford to rent studio time. 

It would be a rags to riches story, but he's still relatively underground, especially in the U.S.  His rhymes are honest and unpretentious, and his tracks are tightly put together. There are parts of this song that would have worked for tomorrow's game post ("I know that everything that goes up, must come down, That everybody with luck, must run out") but I didn't want to give it short shrift. This appears to be the official music video and in the spirit of his music, it forgoes any bullshit and is straight to the point. 

Now a couple years after this drop, I'll probably flop,
But thats the way it goes when you get on the top,
I'm talkin bout Canada, yo this industry's a joke,
I'm a canadian rap star, and kid I'm still broke.

But I ain't work in years, and some think I'm famous,
While other people ask when the hell I'm gonna make it,
I'm good where I'm at, keep the glamour and the glitz,
I don't run from my fans, cause my stamina is shit.

Some Sensitive Subjects

[For those familiar with the site, I am dropping the typical weekend morning header, for reasons that will be very apparent in about two seconds]

Almost every other blog I read that covers baseball had something on the passing of Nick Adenhart. We would have put a post up as well, but it didn't seem right. None of us knew him and he wasn't on any of our teams. That didn't stop so many others from doing so, and I think that speaks volumes about the sports blogging community and about human nature in general. No one had to send out an email and tell people they should put something up. Most just took it upon themselves to pay tribute to a incredibly talented kid who caught the worst break possible. It kind of destroyed that whole "blogs are mean spirited" cliche.

Most of us never would have met Nick. More than likely, the only way we would have laid eyes on him was when he the Angels came to town and he toed the rubber. But yet, there was still an overwhelming outpouring of support for those who did actually know him. As heartbreaking and painful as death is, it unites people. At every wake or funeral, a few people who had relatively brief or just passing encounters with the departed usually show up and pay their respects.

I think when we saw the headline Thursday morning, we all had the same emotions and reactions. Shock, sorrow, disbelief, empathy, a frog in your throat? Maybe I'm just soft, but there was one in mine. I don't care how much you hate Scott Boras, if watching him try to speak at that press conference wasn't a humanizing moment, you have no soul.

I can't decide if this is a good or bad thing, but the reason that so many people were touched by this was that, in some sense, he was a celebrity. If you are a baseball fan, he was a minor character in your life. He even had a tragic sounding name that could have been plucked from a Shakespearean play. There were two other people who died in that car, but many of the articles didn't even mention their names. If you read what Matt Clapp at Sharipova's Thigh wrote, you would know one of them.

Matt delivered a heartfelt tribute to his best friend, Henry Pearson, who was also killed that night. If you haven't yet, click through and give it a read. It will make you think about your own best friend and realize how unique your relationship is. I found myself hoping that if I ever have to write a piece like that, it won't be for a very long time.

The way it happened almost isn't important anymore, but it's worth noting that they were hit by a car that ran a red light. What the fuck are the odds of two vehicles traveling at a fairly high rate of speed meeting at an intersection in such a forceful collision? If someone forgot their cell phone before they left or some other random thing, it never would have happened.

Of course if the other driver hadn't been drunk it almost certainly wouldn't have happened either. Living in Manhattan, thankfully drunk driving doesn't even enter the equation. It used to though, when I lived in a place where people couldn't just hop in the next cab and give the driver their cross streets. The same goes for Joba Chamberlain, one would imagine.

While watching that video on the Smoking Gun, the one thing that absolutely astonished me was that he had an open bottle of Crown Royal sitting on the passenger's seat. If that had come out when the intial reports of his arrest were published, I'm guessing there would have been a far greater public outcry. There's a difference between drinking and driving and drinking while driving.

Even the staunchest opponents to drunk driving would agree that after having one beer at a backyard BBQ or two glasses of wine at a fundraiser, it's okay to drive. The point being that .08 BAC (or whatever it is in your state) is an arbitrary number. There is some gray area. Most people have probably been in the car with someone who was technically over the limit, but you still trusted implicitly that they did not have their ability to operate the vehicle impaired.

No matter how many tragic drunk driving stories there are out there, people are still going to roll the dice. The fact of the matter is that are some people who, if they think they are capable of driving, are going to get behind the wheel no matter how stiff the consequences are. I'm not saying that is okay, but it's just one of those things you can't legislate. Alcohol impairs your judgement long before it impairs your ability to drive.

Me saying "don't drink and drive" isn't going to change what happens at 1:30AM tomorrow morning when one of you is trying to rationalize getting behind the wheel. The only thing I can say is "think about it". If you get in an accident, it may or may not involve someone else, but it fucking surely will involve you.

[As the headline implies, these are issues that hit close to home for a lot of people. As always, my email is on the side of the site, and I will reply.]

The Fallacy Of The Predetermined Outcome

I'm a little late to the party on this one, but Lar at wezen-ball (fellow resident of Shysterville) asked one of the most loaded sports-related questions one can ponder on Tuesday: Have Two Baseball Games Ever Played Out Identically?

In other words, are there any two games in baseball history that, if I were to pick up the scorecards for each, they would be indistinguishable?

The difference between Lar and pretty much everyone else in the world is that he actually set out to crack this mystery. He created a Retrosheet database and methodically broke down the potential possibilities resulting from each plate appearance and quickly came to the conclusion that the odds would of two games playing out exactly the same would be astronomical.

If you think about the numbers involved, it's not surprising in the least: with at least a dozen possible standard outcomes available for each plate appearance (and another dozen or more possible, but highly unlikely outcomes), and with 60 or 70 or even 80 plate appearances per game, the odds become fantastic that two games would be identical.

Furthermore, if it were possible to have each plate appearance broken down by pitch, it would become even more impossible to find two identical games. Click through to see how similar the pairs of games he isolates actually were. You might be surprised.

-----

Take into account that it is wildly unlikely that any two baseball games have ever played out in exactly the same way, and remember that the next time some tries to apply hindsight to something that almost (or supposedly should have) occurred in a sporting event of any kind. "Oh man, if the ump had called that obvious strike, then Pettitte gets out of that inning, those two runs don't score, and the Yanks would have won." Those are the same people who think "everything happens for a reason" and that everyone has a soulmate.

The title of this post comes from something that Michael Kay likes to say during Yankee broadcasts. I've had some fun with Mr. Kay 'round here, but I must agree with him on this one. There is NO chance that the game would have played out the same way and to believe so is to subscribe to the fairy tales of Destiny and/or Fate.

Lar went back over the entire history of recorded MLB game data and couldn't find anything close to two identical scoresheets. That database consisted of 100,000 games. When people try to isolate one event and keep the rest of the game the same, they are saying that not only is the imaginary divergent outcome of the game is the same as another that occurred in baseball history (essentially impossible), they are saying that it is the same as the actual outcome of THAT game (essentially impossible multiplied by 100,000+).

This is the kind of stuff that makes life endlessly fascinating. Even in a sport like baseball where things are endlessly categorized and recorded, it is almost impossible (no, fuck it, it IS impossible) to have two games which are the same, even on a scorecard.

That's why I hate the concept of "everything happens for a reason". Ironically the people who say this are usually talking about things beyond human control, which are actually the exact things that don't happen for a reason. There is plenty of stuff in life that happens without any reasonable explaination at all, and the best we can do is try to make sense of it logically.

Thursdays Just Got A Whole Lot Less Cool

We here at Fack Youk make no secret of the fact that the name of of this rag tag outfit was inspired by Drew Magary's brilliant transcription of Bawston-speak onto the intertubes. During the NFL Season he writes the incomparable Thursday NFL Dick Joke Jambaroo, but I looked forward more to his offseason Balls Deep column, in which he seamlessly blended insights into life, sports, drinking and sex with hatred, profanity, and sarcasm. Back in June, he delivered a stirring address to the Graduating classes of '08:

You think you’re gonna make a difference? You got some nerve, asshole. You’re just part of another class going through the same routine as the class before you. You’re no different. You’re just as full of douchebags and shitheads as any other class. In fact, given the rising popularity of lacrosse, your class is probably even worse. The rest of us eventually had our dreams crushed by the cruel realities of the world. I see no reason not to burst your bubble right here and now. Heed these words, then fall in line like the rest of us.

Truly inspirational.

He also used that regular column to come up with some genuine insights into life, including when he explained why, selfishly, he was voting for Obama:

I’m voting for Barack Obama this fall. Now, I have lots of reasons to do it, all of them blatantly self-serving. Don’t like Obama? Feel like voting for McCain? Fine by me. I’m not interested in starting any sort of political flame war. But the main reason that I’m voting for Obama is because he offers something that McCain does not: an opportunity for me to “be a part” of a historic moment.

It’s an inescapable fact for both candidates that a black man winning the White House would be a far a greater milestone in American History than if another old-ass white guy were to keep the streak alive. The reason Obama can talk about change all the time without getting too specific is because he doesn’t have to get specific. He IS the change. The act of him winning, by itself, has a huge impact.

So there’s something immensely appealing to me about the prospect of living through that sort of moment. I was born in 1976. I have lived through exactly one seminal moment in American history, and that was 9/11. I would very much like something to counterbalance it. I’d like to bear witness to history and not feel ashamed for the odd kind of thrill it provides. I’m voting for the moment as much as I’m voting for the man.

Well, in yesterday's Jambaroo, the last of the NFL season, he announced that Balls Deep was no more.

Also, I regret to inform you that Balls Deep, the regular Thursday column I ran in place of the Jamboroo during the offseason, will not be returning. Much to Buzz Bissinger's relief.

Instead, I'll be continuing my editor at large duties here by popping in for random posts every so often. My hope is to litter the site with more Great Moments in Poop, polygraph tests, Nazi Shark picks, and poorly worded, profanity-filled rants. I believe I also owe the editor of this site a Cultural Oddsmaker column, so look for that, too.

Lastly, not that you needed the incentive, but I've joined Penthouse magazine as a new monthly columnist. Someone on Facebook told me they only masturbate to it for the articles. Me too!

It's a sad day to be an occasionally vulgar sports blogger. Good for Drew, Penthouse is the perfect forum for him, and I hope that what he writes over there resembles all the fantastic stuff he has done for Deadspin over the years.

The first Balls Deep column I read completely blew my mind. I didn't know you could do THAT. There wasn't (and probably still isn't) another place to get random sapient sports-related insights very specific to the college/20's demographic presented without pretense, self consciousness or an editorial filter.

I can tell you that reading his stuff not only helped encourage me to build this little thing here, but to expand my range and talk about all sorts of stuff, and not be afraid to use words that might offend some people. But like all good things, this came to an end.

We still have KSK, and like he said above, he will still make surprise appearances at The 'Spin. But on Thursdays from early February to late August, there won't be something that will make me drop whatever I'm doing at work around 4:00 and head to my Google Reader.