Stop clapping you lost

Holy crap what a first day!  I mean seriously did that just happen?  I am going to go out on a limb and say that was the craziest day 1 in the history of the NCAA tournament.  Never mind that people at my new job think I’m a weirdo for going nuts after the Murray State final shot let’s take a look at some snap judgments from day 1.

Snap Judgments

Dear Notre Dame just because your football team shit the bed this year, last year, the year before that…and so on, doesn’t mean you have to follow suit.  Just once I’d like a ND team to show up and play to potential.

picture via SI.com

Northern Iowa way to show up and rep the MVC!  I only wish Gus Johnson would have called Ali Farokhmanesh’s game winner because Ali definitely was in the parking lot when he hit that 3.

Marquette, yea you deserved that.  Sorry ‘Nova but you deserved the same fate at Marquette but you somehow managed to pull it out.  That’s two years in a row that ‘Nova has had a bit of a scare in round 1.  Survive and move on is all that matters I guess.  Big props though to Bob Morris, not only did you almost upset ‘Nova but you have by far the sweetest uniforms in the tourney.

picture via SI.com

Danero Thomas can now have any girl on the Murray State campus after that shot.  Still not totally convinced that’s a good thing.  That last second shot made me think, in March Madness can you remember a time when a last second shot by an underdog didn’t go in?  I mean putting half court heaves aside I can’t remember when it didn’t happen.

picture via SI.com

Big East had an awful day.  Georgetown pooped themselves (Really, Ohio?), we’ve already covered ND and Marquette’s wonderful showings as well as ‘Nova deciding they wanted to play on Saturday.

RIB Bracket Challenge Day 1 Round up

Congrats to Andy “shattered ankle” Turney for taking an early lead.  Got to give a big shout out to Matt “Plugger” Pflughoeft for his bracket where he has Georgetown winning it all.  Way to go Plugger, hell of a first day son.  Why didn’t you just light $25 on fire?  Just asking…

Song that best sums up Day 1

Ladies and gentlemen, well just gentlemen because let’s be honest there are no ladies that read RIB…I think.  Anyway, the big day is finally upon us, the start of March Madness.  To celebrate this momentous occasion I have started the day by sporting my CBS jacket as well as prepared a little smorgasbord of March Madness related items for you, I’m so wonderful aren’t I?

Before we get to any of the fun, if you still haven’t signed up for the first annual Roman Is Burning NCAA Tourney well then make like Sully moving to the buffet line and sign up.  CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP.

On to the Madness…

The Best March Madness Commercial Ever

Greatest Announcer…Ever

ONIONS

10 Players to Watch During March Madness

Check them out via SportsUntapped.com

Eight great NCAA Tournament buzzer beaters

Some amazing shots in here via SDNN.com

5 People In Your NCAA Pool

Yea we all know these people, via AskMen.com

Happy St. Patrick’s Day to all you Irish…and I guess all you non-Irish out there.   Last week we touched on my favorite Irish things so no need to revisit that, however there was a certain movie that we totally missed (we apologize for nothing).  How in all of its Irish glory could we possibly forget Rudy?

If you haven’t seen Rudy I am not going to take the time to explain it to you, just go see it.  You will probably cry at the end and find yourself breaking out in random “Ruuuudy, Ruuuudy, Ruuuuuuuuuudy” chants from time to time but you’ll thank me (Who’s the wild man now?).

So this St. Patrick’s Day I offer you a fine Irish Blessing, a look at why Guinness beer is actually good for you and a tribute to the movie Rudy.

IF YOU HAVEN’T SIGNED UP FOR THE FIRST ANNUAL ROMAN IS BURNING NCAA BRACKET CHALLENGE CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP.

An Irish Blessing

May the road rise up to meet you.

May the wind always be at your back.

May the sun shine warm upon your face, and rains fall soft upon your fields.

And until we meet again, May God hold you in the palm of His hand.

Guinness the Miracle Beer

A deep look into the wonder known as Guinness.

**Thanks to Joe Ryan for the link

Rudy Tribute

Just throwing this out there, with all the talk about how the NCAA Selection Committee did a good job or a bad job what no one is really talking about is that the Selection Committee doesn’t really exist.  It is all just a ploy to make people believe that a bunch of guys sit in a room and select the field of 65.  Who picks the field then you ask?  Well that’s easy, it’s Roman of course.  See we all know Roman basically runs CBS so a couple years back the NCAA Tournament was going through a few rough years, they then approached Roman and asked him if he would take over selecting the teams for the NCAA Tournament.  Since Roman has never backed down from a challenge in his life he gladly accepted the offer.  Therefore all questions, comments and concerns about what teams are in and what teams are out should be directed to Roman, or Emily (Kyle) Colborn.

Now that we have that business out of the way it is time for you to fill out your brackets and compete in the first ever Roman Is Burning Challenge.  This challenge is going to be run on CBS.com (of course), there will also be a $25 entry fee (Roman doesn’t do anything unless dolla bills are involved) and of course a pay out to the winner.  All that info will be announced as soon as we have the final number of entries.  Gladly assisting RIB in this process will be RIB reader/wanna-be pocket passer Mike Cloud, he will be coordinating the CBS site as well handling all the money collection, so be nice to him.

Additional Rules:

Constitution:
1. $25 per entry
2. Money must be received prior to the first game on Thursday, March 18th. If your money is not received before the tip-off, then your bracket will be removed from the group.
3. There are two payment options, either via PayPal or by mail. For PayPal, (which is the preferred option due to its convenience), please send your money to mcloud23@aol.com. For mail, make your check out to Michael Cloud and send it to 1504 N. Western Ave. APT #1 Chicago IL 60622.
4. Depending on how many entries we have, we will either do winner takes all or pay out for first and second place. This will be announced after the deadline for submitting brackets has passed.

Okay so CLICK HERE to sign up and chose your teams (link and password are also below).  If you don’t have a CBS account, well shame on you, but no worries you can sign up…it’s quick and easy (just like Jim Cook).  One final disclaimer:  if you sign up for this challenge and suck it up, RIB reserves the right to rip you apart during Morning Coffee…that just happened.

http://romanisburning.mayhem.cbssports.com/e?ttag=BM10_EM_all_cspt_os_inlk_0001

Our Group password is: roman

Apparently yesterday was Pi Day?  Having sub par math skills it took me a little while to realize why they called yesterday Pi Day…shut up Saturday killed off a lot of brain cells.  If there was one person who didn’t forget yesterdays holiday it was ganaxin.com.  They compiled the best pie in the face baseball videos out there.  I am grateful that we do not have to see that attention hound Nick Swisher anywhere in these videos.

My favorite one is definitely the video featuring Mike Maddux but make sure you click here to check out all the rest.

Anyway on to more important things, like drinking and St. Patrick’s Day.  Is there a more wonderful day of the year than the Saturday before St. Patrick’s Day (or if we get lucky like last year and it falls on a Saturday)?  Green beer and Jameson for everyone is the only way to celebrate, but if you are going to drink your face off please do it responsibly, be safe out there because Lord knows weridos like staff writer/pitcher bringer Jim Cook are out there…lurking.

I thought I would give you my Top 10 Favorite Irish Things.  Why you ask, well because I have to, that’s why.

10.  Guinness

No one really understands that this beer is actually much better for you than most of the light beers out there, tastes better too.

9. Jameson

Sure it tastes like death, but it’s a good death.  Just watch yourself around this stuff, anymore than 3 or 4 and you’ll start seeing leprechauns.

8. The Boondock Saints

A cult classic movie, even if those accents were downright awful.

7. Danny Boy

One of the best songs of all time…

6. Irish Promise rings

Sweet looking rings, thing I like about them is if you are going to approach a girl who is wearing one you know immediately if she has a boyfriend or not.  Just takes the guess work right out of it.

5. Liam Neeson

Taken was bad ass!

4. Lucky Charms

Before I went paleo I could inhale this stuff, how is miss it.

3. Brian Scalabrine

I am not sure if this guy has any actual Irish heritage but he sure does look like he does.  He might be the worst player in the NBA but you will always know when he is on the court with that fire red hair.

2. Notre Dame

Sure they’ve been a punch line for quite some time now but you have to take the good with the bad, even if the bad is a 350 lb. coach who got run out of town…good riddance.

1. My Grandparents

If it weren’t for them I wouldn’t be Irish, love ND or go to Cubs games.  Drunk dialing grandma on St. Patrick’s Day to have her sing Danny Boy to us has become a tradition of sorts.

As we near the greatest day in the history of earth, better known as St. Patrick’s Day, we all need to take a step back and thank the good Lord for all the blessings in our lives. One blessing you should be especially thankful for is staff writer/dog park navigator Jim Cook and his look at the 11 years in-between Chicago Bulls All-Stars. Okay, enough with the sappy-sappy and on to Jim’s musings…oh yea, in case you missed any of the first eight parts they are below.
Part I
Part II
Part III
Part IV
Part V
Part VI
Part VII
Part VIII

_____________________________________________________

It’s been about a week since I’ve given you all a piece of my mind and a recap of the Chicago Bulls during their All-Star drought.  And as a reward for your patience, I will provide you with a story and a recap of the most successful Chicago Bulls season in our 38 part series.  As with all these diatribes (not sure if that’s the right use but it’s a cool sounding word), make sure you set aside a couple of minutes to read what I’m about to write because there will be a quiz at the end of today’s lesson.

Let’s start with the story.  Although I have a great story about Toni Kukoc, whom you may remember from part 1, 2, or 3 (if Lil’ Roman is smart, he’ll link put the links where the 1, 2, and 3 are), this story has to do with an experience that many sports fans probably have thought “that would be cool to do”.  On Sunday, I was blessed with 300 level tickets from one of my cousin’s good friends, Mike Stack, for the Blackhawks-Red Wings game.  You may have seen it, it was on TV.  You may have seen me, they show good looking people on TV.  While walking out the door, I quickly caught myself and ran back into my room to grab a hat…just in case.  (If you don’t know where this story is going, keep going.  Otherwise you can skip to the Bulls stuff you also don’t like)  Anyways, we’re at the game, sitting in our 300 level seats, having a good time and our good friend Andrew Ladd netted himself the first goal of the game. 

After my second Bud Select of the late morning, I told my cousin “If Ladd scores twice more, I’m throwing this hat.  It’s the only reason I brought a hat.”  He laughs, I don’t.  We debate where the hat would actually land.  I saw right on the back of the head of the Indian at Center Ice.  My cousin doesn’t even think it makes it out of the third row.  I tell him I’m gonna throw him on the back of the Indian head and that ends the conversation for the time being.  Anyways, Mr. Ladd scores himself another goal early in the third period and I’m starting to think that it’s going to happen.  I’m going to see a hat trick and I’ll be able to throw my hat on the ice. 

Now, I become REALLY obnoxious, even though the guys next to me are enjoying my combination of enthusiasm and stale booze.  Basically anytime Ladd touched the puck or looked at the puck or was in the stadium, I would encourage him to shoot the puck.  I tried my best to make sure he heard me.  Finally, he got the hint and scored his third goal to cap off the hat trick.  Now it’s time for me to put up after I had been begging for it for all game long.  Much more thought had been put into how I could yell louder for Ladd to get a hat trick than what I’d do if he actually did score.  So I took off my hat and eyed up that Indian head.  Now here’s the part you hockey fans will want to pay attention to:

I threw the hat like you would a frisbee.  It spun gloriously as the “da-da-da-da-da” song plays in the background.  The trajectory is looking really good.  And then it just hung in the air.  Slowly but surely it floats below our vantage point undoubtedly in the very last row of the second deck at best.  Last I saw, it was not making it to the Indian head.  I immediately regretted not practicing before.  My cousin was being a jerk off and wouldn’t let me try again with his White Sox hat so I was left with the slow float of my Miami Redhawks hat knowing it didn’t make it to the ice to celebrate.  My recommendation for the future, throw it like you’re pulling down a window shade.  And if that doesn’t work, you’re on your own.  Odds are you won’t ever see a live hat trick anyways so these past 24 minutes have been a waste of time for me writing and 30 seconds of you reading.

So now that we’re done with the foreplay, let’s get into this 2006-2007 Chicago Bulls season.  Clearly the most successful squad of the era.  A much tougher squad than what we typically were treated to, on both ends of the floor.  Honestly, I felt like this season had a ton of sloppy games in it, and winning ugly was an identity of this Bulls squad.  That can be attributed to the signing of the sloppy, ugly Ben Wallace.  Being able to sign one of the most valuable defender and rebounder in the league was a huge boost, not to mention that it put a major dent in his previous team’s armor, the Detroit Pistons.  De-troit Sucks.  All it cost to bring Big Ben to town was $60 mil over 4 years for a 32 year old that could only do one thing very well (rebound) and another pretty good (defense).  I’m not going to lie, I was pretty pumped at the time.  Although the Bulls didn’t really need another big man who could rebound and miss shots by the hoop and airball free throws, I did think it was good that they were able to poach away a main cog of the Pistons sorta dynasty.  Little did I know how disappointing Big Ben would actually play.  But of course, hindsight is 50/50.  With the signing of Wallace, it was necessary to get rid of the younger, cheaper version of Wallace the Bulls currently had in Tyson Chandler.  Remember when he was traded for Elton Brand a while back?  When we decided to cash in on our Chandler stock, all it was worth was PJ Brown and JR Smith.  So basically he was worth a lot of initials.  The Bulls then decided they didn’t want a guard who could score quickly and make big shots (that’ll come back to haunt them in future episodes that you won’t read) and flip JR for Howard Eisly, and two 2nd round picks.  Those picks turned out to be Aaron Gray and JamesOn Curry.  More on them later.  But if we track what we got for Elton Brand, an All-Star, double-double machine, and low post scorer that the team desperately looked for  years, we see it was PJ Brown, Howard Eisly, Aaron Gray, and JamesOn Curry.  We talked about ROI earlier and we can safely conclude that the Bulls received an AWFUL ROI on the first pick in the ‘99 draft.  Don’t have to look far to see why this team was so bad for so long.  Anyways, that was a whole lot of word diarrhea for me basically saying this…In: Wallace and Brown, Out: Chandler.  Yeah, there were some spare pieces that came and went but I’ve already blabbed on enough and none of them really meant a difference anyways.  Well, they signed Adrian Griffin again.  I’d take a cup of Perdue pee to figure out why.  God damn somebody really liked that guy or something.  Whatever, let’s move on.

The Bulls also acquired this guy: http://search.espn.go.com/martynas-andriuskevicius/

 As for the draft, basically the same shit as in free agency.  A whole lot of hope, not a whole lot of output.  This season or in the long term.  Because of the Eddy Curry robbery of the Knicks, the Bulls owned what turned out to be the second overall pick in the draft.  John Paxson, taking this stroke of great luck and prime opportunity to start building a dynasty decided to take a complete project in the form of Tyrus Thomas.  Well, let me step back and say the Bulls took LaMarcus Aldridge, the back to the basket big man they have been searching for since Brand (minus that one contract year from jizz-towel Curry).  Aldridge, although lean, was a strong scorer at Texas and maybe might have made a little bit of sense to get on the team to compliment the defense and rebounding of every single big man the Bulls had on the roster so far.  But what the fuck do I know?  Anyways, Johnny P flipped Aldridge for the raw Thomas and Viktor Khryapa.  His name is pronounced “Crap-ah”.  He played like “Crap-ah”.  Someone needed to tell Pax that it’s ok if the Bulls don’t get the absolute worst player in every trade.  Back to Thomas.  Tyrus was coming off an exceptionally exciting freshman season where he (and Big Baby Davis when he was really fat) LSU to the Final Four.  Thomas put up great performances in the Sweet Sixteen and Elite Eight, culminating in a 9 point, 13 rebound, 5 block effort against Duke.  And then in their Elite Eight game against Texas, he blew up going for 21, 13, and 5.  Although it was questionable if he would ever be able to develop an offensive arsenal, it was widely acknowledged that he would be able to contribute rebounding and defense quickly.  Cause we needed more of that from our front court (shaking my head),  The kid had athleticism out of control and a whole bunch of raw talent.  The only problem was that he was a 19 year old kid, picking up basketball as a junior in high school, he didn’t really have too much experience.  His play as a rookie reminded me of me in the bedroom: excited, caught out of position frequently, and being told to get out after about 2 minutes.  But after a freshman year of 12 and 9, I can understand why the Bulls might have been so attracted to his talent.

With their original first round pick, the Bulls did some more wheeling and dealing because Pax likes to make dumb trades that piss me off.  They took their 13th overall selection and traded it to the Philly 76ers for their 16th overall, a second round pick, and cash.  I’m not going to break this down because I’ve already wrote too much shit about this season so I’ll skip to the money shot: the Bulls selected a French guy named Thabo Sefolosha.  According to Wikipedia, he’s a Swiss guy.  Wherever he’s from, they shouldn’t be throwing him a parade anytime soon.  The scouts that wasted their time watching him play against people wearing dresses determined that he also was a solid defender but without any assurance of developing a strong offensive game.  What the fuck?  How many more times are they going to draft like that?  Could this be me hinting at what they’re going to do in next year’s draft?  (nodding my head)  Thabo seemed like a nice guy but he never really found a spot in the rotation.  And with General Skiles not being too friendly with rookies, Thabo and Tyrus both found themselves on the very short end of the playing time see-saw.  The Bulls second round pick got traded around so I’m not going to waste your time tracking it like Jack Bauer so I’m just going to say in that slot, the Utah Jazz took Dee Brown, 1991 NBA Dunk Champion and 2005 First Team All-American.  That doesn’t sound right…

Coach

General Skiles was back in control of this team for his third term and change.  I don’t feel like looking up documentation or articles supporting my claim, but it was widely considered that the Bulls were one of the most disciplined and well-coached teams in all of basketball.  High marks for Scotty.  Does anyone notice that he’s currently doing the same thing with the Bucks that he once did with the Bulls?  Taking a young team, grooming them, getting them to overachieve by defense…and that segues into their #6 defensive ranking (out of 30) and a strong 13 rank in points per game.  Better than the year before, eh?

Record

49-33.  Very respectable.  Good for the 5 seed in the Eastern Conference.  Especially not bad considering both the Pistons and Cavs had real strong seasons, which bumped the Bulls down the seeding ladder.  This record is even more respectable considering the Bulls started out in the shitter again.  Why they’d start the season 3-9 is beyond me, but they did and then only lost 24 games the rest of the way.  Not bad.  Plus they led the whole fucking league in attendance.  People were really excited to see Viktor Crap-a suite up.  He reminds me of Vikidis from Semi-Pro. 

Longest win streak

7, which obviously came after the preformentioned 3-9 start.  Is preformentioned a word?   I know aforementioned is around but what does preformentioned mean?  So, during this 7 game win streak, the Bulls had a sexy party with the hoop, scoring 100 or more points in 6 of the 7 wins.  Looking at a couple of the box scores, it looks like Ben Gordon got pretty hot fueling this scoring skeet-fest.  Good for him.

Best win

Surprisingly, this one is easy because it was night one of the NBA season.  The Bulls opened the season in prime time, against the defending NBA Champion Miami Heat.  I remember the game vividly, I was working out at the Fitness Formula Club on Waveland that night.  You don’t look like this naked without putting time in the gym, kids.  The Heat, led by Dwayne Wade, Shaq, Zo Mourning, Gary Payton, Chris Quinn amongst others, were absolutely mushroomed stamped in their own building that night.  The Bulls, led by Kirk Hinrich’s 26 points, gave the Heat the worst opening night loss of an NBA defending champ by the score of 108-66.  The Heat scored 30 points at half.  The Bulls scored 37 in the second quarter alone.  The first game with Ben Wallace provided lots of fuzzy feelings about the season.  He had 11 rebounds, only 49 less than how many millions he was being paid.

Longest losing streak

How’s this for symmetry (how do you spell that?  That looks wrong) Right before the Bulls went on their 7 game win streak, they lost 6 in a row.  So I guess it was basically a wash there.  The squad went from 3-3 to start the season to 3-9 quick,  More symmetry (?), the Bulls gave up 100 or more points in 5 of the 6 games they lost during the streak. 

Worst loss

I’m just going to stick in this 13 game W/L streak stretch that we’ve been talking about the past few categories.  I was just looking at the games in the losing streak and saw they lost to the 76ers 123-108.  The 6ers didn’t make the playoffs that year, and I didn’t remember them having much surrounding Allen Iverson v1.0 so I clicked on it.  The reason I declared this the worst loss was due to the contributions of their prize off-season pickups.  Ben Wallace, PJ Brown, and Viktor Crap-a combined, COMBINED, for the following line: 0 points, 2 rebounds, 1 assist, 0 steals, 0 blocks, 2 turnovers, 6 fouls, 0-3 from the floor in a combined 26 minutes of play.  That kind of production reminds me of the day when your boss isn’t in the office and you just look at the same websites over and over and over and then it’s finally time to go home.  Now imagine if 3 people did that.  Wouldn’t somebody in the office go completely bonkers on those 3 employees?  Well, maybe General Skiles did cause they did reel off their next 7.  Never mind on my previous point.  Just know that those three guys combined to suck a ton that night.

Best Moment

Although it could be the fact that the Bulls placed two players (Hinrich and Wallace) on the All-Defense team or whatever it’s called, I think the best moment is going to be the 4 game sweep of the defending champion Heat, especially since the Heat were the higher seed and supposed to have home court advantage.  Luol Deng, who has come to usually get some sort of injury towards the end of the season (see: year, This), he duct taped himself together to make it to this playoff series and happy we were he did.  Averaging 26.3 points, 9 rebounds, and 3 assists per game in the series, Deng carried the Bulls to the second round show down against the Detroit Pistons.  With the first playoff series victory since MJ, morale was high on the Bulls and focus was on a future NBA title.  I was on the bandwagon, sitting shotgun.

Sadly, that second round show down with the Pistons didn’t really go as planned.  Dropped down 0-3 in the series before it seemed like game 1 was even over, the Bulls fought back to earn a game 6 at home.  Where they played hard to keep up with Detroit, they unfortunately could not keep up their furious effort and were finally disposed.  Sad face.  But even with that, the series showed that the Bulls were finally ready to compete in big games and make some noise in the playoffs.  Or at least so we all thought (more foreshadowing so that if you made it this far, you’ll just keep reading whatever shit I write because you’ve come this far).

Funniest player to start at least 25% of the games

I spent like 6 seconds trying to decide between Chris Duhon and PJ Brown but I’m kinda ready for bed so I just picked PJ Brown so I can continue moving forward.  This 37 year old man averaged 6 points and 4 rebounds a game while playing 20 minutes per game.  Was it necessary to start him?  Why not just let one of those younger guys start and get some experience.  But instead this old creaky man started 49 games.  Does anyone think PJ Brown was ever very good?  Well, looking at his numbers, it turns out that these 49 games were the LEAST amount of games he started before he latched on with Boston last year.  Wow.  Color me stunned.  He wore 42 everywhere he went and then he got to Boston and changed numbers to 93.  Huh?  And I saw him at Great America once.  I probably should have just picked Chris Duhon for this exercise.  Fuck.

Other bozos on the roster

Malik Allen again, Andre “I’m out of the league” Barrett, Adrian “Fuckin” Griffin, Viktor Crap-a, Mike “he really liked his” Sweetney”s”.  That was a stretch, I know.

Leading scorer

Ben Gordon (21.4 ppg)

Leading rebounder

Ben Wallace (10.7 rpg)

Leading asssssssitsssssss

Kirk Hinrich (6.3 apg)

When I was growing up my brother Drew and I would often play video games against one and other.  Drew was far superior to me in every single game we played (funny because I dominated his world in real sports).  The only way I could ever even think to beat Drew at a video game was to wait him out.  Wait him out?  Yea, basically we would play for so long that Drew would eventually have to go to the bathroom but refused to put the controller down.  This always led to him standing up and doing the “I don’t have to pee dance”, yea you’ve all seen it at one point in your life.  Roman would later coin this dance “The Drew Dance”.

Why did I decide to tell you this TMI story about my little, now slightly overweight, brother?  Well because it seems during the Gold Medal game of Men’s Olympic Hockey Tournament it seems that the whole country of Canada was doing the Drew Dance.

Below is a chart from a water company in Edmonton, EPCOR, that charts the water consumption during the gold medal game.  Say what you will about the Canadians but those people are dedicated to the game of hockey.  Click here for the original link.

 
 **Special thanks to Joe Ryan for the link.

 

It’s just something new every day so far this baseball season, I just can’t catch a break.  First Guzman, then Nathan and now Nomar is retiring? It appears that this morning my original man-crush Nomar Garciaparra will retire as a member of the Boston Red Sox.  Reports say he will make the move to the booth and join ESPN’s broadcast crew, not quite sure how I feel about that yet.

I first became a fan of Nomar back in 1998 when he hit .323, clubbed 32 home runs and drove in 122 runs which earned him a second place finish in the AL MVP voting that year (He finished second to Juan Gonzales who was obviously on the sauce, so there is that).

During those years the three-headed monster of Jeter-Nomar-ARod were establishing themselves as the top three shortstops in the league.  It was always assumed that you backed on guy and hated the other two guys, and as it still holds true I hope Jeter and ARod take a two-hopper off their respective faces.

There were just so many cool things about Nomar that drew me to becoming a fan of his.  From the way he flipped his batting gloves in-between every pitch to the fact he married Mia Hamm, Nomar was a flashy guy without being flashy.  He just has this essence of smooth about him, to me was Pedrioa before Pedrioa.

When Nomaaa was traded to the Cubs in 2004 it was like Christmas come early.  I was in Mexico with my family at the time but I remember everyone just looking at me very strangely when I came sprinting down to the pool screaming the Nomar song (to the tune of Hava Nagilah: Noma-Garcia-para).  After one of the most gruesome groin injuries that I have ever seen in 2005 Nomar strung together a few “off into the sunset” seasons (including a 2006 All-Star selection) culminating with his retirement today.

So congratulations and thank you to my original man-crush and one of my favorite players of all time.  Please don’t suck as an announcer.

I consider myself a happy person, I like when good things happen to good people, for the most part I’m cheery, I like puppy dogs and babies (unlike Patrick Sullivan who hates anything that makes people smile), but man do I hate when good things happen to awful fan bases.

When the news broke this morning, confirming my worst fear that Twins closer Joe “don’t call me Lamb” Nathan has a torn ligament in his elbow I slightly threw up in my mouth.   They are calling it a significant tear but Nathan isn’t going to opt for surgery right away.  What?  Are you serious?  When the words ‘significant’ and ‘tear’ are talked about in the same sentence with ‘your elbow’ I think surgery might be the next logical step.  But what do I know.

 At this point we can basically hand the division to the White Sox because without Nathan the Twins are going to have to rely on…umm…uhhh…Jon Rauch?  I think I’m going to puke again.

F my life, the season hasn’t even started yet and the Cubs have lost Guzman and now the White Sox are going to benefit from a Nathan (Lamb) – less Twins team.  Okay here is the deal, I’m just going to spare myself the agony and you tell me how the 2010 season goes.  Deal?

**Ha, stupid White Sox fan, way to put guys who are actually on your 2010 team in your video…idiot (no I’m not bitter).