Nerds on Sports

Holy Crap!

Kevin Youkilis has a blog now!

Personally, I’m still waiting for the Manny Ramirez blog.

No, that’s not a baseball score — That’s the final score of the MLS Soccer game I attended this weekend. Actually since the Revs didn’t win I think the scoreboard should say: Wizards 4 — Revolt 3. Even though the home team didn’t come out victorious, it was a good event.

The Kansas City Wizards fired a magic missile at the darkness and that magic missile was Eddie Johnson. Eddie blew the Revolution away with his first career hat trick. The game winning goal was a pretty sad one from a Rev’s fan point of view — In a horrible back pass between defenders, Johnson comes out of what seems like nowhere going about 100 mph and steals the ball. Catching the defender off guard, Eddie speeds right by leaving him with a one-on-one with Reis. Reis is a pretty good keeper, but Eddie Johnson (who kind of sucked it up last season) was able to score easily.

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Technically speaking, readers, today (Tuesday) is Business Day One of the workweek. So though I didn’t post on Monday, I don’t think I’m entirely in default for my weekly commitment. Thank the good lord for sweet technicalities – they’re the only thing that keeps me going. Anyway, let’s do this.

I logged on to ESPN this morning and was legitimately stunned that the front-page article up was about Game 1 of the Stanley Cup Finals. I was half-expecting news about Roger Clemens’ minor league start or something about the Spurs-Jazz series. But no. There was an honest to goodness hockey article up there. There is in-depth analysis around this now-marginalized sport on one of America’s most frequented websites, and it is putting me in a very odd place, sportsmotionally. Read more »

User-generated content day at Nerds on Sports.

Today’s game: Let’s Invent A Sport.

The procedure:

(1) You add a rule by posting a comment to this entry.

(2) The rules don’t need to be in any kind of sequential or procedural order. So if everybody else is talking about how to resolve fouls and you want to set the rules for overtime, just write it down.

(3) Don’t contradict anything that anybody else wrote already, unless you want it to be a special exception or a rules loophole.

(4) Don’t waste comments asking, “Hey, what do you mean when you say ‘x’ in comment #202?” Tell me what I meant by adding it to the rules.

I’ll start us off.

Scoring: Players score by either advancing the ball into their opponent’s First Zone and then passing the ball to a teammate in the opponent’s Primary Zone, or by advancing the ball into the opponent’s Primary Zone and then passing it to a teammate in the opponent’s First Zone.

LOLplayers! Collect them all!

More after the jump.  If you want to create some, shoot them to peiseresque[at]nerdsonsports[dot]com and I’ll add your distinctiveness to our own.

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I’m like most guys — I like sports and women and never the twain shall meet. Though, if the internet and blogo-icosahedron (yes blogs are a 20-sided die) have any say the 2 shall never part. The picture on the left is of Allison Stokke, a high school pole vaulter from California. Do a Google search for her and you get over 185,000 results. About a pole vaulter. In High School. Now do a search for Rudy Ruettiger. Half the results. The Internet has spoken, and it wants you to know about women and sports.

So I listened. And I heard some crazy stories. Like a female golfer from Dubai who had a terrible sexual escapade and related that story with puns. The Philadelphia Cheerleaders have a blog. Who cares that Brad Penny is 5-1 with a 2.54 ERA, he’s doing Eliza Dushku. And very recently I came across an elimination battle of hot wives and girlfriends.

After the crazy sexy women stuff, it started to get weird. Read more »

Given the loss of Darrell Rasner, Phil Hughes, Jeff Karstens and Carl Pavano, and the shaky status of Chien-Ming Wang and Mike Mussina, the New York Yanquis are clearly under a curse of some type.

With the aid of my junior Tarot deck, I’m going to divine the fate of the rest of the Yankees’ roster.

Brian Bruney (#33): Pitches a breaking slider to Mike Lowell. Lowell gets all of it with a fat swing, driving the ball right into Bruney’s chest. A baseball-sized chunk of flesh exits Bruney’s back. Out for nine weeks.

Tyler Clippard (#19): Texting animatedly to Fox News’s online poll to express his rabid support for maverick Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul, he rear-ends a school bus, igniting his car. Out for season.

Matt DeSalvo (#14): Hantavirus. Misses next start.

Kyle Farnsworth (#48): Raises his hand to call over a waiter while “David Cornwell” is being paged at Sapa. Is mistaken for double agent by spies as a result. Kidnapped at gunpoint, interrogated at Westchester County mansion, framed for murder of U.N. delegate, boards train, romances Eve Marie-Saint. Out for four weeks.
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I live in New York City. Much is made here, on the back pages of the two notable tabloid newspapers [i.e., The New York Daily News (motto: "New York's Hometown Paper") and the New York Post (motto: "DAILY NEWS SUCKS COMMIE BALLS")] of the annual “Subway Series” of six games between the New York Mets and the New York Yankees. For those of you who’ve been resting in healing blue light since Thursday, the first half–the Shea half, the better half– of the series has now been played, and the boys from Flushing are up 2-1 on the hapless Bronx Bombers. Here’s a brief recap:

Game 1, Friday: Mets are awesome.

Game 2, Saturday: Mets are awesome, and Robinson Cano has apparently been replaced with one of those zombies from Resident Evil, except the zombies are usually better at playing second base than this.

Game 3, Sunday: Yet another rookie started for the Yankees. Mets were obviously tired from a long night of awesome-ing with Andy Samberg after he awesomed it up on SNL.

The winner of the Subway Series gets featured on the back page of both the Post and the News, unless it’s the Mets, then you have to flip through the classifieds and squint to see the coverage.

Anyway, all that’s ancient history now, if awesome ancient history. You don’t come here for the breaking sports news you might get from, say, ESPN or Sportsline or Amazon. You come here for hard-hitting, in-depth analysis (or because you’re that creepy guy who punched “gil meche ninja fishing” into Google).

So let’s talk about-and by ‘talk about’ I mean HIT HARD, IN DEPTH- the issues of public transportation and sporting venues and interleague rivalries. Read more »