We Got A Great Big Combine

The latest drill at the NFL Combine

The notion of "news" from the NFL Scouting Combine is always a bit strange, seeing as nothing actually happens there. Guys whom NFL scouts and front office types have been watching for four years show up, do a few drills, answer a few questions, and sweat a lot. That's it. Nobody - and this is the key part - actually plays any football. They do exercises, very few of which have application on a football field, and serious men with serious stopwatches and logo-embroidered collared shirts stand around and make serious noises about how serious it all is.

You do get plenty of breathless stories about someone's stock rising or falling based on a combine workout - the guy whose 40 slipped 2 tenths of a second is suddenly a pariah, never mind that A) there's a thousand reasons someone might have a variance of two tenths of a second and B) who's to say the guys doing the timing are absolutely precise themselves.

So we get stories. We get stories about how Shamarko Thomas of Syracuse did a broad jump of 11 feet, one inch, which should be incredibly useful the next time he has to cover a receiver who's on the other side of a ten foot wide pit full of alligators. Or that B.W. Webb of William and Mary topped the 20 yard shuttle dash rankings by .01 seconds, which surely will come in handy when they change the rules of football so that you run back and forth across the field instead of, say, to the end zone.

And then there's poor, benighted Manti Te'o, whose draft status - undisputed stud until his...unique dating habits got exposed - is now suddenly wobblier than Tennessee's athletic department funding because he ran a 4.81 in the 40. This, apparently, is earthshattering news that will undoubtedly cost the kid millions of dollars as his draft stock does a full-on Louganis because he had a bad 40 time at the Combine. This, then, is the story, never mind that anyone who'd watched the years and years of game film we have on Te'o would have already had a pretty decent idea of what his strengths and weaknesses were. But in the rush to sprinkle football news into the parched earth of the offseason, to make sure to cement the NFL's grip on its fans year-round, the Combine gets blown up into the equivalent of the season finale of the Bachelor, where EVERY. DECISION. COULD. BE. VITAL., and nothing's too insignificant to analyze to death. After all, they need to keep diminutive early-period Klingon Mel Kiper Jr. off the streets somehow.

Which is why we get breathless coverage of large men in shorts standing around on a field, sweating. And breathless coverage of guys lifting weights, and not in a totally-awesome-Magnus-ver-Magnusson sort of way. (Seriously. How cool would it be if they mashed up the Combine with World's Strongest Man competitions? I want to see NFL prospects dragging a bus full of cheerleaders by their teeth, and I want to see it now.) And breathless analysis of guys standing there in sweaty shorts. And it's boring as hell, and it's bad for the game - and if you doubt me, I will beat you to death with a Mike Mamula bobble head - because the whole damn thing is now so fraught it's overwhelming.

As a football fan, I don't want to know what sort of 40 time an offensive lineman has. If you're playing major college football, you're going to be somewhere within a narrow band of results or you never would have gotten on the field in the first place. What I want to know is can he knock a defensive lineman who looks like the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man on his butt, forty times a game. Show me that at the Combine and maybe there's something to get excited over. Until you do, all I'm left with is the possibility that a few seconds out of context will get weighed more heavily than years of hard work.

Me, I prefer the hard work. And the game tape, especially if the alternative is more large men standing around drinking Gatorade, and raising their draft stock exponentially by doing so.

In Which I Am Not Bill Simmons

I went to Las Vegas this past weekend.  In an effort to prove once and for all that I am not Bill Simmons, I did none of the following:

• Hang out with guys named "The Broom" or "Fang," although there was a "Loopy."
• Bet on any sports at all. (I seriously don't know how I failed at this. I walked past the sports book 25 times and I WANTED to bet on the Pens over the Lightning.)
• Smoke a cigar.
• Run, with my bros, a 16-rack bracket comparing the physical features of the cocktail waitresses from the various establishments I attended. In fact I failed to bracketize anything.
• Engage in a fist bump of any kind.

I'll turn in my sports blogger card at the next annual meeting.

Things I learned in Las Vegas:

• The elevators in the Luxor pyramid are not "elevators" at all but rather "inclinators." They go up and to the left or right as they traverse the outer wall of the pyramid. This is surprising when sober. When drunk it's a Bosch painting.
• You have to tap the table when checking a bet because the cameras can't hear you say "check."
• The scalper on the street assured me that the way the Internet works these days, fake tickets won't even print out. So if the tickets are printed they must be valid. Even if he is selling tickets to a $90 show for  $10.
• It is possible to run out of amazement.

Your 2013 NBA Deadline Deal Quiz

Josh Smith, I play these tiny violins for you, my friend. FOR YOU!

Ordinarily, we would take some time here to break down the NBA trading deadline - who got moved, who didn't, who made good moves and who ended up with Darko Milicic - but unfortunately, this year we're not going to be able to do that. We deeply regret the necessity, but unfortunately there's one simple reason we can't offer you our analysis, and that's because we have literally no idea who the heck any of these guys are, or why trading them makes a difference. When the biggest name moved at the deadline is J.J. Redick1 (and hush, you princes of Cameron, you kings of Durham - I don't care what he did against Clemson, he's not that great an NBA player) then this deadline was indeed both dead and anonymous. Doubt us? Then take the Sportsthodoxy 2013 Deadline Deal Quiz, and see how well you do.

The Handy-Dandy Guide to Jeffrey Loria's Letter To (Both) Marlins Fans

This is Jeffty Loria's idea of what heaven looks like

Jeffrey Loria is probably not the worst owner in professional sports history. He lacks, for example, the heady taint of slumlording racism that lingers around Donald Sterling. He's not dumb enough to bet on his own team, like jocksniffing gambler and pilings magnate William D. Cox. He hasn't actively engaged in the sort of wholesale criminal behavior of a Harold Ballard, and he's blessedly absent Marge Schott's fetishes for on-field St. Bernards and Nazi memorabilia.

Also, he's probably never buried a dead hooker in the Everglades.

That's about all the good stuff you can say about him. On the other hand, he actively conspired to destroy baseball in Montreal, hung the cash-strapped Miami municipality on the hook for well over a billion dollars in bond payments for his art nouveau fishtank of a ballpark, shoveled revenue-sharing cash intended to make the team competitive into his pockets with both hands, and repeatedly and cynically dismantled teams after they'd served their PR purposes. He's petulant, vindictive, thin-skinned, petty, and obnoxiously smirky, and I don't care how many awards that stadium wins from People Who Just Happen To Be Friends Of Jeffty Loria, it still looks like the long-lost Jemm And The Holograms stadium playset.

Believe it or not, though, people in South Florida have noticed. They've noticed to the point where they're writing snarky blog posts and not showing up to buy tickets. And that inspired Jeffty, who acts like he is perpetually five, to write a long, chest-thumping screed defending the royal screwing he gave both the region and the fans, and pay to have it run in one of the local papers.

Here, now, is Sportsthodoxy's take on what he said:

What Loria Said:
It’s no secret that last season was not our best — actually it was one of our worst. In large part, our performance on the field stunk and something needed to be done.
What Loria Meant:
"Losing bothers me a lot less when it's cheap."

The NL is Going To Get Better

This pitchers' mound we're standing on? It's made of money.

Over the past decade and a half or so, the consensus in baseball circles has been that the American League is much, much better than the National League. Watch the All-Star Games, tally up interleague play, and fiddle with the advanced metrics on the rosters and it's clear: more of the better talent is in the AL. Yeah, occasionally a San Francisco or a St. Louis can snaffle up a World Series win, but Billy Beane can tell you all there is to know about the sort of small sample size you get in the playoffs, and how well one's crap works therein. (Hint: it doesn't.)

If It's Not Lehigh Valley, It's Crap

The Phillies #6 prospect, according to John Sickels

Phillies' GM Ruben Amaro Jr. said today that he thinks preseason prospect rankings are, in a word, "crap".

This is not surprising. After all, Amaro's go-to move is to dump a truckload of prospects on another team for a player he thinks will put the Phillies over the top. Even marginal pickups like Michael Young and Ben Revere - and no matter what you think those guys will or won't do this year, they're definitely bargain bin pickups compared to the Halladay/Lee/Pence glory day shopping sprees - went on the BOGO plan. That's going to be harder to do going forward if Amaro admits that what he's got now is the equivalent of a deck full of Atogs and two Llanowar Elves. So of course he's going to trash the ratings. It's good business for him to do so.

Closers Should Be Heard And Not Listened To

"I'm thinking a Van Dyke and maybe theme music by Mastodon"

The difference between closers and kickers consists largely of theme music and poorly trimmed facial hair.

Otherwise, the similarities are uncanny. They're on the field much less than their peers. They're brought in high-pressure situations when the game is on the line. They tend to flame out rather quickly. And the few with any kind of longevity acquire a sort of mythical status.

Oh, and when they shoot their mouths off, it always feels kind of weird.

Wrasslin' Olympic Style

You're going to de-list this guy?

The IOC has de-listed wrestling as an Olympic sport, surprising only those people who were still aware that Olympic wrestling was an actual thing. (The rest of the country presumably believes that Jimmy "Superfly" Snuka took home Fiji's first gold medal, while Nikolai Volkoff silvered for Russia and King Kong Bundy won Skull Island's solitary bronze.)

This is, of course, an arbitrary and strange decision, as wrestling is consistently one of the most competitive and entertaining events. The removal of baseball and softball a few years back was a bit more
understandable; a few countries consistently dominated those events, they were resource-intensive, and they didn't draw. Wrestling, however, was competitive, fast, and cheap - just find a flat surface and throw out the mats, no pitcher's mound required. But it was still cut from the list of "core" sports (to which golf, rugby, and modern pentathalon have been added. Modern pentathalon, in case you're wondering, includes Zumba, syncing your iPhone wirelessly, competitive craft beer chugging, Farmville, and the 100m instagram cat picture). Instead, it's lumped in with a bunch of other sports that can lobby for inclusion, a shameful turn of events for one of the events that we can trace back to the original, all-Greek Olympiads when competitors entered the lists naked and there was nary a McDonalds' product placement to be found.

Wrestling partisans are justifiably upset by this turn of events, and as a result are protesting. Unfortunately, the form the protest is taking is that wrestlers in Tehran for the World Cup are going to lay down on their mats. Which is all well and good, I suppose, but if they really want to attract the attention of the IOC, they'd do better to lay down on piles of currency. The IOC's level of corruption defies comprehension, from bribes in SLC and Nagano to vote-buying to nepotism to scalping tickets to match-fixing to the fact that the freaking organization used to be run by a guy who was part of Franco's cabinet. You see a headline like "IOC Meets In London to Discuss Corruption" and you assume they're going to be talking best practices and innovative new techniques.

So if the partisans of wrestling, a good and noble goal that has brought together even the US and Iran on the issue, they should stop with the laying around and start with the shoving large bags full of small unmarked bills at senior members of the IOC.

Maybe they could add corruption to the modern pentathalon. Fastest bribe, quickest denial, whatever. It certainly seems like it would fit, at least with this batch of "guardians" of sport. And hey, it's already on the docket.

Not So Much A Baseball Town

Presumably not interested in Adrian Beltre's OPS+

There is only one conceivable response to freshly minted Los Angeles Angel of Anaheim Except When The Traffic Backs Up On The 5 In Which Case You Want To Be A Los Angeles Angel Of Taking 91 Maybe As A Bypass Josh Hamilton's comment that Dallas is not a baseball city.

Duh.

Yes, Texans play a lot of baseball. Yes, Texas has produced a lot of great talent - some guy named "Ryan" springs to mind. And yes, the Rangers are currently riding high with a monstrous lineup, a strong pitching staff, and a ballpark that would not drive former Arlington beat writer Mike Shropshire to drink (more).

But.

It's Dallas. Home of the Dallas Cowboys, the most football-crazed city in the most football-crazed state in the country. Never mind that since the turn of the millennium, the Cowboys have been the worst of the four major sports teams in the DFW area - worse than the Rangers, definitely, but also worse than the Stars and the Mavericks. Maybe owner antics both positive (Mark Cuban's resurrection of the Mavs) and negative (Tom Hicks' greedhead shenanigans with the Stars and Rangers) obscured that fact, but it doesn't matter. Dallas is the Cowboys is Dallas. Maybe that would change if the 'boys Romoed their way to a couple of consecutive 0-16 seasons, but I doubt it. Denying this - or being horrified that someone said it - is shove-your-head-in-the-sand stupid, a willful denial of the obvious and the factual.

And really, it's unnecessary. Football's number one? Sure, but that doesn't mean that the Rangers are sitting out by the Gas'n'Sip at 2 AM waiting for John Cusack to show up. They ranked 3rd in baseball in attendance last year. They pulled 3.4 million people through the turnstiles. In a town where they're not the priority, they still seem to be doing all right.

Which points us, I suppose, at the real issue here, which is to say the half-assed Manicheanism of the sorts of folks who aggressively stir up trouble in the interests of a loud - not good - narrative. Dallas is primarily a football town? Big freaking deal. Until they park life-sized statues of Leon Lett in front of every stadium entrance in Arlington to keep people from seeing Rangers games, it has precisely zero impact on whether people in Dallas can enjoy baseball, too.

On second thought, forget I said anything about those statues. I don't want to give Jerry Jones any ideas.

Go Ahead, Draft a RB

While listening to the usual insane garbage on drivetime sportstalk radio ("Manti Te'o, whose name I cannot pronounce despite hearing it on ESPN for 15 days straight, is a great prospect! And a locker room laughingstock crazycakes who got exposed as a weak linebacker by Alabama! And a delicious dessert topping!") I heard something that made me think: data. Give me data.

The line I heard was that teams needed to draft highly-regarded running backs early.  The commentator (seriously, I don't remember who, it may have been a morning-drunk caller on a local show for all I know) said that teams definitely wanted to grab quality running backs in the early rounds.

But, I thought, what about Arian Foster? What about Bill Belichick's tendency to call promising fans down from the stands, give them a mouthguard, and say "follow Logan Mankins to daylight?"

So, skeptical, I grabbed the list of the top rushers from each team for 2012, and looked up their draft rounds.

Turns out that the leading rusher for 12 teams in the league were running backs drafted in the first round.  (The Panthers' top rusher is a first-rounder, too, but he's a quarterback, and that says more about the Panthers' problems than anything else).  Of the remaining 19 teams, 11 have a top rusher drafted in the 2nd or 3rd round.  Only 8 guys were drafted in the 5th, 6th, or 7th, or were undrafted free agents.

The Super Bowl winner's top rusher was drafted in the 2nd round; the Super Bowl loser's top rusher was drafted in the 3rd.

So I guess what I'm saying is, if you're an NFL general manager reading this blog, first, what the hell is wrong with you, but second, go ahead and draft that early-round running back prospect. He may pay off.

Et Tu, Testudo?

So Coach K. is mad that Maryland is leaving the ACC. Mad that they're going to the Big 10. Mad that they're walking away from a conference they helped found in 1953 (by breaking away from the Southern Conference). Mad that they're abandoning the long-time rivalry.
He's right to be mad, of course. That's a lot of tradition for Maryland to be abandoning for the promise of a paycheck and regular exposure on the Big 10 Network. I applaud Coach K.'s stand that teams should not leave their conferences, that they should not abandon their long-time rivalries for filthy lucre, and they should not leave the conferences they helped found behind.
And I look forward to hearing Coach K. re-iterate these sentiments next year when founding Big East member Syracuse comes to Cameron Indoor Stadium as part of its initial season in the ACC.

Your Trevor Bauer Hour of Power

"We bought these hoodies at Belk"

Trevor Bauer can't rap. This, in the grand scheme of things, means absolutely nothing.

Trevor Bauer can't find the strike zone. This is considerably more important to the young man's future.
Bauer, the former Diamondbacks prospect who found himself shipped out of town in exchange for Didi Gregorius and a past-his-sell-by-date Lars Anderson, attracted some brief notoriety this spring when his former catcher, Miguel "Ghan-buri-Ghan" Montero said mean things about Bauer's ability to take instruction. Because it was early spring training and early spring training consists largely of men wearing pajamas playing catch, this briefly became a "thing".

And when intrepid reporters found evidence of Bauer's attempted dis rap directed at various unnamed "haters", it became more of a thing. Because clearly here was Bauer responding to Montero in the sort of way only a 22 year old would think was appropriate, and by the way he can't rap, and doesn't this prove everything that Montero said (apparently "is in love with his fastball" is code for "has no flow") and, well whatever.

Except, of course, that a quick check would reveal that the track in question - and make no mistake, it is terrible; Bauer-as-rapper is about as smooth on the mic as Bruce Springsteen trying to do Pagliacci with a sinus infection and one foot in a bear trap - was recorded in December, well before Montero laid down his version of the law. So it couldn't possibly have been a response to Montero's criticism unless Bauer is actually a Time Lord and hopped into his TARDIS (which, to be fair, has a sweet mixing board) to go back a couple of months and drop the track before the beef started. Then again, if he did have access to a TARDIS you'd think he'd use it to gather up some better collaborators - I can totally see David Tennant talking Tupac, Biggie and maybe Kool Moe Dee into the TARDIS, and, well, anyway, you get the idea.

At any other place, any other time, the news that a 22 year old rich kid from the suburbs had posted a crappy attempt at rapping on YouTube would have garnered precisely zero notice. The fact that this time, it was news (for certain values of "news") just reaffirms how much we need actual intel out of spring training. Bring on the phenoms, bring on the guys with visa issues, bring on the training camp battles and the "Best Shape Of His Life" stories and everything else we've come to grow and love and expect out of early baseball coverage.

But for the love of God, leave the 22 year olds rapping out of it.

To Be a Fan of a Minor League Team Is To Constantly Say Goodbye

So long, farewell, it's time to bid adieu...

To root for a minor league baseball team is to be constantly saying goodbye.

All Hail Charles Pierce

It's Charles Pierce's world. The rest of us are just living in it.

Already, the Red Sox season is off to a promising start.
Brentz, 24, accidentally shot himself in the leg while cleaning a handgun two weeks ago. The bullet entered and exited the leg, and Brentz tweeted that he anticipates "returning to full practice" Monday.
If it had been Josh Beckett, he'd have missed, killed three passersby, and pulled a hamstring, putting him on the DL for 15 days.

There is nothing in that passage I can argue with.

Sportsthodoxy Guide to Ray Lewis and the Chelyabinsk Meteor

They're more similar than you thought

Chelyabinsk Meteor	Ray Lewis
Act of God	Pawn of God. Really.
flattens the countryside	flattens quarterbacks
explosion audible for miles	self-aggrandizement audible for miles
caught on dozens of cameras	no witnesses
blows up	blows up defensive schemes
breaks apart in the lower atmosphere	falls apart when asked to cover tight ends
sets off car alarms in Chelyabinsk	sets off police scanners in Miami
cracks during descent	exposes crack in postgame

Redemption, or Not

(inspired by a Twitter conversation with Hal Mangold (@AtomicOvermind) who has been threatening to write for us for years in much the same way Vermont keeps threatening to secede)

Hockey's an unusual sport in a lot of ways. It's played on a sheet of ice; the players wear razor-sharp blades and collide with one another all the time; it's so exhausting that a one-minute shift is considered long. And it's the only sport that Québécois parents allow their children to play*.

Violence isn't unique to hockey, certainly. Longtime readers** know that I dwell overmuch on the long-term effects of injury in the NFL. Hockey suffers similarly.

But really, only in hockey do you have the guy with the designated role "enforcer," or "thug."  The guy whose job it is to try to injure other players, or to retaliate against those that have injured your players.  The guy whose job it is to pick fights with the guys in the other shirts.

Matt Cooke isn't exactly the Pittsburgh Penguins' enforcer.  But he has a reputation as an instigator, and as a dirty player, based on hits like this one:

Penguins management didn't protest the suspensions that Cooke received from this hit and another, near the end of the 2010-2011 season. Cooke was known for committing these kinds of fouls, but the Pens front office was getting tired of it.  Especially after a couple of deliberate head-shots that ended up damaging superstar Sidney Crosby's brain.  Crosby ended up losing over a year of playing time, and the Penguins joined the chorus calling for greater penalties for headshots.

Penguins GM Ray Shero said, essentially, that he wasn't going to try to protect Matt Cooke anymore; he didn't want Cooke committing these kinds of hits, and that Cooke didn't have much of a future as a Penguin if he didn't shape up.

And then something amazing happened: Cooke shaped up.

In the 2010-2011 season, Cooke played 67 games. He had 129 penalty minutes, roughly one 2-minute minor per game. He scored 30 points***.  That's less than half a point per game.  He only played 67 games, in part because of 14+ games worth of suspension.

In the 2011-2012 season, Cooke played all 82 games.  He had 44 penalty minutes -- that's around one minor penalty every 4 games, and the lowest total of his career.  He also scored 38 points, the second-highest total of his NHL career.  Cooke became a Penguins attacker worth taking seriously.

He spent a lot of time watching film, reviewing his hits, and figuring out ways to play effectively without always going for the biggest his possible.  He also received counseling and therapy in light of his suspension and his wife's life-threatening kidney illness.

The 2013 season has been a weird one, of course, thanks to the lockout. It's hard to extrapolate players' statistics for the season based on just the 14 games the NHL has had so far this season.

Before last night, Cooke's penalty minutes per game remained low (8 minutes in 13 games); his scoring is below his average from last year.  But then last night Cooke went somewhat recklessly into Ottawa's Erik Karlsson, and Cooke's skate blade went 3/4 of the way through Karlsson's achilles tendon.  Karlsson's out for at least the next 3 months. He may have lost his season.

Hockey fans -- particularly including Ottawa fans -- went nuts. Same old Cooke. Last year must have just been an aberration. He's a dirty player, he should be thrown out of the league, he did it on purpose, etc.

The NHL said there was no sign of intent.  Cooke was penalized, but he won't be suspended.

I don't know.  The Matt Cooke we've seen over the last hundred games isn't the same guy we had on our hands before. Which guy committed the hit last night?

Once somebody turns around, how many screwups are they allowed?

* I kid. The Québécois and me go way back. I believe they're also permitted to play badminton.

** Both of them!
*** For those unfamiliar with hockey, players are credited with one point for a goal or an assist.

In the Cauldron of Cameron

Mason Plumlee, practicing telekinesis

So.

Duke-Carolina tickets.

I did not attend Duke. I did not attend North Carolina. My rooting interest in the ACC, such as it is, lies with Boston College, a school whose unseemly departure from the Big East I still find annoying and who, despite being closer to the actual Atlantic Coast than any other school in the conference, still gets crap for not belonging. (Dear Georgia Tech: It's a long drive from Atlanta to the beach. Trust me on this one.)

I won the tickets in a charity raffle. "You gonna sell them?" my coworkers asked. "They're going for six hundred a piece on StubHub."

I thought about it. I may be a writer, but I can do math, and that's a lot of money.

But it was Duke-Carolina. I've been living in the Triangle for thirteen and a half years. During that entire time, the sports conversation has almost entirely been dominated by Duke-Carolina. Carolina-Duke. Zellers and Montrosses and Duhons and Stricklands and Hensons and, God help us all, the occasional Zoubek. State, yeah, sure, it was there, but really only so people could chant "Herb Must Go" ironically or otherwise. No, it was the War of the Blues, something that seemed transcendent.

I'm never getting to a Super Bowl. I have no interest in the BCS championship game, or the Masters'. The AAA Championship Game I'd taken my nephew to was a rain-soaked flogging. The World Series seems an impossible dream, and the Olympics, well, I'd been in Atlanta in 1996 and they were largely a traffic nightmare.

But Duke-Carolina. To go, to take my father - who had never been to a college basketball game. That would be something.

Dad was feeling up to it. That decided me. We'd go.

***

Walk into Cameron Indoor Stadium for the Carolina game as a stranger, and you will be lost. This is a place of ritual, of carefully prepared chants and behaviors, of fluttering championship banners like shrouds for hapless opponents, of ritual call and response. Everyone who belongs there knows the proper answers. Everyone who belongs there knows the times and the places and the words to say. And you realize after a while, that this is not a basketball game. It is a sacrifice, with Coach K as high priest and a liturgy of thunderous catcalls, and Carolina is on the altar.

Right about then is when, if you don't have a dog in the fight, you start rooting for Carolina. Because it's always nice to see the underdog survive.

***

Duke's tactics are simple: wear you down. Make you run through pick after pick after pick. Play hard, physical defense (and offense), and push up to the line of what the refs will call. If that line budges an inch, push that inch further. Of the five guys on the floor for Duke in the last minute tonight, four had four fouls.

That's what happened to UNC tonight. They got tired. They got worn down. The jumpers that they were popping free for in the first half started falling a little bit short. Enough Mason Plumlee elbows in the solar plexus and it starts affecting your shooting stroke. And when those jumpers stopped going in, then Duke picked up the game and ran away with it.

The final differential was 5. It really wasn't that close, not in the end.

***

Mason Plumlee is Shaq moves in a Brad Miller body. His best play is to get the ball down low, then repeatedly drop his shoulder and square his elbow into the gut of the man guarding him. Watch carefully and you'll see him practicing his "I've been fouled!" face even when no one's within five feet of him. You can't blame the kid; it works, especially when he's up against a pipe cleaner like James Michael McAdoo.

When he gets to the NBA and tries that move, though, Dwight Howard is going to turn him into a pretzel.

***

The hardest working people at the Duke-Carolina game are the Duke cheerleaders. They are out there every time out, handspringing their way up and down the court with fearless and reckless abandon. One young lady managed thirteen consecutive during a television time out; I can only assume that if she hadn't had her way blocked by one of the baskets, she would have just kept on going.

***

Sound is a physical thing at Cameron. It comes at you in waves, roaring around the building again and again. It starts in the Crazies, wells up in the student section and whips around and around until it rises to the upper deck, populated by middle-aged men in tan slacks and their sons and wives. It hits the walls hard enough to bruise, bounces off the ceiling and comes crashing down on itself. The chants get muddied until it's all one wild roar, hammering your eardrums and making your sternum throb in time.

I know there's words in the chanting. They hand out carefully prepared cheat sheets to the Cameron Crazies. But by the time the sound has finish boiling itself into a maelstrom, it all sounds like "WAAAUUURRRRGGHGHHH". It's a unified "WAAAAUUURRRGGHGGG", but it's a "WAAAAUUURRRGGHGGG".

***

Attending a game at Cameron Indoor forces you to become a jerk. At every Duke basket, the crowd surges to its feet, and stays standing until the resolution of the next Carolina possession. If you do not stand, your view of the game looks suspiciously like the back of someone's knockoff Seth Curry jersey. If you do stand, congratulations, you've become a jerk by blocking the view of the people behind you. Who will now stand in order to see, which will block the view of the people behind them. And so on and so forth, up until you get to the very last row, and you bang your head on the rafters.

I saw the game with my father, who is not necessarily built for standing for a couple of hours on end. Nor is he set up for a synagogue-style up, down, up, down. So he sat. So I sat with him. As a result, large portions of Duke's decisive run early in the second half looked a lot like the back of someone's shirt.


***

Duke won by 5. They made a run about ten minutes into the second half, and when it was over they were up by 6 and Carolina's jumpers were clanging off the rim. The Heels shot two airballs in the second half, clear signs that these guys were just exhausted, but this year Coach Roy doesn't have the horses, and the big guns had to stay out there. Duke pushed the lead to 8, and that's pretty much where it stayed down the stretch. The game ended (after a little debate over a particular basket counted), and the fans streamed forth into the night, cheerful and exhilarated. Downstairs, the student section erupted out towards a rumored bonfire; the Cameron staff was friendly and polite and their shuttle service down to the handicapped lot where we'd parked was ridiculously efficient. As we rode down, a chopper flew overhead. "Probably looking for the bonfire", the driver cracked. Everybody laughed.

***

Love is blind.

The guy sitting in front of me is one of those fans who believes the next foul his team commits will be its first. Every Duke possession, he's up and shouting "Aww, come on!" at the refs while making the universal symbol for "hack" - right hand chopping down just above left wrist - so often I start wondering if he's actually David Byrne.

But that's fandom, which is love. The object of your affection is beautiful and perfect. All those who strive against it are twisted and corrupt.

And love, like the refs, is blind.

Duke-Carolina

Yes, they're real

For once, I will not be rooting for a meteor to hit the stadium.

Unless it's a very, very small meteor and it's going to buzz Dick Vitale.

"Nothing" Is the Hardest Thing To Say

NOW COACHING THIRD....BOBBY....VALENTINE....

One of the best parts of Spring Training is what happens when guys who have largely been ignored to go hunting/fishing/truck washing/whatever for four months suddenly get an Edible Arrangements-sized bouquet of microphones stuck in their faces by reporters who haven't anything to talk about except salary arbitration (which is math and which many of them therefore do not actually understand). The players, understandably, are not in mid-season cliche-spouting form, and as such there's a greater-than-average chance of getting something pants-on-head quotable.

Like, say some passive-aggressive stream-of-consciousness sandbagging of former teammates and managers. Take, for example, Red Sox DH David Ortiz taking the opportunity to throw long-gone and discredited former manager Bobby Valentine under the bus. Now, the odds are that the next team Valentine manages consists entirely of nine year olds and has the words "SPONSORED BY CONKLIN LIQUORS" on the backs of their jerseys. It is also entirely likely that by the end of that season, the kids will have grown tired of Valentine's erratic distribution of orange slices, his calling out of the team's third baseman for spending too much time on math homework, and his refusal to accept the fact that one of the pitchers actually did get a boo-boo on his elbow when he ran into the catcher by accident chasing a pop-up. But you know what? It doesn't matter. Valentine's gone, Ortiz is still there for another year or two, and everyone moves on...except someone's got to get in last licks.

Then there's the fun in Arizona, where catcher Miguel Montero (the quintessential $9 NL-only roto league catcher) made a point of ripping former Diamondbacks pitching prospect Trevor Bauer for his poor work ethic and inability to take instruction. Bauer, who ended up in Cleveland this offseason as part of Arizona's plan to field a team of nine cloned, stubbly Kirk Gibsons, has his own unique throwing and workout regimen, and regardless of results, this didn't sit well with DBacks management, coaches...or players. And so Montero unleashed a rant that, translated from the original Khazad, can be boiled down to "I totally dumped him first." (Bauer, for his part, responded from Cleveland with a bit of verbal jujitsu that can be summarized as "He crazy. God bless the troops!")

You don't get this stuff during the season, except maybe at the end when the ship's going down and everyone's fighting for a job. But for now, baseball is fresh and so are the opinions, and all I can say is "pass the popcorn".

The Rights of Spring

"Wave your hands in the air like you're going to be assigned to Pawtucket shortly!"

There are people who are very good at writing about the magic of spring training - Thomas Boswell, for one. They can conjure the magic and the pastoral grace of the scene of grown men trotting out to a green, green field to play catch in garments that look suspiciously like pajamas.

I'm not one of those guys. Don't get me wrong, mind you - I love baseball. I can't wait for the season to start. I look forward to reading about positional battles and spring phenoms and guys who, for the space of an afternoon split-squad game in Bradenton, are big leaguers because they dropped a dying quail in off a Cy Young winner who's just there to get his innings in. They may be gone with the first round of cuts, but they'll have that single forever.

See? I just don't have that Boswell poesy, that Posnanski everyman shuffle (complete with Springsteen soundtrack). What I do have, though are a few things. A dog-eared Brooklyn Dodgers yearbook my parents gave me. Baseballs autographed by guys like Ryan Madson and Miguel Batista and the 2011 Syracuse SkyChiefs. A kid-sized Montreal Expos baseball cap, purchased at Olympic Stadium during that last fateful summer when 5000 fans made themselves sound like 50,000 by hammering the metal stadium seats with tiny souvenir baseball bats. Publicity photos signed by guys like Dickie Noles and Jeff Stone. One of those guys actually screwed up his own signature; I won't tell you which one. A signed and dusty caricature of Bob Feller. Carolina Mudcats baseball cards from 2009. You get the idea.

These are not the items of a memorabilia collector. There is no rhyme or reason to them, no special effort being made to keep them pristine to ensure their resale price and no organization to them save "this would be cool" and being in the right place at the right time. They're a fan's collection of talismans, acquired over the years in fits and starts and "hey wait, what's that down there" explorations.

And they are the items of a guy who is made happy every year when spring training starts, not because of the overwrought poetry of watching David Ortiz seismically try to shake off the rust, but because it means he'll get to watch baseball games again soon. A simple pleasure, but a real enough one.

Pitchers and catchers have reported.

Play ball.