Red card, Yellow card...Red Sux

I have to admit the JET Get Born CD is one of my most deeply embarrassing guilty pleasures. I could listen Are You Gonna be My Girl way too many times in a row. Funny, I never favored black hair, but oy, the boots line...

All right, I'm sure all those Red Sox fans out there feel the the Devil Rays (I refuse to acknowledge the religious rights ultimatum to get rid of the Devil) have the them right where they want them. You know the comebacks (3-0,3-1) against the Yankees and the Indians (@#$%&) are still fresh in their minds. But you know what? It ain't happenin' this time! And the moaning about the Red Sox starters is being way over played. Hey, when you know a team can't score, the ball looks bigger and the bat feels lighter when you're at the plate. These Devil Rays know this isn't the SUX that had Manny and Mike Lowell in the lineup. Okay Bay is a decent hitter, but when you look over in the on-deck circle and don't that crazy, bug-eyed mutha' fer waiting to hit, Ortiz doesn't seem so threatening. I know the supposed experts are saying it's his hand, but it has to have something do do without having Manny. So, he pouted and got the trade he wanted. But still, this is his walk year, and he doesn't lay down in the post-season. The cliche about making the players around him better fits here. Even if said player can be an A-hole at times. The converse to this is that the Red Sox batters is that the ball looks like a pea, and the bat feels like a telephone pole. I think they'll win (Sox) tonight, if Dice-k can keep the walks down; and I don't like the switch to Kasmir as the Devil Rays starter. He's a five inning, soft tossing Johan Santana...then he turns into Carlos. It's hard having a wife and daughter that are so enamored with the Olde Town team. The wife won't watch, and I was in deep shit when I blurted the first inning score to her last night. My daughter's away message on IM "GOD DAMN TIM WAKEFIELD!" By the third inning I was thumbing back and forth between the Knicks pre-season and the baseball game. The Knicks may still suck, but they get over a hundred points a night with this D'Antoni offense...run, run and run some more. It's a trip seeing Randolph running the floor! They scored fifty-nine points in a game last year. Last night they had fifty-one at halftime! Too bad tickets cost two car payments, a bag of af-gooie and a weeks groceries. For now though, the Rangers are 5-0-0. Dubinsky...star on the rise.

My bitch du jour are these head-hits in the NFL. I'm waiting for a helmet to come off some QB's head...and his head will still be in it! So while watching the USA annihilate my precious Cuba team in the World Cup qualifier, it came to me like a rum injected bolt of lightening. (Cuba, what memories; chopping cane with Che, watching Hemingway make a fool of himself on daiquiris in the bar at the Hotel Floridita, and of course taking BP against Fidel. But I digress, and I'm not supposed to talk about anything before the Bay of Pigs fiasco.)

The fines (could management be helping out with these, many former players have cited "bounty issues") these guys get, and the occasional suspension are not going to stop this excess violence. Sure, I know people who have stopped watching. My own brother, a producer/director for HBO's Sunday pre-game show wouldn't know the difference between Santana and Sinorice Moss. (I had to get Santana in this piece twice...he's on the CD player now. By the way, all you techno geeks out there, stop laughing. I have Sirius on line, but I like the feel of the CD. You know it's like reading the news on-line instead the tactile pleasure of a of a newspaper.) Anyway, while watching the soccer game, the original football, the answer to this was obvious . Apply the red card, yellow card system to the NFL. Doesn't that sound like a Dr Zeuss book? An overly zealously shot, but not malicious, would give the team on offense the penalty and the guilty party would get a yellow card to boot. (Nice pun.) Two cards, he's ejected and misses then next game. Those big, fifteen yard start, four seconds after the whistle intended to send the QB in orbit would be the red card offense. Immediate ejection and suspension for the next game. All other professional sports have similar legislation, but football, the closest thing to the events that were held at the Roman Colosseum...nada. They sure keep an eye on the crimes and misdemeanors during the players off-time (after years of looking the other way), but how about what goes on every Sunday afternoon during the NFL season.

Aren't Sundays a sports degenerates delight this time of year? Wake up to the Premier League, maybe some La Liga, the NFL, baseball, hockey and if your thumb is well-enough developed some golf (sucks without Tiger), NASCAR (start and finish only), bull-riding (a big, big mea culpa to PETA, but hey, the bulls win most of the time, and you know what that means, lots of stud time) and the when all-else fails some west coast pre-season basketball. All you need for this is a wife who loves baseball and tolerates the rest of the bullshit. Yes, I am a lucky man. We've been to all the major American sports (she was once run over by Eric Metcalf while doing the photography for a Browns/Pats game I was covering), World Cup Soccer and I think she went to a few holes of either the senoirs event or the LPGA in Naples, FL. I think she could have passed the test in Diner.

Too bad about Big Brown tearing his hoof again. He and Curlin would've been a helluva match in the Breeder's Cup.

All right, thanks for listening, the knee feels well enough to walk to the mail box...later, biff