1. I am spending my day doing one of the things that makes me happiest of all-marinating in baseball. Watch the Red Sox win in the early afternoon, listen to the Yankees currently losing in the late afternoon, and tonight I'll watch the Cubs and Cards without having a horse in the race. In between I'll take the pooch for a walk and listen to mindless sports talk. Yes, tomorrow I will probably go straight back to my regular news-obsessed, neocon-hating self, but for just today I am in baseball bliss.

2. Speaking of neocon hating, did you see who is throwing out the first pitch at the All Star Game? None other than President Barack Obama. Did you see who will be catching that ball? Likely 2009 MVP and Triple Crown contender Albert Pujols. You gotta know, the combination of the black president and the Latino first baseman taking center stage at baseball's annual society ball is going to be driving some people insane. Gulp. I just hope they have tons of tight security at Busch Stadium...

3. Watching Tim Wakefield talk about how grateful and humbled he is to be going to the All Star Game makes me realize what complete jerks some of these guys are who are looking for any reason they can to avoid going (yeah, Manny, I'm looking at you, for one). They all should be down on their knees thanking their lucky stars for making them good at swinging a bat or throwing a ball instead of washing dishes, and they should be kissing the fans asses for continuing to support their dirty, drug-addled sport. And that means showing up to the All-Star Game every year you are selected without fail or excuse. Got it? Good. 

4. John Smoltz must be wondering if every night he pitches is going to have to be a complete game in order to keep any semblance of order on the mound. Why does Manny Delcarmen suck all of a sudden? Or Justin Masterson? I am going to just take a breath and hope that there is nothing wrong with either of them that a good four days off won't cure.

5. Two out in the bottom of the ninth at Anaheim, Angels up by one, and who is up to the plate but the Steroid Boy Wonder himself. Walk him. Just walk him, and take your chances with Matsui...(jesus, a four-seamer right across the plate, what are you guys doing to me???) Ball...ball..SWINGING STRIKE!!!! NO HEROICS FOR AROID THIS TIME!!! ANGELS SWEEEEEEP, SOX UP THREE AT THE BREAK!!!! Seriously, between ALDSes and killing the Yankees, the Angels have given me some of the best baseball times of my life the past ten years. Give those men a Klondike bar. 

6. Emotional halfway point of the season has the Sox in really, really good position, second only to the Dodgers in terms of record, Beckett and Lester looking like Spahn and Sain and Big Papi's power back, if not quite the average. Wooo-hoooo!!!! Bring on the second half!!!

(Pres Obama lifted from Rolling Stone)

"He left a legacy.  The same way when Jesus left, because he had to sacrifice for all of us."-Ray Lewis, speaking today at Steve McNair's funeral. 

You know, I am not a Christian, but that just seems...well...strange. Even considering the source.

Or not.

I mean, what the hell kind of crap is that? Shut out, at home, by the As, the worst team in the league? Where Joe Maddon had to play eeney-meeney-miney-mo to come up with one All-Star? These guys are terrible, and yet you would have thought they had Carlton on the mound and Gehrig and Ruth in the lineup last night. Every guy wearing a Red Sox uniform had better be properly contrite this morning, wearing a big scarlet S for suck on his forehead.  There's no excuse for a performance like that. I'm glad I didn't pay StubHub prices for that debacle.

While there's no excuse, there certainly are reasons, and one of them is that Terry Francona decided that the As were so awful they really don't count as a major league team at all, and since we have been playing so well the last few games, and have such a comfortable lead in the division, let's just throw a minor league lineup out there! I mean, who the hell is Aaron Bates? There are other reasons, too, such as...

Kevin Youkilis-.216 over the last 30 days, .091 (!) in July. Sheesh. No wonder Teixiera edged him out. He's been sucking the air right out of the ballpark lately.  

Jason Bay-.221 over the last 30 days, .167 in July. Not quite what we were seeing earlier in the year, and becoming quite a big rally-killer lately. Average down to 260.

Mike Lowell-DL

When your big run producers aren't producing runs, the rest of the lineup is only meh, and your pitching staff has been inconsistent-color me not impressed with the Smoltz experiment thus far, but hey, he was cheap, right?-there's just no way you are going to win a lot of games. If, at home, playing the weak sisters on their schedule until the All Star break, this team loses more ground to the Yanks, there is going to be some serious splainin' to do.

In other news, it was good to see the fans give Nomar an appreciative welcome on his return. He played a lot of good years for them and deserved their thanks for that. There have been essentially two Nomar camps that have evolved over the years-members of the first are of the opinion that he was a wussy crybaby injury faker who couldn't stand the heat and was removed from the kitchen by St. Theo of the Monster, thus paving the way for the 2004 championship.  Members of the second believe the aforementioned sulky, balky Nomar was completely a media creation by the evil Larry Lucchino and his equally evil sidekick Dan Shaughnessy, that he was a Duquette guy, not a NOG favorite at all and thus made a scapegoat for everything that was going wrong in mid-2004. My guess is that the truth lies somewhere in between. It's become clear years later that Nomar was just the first of a group of high-profile fan favorites to exit in a hail of bad press, so I have to believe he was at least somewhat smeared by the POTB while the ground was being paved for his exit. But it's also clear it ended up being a great trade for the Red Sox in the end. In any event, I was glad to see him welcomed warmly, and he clearly was very touched by it. You have to wonder if he wasn't thinking, though, opportunity squandered? Thanks, Nomar, and have a great life. It sure was fun while it lasted.

Josh Beckett tries to turn things around at the Fens at 7:10pm. Which team shows up tonight? The one we were sold with the great starting pitching and awesome lineup, or the one of late which makes us cast our eyes forlornly in the general direction of first base in the new Yankee Stadium...?

(screen grabs from redsox.com)

It appears The House That Greed Built is too rich for the blood of even the richest athlete in sports...

Tiger Woods is working on his stinger shot off the course as well. He went deep on the Yankees Friday with a swipe at what the "Evil Empire" is charging for admission to the new Yankee Stadium.

Complying with a trend in golf, the AT&T National host is letting kids under 12 in for free this week.

"We don't want to have what happened at Yankee Stadium," Woods said. "Tickets are so overpriced that you can't bring the family. We want to have everyone come out and enjoy being in a family atmosphere, walk around, have a good time and not have it cost an arm and a leg."

Yep. The most colossal arrogance of the Steinbrenner brothers is that they thought they could shakedown the public to pay for their million-dollar-a-day free agent habit, raising formerly $150 seats to $850 and charging $135 even for nosebleed seats in the upper deck. Or perhaps it's not a shakedown so much as just a desire to price out the more unsavory elements to try and prevent a Matthew Shepherd incident that would bloody up the place and piss off the maintenance crew. Or maybe they just heard Cynthia Rodriguez wants season tickets? 

Beyond being a billionaire, Tiger Woods is also a guy who wouldn't say shit if he had a mouthful, so you know there's a PR problem in Yankeeville. Hey, Hank, Hal, take heed, because Tiger may just have started a fad here. If I were you, I'd take a good hard look at the ethicality of my business practices before you unleash the wrath of the likes of J.D. Salinger.

Reactions are dropping like rain...

"If you love baseball, Manny MUST GO. Until they make a big public example of a destroyed career, steroids are here to stay. As long as you know you get a mulligan for a first offense, it is still worth the risk."-a rather shrill and self-righteous Brian Ross, acting as though this were the first he'd heard about it. 

"Will Ramirez, now busted, act more like his baseball age? Or will he continue to be a hitting savant bucking the trend of baseball skewing younger? We just don't know, in part because even with a failed test, we don't know the extent of Ramirez's PED use. On Friday night, and for the foreseeable future, most people didn't care, either."-Tom Verducci

"Because Ramirez* is more cuddly than Barry Bonds*, or more goofy than Roger Clemens*, or less intimidating than Mark McGwire*, it's as if he's being graded on the curve. And that is disgraceful"-Scott Miller, who is also apparently on the verge of a breakdown 

"Manny Ramirez is yesterday's boos. He's a sure sign of society's steroid fatigue and baggy-pants proof of Karl Marx's postulate that history repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce."-Tim Sullivan

If Manny's return to cheers and well-wishes drives you stark staring insane, then all I have to say is...find another hobby, dudes. I've been watching this saga unfold for nearly a dozen years now, and the fact of the matter is, the average fan doesn't care. No more than they ever cared about Bill and Monica despite the shrill moralizing and name-calling from others who should've known better. As long as they are being taken care of and their team is winning, they don't care. Sure, it's fun to be able to look at a hated rival and say their team is "tainted" when a big name is caught using, all the while knowing your team is just as bad and maybe worse. And, yeah, it's really fun to watch the house of cards come crashing down around some of the biggest pricks on the planet, guys digging their own graves with their intransigence who just don't get that all would have been forgiven had they just said, ala Andy Pettitte, "ooops, whoopsie, my bad," and moved on. Or cultivated an image of sainthood like Lance Armstrong. It's the arrogance and the insults to our intelligence after you've been caught that pisses us off, not the fact that you've been using.

You know why that is? Because the average fan has a job he is insecure about, two kids that drive him crazy, a boss he hates, a wife who nags and probably twenty years to retirement. He knows the deck is way stacked against him and that many others are playing by unfair rules in games which affect him far more directly than does some juicer's, like the guy who sold him the ARM or drained his pension account. Baseball is an escape; it's secondary.  Yes, he'd prefer a clean game, but it's just not that important in the grand scheme of things. He respects Andy Pettitte and even enjoys watching that goofy Manny Ramirez. He thinks, hey, Manny's right-he didn't rape or murder anybody, and for $25 mil, our average fan might just shoot up, too.

I found this telling statement from a brutally honest blogger that absolutely nails that average fan"s feeling...

All this talk about the sanctity of the game, of the history of the baseball, of the stats - total garbage to me.  I care about watching the game, and seeing amazing things being done that I've never seen done before.  I care about the most incredible season I'll probably ever see, a .370  with 46 HR season in which a man was walked 198 times.  Most on purpose.  This after a 73 home run season.  Two years after that, a 232 BBs season, with a .362 BA and 45 HRs in 373 official ABs.  4 straight MVPs, and only teammate Jeff Kent's MVP in 2000 preventing Bonds from 5 straight. 

He'll never win another award in all likelihood, but his career will go down as the greatest career we've seen since Babe Ruth.  And they might try to add an asterisk to it like they did to Roger Maris, but someday that asterick and those haters will be gone, just like the Maris haters all disappeared, and all that will be left is the amazing numbers.  That's the beauty of the baseball - it's numbers. 

And I'm glad I'll be able to say that I saw it all, instead of say how great he would have been if he didn't get injured.

So, folks, baseball police and purists-if you're waiting for us to turn our backs and force the game into submission through our indignation and wounded sense of fairness, well, it appears you've got a long wait coming. It may not be fair, it may not be right...but it is what it is. In the overall scheme of life, fans just dig the long ball.

This just in:

A federal judge in Texas has reaffirmed his dismissal of most of Clemens' claims in his long-running defamation lawsuit against Brian McNamee, the trainer who accused the Rocket of PED use.

U.S. District Court Judge Keith Ellison's original opinion and reaffirmation yesterday said that the statements McNamee made about Clemens during the Mitchell Report investigation should be immune from litigation because they were made in conjunction with a government investigation.

That clears the way for McNamee to ramp up his defamation suit against Clemens. His lawyers told the New York Daily News that will happen at the end of this month.

"This is the final nail in Clemens' Texas coffin," McNamee attorney Richard Emery told the Daily News. "We will welcome him to New York to litigate."

I just read American Icon. While Clemens comes out looking exactly as you'd expect-a narcissistic bully-Brian McNamee comes out not looking so much like the drug-dealing scumbag of Dan Burton's wet dreams but as a wussy lovesick teenager, fretting over whether or not Roger Clemens loves him as much as he loves Roger.  Which he didn't, of course.  Roger's first and only love is Roger Clemens, (and especially Roger Clemens' money) for whom he would slander and defame a guy he said was his friend, throw his own wife under a bus, and tamper with a Congressional witness to protect.

Roger Clemens is a liar, a cheat, and an enormous fraud, and now he's also a pathetic loser. To paraphrase his own words, today is the day he truly became a Yankee.