Dorks And Losers

This is kind of a late — very late — post but I think I really wanted to com­ment on it. This week­end held two cool sport­ing events: the WTA Bank Of The West tour­na­ment and the 2007 MLB Hall Of Fame Induc­tion Ceremony.

Both semi­fi­nal matches were cool, one involv­ing India’s Sania Mirza (who appar­ently is a ris­ing star) and Austria’s Sybille Bam­mer (who is mas­sively fit), and the other involv­ing two very attrac­tive play­ers Slovakia’s Daniela Han­tu­chova and even­tual cham­pion Russia’s Anna Chakvetadze.

Han­tu­chova is a very solid player, but Chakve­tadze has been leap-frogging ahead of many other play­ers.









Anna Chakve­tadze

Daniela Han­tu­chova

Tony Gwynn and Cal Rip­ken Jr. were inducted into the MLB Hall Of Fame on Sun­day. Both col­lec­tively amassed over 6200 base hits, and well their stats can be Yahoo!ed if you want to look at them.

Con­grats to them.

For a cool story by Buster Olney about the true player that Rip­ken really was (Insider access only).

Rip­ken went through a big slump after his break­ing of Lou Gehrig’s con­sec­u­tive games played record. His way of deal­ing with it:

About an hour after the game ended, a lone fig­ure stepped out of the dugout and walked onto an oth­er­wise empty field. It was Cal, and he had a bat­ting tee and a bucket of base­balls. He set the tee on home plate, stood in the right-handed bat­ters’ box, set the first of per­haps 50 balls from the bucket on the tee — and pro­ceeded to spray balls all over Tiger Sta­dium, one by one. Cal was in a slump, he didn’t like it, and this was his way of find­ing a solution.

He emp­tied the bucket, then walked around the field retriev­ing all the balls him­self; there was a nation of base­ball fans and some club­house kids who would have done this for them, but Cal did it — his penance, it seemed, for his slump. Then he returned to home plate, and started over, hit­ting balls into the twi­light. What we saw that day was closer to the essence of what he was as a player, I thought, than what we had seen in the very pub­lic set­ting of con­sec­u­tive game No. 2,131.

It gives you a real good indi­ca­tion of how much respect that he had for every­one who has ever played base­ball. There are some play­ers like Babe Ruth and Sandy Koufax that peo­ple swear were blessed by the base­ball gods. There are other play­ers who toil through the minor leagues and will prob­a­bly never ful­fill their dreams of reach­ing the show.

Rip­ken was some­where in the mid­dle. He knew it. He was never as tal­ented as some­one like Gwynn at hit­ting a base­ball, but he worked his butt off to try to hit a base­ball as good as Gwynn. Gwynn was so good at hit­ting a base­ball that he had one swing his entire career. They say Rip­ken had six hun­dred swings.

Olney uses the word “penance” in describ­ing Ripken’s atti­tude. This is in stark con­trast to some mod­ern play­ers who feel it’s their right to play base­ball (and I’m think­ing of that inter­view with Devil Rays play­ers Eli­jah Dukes and Del­mon Young). Hope­fully, his­tory would rec­og­nize Rip­ken for his career con­tri­bu­tions to base­ball, instead of just break­ing that one sup­pos­edly unbreak­able record.
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Here’s a quick snap­shot of Yahoo! Baseball’s hot play­ers. (Sorry if the pic­ture is a lit­tle squeezed.

My ques­tion is: what idiot play­ing fan­tasy base­ball doesn’t have Matt Hol­l­i­day or Cur­tis Grander­son in their league if no one else does? I mean 2% of all Yahoo! fan­tasy base­ball leagues has Hol­l­i­day being on NO ONE’s team, and more leagues have Brian Roberts (no offense) on a team than Granderson.

Unbe­liev­able.

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