Wednesday baseball preview

Note: All times Pacific

GAME OF THE DAY: Detroit Tigers at Cleveland Indians again, but you already knew that. Tonight’s game is nationally televised on ESPN. Probables: Jair Jurrjens’ debut vs. Fausto Carmona

The Tigers won the opener Tuesday night 6-2 in 10 innings, moving back into first place by one game. Tiger fans are thrilled, and as you might imagine, Cleveland fans are pissed.

In other Detroit-Cleveland items from around the blogosphere, Babes Love Baseball points out Placido Polanco has broken the record for most consecutive errorless games by a second baseman and Bugs and Cranks has a post about bad pitching vs. bad hitting.

THE REST OF THE MLB SCHEDULE:

There are games being played all day on Wednesday, so I’ll tell you what to follow at different times of the day.

Morning (10 a.m.): Baltimore at New York Yankees (Erik Bedard vs. Phil Hughes) AND Tampa Bay at Boston (Andy Sonnanstine vs. Daisuke Matsuzaka). The AL East race heats up.

Afternoon (1:30 p.m.): Minnesota at Seattle (Scott Baker vs. Jarrod Washburn). This is the rubber game of the series. Minnesota tries to get back in the playoff hunt, Seattle tries to keep pace with the Yankees and the Angels.

Evening (4 p.m): Along with Detroit-Cleveland, there is Angels at Toronto (Dustin Moseley vs. Shaun Marcum). Toronto won Game 1 of the Series on Tuesday night in a game that lasted under two hours.

On national TV (5 p.m.): Cincinnati at Chicago Cubs (Phil Dumatrait vs. Ted Lilly) — I love catching random Cubs and White Sox games on WGN.

Night (7 p.m.): Houston at Los Angeles Dodgers (Jason Jennings vs. Brad Penny). When the Dodgers lose tonight, they’ll be back at .500.

There are no other significant sports I could find.

ESPN has no orignality

A friend tipped me off to this, a list of 12 ESPN “experts” predicting the upcoming college football season.

All 12 of them picked USC to win the national title. That’s right – all 12.

Are the people at Bristol programming all their talking heads to think alike now?

Now, I’d agree USC is among the favorites to win it all — but a lot can happen on the way to the BCS title, where in a lot of years, you need to be perfect to get in. Then you need to actually win the title game too.

That’s not all.

All 12 picked Virginia Tech to win the ACC. All 12 of them! Keep in mind that the ACC has a conference championship game, so all 12 not only think that the Hokies will win their division, they’ll win the conference title game against a quality team too.

All 12 of them also picked LSU to win the SEC West and for Southern Mississippi to win the Conference USA East.

ESPN — not exactly a hotbed for unique and different ideas.

P.S. — Colin Cowherd was one of the “experts”. What classifies him as an expert?

Intelligent writing about the Yankees must be impossible

Reading this post on Awful Announcing reminded me of my quest to find a quality mainstream sports site to go to that’s not ESPN.com, who I’ve given up on completely, Page 2 being an occasional exception. (And as AA points out, it’s not the error that’s bad, but the fact that it was up for 15 hours.) I read FoxSports.com sometimes, and they have some good stuff. But they have some bad stuff too.

Note that I’m fully aware that many writers have built careers off of saying stupid things about the Yankees. But this column by Mark Kriegel of FoxSports.com is the one that set me off.

As soon as I saw the promo on the homepage, I knew I was in trouble. It said: … So how are the Yanks back in it? Look no further than Joba Chamberlain, says Mark Kriegel.

My initial reaction was, OK, Joba Chamberlain has looked good so far, but he’s only pitched three games and five innings, and two of the games were in blowouts. He can’t possibly be the reason the Yankees are good again.

Then I read the column, which was, to its credit, more about the Yankees and less about Joba. But there were these gems:

Chamberlain seems the unlikeliest of Yankee heroes. But he also embodies their sudden resurgence.

He’s pitched five innings! Five! Let’s hold off on calling him a hero, please? And the Yankees went 19-9 in July, before Chamberlain was on the team. There’s more:

It’s worth mentioning that when (Mariano) Rivera came up in ‘96, he pitched the eighth inning, too. Like Chamberlain, he had an easy delivery and an out pitch.

Technically, Rivera came up in 1995. He wasn’t that good in 1995, but he did pitch in the playoffs that year. So it’s not like Rivera was pitching in an environment he wasn’t used to in 1996.

And are we sure we already want to compare Chamberlain to Rivera? Rivera might me the best closer of all time, and his postseason prowess is unbelievable. Chamberlain has only pitched three games, and only one of those was a close game.

Like I said, I don’t mean to overly pick on Kriegel. There are way too many other writers and media people out there who have built careers on saying stupid things about the Yankees.

What is it about the Yankees that makes so many people gush about them illogically? Is there something in our brains that says when a team has a lot of big-name players, rich history and a high payroll, all logic and real analysis goes out the window?

Back to my intro paragraph though, I really do think that FoxSports.com has better free content than ESPN.com. Ken Rosenthal is a younger Peter Gammons, Dayn Perry is a good baseball writer, I’ve enjoyed Jeff Goodman’s college hoops reporting and Charley Rosen’s NBA stuff.

But pieces like Kriegel’s and Jay Mohr writing for FoxSports.com won’t let me give them the full Obscure Sports Quarterly endorsement. In the meantime, I’ll say, it’s not ESPN.com — that’s a good thing.

Tuesday Links

T.J. Simers of the L.A. Times has a great column about the Dodgers — why does Ned Colletti get a free pass when past general managers didn’t? I promise to have an in-depth analysis of Colletti’s tenure later on, as soon as the Dodger collapse is complete. 

Madden 2008 came out today, and here’s a review from Sportable and another from AOL Fanhouse. As for me, I bought the NCAA Football 2008 game on opening day and I’ve been happy with it so far, so I won’t be buying Madden anytime soon.

Developers are taking advantage of tax breaks from Hurricane Katrina to build luxury condos for Alabama fans. Roll Tide! (The Wizard of Odds). Deadspin has a post on this too.

I’m about to say something good about the Red Sox: I love Tim Wakefield, and he has great value. (I love Baseball, but I Bleed Red.)

Anyone who can manage long enough to be 200 games under .500 must be a good person, or doing something right. Ballhype’s Chris Jaffe has a tribute to Buddy Bell.

Joe Morgan makes more errors on the air. (Fire Joe Morgan)

70,000 fans at a basketball game???

The NCAA has announced that is increasing seating capacity at the men’s basketball Final Four to 70,000.

 You read that right — that’s bigger than most football stadiums (or any other type of stadium for that matter).

This will take effect starting at the 2009 Final Four at Ford Field in Detroit (where the Lions play). How good can the view possibly be from the nose-bleed seats? Remember, a basketball court is significantly smaller than a football field.

We can all guess why the NCAA is doing this:

Officials estimate the configuration could generate about $4 million per year in additional revenues while creating a more student-centered event and increasing membership inclusion.

Meaning the NCAA would put 200,000 fans at a basketball game if it could.

Does any business care less about its customers than sports owners?

One of the new owners of the Seattle Supersonics, Aubrey McClendon, said that the plan was for the team to move to Oklahoma City all along:

“But we didn’t buy the team to keep it in Seattle; we hoped to come here,” he said. “We know it’s a little more difficult financially here in Oklahoma City, but we think it’s great for the community and if we could break even we’d be thrilled.”

Wow. Did McClendon not realize that there’s this thing called the Internets nowadays where people can read things from anywhere, including Seattle? That’s got to be a great message to send to your fans who you hope buy tickets (and parking, concessions, merchandise, etc.)

No truth to the rumor that the team’s new slogan is: The Supersonics, see them while you can!

A friend pointed out that this doesn’t happen in too many other industries where owners completely disregard their customers. They may take advantage of their employees, the government or other people. But if they did something to annoy their customers this much, they’d be out of business. (The only exceptions I could think of are oil companies and cable companies, and even the latter isn’t immune).

This is common in sports. Owners routinely threaten to move if they don’t get a new stadium, threaten to cut payroll if fans don’t show up and raise ticket prices, concession prices and parking without limit.

Looking at the NBA, when the Supersonics do move, will Oklahoma City remain in the Northwest Division?Because that could be kind of cool.

Other blog posts about the move:
Deadspin
Ballhype
Fan IQ