“Passion Bucket” catching on

The phrase “passion bucket”, which was coined by UCLA football coach Rick Neuheisel and made popular by Dan Patrick is really becoming trendy now.

Kobe Bryant said “passion bucket” in a post-game interview on TNT not once, but twice. Here’s the video:

I’m hoping “Passion Bucket” really catches on. Hat-tip to Bruins Nation and Yahoo! Sports for finding the video in the first place.

A crazy announcer + Links of the Day

This clip may be a few years old, but listen to how excited that announcer gets. If only we had people calling games like that in the U.S.

Some great links I’ve found across the Interwebs:

Recapping one crazy experience at Cubs Con 2008. (A League of Her Own)

A great post speculating that the end of the Francisco Rodriguez era may be near. I hope he’s wrong, but I have to agree with Rev’s analysis. (Halos Heaven)

50 years and a few days ago, Willie O’Ree broke the color barrier in the NHL. (Epic Carnival)

Introducing the curse of Deanna Favre. (Hugging Harold Reynolds)

Being 7-foot-7 has its disadvantages. (Yahoo! Sports)

China is reportedly covering up people dying in the construction of the Olympic facilities. (The Sporting Blog)

69 days ’til Opening Day

There’s 69 days left until that best day of the year, baseball’s Opening Day. 69 is also the number of wins the Kansas City Royals and Baltimore Orioles had in 2007.

Both of these franchises have been horrible recently, but just how bad is surprising.

Question: Which team has had more winning seasons in the last decade, Baltimore or Kansas City?

Answer: Kansas City, with one (2003).

That’s ridiculous. If you were to conduct a survey among baseball fans about which franchise is worse, I’d guess the majority would say Kansas City, and deservedly so. But the Orioles have been really bad too.

Baseball fans around my age (in their mid-twenties) can remember Baltimore being good at some point in their lives. They made the playoffs in ‘96 and ‘97, and played in the infamous Jeffrey Maier game. But they haven’t had a winning season since ‘97. We can’t ever remember Kansas City being good (last playoff appearance in 1985) other than that fluky 2003 season, in which they stayed in the AL Central race despite having a mediocre record of 83-79.

As much as I love baseball, this is one complaint about the sport I can’t argue. I couldn’t imagine being a fan of Kansas City, Baltimore, Tampa Bay, Pittsburgh or Cincinnati where every season seems hopeless and there’s been no real competitive season in 10 years or longer. To those of you who are real fans of those teams I salute you. I don’t know if I could keep it up as long as you people have.