Just Churning Out Some More Insanity

I have a few entirely unrelated things to discuss today.

Rick Ankiel! Come on down! You're the next contestant on "The Price is Right!" Speaking of which, how the hell is Drew Carey going to replace Bob Barker as the host? He's awful! He was terrible on "Whose Line is it Anyway?" Whatever, totally off subject. Anyway, yesterday marked the return of Rick Ankiel to the Major Leagues. Now before I scare all of you away (blah blah blah, more sports, I hate you Schmutter, write more about the A-train, write a song about me, send Trogdor over to my house, put on a purple thing and dance around. Well I've had it! I will never ever ever ever ever write a song about Sibbie. See SB E-mail #76 "Sibbie." Wow, been a long time since I had a Homestar Runner reference.), this is not a rant about statistics or bad sports writing/commentating; it's a feel good story about a man. Rick Ankiel was drafted by the St. Louis Cardinals in 1997, and in 1998 was their Minor League Player of the Year. In 1999 he was named the Minor League Player of the year for the entire Minor Leagues, az the Cards called him up to the Show in 1999. He had a very respectable first season in the Majors, posting high strikeout totals and an 11-7 record. He continued to pitch well in his second year and his team made the playoffs. The manager selected him to start the first game of the NLDS agains the Braves, and he began the game fairly well, but in the third inning, Ankiel absolutely fell apart. Little did anyone know that this was the beginning of the end of his pitching career. Here's how the third inning went down for Ankiel:
1. Greg Maddux walks
2. Rafael Furcal pops out in foul territory (1 out)
3. Wild pitch to Andruw Jones (Maddux advances to second base)
4. Wild pitch to Andruw Jones (Maddux advances to third base)
5. Andruw Jones walks
6. Wild pitch to Chipper Jones (A. Jones advances to second base)
7. Chipper Jones strikes out (2 outs)
8. Andres Galarraga walks, wild pitch on Ball Four (Maddux scores, A. Jones advances to third base)
9. Brian Jordan singles (A. Jones scores, Galarraga advances to second base)
10. Wild pitch to Reggie Sanders (Galarraga advances to third base, Jordan advances to second base)
11. Reggie Sanders walks
12. Walt Weiss singles (Galarraga scores, Jordan scores, Sanders advances to second base)

And then he finally gets replaced. No one knows why he was suddenly unable to pitch; his mechanics didn't change and he was completely healthy. He just couldn't pitch anymore. Since then he's been up to the Majors a few times, but continued to throw wildly. He was sent down as far as the Rookie Leagues, playing with kids right out of high school. During his time in the Minor Leagues he worked on his hitting and in 2005 after his recovery from Tommy John surgery he decided to abandon pitching and tried to reinvent himself as a slugging outfielder. His progress was delayed because of knee surgery in May of 2006, but was healthy enough to continue playing at the start of the 2007 season. He began the season at AAA Memphis, and through August 8th hit .267 with 32 Home Runs and 89 RsBI. He played a quite respectable outfield too with only seven errors in 95 games. He finally returned to the Major Leagues on August 9th and got one hit in four at-bats against the San Diego Padres. His one hit was a three-run homer to deep right field, and the Cardinals went on to defeat the Padres 5-0. I'm going to leave it as it is for now and let each of you come up with your own superlatives about this story.

Moving right along, I was reading The Soul of Baseball blog by Tom Posnanski online today, as I often do, and he made some comments about today's society. He mentioned that we have so much available to us today that we don't even need to be exposed to things with which we might disagree or things we dislike if we don't want to be. For example, he was at a restaurant and he heard a Billy Joel song playing on the radio there. It was the first time he had heard this song for like 15 years, because he is entirely in control of the music to which he listens. What he means is that you can listen to only the music you want because of Ipods and satellite radio, etc. I only take note of this story because something similar happened to me this week. My friend picked me up from work on Wednesday and I was looking through her CD collection to see if there was anything worth hearing, and I found the first Shalsheles CD. Az I popped it in the player and listened to Mi Ho'ish for a minute or two before deciding to switch to song eight, Asher Bara. Now over the past six years or so I've copied numerous CDs onto my computer. When I first copied Shalsheles 1 all those years ago, I deliberately did NOT copy Asher Bara; it's just that bad. Every couple of years I manage to get my hands on that CD and decide to listen to that song on the off chance that I've been wrong all these years. Nope, it's really an awful song. Yitzchok Rosenthal should really just stick to composing the songs and quit singing them. He has a decent voice like I have a decent voice, but his talents really lie in writing songs.

As I mentioned in an e-mail last night, we're rapidly approaching the best time of the year on the sports calendar. Yes, my friends, as the baseball season heads into the home stretch of the pennant races, the clock is ticking down to the opening kickoff of football season. That being said, I'm trying to organize both a Fantasy Football league and an Eliminator league. The purpose of this post is not to promote my leagues, but if any of you or your friends want to join please let me know. What I AM trying to accomplish with this post is to obtain some help from you. Here's the thing: last year I was involved in two fantasy football leagues. Fantasy football is really awesome, but it can be extremely nerve-wracking and time consuming. Last year I invited my friend and his infant son to come over to my apartment to watch the J-E-T-S Jets Jets Jets one Sunday. Let's just say that he was really giving me a hard time because I was barely watching the game; I spent the majority of the time following the stats from all the other games going on to see how well my fantasy players were doing. Az please, friends, don't let me fall into the same routine this year. Seriously, at like 1:45 every Sunday, give me a call and ask me what the score is and how many yards Chad Pennington and Thomas Jones have accumulated. Thanks.