Category: Sports

Like many of the baseball fans out there, I have heard of Lefty O’Doul before. But I didn’t know what he really did for baseball until I listened to a podcast on Sparkletack, Lefty O’Doul – the man in the green suit.
O’Doul grew up in San Francisco and went on to bigger and better things, but never forgetting his hometown by the bay.

He started his career as a pitcher for the San Francisco Seals before being drafted by the New York Yankees. But he didn’t do much there as a pitcher and was sold to the Boston Red Sox’s, but after four years his career as a pitcher was done. But he made a good friend on the Yankees that he kept for a lifetime, Babe Ruth. Continue reading “Lefty O’Doul for the Baseball Hall of Fame”

Well I got out to golf this weekend and had a real tough go at it. I played the City of Denver course, City Park Golf Course.
This is an older course that is shorter than most, about 6500 yards. There is one par five on the front 9 and three on the back 9. But in the shortness of the course, they make that up with narrow fairways and small greens.

It was tough to make par if you missed the fairway. I had a good run through the middle part of the front 9, holes 3-7, and the one common denominator was that I put my tee shots in the fairway. When I missed the fairway, it was bogey or double-bogey city. I ended up shooting a 92 which was just over my handicap. Holding the ball on the green with your approach shots was almost impossible. They were a little hard. It was almost easier to land them short and let them run onto the green.

The greens fees were relatively inexpensive with the fees only being $41.50.

One thing to be aware of was that I was only going to play 9, but they said on weekends from 7 AM to 4 PM they do not allow 9 hole rounds. So I had to pay for 18. The only problem was that they don’t tell you that when you make your tee time or anywhere on their website. It is kinda a rip-off.

My overall impressions was that it was a good challenge. It made you hit good shots in order to score well. If you kept it in the fairway it rewarded you. If you missed, it penalized you. The way golf should be. They could make the greens more receptive for approach shots and the speed of play could have been faster. It got quite slow at times.

If you are ever staying in Denver, catch the views of downtown and the mountains from City Park Golf Course. It is worth it.

Yeah!
Sabbatini exploded today and shot a 79.

He is now out of the running for the championships.  He apparently can’t back up the talk.

I am so glad that he is no longer in the running.  He shouldn’t be on the tour if he can’t behave correctly.

I hope Rory Sabbatini loses this weekends golf tournament.
His attitude is wrong for golf. Today is going after Tiger Woods (wrong move).

A couple of years ago he was upset for the slow play of Ben Crane that he walked off the green.

The thing with golf is that regardless of how you or your playing partners are playing, you treat them with respect. You don’t do what he did.

Since he did that to Crane, he lost any respect that I had for him as a professional golfer.

Now back to Woods, he had a bad day under tough conditions. But he won last week after trailing early in the tournament. I definitely wouldn’t be out saying stuff to make him mad.

You can read more on ESPN.com: Sabbatini takes early TPC lead, calls Woods ‘beatable’

In an earlier post, I discussed Why I Hate the NBA. It mainly came down to how bad the officiating is.
Well, there was a study done looking at several years of data and they found a bias in the officiating. In an article published today in the New York Times, Study of N.B.A. Sees Racial Bias in Calling Fouls, they found a racial bias in the officials calls.

In the study, they found that white officials called fouls at a greater rate against black players versus white players. They also found that black officials called fouls at a greater rate against white players versus black players, although not at as big as a rate.

Well the NBA has responded. In an article on ESPN, “NBA: Claims of racial officiating bias ‘flat-out wrong‘, the NBA claims “the study the report was based upon was wrong and contained flawed statistical methodology.”

The NBA even did their own study and NBA president of basketball operations Joel Litvin said, “We conducted our own study with experts in mathematics and statistical analysis, and those experts, looking at far superior data that included 148,000 calls, concluded unequivocally that there was no racial bias in officiating.”

But the New York Times did their work and even had both peer reviewed. In response to the NBA’s claims, Tom Jolly, the New York Times sports editor, had a response in the same ESPN article.

“We are confident that our article fairly and accurately reflects the findings of the Wolfers-Price study, and fairly and accurately reflects the NBA’s response to that study. Over the course of three weeks of reporting, Alan Schwarz spent several hours meeting with NBA. executives to discuss the Wolfers-Price study and the league’s own subsequent study.

As we reported, all of the data that was made available to us from both studies was reviewed at our request by three independent experts: Ian Ayres of Yale Law School, David Berri of California State University-Bakersfield and Larry Katz of Harvard University. They uniformly agreed that the Wolfers-Price study reflected a solid analytical approach and that the NBA’s study was significantly flawed.

In fact, after studying the NBA. data, Katz, one of the nation’s most respected economists, told us: “It was so poorly presented that it was hard to figure out what they were doing. And to the extent you could figure out what they were doing, there was such incoherence you couldn’t draw any conclusions from it.”

It will be interesting to see what comes of this. I know the NBA referees have biases, but this may be too much for them to handle or keep control on.

It is becoming a familiar situation for the Nuggets.
Once again they are down in the first-round and again they are benching a player.

Last year it was Kenyon Martin and now it is JR Smith.  It is becoming a all-to-comfortable excuse.

Oh well, there is always next year.

I always want to keep coming back to the NBA, but every time that I come back, I realize why I hate the NBA.
The officiating.

The officials always seem to favor the team in the lead and the team that is favored.   And they always seem to swallow their whistles when the game is on-the-line and the non-favored team is trailing.  They just can’t get any calls, even though they might be mugged going to the hoop.

Until the NBA improves the consistency of their officiating, I won’t watch and a lot of people won’t watch.

No wonder their ratings are hurting.

Al Wilson was released today by the Denver Broncos, a casualty of the salary cap in football.
Wilson has been a leader, almost another coach on the field, and has inspired his fellow players since he joined the team. He has always given it his all and you can’t ask any more than that.

Al, we are going to miss you. Good Luck!