C-Rod (Cheat Rod)

Okay, yes, cheating goes on in baseball all the time. Less now than formerly, when pitchers put substances on their gloves to affect the ball and didn't get caught (do they still try to do that?), batters thrown out at second or home who know they're out, but are called safe, say nothing. Outfielders sometimes pretend they've caught the ball when they've only trapped it. But that's them, effecting their own play. The hitter still has a chance to hit the messed-up ball, for example.

Then there's the dirty play of C-Rod.

Below is the excerpt from the recap of the Yankees vs Toronto Blue Jays game of May 30, 2007:

"Rodriguez hit an RBI single with two outs in the ninth that made it 7-5. Jorge Posada followed with a high infield pop and Rodriguez ran hard, cutting between Clark and shortstop John McDonald.

Replays showed Rodriguez shouting something, and Clark backed off at the last second. McDonald was only a few steps behind Clark, but couldn't make the catch and ball dropped for an RBI single.

"I just said, 'Hah!' That's it," Rodriguez said. "Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't."
McDonald started jawing with Rodriguez, and third base umpire Chad Fairchild got between them. Toronto manager John Gibbons came out to argue, and exchanged words with Rodriguez and third base coach Larry Bowa before leaving the field as plate umpire Eric Cooper intervened. Rodriguez stayed on the bag with a smirk.

When Jason Giambi stepped up to hit, he seemed to get into it with catcher Jason Phillips and Cooper settled them down.
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Giambi followed with a two-run single. When the game ended, many of the Blue Jays stayed on the bench, staring at Rodriguez and the Yankees.
"They have their opinions," he said, adding he pulled the trick to help the Yankees "win a game. We're desperate." "

My own thought is, by interfering with the play he should have been called out. It's easy for players to ignore shouts of "Drop it" from the dugout, but when it's said on the field it interferes with the play.

C-Rod is also the guy who, a couple of years ago, slapped the ball out of Bronson Arroyo's hand as he tried to get to first base. He was called out for interference, and serve him right. This should have gone the same way.

Fantasy picks for Tues, May 29

Well, gee whiz. Ichiro got his hit - thank you Ichiro. The Detroit Tigers were 3 outs from winning their game for me - and lost it in the 9th inning! Grrrr.

So time for a new streak.

Mariners are hot... I'm going for Ichiro to extend both his and my streak, and for the Mariners to defeat their division-leading rivals, the Angels.

Softball College World Series

I have looked in vain on CBSSportsline.com for any news on the softball college world series, which had regionals this past weekend. Not a peep of news about it.

I can't say that they're ignoring it because it's a woman's sport - I caught a glimpse of a men's college baseball world series regional game as well - and CBSsports isn't mentioning that at all. Ditto lacrosse..which I think is also going on.

Actually, with the end of the school year coming up I bet all kinds of sports - gynmastics, swimming, etc,. are also winding down their season - and if I paid more attention to my local paper (Yorktown, Virginia) I'd probably know what was going on with those - but for reasons I won't go into at the moment I haven't had time to read a paper in 2 weeks.

But, that's what I hope the Mudville Megaphone will eventually become - a central clearing house for professional and college sports, treating each with equal weight. The difference between the MM and other sports sites, for example SportsPageMagazine (http://www.spmsportspage.com/) is that we'll deal with personalities, while they deal with scores, recounts of games, etc. SPM features the WNBA and lots of women's college sports, so check them out.

Anyway, CBSSportsline does have a button called WorldSports, under the Other Sports tab, which deals - a bit - with college sports and there are a few headlines there
http://www.sportsline.com/worldsports

But for covering women's college sports I think ESPN is better. Unlike CSB Sportsline, they actually have Womens BB as a tab on their front page, instead of buried as Sportsline has it. They also have a tab called ESPNU - covering University sports, and are covering the various college championships there.

http://espn.go.com/
http://sports.espn.go.com/ncaa/index

MLB Fantasy Picks May 27

Well, Derek Jeter let me down yesterday..typical. But...time to start a new streak.

Now, Ichiro is hot, but he is also now at a 19-game hit streak. So he's due for a 0-fer, isn't he? Nevertheless, he's my choice.

Boston RedSox to win again, also.

Meantime, do the Jazz have any other players apart from Carlos Boozer? He's the only guy CBS Sportsline ever shows in their front-page page photos between the Jazz and Spurs...starting to get annoying.

MLB Fantasy picks May 26

Well, Derek Jeter is one shy of his longest hitting streak (he's at 19), and he's going up against a pitcher whom he has hit well. So I'm going with Derek Jeter to get a hit today. My streak is currently at 9. The Beat the Streak player with the top streak is now at 30 (there was someone with 36, but he chose Placido Polanco yesterday....and Placido didn't get a hit.)

Boston Red Sox won yesterday - and I'm going with them again today.

Commercial hunting reservations

You know what these are, eh? Places where tamed animals are let loose so that hunters can go and shoot them, and then act like they'd actually done something? Or other animals with no natural enemies can grow to enormous size and feel no fear...until they feel a bullet entering their body....

http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/05/25/monster.pig.ap/index.html?eref=rss_topstories
is the URL.

Here's the excerpt that struck me:

Jamison, who killed his first deer at age 5, was hunting with father Mike Stone and two guides in east Alabama on May 3 when he bagged Monster Pig. He said he shot the huge animal eight times with a .50-caliber revolver and chased it for three hours through hilly woods before finishing it off with a point-blank shot.

Through it all, there was the fear that the animal would turn and charge them, as wild boars have a reputation for doing.

"I was a little bit scared, a little bit excited," said Jamison, who lives in Pickensville on the Mississippi border. He just finished the sixth grade on the honor roll at Christian Heritage Academy, a small, private school.

His father said that, just to be extra safe, he and the guides had high-powered rifles aimed and ready to fire in case the beast, with 5-inch tusks, decided to charge.

In other words, the boy chases this suffering animal for 3 hours with a hand gun, meanwhile Dad and guides had high-powered rifles and could have [perhaps] finished it off immediately, but they didn't because they wanted the boy to get the honor of killing the pig all to himself.

To get that big...I wonder how old it was?

"It feels really good," Jamison said. "It's a good accomplishment. I probably won't ever kill anything else that big."

Other than that... well, at least they're making sausage out of it so they'll get food out of it, as opposed to just taking the head to mount and leaving the rest of it to rot...

Ichiro watch

Articles specifically about Ichiro

May 25, 2007
http://seattle.mariners.mlb.com/news/article.jsp?ymd=20070524&content_id=1983955&vkey=news_sea&fext=.jsp&c_id=sea
The 1,000th game of Ichiro Suzuki's Major League career started with the kind of hit that makes him almost impossible to defend -- a one-hopper to the right of the first baseman that turned into an infield single.