Sports fodder for a Friday morning...
This country's sportswriters need to do the honorable thing and politely step away from the baseball Hall of Fame voting. When the Hall of Fame began in the late 1930s sportswriters were, by far, the biggest authority on the game. There was no television, and radio was just in its infancy. Fans didn't even know what players looked like. Baseball statistics were almost impossible to find. It made sense for the writers to vote for the Hall of Fame. But those days are over. Newspapers are on life support right now and in about two years the only sportswriters will be guys sitting in their underwear in their parents' basement updating their blogs. Those guys shouldn't have the right to vote for either paper or plastic, let alone Jim Rice or Andre Dawson.
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Nobody should have any problem with Jim Rice going into the Hall of Fame. You also shouldn't have been upset the last 14 years when he didn't make it. Rice, a one-dimensional player who played in a ballpark suited for his talent, was a borderline Hall of Famer. But now that Rice has been allowed in, it's now time to throw open the doors of the Hall and let about three dozen other guys in. Check out Rice's numbers and then check out the numbers of Dawson, Andres Galarraga, Harold Baines, Dick Allen, Dale Murphy, Ron Santo, Will Clark, Steve Garvey, Matt Williams and Joe Carter to name but 10. The only difference between Rice and those 10 is that those seven didn't play their entire careers for either New York or Boston and, therefore, don't have the biased East Coast media machine behind them.
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The fact that Williams received just seven Hall of Fame votes is a joke. Is the Carson Crusher a sure, no-brainer, obvious Hall of Fame choice? Of course not. But neither was Rice. What, exactly, do the Hall of Fame voters have against third basemen? Just 10 third basemen in the history of the game are enshrined in Cooperstown. We should take the vote away from sportswriters for that reason alone. Third base is one of the toughest positions to play on the field. Rice could barely play left field (the easiest position on the field) and he got into the Hall. Williams had 1,225 less at-bats than Rice, hit 378 homers (just four less than Rice) and drove in 1,218 runs (just 233 less than Rice). And, oh yeah, Williams won a World Series and Rice didn't.
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Tim Tebow is going to solve our country's economic crisis, put millions of people back to work, win American Idol, end the war in Iraq, buy Happy Meals each and every day for hungry kids in Africa, build a defense for the Wolf Pack football team, capture a third national title in January 2010, give the Kansas City Royals $100 million to spend on free agents, find a way to keep LeBron James in Cleveland and eliminate the designated hitter rule. Barack Obama is lucky he didn't have to run against Tebow in November.
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Will some NFL team want Tebow to play quarterback? If Tebow and Michael Vick were on the open market at the same time, who do you think would receive more NFL offers? The fact that you even have to think about the answer to those questions tells you everything you need to know about the NFL. If I'm a NFL general manager and looking for a quarterback, I don't want either one. Tebow is more Cade McNown than he is Steve Young and Vick should never even be allowed back in the league.
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The NFL, though, does know how to crown a champion and stage a postseason tournament. The league can't help but put on a fascinating Super Bowl. Eagles-Steelers would put the state of Pennsylvania into a frenzy. Ravens-Eagles would be a backyard brawl. The Cardinals in the Super Bowl would be the football version of Hoosiers. If the NFL were college football, the New York Giants and Indianapolis Colts would have been named the two best teams in late December and we would have had to wait a month for the Super Bowl.
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Who will be in the Super Bowl? My choice would be USC and Texas but there is probably a NCAA rule against that sort of thing. The safe bet would be an Eagles-Steelers Super Bowl. The AFC title game is a toss-up and don't count out the Cardinals just yet. Yes, they are doing it with mirrors. And, yes, there will probably be more Eagles fans in Arizona on Sunday than Cardinals fans. But it will just be nice to see a championship game in Arizona that involves a team actually from the state.
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Some Major League Baseball owners are currently floating the idea of a salary cap. Good idea. Want a better idea? How about a ticket price cap? Just a thought.
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It doesn't matter if the Wolf Pack men's basketball team wins the Western Athletic Conference regular-season title. It would be nice to extend the Pack's streak of WAC titles to six in a row but, really, who's counting? The Pack already has more regular-season WAC championships (five) than any school currently in the league. The only thing that matters this year is getting your team ready to play its best basketball in the conference tournament in March in Reno.
