Sunday, October 24, 2021

Fox gets its Halloween nightmare match-up

Posted by el duque at 7:28 AM

Houston v. Atlanta. 

A team known for cheating vs a team known for the Tomahawk Chop.

Professional Cornhole, anyone?

The Knicks are going to rule the back-pages.

22 comments:

Publius said...

Confederate baseball. Ick. Too bad, Brandon.

October 24, 2021 at 9:49 AM
JM said...

I don't think the ratings services go low enough for this one. They'll need a negative number.

And how is Atlanta still getting away with the chop and the name, Braves? Is Braves considered neutral, not derogatory or incorrect like Redskins and Indians? How's that work?

The chop, on the other hand. Jesus Louise Parker, if they still do that and pound on those stupid drums, you'd think there would be protests like mad during every game.

Didn't they have a guy who wore a headdress and "war paint" who used to pound a drum?

All of which is too bad, because Houston is still just hateful as long as Altuve is there, and any team beating them in the Series would instantly be elevated to hero status. Except, maybe, the Braves.

Pity.

October 24, 2021 at 10:25 AM
Doug K. said...

As it turns out the Knicks have given me more pleasure in the last two games than the Yankees did all year. A double overtime win against the BOSTON Celtics as opposed to losing to the Boston Red Sox and a dominant win against the Magic.

Are they championship caliber, probably not. But they are entertaining which is more than I can say about my other teams. So give em the back page. Give em ALL the pages as far as I'm concerned.

Last,

Initially it just happened to be on while I was doing something else but I ended up watching the NINE overtime game between Michigan and Illinois. It was great.

What was interesting was how the rules in overtime changed as they went further along. I'm not a fan of the ghost runner in the 10th and the 11th but by the 12th it does work for me. And by the 18th they could start a man on third and pitch underhand. Wrap it up!

speaking of wrapping it up... I have to go get ready to watch one and a half quarters of the Giants game. The downside is how painful it is to watch even that short amount. The upside is I eat and drink less.

October 24, 2021 at 10:33 AM
Ironbow said...

New York sports teams are clearly in the dumpster these days. The Giants and Jets are especially painful to watch.

October 24, 2021 at 10:47 AM
TheWinWarblist said...

Sports? What are sports?

October 24, 2021 at 11:24 AM
HoraceClarke66 said...

JM, weird little story on the origin of "Braves": it didn't come from Native Americans (in this case).

The Boston NL team—which tried any number of different nicknames, including "Bees" (always seemed like a good one to me)—was stuck with the moniker by sportswriters when the franchise was run by Judge Emil Fuchs, the guy who got Babe Ruth back to Boston for his last, sad year in baseball.

Fuchs was a Tammany man, a New Yorker who had been attorney to the NY baseball Giants and deputy atty. general of NY State for 8 years. He bought the Boston team on a franchise in 1922, originally to have a team for Christy Mathewson to run. But Matty's decline and death from TB put the kibosh on that plan...

October 24, 2021 at 12:01 PM
HoraceClarke66 said...

...Like all too many major-league owners of the time, Fuchs was trying to run his team on a shoestring. It didn't work out. Bringing in Ruth was a last-ditch effort to save the team. When it failed, Fuchs sold it off before the 1935 season was done.

Tammany's stalwarts were nicknamed "Braves"—and "Sachems," and other such Indian titles—because of all the Native American ceremony the political machine invested its proceedings with. Hence, Fuchs' Boston team became the Braves.

Side note: At the Gettysburg battlefield, which I very much recommend to everyone here, all of the states that had soldiers at the battle were invited to put up statues, commemorating the dead.

The vast majority of these are pretty routine: soldiers standing with their rifles. But New York's towers over all others, a very elaborate monument that features...an Indian, thanks to the fact that it was Tammany that had it commissioned.


October 24, 2021 at 12:06 PM
HoraceClarke66 said...

And Doug K.? NO to extra runners anytime, anyplace, anywhere.

College football is college football, and the "overtimes" were an improvement over ties.

Baseball's extra innings did not need to be improved. What the sport needs is to fix what's actually wrong with it.

October 24, 2021 at 12:08 PM
Doug K. said...

Hoss,

Re: Ghost runners We'll have to agree to disagree on this one.

Speaking of Ghosts...

Re: Gettysburg - Been few times back in the days of that giant electric map of the battle field. Went once while still in college. My buddy I arrived around midnight and did a rather stoned reenactment of the battle of Little Round Top. Eerie as hell. The place retained a palpable energy. It was quite the night.

October 24, 2021 at 12:32 PM
Carl J. Weitz said...

Screw the Knicks! They, perhaps, are the worst run franchise in all of sports. I say " GO RANGERS"!!
Yes, they might have the same drunken contemptuous asshole owner as the Knicks, but as the are seen as the Crown Jewel of MSG, he has hand a more hands-off attitude regarding the Rangers. And Jeff Gorton did a great job of jettisoning his older and more valuable players for tons of top draft choices, orchestrating some strategic one-sided trades (I'm looking at you Adam Fox) and quickly rebuilding the team into quite possibly a dynasty team.

October 24, 2021 at 1:05 PM
Carl J. Weitz said...

Doug, I remember that Gettysburg map with the red and blue lights. But I was in third grade when we had that class trip from Asbury Park. I bet just like the Hayden Planetarium laser light show was enhanced when I was high, so too would that Gettysburg experience be intensified when stoned.

October 24, 2021 at 1:12 PM
Carl J. Weitz said...

I think it was red and blue lights. Perhaps it was gray and blue.

October 24, 2021 at 1:14 PM
mik said...

Giants are up 5-3 vs The Panthers. I wonder if they bring in Chapman to try and hold the lead?

Can't anybody around here play sports?

October 24, 2021 at 1:49 PM
HoraceClarke66 said...

YES! I loved that Gettysburg map!

My parents took us there when I was 7. I was, you won't be surprised to learn, a total Civil War freak. In those days, you could still go up in the cupola of the college, and look out to see where the Army of Northern Virginia approached from.

Favorite Civil War battlefield!!

October 24, 2021 at 2:47 PM
HoraceClarke66 said...

Jets got beat by 54-13. First time they've allowed over 50 points since 1995. And Zach Wilson got injured.

The Nightmare Century never stops for New York sports fans.

October 24, 2021 at 5:20 PM
Publius said...

Football Giants, though...

October 24, 2021 at 6:23 PM
Pocono Steve said...

Yeah, and about those Knicks. . .

October 24, 2021 at 9:38 PM
13bit said...

The Dolans are devil people.

October 24, 2021 at 11:04 PM
Joe Formerlyof Brooklyn said...


As long as we're discussing cheating and the like, there's a rumor -- an old one, it turns out -- about how Cal Ripken's consecutive-games-played streak was helped along by a fake power outage in 1997.

NOTE: He had already broken Lou Gehrig's record by then.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/sports/mlb/new-podcast-revisits-rumor-about-cal-ripken-kevin-costner-and-a-mysterious-power-outage/ar-AAPV4Me

The rumor says Ripken discovered his wife in bed with Kevin Costner. He had some kind of confrontation with Costner and didn't show up at the ballgame. To overcome this interruption to his streak, someone created a lighting outage at the Oriole ballpark -- canceling the game.

My reading of the article says no weather issues caused the outage.

It's labeled as a "conspiracy theory." My take: Explanations labeled "conspiracy theory" generally come to the fore when there are inexplicable events. This one doesn't seem on the level of the 9/11 buildings fallings down -- but then again, how often do ballgames get canceled due to electrical issues?

Costner denies it. Ripken denies it. Ripken didn't divorce his wife, Kelly, until 2016.

October 25, 2021 at 6:32 AM
TheWinWarblist said...

Oh JoeFoB, you make me wistful for my younger days, who among can say they didn't fuck Kevin Costner in the 90s?

October 25, 2021 at 9:13 AM
JM said...

I remember going to Gettysburgh. The eerie feel to the place was palpable. Would not go there on Halloween, or at midnight, or stoned any time of day.

Brrrrrr.

October 25, 2021 at 10:45 AM
Carl J. Weitz said...

JFB...are you sure that wasn't written in The Onion?

October 25, 2021 at 11:33 AM

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