What more has to happen for coaches involved in baseball to wear some kind of protection on thier noggins when coaching in either the first or third base box while on the field?
Last July Mike Coolbaugh, a coach in the Colorado Rockies minor league system was struck and killed by a line drive.
Just recently Osewego College (N.Y.) manager Frank Paino was coaching third base when he was struck in the side of the head by a line drive, after some quick actions by the opposing mangager, Paino {thankfully} will be able to coach again.
Coolbaugh’s death has led to a new rule requiring all base coaches in Major League Baseball and the minors to wear a helmet, but no such rule exists in high school or college.
Paino was not wearing a helmet.
Why in the world would one want to coach in the field in either high school or college where they use aluminum bats and not wear a helmet?
It makes no sense to me.
I know how hard a ball comes off an aluminum bat in slow pitch softball, but we are talking young athletes coming into thier prime here using a weapon (aluminum bat) with most often an older coach out in the field.
We all want to emulate the major leagues growing up, so why not follow thier lead on this matter.
Why I bet even Chuck Norris would wear a batting helmet!

-Lenn

The NBA postseason is winding down and look who’s in the finals. When the playoffs started, I predicted the Lakers and Celtics would meet in the championship series. It may appear that I took the safe route and just picked the No. 1 seeds from both conferences,  but these really are the two teams I wanted to see in the end. Growing up in the 1980’s,  I remember those classic matchups between LA and Boston and how I enjoyed those games so much. It may have taken a month and a half to get to this point, but the finals will prove that it was worth the wait.

And who’s going to win? I predict the Lakers in six games.  First of all, that was how many games it took the Lakers to beat Boston for the title back in 1987. Secondly, Los Angeles has more players on their roster with championship experience. Kobe and Derek Fisher played on the Lakers teams that won three straight championships. Sam Cassell won a championship with Houston, but he’ll probably spend more time on the bench and won’t be much of a factor for Boston.

Boston is a good team. You don’t get home court advantage in the NBA finals by being a bad team. The Celtics have to be somewhat tired though. They’ve already played 20 games this postseason and have to play again on June 5.  

Overall, the Lakers are just simply playing better basketball. It helps to have Kobe on your team as well. Love him or hate him, Kobe continues to prove he’s one of the best to have ever played the game.

You may not agree with my reasons and think I’m losing it. But the Lakers still have some “Magic” left to carry them to their 15th championship.

-Jerome

I know there are worse annoyances in sports, steroid use in major league baseball, the motorsports media’s infatuation with Danica Patrick, Dick Vitale with a broken “mute” button on the remote, but this one has rankled me almost from the beginning: use of what are commonly known as Thundersticks by spectators.
A pair of inflatable tubes are slapped together to make a hideous amount of noise. I’d rather give a toy trumpet to a three-year-old.
One pair is bad enough, but collectively a whole arena full of Thundersticks can ruin the day of someone trying to cover, or even just enjoy a sporting event.
You’ve seen these at basketball games, football, hockey, indoor, outdoor, makes no difference. They’re extremely annoying anywhere.
Let the fans yell and scream and clap their hands. Leave the artificial noisemakers out of it.

There. I feel better.

Jim

This guy’s words have no place in sports:
On May 27, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette quoted Mark Madden, a former ESPN employee, as saying on the radio that he had hoped Sen. Edward Kennedy “would live long enough to be assassinated.” Madden, without pause, added, “I wonder if he got a card from the Kopechnes,” suggesting the comments were self-referential. He was fired several days later.
Madden’s comments came during his show about hockey on May 21, the day same it was announced the Massachusetts Democrat Senator was diagnosed with an aggressive, malignant brain tumor. “Kopechne” was mentioned in reference to Miss Mary Jo Kopechne, who drowned in during Senator Kennedy’s controversial Chappaquiddick car accident incident. Critics assert Kennedy’s personal political ambitions were prioritized by the Senator before saving Miss Kopechne from his overturned and underwater car given Kennedy was likely drunk, and then failed to report the incident to authorities until about ten hours later.
Madden was last heard on the air last Thursday, the day before his comments appeared in the Post-Gazette. Subsequently, ESPN national headquarters confirmed that, after a review of his overall history, Madden was taken off the air, permanently.

I know the guy was fired, but should there be some other punishment here? You would think a guy would know what not to reference when it comes to dark parts of our history as a nation. At what point do announcers - or even writers for that matter - cross the line when it comes to politics and sports?

- Josh

The NBA is going to start fining guys for flopping. All I can say is it’s about time. One of the smarter basketball fans I know has long said a “flop” should get you a technical foul for attempting to deceive an official. I’m hoping fines work.

Ever since one of my least favorite NBA players of all time (Bill Laimbeer) made it an art form, the flop has become a staple of the game.

I despise it.

First of all, the charge call in basketball is the most overused call ever. Referees should have a charge quota of about five per 20 games. If you call more than that, you’re getting fooled (I’ve been to high school games where refs will call five charges in a 32-minute night. That’s utterly ridiculous). The idea that a defender can slide over and hurl himself to the floor with a scream at the first inkling of contact and get a ref excited enough to call a charge drives me nuts. It’s almost always a deceitful play by a defender doing anything he can to stop an offensive player whom they have no other way to stop, but I think refs just like turning the other way and putting their hands behind their heads. It makes them feel like dancers, or something. 

I can’t say that I’ve never done it (flopped) either. One year in a state amateur tournament, Volga’s Ryan Burggraff was having his way with my team. Just abusing us. I started leaving my guy and rotating into his path and took two, very, very dubious charges (as 95 percent of them are). On the second one, I started screaming and flailing to the ground before he even ran into me — a trick I had learned after getting called for three charges in about five minutes of one game. I even apologized to him after the whistle. I hated cheapening a game that is a borderline religious experience for me, but we ended up winning. Yes, I just admitted that I have cheated and deceived in order to win a basketball game before. I’m almost as pathetic as Bill Laimbeer. I need to shower and go to confession.

Still, I wish that it wasn’t part of the game. The funny thing is any coach in the world would be hollering at the ref for making that call against his team, but cheering his player on, patting him on the back and telling his teammates that was how you should “sacrifice” for the team, if it went his way.

Charges just don’t happen that often. Call the block, ref. Rewarding guys that are looking to take themselves (and others) to the floor is not conducive to great basketball.

Besides, it’s almost always a lie anyway.

Sucker.

- Padraic

I was surprised today when I checked out ESPN.com and came across the story that former Cub Sammy Sosa will retire in 2009.
I’m sorry, I thought he was already retired. I figured the fact that no Major League Baseball team had offered him a contract this season, kind of already meant he was done. My mistake.
Sosa, who is not currently with a ballclub in 2008, plans on sticking around until after the next World Baseball Classic.
“It’s part of the plan. It would be great if folks can see me for the last time wearing the uniform of the [Dominican Republic] National Team,” Sosa told Hoy, a Dominican newspaper.
Sosa, 39, currently a free agent, had 21 home runs and 92 RBIs in 114 games last season with the Texas Rangers. Last June against the Cubs, his former team, Sosa became the fifth player in history to hit 600 home runs, following the path of Barry Bonds (762), Hank Aaron (755), Babe Ruth (714) and Willie Mays (660).
“There’s something that I wish to state very clearly: I’m not looking for a job. In fact, I have told my agent that he should stop offering my services to MLB teams,” Sosa told Hoy. “I’m not retired. I remain highly focused and not begging for a contract.”

Andrew

Numbers can lie especially in sports, but something that has to be chalked up to odd coincidence is the San Antonio Spurs inability to win NBA titles in even numbered years. San Antonio has won four titles but none of them coming in back to back years and none in an even numbered year.

Things are not looking good for San Antonio to get the job done this year, 2008, either as they lost to the Lakers last night to go down 3-1.

It is an something that is almost hard to believe because the Spurs have very little turnover among their top players, or maybe that is why they are running into trouble. Is it better to shake things up after winning a title or try to keep all the peices in place.

The one person who is not worried about this is David Stern. The NBA Commish has to be drooling at the idea of a Lakers-Celtics final. Although it would be fun to watch the TV ratings plummet with Spurs-Pistons final.

Jeff

That Chicago Bulls player Joakim Noah was arrested in Gainesville, Fla., early on Sunday morning on open container and possession of marijuana shouldn’t come as a surprise. Apparently the majority of NBA players light up more than a scoreboard on a regular basis
Josh Howard of the Dallas Mavericks recently told a reporter that he and many of his NBA brethren smoke pot during the off-season, and that it is “his personal choice” to do so.
Many believe that up to 60 percent of the league is getting high.

And here I thought “getting up for the game” was supposed to be kind of a spiritual thing. What was I thinking?

The first game of the Stanley Cup Finals has come and gone and if you missed it I wouldn’t blame you. Not because it is hockey, not because it was going up against the Eastern Conference Finals in the NBA and not even if it was because you just don’t have a desire to watch the sport anymore.If you didn’t watch it I blame Gary Bettman for signing a television deal that put the Stanley Cup Finals exclusively on the VERSUS network. I don’t know about you but when I tried to find the Outdoor Life Network…er… I mean VERSUS I had to go to the channel guide just to try to figure out where it was on my cable system.The good news is I do get Versus but the bad news is not nearly as many people get VERSUS as they do say ABC, NBC or even ESPN.Some say that hockey viewer numbers are up since it went to VERSUS but I have a hard time believe this. The fact that the finals are on the network just shows how far the league has to go to reclaim its spot as part of the Big Four sports in this country. It may never happen or if it does it may take a long, long time.Jeff 

I’m a supporter of instant replay. Because of the number of disputed home run calls this week, Major League Baseball once again tossed around the idea of using instant replay. I’m all for it. I’ve heard arguments that instant replay won’t work in baseball. Some say the solution would be to go back to using six umpires for every game or get rid of the yellow line and instead, just let the ball drop in the stands to be considered a home run. Those sound like good solutions but why not use instant replay?

Sports officials are human. They make mistakes. I know officiating is a tough job and I respect individuals who want to do such a thing. Yeah, I’ve done my share of disagreeing with calls, but wouldn’t you like to see a game played fairly and the correct calls made. I’m not saying instant replay should be used to decide the outcome of games. That should be left to the athletes. I’m simply just pointing out that if instant replay is available, why not use it.

Instant replay is not perfect and probably never will be. For example, I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve watched NFL games and have seen calls overturned and wonder what the ref saw that I didn’t to make such a call. But I’ve also seen a receiver making an outstanding catch which an official ruled incomplete but replay showed otherwise and the call was reversed. Regardless of what instant replay shows, you’re never going to make everyone happy. Just like an umpire who calls a player out. He too didn’t make everyone happy with the call but he still continues to umpire.

It seems like instant replay could be used in baseball for certain situations to make sure the call was the right one. Maybe each manager could ask for it once every game. I don’t think that would slow the game down at all. Everyone who loves baseball just wants to see the correct calls made. The reason they use replay in other sports is for the same exact reason. It takes nothing away from an official or the credibility of the league.

I say give instant replay a try in baseball. Give it a test period. If it works than lets use it. If it fails, no harm done in my opinion. As long as their is disputed home run calls in baseball, might as well give replay a chance.

-Jerome