7:32 PM I'm sure Michigan football fans will be more than happy to spend an additional $83,000 to maintain their seat location at Michigan Stadium. With RichRod piloting the ship and the state of the economy, all is well.
It never worked for Wile E. Coyote, so why did an employee of the Tampa Bay Rays think that some fake ACME explosives would propel his team back into the AL East race? Meet William L. Jordan, 38, a mechanic at Tropicana Field who apparently saw the film “The Hurt Locker” one too many times, and thought it would be funny to plant a fake bomb at the stadium for a game with the Boston Red Sox.
Placed in a cabinet near one of the gates, the device was box-like, with wires and blinking lights — very MacGyverish. Police and team officials, however, did not get the joke, and Jordan was arrested. Read more…
We’re not sure what the deal is, but it seems like every month or so, there’s one fan who decides to get cute with an escalator railing or something at a pro ball park. Predictably, disaster ensues.
(This is not the fan or incident in question… but it’s probably pretty close.)
And so it goes in Tampa, where one fan is “expected to survive” (always a good sign when the hospital’s saying “we think he’s not going to die,” right?) after taking a 20-foot plunge at a Rays game last night.
Let it be known henceforth that if you produce a t-shirt with a starburst on it, the Tampa Bay Rays will hunt you down and sue you until you bleed from various orifices. Does the image on the right — which Tampa resident Billy Castro claims is his company logo — closely resemble the image on the left, which is the tiny starburst in the “Rays” logo? Well yes, it kind of does.
And that’s why the Rays and MLB have waged a two-year campaign to sue Castro for copyright infringement, noting that the Rays fan had a duffle bag with 10 or so t-shirts outside of Tropicana Field last year before Tampa Bay’s first-ever World Series game, which he was attempting to sell for $5 each (Castro denies this). Clearly a major crime and a threat to democracy and our very freedom as Americans. Can’t we just throw him in Gitmo? Read more…
You remember Robert Eaton, the Tampa Bay Rays fan who wanted an autograph from the Phillies’ J.C. Romero last week, and wound up getting throttled by the pitcher. Now Eaton wants more than a signature — he wants cash. It’s litigation time at the Trop! (Jaunty organ music here).
That’s not actually Eaton pictured on the right above, although that’s how I pictured him while he was talking, along with his attorney Jim Magazine, on WIP radio in Philadelphia on Tuesday. I wonder, did the interview conclude with a call-in segment? I would have loved to hear that, since they were in Philadelphia. Anyway, as Jimmy Shapiro of Sports Radio Interviews.com points out: “Eaton talks of a neck injury and I can totally see a Brady Bunch type neck brace in a court setting for this clown.”
Rays fans didn’t exactly go crazy for the World Series rematch with the Phillies at the Trop this week — they didn’t get a crowd that topped 21,000. But one Rays fan got his money’s worth down by the Phils’ bullpen, and ended up getting allegedly smacked around by J.C. Romero.
Romero, if you didn’t know, was the winning pitcher in the deciding game of the Series last year, then was suspended for 50 games this year for testing positive for androstenedione during the 2008 season. He and some other Phillies were approached by 25-year-old Robert Eaton for autographs, but after brushing him off Eaton yelled out to Romero something about him “getting some juice” instead. J.C. didn’t take too kindly to that, but after reading the whole story I’m not so sure that Eaton doesn’t come off looking like the bigger idiot.
Unfortunately for the stunt double for Gene Hackman from The Conversation, Maddon, his “quality assurance coach”, and his bench coach all missed that Maddon listed Evan Longoria and Ben Zobrist at third base and failed to list a DH. Therefore, starting pitcher Andy Sonnanstine had to bat for himself in the third slot in the order.
If anyone was going to step up and hit the game-winning shot in a must win game for the Boston Celtics, of course if was going to be Glen “Big Baby” Davis, right? I mean, just look at the guy’s track record. It’s…OK, basically it’s him getting screamed at by Kevin Garnett on the sidelines and crying into his towel. So what I mean to say is that there is no possible way that Glen Davis hits the biggest shot of the season for the Boston Celtics.
But there he was, with the clock running down on Sunday night against Orlando and the Celtics trailing by one, draining a 21-footer after the Magic had swarmed Paul Pierceto give Boston the 95-94 victory to tie their Eastern Conference semifinal series at 2-2. And there he was charging down the court like he was chasing down the ice cream truck as it took off down the street, taking out some helpless kid on the sidelines in the process. Make sure you keep an eye on the kid’s friend shooting daggers at Davis:
Yeah, kid, I’m sure you could have taken him down if he just wouldn’t have run away so fast. But back to the shot: it’s not that the shot was too uncommon for Davis to hit - he does have that kind of range from the outside. But to hit that shot in that situation is just uncanny. Almost as uncanny as Paul Pierce having the guts to pass to him and let him take the shot with the Celtics’ season basically on the line. Can you imagine Kobe Bryant passing the ball to Andrew Bynum in the same situation?
Meanwhile, remember how the Rockets’ season was supposed to be doomed when Tracy McGrady went out for the season? That didn’t happen, as Houston won a playoff series for the first time in 47 years (approximately) before giving the Lakers all they could handle in their Western Conference semifinal series. But the news that Yao “Bamboo Bone” Ming would miss the rest of the playoffs with a broken foot suffered in Game 3 was surely the end of their run.
Then what in the world were the Lakers doing trailing by as many as 29 points to a team starting a 6-foot-6 center (Chuck Hayes) before falling 99-87 to have their series evened up at 2-2? For one thing, the Lakers had no answer for Chris Rock Aaron Brooks, as the diminutive guard ripped Los Angeles for 34 points, while the combination of Ron Artest and Luis Scola held Kobe Bryant to just 15 points.
As Phil Jackson predicted, it may have just been a case of a team playing full of emotion after having their backs to the wall; and yes, the Lakers did still regain home court advantage during the two games in Houston. But watching the Lakers and comparing them to the molten hot ball of basketball destruction that is the Denver Nuggets right now, perhaps that Cavaliers vs. Lakers NBA Finals isn’t as much of a sure thing as we previously thought.
Meanwhile, in those “other” playoffs, the Bruins followed the lead of their basketball brethren from Boston, although their prospects are still far more bleak. Despite their 4-0 win over the Carolina Hurricanes, Boston still trails 3-2 and needs to win at Carolina in Game 6 (where the Hurricanes have lost just once this postseason) in order to extend things to a Game 7. And in the Western Conference, the Red Wings pushed the Ducks to the brink with a decisive 4-1 victory to take a 3-2 series lead.
While the Celtics and Bruins were in their playoff battle, the Red Sox were simply beating the Rays 4-3. But how could one fan celebrate everything that was going on in the Boston sports world on Sunday? BUGS AND CRANKS found one fan who had the perfect answer: a Celtics jersey pulled over a Bruins jersey, topped with a Red Sox cap:
Just to finish our Boston sports orgy: are you ready for a reality show starring Troy O’Leary as the baseball version of Simon Cowell? The BOSTON GLOBE says O’Leary hopes you are, as he’s developing a new TV show called “Play Big or Go Home” that is trying to find baseball diamonds in the rough. My choice for the Paula Abdul spot at the judges’ table? The San Diego Chicken.
England national team soccer star Ledley King was arrested over the weekend after allegedly assaulting a bouncer at a London nightclub and insulting his Pakistani heritage. THE SUN says that King got to sleep it off in the drunk tank, literally, as he passed out in the stony lonesome for five hours.
While that was happening, the TELEGRAPH says that Manchester United was throttling Manchester City 2-0 to put a stranglehold on the English Premier League title with two games remaining. But mercurial United star Cristiano Ronaldo found something to mope about, throwing a fit after being removed by Sir Alex Ferguson just short of an hour into the match:
PRO FOOTBALL TALK says that Drew Rosenhaus is, as usual, stirring up more problems. This time he’s using Twitter to start trades for one of his disgruntled players, saying that he thinks teams would “give up a 1st round pick and more for my client Darnell Dockett.”
NASCAR’s head of drug testing isn’t exactly buying Jeremy Mayfield’s claim that a reaction to an allergy medication led to his positive drug test, telling USA TODAY that “in my many years of experience, I have never seen a violation like this due to the combination of over-the-counter or prescription products.” But maybe he was trying to get pregnant?
With college athletes getting in trouble about Facebook postings on a seemingly daily basis, you would think that universities would avoid social networking sites like the plague. But the IDAHO STATESMAN says that Boise State is embracing the concept in a big way, complete with Facebook pages, YouTube channels and more. (h/t to THE WIZ OF ODDS)
