In the hundred-and-thirty-seventh episode, I don’t remember what Thomas and Danny talked about because it was so long ago and I forgot to post it until just now.
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Ned Flanders is a crafty lefty.
It should surprise no one familiar with this site when I say that we haven’t been blogging much; not counting writing done for other sites, I haven’t written an original article for over seven months. To break my blogging fast, I couldn’t decide if I wanted to recap the offseason, or analyze the contracts to Jeremy Affeldt and Javier Lopez.
I started to do the latter, but five minutes in, I realized they were pretty much the same because, really, there wasn’t much else. A few trades, minor hopeful improvements to the offense, some weight loss, nothing big. What was more surprising were the contracts to lefty relievers Affeldt ($5 million) and Lopez (2 years, $8.5 million).
After the Giants front office had publicly claimed poverty when it came to bolstering the offense, the contracts to the two certainly seemed excessive. But assuming that Brian Sabean doesn’t act completely randomly in a drug-induced vacuum, it’s worth taking a look at the factors that went into this decision.
A visual representation of my heart during the offseason.
Pitchers and catchers have reported, and whoop-dee-friggin’-doo. Now not only are we forced to live without baseball to watch, but we have to live with the knowledge that baseball is happening somewhere, but nowhere that we get to see. It’s lovely to read the stories that have abounded with the beginning of Spring Training (Tim Lincecum abandoned his mustache crusade), but it’s just another step in the excruciating winter that is the offseason.
With football still over, basketball still boring and my XBOX perpetually on the fritz, I’ve been filling my non-work hours with the calming, intellectual Spartacus: Blood and Sand, a show seemingly intent on seeing how many dead bodies and exposed breasts can be fit into an hour-long show.
But even while Spartacus is about the noblest of competition – gladiatorial combat – it falls victim to the most common problem of such fiction. The series is called Spartacus, so whenever our hero by the same name steps into the arena, it’s a pretty safe bet that he’ll be walking out of it alive before too long.
That’s the problem with even the greatest sports fiction: it’s utterly predictable. Continue reading