The Big Tease and other thoughts

The big tease...the New York Yankees. That's what they've become. They're the Buffalo Bills of the early 1990's, the Philadelphia Eagles of the first part of this century. They have become the American League version of the Atlanta Braves.

They make it to the post-season, they just can't do anything when they're there.

And this time Yankees' fans can't blame A-Rod who batted a vaguely respectable .267 with one home-run, two runs scored, and one RBI.

By contrast, Derek Jeter, the Yankee-who-can-do-no-wrong with Yankee fans - .176, no runs, one RBI. The Yankees had five starters bat below .200 for the series with their starting first baseman at a rousing .000.

Maybe George Steinbrenner should take a closer look at the talent he forces Cashman to pursue before he cans Joe Torre. The fact that they removed Roger Clemens from the post-season roster is a pretty strong indictment of Steinbrenner's personnel wants and needs.

Bring on the Indians.

They had a bad day...

And still scored 34. The defense came up big when needed, but gave up more yardage to the Browns than to any other team so far this year. Tom Brady, however, looked distracted and frustrated the whole game.

When Brady missed his mark, it was generally his fault. Very few of his passes were dropped, and several of the times that they were (passes primarily to Moss) the receptions would have been highlight reel sort of plays.

Next week the Pats play the Cowboys who barely escaped from Buffalo with a win last night. Is this another indictment of the quality of football in the NFC, that Dallas was within seconds of losing to one of the worst teams in the AFC East?

Running on empty...

There's no other way to say this than - the organizers of the Chicago Marathon are idiots. Complete morons. And they need to keep sponsors of the event from making stupid comments to the press.

For those of you who don't know, the Chicago Marathon was run in close to 90 degree heat without adequate water supplies.

This is from the CNN report -

Organizers insisted they adjusted their plans for the heat and boosted the number of drink servings at the race's 15 aid stations to 1.8 million from 1.6 million, as well as adding misting areas, extra ice and water-soaked sponges.
"We did feel we had more than adequate water supplies out there," said Shawn Platt, senior vice president of LaSalle Bank, the marathon's sponsor.
Platt said planners did not anticipate runners would use drinking water to cool themselves when misting stations and sponges weren't available. He acknowledged many stations and sponges were set up toward the end of the route instead of early on when runners first started showing signs of fatigue.

I have been running in road races since I ran track in high school...some 23 or 24 years now, and that includes at least one marathon. I have never been in a road race where runners didn't use drinking water to cool themselves. It happens in every road race.

Now this guy Platt is a senior VP at a bank, but I guess he is not a particularly gifted mathematician. His argument is that they increased the total number of drink servings at the marathon by a total of 200,000 for the 35,000 runners. Let's run through the math on this. That's an additional 200 servings per 35 runners, or a total of an additional 5.7 servings throughout the course of the marathon. Split between the 15 aid stations? That's less than half a cup additional per runner per aid station. That means they went from 3 cups per station per runner to approximately 3.4 cups on a 90 degree day.

Part of what's amazing about this is that the organizers continue to try and defend themselves instead of coming out and owning up to the fact that they completely fucked this up.