On the brink...

Of a Rocky Mountain winter...

The problem with Cinderella stories is that at some point the clock strikes midnight. Somewhere in Colorado a bell tower has chimed for the eleventh time, the twelfth chime is only seconds away.

The Rockies' offense showed signs of life for the first time during the World Series last night. Unfortunately, for the second time in three games Colorado's pitching didn't show. Through three games, Colorado has scored a total of seven runs to the Red Sox 25.

With Jon Lester on the mound, the Rockies have their best chance of taking a game from the Sox...but only if they get the pitching performance from their starter and bullpen that they got in game two. Otherwise, the celebrations will begin from Abington to Yarmouth.

It will be the second time this decade that the Sox will have won MLB's championship - the only team that will be able to claim multiple World Series wins since the start of the century in 2001. It gives me a warm fuzzy that the Sox will have won two titles since the last time the Yankees won one - and boy is that franchise looking dysfunctional right about now.

For Yankees fans that think next year is going to be the year, get a reality check - they are carrying an aging, prone to break-down, erratic first-baseman/DH in Jason Giambi. They have a left-fielder in Johnny Damon who's another year older and also having his share of health problems, they might have issues retaining their best catcher in Posada who had a career year heading into free-agency. The Bronx brain-trust plans on pulling Chamberlain out of an already undermanned/overworked bullpen and into the rotation - and all of this is just the tip of the ice-berg.

Get used to the following term in New York - rebuilding.

As for Colorado - there's a lot of young talent over there. If this year wasn't just the serendipitous convergence of career years, the Rockies should contend for some time to come. Like a bad horror film villain, they'll be back.

Lateral movement on the brink of defeat...

This has to be seen to be believed...Division III Trinity U. puts the nail in the coffin in the last 30 seconds for one helluva come-back.

Stern problems on the brink of irrelevance...

David Stern has officially sunk the NBA to a new level. After years of issues and accusations about games being fixed to get the best match-ups in the play-offs and finals it has come out that more than half of the NBA's 56 officials have violated the league's anti-gambling statutes.

Stern's reaction? He has decided that the rule is too out of date and needs to be changed.

Rather than remove the doubt that he could have up to 30 officials that might have been involved in fixing games, Stern has decided he wants to accommodate the officials' collective penchant for visiting casinos. Then to compound matters, Detroit Piston center Rasheed Wallace hits the press with the following rant -

"I still don't think they (Cavaliers) beat us, we beat ourselves," Wallace said. "And I think we also fell victim to that personal NBA thing where they are trying to make it a world game and get (television) ratings. They wanted to put their darling in there (the NBA Finals) and they did, and look what ended up happening.
"This game ain't basketball anymore, it's entertainment," Wallace said. "It's starting to get like the WWF. There ain't no real wrestling anymore either. It's all fake."

Yeah, this has been a good off-season for the NBA (note the sarcasm). After managing the league to unprecedented popularity in the 1990's Stern is now managing basketball into the ground - above and beyond the image problems caused by players like Allen Iverson, the infamous Portland "Jailblazers," and the thugs involved in the incident in Detroit a few years ago (author Jeff Benedict, writer of the book Out of Bounds: Inside the NBA's Culture of Rape, Violence & Crime, said in 2004 that 40 percent of NBA players have criminal records - that's two players out of every starting five in the league, not including the bench). This is who the NBA is trying to market to people who have to pay on average $51.00 to get a seat to a game.

Not exactly a great group to market to the people that can afford half-a-C-note to go see a game (and that doesn't even include parking, so think more like $70.00, $75.00 per game).

What do you suppose the over-under is on when the NBA starts to feel like the NHL?