Billy Paultz Reconsidered

Back from an eventful (in sports, not for me, especially) week off…
Whether they get Roy Halladay or not, right now, at this moment, the Phillies are the best team in baseball. Yes, the Yankees are also 10-1 since the all-star break in a better league, but the Yankees haven’t faced better competition during that stretch […]

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We were one hard bounce off the 18th green at Turnberry away from having that tedious debate all week.
Some people - not the most thoughtful among us -are having it anyway.
What people who say golf isn’t a sport mean is they don’t like or respect golf, and I’m not going to argue with that. You […]

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I was sure I had already posted this, but apparently not…
It’s the definitive takedown of Sarah Palin made all the more so because it’s by a conservative former Reagan staffer, and because it appeared in the Wall Street Journal. 
It’s all good, but here’s a money passage:
” ‘[It’s said that] The elites hate her.” The elites made her. […]

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Baseball Prospectus recently held an “American Idol”-style contest to pick a new writer to give a one-year contract.
Here’s an article from the winner, Ken Funck, that lends empirical creedence to an idea I’ve touted in print, that you could get more from a pitching staff, in quality and quantity, by using tandem starters, with a six-man […]

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The writer Dave Eggers, in an interview in Salon:
“More than any other event in recent history, this exposed the quiet racism that’s right there under the surface, these assumptions.”
He was talking about Hurricane Katrina, but he might have been talking about the Sotomayor confirmation hearings.
They could have been a compelling snapshot of the politics of […]

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You may, with ardent surfing, find your live blogs on the Home Run Derby, or the Sotomayor confirmation hearings, or, oh, I dunno…. pro wrestling.
But I say without fear of contradiction that nowhere else, in the entire world wide interwebs, will you find all three in one place. We’re coming at you live from Chez Gross, […]

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I have only two things to say about the all-star game, none of which get into the tedious business of player “snubs”.
1. It’s possible to get carried away with the idea that the squads should be chosen based entirely on first-half-of-2009 performance. I said this on “The Low Post,” Tuesday, but when I was in […]

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Matt Yglesias blasts the bulls-eye on the pistol-packin ex-Governor.
Yglesias was working off a column by Ross Douthat, the New York Times’ new house conservative (and a gargantuan improvement over the last one, Bill Kristol). Douthat makes the point that Palin was worked over unfairly because of her class and gender:
Male commentators will attack you for […]

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It’s like a little slice of Christmas morning for college football geeks: Phil Steele’s college football annual is on the newsstands. The thing is garish from a design standpoint, rather crudely written and put together and not cheap ($8.95), but this guy’s working too hard at compiling and analyzing information to worry about the fancy […]

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The weather, the food, the general sense of bonhomie…. it’s been a delightful Fourth of July weekend. Howevah…..
Ryan Howard should not be going to the all-star game. The National League is going with four first basemen- Howard plus Albert Pujols, Adrian Gonzalez and Prince Fielder. Dumb.
Howard has an .845 OPS. Gonzalez’ is .969 is a […]

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