Billy Paultz Reconsidered

One could make an argument that, by formal analysis, the Yankees have the better offense, defense, starting pitching and bullpen.
Problem:  I just went through the last 30 World Series at length. There were 22 in which, by my reckoning, a superior team could be identified. In those 22, the better team went 10-12. (The other eight I considered, […]

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My all time favorite newspaper headline appeared in the long-gone Philadelphia Journal, a sports-oriented tabloid that could best be described as a cross between the Philly Daily News and one of the colorful, scandalous London Fleet Street papers.
The story was on an economist from the University of Pennsylvania winning the Nobel Prize. It appeared during […]

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to bear in mind next time you hear whining about the liberal media, courtesy of Slate’s Timothy Noah.

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The injuries are of course an issue, but Iowa is if anything more banged-up than Penn State (there’s a rumor, denied by Kirk Ferentz, that all-Big Ten tackle Bryan Bulaga has been sidelined by an infected tattoo).
Ferentz has been weird this week. He keeps categorizing his team as a work-in-progress, almost as if it can’t really be […]

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You probably heard about this, the U of Hawaii football coach dissing Notre Dame, yet another flap wherein somebody says something, and the world spends days deciding how offended it should be by it.
Carroll makes one very good point:
(I get so impatient with all those non-apology apologies about racial slurs and gay slurs - “it […]

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It’s been a slow week, especially in sports….
Don’t know much about soccer. Don’t care much about soccer. So let’s equate this to other sports- Let’s say there was a country (we’ll call it Canada) that was trying to play American football at the highest level, and in the space of a few days Canada’s best football team beat the […]

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I don’t have anything useful to say about Michael Jackson, but Jeff Pearlman does.
The definitive NBA draft diary. Let’s just say Simmons and I disagree dramatically about Tyreke Evans.
Matt Yglesias has a contrarian, but somewhat sensible, take on Minnesota buying point guards like they’re hamburger buns.
Because lists are good fun, here’s one man’s top 50 players […]

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Here’s a list of the NBA’s all-time top 50 players by Slam magazine. It’s easy to quibble and there are one or two obvious howlers (Dennis Rodman but not Bill Walton or Pete Maravich?) but overall, it’s a better list than I expected. Dissent welcome.
As of Wednesday night, the “aftershow” part of Artie Lange’s hideous/spectacular performance […]

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*Sporting News Today is an e-mail quasi newspaper they deliver to your inbox everyday for free. It’s an interesting experiment, like a new-age version of the beloved National in some ways. It’s worth checking out; lots of information, although not enough in-depth stuff and real writing for my tastes.  
I bring this up because they cover […]

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Today’s Sunday News column, plus a couple additions observations at the bottom:
 The Phillies’ Raul Ibanez has 21 home runs through Friday, among overall offensive numbers that, if the season ended today, would make him a serious candidate for National League MVP.
He’s 37, and has never hit more than 33 homers in a season, and more […]

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