Author Danny Vinik

Eerily Quiet In The Bronx

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The Yankees are in the midst of a 4-game losing, including a sweep at the hands of the rival Boston Red Sox, and are in third place in the AL East, a game under .500. Their biggest free agent acquisitions, C.C. Sabathia and Mark Teixeira, have both been awful. Yet, all is quiet in Yankee-land.

Where is George Steinbrenner? Where is his voice resounding through the media and plastered all over ESPN? Where are the threats that heads will roll and the attacks on Yankees’ manager Joe Girardi?

I want an explosion. I want the Yankees’ players to be trembling in every at bat, worried that if they strikeout, they will walk back to the dugout and find out that they have been demoted to AAA. 

Those were the good old days. Now the Yankees fall apart in silence. The glorified New York Yankees, the Evil Empire and 26-time World Series Champions, are no longer the king of baseball. Steinbrenner no longer owns the sport. Continue reading “Eerily Quiet In The Bronx” →

Brashear’s Cheap Shot Unacceptable

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Watch the above clip and tell me that Donald Brashear should be allowed to play in the NHL this year. He’s a big, hard-nosed player, who occasionally takes liberty with hits, but this was too far. Way too far. Brashear viciously elbowed an unaware Blair Betts in Game 6 between the Washington Capitals and New York Rangers. Betts had played the puck a few seconds earlier and even if the hit hadn’t been an elbow to the head, it was late. It was a dangerous cheap shot and Brashear shouldn’t be allowed to play in the rest of the playoffs or next year.

Give him a year suspension.

That kind of play has no place in sports so if that is how Brashear is going to play, then he has no place in sports. Betts was knocked unconscious and needed significant help just getting off the ice. It was an elbow right to the head. Forgetting about the game and Betts’s career for a moment, Brashear’s antics could have paralyzed Betts. An elbow that hard right to the head could certainly change a man’s life forever. Continue reading “Brashear’s Cheap Shot Unacceptable” →

Who Cares About The NFL Draft

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Less than 90 minutes from now, the NFL Draft will get under way with the Detroit Lions selecting QB Matthew Stafford with the #1 overall pick. For the next five hours, ESPN will broadcast every pick of the first two rounds. Then, Sunday morning, they will broadcast ANOTHER eight hours of draft coverage. Just five hours of coverage would be overkill, and ESPN is showing 13.

To be fair, I don’t consider myself much of a football fan. Yea, I’ll watch all my Patriots’ games and know the team fairly well, but in terms of teams I care about, they are down on the list. I still can’t figure out who can watch 13 hours of NFL Draft coverage without killing themselves though.

No other sport has that kind of coverage for an event in which NOTHING is determined. You barely hear anything about the MLB and NHL drafts. The NBA Draft has the closest thing to the kind of coverage that the NFL Draft has, but that is because one player on an NBA team can make much more of a difference than one player on an NFL team.

Think about that in terms of numbers. Five players are on the court at one time in the NBA. If you can significantly improve one of those players in the draft, then you have just improved your team by 10-20%. In football, there are eleven players on offensive and a different eleven for defense. That’s 22 players, so significantly improving one player via the draft only improves your team by 5-10%. Continue reading “Who Cares About The NFL Draft” →