Welcome back, NESWers, to your weekly burst of rancor from your old pal DMtShooter, moonlighting from Five Tool Tool. Every week you can chew on some tasty dislike; we call it the Enemies List. And with that, let?s go straight to the hate.
5) Jim Hendry, general manager to your Chicago Cubs. OK, let’s get this straight. A week after they dump last season’s park-inflated older outfielder signing mistake (Milton Bradley) to the Mariners for some Big League Chew and the guaranteed horror that is Carlos Silva, they are back to… sign Marlon Byrd, who is basically the same guy as Bradley, only older, less insane, and not as good.
Byrd is, for those of you who don’t pay attention to baseball players who aren’t good enough to use in a fantasy league, a� washout in two other NL stops (Philadelphia and Washington). He then put together some tolerable empty calorie years in the thin air of Arlington, hoping against hope that some dumb bunny team would fail Equivalent Statistics 101… and hey presto, here come the Cubbies for three years and $15 million! May we all find opportunities in life to be so abundant.
At 32, Byrd isn’t going to steal bases (just 8 last year; and at 6′-0″ and 245 with past knee problems, I suspect he’s more than a few donuts past developing that as a career skill). He’s never been any good at getting on base (career OBA: .340, with a .329 last year in 547 ABs). The defense is just meh, since he no longer has the wheels for center, and never really had the arm for right. He doesn’t even help them much by balancing out the lineup, being right-handed. His career high in HRs before last year was (I hope you are sitting down for this) ten; last year it was 20. Finally, there’s absolutely no reason to sign him to decent money, since guys that do what he do, um, are more or less littering triple-A rosters across America.
There is a reason, folks, why the Cubs are the Cubs. It’s in signings like this, with a near total certainty of failure, and the whole dumb century-plus of similar moments. Maybe this time next year, they can ship Byrd off for a disaster of a closer instead!
4) Gilbert Arenas. How could Agent Zero fail to make the list this week? It takes a special kind of dumb to dance with certain suspension in a make-good season after years of debilitating injury, but that’s just what the man has done with this Wild West insanity. For the sake of collecting some twerpy gambling debt (and given that his gambling buddy is a complete scrub, it’s hard to imagine that the money involved is even one of Gilbert’s game checks), the one-time All-Star and Hibachi man is going to forever sully his name… and most dangerously, give the Wizards one more chance to, well, lose games at more or less the same rate that they were losing with him. And considering that his 23 points and 7 assists per game also come with the not so hidden bummers of bad defense and low shooting percentage, it’s also not beyond the realm of imagination that the magic users are going to find out that they might just be better off without him… assuming, whoops, that they can find some team that’s willing to eat that $16 million a year contract. There’s also the chance that they can use this to void his contract. That would be special.
Ah, you have to love the Association. If this winds up getting Gilbert back his street cred and a fully paid vacation from a terrible team, we’re going to see guys with tanks in the parking lot…
3) Tom Coughlin / Eli Manning. Have you ever seen a football team quit more than the Giants in the last two weeks? First you blow any chance of playoff eligibility with an utter gutbomb loss in your last home game, and then you go on the road to Minnesota and provide the Vikings with a Week 17 bye. The only suspense in this game was when the Vikes would pull their starters, or if the home team would start showering the visitors with confetti buckets. Manning’s performance in stopping the bleeding (17 of 23 for 141, a touchdown, a pick and a fumble) is damming with faint numbers, in that the touchdown came when his team was already down 44 in the fourth.
I realize that championships matter, and that no one will ever be able to take away Eli’s moment in the sun in stopping the Not Quite Perfectriots, or the lightning-struck month of Coughlin-schemered road playoff wins that led up to it. But at some point, doesn’t someone — anyone? — have to lose their jobs over this kind of behavior? The Giants hit the canvas with such a fishy stink, they would have lost their license in Nevada.
Wait, actually, I kind of hate the Giants. Stay the course, Big Blue!
2) Evander Holyfield. On the off chance that you aren’t staying up on the fight game in Uganda, everyone’s favorite fighting 47-year-old is going to spending January 16 in the ring with fellow clown Francois Botha, a South African who has also stepped inside the ring over fifty times. And while I get that fighters, especially those with alimony issues like Commander Vander, fight until no one watches… well, at this point, the amount of time that he’s spend in Sad Old Man stage exceeds the amount of time in which he was actually something to see.
I’m not saying you should care about boxing; it’s a cesspool of human corruption and degradation, beset by characters that start at vile and then get serious. I’m not even certain, if I were Holyfield, that I’d be doing things any differently; it’s not like he’s going to make bank any other way.
But if you are watching this, or paying to watch it? Go find a new hobby. Maybe cockfighting, or waterboarding. It’d have as much dignity, and your dollar will go further.
1) NFL Quitters. Look, I realize that every team dreams of mailing in Week 17, and that if you’ve done the work for the rest of the year, you’ve earned the right to protect your assets, rather than see them go down like, say, Wes Welker in the Texans game. (A small Nelson Muntz moment: Ha Ha! Thank you for that.) But for heaven’s sake, is this really how you want to treat the gambling and viewing public?
People watch SNF for the dream of a decent game to help take their minds off going back to work on Monday, especially after a holiday. Instead, we saw the Bengals perform worse than they ever did when they stunk. The Patriots could not even quit correctly, yo-yoing in QB Tom Brady and losing anyway, along with Welker suffering the slings and arrows of outrageous Bernard Pollard. The Saints made everyone forget their year and took away any sense that they were a juggernaut; the same goes for the Colts. If either of these teams lose in the first round, you will not be surprised; in all likelihood, you will laugh and think that God is just.
Right now, the only Super Bowl that looks like it *should* happen is Chargers v. Cowboys or Packers, and the only reason anyone feels good about the Chargers is that the Redskins can’t even beat their practice squad.
There’s something wrong with a league where full price is paid for games with fourth-rate talent. There’s something *very* wrong in which the two most loyal constituencies in NFL fandom — spread betters and fantasy league honks — get boned every single year. And finally, there is something spectacularly wrong when doing the wrong thing for the viewing public is the right thing for the individual team.
The NFL needs to fix this, and for now? The rest of us get to hate it. A lot.
Fellow haters, that?s all I got. See you next week.
Full story at http://neswsports.com/2010/01/03/the-enemies-list-vol-9/
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