SimonOnSports

The All Star ballots are beginning to tabulate and once again to no ones surprise the public is making a lot of miserable picks. Here's a rundown of my thoughts per position, and who my picks are per position for the AL. 1st Base All of my grinding about Morneau last year not deserving the MVP and he goes out and has a terrific 1st half. Giambi deserves to be thrown off this list completely and one person who is not here but surprisingly deserves serious consideration is the Greek God of walks, Kevin Youkilis who is straight up raking daily. So after Morneau the Youk really deserves the bench spot, maybe even over Ortiz. 1. Ortiz, D. Red Sox 601,770 2. Giambi, J. Yankees 240,030 3. Morneau, J. Twins 221,520 4. Hafner, T. Indians 176,364 5. Casey, S. Tigers 161,436 2nd Base Wow isn't this a joke, Cano gets all the credit from the casual fan despite only being legit in the majors for a year and a half. And he's leading the AL by a decent margin despite having a terrible sta

The All Star ballots are beginning to tabulate and once again to no ones surprise the public is making a lot of miserable picks. Here's a rundown of my thoughts per position, and who my picks are per position. 1st Base Surprise, Pujols is winning despite putting up arguably his worst numbers of his career thus far. Meanwhile the Prince is mashing balls out of the park left and right and should be getting everyones vote to start the All Star game. 1. Pujols, A. Cardinals 399,706 2. Fielder, P. Brewers 291,911 3. Lee, D. Cubs 224,165 4. Garciaparra, N. Dodgers 222,107 5. Delgado, C. Mets 218,647 2nd Base This is pretty much a no brainer, Utley has hands down the best stats, he is the best player and he's the peoples choice. Good for him. What is laughable are the names below him. Biggio and Kent, its not 1999. Valentin has missed almost a month. 1. Utley, C. Phillies 322,590 2. Biggio, C. Astros 251,664 3. Weeks, R. Brewers 233,593 4. Valentin, J. Mets 179,952 5. Kent, J. D

Those are two phrases you should expect to hear at a much larger volume levels when you walk around Yankee Stadium in the not too distant future as the state of New York is expected to eliminate restrictions on ticket scalping . So now instead of walking near the stadium and having guys analyze you from a far and then ask you if you need any tickets, they can just holler and scream as loud as they want. I do not know whether this is a good/bad/neutral thing. Does it really change much? I mean people have been and will continue to scalp their tickets regardless of the policy. And it's not as if I plant myself around Yankee Stadium and scalp my tickets so it doesn't really effect me unless I plan on going down and buying scalped tickets some day, which is doubtful. I think in the long run it just benefits people who live in the Bronx and Queens who can go to the stadium any day of the week and find tickets to buy regardless of the game, or can go out and sell their tickets

So if you had a to guess who was leading the American league in innings who would your guess be? CC Sabathia, he's a horse. Johan Santana, he is the best pitcher in baseball? Dan Haren, he is leading the AL in ERA? How about James Shields of the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, when would his name cross your lips? Never? Have you ever even heard of James Shields before? Well, Shields in fact sits as the league leader in innings pitched after last night, and sits one inning behind Tim Hudson for the major league lead in innings, and the amazing part about that is that Shields has one start less then just about everyone else in the top 10. So where did this guy come from? I like the majority of the world had never heard of him before this season. Well he actually was at one point in time a highly touted prospect, as he was ranked #16 in the country his senior year in high school and was drafted by the D-Rays in the 2000 draft. His first cousin is Phillies Centerfielder Aaron Rowand. He

HAHAHAHAHA. Come on if you've played baseball and have never had to either deal with someone screaming I got it while running by you, or never done it yourself then you obviously don't play in fun leagues. And sadly enough the Yankees really needed that just so that they could put themselves up by enough runs so they couldn't choke away the lead. Save Totals Mariano Rivera = Hideki Okajima = 4

But I just watched the YouTube clip of the Iceman getting dropped by some black guy I've never heard of from the UFC fight on Saturday, and it was up there today for the biggest waste of 2 minutes of my life. They pretty much walk around the ring for 2 minutes, throw approximately a total of 7 punches. The black guy lands one on the chin and drops Lidell, and then pounces on him until the ref jumps in between and calls the fight. So where exactly is the excitement of MMA? Did I miss something there? Maybe the undercards were good? But certainly dropping 50 bones on a fight that lasted 2 minutes and consisted of roughly 10 punches was not worth it. If you care to waste 2 minutes yourself...

I feel as if everyone that every runs on the field gets destroyed like this, but every time I still enjoy it. Courtesy of Who Ate All the Pies

Bad Enough that, they turn Aaron Hill, career 10 stolen bases, into Jackie Robinson. Ugh.

Americans have always had their most difficult time winning matches and grand slams when they play on the clay of Roland Garros, but this bad come on. After the first monday of the French Open, 8 of the 9 American Men were bounced including both of the top ranked men, Andy Roddick and Fairfield native James Blake . No one could honestly expect Andy Roddick or Blake or Fish or any of the men to seriously contend for the French Open Championship. None have the track record on clay, none really ever advance far on clay, but this bad, basically a clean sweep out of the tournament on the first day, wow. That's bad. Now the American's hope lies on the shoulders of one Robbie Ginepri, the only American to not go down yesterday. And don't get your hopes up, Ginepri is only still alive because his match got suspended because it was too late, and he is currently on a 4 match losing skid, 3 of which have come on clay. Perhaps American Tennis should start building some clay co

~The Yankees blow. That's pretty much all you can say right now. They go out and show some life by beating the Red Sox 2 of 3 and then tank come the weekend, to their bane the Angels. Every single day they find away to lose. The one time they score a decent amount of runs this weekend (6) they give up 10 then when they get good pitching outings they can't score any runs. The season is only so long and they're currently 13.5 out of the East and 7 1/2 out of the Wildcard but it's not just that. In order to win 95 games the Yanks need to go 74-39 the remainder of the season. That's at a clip just below winning every series 2 out of 3. Maybe that's a possibility but if they don't turn it around this week and start winning games their season is effectively over, and heads should start to begin rolling, starting with the man at the top, the Cashman. ~On that note, can the Red Sox, lose maybe a game or two? ~The Indians dominated the Tigers this weekend to

Ok first LBJ doesn't go to the rack and dishes for an open three game 1 and he gets killed. Now he drives to the lane and everyone is complaining that he doesn't get a foul call and then people are questioning the fact that Mike Brown decided to drop the clock down and "play" for the last shot. First off, I can't complain they didn't get a foul call and neither should anybody on the Cavs, by not calling a foul there they ended up with a wide open 6 footer which no matter how you draw up a play you can not expect to end up with a better shot than that. Secondly as, for waiting for the last shot, what's the difference. They had 3 opportunities at the shot, it's not like they waited til the last second. They had James shot, a perfect look for Hughes, and a decent tip opportunity for Floppy-Head. Stop your complaining and make shots down the stretch. It will be apropos when both of the conference finals end in sweeps, marking just how uninteresting the

I know that at this point int time in my life I could not fathom what the loss of a son would feel like and I can not blame Josh Hancock's father for being hurt and depressed after the loss of his son. However, I can't condone him trying to take lawful action against the bar that his son received his drinks at and definately not against the tow truck and the owner of the stalled car. His son chose to drink and drive, the bar should be responsible only for making sure that people do not get overly intoxicated. I'm sure a man of Hancock's stature both in build and as a professional athlete should be able to appear more sober than the typical person. In addition, how if you are a Cardinals bar are you going to refuse to serve one of the Cardinal's players. If he wants a drink and isn't fall down drunk, you're not going to serve the guy? In addition the Tow truck company whom Hancock struck and the car's owner that was being towed were also named as def

In my entire life only a handful of albums that I have ever bought have I sincerely enjoyed them on the first listen. Sometimes they eventually catch on and become favorites other times they are given a few more chances and then brushed aside. There is one album that stands out in memory though, as an album that I sincerely enjoyed first listen and every other time I have put it on, and that was Linkin Park's second album Meteora. It was just flat out really good, aggressive but not overly aggressive, solid beats, a good mixture of rap and lyrics, but mostly each song was catchy, each song grabbed you from the start. So over the past 4 years I have waited for them to come out with a new album and waited and waited, while they went on tours and did mix cds with Jay-Z or branched off and created Fort Minor, simply waiting for their next album to drop. And come last wednesday I hear a song on the radio and go, huh Linkin Park came out with an album, granted I was only one day late

Do you think your brain would hurt after this, regardless of having a helmet on? A point blank fastball from a shortstop to your forehead?

Well after much delay and seeing every single doctor on the face of the planet, yesterday it was made official that PavGirl, will be sent down to Bama to get himself some Tommy John surgery and effectively end his tenure as a New York Yankee. Effectively Pavano has locked in his career stats for the New York Yankees now and will at the conclusion of next year raked in $40 million dollars and have arguably the worst contract in the history of humanity . And honestly, I might be slightly disappointed that it's all done and will not be mentioned at all anymore. Who am I going to continuously spit hate towards? Who am I going to define as a wuss in my dictionary? Who will be the Yankees fans uber whipping boy? For that Carl you will be missed. Or not. In all honesty this is probably the best for the Yanks. He will never ever have to be in the clubhouse again, and they most likely will recover a large chunk of his salary from an insurance policy and be able to filter it back int

~Larry Bird looked none to pleased at not having a draft pick. ~The guy opening the envelope looked pretty friggin stumped when he saw the Celtics logo. ~I think Tommy should have beat him to a pulp. ~Ugh...

If you tried to measure the just how bad the draft lottery went for both the Celtics as well as the NBA in general it would register the lowest amount on every scale imaginable. Let's Count the Ways that last night sucked: Celtic Woahs 1) The Celtics Managed to yet again avoid garnering a franchise Center. 2) Doc Rivers was given a contract extension, and will remain the coach. 3) Ditto on Danny Ainge. And both are horrendous. 4) The chances of the Celtics getting the fifth pick would be slightly under 17% if they did not take the ping pongs balls out after each lottery selection. 5) The Celtics had 19.9% chance to get pick #1. After the Blazers landed #1 pick the Cs had a 21% Chance of getting the #2 pick. After the Sonics landed that they had a 23.1% chance of landing pick 3. 6) When you take into account the lottery balls being pulled out the Celtics had a 44.9% chance to move up a pick on the first selection, a 47.3% chance to move up on the second selection, and a 52.1% ch

With the NBA's hype machine rolling these past few months about who would wind up with Oden and Durant and how teams were positioning themselves by tanking the end of the season and side bar stories like what if the Bulls land Oden through the Knicks pick; it's evident that the Lottery is great for the NBA. Would it have the same effect in the NFL and would it be worth it? Tanking the Season Because the NFL season is such a smaller sample size it's much more difficult at the middle of the season to justify throwing it in the tank job. The Celtics and Grizzlies for instance by mid year had long losing streaks and were without their star player and were effectively out of the race. Unless you are 2-6 or below at the midway point of the NFL season, you still have a fighting shot. Granted you will need to get incredibly hot down the stretch but you won't throw it in dump mode yet. Impact of Top Picks The impact of the top picks in NBA is typically much larger than tha

"NBA teams should no longer be built around a big man, especially if that big man can't run. A wing scorer is a better way to build a team." That is a line you have heard and will hear much more as some people try to tell you that Durant should be taken in front of Oden in the upcoming draft. This might be the biggest crock recently uttered by so called expert scouts in the NBA. Let's do a quick analysis of who in fact has won championships recently. 1999 - Spurs, Duncan PF/C & Robinson C 2000 - Lakers, Shaq C 2001 - Lakers, Shaq C 2002 - Lakers, Shaq C 2003 - Duncan, PF/C 2004 - Pistons, Billups G 2005 - Spurs, Duncan C/PF 2006 - Heat, Shaq C 2007 - Spurs, might as well chalk Duncan up for title #4. So assuming the Spurs win the title this year, they are the best team remaining, of the past 9 champions, 8 of them would have had a dominant big man, who can not run the floor. So where am I missing how a team should not be built around a dominant big man. Shouldn

~So just when you thought the Yankees pitching staff couldn't get more injured, Darrell Rasner goes out and breaks his finger trying to field a comebacker and is placed on the 60-day DL. Hilarious, how many pitchers could the Yanks possibly have injured. ~At the other end of the spectrum I go out and make fun of the fact that the Yanks are pitching Tyler Clippard on sunday and he goes out and throws a 3 hit gem. And it was much needed as the Yanks hitting was miserable the first game of the series and nothing worked on saturday. A Sweep against the Mets would have been incredibly embarrassing, and the Clippard win both avoided that and gave the squad some momentum which carried into last night. ~Federer whiped out Nadal in the final two sets in Hamburg to make the upcoming French Open much much more intriguing, if they end up meeting in the finals in Paris, I will be watching every second of that match early on a sunday morning. ~33 years after the fact, George Foreman is makin

What is something you always worry about now with basketball players in the NBA? Them being complete and utter thugs right, ala Stephen Jackson or Ron Artest. Well this nice article on Page 2, points out that Oden for the most part is much more tool than thug. Oden grew up wanting to be a Dentist? He loves Will Smith Music? And he watches a lot of CBS? He's wearing a brown turtle neck sweater during this interview? His best friend was a white kid from Indiana who was on a golf team, and unfortunately passed away in a car accident. It really doesn't appear like he has a single thug bone in his body, and as a franchise knowing that your #1 draft pick will come for the most part without a major entourage and his favorite rap artist never utters a curse word, doesn't that make you feel a little more safe? Doesn't that make you drool even more as a team GM over the lottery tonight?

So just in case for some reason you were wondering why there were no posts yesterday, well it was because I spent the day in the Big Apple which included a first trip to a Yankee Red Sox Game. I sat in the upper deck on the left field line, in essence where that photo is just a few more rows up and one things for certain being inside the stadium for a Red Sox game is much different than a Royals game... High School Bad Asses So I get into the stadium about 5 minutes before the first pitch and we're sitting around (my father, myself, my little sister and my girlfriend an evil Red Sox fan) and to for the first half inning there is really no body around us until mid inning when a whole high school came in and surrounded my seats. The kids were definitely upper high school, and thought they were epically cool. One kid snuck in a bottle of Smirnoff, and was in the bag immediately. He walked into the row, sat down for a half an inning, then decided to go to the bathroom, fell on his

Sometimes when you read these chats at ESPN you find nothing of value, the same old stuff everyday, sometimes someone throws something out there that I hadn't necessarily thought of, like: While Arod will almost certainly opt out of his contract, due to him having Boras as his agent and the fact that their will be a huge market out there for him, unless he tanks the remainder of 07. But still if you were Tom Hicks, doesn't these seem like must. That is approximately equivalent to Hicks dumping a 15 to 20 million towards Arod, to save the same amount of dollars. I wonder how much tampering chargers could be brought up in this case. Like would the Yankees really have the option to sue Hicks for doing this, what if he gave him a 'contract' with one of his other businesses, would it still remain illegal? Like if he signed Arod to a $15 million dollar contract with Liverpool FC or his investment firm. Do the Yanks have the option to deny this if he remains under contrac

Well not really, that would be the weak second consolation prize when they Celtics don't get one of the top 2 picks, aka Oden or Durant. But when the Celtics nab the third pick in the draft I think they have to go with the kid from China Yi Jianlian. So what if his birth certificate is as accurate as Danny Almonte's, he's still probably only 22. He looks like he's above average athletically, and he's 7 feet tall with a jump shot. From the video's I've seen on YouTube and the ESPN insider article , it appears that he's got some quickness. He certainly will need to bulk up and get tougher much like how Yao still needs to do so, but his potential is better than anyone else in the draft past the immaculate 2. Perhaps the kid is the next Darko, perhaps he's the next Dirk, if the Celtics land number 3 or number 4 I think they should make the gamble. He does wear my number so that definitely gets him some solid bonus points in my book. And if he con

The Yankees continue to lose and currently they sit 9 1/2 games behind the surging Red Sox, but apparently that hasn't stopped them from having plenty of free time to shoot out some interesting quotes to the media. Who knows how this conversation sparked, but Jason Giambi is quoted as saying that Major League Baseball should apologize to the public for the steroid era. Really Jason, kind of like how you apologized? Bud Selig "I'm sorry that people took stuff in the 1990's, we knew people were taking stuff, but the we didn't know the effect the stuff was having, and we enjoyed the success people were having when they were taking the stuff and the popularity the stuff was having on the game. But in retrospect perhaps the stuff left a bad legacy which I will now officially deam as "The Stuff Era", where people's records and stats were often caused by the stuff they were taking." What are you doing these kind of interviews during the middle of the

A little over a month ago Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson went on their quest to ban Imus from the media . Sharpton and Jackson saw an opportunity to exploit a white versus black issue no matter how insignificant it may have been. In the past month there have been two things that I have stumbled upon that have seriously called for black leadership to respond and take action, but apparently because white people weren't the crime committees, Jackson and Sharpton didn't need to pop their ugly little heads into the mix. The first occurred early this month in which a black girl was murdered by two black men over a friggin Game of Monopoly. Doesn't that just scream out we need to do something as a community, when someone gets murdered over a border game. But that didn't bring forth any black leaders. Then there's this crime which happened in January and is straight out of a Horror Film. Not only were there no black leaders there when this went done, but somehow somew

~Coming as no surprise to anybody the Suns lost last night because David Stern is a tool. D'Antoni made absolutely no attempt to rest his players and it cost them at the end. Nash Marion and Bell played practically ever minute of the entire game and the Suns blew and 8 point lead down the stretch mostly because they just stopped scoring. And he only really used 6 players the entire game, with James Jones the only one on the bench getting more than 5 minutes of PT. It's impossible to say what the game would have been like if they had Amare and Diaw the entire game, but me guess that they would have won. Now you can just pray that Amare leads them to a game 6 victory. ~David Stern kept on harping that the rule is the rule and that he must enforce it and then said stuff like the rule my not be fair. You are the commissioner David, your job is to do what's best for the sport of basketball. By suspending Amare and Diaw, you sacrificed the iintegrity of a game in the most imp

Last year I complained vehemently about how much my cable provider sucked regarding it's lack of carrying of Sox and mets games. Well apparently that isn't even nearly close to as bad as it can get throughout the rest of the country . Some regions, mostly the ones that don't really have a highly associated major league team are blacked out from several teams. For instance one guy in Iowa said that he is considered to be in the region of 6 major league squads. Six friggin teams? The whole state of Iowa is a 6 team region, Bud your kidding right? People in Oregon are for some reason considered to be in the Oakland A's region despite the fact that many of them live an 8 hour drive away from the Bay area. An 8 hour drive, are you serious? Vegas and lower Nevada are also in 6 team's regions. What I really don't get is how Major League Baseball can justify blacking out customers from watching teams 'in their region' if they go out and get the MLB packag

The NBA announced yesterday that it was going to go by the letter of the law and suspend Amare Stoudemire and Boris Diaw for game 5 of the Suns Series versus the Spurs, for getting off of the bench after Horry's flagrant foul. If you watch the video the Suns coaches stopped Amare and Diaw well before they ever came anywhere near the "altercation" as Stu Jackson calls it. How is that not taken into account? Should someone get suspended for starting to swing an elbow at someone and stopping well before they land it? This rule has been absurd since day one. This rule is equivalent to your buddy getting into a fight at the bar started by someone else, and you stand up in your stool and are thrown out of the bar. It makes no sense. So the NBA is willing to throw away a game in the only important series in the entire NBA playoffs. Does this make any logical business sense? Essentially Kurt Thomas is going to have to play millions of minutes despite him being elderly, an

We all know that the top tier players are not what wins or loses your fantasy season but rather those low round bargains that you were able to snipe and have lead to your ascension up the rankings. Here are 5 pitchers and 5 hitters grabbed in the lower rounds or early weeks free agencies that have made tremendous impacts. JJ Hardy - So, JJ Hardy leads the National League in homers? I think it's safe to say that Hardy's performance over the course of the first month and a half is by far the most surprising in the league. In one player per position leagues, he was probably not drafted period. In two shortstops leagues he was probably a lower end second SS pick. Right now he's hitting .325 with 12 homers and 37 RBIs and is currently the 3rd ranked player in fantasy behind only Arod and Jose Reyes. Buy or Sell: Sell JJ has never hit more than 12 homers in a season in his career, sell him while his price is maxed out. BJ Upton - Many people including myself avoided draftin