Why Pirates? Why? By: Vas Tumati

As always, I follow my life sucks rants with an article that follows the heart of this blog, an article about sports. I hope you all got a good a laugh at the thought of me running around in 80 degree heat trying to find any indication of where I was, but now let’s talk baseball.

Having grown up in Pittsburgh, I am a huge Pittsburgh sports fan, with exception of one sport, baseball. Like many other people of my age, I got drawn into Braves baseball by Braves on TBS, but with good reason; the pirates haven’t had a good season since I was six years old. Go easy on me, it’s hard to accuse a kid that young of being a fair weather fan. So why after all these years have I not recanted my ways and returned to being a Pirate fan even though I recognize the incongruence? I say this, if the owners don’t care then I won’t either.

Even though, admittedly, I am a Braves fan, I still have a soft spot for the Pirates, I mean, I did watch a lot of games in both Three Rivers and PNC. However, I can’t take is easy on them for some fuzzy childhood memories. They are about to approach a record setting, and this for all four major professional sports, 17th straight losing season. The closest they came to a winning season was 1997 when somehow finishing below .500 was enough to barely miss taking first in the central. It’s not for lack of talent or lack of coaching, it’s the owners! They don’t care and it shows.

Look at the history of the team, they are perenially the youngest team in the league. This year they have a scant average of 26 years old. Age aside, as soon as a player shows any sign of talent the owners trade them away for fear of having to pay a hefty salary that might cut into their profit margin. The earliest player I can remember is Jason Kendall but there is a long history of this. Off of the top of my head I can name Aramis Ramirez, Brian Jiles, Jason Bay, Nate McClouth, and Xavier Nady. If you notice, all of the players I mentioned have had great seasons with other teams.

Any time I bring the Pirate’s losing ways up someone is quick to scream “SMALL MARKET SYNDROME!” Really? Because last I checked, the Rays made the world series last year, the Marlins started off the year hot and have won two series since the last time the Pirates had a winning season, the Rangers are tied for their division lead right now, and the Rockies (though 10 gb in their division) have a better record than the Pirates. All of the teams I listed are in the bottom ten in terms of payroll, and a lot of the teams in the bottom ten have made playoff runs in the last few years. So the key to winning is not a big payroll, it’s smart scouting and smart owners who care about winning.

So until the Pittsburgh Pirates actually start caring and make an effort to win, I will continue to be a Braves fan first pirates  fan second or maybe third, but rather than give a damn I’m sure they’ll just trade Nyjer Morgan because he made the Sportscenter top ten the other day.

Tiger 3.0?

First off let me begin by apologzing to our fan; singular. While I don’t know what Mike and Neil were doing, I got very very busy with school and neglected to write anything for months, in fact I missed most of the NBA finals because I would pass out from study exhaustion about a quarter of the way into the game. It may not seem like much of an excuse but, I am a medical student first and everything else comes in a distant second. Good news though, I had my last final friday and now have eight weeks of freedom to celebrate and pretty much do nothing but write about sports all day (this free time may turn into an interesting event for our fans: details to come later).

Now I know we have missed a lot of sporting events this year due to our disappearing act but I would like to keep it current and talk about the rainy US open and my favorite golfer Tiger Woods. No one can argue with the fact that Tiger is the greatest golfer of all time, he has an unshakable concentration and a wonderful all around golf game. He also works harder than any other athlete, he reportly puts 10 hours a day into practice and working out, everday, no exceptions. Honestly though, I think he is losing it and we can’t blame it on the knee. Yes, he has won tournaments this year including the Memorial, but only one of the wins was in the accustomed “Tiger-style”. Look at his first win of the year, the Arnold Palmer invitational, he did not so much win it as Sean O’Hair lost it. His other win at the memorial, that was impressive, he looked like the old Tiger and hit every fairway, he almost made it look like he was playing his video game. His other outings, however, not so impressive, for Tiger anyway. He did finish eighth at the masters and sixth at the players, which is fantastic for any golfer professional or otherwise, but it is somewhat lacking for Tiger.

In all of the other tournaments he has played this year, we have nothing but a seemingly awkward and random bag of shot selections. His putting has been off, granted he missing by less an inch right or left everytime, but these are putts we are used to seeing Tiger make. This is where we can’t blame the knee, pulling or pushing balls to the left and right does take a lot of full body strength and puts a lot of strain on all of the joints, but Tiger has been making those shots with ease, in fact his driving has become more dangerous because how strongly he can shape a ball on his “new” knee.  In fact it his remarkable ability to recover from bad shots that keeps him near the top of the leaderboard in all of these tournaments. Putting, on the other hand, is something of a simple motion and, obviously, has the largest impact on the game; let’s also add that putting surface is where the game is won or lost.

The question remains, however, is the apparent loss of putting skill due to the loss of last season and all of his practice time? Or is this all just age? Granted Tiger probably has another ten years on tour, assuming he and his family avoid any major problems. I do have to stress that even in his current state he is one damn amazing golfer but it begs the question are we every going to see the old Tiger again? And, I mean the Tiger that won 6 majors in two years.  Or, are we going see the Tiger that went on a three year drought without any major wins? All I can really say to the affirmative, the next couple of seasons are going to be interesting ones for golf fans everywhere.

As a side not separate from the article, I wish the Mickelson family all the best and hope everything goes well.

Whoa Man-Ram by: Vas Tumati

First off let me apologize that we have not been writing all that much. I have a good excuse though, school takes up a majority of my time. Today alone I got up at 6 am, worked out, studied for six hours, played two hours of basketball, watched the denver game (aside: dude, how awesome is Chris “the birdman” Andersen?), and now I am writing this article and will probably do a little more studying while watching the Cavs game. By the way, today is what I like to call a light day. So get off of my back! On to the article!

Other than quirky, and what I find witty, title to the article I can honestly say I don’t care about Man-Ram. For those of you who have been under a rock for the last couple of days Manny Ramirez has received a 50 game suspension for violating the leagues banned substance policy. Basically, he was caught taking hCG through some paperwork. In addition, they found that he had an elevated amount of testosterone in his urine some of which they could prove was from an artificial source. hCG is mainly used as a fertility drug for women, but has off label use as a drug that restarts natural testosterone production after a cycle of steroid use.  Technically, in pregnancy, hCG has some growth hormone like action but outside of a pregnant woman and her fetus it does very little affect human growth.  Man-Ram claims that he went to a doctor for a personal issue and was prescribed the medication, but he did not ask for a medical exemption from the league. Basically, Ramirez is claiming ignorance in this situation and is taking the suspension for violating the rules.

Let’s be perfectly honest here; Manny Ramirez is probably on steroids. Let’s be more honest, pretty much every player in the MLB is on ‘roids. If nothing else, I think all of these steroid “stories” have proven to us, the average fans, that if you can get away with something you’ll probably do it. I don’t care anymore, we know these players are taking every advantage they can get and there is nothing we can do about. Baseball has always been a sport plagued with substance abuse. Locker rooms in the MLB are filled with booze, many players are known to throw back 10 or 15 drinks on flights . In the 80′s the MLB struggled with a severe amphetamine problem, players used to take whatever “upper” they could find to get them through the 162 game season.  We are not even talking about the number of players from the good ol’ days that died of cirrotic livers or alcoholic pancreatitis.

At the end of the day all of these performance enhancing drugs have little affect on the game.  If I were to start taking ‘roids today I would probably still bat a .015 in the MLB, the people I play softball with will probably still drop the easy fly balls or  miss the perfect textbook throw to first or still try to make the play at first instead of making the easy flip to second. I hate the argument but baseball does require skill. I know some performance enhancing drugs can make you recover faster so you play better more often but they take their toll, players aren’t going to be as durable.

The sad part of all of this is that I am still against using steroids. I have just lost all hope in the sport of baseball, there is no purity left, I have just come to accept that everyone is taking every advantage regardless of the rules.