Even though the Red Sox managed to come back against the Mariners tonight and win the single most impressive game a team has ever played in their 27th contest of a 162 game season, today was still a good day in Sedition in Red Sox Nation world. Tom Brady was seen walking through NYC sporting a jaunty Yankee cap. Bob Halloran wrote an uninspired post for his blog, and there was a mind-numbingly dull piece in Red Sox Times on how to socialize with other Sox fans down in New York. And best of all, Steven Jackson and the Golden State Warriors routed the mighty Dallas Mavericks out of the playoffs.

First, Red Sox Nation is in moral crisis because their football hero Tom Brady is wearing a Yankee cap to conceal his receding hairline while he's out gallivanting his Brazilian supermodel companion. And he's spending his time in New York City when he could be in Boston cheering on the Sox. Maybe he could have been seen in green Sox regalia, after all, isn't it his duty to make sure that he spend every waking moment figuring out new ways to do everything New England fans want him to do?

That's just one more reason to love Red Sox fans. This is a huge non-story. After all, Brady came from California and went to school in Michigan. His ties to anything remotely connected to Red Sox Nation didn't even begin until the Pats drafted him. So why is it incumbent upon him not to wear a Yankees hat?

If Brady does in fact, as I fear, harbor political aspirations for his future after football, doesn't it make sense for him to curry favor in New York? It's a bigger, richer market than New England. And he already has Patriot fans in his corner. Hell, he'd have to start breaking in to season ticket holders' houses at night to smash their possessions and kick their children to alienate them.

Then there is our old friend Bob Halloran, who is not convinced that the NFL pays enough attention to on-field performance in the rush to draft workout warriors who put up impressive numbers at the combine. The vertical leap in particular concerns Halloran. I'm sure it never occurred to him, but the vertical leap is one of the better ways to measure a player's explosiveness from a standing start.

And as for the question of whether the teams don't watch enough game film, that is ridiculous. In the process of media build-up, individual workouts and interview sessions, teams seem like they do more and study more than they should as opposed to less. It's hard sometimes to tell everything you need to know about a player from the game tape. There is a very fine line between the player with a great head for the game and a guy who was in the right place at the right time against inferior competition.

If you are a Red Sox fan and you want to network with other colossal tools, there are a number of places in New York City in the heart of Yankee Country where you can meet fellow travellers. Read this Fist Magnet's Guide To Rooting For The Sox In New York to find out where to go. Use extreme caution, however, and do not operate a motor vehicle or heavy machinery after reading it. The boredom it inflicts could be lethal in large doses.

I particularly enjoyed the story of the author's meeting with Jonathan Papelbon's mother. Oh, to be a fly on the wall for that encounter which I'm sure must have been painfully awkward. Not having a child who pitches for a professional team, I can't say for certain how uncomfortable it would be to meet a random stranger who just happens to root for said team and wants to have a nice chat about my son. But I'm willing to be that it would call to mind visions of Ted Bundy, or at the very least the Robert DeNiro character from the terrible movie The Fan.

And in case you're wondering in Red Sox Nation, there is a touch of grey to the silver lining of tonight's impressive come-from-behind win over the Mariners. First, the Mariners starter should have been pitching to Artie Lange in Beer League. And Matsuzaka walked the bases loaded in the opening frame before he recorded an out. Yeah, JC Romero recorded his first save in a long, long, long time, but lost in all of that is that Jonathan Papelbon might have overstressed his arm throwing those thirty five pitches while blowing the save the other night. That won't be good for the Nation.

Finally, the real story of the night is that the NBA, the Bilderbergers, the Trilateral Commission and the Rand Corporation can rest easy for another year. Mark Cuban and his Dallas Mavericks have just been eliminated from the playoffs by the Golden State Warriors. For the first time under the current playoff format and just the third time ever, an eight seed has eliminated the one seed. It's only the second time a team which had won 65 games in the regular season failed to win the championship, and the first time a team with many wins didn't reach the conference finals.

Google and YouTube are in the process of retreating to the hills. Since the NBA has eviscerated the lone voice of reason on basketball issues by fining Cuban hundreds of thousands of dollars for his crying out in the basketball wilderness in blogMaverick, the Benefactor can but vent his spleen on media conglomerates. With any luck, Cuban will be too depressed to buy the Chicago Cubs in the wake of this catastrophe.

Dirk Nowitzki's performance, especially in the second half, was abysmal at best. I remember a quote attributed to Napoleon that said "scratch a Russian and you will wound a Tartar." Nowitzki has inspired me to offer this version: "hit a German in the mouth and you will make a gutless bully cry." I'm sure Angela Merkel will give Dirk a national holiday to console him, as rolling over in a playoff game is still the most tangible achievement of any German since a ghost in the machine ruthlessly shanghaied a four week old child into the German army.

Even better, Don Nelson led his team past the owner who fired him. Steven Jackson who did his best to take the mantle of worst citizen in the NBA (based on the way the media covers him) or guy who really needs some help with his decision making off the court from Ron Artest as long as Jackson stayed in Indiana is now somewhat vindicated. At the end of the day, Dallas was outplayed and outcoached, they were beaten as an organization. And it put a smile on my face, if it's any consolation to the Benefactor.

All I have to say on the Western Conference playoffs as they progress is this...

Be looking good Warriors. Be looking real good.

And good luck with that, as Baron Davis reminds us that a guy really shouldn't have a beard that's longer than the hair on his head.

It seems every so often someone has to come out with a list ranking something. God forbid anything stand on its own. Everything has to be ranked and compared and contrasted. It helps writers of columns and magazine/web content editors fill up space on short notice with a minimum of effort. The list that is bothering me at the moment is Moviefone's list of the top 25 sports movies of all time.

Among my many problems with this list is that I don't really consider Jerry Maguire (ranked number 15) a sports movie. Yeah, the title character is an agent, and Cuba Gooding would go on to win Best Supporting Actor playing a character who is a wide receiver. And there are somewhere on the order of 1 million athletes who make cameo appearances. But the movie is only peripherally concerned with sports, and at that it comments on the crass commercial aspects of the sports industry. It's more about the agent's personal growth set against the backdrop of professional turmoil than about sports.

My real problem with this list is the film at number 3. It's Bull Durham. I hate to be the one who breaks this to the American sports fan, but that film sucks. Before you cough and splutter and stutter "S-s-s-s-s-sucks" like Judge Smails from the underrated (based on this list which placed it at number 6) Caddyshack, that's right. I said Bull Durham sucks. And it gets worse with age.

Every person who defends the movie feels compelled to dismiss the fact that a three year old girl could play a can't miss minor league pitching prospect more plausibly than Tim Robbins at some point in the conversation. Even worse is the name the writer bestowed on him. Nuke LaLoosh? Why not name him Douchebag, Total Tool, Fist Magnet or some other similar name?

Then there is the famous Kevin Costner speech. If you are a Baby Boomer looking back on your life and realizing that you've done nothing worth doing, and might just as well not have existed in the first place, then that speech about baseball and the small of a woman's back is right up there with now is the winter of our discontent. But if you can, in fact, while away the hours talking with the flowers (an elaborate way to say you have a brain), then the speech rings hollow as it should.

This piece in Salon described the movie as a "pastoral vision for hipsters". That is most likely correct, and it's also what's wrong with the movie. Nobody talks like Kevin Costner in that sequence. When do you ever get a chance to get across a 3 paragraph pick up line? If it's going to work, that probably means that you were in to begin with, and the odds of getting a woman to change her mind by lecturing her have to somewhere in the millions to one against range.

I'm not, thank God, the only person who hates Bull Durham. Bob Halloran, whose work in the Metro has been criticized in this blog, wrote this surprisingly amusing and insightful piece on the awfulness of Bull Durham a few years ago. I'll have to keep that in mind when baseball season starts in earnest and it's time to rip the Red Sox just about every day. Maybe I'll have to be nicer the next time I write about a piece Halloran writes for the Metro.

More than any of the other deficiencies of this film, it's the Costner speech, or more precisely the manner in which it's quoted, that irritates me about Bull Durham. The movie came along at a time in the 1980s when the white collar fan took over sports. This new type of fan was college educated and felt the need to prove it. But how do you prove you're smart without proving you're a nerd in the process? The answer...quote movies.

I'm aware of the fact that I quote movies all the time in this space. I think the difference between me quoting a wide array of movies and the people who quote Bull Durham is that I usually quote movies that aren't widely quoted (how many people do you know who quote Die Hard or Miller's Crossing or Kelly's Heroes?) and they're much better than Bull Durham. In his second essay on Rudyard Kipling, Orwell ripped the imperialist faction because they "set Kipling on a pedestal, and some of his more sententious poems, such as 'If,' were given almost Biblical status."

That's what these fans have done with Bull Durham. It's become the Bible for the 40+ year old washed up never-was when they talk about baseball. I don't believe in the hanging curve. I don't care when you open your damn Christmas presents. Baseball isn't a metaphor for life. Baseball isn't even a metaphor for for baseball. It's just a sport, and a half-assed hipster movie about it is no better than any other half-assed hipster movie from that time period.

The number two was a strange choice, or at least I thought so. It was Raging Bull. For some reason, I just don't think of Raging Bull as a sports movie. I think it was a great cinematic achievement. But whether it's the black and white cinematography or the fact that it seems more influenced by European films of the 50s and 60s than American sports movies or the fact that its production values are so different from the other movies on the list, I just don't think of Raging Bull as a boxing movie.

Rocky was the number one sports movie of all time, according to the list, and I have no problem with that. But when I discussed this topic with a friend of mine tonight, he pointed out that Rocky's non-boxing life, and, in particular, his relationship with Adrian take up much more of the movie than the fight with Creed. That is true, but that doesn't bother me as far as classifying Rocky as a sports movie is concerned (even though I objected to Jerry Maguire on the basis that it was much more about peripheral issues than it was about sports).

Above all, Rocky is about a guy who becomes something much more than he was when the story began. And in a sense, that's what all good sports movies are about the Bad News Bears (#18) become more than an island of misfit toys. Roy Hobbs (#5) goes from being a never-was to the best there ever was for a year. The Hickory Huskers (#4) go from hicktown losers to David killing Goliath. And so on.

Courting Adrian is a part of Rocky's transformation from two bit legbreaker and loser to the guy who inspires a nation. Their relationship parallels the fight with Creed. He starts off a little slow, but he keeps going until the end. Winning her heart is one of the things which elevate Rocky from that dockyard thug that tried to fight Gazzo's driver.

I didn't really intend to post tonight. After last night's slightly delayed defense of Terrell Owens, I figured I could wait a day and then post what I intend to post tomorrow night. But a friend emailed me this story, and I can't let it pass. This story almost makes me want to read the Metro, that way I could get a free post at least once a week in response to what ever you would call this (I am afraid to give it a genre lest it grow stronger).

I never would have guessed that Daisake Matsuzaka was the victim in his contract negotiations with Boston. But that's what Bob Halloran would have us believe. He says that Matsuzaka may be the best pitcher on the planet, and as a result is grossly underpaid under the terms of the contract he signed recently. If this is the case, he is the first player to be grossly underpaid by the Boston Red Sox since Ted Williams signed his initial contract in the late 1930s.

I sincerely doubt that Matsuzaka is the best pitcher on the planet. I think there is a guy in Minnesota by the name of Liriano who may or may not recover from his arm surgery that has an infinitely more impressive resume in major league baseball. Even if Liriano never throws another pitch in competitive play, he has won multiple games against major league talent in the regular season. That is considerably more than any one can say for Daisuke. And Liriano isn't even the best pitcher on his team.

If we are to believe this claim, we place much more importance on WBC games than any of the participants from MLB did. Daisuke Matsuzaka could only be the best pitcher on the planet if the planet has somehow been reshaped in the last several weeks to the point that Detroit and Minnesota are no longer part of the Earth. The current AL Cy Young Winner is the best pitcher on the planet. Some of the runners-up must be included in that discussion, since they have a multiple game track record against top flight competition. To build a pitcher's Hall of Fame resume on the World Baseball Classic is even worse that thinking that two decent games expunge two seasons of humiliating failure from Jeff Garcia's CV.

Perhaps the World Baseball Classic would carry more weight if it had included series play instead of one game encounters between the power teams. What if the hitters on the Dominican team had had a second look at Daisuke? Would the gyroball have been quite so formidable? If that is a question with merit, what will happen when teams have 3 or 4 cracks at Matsuzaka this year? Obviously, the answer is Matsuzaka will find ways to dispose of opposing hitters that just might boggle the minds of Red Sox Nation if the average Red Sox fan were endowed with the innate capacity to while away the hours talking with the flowers.

Leaving aside the questions that surround Matsuzaka's talent, let us consider the bidding process. Halloran believes the Red Sox thought that Matsuzaka was better than any other available pitcher (hence the $51.1 million bid for the negotiating rights). A more cynical commentator might think the Red Sox out-Heroded Herod (both NY teams, but most directly the Yanks) out of fear more than intelligent management. After all, the Red Sox ended up spending at least more than $18 million the Evil Empire bid to negotiate with Matsuzaka. The Sox were also about $8 million ahead of their closest competitor.

This whole process has been a smokescreen on behalf of Red Sox Nation. They spend fantastic amounts of money to compete with Steinbrenner, but they don't deliver on their promises. Their payroll goes up and up, but it gets no younger. Like the board itself in some ways. But Matsuzaka is the victim here. Imagine that. A guy who has thrown no pitches, recorded no outs, logged no innings and won no games in MLB, but he is the victim in all of this, after he signed a $52 million contract.

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