Yeah, I haven't updated in over a week. So I am a bad blogger and a catastrophic failure as a human being. I have come to accept that about myself, which puts me on the path to enlightenment. The next step is to care that I am a bad person, and after that comes the actual process of doing something about my flaws. Of course now that I've done all that heavy-duty self-awareness type stuff, I might have to slow down and rest, lest I have too little energy to continue on the path to enlightenment as I get older.

So the Celtics won it all. Big effing deal. It's nice, I suppose, for the 8 people who stuck with the team through all the lean years. And it must be a great time to be an orthopedic surgeon or an acupuncturist in New England these days. God knows that 99.999999999% of those who defined themselves as Celtic fans as of this winter must have hurt themselves jumping on the bandwagon.

Or perhaps they have sufficient practice in discovering new found ancient allegiances to the local teams over the past several years that they can spring from bandwagon to bandwagon like Batman traversing the rooftops of Gotham City. And let's not kid ourselves, I am old enough to remember that prior to Bill Parcells coming to coach the Pats, games at Foxboro were routinely unavailable on local TV because the team had failed to sell a sufficient number of tickets and the NFL blacked the game out.

And Fenway is as much a place to be seen as it is to see an actual ball game. Can you honestly tell me that there aren't at least 15,000 people in those stands on a given night that haven't given more thought to what they might look like in high def on NESN or to what exact stupid, insipid and cloying effort to get some dap from the Rem Dawg they're going to put on some poster board and hold up like a meathead than they've given to who is pitching for the opponent and when Papelbon will finally join the ranks of the literate?

I'm not really a stranger to jumping on bandwagons, but I like to start early and I like to get in on the ground floor. And I don't have the facility of intellectual dishonesty or simple inability to appreciate irony that one must show to jump on a Boston bandwagon. Because no one here can ever admit that they jumped on the bandwagon.

Boston fans must instead prove that not only have they been fans for their entire lives, but every single last descendant of theirs down through the first to set foot on Ellis Island all the way down to the first homo sapiens in their family tree to hit the European continent in the last Ice Age rooted for every Boston team despite the notable handicap that Boston itself was a millennium or twenty away from being settled.

I've mentioned this before, every Red Sox fan who discovered the team right around the 1998 divisional series with the Indians will tell you that their fathers, grandfathers, greatgrandfathers and the missing link (since Red Sox fans represent a lower order of our species, they can trace themselves back only so far) all were die-hard Sox fans. And yet, somehow, when every American knew it was Ted Williams final game at Fenway (it was so clear that the writer John Updike who grew up in Pennsylvania and lived in New York came to Fenway specifically to see Ted's last game in that lyric little bandbox), only 10,000 and change were on hand to see his final at bat culminate in a home run.

Funny how that works for generations of die hard Red Sox fans. Hell, If Detective John MacLaine of the NYPD held himself to that standard in the film Die Hard, Die Hard's sequels would have revolved around Hans sitting on the beach drinking cocktails and earning 20% on the money he stole from Nakatomi while the feds sifted through the building's wreckage looking for him.

To make a long story short, I hate bandwagon jumpers who try to pass themselves off as legitimate fans. I haven't forgotten that Ainge, while he backed his way into a title thanks to Kevin McHale's turning the Minnesota Timberwolves into a China Syndrome instead of a basketball team, is still the same man who traded one of his best players for magic beans because of a petty, personal argument and, in so doing, turned a playoff team into a shit show. I just can't find it in my heart to be cool with that. Sorry.

That said, the NBA Finals blew. The games were on way too late, as everybody and their brother said. The officiating sucked. I don't know that a single player set a legal screen in the entire series. I could understand when Jordan got away with palming the ball the way he did, I wasn't crazy about it, but he was Jordan. Now the ball is palmed and carried and players take an obscene number of steps and get away with using multiple pivot feet to the point where you wonder why a rule book is even printed any more. But David Stern runs a tight ship, and the league is in great shape.

And in case you haven't heard, the NBA is trying to extract $1.4 million from Tim Donaghy, the ref who admitted to gambling on games he worked. Thanks for the smoke screen, Commissioner Stern. Because it all goes back to that situation, not the fundamental problems with games that start so late and last so long that even unemployed insomniacs start thinking twice about watching them and the fact that the one thing that keeps every fan from being fully convinced that the fix is in is that the officiating is so wildly inconsistent that no one could possibly have rigged it.

In spite of all that, the NBA makes money. I guess it goes to show you, the average American is a complete moron. And they trust these people to elect their own leaders...

In other news, there was a baseball game played tonight, and the Red Sox lost. At least that's the way the outcome stands at the moment. Rumors have it that the league will set aside the outcome, award the victory to the Red Sox and suspend Dan Harren for two months for the heinous offense of making the Red Sox lineup look ridiculous while simultaneously looking like a stunt double for one of the guys from "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia."


Alas, the Red Sox are still in first place in the AL East. And there is a large portion of the season left to be played. But there are some encouraging signs. For instance, Papelbon has already blown more saves than he did in all of last year. Good thing for him he has his keen intellect and stunning good looks to fall back on should his arm burn out on him... Too bad he's a total meathead with an IQ that rivals that of a cinderblock and he looks like a lizardman from one of the old cartoons.

And then there is David Aardsma. So he pitched himself out of trouble in the top of the 9th this evening. Awesome. You did your job. But I think the fist pump he gave walking off the mound was a little excessive. First, it's not as though you somehow reversed the rotation of the earth and altered the fact that the D-backs were up a run. And perhaps more importantly, you pitched yourself into the trouble in the first place, letting up a hit and walking a guy (not counting the intentional walk).

Then there was Youke, his freak accident this evening had to be somehow related to his squabble with Manny Ramirez earlier. After all, Ramirez had to have been in the wrong, a veteran of his caliber and with his achievements daring to question Youke, who is the baddest badass on the planet, just ask him and he'll tell you in agonizing detail. I'm just amazed that Manny is still alive. In case you don't know all the real Chuck Norris facts are doubly true for Youkilis.

That said, as much as I think Manny can effect players like Youke and warmup throws from Mike Lowell with the Shining-esque powers of his mind, I have to think Youke got hurt because he's bald. My sources in the medical profession tell me that bald people, and in particular bald men, have tremendous difficulty with idea retention. The ideas simply waft into the ether because there is no hair to hold them in the skull. In extreme cases, it can also impact the portions of the brain that manage common sense, motor coordination and the section that governs the ability not to look like a total dumbass. And that is why Youke took a routine warmup toss off the noggin tonight.

Finally, Varitek got a hit to end his 0-24 slump tonight. Not only that, but it was an extra base hit as well. Unfortunately, his spot in the order came up at the end of the seventh, with the tying and go-ahead runs in scoring position with two outs. Even though Harren looked tired and the game was on the line, Varitek found a way to do what he does best, and the rally died in his arms. And so I dedicate this song to Varitek in memory of the rally he killed tonight and in the hope that he can find the magic to go 0-his next 24 or so ABs.

Even though every moron and his brother has seen fit to weigh in on the NBA officiating scandal, I still want to put in my two cents. There are aspects of this story that surprised the hell out of just about every American fan. It sort of reminded me of the famous scene from Casablanca where Claude Rains as Captain Renault (the prefect of police) shuts down Rick's under orders from the Germans. The pretext he used is that there was illicit gambling going on in the bar. And as he is claiming to be shocked at that fact, the croupier walks up to him and hands him his winnings.

As a nation of sports fans, we have exhibited the same basic reaction as Captain Renault. We have the nerve to be shocked by this story when we ought to come out and admit that we're really surprised that it has taken this long for an official in one of our major sports to be implicated in a mess like this, or we would be if we weren't so monumentally naive. Officials don't make a lot of money and they have a pretty thankless job. I'm surprised only one of them has allegedly been fixing games.

Another thing that surprised me was Mark Cuban's response to this situation. I would have bet money that he'd have come out in his blog whining about the number of Mavs games Ted Donaghy reffed which featured questionable or controversial calls. Perhaps I was blinded by my hatred. To his credit, the Benefactor came out with a shockingly moderate response and provided a vote of confidence for the league office. I don't agree with him, but I found it to be a not entirely unpleasant surprise.

I don't want us to lose sight of the real victim here. Poor Bill Simmons is now dangerously close to experiencing an identity crisis of epic proportions. For 6 years now, he has managed to walk the fine line between being a wholly owned subsidiary of David Stern and daring to come out of the Commissioner's pocket once in a great while to criticize the league. Now he might have to pick a side, and it might hurt him a little bit.

When I discuss basketball in this space, I think I have made it explicit that I am not impressed with David Stern. He got to where he is today by stabbing his boss in the back. The NBA is falling down around his ears, and the most proactive solution he could come up with is a player dress code. But people claim he's the best commissioner in professional sports today?

The NFL gets better and stronger with each passing year. Their players get involved in ugly off-field incidents and the league comes down with a new player conduct policy. I'm still not a fan of it, but it's a genuine response. Pro basketball players fire into the air outside the strippie, enter the stands to accost and/or assault paying customers and the ratings decline year in and year out, but they have a fancy dress code.

Am I missing something here? Do I need to start smoking dope? How does any sane person look at that and think David Stern is the best commissioner in sports today? So what if the NBA runs a tighter ship than hockey or baseball? Is the constant struggle to attain mediocrity now what a person ought to aspire to?

Here's a thought: maybe David Stern should have been wondering whether one of his officials might have had a gambling problem. Maybe the Commish should have considered the possibility that an official with an alleged gambling problem might possibly come under the thumb of organized crime figures. And maybe one of his officials with an alleged gambling problem and alleged ties to alleged organized crime figures might allegedly take a hand in altering the outcome of games in which he was officiating.

Unless one can solve that problem with a new dress code, Stern could be in a little bit of trouble on this one. I think he might want to put the World's #1 Sports Commissioner mug on the back shelf for a little while. Before I leave this topic, I want to ask a rhetorical question. Every year the NBA playoffs seem to get worse from a fan standpoint. Is it a coincidence that the NBA championship trophy is the Larry O'Brien trophy and said O'Brien is the boss who was stabbed in the back by David Stern?

In other news, Jon Lester was impressive in his debut. And I don't really care. Don't get me wrong, it's awesome that his cancer is in remission. It's just that I wish him good health but professional failure. Also, it doesn't help that I hate the Indians. I had a hard time summoning up the energy to root for them tonight.

Finally, while my people seem to have hit a roadblock in advancing my candidacy for President of Red Sox Nation, it won't stop me from ripping Bill Simmons again tonight. I forgot to mention last week when I linked to his podcast addressing his flap with the Remdawg, Bill Simmons managed to make himself the dean of the Max Mercy Hall of Fame.

Simmons said that he wasn't going to feud with Jerry Remy because he didn't feud with second basemen with a lifetime OPS of less than .660. Which is a pretty damning insult coming from Bill Simmons. Out of curiosity, I went to Baseball Reference to set up one of their statistical comparisons to see what the Sports Guy's lifetime OPS was. And the damnedest thing happened. The comparison engine didn't work. It took me a while to figure out why. Then I realized Simmons never played the game.

I'm not a big fan of the midday post. Even when I don't have better, or at least more important, things to do, I try to give the impression that I do. But I was just too damn tired, and quite frankly a bit angry, so I couldn't do this last night. In part I was mad that the Spurs won, and a lot of my anger had to do with the guy who was tailgating me in his minivan for a good 10 miles last night. And I'm not an easy guy to tailgate, as I tend to be somewhere around ten miles over the speed limit at all times.

I find myself wondering as I watch certain commercials (like this recent one from Nike) whether I am the only one out in the wide world with a sense of irony. I thought it when I first saw the old Campbell's Chunky Soup Ads that featured Michael Strahan's grinning maw peering in the window on a NYC subway car, with his face framed above a decal that said "Watch the Gap." And I think it now, watching the We Are All Witnesses spots from Nike which will surely go away now that the NBA Playoffs are finished.

We were witnesses, that much is true, but not necessarily in the sense that Nike commanded us to be. We were supposed to witness LeBron James become the basketball player he had better be for the sake of the NBA's future. And he very nearly did. He submitted what would have been the mother of all transcendent sports moments for this very young century in that ">amazing Game 5 performance against the Pistons. I say would have been because he really needed to submit a couple of 30 point efforts, maybe force the Spurs to a game 6 (or at the very least game 5) to cement that status. Alas, it was not to be.

What we, the basketball watching public, instead witnessed was a shameful display of dreadful basketball with a few brief shining moments where the games aspired, didn't quite reach but aspired nonetheless, to something verging on mediocrity. Now for a regular season game in early January where one or both teams comes into the game on the second leg of back-to-back games, that wouldn't be so bad. Unfortunately for us, this wasn't a throwaway game. This was the end-all, be-all. The NBA Finals. These were the last two teams standing slugging it out for the O'Brien Trophy.

Back when I thought it was a good idea to study European History, I remember reading about the Battle of Jutland. The British and the Germans invested ludicrous sums of money in big fleets of massive battleships. The two navies sailed out and met off the coast of Denmark. They fired their big guns at each other for hours, and at the end of the day it was just a big waste of time. The Germans ended up inflicting more damage on the British ships, but they went back to port and never tried their luck again.

That's what this series between the Spurs and Cavs boiled down to in the end. A big, giant multi-million dollar waste of time. I wonder whether some marketing czar at Nike is answering to the CEO as we speak. I wonder whether David Stern is thinking that maybe some rule changes are in order. Maybe Mark Cuban is thinking he really shouldn't have hired Dan Rather, what with the fact that he said CBS is tarting up its evening news with Katie Couric. God forbid we get a younger woman who doesn't look like Methusala's older brother and doesn't have an alleged penchant for broadcasting doctored documents about the President of the US as though they were true. But enough about that.

I think that the easiest way to fix the NBA is to have the officials actually call fouls that are in fact fouls. A foul doesn't cease to be a foul because the player scored, nor does it become a foul when the shot misses. This late whistle nonsense must come to an end. This can never happen, as it would require a miracle and the present NBA regime has apparently outlawed miracles.

If, however, the league office desires to be more proactive about fixing its product than interfering in off-court behavior and imposing a dress code as though this were reform school and not a professional sports endeavor, I have a suggestion I think is constructive (for a change). Get rid of the 24 second clock and replace it with a 14 second clock. Get some positive ball movement back into the game, speed up the tempo and end the trend of the superstar who dribbles at the top of the key until fans decide to surf channels to see if Masterpiece Theater is showing an interesting Miss Marple mystery.

But what do I know? I'm only a rabid sports fan who found himself watching Too Late the Hero last night during the first three quarters of the last game of the NBA Finals. And wouldn't you know, the damn hero was, in fact, too late. And that ending was still more of a surprise than the Cavs losing the game and the series to the Spurs.

But every cloud has a silver lining. This time, to paraphrase the immortal words of MeatLoaf, two out of three is not, in fact, bad, not bad at all. The Red Sox lost the rubber game against the mighty Colorado Rockies. It could not have been better. Josh Beckett was shelled. Francona dug deep into his bag of tricks and ordered JD Drew to bat in the leadoff spot, where he submitted probably the single most impressive 0 for 5 game in the history of Major Leage Baseball.

In case you're keeping score at home, this was the seventh time in the last nine games the mighty BoSox have managed to put two or fewer runs on the board. JD Drew, Coco Crisp and Julio Lugo are all hitting .230 or below and making millions. Kevin Youkilis and Dustin Pedroia have a long way to go to hit the seven figure plateau in terms of salary, but are both hitting over .300. Sooner or later the iniquities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men are bound to catch up to this team. But at least John Henry has his little foray into professional beach volleyball to console him.

For long time readers familiar with my habit of quoting the Grateful Dead in order to remind everyone that every silver lining has a touch of grey, here it is. The Yankees are seven and 1/2 games back, but they host the Mets (whom I absolutely hate, except for that nice little two week stretch back in October of '86) who enter the game at 36-28 and in first place in the NL East while the Red Sox host the Giants who enter the game at 30-35 and in the cellar in the NL West. It was a nice run while it lasted, now we need the Yanks to stay close through the weekend and then mount another run before the All Star break.

PS - I hate to do this, but it was a nice, empty gesture on the part of the Red Sox to ask that MLB replace David Ortiz with Kevin Youkilis on the All Star ballot.

So many of our old friends have been up to so much, it's hard to know where to begin. Daisuke Matsuzaka was trounced by the Indians and chased from the game in the 6th. Kobe Bryant has found himself sinking into a morass of his own creation in Los Angeles, but he's mad as hell and he's not going to take it anymore. And to top it all, there is a rumor of a new football league in the developmental stage and the Benefactor is involved.

After so many wins, I am cautiously optimistic that the Red Sox are due to fall back to earth. With any luck, they'll go straight from dizzying height to terrifying low, bypassing the creamy middle. But for a change, I'm going to do my level best not to jinx this one. After all, Carl Pavano's to do list probably reads like this now: 1). have Tommy John Surgery. 2). track down and apply savage ass whooping to pseudonymous anti-Red Sox blogger who predicted 18 win season in 2007. 3). rehab from Tommy John Surgery. So no more on the Sox for the moment.

I really hate jumping on bandwagons at late stages, but I really do not like Kobe Bryant. For those of you who have been reading this space from jump street, you know that. You also know that I am a big Elvis fan. So when I heard the series of interviews with Stephen A Smith and Dan Patrick today, it reminded me of a relatively obscure country song Elvis released in the early 70s. The song's title is "It's Your Baby, You Rock It" and it includes the following line: "You made that bed you're sleepin' in and I'm tired of hearing about it friend."

Kobe really, really, really wanted Shaq out of LA. Since Bryant was the younger of the two superstars, management obliged him and sent the Big Aristotle to Miami. Shaq has gone on to win a championship with the Heat. Kobe has yet to carry the Lakers to the second round of the playoffs. And now Kobe says team management promised to build a title contender around him in the immediate future. Bryant's hurt, he's betrayed and they lied to him. And yet I am not in tears.

It seems incredibly unlikely, but I guess there is a remote possibility that Kobe Bryant doesn't know basketball. You'd think that he might, since he's played it since childhood, his father was a pro ball player and he chose it for his career. But that might not necessarily mean he knows the game. After all, if management told him they were looking to compete at the highest level in the wake of the Shaq deal, and he believed them, Kobe is either ignorant or full of something unpleasant, particularly in the heat of summer.

The Lakers traded Shaq for Carom Butler and Lamar Odom. Shaq, at that point in his career, was a veteran of 5 NBA Finals and a three time champion. Carom Butler and Lamar Odom may have won any number of titles playing NBA Live on X Box, but neither has played so much as a minute of basketball in the NBA Finals. Moreover, they're both power forwards. They play the same damn position. How could any one not see that as a bad deal for LA?

It is true that the Lakers parlayed Carom Butler into Kwame Brown, who was supposed to be the center of the future. At the time, in literary parlance, that was rather like the Ancient Mariner from the Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner trading in the albatross around his neck that weighed him down for a large metal anchor. Since then, the trade has gone on to look much worse, as Butler made the Eastern Conference All Star team this season (yeah, the East kind of blows, but it is still an All Star team) and Kwame Brown is stuck in neutral. He might not be getting worse, but he surely isn't getting better either.

None of the Lakers other moves have panned out since they let Shaq go. Lately, the "brains" of their operation have been taking a lot of heat for failing to deal for Jason Kidd at the deadline. I don't see why. Can you honestly tell me that Kidd would have made the Lakers markedly better than any of the other seven teams that qualified for the playoffs in the West? I just don't think that would have been the case.

So I'm sick of Kobe whining. This was never about winning, this was about getting away from Shaq's shadow. Now Kobe has been jarred back into reality because everything that was his now belongs to LeBron and D Wade. Wade has a ring, and LeBron is fighting the Pistons to a standstill. They're younger and more dynamic than Kobe. Kobe needs to do something or he'll lose his league.

The trouble is, fans everywhere believe he forced management to sell Shaq for pennies on the dollar. Fans have been convinced after the scoring binges of the past two years that Kobe cares more about his numbers than his team. Kobe is in danger of becoming the answer to the trivia question: "Who scored the second most points in a single NBA game?" Would that he had chosen a more dignified route around his present course to oblivion.

Then there's the Benefactor. He's already on board with the proposed venture known as the UFL. Because the American landscape needed another professional football league. Because the USFL and the WFL and the XFL were all unqualified success stories. Because the NFL is much bigger, wealthier, more powerful and infinitely better prepared to adapt its product to the environment in which it exists than it was when the AFL challenged it in the 1960s. That's why the UFL is such a good idea.

What no one on the outside of the football business looking in on it's riches seems to understand is that the AFL succeeded for a reason. It wasn't because the upstart league was able to sign huge college stars like Namath or Mike Garrett, or develop guys like Len Dawson, Lance Alworth and so many others into household names. Those factors helped, but look at the USFL who went for broke luring Herschell Walker, Jim Kelley, Steve Young, Doug Flutie and others into their league and got pretty damn broke pretty damn quick.

The real reason no football league will ever compete against the NFL the way the AFL did is simple. Because there were no collective bargaining agreements, minimum salaries and pensions back in the 1950s and 1960s, there was room for a second league to come in and start a bidding war for the solid, dependable veterans that make up the guts of a professional football team. Now the NFL has all that infrastructure in place for all 32 of its teams.

Can you imagine how much capital would be necessary to start 8 new teams at once? Not to mention creating a league office to codify the rules, set up a draft, schedule all the games and make sure that each new team has a home city and a home stadium? And on top of those headaches deal with the fact that the 2,000 best football players in the world are currently under contract to NFL teams? Any one who thinks they can do that with 8 different billionaires who have no experience in football beyond watching a game or two here and there, no current common bonds and Mark Cuban involved is dreaming.

If this new league tries to get off the ground playing in the fall on Friday nights, they'll be destroyed. Maybe they'll get a few high profile college draft picks, some older stars looking for one last big score like an aging thief in a crime drama and some other assorted has-beens and never-will-bes. That might be enough to challenge for a Grey Cup or two, but not to take money out of Jerry Jones' pocket.

People don't often realize, since it takes a little more thought than the average tool is willing to put in to the sports he or she watches on the TV, but Namath made the guarantee and his teammates won the game. Randy Beverly and Johnny Sample were two former NFL defensive backs and they made huge plays in the Red Zone to stop big drives for the Colts. In the old days, guys like that were on the open market. It's just not the case any more.

And what is the Benefactor going to do? Spend like Dan Snyder? We've all seen where that has gotten the Redskins lately. I suppose I ought to shut my mouth. If he wants to waste his money on a colossal failure in the making, that's his business. And the sooner he gets back to his new favorite pastime of hiding and trembling lest David Stern smack him down again, the better for us all.

Today was a bad day in Sedition in Red Sox Nation. Nick Cafardo beat me to a punch. And I take very little consolation from the fact that that puts me in a very, very, very small fraternity of people who have been beaten to a punch by a writer notorious for being slow to the punch. I imagine the Red Sox ownership did their very best to conceal the fact that JD Drew is in a persistent offensive funk from keen, penetrating minds like Cafardo's, but the scribe got wise.

Unfortunately for Nick Cafardo, living in the era of Google means that I can simply type his name and JD Drew's name in a search window. Within seconds, almost by magic, I can read articles like this one where Cafardo wrote in December that JD Drew has gotten a bad rap over the years. It would be ironic if it weren't so pathetic.

For my part, I have been reluctant to point out the fact that JD Drew is underperforming in a big way. In part, I have been hoping his offensive woes would get worse before I posted on the subject. I have also been waiting patiently for the team to reverse field and come back to the pack in the American League. To this point, I have been disappointed in that simple ambition. But cliches tell me that sooner or later all good things come to an end and what goes up must come down, so I have yet to panic.

This team simply isn't good enough to keep winning at this pace over the course of a 162 game season. Drew is hitting .250, and may have hurt his back in an effort to look sublimely ridiculous whilst breaking his back on the right field wall last night. Coco Crisp is hitting a stately .231, and begging the question why aren't Red Sox fans demanding his immediate departure with his performance (or total lack thereof) on a daily basis. Manny has come alive, but we all expected that.

JD Drew needs to be a productive player for the Red Sox to maintain any kind of momentum through the dog days of summer. At some point, the teams in the AL East are going to get better. Everything that could have gone right to this point has gone right for the Red Sox. They haven't had any injuries to speak of, the Yankees are ravaged by injuries and their offense is apparently wrapped up in the graduation season (they've hit four homers in the last ten games, and two of them came today).

The Red Sox can afford to harbor a .250 hitter with 2 home runs and 13 RBI right now, but what will things look like for the Nation if their #5 hitter is putting up numbers like that in August and September. I imagine that Red Sox fans will stick out their chests and boast that they will have clinched by then, so a slight statistical correction won't make a difference. Of course, there isn't a group of people in the world that can front-run with Red Sox Nation.

The real question is can Red Sox Nation afford to pay a guy to bat in the five hole where they desperately need protection for Ramirez and Ortiz $12 million to hit .250 without producing solid power numbers? It will make it all the harder to sustain the pleasant fiction that the Red Sox are the victim of the Evil Empire's spending sprees.

I think the problem here is that the Red Sox expect JD Drew to play like a guy worth $12 million a year. If they really wanted him to play as though he were worth $12 million, then John Henry should have signed him for $18 million a year. When this situation becomes a problem, and it will because another hitter is due to go into a slump any minute now or a pitcher will lose his mojo (maybe Beckett has with his litte finger issue), I won't enjoy it as much as I ought.

Red Sox fans have a way of passing their misery on to the rest of humanity. As soon as I get my first "I told you so" post up, I'm sure I'll have comments from Red Sox fans saying they knew this was going to happen because they went to one of the dozen websites that enable baseball superfans to find the statistics they use to bore normal humans into submission and were able to calculate the minute disparities in WHIP and OPS to the 35th decimal place which explains why the team flopped down the stretch.

Speaking of flops, so much attention has been paid to the incredibly harsh suspensions of the two Phoenix Suns following the incident in Game 5 of their series against the Spurs that the underlying hypocrisy of the situation has been overlooked. I think that the one game suspension should have been extended once the Suns tried to sell the fact that their players had left the bench area because of offense-defense substitution patterns to people who should have been too intelligent to buy it.

That was one of the more ridiculous statements I have heard in a long time. First, unless there are some special rules for Phoenix, no one could have come into the game until a stoppage. Considering that there were fewer than 24 seconds to play and the Spurs were over the foul limit, how was the clock going to stop? Unless magical elves intervened, the only way the clock was stopping was a foul by San Antonio.

Once that foul was committed, Phoenix would have two free throws, which is ample time to insert players. In the time it took for all of the players to line up at the other end of the court, two healthy men who are ostensibly world-class athletes should be able to walk the thirty feet to the scorer's table in time to be admitted to the game between the first and second free throws. It happens all the time, in every game and it could have happened there.

A more interesting question is that Phoenix knew, because Mike D'Antoni is the brilliantest mind in basketball (so brilliant that any effort to describe it in one word requires the writer to resort to expressions that are grammatically and syntactically impossible as I just did), that San Antonio would foul trailing by 3 with fewer than 24 seconds on the clock if they wanted any chance at winning the game. So if San Antonio is going to foul and said foul will end any offensive possession and transition immediately to defense, were the Suns really going to substitute two players in an offense-defense pattern?

I don't like it when teams lie to me. Phoenix players left the bench for one reason, and one reason only - to get after some member of the Spurs. I don't want to have to examine their case as if I were Lt. Caffey trying to find out from Colonel Jessup why Private Santiago didn't pack his gear or make any telephone calls prior to his 0600 flight out of Gitmo. If Phoenix didn't try to weasel their way out of the suspensions with such a blatant fabrication that ought to insult the intelligence of any person who has ever watched a basketball game, maybe I'd be a little more sympathetic to their plight.

However, the real travesty of the unpleasantness at the end of Game 5 is that we are expected to treat a small, gutless overachiever from Canada as though he were the victim in all of this. Steve Nash took a step before he went down, he flopped. If I were the type of person that believed that sort of gamesmanship had any place in civilized competition, I would offer kudos to him for that kind of initiative. Unfortunately, I find it reprehensible and I am not amused.

As a point of comparison, I don't know if you remember when Chad Clifton was crushed by Warren Sapp. I tried to find the video on youtube, but it wasn't available. The site was doing routine maintenance, which might have been part of the problem. Chad Clifton, who was slightly bigger than Sapp, went down immediately. But Steve Nash, who was a good deal smaller than Robert Horry, managed to take a step in the process of his collision? It doesn't make sense to me.

As I've mentioned in this space before, there is a serious problem in the NBA right now. Some one needs to step in and put an end to the culture of flopping. Surely I am not the only basketball fan who is horrified that flop artists and hacks like Raja Bell, Bruce Bowen and Shane Battier are considered top-flight defenders? Michael Cooper, whom I hated as a kid, would be rolling over in his grave to see that, provided, of course, that he were in fact dead.

No one seems to have the guts to say this, but the problem in the NBA begins at the top. David Stern is the problem. I have been reluctant to say this because I thoroughly enjoy it when he oppresses Mark Cuban. But he has let the product be debased. He was given a mulligan when the experiment of expansion into Canada proved so disastrous that Vancouver relocated to Memphis (a city that has a claim to fame other than Elvis???) in just a few years of existence. The closest thing to a proactive policy he has instituted is a dress code for players, which hasn't exactly been a smashing success.

Chicago fans, especially, ought to be griping about this situation more than I am. That nice layover between the series with Miami and the second round killed the momentum for the Bulls. Absolutely murdered it. Plowed it under and sowed salt in the furrows. It's been amazing to see the Bulls claw their way back to force a Game 6. But it makes you wonder what this series would have been like had the Bulls with limited playoff experience not had to deal with a week of downtime between playoff games. If it's any consolation, at least TNT had the convenience of running forty games in forty nights promos.

I have a riddle for you. When is a win not a win? When an official goes mad with power, runs amok and ejects the best player on either team with little or no justification. Such was the case last night in Dallas, where the Spurs went into a funk after Joey Crawford kicked Tim Duncan out of the game on a insane power trip and lost to the Mavericks.

After a long silence on the subject of basketball, the Benefactor weighed in on this subject today. Mark Cuban doesn't want you to send him emails complaining about the officiating in the NBA anymore. He wants you to email the owners or managers of the other NBA franchises to stir up grass roots action to change the face of NBA officiating.

Of course, as a blogger who has long been critical of his hypocrisy, I have to wonder whether the Benefactor would have been so quick to bow out because of the severity of any fine the league would levy prevents it from being worth his while had it been one of his players instead of Tim Duncan. I have to think that had Joey Crawford had so much as troubled the serenity of Dirk Nowitzki by mentioning the fact that the German government recently tried to draft a four week old child into its war machine or pointing out that David Hasselhoff's music sucks, the Benefactor would have manned the barricades and screamed bloody murder. But that's just me.

That gets to the root of my problem with the Benefactor. More even than his atrocious personal deportment in the crowd at games, which constantly evokes the image of a spoiled four year old throwing a temper tantrum because another child is playing with his favorite toy, the fact that his concern with the quality of NBA officiating begins and ends with how it impacts the Mavericks.

If Joey Crawford broke a chair over a player from any other team's head, kidnapped his family to force them to participate in some ill-conceived cross-country race or sold poisoned milk to school children, Mark Cuban would keep his mouth shut. But if he misses one call that the Benefactor thinks should have benefited the Mavs, and it's go time. Even if David Stern decided to forgo the standard fine and handed Mark Cuban over to black market organ harvesters to exact punishment, the Benefactor would move heaven and earth to get his two cents heard.

And Mark Cuban doesn't want to be bothered by fans looking for a mouthpiece to articulate their discontent with NBA officiating. It seems like he should have made that call a few years ago, before he set himself up as NBA gadfly to get people to notice him. And if you don't think it's about ego with the Benefactor, then maybe you shouldn't read this little piece about what a tool Mark Cuban is.

I have a solution to his little problem. Email Mark Cuban to complain about NBA officiating. Email him to talk about the umpires in Major League Baseball. Email him to talk about the weather in your town. Email him to ask pointless, unanswerable questions. Email him to talk about sailing ships and sealing wax and cabbages and kings as though you were the damn Walrus from Alice in Wonderland. Email Mark Cuban several times a day to tell him no one cares about his opinion on Google and YouTube. Just email him to tell him he's a tool and a hypocrite and wish the Mavericks an early exit from the playoffs when you email him.

I think I have reasonable precedent for this. According to legend, the eminent comedian WC Fields would send Elanor Roosevelt and the IRS letters every day to complain about them. I think you should take the time to complain about Mark Cuban, provided of course that you want to. God knows, if I ever become famous, I'm going to send a letter to remind people (like John Henry, Theo Epstein, Larry Lucchino, Danny Ainge, Wyc, Steve, Irv, the rest of Banner 17, Bill Simmons, the CHB, Bob Ryan, Jay Mariotti, Mark Cuban and others) that I don't like them.

Just do me one favor if you decide to email Cuban, keep it clean and don't do anything illegal. And do not under any circumstances send any complaints to the IRS. That sounds like one hell of a good way to get an audit, and I just don't need that hassle.

Tonight, we have a combined tool of note segment and random thing I hate thing segment for the first time ever. They both come out of that colossal waste of time that is the Boston Marathon. While I hate the marathon, it is not the random object of my derision tonight. Instead, that honor goes to the space program.

Space exploration was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be a giant waste of time and money. So what if we got Tang, Velcro and pens that write upside down. I just don't see how that and all the and a little flag on the moon justifies the billions and billions upon yet more billions of dollars of the next dozen generations' money that the government spent on the space program.

Even if there is intelligent life in the universe (based on what passes for it on this planet, I sincerely doubt that intelligent life exists anywhere), I just don't see how sending people up in rockets to do experiments of little tangible value is going to help us here on Earth. So what if aliens invade the planet to probe rednecks or kidnap people or kill us all.

And among all of the colossal wastes of both time and money in the space program, there is this gem. A woman at the space station was tethered to a treadmill to run the Boston Marathon in spirit. And on both Tax Day and Patriots' Day. The Founding Fathers must have been rolling over in their graves. They revolted against a relatively benign tyranny over a 3 cent tax on tea, and now we have a woman in space running on a treadmill at the expense of billions of dollars of public money.

Even better, the woman was running the Boston Marathon in spirit as a gesture of solidarity with her sister. Aside from the gargantuan waste of money, this struck me as a total fraud. First, if there were gravity on the space station, why did they have to tether her to the treadmill? And if there was less than normal gravity shouldn't she have had to run further? And how does it count, even if she'd changed the incline settings at the appropriate times? It's not like she ran real, honest to goodness, no fooling hills in the rain.

And on top of everything else, the woman was a Red Sox fan. There they were on TV, the banners, trappings and paraphernalia of the team I hate as the woman was wasting an entire nation's money in an exercise that was so obviously fraudulent. A perfect storm, in the metaphorical sense, and with no pun on the miserable weather.

As a special bonus, here is a second tool, with a bizarre infatuation for the terribly pointless UPS whiteboard ads.

Just so you know, there will be no links tonight because I'm feeling particularly lazy. But I have somethings to say. It's just another post with an ESPN theme. Obviously they spent a lot of time on the Daytona 500, today and the breaking story was the bizarre episode of All My Morons that has been the 2006 San Diego Chargers. There was the linebacker shot by an off-duty cop. There was the safety arrested by Federal authorities for allegedly selling codeine. Then there was the waiting until the offensive and defensive coordinators accepted head coaching positions with other teams. Now they hire Norv Turner, who was once chased from a blackjack table in Las Vegas by Bill Simmons and one of his super-cool friends.

But there was a substantial amount of coverage dedicated to the All Star Weekend. First, on Mike and Mike in the Morning, Greenie made the pronouncement that no one puts on a show like David Stern. Meanwhile, he admitted later that he gained a renewed appreciation for Bono as he watched Mary J. Blige flounder her way through the classic U2 song "One."

And then there was Wayne Newton. It took me 2 days to come to terms with his presence. He was terrible. Actually, he was far, far, far, far worse than terrible. First, as Mike Wilbon would say on PTI, he looked like he'd escaped from the wax museum. Whatever they did to lift his face and Botox away his wrinkles made him look like a 2 week old sandwich in Saran Wrap. And there was his "tan." I don't know how to describe it, save to say that it made him look like one of those oranges that have those rough brown patches that the growers call wind scars.

Then there was his hair. It looked like his hair had been dyed with the black paint they use to rustproof metal benches and chairs. I don't know that it can be fairly called hair, but it sits on his head and it's not a hat, so we'll call it hair. It looked to me as though some drunken hair restoration technician had sewn the hair on somewhat imperfectly.

And there was his singing. I don't know much about octaves and that sort of thing, but I know he was nowhere near the high notes that made up the falsetto that made the song unique in the first place. His version of Viva Las Vegas was an insult even to people who aren't Elvis fans (I, however am an Elvis fan). Basically he looked and sounded like a bad impersonator. I get the feeling that Englebert Humperdink sat up somewhere in Branson, Missouri or wherever old lounge singers go to die and called his agent wondering why he couldn't get a gig with the NBA.

Then there was the triumphant return of Around the Horn. Because the show had been bumped all last week for NASCAR Now, they hadn't had a chance to excoriate Tim Hardaway. Everybody's conscience, Jay Mariotti, was in top form. He commended David Stern for the swift and fair response in banishing the homophobe from All Star Weekend. The voice of the voiceless went on to lament that certain other commissioners (Bud Selig, by name) do not act with such probity.

It was truly inspired, or at least it was, before I translated it from Mariotti-speak into English. Basically, Jackass Jay said: "Whah, Whah! Big Bad Ozzie Guillen was mean to me, please fight my battles for me, Mr. Commissioner." I've had enough of Mariotti. He's a total tool. And of the off chance that one of his minions monitors my site, feel free to tell him this. Jay Mariotti is a middle aged guy just coming off an angioplasty. The actuarial tables are in my favor on this one. He's going to die before I do, and I'm going to find his grave and take a leak on it. A little harsh, and totally lacking in my customary good humor, but I am so sick of phony tough and crazy brave reporters.

Speaking of people monitoring my site, I've been setting traffic records lately. It got me thinking. For those of you who are new to this site, Catch 22 is one of my favorite books. In the novel, the protagonist was forced to censor letters written by enlisted prisoners while he stayed in the officer's ward at the military hospital. Since it was boring duty, he got creative and started censoring all the modifiers, then all the romance words, then everything but the salutation while he rewrote the letter's body and finally he censored the envelopes. When he censored the letters, he signed Washington Irving's name.

Once he censored the envelopes, the military bureaucracy sprang into action. The Army sent a man from the the Criminal Investigations Division to the hospital to catch Washington Irving. This triggered an entire series of misadventures which ended up with the first CID man getting sick. The Army then sent a second CID man. Eventually, the two CID men spent all their time investigating each other.

I went through that long aside to say something, believe it or not. The other day, I joked with one of my friends that my spike in traffic was due to a number of people monitoring me for Mariotti, the CHB, the Red Sox, the Pats, NASCAR, Ainge and the other targets of this blog. After keeping an eye in this site for a while, I imagined that they would eventually use this site as a means to monitor one another. It seemed like a funny image.

Can you picture it? Across the country, recent college graduates who always wanted to be athletes, but lacked the size, speed, strength, talent or any/all of them to make it became jock sniffs and gave up their dreams to enter the world of sports journalism. Now they sit in their cubicles, dividing their time between monitoring my site and mooning over the hot receptionist who is hopelessly out of their collective league. And I bet they're questioning their career choice as they try to remember whether Mr. Mariotti takes his coffee with cream and sugar and wonder if Jay will release his pent up aggressions on the lowly intern after Ozzie or Hawk Harrelson disses him again.