Weekends just keep on getting better for me, don't they? Next week I am forced at long last to root for the Indianapolis Colts to win a football game. I still hate the Colts, but far less so than I hate this incarnation of the New England Patriots. With each game, I like this Patriots team less and less.

The two images which will linger on longest in my mind from this "game" against the Washington Redskins will be Randy Moss committing offensive pass interference while the officials looked on without discharging their duties and Bill Belichick standing confused at midfield when the game ended and there was no opposing coach waiting to shake hands with him.

Imagine the audacity of Joe Gibbs, resenting the Patriots for scoring 44 points more than were needed to win. He should have been there waiting to congratulate Belichick for being God's gift to professional football. Even if he had to trample over widows and orphans to do it, Gibbs should have been there to render unto Belichick what is Belichick's.

I realize I'm in the habit of quoting or referring to Jimmy Johnson's response to Gerry Faust after the latter complained that Johnson had run up the score on his Fighting Irish team. Johnson's response was terse but to the point, as he said if you don't want to get blown out, then recruit better players. I am of the opinion that the Redskins should have taken steps necessary to ensure that they didn't find themselves on the wrong end of a 52-7 beating. But I don't blame Gibbs for not shaking Belichick's hand.

I am sure that I will be in the minority on this issue, since I am sure the sages of the Boston media like Shaughnessy, Ryan and the knuckle-dragging, mouth-breathing troglodytes at their rival newspaper will rise to Belichick's defense. After all, the Boston media is exceedingly reluctant to question or criticize the pride of the NFL since they know they are less formidable adversaries for the team owner than certain eccentric heads of state.

Back to the point at hand, I don't blame Gibbs for refusing to shake hands with Belichick after this game. It is true that he could have, and probably should have, done something more to prevent this from happening. That said, I don't remember the portion of the Johnson quote that enjoined the defeated to enjoy their defeat. After all, would Belichick have been the model of graciousness had the situation been reversed? I hardly think so.

It seems strange, after the episode with Eric Mangini at the end of the rgular season last year, to see Belichick the victim of an episode like this. But can one fairly say that Joe Gibbs refusing to meet Belichick at midfield was any more classless than Bleichick leaving Brady in as long as he did, or when he replaced Brady continuing to pass the ball with Castle and Gutierrez? I don't think so, and not just as a Patriot hater but as a general football fan.

I appreciate that it is generally advisable to have a backup quarterback with game experience on hand in the event that the unthinkable should happen to Tom Brady. However, a half dozen completions against a Redskins team that had given up the ghost two and a half quarters before said backup quarterback left the bench aren't going to serve Castle or Gutierrez particularly well should one or the other be pressed into service next week. And it doesn't earn any karma points with the powers that govern the football universe.

But kudos to Joe Gibbs for not worshipping at the altar of Belichick and actually rendering unto him what is due. Going forward, I don't really know what to think yet, about the Colts game next week. I'm not going to make any predictions for a long time, now. I just know I'm rooting for Indy, even if it hurts my soul to root for Manning. And I'm looking forward to the Freeny matchup with Matt Light.

To any Patriots fans who take issue with my claim that the Moss play was offensive pass interference, consider this. What if Terrell Owens had made the same move in a theoretical game in Foxboro? Would you not call for the Norfolk County Sheriff's deputies to haul him off for arraignment for felony assault in Wrentham District Court? Or if Assante Samuel found himself the victim of such a play (even if it is stretching the imagination to the breaking point to picture someone puling a stunt like that without getting a beating to rival that which Bruce Lee threw on the Ohara character in Enter the Dragon from Assante for his trouble), would the fans not demand justice? Or at the very least a flag?

Of late, I've been thinking of the end of Moby Dick. The movie, since I never had the courage to face the book. Captain Ahab stabbed at the white whale from Hell's heart, and fat lot of good it did him. The whale just kept right on swimming. And the World Series is now over. And I have this to say to Red Sox fans: GET FUCKED. But remember, I mean that in the nicest way possible.

What to think of this World Series? I find myself wondering whether it would be as painful to watch the Red Sox in the World Series if the FOX Network weren't carrying the games. I've mentioned a time or two that I can't abide Joe Buck and Tim McCarver, nor do I know a single person (and I know some contrarian SOBs) who thinks they add any value to the viewing experience.

Maybe it's me, and if I were a Red Sox fan I'd think differently. Maybe the Red Sox relief pitchers forming some sort of one-third assed percussion ensemble routine as their team rallies is really clever and cute and wonderful. I don't know, but it drives me crazy, and I could do without seeing it. But as bad as that was, the good people at FOX had to go and mic the bullpen, so now one can hear it. It was worse than I imagined it to have been when I could only see it.

Now I'm not particularly musical, and the audio doesn't come in well enough for a person of my tonal sensibilities to tell, but I find myself wondering whether Eric Gagne is off beat when the bullpen does its thing. I think we need some intrepid soul to investigate this phenomenon.

In somewhat related matters, I have, in the few times I've mentioned him in this space, been less than kind to Ken Rosenthal, baseball guru of FOX Sports. Of course if he wrote more pieces like this one, calling to our attention the fact that the leader of the independent commission investigating the abuse of performance enhancing drugs in Major League Baseball is a board member with the Boston Red Sox, I might be inclined to praise him.

First, I don't want to question the legitimacy of the Mitchell Commission. As far as I'm concerned, it's a total fraud, more in the line of an Easter Egg hunt than a witch hunt. Just think for a second how many superstars we firmly believe were using some sort of illicit substance to gain competitive advantage. And has any of the players suspended by the league been a household name? Hell, I bet some of them have close relatives who don't even know they were in the league.

Where an observer like Rosenthal errs is in assuming that because George Mitchell was, many years ago, Majority Leader of the US Senate that he is somehow above the fray and of such eminence that he can clean up the steroid culture instantly. Americans are always of two minds concerning elected officials. When they're in office and responsible for taxes and spending, they can't be trusted, but once they retire for a decade or so, they virtues which no one suspected they have suddenly become apparent.

Of course, we now have the added virtue that Mitchell was a Democrat and thanks to this administration, the Democrats now own integrity and honesty and general, overall moral excellence. Or at least they believe they do, and slightly less than half the nation agrees. That's why Mitchell can be trusted, but no one is mourning the retirement of Bill Frist and there are no ceremonial figurehead posts waiting for Trent Lott. But just wait until the Democrats get the White House and get a chance to create their own controversies, then people will miss Frist and Lott.

Most of the controversy surrounding Mitchell's position came out of the leaked story that Paul Byrd has taken HGH, particularly because of the timing, right before he was to start Game 7 of the ALCS. There are also some coincidences that are difficult to shrug off when one looks at them in this Mitchell mess. Mike Lowell comes to mind.

If you look at his career arc, Mike Lowell's stats dipped significantly from 2004-2005 when the heat was really on baseball. Congress was holding hearings, the media was investigating BALCO and it was the topic of the day. Now that these things have been shunted aside by the NFL and NBA grappling with player conduct issues, the NBA staggering from the Donaghy scandal and the NHL trying to come back from labor nightmares, who remembers that Mike Lowell is back from the statistical dead?

People have made much of the impact Dave Madagan has had on the batting technique of Mike Lowell and how that has turned him around at the plate. I might be overly suspicious by nature, but I'm not sure I buy it. I'm old enough to remember Dave Madagan baseball player, before he became Dave Madagan hitting guru to the mediocre. Madagan wasn't much of a hitter, in fact he was very, very, very, average. Perhaps it's a case of those who can't teach, but I'm not much on old sayings right now.

I know it's been a while since I last updated this blog. I've been more than a little depressed by this World Series. The Cardinals winning is not good for any one. I think we can all agree that no one in St. Louis really deserves to be happy. When your chief landmark is a big freestanding arch with no particular significance (I know the arch represents the gateway to the West, but it's still pathetic), you live in a loser town. No way around it. Given the choice between living in Missouri and death, I'm taking death.

A lot of people wonder why the World Series ratings are so low. Part of it may be the fact that the Tigers and the Cardinals did not get the national TV exposure during the season that the New York teams received. Part of it may be the fact that the Cardinals were dreadful this season. They finished two games over .500, and they went on an amazingly boring run in the playoffs. Part of it might be that baseball is no longer America's pastime. The NFL is the big sport now.

One thing that has not received enough attention is the network itself. FOX does an atrocious job of packaging and presenting baseball as a television sport. It is difficult to make baseball work as a TV sport, there is a lot of dead time in a baseball game. Do we really need to see managers spit and scratch themselves while the pitcher and catcher sort out the sign, the hitter steps in and out of the batter's box and boring announcers try to be amusing and fail miserably? But that is what we get. There are those who maintain that the beauty of baseball is that there is no clock. I disagree. With a clock there might be more consistent urgency, more motion and more action. Is that a bad thing?

Joe Buck and Tim McCarver have no business broadcasting games, together or separately. Think about it. Ask your friends (provided, of course, that you have any). Find some one who is willing to admit that they like these guys calling games. Is there one person in America not related to Buck or McCarver that looks forward to their brand of broadcasting? They have no charisma, they are boring, predictable and dragging the games down. The network attempted to bring some life to the booth for the championship series by including Luis Gonzales. That was a colossal failure.

Then there is Scooter, the annoying (to say the least) animated baseball endeavoring to explain the various pitches to the casual fan. Will any of us who saw it ever recover from Jeff Suppan's ill fated appearance with Scooter, rebroadcast during Game 3? I think not. I know he was trying to be funny, but I can't forgive him for failing so drastically. And if my name were Suppan, and you called me Soup, there would be both consequences and repercussions.

Baseball is really dying before our eyes. Yeah, they set an attendance record this season. That's nice, but when your marquee event's TV ratings decline year after year you have a serious problem. Crowning 7 different champions in 7 years may point to parity and competitive balance, but have teams leveled up or leveled down? I think baseball has leveled down. There are no great teams, and very few great players. There are even fewer compelling stories. When we look back on this postseason, will we remember it for having one of the weaker champions of all time, or for it bringing the demise of Steve "Psycho" Lyons?

As I type this, FOX put a fitting signature on this evening's broadcast. Joe Buck finally revealed the ultimate mystery of baseball. His final thought: "There can be only one champion." No way! Really? I was under the impression that there could be 13 or 14 or an infinite number of champions. And as the credits roll, what does FOX play? A cover of U2's One. And a very bad one at that. Apparently they couldn't get the Kenny G cover of Juicy by the Notorious BIG (I am aware that was also a cover).

This World Series was terrible because the media built up the Tigers until we were sick to death of them. And then the Tigers, whether because of the layoff, the team buying into the media coverage and letting down or a combination thereof, bombed and bombed badly. Now we have the Cardinals as a reigning World Series champion, and who cares? No one likes the Cardinals because they are eminently dislikeable.

Maybe Albert Pujols is the best hitter in the world, but he has no personality. He's not marketable the way Jeter or Ortiz or even Manny can be marketed to the masses. He has all the charisma of the Frankenstein monster in the original cinematic version. Then there is Jim Edmonds, the least likeable centerfielder since Ty Cobb. Duncan, Taguchi, Belliard, Molina, Rolen, Spezio. Those names don't exactly leap off the page, do they? Even with that stupid red beard on Spezio.

David Eckstein, the All American boy (Jim Leyland's words, not mine)? More like that hall monitor that always ratted you out for breaking whichever of the insipid rules elementary schools use to thwart the creativity of the individual (I was less than a model student as a youngster), without, of course, the bear mace and religious fervor that made Cartman such a success in a recent South Park. And if proud NH product (as though that weren't a massive contradiction) Chris Carpenter ever despairs of living free, I won't miss him should he try the other half of New Hampshire's glorious motto.

If you can't tell by now, I wanted to see the Tigers win. Alas, Placido Polanco didn't want to hit. The Tigers pitchers didn't want to field their positions correctly. And Curtis Granderson wanted to play centerfield like a drunken sailor in Game 3. There is more blame to go around, as is always the case with a catastrophe of this magnitude, but there isn't enough time to get into it now. I'll just have to deal with my disappointment.

Before I sign off, I think this point must be addressed. Jim Rome, among others, has discovered a disturbing trend in America today. Shawne Merriman tested positive for steroids, and it isn't as big a deal as the baseball steroid witch hunt. This double standard exists for two reasons. First, we expect more violence from our football players so we are willing to look the other way when they enhance their natural gifts with banned substances. We also focus so much of our energy on our fantasy teams and football gambling that we look the other way in these cases.

There is another way to look at it. Perhaps we reacted to the Merriman suspension the way we did because the NFL has a history of suspending players for steroid use that goes back more than two decades, and not until Congress wasted time and millions of dollars in a farce two years ago. I'm sure I'm wrong though, because my way of thinking would require Jim Rome and his followers to step down from the soap box and spare us the anger of the righteous. I don't think any of us want to live in world like that.

Well, the As won't be celebrating a World Series title this fall, just like they haven't celebrated in each of the seasons during Billy Beane's reign of terror. Sooner or later, the commercial media will stop massaging his ego and start expecting a little more than simply making the playoffs. Until that day, I guess fans will have to swallow his snake oil for at least one more year. Perhaps Billy Beane and Peyton Manning can have a grudge match in the offseason to see which overhyped fraud can rightly lay claim to the title "King of the Frauds."

Unlike most people, I guess, I think that at some point a player or a coach has to lead his team to a championship game or series, and an executive must build a team that can at least reach the championship game or series. Until that happens, any praise a player, coach or an executive receives isn't worth a damn thing. Sports, unlike any other aspect of life, are shockingly simple. Someone wins and someone loses. And until you've won, you're nothing but a loser. Any other sentiment but that is nonsense you feed little kids after they lost a Little League game. That's why Peyton Manning is a fraud, and Billy Beane is nothing more than the nerdy kid who knew more algebra than they rest of us (Theo Epstein, stats tool though he is, gets a pass because his team won a title).

A development more interesting than the As collapse occurred in this year's ALCS. Far be it for me to take delight in the downfall of another, especially when some many better paid commentators on TV and in the press do it so gleefully. But Steve "Psycho" Lyons will not be joining us in the broadcast booth at least not for the foreseeable future. I guess we all should have seen this coming, but I never believed it possible.

I imagine their must have been a segment of the viewing audience who enjoyed his "wit," "wisdom" and "insight." I was not one of those people. Moreover, no one I know enjoyed his commentary on baseball broadcasts. And yet, there he was calling games on Fox Saturday baseball with Thom Brenneman making you miss Tim McCarver and Joe Buck, as impossible as that seems. It's amazing that a lack of talent, humor and real insight into the game is not cause for dismissal.

I do agree that his off color comments on people of Hispanic descent merited punishment. But is saying that Lou Pinella was "hablaing Espanol" so terrible? I don't think so. It's certainly stupid, a poor attempt to be folksy. Very poor indeed. Far worse, and less intelligent, was his remark that he was uncomfortable sitting next to Lou Pinella (who is of Hispanic descent) and he feared for the safety of his wallet. That was enough to get him fired.

The strange thing is he had a history of this type of behavior. During the Mets-Dodgers NLDS matchup, he cracked on a fan wearing unusually thick glasses. The cute little epigram was "wearing a digital camera on his face." Of course, there was no way for Steve Lyons to know that the fan in question was almost blind, but there was no need for him to say that either.

Then there was the infamous criticism of Shawn Green for not playing a game against the Giants during Yom Kippur. Shawn Green just happens to be Jewish. Amazingly, Lyons survived that incident. He was suspended without pay, but he wasn't fired. I guess this was his third strike.

I am somewhat torn about this. Part of me is glad that he's no longer broadcasting baseball because I thought he brought nothing to the table. Part of me understands that what he said was colossally ignorant and has no place in civilized conversation. But part of me knows that we've all either made off color comments about other racial or ethnic group. And part of me fears political correctness will eventually overwhelm free expression.

One must ask the question how dumb is Steve Lyons? Even if enlightenment in this area is beyond your intellectual capacity, at some point the instinct to self preservation should come to the fore. If you have been caught on two prior occasions for general insensitivity, and disciplined for religious insensitivity, avoiding any type of ethnic insensitivity might be a good idea. If those of you who read this (all 1.3 of you) aren't smart enough to grasp the self preservation concept, I would suggest this course of action. Simple politeness.

Take a page from General Patton (as depicted in the Oscar winning film with George C. Scott). After omitting the Russians from a speech on his experiences in England where he ever so briefly mentioned Anglo-American world rule in a postwar scenario, Patton found himself in hot water with his superiors. The organizers of his appearance assured the General that his remarks would be off the record, but word got out and caused a huge controversy.

Patton said to his superiors that he would have mentioned the Russians if there had been any present at the time. He said he didn't like the SOBs, but he would have mentioned them out of simple politeness. Apparently simple politeness is far, far beyond the capacities of our society.

Do not misconstrue the tone of this post. Racism is not acceptable. Under no circumstance should you make someone uncomfortable because of their heritage. I merely suggest to those individuals who are not sufficiently enlightened to abandon racial prejudice or clever enough to recognize the consequences of ethnically insensitive comments, that you should at least be polite enough to keep your mouth shut. I apologize for the grammar, but if you can't not be a moron, at least be a quiet moron.

In the long run, I think it's a victory for us all to have Steve Lyons off the air. Unless, of course, the network finds a permanent replacement who proves to be worse than Psycho. I guess we can always hope.

Would that I had more to say on the A's punking the Red Sox this evening, but who can do a beating like that justice? Plus it was my misfortune to run into a cat with a 2004 World Series ring this evening. That coupled with an old friend who told him that I stopped drinking St. Louis beer (Bud/Bud Light) in the wake of the Cardinals collapse in that unfortunate series is enough to put a damper on my enthusiasm. In my defense, I am (and have been since those who know the Cincinnati Kid can remember) a Miller High Life drinker.

The Cardinals awful play is merely one excuse for not drinking St. Louis beer. I have some others, but I will not expend both barrels on Anheiser Busch until I get paid for it. The only reason I'm posting tonight is that I have been alerted to the existence of this site recently. It can take you to this site, which was surprising and disappointing for a brief moment, until one realized that the English and their govt were left behind in the New World.

Go here, and see how short and expensive life can be. I must say I wish I had more to add, but I must disappoint my loyal readers. All I can say is got to the site above, or click on this particular link. Even if it won't find you treasure, it might help you find the missing piece which can make us all soldiers.

It is now about 36 hours after the main portion of this post was composed. I have no idea what the hell I was thinking when I wrote it. I don't know why I made the English government reference. I have no idea what it meant. Nor do I understand where the make us all soldiers bit came from. The original intention with the last link above (which sends you to a site entitled "When Tools Attack") was to make some bad joke about tools attacking failing to include the Red Sox who are, as we all know, giant tools.

It wouldn't have been very funny, so I guess it's just as well that I went the Kellen Winslow II route. It was certainly in poor taste with the unpleasantness overseas, so I apologize. Part of me wanted to delete this post altogether, but in the spirit of honesty and cynicism that are the hallmarks of this blog, I had to leave it up with my apology. This is yet one more from the long list of reasons why one shouldn't drink and blog.

From beer with dinner to White Russians at the bar to more beer on my return, I should never have posted. But I did, and I won't try to save myself the embarassment. I only wish I had the flight data recorder going to help me understand the English in the New World referrence. All I can say in my defense is that at least I wasn't dumb enough to drive that night.