About Roger Clemens and Congress...

My final thought for the day:

Why is Roger Clemens in trouble for lying to Congress... when Congress lies to us ALL the time and always gets away with it?

Read More

Weird contract clauses for baseball players

Relief pitcher Charlie Kerfeld asked for and received 37 boxes of orange Jell-O as a bonus when he signed a new contract with the Astros in 1987. Roy Oswalt got a shiny new bulldozer for helping his team get to the World Series. A.J. Burnett required the Blue Jays to give his wife eight round-trip limo rides per season from their home in Maryland to Toronto when he signed as a free agent five years ago.

Those are just a few of the wacky stipulations that professional baseball players have demanded or agreed to in their signing contracts, according to this entertaining lil' article at CNN.com. One thing that I didn't know until reading this: Michael Jordan was still getting paid by the owner of the NBA's Chicago Bulls when Jordan tried his luck at baseball in the early Nineties. Why? 'Cuz Bulls owner Jerry Reinsdorf was also the owner of Jordan's baseball team :-)

Read More

The 4,900 calorie hamburger

The Class A West Michigan Whitecaps have added the following gastronomic monstrosity to their ballpark menu: the Fifth Third Burger.

A heart-stopping (perhaps literally) 4,889 calories of beef, lettuce, tomato, salsa, sour cream, chili and Fritos on an 8-inch sesame seed bun. Total weight: nearly 30 ounces.

The ballpark management suggests that one of these hamburgers can feed four people. But if one person manages to eat the whole thing, he/she will earn the right to wear this t-shirt:

Read More

NCAA clamps down on live blogging at college games

This may be the dumbest thing that I've ever heard from the world of sports journalism: a few weeks ago the National Collegiate Athletic Association implemented new rules for live blogging at NCAA-sponsored sporting events. The whole thing got started when a sports writer was thrown out of a college baseball game for providing an online chronicle of the action as it happened. The NCAA screamed about "infringing" on the rights of the broadcast partners.

In the wake of the uproar, last month the NCAA established some... strange... regulations for live blogging by professional sports reporters at college athletic events:

Football
- Three posts per quarter and one post at halftime

Baseball
- One post per inning, including extra innings

Basketball
- Five posts per half, two posts in halftime, two posts per each overtime

Not only that, but each blog must display the NCAA logo (what the... %@#&?!?!?) and all blog posts by credentialed journalists must be submitted to "the NCAA Blog Central" (?!?!?).

Naturally, sports writers are having a field day with this lunacy.

Check out Kara Ratliff's story at WebProNews (a website that I heartily recommend) for the skinny on the NCAA's bizarre blogging policy...

Read More