What is to be done?

First off, a note that the New York Times preview of Northwestern is up at their college football blog, The Quad. They have Northwestern ranked #47 going into the 2009 season, above #105 Indiana, #62 Minnesota, and #57 Michigan. Paul Myerberg's preview is excellent and accurately assesses the 'Cats strengths and weaknesses going into next season. Although Northwestern does not play Michigan this year, the home games against Indiana and Minnesota will be vengeance games: Northwestern will be looking to reconcile its disappointing loss in Bloomington, and Minnesota will try to avenge the Wildcat walk-off and walk-out interception that saw that the Gophers would never win in the Metrodome again.

Alexandre Dumas, literary patron saint of
vengeance, vows revenge on Henri Meyer for
this
unflattering caricature

SECOND HALF CUBS PREVIEW

Instead of running away with a flawed division as predicted by most media outlets and at least three of Milwaukee's racing sausages, the Cubs are desperately fighting for third place in a miserable division behind Milwaukee and a St. Louis team that is winning because Albert Pujols is playing like Bugs Bunny against the Gashouse Gorillas. As they would say in the title of three-fifths of everything published in nineteenth century Russia, what is to be done?

Chernyshevsky, Lenin, and Tolstoy, all authors of works
entitled What is to be done presented here in beardal order

The Cubs' struggles on offense this season have been well-publicized without a good explanation; should a Cub manage to safely reach base, his teammates immediately begin striking out, popping up, waving their bat around like they are trying to put out some sort of broom fire, and suffering Jose Cardenal-like problems with depth perception.

Cardenal had problems in his Cubs
career with mysteriously shut eyes,
renegade grasshoppers, and inferior
baseball cap technology

The amazing thing about the Cubs has been the curious synchronization of slumps. Both Alfonso Soriano and Milton Bradley are having their worst years since 2001 and 2002, their first full seasons in the bigs (considering that Bradley has only played in more than 100 games three times in his ten year career, I'm counting 98 games as a full Milton Bradley season, much like a full Milton Bradley injury does not count unless he's being restrained or surreptitiously sedated for plane travel). Bradley, at least, is getting on base, whereas Soriano's OPS is currently identical to utility man Geoff Blum and backup catchers Chris Coste and Gregg Zaun, who at least has an amazing webpage combining Rush with a searing hatred of unjust commandantes.

Mike Fontenot, who put up a .909 OPS in limited duty last year has become nearly useless, and Geovany Soto has been unable to stand up to the pressure of his rookie of the year season and the WBC's reefer madness witch hunt. Of the healthy Cub regulars, only Derrek Lee is producing at almost his exactly his career average. By OPS+, only Lee, Theriot, and Fukudome are producing at league average (and Fukudome only because of his insanely hot April and May is balancing out a terrible June and fumbling July). So what is to be done?

The only logical solution is that the bats, they are very sick. The Cubs should call in a professional. Facing a similar crisis in 2001, rookie Julio Zuleta grabbed an armload of apples, oranges, sunflower seeds, and Flexall and attempted to cleanse the bats using a dark art he invented called "zoodoo." According to this SI story, Zuleta explained his thought process combining his mastery of alchemy, sorcery, and occult books with ornate yet sinister cover designs: "I thought that maybe the bats were hungry, so I gave them some fruit. I put them in the sun so we could get hot." Fortunately, blasphemy does not appear to be a part of the zoodoo process: "I don't practice voodoo. I am Catholic, and I believe 100 percent in God. But the way we were losing, something had to be done," he said as he ordered his manservant to attack Indiana Jones.

Zuleta is currently a free agent after a successful career in Japan with the Fukuoka Softbank Hawks and the Chiba Lotte Marines, earning three all-star appearances, his own supporter song, and the nickname "Samurai." Zuleta was last seen playing for Panama at the WBC where he went 0 for 8 with 3 Ks, which fits him in perfectly with the Cubs' team concept.

Zuleta bats for Panama at the WBC adespite also qualifying to play for an army of
the undead that he raised by his reckless use of incantations from the
Necromonicon to try to change the clubhouse sunflower seeds from regular to
barbecue flavor

TRACKING DOWN THE APOCRYPHAL

I recently came across this odd article for the New Statesman written in 2000 by Nina Khrushchev about her grandfather's famous shoe-wielding outburst at the UN. In it, she claims never to have seen evidence of the incident and wonders whether it might be a too-perfect story designed to inflame cold war tensions:

The shoe banging, it seemed likely, was an anecdote created by public demand, consistent with the political needs of the socialist-capitalist division. In short, I was almost sure it had never happened. My grandfather was innocent, and I had no reason to be ashamed.

Khrushchev sought to test out the process of historical myth-making in an age of mass-media, where apocryphal stories continue to flourish. After all, apocryphal attribution seems to be the source of 99% of material related to Winston Churchill, very possibly including the phenomenal dick joke found at the bottom of this page (an entire web page, for example, exists to debunk the famous "up with which I shall not put" quote, displaying the sort of pedantry, oddly enough, that Churchill would probably not put up with after consulting with his gin cabinet). Khrushchev's search, however, came less from a duty to historical accuracy and more from an understandable desire not to see her grandfather as a shoe-waving maniac, a view with which I cannot empathize.

Mr. K: You ain't tough enough for me

The Khrushchev article did lead me to examine the news coverage of the incident, which happened at the U.N. on October 12, 1960. Khrushchev was already on edge, having confronted an uppity Spaniard the day before who had refused to applaud him. The New York Times described Khrushchev's outburst as "a brief but vivid display of finger-shaking and recrimination," noting that he "indicated his disapproval of the Spanish delegation with a series of vigorous arm gestures." The same day, he threatened delegates by claiming that Soviet factories were producing rockets "like sausages," a combination of factors resulting in an all-time great article subheading:


The shoe incident itself earned another ace headline from our friends at the Times:

Benjamin Welles described the scene: "Mr. Khrushchev thereupon pulled off his right shoe, stood up and brandished the shoe at the Philippine delegate at the other side of the hall. He then banged the shoe on his desk." The story continues, under the subheadline "KHRUSHCHEV ADDS SHOE-WAVING TO HIS HECKLING ANTICS AT U.N.": "Later...Mr. Khrushchev alternately shouted, waved a brawny right arm, shook his finger and removed his shoe a second time." I'm grateful for the attention to detail that indicates Khrushchev goes to his right for all shoe and arm-waving as well as the author's robust vocabulary for describing Soviet outbursts.

Was Khrushchev a madman or did he have another purpose? The article provides further analysis to his motivations: "Serious observers here believe Mr. Khrushchev has a deadly serious purpose in his histrionic excesses. They noted that a standard Communist practice, whenever the Communists believe they cannot win in a court of law, is to destroy the prestige and sanctity of the court."

One thing that Khrushchev did not do at the U.N. is threaten to bury the West or declare that anybody's grandchildren will live under communism. The burial threat occurred in 1956 at the Polish embassy in Moscow as the Western delegates retreated under a hail of abuse, as chronicled in this excerpt from Time, although the New York Times comes through again with the headline "KHRUSHCHEV TIRADE AGAIN IRKS ENVOYS." The idea of grandchildren living under communism comes from an exchange that U.S. Agriculture Secretary Ezra Taft Benson claims he had with Khrushchev. Here's the anecdote in his own words that is apparently being played during what appears to be a 2008 Republican primary debate as the delegates stand silently demonstrating their displeasure with the Soviet Union, a hot-button issue in the 2008 election.

Perhaps if Zuleta's bat rituals fail, the Cubs can turn to some godless communists to cook up a five year plan for getting some hits or they will be forced to endure vivid displays of finger shaking a recrimination and histrionic excesses from disappointed fans.

Le Tour de Fitz

Coach Fitz is set to be enshrined in the College Football Hall of Fame this weekend, capping off his remarkable run as the heart and soul of the defense for the 15-1 1995 and 1996 Rose and Citrus Bowl teams that took Northwestern from the dregs of the college football landscape and put them on the map in much the same way that Peter the Great's Russia rose from a comical European losing streak and defeated Sweden in the Great Northern War.

Sweden's Charles XII conducted the Great
Northern War in an intensely vengeful, personal
way, sacrificing advantages in an attempt to raise
the volume on the lamentations of his enemies'
women after being enraged by Northern Alliance
diplomacy focusing on resolving the question
"why the long face?"

The enshrinement takes place in South Bend Indiana, where fans can take advantage of an entire weekend of activities including a celebrity golf tournament and ladies' fashion show and brunch, all listed on a web page designed to make readers wish they never see the word "enshrinement" or any other variation of "enshrine" again. The schedule of events also includes an Enshrinement Corn Hole Tournament hosted by Indy Custom Cornhole and the Young Professionals Network.

A young Fitz extends his fist over a vanquished
opponent.

Fitz was the first two-time winner of the Bednarik and Nagurski trophies in 1995 and 1996. He'll be joined by charismatic television personalities Troy Aikman and Lou Holtz.

Lou Holz emphasizes a point in the ESPN studios, a lazy, meanspirited, and
obvious joke from your friends right here at Bring Your Champions, They're
Our Meat

LE TOUR

We're right in the middle of the Tour de France, one of the world's greatest feats of endurance by a group of men who are three mysterious vials away from turning into comic book superhenchmen.

Bane from Batman and Robin prepares to climb the
Ballon d'Alsace, right after setting up a bunch of bombs
in the Gotham Observatory. My favorite thing about
that part of the movie is that every time he places a bomb,
he says the word "bomb." Somebody wrote that,
hopefully not the person who I imagine was thrown into
a locked, stuffy trailer and ordered not to leave until he
or she came up with at least four dozen terrible ice puns
as part of the settlement of a mob-related blood debt. Of
course nothing in that movie can ever top this
classic batman moment.

The hand-wringing over cheating and drug use at the Tour has always been overblown, mainly because the Tour seemed to have been designed with cheating, doping, and any other sort of Wacky Races-style skulduggery clearly in mind. In 1904, the second Tour de France saw the disqualification of its top four riders including inaugural Tour winner Maurice Garin. Two of these men were banned for life: Lucien Pothier for drafting behind a car, and Chevalier of Moulins for hitching a ride in one. Garin received a two-year ban for blackmailing a sponsor for food.

These anecdotes come from the excellent Blazing Saddles: The Cruel and Unusual History of the Tour de France by Matt Rendell, which provides a short history of each of the Tour's races through 2007 with a properly reverent tone:

Whatever else the Tour was-- and it would become many things--it was also an undeclared congress of Europe's hardest scrota. Maurice Garin, at five foot three, a pocket-sized Charles Bronson look alike with a handlebar moustache, might have had the hardest-wearing crotch of all.

Maurice Garin, winner of the inaugural 1903 Tour de
France and possessor of a Matt Rendell-approved crotch

In French Revolutions: Cycling the Tour de France, Tim Moore, a British writer and fan of brief cycling jaunts in the park, sets off to do the Tour de France himself by following the race route and allowing himself approximately twice as much time as the pros. Quickly, he succumbs to the suffering: downing hay fever pills for a pick-me-up, cutting corners, and ruthlessly drafting behind an erstwhile friend, exploiting his lack of knowledge of bicycling physics. Yet, despite his manifold sufferings, Moore had it easy compared to the early tour riders.

Early Tour riders used heavy, cumbersome bicycles on dirt paths without gears or even freewheels, which had been banned by the evidently sadistic tour founder Henri Desgrange (this webpage helpfully lists technological innovations in tour bikes along with innovations in drugs-- for example 1910 saw the development of derailleur gears and the use of chloroform by cyclists and dastardly counts). Rendell notes that cyclists at the time faced other hazards, such as tacks thrown by the opposition and, in the famous 1904 race, angry mobs that would show up and beat the cyclists with sticks until being dispersed by Desgrange firing a gun into the air. The hazards did not end with the race; 1905 Tour winner Louis Trousselier was immediately seized by military police (he was due to start his duty sometime around stage three), which soured his successful fending off of the astoundingly-named Hyppolite Aucouturier.

Hyppolite Aucouturier lost the race, but got
his revenge by absconding with the tour's
hamburger supply

Rapscallionship, scoundrality, and underhandery are built into the very fabric of the tour, and not just its early years. In 1935, for example, Julien Moineau lured the peloton into a free beer oasis, sneaking ahead while they guzzled away at their depridations.

Of course, the early Tour is fantastic for another reason: it may be, with the potential exception of triangular weight lifting, the most mustachioed sport in modern history. For ten years, every winner of the tour sported an epic mustache, from the tiny Garin, to the gigantic François Faber and the Lucien Petit-Bretons and René Pottiers in between. The streak became broken when a Belgian, Philippe Thys, won the race clean shaven, and the sport would never recover.

Notes:

1. Henri Cornet (top, second from left) was awarded the Tour in 1904 after the
disqualification of the top four finishers: Garin (top, first from left), Pothier
(not pictured), and Aucouturier all had mustaches; the other finisher, Chevalier
left behind no known first name nor picture, but we can assume that his mustache
was so grand that he used it to float on air currents above his opponents or braided
it into a crude whipping device like a Ben Hur charioteer.

2. Trousellier (third from left) eerily resembles a cross between a young Stalin
and Punch-Out villain Von Kaiser

3. Pottier, (fourth from left) pioneered the racing bonnet

4. Lucien Petit-Breton(top right), officially the first back-to-back tour winner
due to Garin's disqualification, appears to be sponsored by chicken consortium.
I prefer to think that it's from an individual famer, who stenciled the exact
silhouette of a particular chicken onto Petit-Breton's jersey.

5. 1912 winner Odile Defraye's light-colored mustache combined with low-res
photographs found on the internet and in the Rendell book have cast some
doubts on his mustache credentials, but it seems present enough to warrant
consideration

6. Thys's 1913 and 1914 wins herald the end of the golden age of cycling.
The 1914 tour began on the day of Franz Ferdiand's assassination and
marked the end of the tour until 1919.

So for those of you planning on cycling to South Bend to catch an enshrinement and a cornholing, I recommend you do it the proper way: hopped up on strychnine and baguettes on a fixed gear bike with a completely unironic mustache and a canvas sack full of tacks for any Notre Dame fans behind you. And in doing so, you may find out once and for all who is more grizzled.

Damn the Hessians, an Independence Day Update

As the summer chugs along into our Fourth of July celebration over the British Empire and her unstoppable Hessian legions allowing us our own football code, Northwestern football is still laying dormant and preparing to liberate the Big Ten title.

Fist-pumping across the Delaware in order to ham-handedly desecrate famous paintings

The Hessian soldiers that fought in the American revolution were a mixed bag. Some were subjects of George III, who retained the title of Elector of Hanover and therefore shared with all four George monarchs the ability to call upon German troops to fight their dirty imperialist wars (the title did not carry to Queen Victoria, as women could not serve as Electors of Hanover; Hanover lost its independence shortly after as part of the German Unification). Other troops came on loan from other German aristocrats, who eagerly sent their paupers, petty criminals, and press gang victims over to the American colonies.

A group of Hessian reeanctors draw the short straw at the reenactment lottery.
The uniform of the Hessian soldier is the inspiration behind the popular
Revolutionary War slogan "Do not fire until you see the reflection of their
giant golden party hats"

Corey Wootton was named to the Playboy Preseason All-American team. It's good to see Wootton recognized for his excellent season last year, and although the proliferation of sponsored college football awards has rendered them a less meaningful as corporations turn out a chum of sponsored watch lists covering approximately 38 percent of all college football players, this particular award can fortunately be taken advantage of as a thin justification for running this wonderful picture:

Hugh Hefner showing off the cravat, puma, and femme fatale henchmen he
purchased from the 1970 Bond Villain skymall catalog

THE MADNESS OF A.J. III

Though interleague play has finished, the Cubs and Sox still have a game to make up, which could be a factor since both teams are still afloat in their crappy divisions. One of the players always in the mix during the series is White Sox catcher A.J. Pierzynski, who remains despised by Cubs fans largely because Michael Barrett inexplicably decided to introduce his knuckles to his face several years ago. Pierzynski is not a popular player around baseball; he left both Minnesota and San Francisco on somewhat bitter notes (this article is full of classic baseball post-trade character assassination by nameless Giants players who accused him of being a "cancer in the clubhouse" and accused him of continuing to play cards instead of going over hitters with Brett Tomko in the grand baseball tradition of innuendo about playing cards in the clubhouse undoing a player's repuatation).

Pierzynski gets a lot of negative attention from fans because he has a reputation of a provacateur, and his face defaults to the "who, me?" expression of an Edwardian public school boy caught red-handed going slightly too far with one of their homoerotic flogging rituals. Most of his antics, however, are simply an attempt to squeeze every possible advantage out of baseball's occasionally arcane rules. His greatest feat was getting on base through the dubious application of the dropped third strike rule against Anaheim in the 2005 ALCS (by immediately bolting to first, he put the onus on the befuddled umpire to decide whether it was indeed a dropped third strike). Last year, he convinced the same umpire to call him safe after drawing a shady interference call by falling down and letting Willy Aybar sort of bump into him as the Sox announcing crew work themselves into a Pravda-style lather. My favorite Pierzynski antic is his automatic appeal to the first or third-base umpire on any checked swing. In essense, on a checked swing, he now catches the ball and points to the ump in a single fluid motion.

Pierzynski in a state of nature

These sorts of antics, however, are pretty much harmless. Pierzynski has a decent bat for a catcher (he has a career OPS of .754; last year, league average for MLB catchers was .715-- I assumed he had better numbers than that because I see him mostly against the Cubs, when he carries an .832 OPS for his Cub killing resumé) and augments that with a roguish attempt to get an extra call here and there, certainly nothing to cause a cascade of boos upon his person. If you must hate A.J., you can hate him for somehow getting involved with professional wrestling while displaying an acting ability that even for wrestling is shocking. Fortunately, Ozzie steals the show by hitting a guy with a chair (evidently something that happens in an alarming frequency in pro wrestling matches along with the announcer referring to a villainous woman as a "jezebel.") In fairness, Alfonso Soriano had his own run-in with a pro-wrestling antagonist that involves him reacting to the interminable yakking of some guy in a glitter hat with the mixture of confusion and indignation that comes with not being aware that attending a professional wrestling event might mean getting yelled at by a guy in a glitter hat (I don't follow wrestling, so I have no idea what Glitter Hat is on about, although I admire that the telecast game him more screen time than Meet the Press would allow for Rep. Ron Paul to rant about fiat gold).

JOIN, OR DIE

The U.S. put on an admirable display in the Confederations Cup, overcoming two embarrassing losses at the hands of Italy and Brazil and qualifying due to an improbable combination of a 3-0 defeat of Egpyt and a 3-0 trouncing of Italy by Brazil. Despite the euphoria of playing world-class soccer for 135 minutes, ending Spain's undefeated streak and leading Brazil 2-0 at the half, the U.S. came up short in its bid to win its first major international tournament. True, the Confederations Cup is not the most prestigious tournament in the world (it started as the King Fahd Cup as a showcase for the Saudi Arabian team), but Spain and Brazil both played almost all of their regulars.

Now the U.S. moves onto the Gold Cup, which they won in 2007 thanks to this fantastic goal by BYCTOM favorite Benny "The Jet" Feilhaber against Mexico at Soldier Field. The U.S. is sending out its "B" team to this year's Cup, along with many other CONCACAF sides (with the exception of Costa Rica), but will be anchored by veterans Brian Ching and Steve Cherundolo and give Freddy Adu watchers something to get excited about.

The U.S. goes up against Grenada on the fourth, and the former British Crown Colony forfeited upon independence the ability to recruit German mercenaries like Michael Ballack, future Luc Besson movie villain Bastian Schweinsteiger, and Oliver Kahn, the frightening half-ape version of Klaus Kinski.

A German experiment goes horribly wrong

Grenada has been a place where Europeans have come to plunder spices in the Western Hemisphere for hundreds of years-- first the French, then the British after the Seven Years War. It briefly was a member of the short-lived West Indies Federation, a Commonwealth organization dominated by Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago.

Trinidad and Tobago's Eric Williams and Grenada's Sir Eric Gairy

Grenada's official website provides a host of important information, such as that the flag contains a nutmeg which "signifies that Grenada is one of the world's largest producers of nutmeg," an excellent flag design strategy of getting straight to cash crops that I wholeheartedly endorse instead of flogging around with abstract symbol bullshit. The site also creates a mystery around what visitors can eventually expect from the Fish Friday page that could possibly surpass what is already there.

Enjoy your weekend by watching the Cubs battle the insolent, shirt-untucking Brewers, jingoistically lashing out against the good people of Grenada, and ordering man-apes from the James Bond villain catalog. Of course, it wouldn't be Independence Day without a gratuitious Jeff Goldblum mention, so here's an article about him being needlessly weird on Law and Order: Criminal Intent or unexpectedly not dead.

Spring Pro Football

Northwestern has extended Coach Fitz through 2015 in an effort to extend the fist pump gap against Big Ten opponents. The deal is a no-brainer; Northwestern fans cannot think of anyone else in the country they want in charge of the program, and Fitzgerald says he does not want to go anywhere. That Wildcat fans believe him when most college football coaches are a combination of treacherous snake oil salesman, glad-handing, corrupt good ol' boy state congressperson, and poet/warlord speaks volumes to what he means to the program. Things did get a bit convoluted late last year with swirling Fitz to Notre Dame rumors no doubt cooked up by the Sun-Times and the sort of conniving papist agents that Dan Brown really wants to exist, but those have dissipated.

Coach Fitz gets his ceaseless energy from NU fan enthusiasm and by traveling
around the country decapitating lesser coaches who stand in his way

In other Northwestern news, three former NU players have been drafted by the new USFL league tentatively scheduled to begin play in February 2010 and fold sometime in March. C.J. Bachér has been drafted by the as-yet-unnamed New York team, and Prince Kwateng was chosen by San Francisco. Tim McGarigle has evidently turned in his badge to St. Louis after growing disgusted with the due process involved with their special teams and decided to tackle ball carriers himself after the brutal stiff-arming of his partner just one week from retirement, but failing that, he has been drafted by the Orlando USFL team.

"You're a loose cannon, McGarigle"

Look also for the return of Dennis Green, who coached the Wildcats in the 1980s and has evidently been punching at the microphone to return to coaching. Other notable players include Michigan's Chris Perry, Wisconsin's Brooks Bollinger, and someone named "Fred Bledsoe."

SPRING PROFESSIONAL FOOTBALL LEAGUES

There are few things more prone to a tragic romantic failure than an attempt to start an alternative spring football league. These operations fail for a number of reasons: for one, the sports landscape becomes crowded in the spring, with basketball and hockey playoff races heating up, March Madness, and the childlike joy of the first images of corpulent relief pitchers waddling around some complex in Florida or Arizona practicing a nineteenth century stretching regimen followed by the arrival of new players and the first sweet crack of the bat heralding the beginning of baseball season that will inevitably end with disappointment or searing heartbreak because your team hasn't won anything since the Kaiser menaced Europe and Yugoslavia was born and collapsed and never will for some mystifying cosmic reason.

Planning the next professional spring football league

The other reason is because these spring leagues are inevitably bereft of solid franchise ownership and constantly plagued by teams moving, bad management, and comically bad ideas. For example, the World Football League, as shoddy a fly-by-night sports organization as any that had ever existed, where players feared visits by both the Turk and the repo man, nearly implemented a special color-coded system for players' pants based on position including featuring stars on the pants for quarterbacks. The World Football League did become a pioneer in ridiculous team names including the Birmingham Vulcans, the Memphis Southmen, and the Shreveport Steamer, which will escape further comment.

The original USFL lasted from 1983-1985 and managed to lose $163 million. Few teams lasted from season to season, and at one point Arizona and Chicago somehow traded franchises. According to the widipedia page, the San Antonio Gunslingers simply stopped paying players, some of whom "were forced to move in with sympathetic fans." The UFL did attract NFL-caliber talent including MVPs Jim Kelly and Herschel Walker as well as the venerable Doug Flutie, but, much like the World Football League, it could not remain stable enough get a grip on fans and ended up inevitably pursuing an anti-trust suit against the NFL.

The most spectacular bust in recent memory is Vince McMahon's XFL, that sought to bring the understated sophistication of professional wrestling broadcasts to football.

Vince McMahon

On paper, the XFL had many advantages: it owned all of the franchises, preventing the squirrelly management that hurt the WFL and USFL, it secured the participation of Dick Butkus, snagging him from the set of "Hang Time," and it promised the type of tawdry gimmicks that inevitably come from using the letter X to stand for "extreme."

The X-treme phenomenon taken well past its logical limit. My
review of xXx: State of the Union can be summed up by the
sentence "Xibit has lines."

The XFL did debut to massive hype and made a number of small contributions to sporting lore: Rod Smart's inexplicably brilliant "He Hate Me" jersey, the return of Rashaan Salaam, the questions raised about the duties and responsibilities of a sitting Minnesota governor, and the possibility that Maniax might be the most inane name of any sports team ever, including the Paraguayan soccer team named after Rutherford B. Hayes.

Even a spring league officially sanctioned by the NFL was destined for failure. Granted, NFL Europa was designed to foster interest in football in Europe as well as develop talent, but American fans largely dismissed it as a curious punchline, and as its existence facilitated a chain of events that led to Jonathan Quinn starting games for the Chicago Bears, I am forced to agree.

NFL Europa employed some minor stylistic differences from NFL
football to make it more palatable in Europe

The financial chaos of the WFL and USFL are actually seductive; that is, owners think that if they can get a business model that does not involve moving teams in the manner of military commanders pushing tanks around those giant table maps with those special tank pushing croupier devices, actually pay players to play, and maintain stable leadership, the leagues could succeed. Instead, the new USFL should consider whether there is a natural saturation point in interest in football and if it is possible to create fan interest in teams after they have already invested so much attention in college football and the NFL. It's impossible to see any spring league rising above the level of niche league beyond appealing to absolute football fanatics and fans of novelty sports leagues.

The odds are against the success of the new USFL, but it is in the hands of Commissioner Michael Huyghue, who boasts an mystifyingly unpronounceable name, but also an uncanny ability to manipulate the shape of his head.

These are two images of Huyghue taken from the USFL site, from his blog index
and then an actual post. I refuse to support the USFL until it resolves this
crucial issue of the exact grade of Mr. Huyghue's head pointiness

BASEBALL AND GOGGLES

Earlier this evening, Cubs closer Kevin Gregg served up a walk-off two run homer after a fantastic shot by Micah Hoffpauir off of Joel Zumaya put the Cubs ahead. Gregg has an above-average ERA+ of 110, a fairly average WHIP of 1.33, and 11 saves, which conventionally means that he's not a terrible pitcher (although Fangraphs calculates a more damning Fielder Independent Pitching stat of 4.59 on an ERA scale). A rational person might argue that it is his tendency to walk batters and occasionally melt down that creates an anti-Gregg furor among Cubs fans; the fact that he replaced Kerry Wood does not hurt although Wood's recent performance has mollified those feelings. Instead, I argue that the invective against Gregg has as much to do with his stupid goggles as his occasional incompetence on the mound.

The Kevin Gregg experience

In fact, I posit that goggled relief pitchers inspire a unique ire in baseball. In other sports, especially basketball, Rec Specs added a certain charm: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Horace Grant, BYCTOM favorite Antoine "Big Dog, damn your eyes Glen Robinson" Carr all were accepted with their goggles. Basketball fans even embrace those face protector masks that Rip Hamilton wore that make it look like they are the only things preventing them from launching into a Lecter-esque cannibal frenzy.

Goggled relief pitchers, however, tend to have sordid reputations-- Francisco Rodriguez, whose wild gesticulations recall the spasmodic reaction to an unexpected encounter with a Portuguese Man o'war or the celebration of a lesser Gramatica, Eric Gagné, the portly department store Santa implicated in the Mitchell Report for all but writing "steroids" on a check memo, and Kyle Farnsworth, baseball's greatest brawling pitcher who started wearing goggles most likely as a way to conceal a shiv and is guaranteed a job in the majors for fear of a Shawn Chacon incident that would turn an executive into a crater and a damp wingtip.

The Legion of Goggled Relievers

By donning the goggles, Kevin Gregg willingly joins this evil legion. I imagine that they gather in a bullpen in a hollowed out volcano, coming up with plots to blackmail the UN into forcing umpires to enforce a looser strike zone, owners to increase the dimensions of their parks, and someone else to give them a card promising a lifetime supply of Chicken McNuggets. Unfortunately, their plan, developed by Farnsworth, involves writing the words "Space Lazer" on a giant sheet of cardboard covered in tissue paper and festive streamers. Gagné prepares the "Good afternoon, gentlemen" speech in front a rasterized portrait of Ricky Vaughn, while Rodriguez practices a series of enraged fistpumps to show the depth of his seriousness and Kevin Gregg, I'd imagine, merely runs back and forth after accidentally setting himself on fire.

The Legion of Goggled Receivers is less
effective than other master criminal legion
organizations

The new USFL presumably has a more competent organizational structure behind it than a set of rogue goggled relief pitchers. It, however, faces a long struggle to become a relevant sports institution, stepping over the bloated corpses of myriad failed opportunities to extend the football cash cow into the spring. Even if it does not work out, perhaps it can keep Bachér, Kwateng, and McGarigle in the football limelight long enough for them to catch on with an NFL team. In the meantime, the USFL owners will leave Commissioner Huyghue tilting at the windmills, dreaming the impossible dream, and somehow adjusting his head.

Interleague Baseball

Interleague play between the Cubs and White Sox begins this week providing the city with playoff intensity, bragging rights, and an excuse for local face-punching enthusiasts to practice their art on unsuspecting drunks. All great sports rivalries are at root inconsequential, but the Cubs/Sox rivalry remains one of the most nonsensical rivalries in all of sports. Between 1906 and 1997, the Cubs and Sox did not play a single meaningful game against each other, yet the two fanbases share a pathological antipathy. In theory, the Cubs and Sox play in separate leagues and share a startling history of futility and a fanbase of mustard enthusiasts-- there is basically no logical reason not to root for both teams or at least maintain a benign indifference to the neighboring club instead the kind of searing, fist-shaking hatred practiced by French mobs against anyone in a powdered wig or a chocolate-guzzling monseignor. Then again, by this logic the Hatfields and McCoys should have realized their similarities as moonshine drinking, possum gobbling, rifle toting, buckskin wearing, toothless shitkickers and combined into a massive jugband, doubling up on knee-slappers, washbin scrapers, and gutbucket experts.

While the washtub is possibly more emblematic of the
classic hobo jug band, the gutbucket is a vastly
superior hobo instrument in terms of versatility,
required skill, potential stew earning power, and
ability to ward off railroad bulls

Like most great sports rivalries, however, the Cubs/Sox rivalry comes from some sort of primordial place that defies logic. Part of being a Cubs fan is taking shots at U.S. Cellular Field (which has evolved into an underrated ballpark) as bland and corporate while Sox fans follow Ozzie's lead by decrying Wrigley's monuments to failure, propensity to attack passersby with unexpected masonry assaults, and incubation of a swaggering vermin population. Therefore, Chicago baseball fans should choose a side and deal with opposing fans by puffing out their chests and displaying eye spots in the threatening manner.

BYCTOM fully supports the "when you're a jet, you're a jet all the way"
school of sports fandom, gangland activity, and grandes jetes. On a
somewhat related note, a shark is so much better than a jet as a
gang mascot (are jets a killing machine made of nothing but
cartilage, teeth, and malevolence?) that it is not even worth discussing

INTERLEAGUE HISTORY

The greatest interleague series between the Cubs and Sox was the 1906 World Series, the first and only postseason meeting between the teams. The "Hitless Wonder" Sox upset the Cubs with Hall of Famer Ed Walsh winning games three and five.


The 1906 White Sox (above) and Cubs. Both teams showcase an extremely
disappointing lack of facial hair, with the main difference coming from the
pictured executives' haberdasherment. The Cubs' C.G. Williams (mentioned here
as a club treasurer) prefers the Jack the Ripper suspect look while "The Old Roman"
Comiskey has the bowtie and more sporting hat allowing him greater mobility for
foreclosing on the dozen existing Spanish-American war widows and stabbing at
Dickensian orphans with a sharpened pince-nez

The modern interleague series has a more festive air. City officials celebrate the ballparks' connection by putting the game ball on the Red Line to be carried by a handpicked malodorous wino or a confidence man with an elborate rhyme taunting fellow patrons into challenging him at three card monte. The most recently indicted city official gets to throw out the first pitch to a mafioso-turned-state's witness.

Wednesday night is "Grand Jury Night" where a lucky fan will
be able to pull a crooked alderman's corruption case off stet, and
the verdict will be decided by fanometer, as the founding fathers
intended

While the 1906 series featured Hall of Famers like Mordecai "Three Finger Brown," Tinker, Evers, Chance, Ed Walsh, and George Davis, the modern interleague series has been marked by mediocre players tormenting the Cubs, like Twins irritant and high priest of the unnecessary head-first slide into first base in blatant defiance of the physical laws of the universe Nick Punto. It's one thing for Carlos Lee to clobber the Cubs; the gelatinous devotee to the sloppy chin beard who loves waddling around the basepaths at Wrigley Field after inevitably assailing Waveland Avenue with grand slams so much that he now only plays for NL Central teams is an all-star caliber player. Surely the greatest White Sox player in this category is former shortstop Jose Valentin, the only batter who demanded a batting cape and was banned from Minute Made Field due to fears that he would tie helpless women to the railroad tracks in front of the orange train before escaping with a cackle and demanding that fans pay the rent.

Only British Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald could use his mustache more
effectively to cast aspersions upon his enemies

I cannot currently find a website that publishes hitters' stats against a specific team, and I am unwilling to manually sift through Valentin's game-by-game stats only to have my anecdotal assertions disproved by inconvenient data, but I clearly remember Valentin as a constant thorn in the side of the Cubs despite his slightly below average career 96 OPS+.

SUBMARINES HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH INTERLEAGUE PLAY

A recent article that caught my attention is David Kushner's piece for the Times about the use of semi-submersible submarine crafts to smuggle drugs. The vessels are assembled deep in Colombian jungles and are capable of traveling hundreds of miles with a cargo of thousands of tons of cocaine shrouded from military radar, a safer and more efficient way to haul a large amount of cargo than with go-fast boats or massive condom-swallowing operations. Kushner notes that the crews refer to the vessel as el ataúd (the coffin) for its cramped conditions and rickety construction reflecting what one naval officer described as a Mad Max style, although the tight quarters dissuade a Road Warrior wardrobe as crew members are reluctant to inadvertently stab each other with unnecessary sadomasochistic spikes jutting out from leather chaps.

Lord Humungous demonstrates submersible fashion faux-pas with
studded vests and chain-link gimp tethering

The submersible technology has improved, with crews using lead and piping cool water to reduce the engine's heat signature. The Bigfoot II, presumably named to echo the creatures' impossibility to detect without the aid of moonshine or a Fox camera crew, remains the only semi-submersible captured intact by the U.S. This video shows the seizing of the vessel and gives a shaky tour of the inside of the boat.

The use of these crude yet sophisticated vehicles recalls the development of submersibles and submarines. The first working submarine dates all the way back to 1620 when Cornelius Jacobszoon Drebbel built an oar-powered sub for England's Royal Navy, a remarkable feat considering the alchemical scientific climate, where, according to his Wikipedia page, Boyle claimed that "Drebbel had a chemical liquor that would replace that quintessence of air that was able to cherish the vital flame residing in the heart."

Drebbel's submarine could travel for three hours submerged at 12-15
feet in an age of leech-driven medical technology

The American Civil War provided the first military testing ground for submarines. The first U.S. Navy sub was the Alligator, which did not actually undertake any military missions but was commanded by Samuel Eakins, who, even by lofty Civil War standards, sported an excellent combat beard.

Samuel Eakins oversaw the
Alligator's glorious puttering around
in Navy experiments before it was
scuttled in a storm or engulfed
in a mislaid pair of Civil War
muttonchops

The Confederate H.L. Hunley did successfully destroy the Union Housatonic with a spar torpedo as a punishment for naming a ship or any object not endorsed by Billy Mays"Housatonic," but the experiment was a mixed bag as its crews tended to drown. The H.L. Hunley sent 32 soliders to a watery grave during its career. The Hunley showed that submarines that did not kill crew members could be useful in combat, and submarines did eventually become the infernal tools of the hated Kaiser.

The Kaiser sends one six-footer Allied
shipping couldn't handle ladies let's have
a party

The Cubs and White Sox meet in this first series to torpedo each others' tenuous playoff hopes. Let us hope that the teams display the quintessence of air and the fans challenge the vital flame of competition residing in the heart but their reliance on chemical liquors could result in watery deaths or overly aggressive pas de basque.

Baseball Draft

Tuesday is baseball's draft, which tends to function as a minor event in the baseball world. It certainly has less flash than the NFL and NBA drafts; Major League Baseball got the draft televised this year by taking control of its own network, taking a page out of the Silvio Berlusconi playbook.

Selig's Forza Baseball policy hinges on retroactively changing baseball rules that effect
him, but has been hampered by the publication of nude photos of aged Czechs taken at
his villa, an ugly public feud with his wife over the appointment of former beauty
queens and television personalities to European Parliament (over which Major League
Baseball evidently has no authority), and a photo posing strategy based on a complete
misunderstanding of the Jowellgate scandal.

Interest in the MLB draft eludes all but the most hardcore baseball fans for several reasons: the relative unpopularity of college baseball coupled with the fact that so many prospects come from high school, the concept of "sandwich picks" and other vagaries resulting from the loss of different types of free agents graded by a shadowy cabal of of Freemasons, the fact that few ever make the majors, and the fact that the draft is restricted to American and Canadian players while the teams stock their foreign talent through some sort of shady process spinning a web of treachery and deceit across Latin America.

A strategic meeting of baseball scouts in Santo Domingo

The success of a player rarely has anything to do with his position in the draft, with first rounders floundering about in the minors unable to deal with tougher opponents, or succombing to injuries or gunshot wounds from mysterious women in black who follow them onto trains, an injury that accounts for a startling 14% of prematurely ended careers. Northwestern's own J.A. Happ avoided this fate after going in the third round to the Phillies in 2004 and is enjoying his first season as a full-time starter.


J.A. Happ joins Northwestern alums Joe Girardi and Mark Loretta in
the Bigs

SUPERPROSPECTS

The exception to the rule is the few highly hyped prospects at the top of the draft, expected to charge through the minor leagues and serve as cornerstones of the franchise. This year, San Diego State ace Steven Strasburg is touted as the can't-miss prospect that could help change the fortunes of the Washington Nationals who have been afflicted by the "Curse of the Youppi" caused by their hasty departure from Montreal as well as the team's brazen taunting of all of the city's soothsayers, monkey skull retailers, crusty old hermits, and Indian grave yards.

Talk of a can't-miss pitcher coming out of college naturally engenders painful comparisons to Mark Prior, whose brilliant 2003 season gave way to an improbable series of shoulder injuries and the occasional freak injury such as when he took a line drive to the elbow, collided with Marcus Giles, and rented an apartment in Chicago's hanging piano district. None of these skeptics have thought about the improbability of a pitcher repeating Prior's career cycle of brilliance matched by an alternating series of freak accidents and the replacement of his shoulder with a cylinder of Cream of Wheat. After speculation of a comeback with the Padres, Prior has been unable to return to the mound; take a look at this list of his recent activity and take a shot every time you see the phrase "Dr. James Andrews."

The classic Prior injury cycle in which Prior reports to camp, claims that he is
feeling better than ever and ready to pitch, and then falls into unforeseen tragedy

The 2001 draft was seen as a symbol of baseball's financial inequity, as Minnesota passed up drafting Prior because they could not afford all of the marriageable daughters and spices from the Orient demanded by Prior's representation of agents and traveling Khanate administration. Instead, the Twins had to get by with Joe Mauer and his batting titles. Who else was available in the first round in 2001 instead of Prior? Mark Teixeira, for one, as well as a surprising number of serviceable major leaguers. The Cubs' roster includes the eighteenth and nineteenth picks of that draft, although Aaron Heilman may still be on the payroll of a competing team in an effort to sabotage the club with his shoddy relief pitching and attempts to convince Cubs that the umpires plan on seizing their children through the aid of an apparatus hidden in the gatorade dispenser.

Other drafts do not seem to have as fruitful of a first round. For example, the 2004 first round seems to lack many bona fide major leaguers, although it does reveal that the St. Louis Cardinals spent the nineteenth pick on Christopher Lambert.

Christopher Lambert's epic rise from the
Quad Cities River Bandits to AA
Springfield to player to be named later in a
trade for Mike Maroth

VERCINGÉTORIX

Christopher Lambert, best known as Connor Macleod in the Highlander movies where he would chop off enemies' heads before being showered in sparks as opposed to when he was in the Mortal Kombat movie and shot showers of sparks at his enemies, also starred in Druids about the life of Gaul leader Vercingétorix. The trailer for the movie covers the requisite Roman war movie motif, alternating shots of clanking soldiers marching across a field and hairy men shouting in slow motion while tantalizing potential viewers with two snippets of dialogue ("You wanna fight? You wanna live forever? Then I will lead you!" and "We have made an enemy. And it would have been much better to have him as a friend.") in French accents so comical that at special screenings, the movie would pause occasionally to batter the audience with baguettes.

Vercingétorix rose from the Gallic province of Gergovia in the middle of present-day France and led an army against Caesar's invading legions. Unfortunately for Vercingétorix, he came down on the wrong side of a besiegement, a common barbarian ailment along with haunch rot, goblet rash, and battleaxe elbow. Though Vercingétorix lost and was subsequently paraded around as a trophy by the victorious Caesar while his land was enslaved to the Romans and then subsequently executed, he became a nationalist symbol under Napoleon III who commissioned a suitably violent statue of him trampling a hapless Roman as he rides to his death. Napoleon III emulated his hero a bit too closely as he discovered that Kaiser was German for Caesa. The Emperor led Frenchmen to glorious surrender as well, although luckily for him, by nineteenth century, captured heads of state merely spent time waxing their Van Dyke beard and getting deposed by unruly French mobs eager to declare another republic.

An illustration from Guizot's 1883 History
of France depicts Vercingetorix either
surrendering to Caesar or accepting a quest
to find the Sword of Foreboding that he will
use to destroy Ceasar when he turns into a
giant snake

The Cubs have the 23rd pick in the draft. Whoever they end up selecting, let's hope that Hendry offers each selection the proper words of encouragement: You wanna play forever? Then I will draft you!