By Mike Conklin
In between firing Dale Tallon and getting booed at the recent Blackhawks convention, John McDonough found welcome relief at the Union League Club. The occasion was the Ring Lardner Awards, where McDonough gave a speech to toast Harry Caray. The awards are held to celebrate sports journalism in Chicago and raise money for charity, which this year was the Boys & Girls Clubs of America. McDonough, who knows a lot about all of the above, was excellent.
It had been several years since the Lardner Awards were held, owing as much to the closing of the Chicago Athletic Association club, where the dinner was enthusiastically embraced, as the state of the industry. The event always has been fun, a chance for the city’s sports insiders to reminisce in a public setting and outsiders to listen and be entertained. This is exactly how the old Sportswriters radio show, granddaddy of sports talk in Chicago, got started back in the 1970s, when customers at the Billy Goat eavesdropped on Tribune and Sun-Times scribes swapping stories.

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Posted on July 30, 2009

By Dan O’Shea
The MLB trading deadline draws nigh, and it seems quite possible that the biggest deal already has been made. It involved a player named Holliday rather than one named Halladay (totally different name, startlingly similar pronunciation). The deal we speak of is the one that sent OF Matt Holliday from the Oakland A’s to the St. Louis Cardinals. It is still quite possible that starting pitcher Roy Halladay could be moved to Philadelphia, though his Toronto Blue Jays reportedly were holding for too much.
Among other possible moves, the C/1B Victor Martinez could end up at a new address, and any number of smaller deals could be done, but at least as of Tuesday night not much was happening. The only other trade of note in recent days sent 1B Adam LaRoche from the Pittsburgh Pirates to the Boston Red Sox.
The Holliday move must be considered a serious boost for Holliday owners. It takes him out of a ball-eating canyon in Oakland, and puts him in a park friendlier to homerun hitter, and in a line-up stocked with menace.
Here’s a quick take on some recently traded players and other names in the news, complete with Fantasy Fix Action Ratings:

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Posted on July 29, 2009

By Jim Coffman
“Well,” I thought to myself last Thursday afternoon, “I’ll never convince him to be a Cub fan now.” My 10-year-old son Noah had attended Mark Buehrle’s perfect game with fellow campers and counselors from his day camp and it seemed clear the experience would seriously strengthen the foundation of his Sox fandom. His dad the Cub fan wasn’t excited about that of course but the boy had witnessed baseball history – the kind that only happens a time or two every decade.
And Noah is the kind of kid who could at least start to appreciate what he’d seen. As I waited to pick him up, I saw some fellow campers I had met previously and greeted them with things like “You saw a perfect game! There have been only 17 of those in 120 years of major league baseball! Congratulations on witnessing one of the biggest things ever for the White Sox! A few of them perked up a bit but they were also battling the after-effects of a long bus ride back from U.S. Cellular.

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Posted on July 28, 2009

By Andrew Reilly
It’s tempting to use events like Mark Buehrle’s perfect game as a foundation for projecting how the rest of the season might go, an especially stupid proposition considering just how much of an aberration the event really is; you might as well say Jim Thome’s seven-RBI outings show a team that’s finally turned the corner. But what Buehrle’s tremendous achievement does give us is a guarantee of some degree of fond remembrance of the 2009 season.
Even if they keep losing so badly to the teams they’re supposed to beat, the perfect game was still awesome.

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Posted on July 27, 2009

By Marty Gangler
How meaningful is it that the Cubs are in first place in the NL Central? Well, we here at The Cub Factor think it’s sort of like being the tallest Fontenot. Or the largest shrimp in the basket. Or the least corrupt politician in Illinois. Oh yeah, we’ve got a bunch of ’em. It’s sort of like being . . .
* The most honest lawyer in the phone book
* The best golfer at the Putt-Putt
* The best episode of Real World: Cancun
* The best reporter on your local TV news
* The world’s strongest 80-year-old man
* Homeless but with a kickass cardboard box
* The best movie on Lifetime this year
* The best Coldplay song
* The smallest check you’ll bounce this week
* The first team that will get knocked out of the NL playoffs

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Posted on July 27, 2009

By Thomas Chambers
In baseball or football or basketball, it’s easy.
We see those guys, many obscenely overpaid, dog it and style it and then try to explain it and we know they’re just mooks. We know who they are and what they are.
But in Thoroughbred horse racing, you have the supreme intangible, the more than half-a-ton beast that has served man for millennia. Who knows which came first? The race, or the idea of betting on it.

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Posted on July 24, 2009

By David Rutter
1. Creepy Caskets
Even for those of us lured into the murky, pained catacombs of Notre Dame football fandom, this is really spooky.
The monks at the Trappist New Melleray Abbey in Peosta, Iowa, hand-carve caskets just for Notre Damers. For $2,560, you can get a hand-made oak ship set sail down the river Styx, and it you have left this world with a larger-than-normal butt, they have an oversized model for $2,800. I may need the XXXL model.

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Posted on July 23, 2009

By Dan O’Shea
The week of the All-Star Game is a godsend for some and a bit of bad luck for others, the sort of week where you see cellar-dwelling fantasy teams beat top-clubs if they happen to have all their pitchers starting or enough position playesr with Thursday games right after the three-day break.
You also have to be careful about working the waiver wire, because you sometimes see the odd reliever or call-up get a start as teams try to re-arrange their rotations around the break. You also might see pre-trading deadline trades give no-name players a batch of starts, though that doesn’t necessarily mean they will continue to start.
That’s why some of the hot hands you have seen on the waiver wire over the last week or so might seem unfamiliar. Here’s a Fantasy Fix Action Rating guide to some recent hot hands and what to do with them.

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Posted on July 22, 2009

By Eric Emery
Is Jay Cutler the Messiah?
He’s at least Messiah-like. He shares initials with the big guy, his middle name is Christopher, and he’s done battle against non-believers. In his (His) senior year of high school, he led his team to the state championship against Zionsville. Oh, and he was born in Santa Claus, Indiana.
If that isn’t enough for you, here are some other similarities between Jay Cutler and Jesus Christ.

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Posted on July 21, 2009

By Jim Coffman
Hey John McDonough, the next time you’re going to fire a flat-out successful general manager (the Blackhawks improved every season Dale Tallon was at the helm, culminating in an exciting run to the conference finals this year), maybe you should do it before he makes so many moves in the off-season that your roster is just about locked in for the next year. In fact, the Hawks are essentially locked in for the next couple years given all of their multi-year contracts and the NHL’s iron-clad salary cap (a team has to keep its payroll below the cap even if an owner would be willing to pay a luxury tax, like he could if he was an NBA owner).

Beachwood Baseball: The White Sox Report The Cub Factor will return next week

At least you should do that, John, if you hope to convince fans with at least an intermittent pulse that the move was due to anything other than a childish personality conflict. McDonough’s team was so lucky last year when it made another knee-jerk decision with significant consequences. That was when the Blackhawks waited until several games into the regular season before firing coach Denis Savard and bringing in Joel Quenneville. Of course, if they were even considering making a change early last season/pre-season, they should have done so well before training camp began, let alone the regular season. That’s what competent teams do to give the new guy a chance to comprehensively implement his system. But they caught a huge break when the veteran Quenneville hit the ice skating and was successful immediately and over the long haul of last season.

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Posted on July 20, 2009