Fantasy Fix: Trade Strasburg!

By Dan O’Shea

How can a baseball season that already has two perfect games and one should-have-been perfect game get any better?
Here’s how:
Stephen Strasburg, otherwise known as Fastball Jesus, made his debut Tuesday night, striking out 14 batters in seven innings and getting his first career win in his first try.
Regardless of outcome, his debut alone represented at least a partial payoff for fantasy team owners who used a mid-to-late round draft pick on him but then had to wait through two months of largely perfunctory minor league warm-ups before they could insert him in the starting rotation.

Posted on June 9, 2010

Dadgum Duck Snorts

By Andrew Reilly

Tuesday night is Hawk Harrelson Night at the old ballpark, an evening to commemorate 25 seasons of hangwifums and duck snorts and more Carl Yazstremski adoration than you can shake a career .239 average at.
The team reports Hawkeroo “will be saluted by a number of special guests,” although it is anyone’s guess as to who these special guests may be. Perhaps any number of luminaries from the squad Harrelson assembled during his historic run as general manager, in which true baseball genius fully flexed itself, a lifetime of folksy wisdom come to life as the team that won an unprecedented 72 games in a single season.

Posted on June 8, 2010

Meeting Expectations

By Steve Rhodes

Are the Cubs really underperforming this season?
I seem to recall an offseason lacking in excitement and a tacit acknowledgement that this year’s squad would not be as good as last year’s. The hope, it seemed, was that they would still manage to get themselves into the playoffs and then, somehow, exceed their previous recent appearances because . . . Tyler Colvin was left-handed?
This Cubs team is right where it ought to be – in a mess.

Posted on June 8, 2010

SportsMonday: The Hawks’ Spread Formation

By Jim Coffman

All they had to do was spread out the scorers. That will be the primary storyline. In a couple nights it will be something different but on Sunday, the Hawks put their best forwards forward on several different lines and Chris Pronger couldn’t cover everyone.
(And when Pronger tried to cover Dustin Byfuglien early in the second period, the big Hawk forward knocked him off his skates (with a quick detour into the boards along the way) with one of the most impressive hits in the history of Chicago’s proud professional hockey organ-i-zation.)
Of course, in the Western Conference Finals all they had to do was put the scorers together. That was when Byfuglien, Jonathan Toews and Patrick Kane first (in this postseason) came together on the top line and worked well enough in unison to lead the Hawks to a sweep. The Hawks made adjustments then, they made them on Sunday evening, and they’ll try to make them on the fly during Game 6 in Philly on Wednesday.
If that doesn’t work, at least they’ll have the last game at home. One thing that has been simplified, after early NHL playoff rounds that featured road teams winning just about as many games as home teams, is that the home-ice advantage is important. Five straight victories by the home team forces that sort of an acknowledgement. But it shouldn’t lead to overconfidence. Last year the Red Wings and the Penguins both won the first three games they hosted in the Cup Finals. But then the Penguins rose up on the road to take Game 7.

Posted on June 7, 2010

TrackNotes: A Highly Bettable Belmont

By Thomas Chambers

It’s Belmont Stakes weekend and not only won’t we have a Triple Crown winner again but this year Kentucky Derby winner Super Saver and Preakness Stakes winner Lookin At Lucky will both skip the race.
This should make it a highly bettable Belmont.

Posted on June 4, 2010

Chicago Baseball Goes Bust

By George Ofman

Let’s hear it for the Blackhawks!
The longer they play, the less attention we have to pay to the bust known as Chicago baseball.
I’m not asking the Hawks to stretch this thing out on purpose, but a seven-game series would give us another 10-plus days of avoiding the soon to be unavoidable: The baseball season here is, as Hawk Harrelson would declare, OVA!
How many losses to the Pirates can you stomach? And is it time to scream FIRE SALE on the South Side?

Posted on June 3, 2010

Pregaming The Hawks

A guide to getting into the proper mindset today.
1. “In the end, the Flyers dominated the third period,” Barry Petchesky writes at Deadspin. “And losing a pair of one-goal games at the United Center is nothing to sneeze at. But in the end, it’s frustrating, and that frustration spilled over after the final horn. Chris Pronger went to retrieve a puck from the ice (as he had in game 1). Ben Eager, the ex-Flyer who scored the GWG, told him he could keep it. Pronger responded with a snap shot, sending a towel on the ice, at Eager.

Posted on June 2, 2010

SportsMonday: The Cup Is Chillin’

By Jim Coffman

The Hawks’ first line hasn’t even shown up yet. The entire team struggled mightily on defense in Game 1 and couldn’t put the puck in the net to save their lives for over 59 minutes of Game 2.
And yet the Hawks hold a 2-0 series lead as they head out on the road, where they have been all but unbeatable all postseason long, for Games 3 and 4. I would say it isn’t too early to begin planning for a small celebration in town this weekend . . . a celebration that has been almost a half-century in the making.

Posted on June 1, 2010

Mullet vs. Gullet

By Marty Gangler

As another week goes into the books on the 2010 season and the Cubs do nothing to distinguish themselves as a good team, it’s hard as a Chicago sports fan not to focus completely on the Blackhawks and their Stanley Cup run.
It got me thinking about how the Cubs and Blackhawks are similar and thinking even more about how they are well, un-similar. Sort of like this Beachwood post. Let’s take it a step further.

Posted on June 1, 2010

Trade Konerko

By Andrew Reilly

The best news in White Sox baseball actually came out of Anaheim this weekend, as excellent Angels 1B Kendry Morales crushed his leg celebrating a walk-off home run. Morales, at the time, led the Angels with 11 home runs and 39 RBI and is under an extremely low-dollar contract through the end of 2010 while Sox 1B Paul Konerko, currently decimating American League pitching, is a free agent after 2010 as well and . . . well, you know where this is going.
But I’ll let you in on a secret: I’m rooting for it to happen. In fact, I’m rooting for all of it to happen to all of them.

Posted on June 1, 2010

« Previous 1 2 3