You do more before 9AM than we do all day.

When I was a kid, like most sane American kids in the late 70’s/early 80’s, I was a big fan of KISS.  “Was” is a misleading term - I’m STILL a fan of KISS.  Maybe not with the intensity I had back then, sure - I’m not drawing KISS logos on any of the TPS reports I do for work, after all - but if you want to make me happy when I’m at your house (and I’m coming over tomorrow - you have beer in the fridge, right?  Good) put on Side 1 (ah, back when you could refer to music by what side of the record it was on.  Good times) of KISS Alive II and you’ll have a friend for life - or at least until “Any Way You Want It” comes on.  Man, that song is lame.

Anyway.

I never put much thought into the men behind the makeup when I was a big KISS fan - I’ve never been the kind of person that has to know my favorite rock stars, athletes, or whatever.  The extent of my relationship with them is that they entertain me; anything else is pretty much unnecessary.  But, as I got older and started reading and listening to a wider variety of media, it’s inevitable that you get to know more about the entertainment and sports people in which you have an interest.

It was in this vein, one day several years ago, that I sat down to listen to Fresh Air with Terry Gross, because Gene Simmons was going to be on.  Now, by this time, I of course knew the basic arc of the Simmons life - lots of chicks, lots of stage blood, almost insatiable greed for money, kind of arrogant - but I’d never really heard what he had to say about anything in any depth.

And, once I listened to the interview, I never wanted to hear his voice ever again, unless it was singing “Calling Dr. Love”.  I don’t know how much of it was an act and how much of it was Gene Simmons, but wow - the man is a complete pig.  I’m not sure how much respect I had for him before I heard that interview, but afterwards, I can’t really even look at Gene Simmons and take him seriously as a human being, because he’s a complete troglodyte.

With that in mind, let’s talk about Buzz Bissinger for a second.  I’ve always been a fan of his writing - Friday Night Lights was great, as was Three Days In August for the most part.  He’s very good at weaving a narrative, and at emotionally investing the reader in his characters and the story they’re telling, which is all you can ask from a person who writes about something as emotional as sports.

There was something, though, about Three Days In August that stuck in my craw, as it were.  In the foreword, and I apologize for not having the exact text, Bissinger went off on any sort of statistical analysis as if it were straight from the hand of Satan himself; it was jarring, even though I’m not much with stats myself (but mostly because I’m not good at reading/creating/interpreting them, not because I don’t think they have value), to hear someone go so completely off the rails on something that has a definite part to play in the game.

But, I quickly forgot that as I lost myself in the book; it was a very engaging read, and all in all well worth the time.  I then put Buzz Bissinger out of my mind entirely, to be brought back up only when he put out a new book or something.

But then, as you all probably know by now, Tuesday night Bissinger was a guest on Costas Now.  It was a Very Special Episode of Costas Now, in which Costas had five 15-minute panels on the state of sports and the media.  One of the segments concerned the relationship between sports and the internet, and that panel consisted of Buzz Bissinger, Will Leitch (founder of Deadspin and author of the excellent God Save The Fan) and Braylon Edwards.

Within about 10 seconds, it was apparent that Bissinger had an agenda - and that agenda was to attack Leitch for being responsible for all things Internet - it started off with Bissinger calling Leitch “full of shit” (in a tirade about the vulgarity and baseness of the internet - IRONY!) and went downhill from there.  Leitch did as well as could be expected in a forum where both Bissinger and Costas seemed to want to do nothing but say “wow the Internet is a horrible, horrible place”; he could barely get a word in edgewise, and when he did he kinda struggled to make his points, but in his defense he was taking such a voluminous cascade of shit from Bissinger that I’m impressed he didn’t just stand up and say “OH MY GOD DUDE ARE YOU GOING TO LET ME SPEAK OR ARE YOU JUST GOING TO KEEP VOMITING THIS CRAP FOR THE ENTIRE 15 MINUTES?”

Both Bissinger and Costas seemed to not know the difference between a “blog post” and a “comment” - Costas, especially, honed in on Deadspin’s comments (which range from the hysterical to the vulgar to the vulgarly hysterical) as a representative of the entire body of sports writing on the internet.  And not even all of them - he focused on one comment to one post, and used that one comment to make the point that the Internet is a vulgar place populated by morons, a point which Bissinger was happy to lap up and regurgitate.

You really need to see the whole thing to get a sense for how hideous Bissinger was - oh look, here it is now!  I’m a big believer in the power of body language - you can get a really good idea for how someone percieves something by how they sit/stand/look when they are interacting with you, and Bissinger’s body language was all about disconnection and disdain.  He spent most of the interview reading from a file folder, and when he could be bothered to look anybody in the eye the venom in his stare was almost comical.

I’m definitely a proponent of the debate between old and new media - there are things to be gained from both camps, and just like anything else, it’s not a black and white issue.  But Bissinger didn’t come on Costas Now for a debate - he came, soapbox in hand, to decry Everything That Is Wrong With The World Today, and by God, that’s what he did.  Vehemently.  Crudely.  And not at all effectively.  As Leitch himself wrote, what Bissinger did was melt down, very publicly, and to very little effect, on national cable TV.  Unlike Leitch, though, I don’t pity Bissinger; I find him contemptible and increasingly irrelevant.  And I don’t blame (or credit) the internet for that - I blame Bissinger.

He could have had valid points.  He could have legitimate issues.  But, in that interview, all I saw was a raving lunatic with an ax to grind; that does very little to make me sympathetic to his stance, if it had any validity in the first place.

So, congratulations, Buzz Bissinger; you’ve achieved the same level of pigheaded stupidity in my book as Gene Simmons.  Your parents must be so proud of you.

The first month of the season is in the books, kids.  How quickly time flies - this time last month, we were all giddy with anticipation, thinking this might be The Year - not The World Series Year, maybe, but at least The Year The Mariners Stopped Tripping Over Themselves And Made The Playoffs.  Which, admittedly, doesn’t look as good on a t-shirt, but we’ll take what we can get, no?

It’s 26 games later, now, and what’s happened?  The M’s have gone 12-14 against a schedule that wasn’t as harsh as the rest of the West; playing Baltimore, Kansas City, and Texas is a good way to ease your way into a season, work out the last remaining kinks, and be in good shape for the Anaheims and Oaklands of the world, or so we all thought.  The M’s proceeded to get their butts handed to them by the Orioles (1-6?  Really? Wow.  Just…wow.), and just kinda managed to tread water against everyone else.  So much for a strong start.

But that’s not the worst of it.  Not by a long shot.  The front office is at it again.  Now, the Mariners are not blessed with a stellar history when it comes to personnel moves, and regardless of what you think of Erik Bedard (and I think quite highly of him), trading Adam Jones and George Sherrill to get him, when what this team needs is a LF that can cover some ground, was probably overpaying.  And it’s coming back to bite the M’s - there’s no real pop anywhere in the lineup, and Adam Jones would have definitely been a welcome addition.

Anyway, as if that wasn’t bad enough, this week the M’s stunned pretty much everyone by offering Kenji Johjima a three year extension, which Johjima jumped on before the M’s front office had a chance to realize how stupid they were being.  This seems to be another in the long, long history of PR-driven moves by the Mariners - there can’t really be any sort of baseball rationale for it that I can see.

Johjima’s a catcher, which means he takes a beating pretty much every day.  He’s a hacktastic presence at the plate, too - he’s never really met a first pitch he didn’t like.  Combine those things with the fact that he’s 32 years old, and what this deal means is that the M’s have locked up a catcher who, by the end of his new contract, will barely be able to walk and will probably hit about .190 or so, and there you have all the makings of A Very Bad Idea.

But wait!  There’s more!

As most of you probably know, the Mariners have a kid in Tacoma right now named Jeff Clement.  Jeff Clement was the M’s #1 draft pick in 2005, the #3 pick overall.  They have high hopes for the kid, and rumor has it he may get a callup here pretty soon; the M’s could certainly use his bat.  What position does The Talented Mr. Clement play?  You guessed it, sports fans.  He’s a catcher!  So, the M’s signed a rapidly declining 32 year old to a brand-new three year deal, thus blocking their #1 pick from playing the position for which they drafted him.  Smart.

I definitely understand the need for the Mariner marketing department to have a “personality” they can latch on to.  I don’t agree with it, but I understand it.  But what I also understand is that those things can be manufactured.  Raul Ibanez was made the “face” of the franchise by a pretty much arbitrary decision, and that arbitrary decision, in a tangential way, cost the M’s the services of Adam Jones.  What the marketing folks don’t seem to realize, though, is that you can make that decision about ANYBODY on the team, and if you push them out in the spotlight enough, the fans will latch on to whoever they decide worthy.

It’s really time to start clearing some of the Mariner deadwood - Vidro and Wilkerson, I’m looking at you - and when the wood gets cleared, I hope the M’s use baseball as their deciding factor on who they should be replaced with, not marketability.  I know, 31 years of evidence says it won’t happen, but I can still hope, right?

Meanwhile, Barry Bonds still needs a job.  I’m just saying.  Barry Bonds needs a job, and the Mariners need some offense.  How is this not doable?  Barry Bonds is a jerk.  So freakin’ what?  There’s no citizenship score space on the boxscore.  Barry Bonds was rumored to have taken steroids.  Again, so freakin’ what?  Was he the first/last’only player to do so?  The Mariners have employed and do employ players that have tested positive for steroids, so that can’t POSSIBLY be a hurdle for them, can it?

This game is about winning, and Barry Bonds can help a team do that.  He’s not the solution to all the Mariner problems, but he’d be a potent bat in a lineup that has exactly none of those at the moment.  Again, I know it’ll never happen, but if you don’t ask, you don’t get, right?

…22 innings, well, that’s a bit much.  The Padres and Your National League Champion Colorado Rockies played 22 innings last night, and neither team actually scored a run until the 14th.  I love reading stories about games like this, because they invariably mention both the attendance at the start and some reference to how few people stuck it out, like “a tiny fraction of the crowd of X were there at the end” or “Only about X diehards of the announced attendance of Y saw the last out” or something like that.  And you know what?  I admire those people.

I used to BE those people.  I still don’t like leaving 9 inning games early - it takes a lot to get me to leave an MLB game before the last out (a lot being, probably, a hospitalized family member or something serious like that.  Don’t tell me about “beating the traffic” or something lame like that).  Extra inning games used to be no problem - I’d stay until the end, no matter what time, no matter what I had going the next day (which, when i was attending games regularly, was usually not much).  Nowadays, though, even though I’d like to sit here and say “yeah, I would have stayed all 22 innings of that game”, I’m not so sure.  Sure, there are conditions - if it’s a playoff game, or a late-September game with playoff implications, then yeah, I’ll probably tough it out.  But a game in April?  Not bloody likely I’ll stay all 22.

And this fact does, in fact, bother me.  I never used to be conditional.  If I was in the park, I was there to stay, no matter what.  Now, though?  It all depends.  I guess that’s one of the invariable consequences of getting older, that you realize there are things you’d rather be doing than slogging through 22 innings of what was, let’s face it, pretty dire baseball; but still, realizing that there’s no way I’d sit through 22 innings of April baseball at this point in my life was like watching a bit (more) of my youth die.

In other somewhat-tedious-but-better baseball news, the M’s won 8-1 last night.  I didn’t watch all of THAT, either - I watched about 6 innings, and while I was really happy to see the M’s win so easily, it just didn’t have the…electricity of Felix’s start Wednesday, to put it mildly; even though I was all set to watch the end of the game, it got to the end of the 7th and I just couldn’t be bothered anymore.  Believe it or not, this is a sign of progress - it’s been a while since I could comfortably turn away from a televised M’s game in the 7th and know that the game was pretty much in hand.

So now the M’s have played all the rest of the AL West, and what do you know - not only are the M’s 9-8 overall, but they’re FEASTING on the rest of the West.  They’re 6-2 against the three other teams in the division.  Yeah, I know, ultra-small-sample-size-theater, and all that, but it was only two years ago that the M’s only won one game against the A’s ALL DAMN SEASON, so I’ll take a 6-2 division record so far as a sign of pretty solid progress.

Now it’s down the coast to Anaheim for the weekend, and I would love nothing more than for the M’s to roll over the Angels like a lawnmower over a dandelion patch.  Tonight’ll be fun, too - it’s DICKEY TIME!  The hard-throwing knuckleballer takes the mound for the first time this season, against Joe Saunders.  Knuckleballers are awesome.  Unless you’re a catcher, I guess.

Monday and Tuesday, I was on jury duty.  In all my nearly 39 years on the planet, I’d never been called to jury duty - I’d always kinda wanted to, but never got the summons.  So I got one, and I went in all prepared to be bored for eight hours and go home.  Instead, I was on the second panel called up to a courtroom, 20 minutes after I got there.  I then “survived” the lawyer’s questioning process, of which there really wasn’t one - we all had to tell a bunch of demographic info and that was about it, and the lawyers didn’t question any of us individually.

So, I was empaneled and sworn in (man, I love using legal jargon.  Makes me sound smart.), and for two days I sat in a courtroom listening to people argue the bane of the American legal system, the personal injury lawsuit.  It was subsequently pointed out to me that I shouldn’t complain, because I could have gotten a child abuse case or something like that, and it’s definitely better than sitting in a room all day reading the paper, but the whole thing left me feeling a bit dirty afterwards.

Anyway, I told you that story to tell you this one.  I was catching up on my internets this morning, and I ran across an interesting article in the always-interesting Hardball Times.  Those of you that know me, or that follow this sporadic corner of the frontage road next to the information superhighway (do people still call it the information superhighway?), know that I love baseball pretty much the way it is and always have been, and I don’t like change to the game, with a few exceptions; I have come to like the wild-card, and interleague play is mildly entertaining (even though I’m kinda getting tired of it now, I’m not agitated enough to want it to end).

But, in HT today, there was a pretty interesting article about changes that Tom Tango and others were discussing on Tango’s website.  I’ve always wondered if there would be a way to speed baseball up without using a clock - eliminating the requirement that four pitches be thrown for an intentional walk being the easiest one I can think of - but some of these ideas would really help speed the game up, and also make it more interesting.

I think my favorite change in this article is the notion of the penalty for the mid-inning pitching change.  I HATE HATE HATE the LaRussa-style management that changes pitchers every two or three batters late in the game, just for some supposed “advantage”, and this change would address that.  One free change, but then each subsequent change starts the next batter off at 1-0, 2-0, and so on - that would hopefully make managers think twice about stupid, endless pitching changes late in a relatively meaningless game in June.

I’m not sure I agree with the floating DH or the one-and-done DH, really, but they’re intriguing ideas.  The main problem I have with the floating DH is it destroys the continuity of a lineup - if you can do it with a DH, it’s only a matter of time until you can do it with all nine guys in the lineup, and then you get into endless lineup shuffling, which is annoying.

I do really like the commit-line idea for catchers, though - as much fun as it is to watch a hitter barrel into a catcher at top speed, home plate is the only place that is currently allowed to happen.  A guy running out an infield grounder isn’t allowed to mow down the first baseman, so why should a guy heading home be allowed to destroy a catcher?  I’d put the line closer than 30 feet, though, I’d put it 10-15 feet from the plate.  After that, it’s a force at home.

All in all, this is a really interesting read - changes to baseball, and to any sport, need to be evolutionary rather than revolutionary, and most of these do that.

Oh, and Felix Hernandez is a stud.  As if we didn’t all already know that.