RealityChuck

Carlos Delgado - B+ Jose Valentin -- B+ Jose Reyes - A David Wright - A+ Paul Lo Duca - B Cliff Floyd - B- Carlos Beltran - A+ Xavier Nady - B+ Endy Chavez - A Chris Woodward - B Julio Franco - B- Lastings Millege - B- Ramon Castro - B Eli Merrero - incomplete Tom Glavine - A Pedro Martinez - A- Steve Trachsel - B El Duque - B Alay Soler - C- Jose Lima - F- Billy Wagner - A- Aaron Heilman - B- Duaner Sanchez - B+ Chad Bradford - B Darren Oliver - B Pedro Feliciano - B- Heath Bell - C

Geena Davis in Commander in Chief (It is impossible to de-eroticize Geena Davis). Felicity Huffman in Sports Night.

SteveJRogers wrote: 4 Starters part of a log jam for 2nd all time in the current configuration (and this includes the Final Man voting as well). Reds in 76 lead with 5 Nope. Reds in 1957, with seven starters (later marked down to five). This was fan voting, by the way. Cincinnati fans stuffed the ballot box, voting for all the Reds' starters. Stan Musial was the only non-Red on the starting team. The commissioner of baseball replaced Wally Post and Gus Bell with Willie Mays and Hank Aaron.

I almost called Columbus a total hack, but the Harry Potter films were decent, as was Rent. However, in both cases, he had a sure-fire property and merely competently brought it to the screen (the post-Columbus Potter films are better than his two, though). He has only had two decent films: Only the Lonely, which is a fine film by any standard, and Adventures in Babysitting, which is promising but not great. Most of his stuff was crowd-pleasing crap; Home Alone is only redeemed from boredom by the final sequence, and Mrs. Doubtfire was treacly, unfunny, dishonest and poorly constructed (e.g., they make a big deal about losing Williams' mask, yet when it's destroyed, he gets another in about ten seconds) . Home Alone 2 had all the flaws of the original with nothing funny happening and Nine Months was just plain awful. And if he was involved in renaming "Skipping Christmas" (a good title) to "Christmas with the Kranks" (a terrible one), it shows he's completely deaf to tone as a writer.

http://www.nhl.com/futures/2006draft/glavine062106.html ]Hockey still resonates with Glavine By Adam Rubin | Special to NHL.com June 21, 2006 Tom Glavine regularly attends Thrashers games during the winter. Two decades ago, he was on a path to be on the ice in NHL arenas. Glavine, the New York Mets pitcher who is chugging toward 300 career wins, was selected by the Kings in the fourth round of the 1984 NHL Entry Draft, five rounds before L.A. picked Luc Robitaille. A former lefty-shooting center and two-sport star from Billerica, Mass., Glavine also was selected two rounds before Calgary selected Brett Hull that year. (The star-studded draft also included Mario Lemieux as the first-overall pick.) "That's pretty cool, to think I was drafted ahead of those guys, who turned out to be Hall of Fame players. Naturally one can only assume I would have been a Hall of Fame hockey player because of it, right?" Glavine quipped. Glavine grew up a Bruins fan, and was even honored with the John Carlton Award by the team during intermission at Boston Garden in '84. The award annually goes to the senior who is the top scholar-athlete in the state, and Glavine's goal-scoring prowess and 3.9 GPA more than qualified him. His nickname even was "The Great Glavine", though the southpaw only sheepishly acknowledges it. "Some people called me that," he said. Five days before he was taken by the Kings, Glavine had been selected by the Atlanta Braves in the second round of Major League Baseball's draft. In the end, Glavine's big debate was whether to sign with Atlanta or play both sports at the University of Lowell (now UMass-Lowell), which had Division I hockey and a solid Division II baseball program. When the Braves offered $80,000, first-round money, he was swayed to making baseball his occupation. "I was intent on going to school," Glavine said. "My dad and I talked about it, and our strategy was once we got to the point where we got them to first-round money -- and it's enough money to be worth my while to give up the scholarship -- then we'll think about it. But until then I was going to college. "Hockey, they have your rights for five years, so they knew I was going to college. They called me, 'Hey, we drafted you. We know where you're going to school. We'll keep an eye on you and talk to you in a couple of years.' The Braves were, 'Hey, we drafted you. We want to sign you.'" Glavine would have been hard-pressed to duplicate his baseball success in hockey. He suggests the equivalent of 300 wins is probably 500 or 600 goals. "I think I was good enough to get there," Glavine said about the NHL. "How long I would have lasted, I have no idea. It's hard to imagine my career in hockey would have been better than what it's been in baseball. I was small coming out of high school. I only weighed 175 pounds, so I would have had to get bigger to stick around." Glavine, who spends his winters in Alpharetta, Ga., estimated he attends 10 to 15 Thrashers games each season. He'd go more frequently, but he needs to report to spring training in Port St. Lucie, Fla., by mid-February. "When I'm done playing it will probably be more, because I miss the whole second half of the season," Glavine said. "I love going. My kids love it. It's still probably my favorite sport to watch live. I enjoy going to hockey games more than anything." Glavine's oldest sons, 11-year-old Jonathan and 7-year-old Peyton, play organized hockey. He's hoping to enroll 5-year-old Mason next year. Glavine smiles while discussing his love of the game, which reveals his fake front teeth. Through years of playing hockey his teeth remained intact. It was during a taxi-cab accident as a passenger while riding from La Guardia Airport to Shea Stadium two years ago that he lost his two front teeth, when an SUV slammed into the vehicle in which he was riding. "That was disappointing," Glavine said. "It would have been much more fun to get them knocked out, and much more glamorous to get them knocked out, playing hockey."

"Nobody leaves this place without singing the blues." And the "Babysittin' Blues" is just a great song. One of Chris Columbus's better films. He did a lot of drek (except for Only the Lonely) before Harry Potter. Elizabeth Shue deserved a better career.

I decided to use one of my cards for my avatar. I had to cut off part of it to fit.

It's party time! http://www.deadspin.com/sports/baseball/meet-the-mets-181663.php

Tom Verdacci makes a case that, with Reyes, they're looking at the wrong statistics and he is one of the best leadoff men in baseball: http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2006/writers/tom_verducci/06/20/reyes/index.html

Ehrhardt certainly deserved the title of greatest Mets fan. I remember "There Are No Words," and he was as much a part of the team as Mr. Met. The management treated him very badly.

Elster88 wrote: At this point I'd be shocked if Webb didn't get the start.It depends on when he last pitched. Assuming he's rested, sure, but if he pitches on Sunday, no.

LoDuca. I don't think anyone thought they were getting an all-star catcher.

Yancy Street Gang wrote: I think the June 15 deadline was for deals within the same league. Deals between leagues had an earlier deadline, but I can't recall the details. Were they limited to the offseason?Essentially. There was an interleague trade period starting after the last game of the WS, and lasting through the winter GM meeting in December. There was a second one during spring training. I don't recall the dates -- probably opening day was the deadline -- but there were few big trades (they were mostly to drop players you didn't want to keep). At one time in the 60s, there was an 26-man roster for the first month of the season. Note that interleague deals were allowed until the final trade deadline, but all players had to clear league waivers, so they were usually straight sales of has-beens.

http://www.fark.com/sports/ Fifth item today, with spiffy tag.

Edgy DC wrote: The only kings until the season ends are the Chicago White Sox.I don't know. Kansas City has some Royals, I hear. Maybe a few of them are kings.

Stupid move. You'd think they'd be trying to improve their team instead of this: now the team looks like a bunch of losers. Oh, wait . . . .

It's seem odd to use it to refer to anyone other than a pitcher. A BB is a tiny bit of shot used in kid's guns;* a pitcher throws BBs when the ball is traveling so fast it seems as tiny as one and hard to pick up to swing at. If a fielder threw BBs, it'd mean the ball was hard to catch. *"You'll shoot your eye out."

Edgy DC wrote: Avildsen's characterizations, in fact, show how dramatically champions have changed. It wasn't so new as all that, as Bogart or Chaplin would demonstrate. You make a good point. Tab Hunter, Troy Donahue and Pat Boone were hardly major movie stars; the biggest name of their time was Marlon Brando, along with people like Kirk Douglas and Burt Lancaster. John Wayne was still huge, as were Cary Grant and James Stewart. Now, if you mean teen stars, I don't think any were bigger than James Dean or (though certainly not of the same acting stature) Frankie Avalon. Blond leading men were thought of a lightweights, and there are very few successful ones. And making the rich kids the bad guys goes back to "Our Gang." Or "Mr. Deeds Goes to Town." But the Karate Kid was a good film. John Avildson is a very underrated director.

I'm sorry it didn't work out for Kaz, but it makes sense to get something for him before his contract runs out. He was not likely to be the starter, and is of limited use as a reserve, so it makes sense to give someone more versitile his place on the bench.

My first game memory (as opposed to commercial) was Roger Maris hitting his 61st. (I was in the stands at the time.)

Baseball and Ballentine.

Yancy Street Gang wrote: ="RealityChuck"]When he was traded to the Mets, the fans howled at the team for giving away Mazzilli. By '86, it stood as one of the best deals the team ever made. Was there that much howling at the time of the trade? Bad Guys said something about that too but I don't recall people being too up in arms about losing Mazzilli. By spring of 1982 we had pretty much given up on hoping he'd be the next Mickey Mantle. Well, it wasn't like today, when you had bloggers screaming all over the place. But Maz was the team's most popular ballplayer and, if not Mantle, a solid major leaguer and the face of the team. He was coming off a bad year, but that was due to injuries, so no one was counting him out: he still was third on the team with RBIs, second in homers, and second in SB, depite appearing in fewer than 100 games (some of that was due to the pathetic nature of the team's offense, of course, but that only meant his contribution was desperately needed). And to trade him -- considered one of the team's top players -- for a couple of unknown minor league pitcher raised a lot of criticism at the time. This was in the "Bow-tie Cashen" era, when the NY tabloids all agreed that Frank Cashen was an idiot and had no idea how to build a team. The team was dismal, and the columnists were blaming him for the fact it had shown no improvement (the comments vanished during the 1984 season, of course, though the low point was when he left Seaver unprotected during the offseason before that). In the long term, of course, it was a great trade. I mentioned 1986, because if you looked at the principals: 1. Darling was the Mets #2 reliever. 2. Terrell had been traded for Howard Johnson, the franchises best third baseman until Alfonso and Wright. 3. The player they had given up -- Mazzilli -- was playing for the Mets.

He's a Yale graduate. When he was traded to the Mets, the fans howled at the team for giving away Mazzilli. By '86, it stood as one of the best deals the team ever made.

Very unimpressive. The final road trip sequence goes on forever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and then ends up exactly the way you knew it would end up when he started. The rest of the film never rises above mediocre. A real disappointment.