Hammer Player's Poker Blog

NFL Winners and Losers -- Week 11

2009-11-24T11:03:00.003+07:00

NFL Week 11 will probably go down as the week that killed the Survivor pools, as a surging Bengals squad lost to the lowly Raiders in a shocker that saw the Raiders score 10 points in the final 1:22 of the game, while the defending champion Steelers also lost a close one to the 3-6 Chiefs thanks to a field goal from Chiefs kicker Ryan Succop in overtime. Lucky for me I managed to avoid taking either of those favorites with my weekly picks, with the result being another 4-1 week to raise my season record against the spread to a lofty 32-18 overall, for 14 games over .500 in 10 weeks of making picks. As usual, there were a lot of good stories and a number of bad ones as well, so without further delay here is this week's Winners and Losers report.

Winners:

1. Brett Favre. All I can say is "wow" to what is without a doubt the greatest story in the NFL this year. After Week 11, we're now looking at 21 touchdowns against just 3 interceptions through 10 games for Favre, a decidedly un-Favre like season as compared to his recent years' problems with throwing accuracy. After going 22 for 25 on Sunday against the Seahawks, Favre now sickly owns the top two completion percentage starts in Minnesota Viking history (minimum 20 attempts). After just ten total starts. Favre is now the NFL's highest-rated quarterback in 2009 with a rating of 112.1, and when I take everything into consideration I am definitely seeing Favre as the MVP of the NFL at this point in the season.

2. Matt Stafford and the Detroit Lions. What a game for Lions' rookie quarterback Matthew Stafford, who got the win in what was easily the best game of the NFL schedule after all was said and done on Sunday, despite being roundly laughed at heading into the Week 11 slate as the worst NFL game in years. Not only did Stafford throw for 422 yards on the way to a last-second (literally!) victory, but he set the all time qb record for the youngest man ever with five touchdown passes, and to boot the guy just generally came out looking like a badass after he seemingly had his non-throwing shoulder separated on the second to last play of the game but then insisted on coming back in for the final play to chuck the game-winning touchdown with the bum shoulder and give his team the one-point victory.

3. Brady Quinn and the Cleveland Browns. In a lot of ways it's a damn shame that the Browns had to lose their game against the Lions on Sunday afternoon, because buried in the loss is the fact that the Browns basically busted out with an entire season's worth of offense in just one game on the day. One week after making headlines for becoming the first team since 1933 to score just five offensive touchdowns over a 15-game span, the Browns exploded under new old quarterback Brady Quinn, who chucked four touchdown passes and threw for over 304 yards without throwing a single pick in the loss, easily outdoing his previous season best performance, and in fact more than doubling his lifetime career TD total of 3 with his 4 touchdown tosses in Sunday afternoon's game.

4. Vince Young and the Tennessee Titans. I thoroughly enjoyed watching young Titans quarterback Vince Young take over the ball at the 2-minute warning in a 17-17 game on Monday night against the favored Houston Texans, and do what he had to do yet again, leading the team right down the field in a highly efficient march right into field goal range for kicker Rob Bironas to boot the game-winning field goal with still 47 seconds to spare. Vince Young is everything for the Titans that Ryan Sanchez has not been so far this year for the Jets -- a guy who manages the game well despite not innately having all the top weapons, someone who doesn't turn the ball over, and someone who can lead his offense down the field and who can inspire confidence in the players around him. After starting off 0-6, this Titans squad has now rattled off four straight wins and has become the team that nobody wants to see on their schedule heading down the home stretch into the 2009 NFL playoffs.

5. The San Diego Chargers. The Chargers rode the confidence stemming from a 4-game winning streak into AFC West co-leader Denver on Sunday afternoon, and they proceeded to administer one of the worst thrashings of the 2009 season against Josh McDaniel's formerly high-flying Denver squad. After McDaniel started Chris Simms at quarterback due to a Kyle Orton injury, the coach then pulled Simms after just two offensive series and put back in aching Kyle Orton, but nothing could get even the remotest thing going points-wise for the Broncs, who finished the day with just 22 minutes of possession vs. nearly 38 minutes for the Chargers. Even on the defensive side of the ball -- which had been Denver's strength earlier in this season -- the Broncos gave it up, allowing the Chargers to dominate the ball with more than 200 yards on the ground on 43 rushing attempts as compared to just 17 for the Broncos. In all, the Chargers have absolutely rocked the AFC West over the past month, surging from 3 1/2 games behind the Broncos just five weeks ago to now a full game ahead, and leaving the Broncos seriously in search of some answers.

Losers:

1. Ryan Sanchez and the New York Jets' defense. Forget the fact that the Jets lost another game and slipped ever further out of the playoff race with a blowout loss to the Cheatriots in Week 11. Forget about that stuff because it's official -- the Jets are no longer in the playoff conversation. But once again it was Ryan Sanchise stepping down in the clutch, and the Jets' defense getting rolled, that led to the team's downfall, and I continue to wonder when supposed defensive wunderkind Rex Ryan is going to get called on the carpet for his defense's lack of performance week after week after week. Sanchez had probably his second worst game of the season, throwing multiple foolish interceptions under the Cheatriots' relentless pressure, and the team allowed the Pats to make 278 first downs and gain 410 yards of total offense while holding the ball for an astounding 40 minutes of game time. It should be noted that, since nose tackle Kris Jenkins went down for the season with a leg injury in Week 6, the Jets are 1-3, with a win only against the hapless Raiders, and the team has given up an average of over 28 points per game in their last three outings, all losses for a reeling Gang Green. With games against Carolina, Buffalo and Tampa Bay in the next three weeks, we are likely looking at Sanchise's and the defense's last good chances of turning things around and ending what is otherwise going to be viewed as a fairly negative season on some kind of a positive note.

2. The Dallas Cowboys offense. Three weeks ago, Tony Romo was coming off his third 300-yard performance in four games and had just won a huge intra-divisional matchup on the road at the Philadelphia Eagles. Miles Austin had suddenly emerged as the downfield threat that this team had been missing since the departure of Terrell Owens in the offseason, and the Cowboys were looking like the clear team to beat in the NFC East. Since then, however, it's like a completely different team on offense. Although the 'Boys managed to eke out a 1-point victory over the Redskins this week on a late touchdown pass from Romo, the team is 1-1 in its last two games, and, more concerningly, the offense has scored just 7 points in each of its last two. This, after running up 26, 37, 38 and 20 points in their previous four games before those, all victories. Now the Cowboys will have to re-find that offense at home against the Bruce Gradkowski-led Raiders next week, because after that it's tough games at the Giants, vs. the Chargers and then at the Saints to kick off what has historically been this squad's December swoon.

3. Joe Flacco. I don't want to kill the guy and I am actually a fan of his ability to manage these games and even throw the ball well on occasion, but Flacco did what I call "pulling a Romo in December" this weekend by throwing a pick on the Colts' 13 yard line with his team down just two points with under three minutes to go against one of the last two undefeated teams in the NFL this year. With his team well in kicker Billy Cundiff's field goal range, Flacco forced the action and ended up giving up the ball -- and his team's chances for a huge, key win -- by making a poor decision that he has generally not been known for doing in his two years at the helm in Baltimore. For the game Flacco finished 3 for 7 for just 27 yards in the red zone -- a quarterback rating of 14.1 in an area where it is most easy to throw touchdown passes -- and will need to work on his finishing skills if the Ravens are to have any chance at all of climbing back into the AFC race with games coming up against Pittsburgh and Green Bay in the next two weeks.

4. The Seattle Seahawks. I haven't made much mention of the 'Hawks this year -- mostly because I've thought they sucked all season -- but at this point it is beyond official. This team is worthless. Former fantasy stud Matt Hasselbeck continued his mediocre-at-best 2009 on Sunday in a 35-9 crushing by the Vikings, as Hass fell to 3-5 in his starts this season, with the only wins coming at home against the eminently beatable Rams, Jags and Lions. Seattle has also shown themselves to be utterly worthless on the road, dropping this weekend to 0-5 away from home, where they really haven't even been close except for in Week 3 at the Bears when Hasselbeck didn't even play due to some broken ribs. And the Seahawks' defense has been doing their best New York Jets impression this year, allowing 30+ points this week for the 4th time in 10 games, and raising their average margin of defeat over their last five losses to 19.8 points per game. Ugh.

TO Watch: Out of nowhere, Terrell Owens busted out with far and away his biggest game of the season, a 9-catch, 197-yard outburst that included a 98-yard touchdown reception on a bomb deep down the right sideline from Buffalo quarterback Ryan Fitzpatrick that represents the longest receiving touchdown in Bills franchise history. TO's huge Week 11 dramatically improves his season numbers, now sitting at 35 catches for 563 yards and two receiving touchdowns in 10 games so far in 2009. Oh, and TO's big performance still came in a loss, an 18-15 beating at the hands of the upstart 6-4 Jacksonville Jaguars.

The JaMarcus Russell award: With the Raiders going with Bruce Gradkowski at qb in nabbing a rare win against the Bengals this week, I had to look elsewhere other than The Namesake for this week's award to celebrate the week's most worthless quarterback. Fortunately I did not have to look far, as Jets rookie Mark Sanchez put up numbers bad enough to make head coach Rex Ryan consider giving Vinny Testaverde a call to see if he happens still to be in football shape. Sanchise's final line in his team's 31-14 loss to the New England Cheatriots: 8 for 21 for 136 yards, one touchdown, four interceptions and one lost fumble. Sanchise's qb rating for the game: 37.1. It's enough to make JaMarcus proud.

NFL's best team: This one doesn't change this week as the Saints pounded out a blowout 29-point victory at the Buccaneers, cementing their spot at the top of the list in the NFC, while Indy also protected its undefeated season record by holding off a tough Baltimore Ravens team on the road. The bigger news on this front is probably the Vikings, as Minnesota's nearly 30-point beatdown of the Seahawks is a clear statement that they belong in that list of the three elite teams in football this year. It's hard to take anything away from any of the Colts, Saints or Vikings as we head into the stretch run of the 2009 NFL season.

NFL's worst team: This one is a lot tougher all of a sudden, as the Browns put up the huge performance in the crazy last-down loss at Detroit, the Chiefs beat the Steelers in overtime and even the Raiders beat a playoff team in the Cincinnati Bengals. After much deliberation, I don't think I have any choice but to look back to the Rams, a previous winner of this weekly award. At 1-9, the Rams are tied with the Bucs and the Browns for the worst record in football, but after last week's offensive outburst by the Browns, St. Louis now joins 3-7 Oakland at the bottom of the points scored list in the league this year, with the Rams tallying just 113 total points over 10 games, for a measly 11+ points per game. And although Detroit, Tampa Bay and Tennessee have given up more points than the Rams have allowed so far in 2009, the overall point differential of -157 in St. Louis is far and away the worst in the NFL. Yeech.

A Little Sister's Scorn

2009-11-23T22:53:00.005+07:00

Funny thing happened today as Hammer Wife drove the girls to school this morning. As they drove down the main drag to my older daughter M's school, the girls see out the window M's friend J, but J has actually made M upset the last couple of times they hung out together by not paying sufficient attention to her. It's been the subject of some discussion at our house and we have spent a lot of time trying to explain to M that sometimes you can't be as good of friends as you want with everyone you ever want.

Anyways, so they saw J with her mother walking on their way to school this morning, and the following ensues:

Hammer Wife: M, do you want to say hi to your friend J? I'll roll down the window for you.

M: Yeah!

[Hammer Wife rolls down window]

M: "Hi J!" at the top of her lungs

And then...

M's younger sister K, sitting next to M on the ride to school, also at the top of her lungs: J, M hates you! You weren't nice to her at your party or ever! And she hates you now and i hate you too for being mean to my sister!"

Hammer Wife tried to roll the window up as quick as she could. But I think J got the point.

You go, K!

NFL Pick 5 -- Week 11

2009-11-20T21:50:00.004+07:00

Week 11 is the hardest week of games to pick thus far in the NFL season. Period. I may have said that one or two other times that I recall here this season, but that's because it was true. At the time, some of those weeks were the hardest of the season to that point. Well this week sets a new bar. Week 11 is chock full of games between one decent team and one bad team, in one or the other's stadium, mostly carrying large spreads, making for a ton of games that are just really, really hard to pick. I did my part by starting off Week 10 on the wrong foot by taking Carolina and laying a few points at home against the Dolphins on Thursday night, a night which saw the Fins pound the ball on the ground and never give Jake Delhomme and the Panthers a chance to recover from some early mistakes and failures to score in the game. Sadly, that Thursday night game was the game I liked the most almost of the entire weekend, and I lost it. So there ya go. With that bout of confidence, here come my picks for Week 11, in no particular order:

1. Carolina Panthers -3 vs Miami Dolphins. Loss.

2. Indianapolis Colts -1 at Baltimore Ravens. I kinda like this Baltimore team, and I respect what they can do under the right circumstances, in particular on defense, having picked them to win a few big games earlier in the season already. But in this case I think this line is just plain silly to be this small, with Peyton Manning and the undefeated Colts coming in to a far older, slower version of the Ravens defense than what most people still think of for some reason when they think about Baltimore's NFL franchise. Peyton Manning has beaten down on this team the last two teams the two have met up, with Peyton throwing for more than 600 yards and 7 touchdowns with zero interceptions over those last two meetings. I'm not saying I'm calling for a Colts blowout here, but in essentially a pickem game I have got to go with the Colts here to win a good game on the road against a flat out inferior Ravens squad. Nobody passes against the blitz and the pressure defenses like Peyton Manning.

3. Minnesota Vikings -11 vs. the Seattle Seahawks. The Vikes have been great this year, and resurgent quarterback Brett Favre is on his way to one of his best seasons in years. At 8-1, the Vikings have scored at least 27 points in all 8 of their victories, including over 29 points per game at home in four tries so far in 2009. On the other side of the ledger are the Seahawks, who have been totally inconsistent this year either with or without Matt Hasselbeck at the helm, and whose only three wins this year have come against the Rams, the Jaguars, and the Lions. When the 2009 Seahawks play good teams, they get beat, especially on the road this year where they are 0-4 with a 13-point loss at San Francisco, a 17-point loss at Indy, a 21-point loss at Dallas, and most recently an 11-point defeat at Arizona. Do I like the Hawks to lose another double digit road game this year at Minnesota? Hells yeah.

4. New England Patriots -10.5 vs. the New York Jets. I am going against my better judgment here, as I am confident the Pats will emerge victorious this weekend but I cannot stand having to give more than a touchdown and a field goal in a game where the Jets held the Pats to just 9 points earlier in the season in a 16-9 defeat of the Pats in New ~~Jersey~~ York. But that said, I expect the Pats to beat down hard on the Jets this weekend for a number of reasons. First and foremost, they are better than the Jets. Clearly. In Week 2 when these two teams first matched up, this was the entire season for the Jets. It was their superbowl, and they were on their way to a 3-0 start and first place in the AFC East, new head coach Rex Ryan left a personal phone message for every single Jets season ticket holder about how much the team needed their support to beat the Pats at home for the first time since 2000. But now, it's all different. The Jets have imploded, Ryan Sanchez can't get anything done and Rex Ryan's vaunted defense has rolled over and caved repeatedly in five losses out of their last six games. Meanwhile, the Patriots return home this Sunday after that crushing loss to the Colts on Sunday night, where the team will likely not only be motivated by revenge after their Week 2 loss to the Jets but also by anger after all the harangue surrounding Bellicheat's 4th-and-2 coaching decision to lose that Colts game. And the Pats come home hot, averaging nearly 39 points per game over their last four against a team who has had trouble stopping the opposition as the game wears on. And let's not forget that the Pats haven't lost two games back to back in several seasons as I recall. I expect the Pats to put on a real show in front of the home town fans and to do their best to come out angry, aggressive, and exact their revenge. 10.5 seems a bit high for this game, but I will still take the Pats and lay the points here, expecting at least a two-touchdown victory in New England on Sunday.

5. New Orleans Saints -11 at the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Don't ask me why I'm taking the Saints to win big against another bad team this week, after they have failed to show up early in each of their last few games, all against subpar competition. But something just tells me that the NFC's best team is going to open a can of whoopass on the Bucs, whom I just don't think have the receivers to move the ball downfield, the running game to control the clock and keep the juggernaut Saints' offense off the field, nor the defense to hold the Saints under at least the mid-30s on the day. I'll take the Saints and lay the points, and just plan to hold my nose through the first half on Sunday.

Thursday Night Football Pick

2009-11-19T09:35:00.000+07:00

It's Thursday, and that means the NFL is back at us with the second of their recently new Thursday Night Football matchups that much of the country does not get to see due to not having the NFL Network. This Thursday's matchup sends the Miami Dolphins to the Carolina Panthers, and the Panthers are favored by 3 points as they have slowly crept up all week. 3 is an annoying number to have to get them at when I've been looking at this line all week, but in the end I'm still going to take the Carolina Panthers +3 vs. the Miami Dolphins for Thursday night in Carolina. Carolina is one of those teams that have quietly really improved since a very slow start, and now just sit a win or two out of the NFC playoff picture as I wrote earlier this week. Carolina has stepped it up in basically all positions since their 0-3 start, as Jake Delhomme has now not thrown an interception in three consecutive starts, DeAngelo Williams has run for 150 yards three times in his last five games (and just under 100 in the other two), and the team defense has basically held its last three opponents -- all solid offenses across the board in Atlanta, New Orleans and Arizona -- in check in going 2-1 over that span. Meanwhile, the Dolphins, a team that I like overall, have gone 1-3 on the road this season so far, with all three losses by double digits, and they have only scored more than 17 points once in four road attempts this season. Although the team has had a bit of a resurgence in its last four games under new quarterback Chad Henne, just this week the team announced that Ronnie Brown is on the IR and out for the season due to injury, and Brown is more than just the team's top runningback -- he is also the guy at the helm of the team's most common wildcat formation plays. That should really upset things a bit on the Miami offense, and this one seems like a touchdown win at least for the Panthers the way I see it.

NFL Winners and Losers -- Week 10

2009-11-17T11:18:00.000+07:00

Another week, another 3-2 for my picks, and really that's more like 3-1-1 as my Lions +16.5 was actually Lions +17 which all of those who bet it know, making that my first push of the NFL season in actual practice for anyone who is actually betting these games. This week in my picks started off solid with the 49ers winning by just enough against the Bears on Thursday night, then saw me lose two of two in the early games on Sunday with the Lions (really the push) and the Broncos who somehow managed to lose to the Redskins. But then the late games brought me back over .500 for the week as my Packers call was right on, as was the Kansas City pick at the Raiders, and that brings my posted season record to 28-17, back to a season-high 11 over .500. Even though I normally find these games easier to pick as the season wears on, this year it seems to be the opposite as many of these weeks are a real chore to pore through the games and find the five I like the most.

With that, here is the Week 10 Winners and Losers report.

Winners:

1. The Cincinnati Bengals. That's right, these are not your father's Bungles anymore, at least not this year. This weekend the Bengals completed a season sweep of division rival and defending superbowl champion Pittsburgh Steelers by clamping down the defense and refusing to give Steelers qb Ben Roethlisberger any breathing room at all. And this comes one week after the Bengals completed a season sweep against also tough division rival Baltimore, leaving the Bengals now 5-0 in the AFC North for the first time in franchise history. As much as the offense is finding ways to score enough to win these games, it's the defense that's leading the way as I've been saying here for weeks, and Week 10 was no different as the Bengals held the Steelers to just four field goals on the day while the Bengals chipped in with four fg's of their own in addition to a kickoff return in the first quarter that was the difference. With their next three games lined up to include the Raiders, the Browns and the Lions, there is a good chance we could be looking at a 10-2 Bengals team heading into the key Week 14 matchup at the Minnesota Vikings.

2. Vince Young and the Tennessee Titans. Say what you want about the lack of oomph in Vince Young's numbers, but his team is now 3-0 since VY took the helm after starting off 0-6 under last year's quarterback Kerry Collins. Not that all of this is directly attributable just to Vince Young, who himself has thrown for just two touchdowns with one pick in three starts this season, but the bottom line is that Young has clearly improved in all three games, and his efficiency at the position has helped lead the team down the field both through the air as well as on the ground. Since Young took over at qb, the Titans are not only 3-0 but they are averaging 35 points per game after managing to exceed 17 points only one time in six games prior to Young becoming the starter. Chris Johnson, the explosive runningback in Tennessee, has had three out of three huge 100+ yardage performances on the ground with Young running the show, after just two triple-digit games in six tries to start the season with Kerry Collins at qb, and even the defense has responded in a big way to the switch, ceding just 19 points per game in three wins under Vince Young after allowing 33 points per game over their first six games of 2009, all losses. For whatever reason, the change from Kerry Collins to the highly efficient, nearly 100-qb-rating Young has clearly energized this team, and there is no doubt that nobody really wants to play them on their schedule late in the year in a game that might really count for something.

3. The Carolina Panthers. The Panthers are another team with a not-so-great record overall at 4-5 but who nobody really wants to play right now if they can help it. After starting off the season with three losses, losing by an average of around 17 points per game in their first three, the Panthers have now run off four wins in six games with this past weekend's 28-19 victory at home over divisional rival Atlanta. What's more, the Panthers have been playing well against and beating some tough competition these past few weeks, taking down Arizona by nearly two touchdowns on the road in Week 8, losing a close game to the Saints after holding a 17-point lead in the second half in Week 9, and now handily beating the Falcons this past weekend who also have playoff hopes. Along with that pounding running game that has seen DeAngelo Williams go for 150 yards on the ground in three of his last five games, Jake Delhomme has now gone three straight without an interception as he bids to keep his job running John Fox's offense, and now the team gears up for games at home against the Dolphins, at the Jets, and the Buccaneers at home in a winnable stretch of games that could bring the Panthers back into the NFC playoff picture in a hurry.

4. The San Diego Chargers. After starting off an inconsistent 2-3, with particular weakness on the defensive side of the ball, the Chargers have been looking good as they rattled off their fourth consecutive win this past Sunday against the Philadelphia Eagles. After tiny sparkplug type of back Darren Sproles seemed to be stealing the lead runningback job away from incumbent LaDainian Tomlinson earlier in the season, LT has reasserted himself over the past few weeks, all wins for the Chargers, as his scoring abilities combined with a really strong and fun-to-watch passing game centered on Vincent Jackson and Antonio Gates make the Chargers a hard team to outscore, and an even harder team to play catch-up against. And as has been the case with Vince Young in Tennessee, even the defense seems to be keyed on to LT's re-emergence in the Chargers backfield: after allowing over 27 points per game over the first five games of the 2009 season (team went 2-3), the last four games have seen former defensive mvp Shawne Merriman recapture some of his former glory as his defense has allowed just over 16 points per game, all victories for SD. With the total collapse of Denver as an AFC power over the past month, this sets up next week's matchup in Denver as one of the best games of the year as the two 6-3 powers will meet to decide first place in the suddenly hotly-contested AFC West.

5. The Arizona Cardinals. You gotta give the Cardinals credit, as they have really overcome the last-decade history of superbowl losers having a real problem even returning to the playoffs in the following season. After just a few games in 2009 I was sure my prediction for the Cardinals to be the latest victim of the superbowl slump was coming true, as the team opened the season losing at home to division rival San Francisco and started off the year 1-2 overall with several tough-looking road games coming up on their schedule. But since Week 4, it's like a different team has been playing -- much more like last year's team -- and what has ensued has been five wins in six games to leave the Cards now with a full two-game lead over the 49ers to take down their second consecutive NFC West title. Although the running game remains the weak link of the offense, Arizona quarterback Kurt Warner is the constant, always slinging the ball with a high efficiency and keeping his team moving down the field with the help of all-pro wideouts Larry Fitzgerald and Anquan Boldin, and it's been this team's road performance that has really been the most impressive aspect of their success so far in 2009. The team is 4-0 on the road this year so far, including big wins at 5-4 Jacksonville and the 5-4 New York Giants as well as beating the Seahawks in the division and the Bears as well on the road this year. And that road record is likely to improve before all is said and done for Arizona, as still on the schedule are games at the Rams, at the Titans, at the 49ers and at the Lions to close out the team's away schedule for the season. Until the playoffs, anyways, where it is increasingly obvious the Cardinals will be come season's end, despite the streak that has plagued so many superbowl-losing teams before them.

Losers:

1. Jay Cutler and the Chicago Bears. What can you say about a guy who throws five interceptions in a 10-6 loss? I mean, any one of those picks could possibly have won the game for the Bears, and in Cutler's case this is especially true as two of his picks came in the red zone, one of them on the 49ers' 1-yard line. Cutler moved the ball ok as usual, ending up with 307 passing yards on the day, but after throwing his league-leading 6th and 7th red zone interceptions in the game, his team was simply not able to overcome their quarterback's penchant for big mistakes so far in the 2009 campaign. With a running game that still has generated just one 100-yard day for fantasy bust Matt Forte now in nine games, and a defense that has allowed more than 40 points in two of their last four, the Bears are indeed on the precipice at 4-5 after last weekend, and they're looking at games at home against an angry Eagles squad next Sunday night followed by a trip to Minnesota the week after, so it is clearly time for Cutler to put up or shut up for the season here heading into Week 11.

2. The Denver Broncos. After a 6-0 start, the Broncos have come crashing down to earth in a big way, culminating in an extremely shocking 10-point loss to the utterly hapless Washington Redskins on Sunday afternoon at FedEx field that can probably best be described as embarrassing more than anything else. This once-proud team a month ago has now given up more than 28 points per game over their last three games, all losses, after allowing just 11 points per game over their first six outings, all wins. In the end, let's not forget that this team was simply not supposed to be a good team at all before this season began, and that might be what we're seeing here as Kyle Orton seems to be getting exposed, the running game is slipping away to almost invisibility, and the defense has nearly tripled what it has been allowing other teams to score over the past few weeks. And the schedule doesn't get any easier for the Broncos either, as they are looking at a key divisional matchup with the 6-3 Chargers next Sunday, followed by a super-short week and then a Thanksgiving night game at home against a hungry New York Giants squad who are likely to be desperately in need of a win.

3. The New York Jets. Let's forget for a minute that Ryan Sanchez threw a couple of bad picks in the second half at home against the 4-4 Jacksonville Jaguars on Sunday, and instead focus on the real problem with Gang Green here in 2009: the defense. You can quote me all you want about the Jets' scoring average against, yardage, whatever numbers you want to use to make the team look better than it is. But the bottom line remains that, basically through each of the team's now five losses in 2009, the opposition has essentially moved the ball at will when it counts the most against this team. After yet another go-ahead touchdown to take a 1-point lead with just five minutes to go in the fourth-quarter against the Jags, for what seems like the umpteenth time this year to disgusted Jet fans, the Jets defense proceeded to come out and lay down for their opponents, allowing the Jags to drive down the field about 85 yards over the span of just two and a half minutes or so. In the end Maurice Jones-Drew "pulled a Westbrook" and laid down on purpose at the 1-yard line with open field to the end zone, selflessly giving up his personal stats for the sake of ensuring that the Jets did not get the ball back with more than a minute to go and a chance to do something crazy. The bottom line is that, with a rookie quarterback and rookie head coach at the helm for this team, the defense simply cannot let itself get walked all over while relying on the reputation the team built up in the preseason and the first few games that they are some kind of defensive mavens. This is no Baltimore Ravens defense, and importantly these aren't offensive juggernaut teams they are facing -- it's the Dolphins, Bills and now the Jaguars who are cutting through the Jets' D like a hot knife through butter late in the 4th quarter to snatch victories away from the Jets late in these games. The state of football in New ~~Jersey~~ York is severely in doubt these days, Yankees or no Yankees.

4. NFL head coaches.

4a. Bill Bellicheat of course makes the headline in this category after his very questionable decision with two minutes to go and a 6-point lead against the Colts on Sunday night football. On his own 30 yard line, Bellicheat did the unthinkable and actually opted to go for it -- yes, with a 6 point lead and yes on his own 28 yard line -- on 4th down and 2, in a situation where he could have easily punted the ball away like everyone in NFL history has figured out is the proper move in this spot, and forced the Colts to drive some 70 yards or so in a spot where they had to score a touchdown to mean anything, and do so in under two minutes. While it's true that Manning had already led two sub-two-minute td drives in the fourth quarter of this game, and I have no doubt that Peyton Manning and the potent Colts offense would have put up a tremendous onslaught in the no-huddle offense to try to get that touchdown, the bottom line is that, across the NFL this year, fewer than 30% of drives that begin on the opponents' 30 yard line or earlier result in touchdowns. Yes, that number is probably higher where Peyton Manning in concerned, but it's not like the guy scores touchdowns in 75% of his drives where he has two minutes and 75 yards to go and has to score a touchdown. And the Pats had already created two interceptions off of Manning in the game, and the Colts only managed to score on five of their 14 positions overall in the game, so it's not like the Patriots hadn't done at least a serviceable job against the Pats on the game overall. Bellicheat's downfall with this decision was that he opted to pick a play that had probably a 60% chance of winning him the game outright by making a first down, but he failed miserably in completing the expected value calculation by working out the effect of the 30-40% chance of his team losing the game outright if they missed, plus the long-term effects of screaming out to the world that he, Bill Bellicheat, has absolutely zero confidence in his own defense. It's no wonder that it took Peyton Manning all of two plays to get to the 1-yard line before punching in the winning touchdown on the night -- once Bellicheat told his defense that he didn't think they could prevent the Colts from scoring a touchdown within two minutes when starting from their 30 yard line, obviously they knew he knew they couldn't stop the Colts from scoring when starting from the Pats' 30. This might be the worst decision ever made by the biggest cheater among the NFL head coaches in the league today.

4b. Jaguars coach Jack Del Rio had Maurice Jones-Drew take a knee on the 1-yard line with about a minute to go in a 22-21 game against the Jets, a game in which the Jags were losing at the time. Then the Jags hiked the ball for two separate plays, with quarterback David Garrard just taking a knee twice in a row to set up for a last-second chip-in field goal attempt for the win. Let me repeat: the Jaguars were losing the game at the time. Of course Jags' inconsistent kicker Josh Scobee made the kick and his team won, but to think that they would not even attempt to run that ball into the end zone from the 3-inch line in three separate attempts in the final minute, when they were going ahead and hiking the ball anyways already as it was, is so indefensible that you can only laugh. It's just too bad that they didn't muff the snap on that field goal and then watch hopelessly while the clock expired and they took the 1-point loss on the game. I mean, I'm all for unselfish play, but this wasn't unselfish; it was stupid.

5. The Dallas Cowboys. Dallas once again showed their inconsistency this week, coming out after four straight wins and laying a complete egg against the Packers this past weekend at Lambeau field. In the end, the thing that bothers me the most about this loss is that the team simply didn't seem like they gave a crap about it all during the game. And head coach Wade Phillips is to blame, I solemnly guarantee you that. After winning four straight games, including key wins over NFC hopefuls with Atlanta and at Philly last weekend to give the 'Boys sole possession of first place in the NFC East, you can be confident that this team didn't do shit in practice for a week heading up to the Packers game. In the end, this game clearly went to the team that wanted it more, and in this case that was the Packers by a factor of about a thousand. The Cowboys are not likely to break their streak of no playoff wins in 13 years while Wade Phillips remains at the head coaching helm. Shanahan or Cowher, that's the big question that will remain on Cowboy fans' minds for the next several months as we get to watch "America's Team" implode yet again down the stretch.

6. The Atlanta Falcons. The Falcons are slumping. Big time. Second-year quarterback Matt Ryan is mired in a real-life sophomore slump, leading his team to three losses in their last four games after starting off the 2009 season winning four of their first five games. Not only are the Falcons now 1-4 on the road this season, something that's just not going to work if they have any real postseason aspirations at all, but Matt Ryan has now thrown 7 interceptions in his last 3 games, a problem he has not generally had in his year and a half as a professional starting quarterback in this league. With games over the next four weeks at the Giants, and later at home against the Eagles and the Saints, we're going to find out in a hurry if the Falcons plan to make a run at the playoffs this year or whether Matt Ryan's sudden penchant for poor decision-making is going to cost his team a spot in the 2009 NFL post-season.

TO watch: TO actually had his first big play of the 2009 season this weekend in Week 10, catching a 40-something yard pass in stride down the right sideline from qb Trent Edwards but stepping out of bounds at the 3 instead of finding a way to pound it in like the old TO would have. In fact, TO's 85 yards on Sunday in a blowout by the Titans represent the best single game for any Bills wideout so far in 2009. But still, TO's overall numbers outside of that one reception were not inspiring, as he ended the game with just three catches for the 85 total yards, another big drop, and of course, no touchdowns. On the season, in nine full games so far this year, TO's totals include just 26 catches for 366 yards, and one touchdown catch. That's fewer than three catches and 41 yards per game. Pathetic.

The JaMarcus Russell award: Glad to see this one back where it belongs this week, with the person who graciously gave this award its name. Before being benched early in the 4th quarter at home against the 2-6 Chiefs on Sunday afternoon, Russell managed to put up some startling numbers: 8 of 23 for 64 total yards. And no touchdowns, of course. But hey, at least he didn't throw any interceptions, right? And at least his quarterback rating of 43.6 for the game isn't his lowest for the season! Sadly, it's not even his second-lowest rating of the season, as in nine games overall in 2009, Russell has gone 96 for 205, for 1064 yards, two touchdowns and nine interceptions. That under 47% completion percentage helps Russell secure a season 47.7 qb rating so far as a starter in all nine games his team has played, and is nearly 30 percentage points below the Peyton Mannings, the Kurt Warners and the Brett Favres of the NFL, with Russell's only consistency being his total lack of consistency in any aspect of quarterback play.

Best team in the NFL? I think this one still comes down to the two unbeatens -- the 9-0 Colts and the 9-0 Saints. In my heart of hearts I still think the Saints might be the best in the NFL, although for three straight games they aren't playing like it. Once the Saints get a nice, fat loss under their belts though -- and believe me, a loss is definitely coming for this team -- then they will probably get a lot tougher, and I still have a hard time picturing any other team in the NFC coming to the dome in New Orleans in January and beating this Saints squad.

Worst team in the NFL? Let's keep this title where it's been for the past couple of weeks: in Cleveland. After Monday night's dismal performance, it is clear that nothing is happening whatsoever with the Browns franchise, from the ownership who hired Eric Mangini within seconds of his firing from the Jets, to the GM who allowed offensive players like Kellen Winslow and Braylon Edwards to leave the team for very little in return over the past year or two, and on down to the coach in Eric Mangini who is now under investigation by the NFL Players' association for the length of his practices being too tough for NFL standards. What a joke of a franchise. And how about picking a quarterback and sticking with him, or just going out and getting someone from outside the team that you can trust to start a few games in a row? So far this year, last night's starter Brady Quinn has gone 0-4 in four games for under 500 yards, one touchdown and five picks for a qb rating of 51 flat. Ugh. And the backup? Derek Anderson went 1-5 in his six starts, which have included going 66 for 154 overall -- a completion percentage that even JaMarcus Russell must sit around laughing at -- for 681 total yards, two touchdowns and nine INTs. You just can't win with either of these clowns and that offensive system, which probably explains why the Browns have become the first team since 1933 to score just five offensive touchdowns over a 15-game span. P.U.!

Sooted Connectors Hand -- Conclusion

2009-11-16T09:38:00.001+07:00

Last Thursday I had posted some screen shots and asked some questions about how readers like to play a standard sooted connectors hand very early in a large MTT. It was the nightly pokerstars 25k guaranteed with a $27.50 buyin at 8pm ET, just the first couple of orbits. UTG limped, a few folds, and then I limped behind with 87s in clubs. We saw a five-way flop of 962 with one club, giving me an oesd, and when the action checked around to me, I bet 90 chips into the 110-chip pot. Just one player in late position called my bet, and we saw a heads-up turn card:

So, I just made my nut straight on the turn. And I picked up a flush draw. And an open-ended straight flush draw. There's 290 chips in the pot, and both myself and my opponent each have around 10x that still behind. I've now switched from win-a-small-pot mode to full chip extraction mode, and the question I posed is how would you play the hand now to give yourself the best chance to win and win big?

In a nutshell, you bet! That was the answer that mostly every commenter suggested, and I have to agree with that approach. There's two main reasons why I think a bet is almost mandatory here. First and foremost, I do not want to lose this pot at this point. Not giving this pot away after the hand I have amassed on the turn card is more important even that extracting my opponent's stack. And giving the entire pot away could very easily happen if I give this guy a free card to draw to another club that could give him a higher flush with the lone Jack, Queen, King or Ace of clubs in his hand. So I need to bet here, and the most important point is that my bet size be enough to clearly price him out of making a call with a lone high club in his hand. That' a little more than 4 to 1 against hitting on the river, so I need to bet more than a quarter of the pot to ensure that if he calls with just the one-card flush draw, that call is by definition profitable for me over the long term.

The other reason I think to bet here is one that was alluded to by a few of the commenters, and it has to do with extracting the most chips from my opponent. If I want to have a chance to get his whole stack, an all-in bet at this point would be for ten times the current pot, would look totally ridiculous, and is not going to be called by my opponent. Even a bet of twice the pot can't possibly be called really, unless the guy is holding the Ace♣ and is a total jackmonkey. But, I'm going to have that exact same problem on the river if I check here and my opponent checks behind. There's basically no way I can make a credible, callable bet on the river for most or all of my opponent's stack, unless I bet first on the turn here and get called, which will make the odds much more in favor of a sizable river bet if that's what seems like the most profitable move for me after the river card falls.

So I've got to bet this here to both maximize my chance of winning big and to minimize my chance of losing the whole pot on the river:

210 into 290. If he's got the Ace♣ and wants to call that bet, I sincerely hope he does. Because he is paying me free chips over the long haul by making this call, and because I know I can and will lay this down to almost any real action on the river if a fourth club hits. Unless it makes me a straight flush of course, in which case I probably move it all in and hope he's got the nut flush in there.

Cue the pokerstarsy river card:

Not a good card for me. There were two diamonds on the flop, and the guy called (not raised) two (not one) roughly 2/3-the-pot bets from me on the flop and the turn. Definitely the kind of play someone would make with a flush draw on the flop that did not fill on the turn, huh? And of course there's also the fact that the turn and river now made a higher runner-runner straight than the one I have, not that I am particular concerned about that longshot play but it's pokerstars, you never know. Would you lead out here, small maybe and try the blocking bet route? Or just check and hope to see a free showdown?

For me, he just played his hand so transparently like a flush draw that I dont' want to bet here. I check, and of course my opponent bets out:

Ugh. 200 chips into 910 in the pot. If that's not a suck bet, then I don't know what is. But then, it's only another 200 chips. Who's calling here, and who's folding?

Once you've decided what you would do, you can click here to see what I did.
[Edit: Link has been fixed]

NFL Pick 5 -- Week 10

2009-11-13T22:12:00.001+07:00

Disclaimer: For those of you here to see the follow-up from yesterday's Actual Poker Post(TM), sorry but you will have to wait until Monday. That was not my intent but it's just the way things have to be for me today. On Monday I promise I will recap the action from Thursday's post and will get to the conclusion of the hand. As always thanks for everyone's thoughts and comments.

So, Week 10 of the NFL is already upon us, with the Thursday night games starting last night with one of the worst football games in recent memory, pitting the four-losses-in-a-row 49ers against the 1-3-in-their-last-four Chicago Bears in a game that did not disappoint those looking to see two inept teams banging heads until one was declared the winner. In the end, San Francisco, who was flat out unable to do anything on offense at home against the lackluster Bears defense, took advantage of one of Jay Cutler five interceptions (at least two of them in the red zone, including one on the 49ers' 1-yard line) to score the only touchdown of the day on their way to an overpowering 10-6 win in front of the home town fans. Fortunately, my read on the Bears' ineptitude on offense away from their home field was just enough to get a cover for the 49ers -3 points and bring us to 1-0 to start the Week 10 season. This is a nice start after last week's 2-3 performance, which brings my overall record so far this season to 26-15 counting last night's win with the Niners. Here's to some more winners this week, where a couple of games really stand out to me as having lines that are just off enough to create some good value for bettors. Here's the Week 10 picks, once again in no particular order:

1. San Francisco 49ers -3 vs. the Chicago Bears. Winner!

2. Detroit Lions +16.5 at Minnesota Vikings. Obviously, the Vikings are a far better team than the shitful Lions, about that there is no debate and no doubt. But are they two touchdowns and a field goal better? I just don't see it. This is the biggest line I've seen on an NFL game so far this season, at a time when most of the huge lines have been coming down a few points over the past few weeks of games when even the best of teams have been unable to cover the spread over the past few weekends. And the thing is, as good as Minnesota has been on both offense and defense this year, they just aren't going out and winning their games by 17 points. Yes, Detroit is horrible, but so are Cleveland and St. Louis, and so was Detroit the first time these teams met back in Week 2, and in only one of those games did the Vikes win by more than 16 points (38-10 over the Rams in Week 5). What's more, the Vikings have actually played better outside of the dome this year than inside, with their three home games so far coming in as wins of 3, 7 and 2 points, albeit against mostly better teams than the Lions. And lastly, the Lions seem to play the Vikings and Brett Favre fairly well over recent history, including causing Favre to have his worst performance of the year in Week 2 with just 155 yards in the air. In 2008 when these two teams met in Minnesota, the Vikings won by just two points, and the teams split their matchups in 2007 as well. And the word is that Favre is injured, so much so that he might not play the whole game, and if he does that he will be affected by the injury to some extent. All of this leads me to think that there is significant value on the Lions + 16.5 points this Sunday afternoon in Minnesota.

3. Kansas City Chiefs +2 at the Oakland Raiders. Wait, the Raiders are actually favored in a game this year? What an insult to Kansas City and first-year coach Todd Haley, especially given that the Raiders are averaging a smart 5.5 points per game over their last six outings. JaMarcus Russell is so far beyond being an NFL quarterback that awards are given in honor of his badness. Six of their eight opponents have scored at least 23 points against the Raiders this season, including their most recent home game which was a 38-0 shellacking by the New York Jets. Oakland actually won at KC earlier this year -- a 3-point victory, 13-10 -- but both of the Raiders' wins this year came when they themselves scored just 13 points, a strong offensive output for them given their performance this season. The Chiefs have at least shown they can score a little bit, breaking 20 points three times this season including twice on the road, and in their only other game against the NFL's shitpile teams (other than the game against the Raiders in Week 2), the Chiefs nabbed their first win of the season against the Redskins in Week 6. All this is a long way of saying that I think the Chiefs are likely to win this game outright and avoid being swept on the season by the lowly Raiders, and getting 2 points to boot against an awful Oakland team is just too much to pass up here.

4. Green Bay Packers +3 vs. the Dallas Cowboys. Here's another game where I can't believe the underdog is getting the points it is getting to cover. Green Bay, an absolutely desperate team at 4-4 at this point in the season, coming off their worst loss of the year so far last week at winless Tampa Bay, returns home on Sunday afternoon to face the hot Dallas Cowboys who are fresh off their huge win at division rival Philadelphia last Sunday night. So it's a bit of a short week for Dallas, they are likely facing a letdown game in between matchups against their two biggest division rivals in Philly and Washington, and we all know the troubles the Cowboys have had in general winning big road games in the second half of the season, which we are now officially in to. And let's not forget how horrible the coaching staff is in Dallas as well. Four wins in a row is more than enough for this Cowboys squad, and I think Green Bay has a good chance of winning this game outright at home in a matchup that they absolutely, positively have to win. Oh, and the Pack is actually getting three points as well? Definite value on the Packers here.

5. Denver Broncos -3.5 at Washington Redskins. I wrote earlier this week about how Denver has been exposed a bit over the past two games, at least as not being nearly as good as their 6-0 record indicated a few weeks back. That said, even though I've been at the top of the "not as good as their record" bandwagon with the Broncos all season, this line just seems wrong to me. The Redskins have played the worst schedule in NFL history so far in 2009, including games against the Rams, the Lions, the Buccaneers, the Panthers and the Chiefs, and yet still the team is only 2-6 in its first eight games, beating the Rams by two and the Bucs by three. Although the Redskins' defense has played reasonably well this year, their last two games have seen them give up 27 points in a loss to the Eagles, followed by 31 in another loss at Atlanta last weekend. In fact, the Redskins have held four of the shitpiler teams they've played to under 20 points, but their three reasonable opponents this season have scored 23 (NYG), 27 and 31 points, and there is no reason to expect Denver not to follow suit, albeit probably to a lesser degree. Denver's defense is basically the best in the NFL, however, and they're facing a totally hapless Skins offense that has averaged just over 14 points per game this year and has failed to break 17 points even one time in eight games this year, mostly against the worst competition the NFL has to offer. Denver should bounce back and beat a truly terrible Washington team this weekend, and although I wish the line were under 3, I'll still give the 3.5 and expect to win a close one here on Sunday afternoon.

Playing Those Sooted Connectors, Plus an NFL Pick

2009-11-12T08:48:00.000+07:00

Wow. I write a little bit about poker one day and I must have had 15 people tell me to do it more yesterday. You wanted another poker post? Well here comes another poker post.

But first, I will get on the record right now and pick the San Francisco 49ers -3 vs. the Chicago Bears on Thursday night on the NFL Network. I will pick my other four of my Pick 5 NFL picks on Friday as usual, but with Thursday Night Football starting up this week I will try to get in a pick on the Thursday night game wherever it makes sense for me, and that means it will have to go up a day earlier than the other picks. Thursday night's matchup is a battle of the losers in a sense, with the 49ers having lost four in a row heading into Week 10 while the Bears have chipped in losing three of their last four as well. Both teams started the season off hot but have since really cooled, although their problems are kind of opposite of each other. The Bears can't stop anyone right now -- they've allowed 45 to the Bungles and 41 to the Falcons in their last two games against NFL-worthy opponents. Meanwhile, in San Francisco the problem is that, after scoring an average of nearly 26 points per game over their first four outings of 2009, the team has now managed to scrape together just 18 points per game over their last four, and they've lost three games in a row by a touchdown or less as a result. I don't love how the 49ers are playing right now, but the bottom line is that, especially at home, I have more confidence in Mike Singletary and the 49ers finding their footing tonight than I do in Jay Cutler and the Bears. At Candlestick Park this season, the 49ers have scored in the 20's three times, and that's roughly where I expect them to end up tonight against the porous Bears' defense. But on the road, Jay Cutler has led his team to four separate subpar offensive outputs, including games with 15, 14, 10 and 21 points. If the Niners can run it up to the mid-20s like I think they will, that ought to be enough to cover against the reeling Bears who will then have to face the Eagles next Sunday night in Chicago to try to right their own ship.

OK, so with that out of the way, you wanted some poker. As I've gotten back into playing a little bit these past couple of weeks, I've started dipping my toe back into the mtt pool, something I really haven't done almost any of since my big score out at the Venetian last summer in Vegas. I was kinda burned out on tournament poker for a while after that magical weekend in the desert, and then the baby came, and before I knew it it'd been basically three or four months of very little mtt play for me. But as I've started playing again I've really been enjoy anew the process of building a stack from scratch in the earlygoing in these things. Especially online, where even the "slow" tournament structures are still actually super duper fast in reality, where the whole time you have to "build a stack" amounts to maybe a couple of hours, as opposed to a couple of days of poker in most live events. After some time away, I'm finding myself amazed at how easy it is to just slide right back into it and play the same aggressive way I've always played ever since I first learned the game. I've always been someone who tries to stir up action -- rather than avoid it -- early in most of the mtt's I play, again especially when it's online. I like to see a lot of cheap flops when the blinds are small relative to the stacks, try to flop a big hand and then figure out the best way to extract the most chips from the most players when I do. I don't want to sit around the starting stack for 90 minutes and then hope to pick up AA or to win a race with AJ vs 88. I want to force the action with lots of spec hands for cheap early anid try to turn one of them into a big big pot for me and get myself up to full chip utility as early as possible whenever I can.

Recently I was playing in the nightly 25k guaranteed tournament on pokerstars at 8pm ET. It has a $27.50 buyin and typically attracts between 1100-1500 runners or so, with four-digit payouts usually going to the top 5 or 6 spots, and a top prize somewhere in the 5k range. It's about as small of a payout tournament as I will generally play in the no-limit context at 25k guaranteed, as I generally prefer larger prizes for the final table to even make it worth bothering trying to wade through the level of donkery one must always survive to make a run like this. I think nothing would piss me off more than to outlast 1500 other shitheads in a $1 buyin tournament, just to end up in third place when my AK goes down to JJ and get paid a total of $500. For me that's just not worth the effort, and the luck, really, that it takes to last through a huge field of players like that, so I typically try to play 30k guaranteed or larger events only whenever I can. This way I can at least be assured that if tonight's going to be another magical run for me, I know I can win more than 5k or at least in the few thousand range for a top-few-spots finish.

So anyways, it's very early (first round) in the pokerstars 25k, and the UTG player limps for 20 chips. The next guy at our full 9-person table folds, and then the action is to me. I am holding 87s.

What do you do here?

I actually love to raise with sooted connectors in early position. In fact, as I've written here many times, when you raise preflop as aggressively as I do, it's basically a requirement to raise with these hands as well, just for balance if nothing else. From what I've seen and read, it seems like mostly all of the big tournament pros raise sooted connectors from early position as well, again in particular when the stacks are deep early in a tournament. However, in this particular spot, with one limper already in the pot, and him seated under the gun at that, I opt to check. To clarify my earlier statement, I like to open-raise with sooted connectors from early position. When the pot's already been opened for a limp from early position, now with a hand like 87s I am looking at a good possibility of a multiway pot if I just limp behind, which actually is my best pure math strategy for this kind of a hand. So where someone else has made the decision for me by open-limping ahead of me, and there is a decent chance of a multiway pot developing if I just limp as well, I will usually limp with connectors in this situation:

Two other players in late position limp in as well, as does the big blind, so we end up seeing a 5-way flop which is exactly perfect for what I'm holding. The flop comes down 962, with one of my suit, giving me the open-ended straight draw. The big blind checks, as does the UTG player, and the action is to me:

What do you do?

My answer is this: try to either take down the 110 chips in the pot now, or, if I end up building a little bit of a pot here, that's ok as well as long as I control the size of that pot such that I can profitably see at least one more card. Nobody has shown any strength yet before the flop here, and the flop is raggy enough that even most limpers should not really have connected with it in some huge way. More than that, the way I play I like to take a lot of little stabs at flops when the pots are still small, and this is a perfect opportunity to start creating that image of an active flop bettor so that the next time I am holding TPTK and of course decide to bet the flop, I will actually have created more action for myself by betting at flops like these as well. And, at this point in the hand, the pot is still super small relative to our stacks, so unlike at some point later in the tournament possibly, right now I have plenty of chips to make a move and still fold to a huge reraise or even to a turn bet or raise from my opponent. So I decided to make the exact same type and size of bet as I would make if I were holding top pair, or an overpair, on most flops:

90 chips into the 110-chip pot. In a pot with four other players, all of whom limped in and thus could be holding the middling-sort of cards that could have connected in some way with this flop, and with the flush draw on the board, I want to make sure I am forcing my opponents to make a poor call odds-wise at whatever they're drawing at. Remember, my game here is to play this flop exactly like I would if I were holding TPTK or something, because I know I'm going to be getting out there and betting at a lot of flops just exactly like that over the next hour or so here.

The late position player called my 90-chip bet here, while the big blind and UTG both folded their hands. So we saw a turn heads-up, and I was first to act:

Boom! I just made my nut straight on the turn. And I picked up a flush draw. And an open-ended straight flush draw. There's 290 chips in the pot, and both myself and my opponent each have around 10x that still behind. I'm thinking this is my chance to hopefully extract some serious chippage from this guy early on in an mtt and get some much-needed chip utility early, as the big blind will move from 20 to 50 over the next 20 minutes or so and I will soon be well below that magical utility level of 100 big blinds.

How do you play this hand now? If you bet, how much? If you check, why?

Back tomorrow with the conclusion.

Super Turbo Heads Up SNGs

2009-11-11T23:26:00.004+07:00

That's right, folks. As I've gradually started getting back in to online poker as my son has started sleeping a good portion of the night, I noticed something brand new last night that I had not noticed before on full tilt -- the presence of heads-up sitngos in a super turbo format. Now, for those of you who don't konw, the super turbos are the satellites that start each player with just 300 chips, and 15-30 blinds, and the blinds escalate every three minutes. Basically, the structure in super turbo formats more or less forces you to play allin preflop poker almost every single time a flop is seen, certainly in the early part of the tournament. If you think you can bump the 30-chip big blind to 90 chips with a preflop raise, but then fold when reraised from late position, you're nuts because with 90 chips already invested, you have already committed around 30% of your stack in a tournament with very quick blind escalation. So it's either allin-or-fold right from the getgo in these things, and it's been well documented among several bloggers over the past year or so since the super turbo format first appeared in limited instances on full tilt that playing in the large super turbo's is basically just a crapshoot, at any level of buyin.

So it would stand to reason, then, that the heads-up flavor of these things would also be a total and complete crapshoot, right?

Not so fast. As I have written about here myself, and as I recall some others have chipped in as well, there actually is some strategy that can be used in the super turbo structure. Ultimately, there is little you can do to prevent yourself from taking your AQs up against someone else's 77 in the third hand of the tournament for all of your respective stacks, but there is a general way of approaching these hyper-quick tournament structures that can give you an advantage over others at your table who don't get it. And what I found last night is that, in the heads-up context, if you can get up against someone who doesn't have the same feel for the super-turbo game as you do, you can actually make some decent, albeit extremely high-variance, profits.

I was lucky last night. I ran into a guy sitting at one of these $160 + $4 super turbo heads-up sitngos who really had no clue how to play them. And more than that, either he was some sick points whore or he had wayyyyyyy too much money for his own good, because whether he won or lost, the guy immediately accepted a rematch offer within seconds of the last sng ending. Although I stopped counting maybe around 20, we must have played at least 25 of these super-turbo heads-up sngs, and in the end I think I won maybe five more than I lost by the time this guy had finally had enough. And more than that, net of any suckouts I foisted on my opponent during the session, he won three or four of our battles on hardcore dominated suckouts, situations where we got allin preflop with my AJ vs. his QJ, or my K9 vs his 97, etc. Plus he won another two or so on what I would call mild suckouts, like allin preflop my AK vs his T9 and hands like that where my preflop odds were probably not more than 60% but where I still had a nice lead when all the money went into the middle.

How did I play this such that I ended up +5 in sngs won, plus another 5 or so where my opponent sucked out but where really I was the odds-on favorite to win maybe 2/3 of the super-turbo contests we played? Given the speed, there are really just a few tricks I employed:

1. Push! Whenever I get relatively short and I am first to act preflop. With any two cards. So when he won the first couple of pots and the chip stacks were 390 for him to 210 for me, I would push in preflop automatically with my 30-chip big blind and his 15 already in the pot, even if I'm holding 34o, a hand I pushed with many a time through our 30- or 40-sng session last night. Almost every time he folded, and the couple of times he does call, I am generally only a 55-60% dog or so, which means I am winning more than 4 times out of 10 in any event even when he does call.

2. Read! My opponent. Yes it is hard to read too much into my opponent's actions when we are playing super-turbo which by definition forces the action quite a bit as it is. But there are still variations in the players who get mixed up in these things, and generally speaking you only have a few short minutes to figure out which kind of guy you are up against. Is he, like me, a push-n-pray guy every time he gets a little short, so that when he is short and moves in before the flop I do not necessarily have to fear being up against a monster. Or, is he one of these guys who only auto-pushes with any Ace or with any two face cards? Will he move in with that 34o if he is first to act and has already put big blind money into the pot, or will he try to wait for a better spot? Does a pause before he bets generally indicate that he has a big hand and wants to bait me into calling, or that he has a horrible hand and needs to psyche himself up into raising with it? These are the things I attune myself to right away in the super turbo structure tournaments, and in heads-up play it becomes significantly more important given that you're up against the same guy every single hand for all the marbles.

3. Know! My preflop pushing odds. This is the last key I used last night in abusing this guy in the super-turbo heads up sngs, and it really goes hand in hand with item #2 above. Once I can put some reasonable limitation on his hand range when he moves in in a given spot at a given speed, I need to know whether it makes sense for me to call given my own hole cards. So, for example, once I determined in our first 10 matches or so that this guy was pushing in with any two cards on the first hand of every tournament, then suddenly that K7o I was dealt becomes a calling hand and not a folding hand. And when I know for sure that this guy autopushes with any Ace or any King at all, that A6 or A7 I am holding once again becomes a caller instead of a possible folder. The key is understanding the math behind the allin preflop decisions, at least on a categorical level, for any reasonable two-card hands he and I might be holding.

Still, in the end as I mentioned above, the variance on these super-turbo badboys is more than anyone should have to deal with in trying to amass some quality results. As I pointed out, although I did end the 40-sng-or-so session 4 or 5 wins ahead of my opponent, these results did include a good 5 or 6 net suckouts on my opponent's part that severely hampered my ability to really lay a smackdown on him, but the fact remains that I got in good position to win his $160 buyin in a good two-thirds of the sngs we played simply by following the three keys above and executing my game plan without making rash calls or bad plays. I'm not sure I want to make a habit of playing heads-up super-turbo poker, but when a profitable situation presents itself I feel good knowing I am prepared with a plan that should work against most lesser-experienced opponents.

NFL Winners and Losers -- Week 9

2009-11-10T15:07:00.000+07:00

Week 9 was an extraordinary week in the NFL, one that saw all but three underdogs cover while nearly every favorite was unable to win at all or to win by the required number of points to cover the spread coming out of Vegas. In a year when the sportsbooks are taking an absolute bath with all the favorites consistently winning regardless of how large the oddsmakers can set the spreads, Week 9 will go down as the week when the books finally made some of that hard-earned dough back. I was lucky enough to be in on two of those dogs with my picks for the week -- Miami +10.5 at the Cheatriots (the Dolphins covered, ever so barely) and Houston +9 (they covered easily in a game they probably should have won against the Colts), although my other three picks all failed in my first sub-.500 week since Week 2 of the NFL season at 2-3. But hey, am I beating myself up because the Buccaneers came out of nowhere and beat the weakass Green Bay Packers? Because the Titans came out of nowhere and beat an allegedly hungry 49ers team? Because the Saints once again gave up a 17-point lead before they decided to start playing in the second half at home against Carolina? Nope. With all the 3-2 and better weeks I've had in a row so far this season, some 2-3's thrown in here and there for good measure has to be expected, especially when picking against the spread.

Here is Week 9's Winners and Losers report.

Winners:

1. The Dallas Cowboys. Another week, another receiving touchdown for Miles Austin. Austin didn't play huge at Philadelphia on Sunday night as the Eagles really seemed to cue on him throughout the game defensively, but he did just enough to make the go-ahead touchdown he scored in the 4th count in a 20-16 victory over a key divisional rival. Coming in to Philadelphia and beating the Eagles is a huge move for the Cowboys, a team that has had trouble during the current regime winning big games on the road, and Dallas now moves to 6-2, a full game up on the Eagles in the division and in the driver's seat to take down their first NFC East since going 13-3 in 2007.

2. The Tampa Bay Buccaneers. The Bucs are off the schneid! The Bucs are off the schneid! I had to get them in here this week because the Buccaneers went out and beat down on the Green Bay Packers this Sunday afternoon in Tampa. And they did so in the first career start for rookie and Kansas State alumni Josh Freeman at quarterback. Freeman did the job on the day, tossing three td passes while throwing for over 200 yards and taking care of the ball with just one interception on the day of his first pro start, while Green Bay simply could not score enough thanks in no small part to three picks from their quarterback Aaron Rodgers (more on that later).

3. The Cincinnati Bungles. OK, this time I mean it for real -- one more win next weekend against the Steelers, and I will officially stop calling this team the Bungles. At least for the remainder of the 2009 NFL season. Because at 6-2, having beaten the Steelers, the Browns and now having swept the tough Ravens on the year, the Bungles are most assuredly for real. A rejuvenated Cedric Benson is blowing up at runningback, now with 837 yards and 6 touchdowns in 8 games for the Bungles, and Carson Palmer and another rejuvenated skill guy in Chad Ochocinco are leading the way in the passing game, but it continues to be the Cincy defense that impresses me the most. In eight games so far in 2009, only two teams have scored more than 20 points against the Bungles, both strong offensive teams in Green Bay and Houston, and Cincinnati has held Baltimore, Chicago, and Baltimore again to 14, 10 and 7 points in three of their last four weeks, all wins for the surprising AFC North leaders at the halfway point.

4. Michael Turner. The Atlanta Falcons' starting runningback has really been rebounding these past few weeks after a tough start to the 2009 campaign. In the Falcons' first six games this season, Michael Turner recorded just one 100-yard game, a 105-yard effort in Week 2 at home against Carolina. Now, however, Turner has to be considered among the hottest backs in the NFL, putting up 151 and 166 yards over 38 carries for three rushing touchdowns in his last two starts, while his team went 1-1 during that time including a close loss to the NFC's best New Orleans Saints. With 166 yards and two touchdowns on just 18 carries on Sunday against the allegedly solid defense of the Washington Redskins, Turner has now served notice to the rest of the NFL that he is back and better than ever as his team readies for another strong second half after ending their first eight games at a 5-3 clip.

5. The Tennessee Titans and Vince Young. Tennessee quarterback Vince Young's passing numbers don't look all that intimidating on paper, but behind the scenes VY has been fairly instrumental in managing the game and in scoring when it counted in his two starts this season, both wins for the Titans after an 0-6 start with veteran Kerry Collins at the helm. The Titans moved to 2-6 this weekend after Young led the team on a go-ahead drive in the 4th quarter, capped off by Chris Johnson's second rushing td of the day, sealing Young's second straight start without an interception as compared to 49ers qb Alex Smith's three picks on the day, two in the final seven minutes of play. The Titans won't be going to the postseason after Week 17 is finished this year, but they might just have found their quarterback of the future right at the back of their own bench, with Young's qb rating over his two starts this season now sitting at over 100.

6. Troy Polamalu. Simply put, Polamalu is the best football player in the game today IMO. It's always hard to compare a defensive guy to a player of Peyton Manning's or Purple Jesus's caliber, but when I watch Troy Polamalu pull a guy down 20 yards downfield after a full sprint for 40 yards from the opposite sideline, when I see him break in behind the line out of nowhere and drop a back untouched for a 5-yard loss, and when I see him read the quarterback's eyes and pick off a pass with an incredibly athletic vertical leap and some of the best hands in the NFL, it just feels like I am watching pure greatness in action. With Polamalu on the prowl in the backfield, the Steelers can automatically handle facing any team in the league and still be extremely dangerous even when they don't have the ball.

Losers:

1. The New York Giants. The Giants are, in a word, a mess, and they are easily the biggest losers of the NFL Week 9. With the Week 9 last-minute loss to the San Diego Chargers, the Giants have become the first team in 20 years to start off an NFL season 5-0, only to lose its next four games. Quarterback Eli Manning's foot is still hurting him, and the running game is more or less nonexistent, despite the presence of Ahmad Bradshaw and Brandon Jacobs, the same 6 foot 4 stallion that loved to bust into opposing linebackers all last season to the tune of nearly 1100 yards and 15 rushing touchdowns in 2008. But it's the Giants' defense that has really up and disappeared like a fart in the wind, as Warden Norton is so fond of saying. The G-Men's defense was highly touted earlier this season, in particular following a three-game stretch against the Buccaneers, Chiefs and Raiders that saw the team give up a total of 23 points over those three games, but when this team has faced actual good players on the opposing offense, the defense has been total trash this year. In five games against teams with formidable offenses, the Giants have allowed 31 points to Dallas in Week 2, 48 points to New Orleans in Week 6, 24 points to Arizona in Week 7, 40 points to the Eagles in Week 8, and now 21 to the Chargers this past weekend. And 33 points per game allowed is just not going to be enough in this league to get you into the playoffs. The Giants will now have to find a way to bounce back after a bye week in Week 10, and they will focus on the Falcons coming in to town on Sunday the 22nd as their chance to start righting the ship.

2. The Green Bay Packers and qb Aaron Rodgers. I mentioned above that Tampa Bay managed to nab their first victory of the season in a 38-28 shocker over the Packers in Florida. Most people heard about this at some point over the weekend as it is always big news at this point in the season when a team finally gets off the schneid for the first time. But what you may not have heard is that Aaron Rodgers took six sacks in the game, meaning that he has now been sacked an NFL-worst 37 times in eight games, and if you watch Green Bay play, it is clear that much of the blame for these sacks falls on Rodgers' own shoulders as he simply sits back there and looks, and looks, and looks, and looks, and holds the ball, and looks some more, and on and on until someone finally gets to him. Rodgers, who has a great arm when given the time to find his open receivers, needs to learn to move a little bit in the backfield, try to avoid the pressure and focus on throwing on the run a little bit to keep the defenders off balance. Anything to prevent him from another 6-sack, 3-interception performance that basically made it impossible for his team to beat a winless opponent this past weekend on the road. And let's also not forget that the Pack allowed the Bucs to score 21 points in the final 12 minutes of the game on Sunday, which equals the maximum number of points that the Buccaneers have managed to string together against any other team in the NFL in an entire game at any point in the 2009 NFL season prior to this weekend. That kind of defensive incompetence is nothing short of impressive, and it easily earns the Packers -- now at 4-4 and three full games behind the North-leading Vikings -- a prominent spot on the Week 9 Losers list.

3. Sticking with the NFC North for a minute, let's not forget to mention the Chicago Bears, who outdid Week 7's 45-10 drubbing by the Bungles with an equally inept 41-21 loss to the West-leading Arizona Cardinals on Sunday afternoon. Cardinals quarterback Kurt Warner finished 22 for 32 for just 266 yards against the Bears defense, but those 22 completions included five passing touchdowns for Warner. Yes, five, a career best for Kurt Warner. In addition to a formerly good defense that has given up more than 40 points now twice in three weeks, the Bears continue to have no running game whatsoever to speak of, as fantasy bust Matt Forte finished the Arizona game with just 5 rushes for 33 yards. At 4-4, the Bears are now also mired three games out of first in the NFC North, and, more disturbing to their chances of making it back to the playoffs after a two year absence, they are behind three other teams battling it out for two wildcard spots in the NFC playoffs.

4. The New Orleans Saints. It's a little bit tongue-in-cheek to include the 8-0 Saints on the Losers' side of the ledger this week of course, but there is some thought to what I'm doing here. For the second time in three weeks, the Saints -- easily the NFC's best team if not the NFL's best -- basically didn't give a rats' ass about their game until they were hopelessly behind and needed a true offensive outburst to get back into it. Of course, with Drew Brees at the helm, and with the receiving corps and the runningbacks this team has, they were in fact able to overcome the 17-point deficit they had allowed themselves to fall into early in the second quarter on Sunday afternoon against division rival Carolina, and the Saints eventually held on for a "mere" 10-point victory. But let's be honest here: the Saints have not looked like an undefeated team for much of their past three games against Carolina, Atlanta and Miami, and truly good teams would definitely not have allowed the Saints to come back and win in either the Miami or Carolina games. This team is starting to remind me of Jordan's old Bulls teams both before and after his retirement in the mid 1990s -- at some point they just got so good, and so sure that they would win, that they basically stopped trying very hard in their games until they either found that they could win anyways, or until they got down enough to make it interesting enough for them to try to come back. Just to see if they could do it from far down against an inferior team that thought it might actually be able to escape the United Center with a win. The Saints better be careful though, because unlike those Bulls teams of the 90s, this Saints squad hasn't proven shiat yet, and they do not want to start falling into bad, repeated habits of rolling over early as the season progresses and the playoffs start to loom.

5. The Denver Broncos. After a 6-0 start, the Broncos haven't just lost two games -- they've gotten pretty much demolished in both of them and have really allowed a blueprint to be created on how to beat the AFC West leaders. First Baltimore and now Pittsburgh have essentially stacked the box and brought the pressure against Denver qb Kyle Orton, forcing him to throw for just 7 yards per completion last week, and then to again throw for under 10 yards per completion this past Monday night in addition to Orton chucking three picks, two of which were returned for scores by the Steelers. The Broncos' opponents have also completely shut down Denver's running attack in the past two weeks, culminating last night with Correll Buckhalter leading the Broncos with just 29 yards on the ground against Pittsburgh. With home games against divisional rival San Diego as well as the hungry Giants over the next few weeks, the Broncos will have little time to figure out how to adjust before they are thrust back out onto the field and forced to defend their turf against opponents who now think of them as one of the last undefeated teams of the 2009 NFL season.

TO Watch: TO recorded zero catches for zero yards and no touchdowns this weekend for the Bills. What's that? No, this wasn't just a regular game for the Bills -- they were on a bye. But the fact that it could have been shows just how far TO has fallen over the past season or two.

There will be no JaMarcus Russell award awarded this week as again my go-to guy for this award -- JaMarcus Russell himself -- did not play this week as his Raiders were also mercifully on a bye week. And while there were some less than stellar performances out of other NFL quarterbacks on the day, none of them seem quite worthy to me of bespoiling with the name of the league's far and away worst starting qb.

Closing the Book on MLB 2009

2009-11-09T09:26:00.004+07:00

As the last of the confetti was cleaned up this weekend after the Yankees parade in lower Manhattan, I had some good time to close the book in my own head on the 2009 baseball season. With a few days to reflect, most of my impressions from last week of course remain the same, but there are some additional thoughts that gradually crept into my head a day or two after Game 6 and which have only gotten stronger since then.

For starters, although most predictions about the greatness of this series coming in (my own included) proved to be inaccurate and exaggerated by the time the teams got on the field to actually play the games, one thing was clearly correct: the ratings for this series were strongly up from past years. The average share for the six 2009 World Series games was just under a 19, meaning approximately 18.8 million viewers in U.S. households tuned in each night to watch the Phillies and Yankees battle it out for the world championship. The most-watched game was Game 4 -- the game I attended in Philadelphia -- with nearly 23 million viewers, while Games 3 and 5 both garnered between 15 and 16 million watchers on the low end. Game 1 of the 2009 Series was viewed by over 19 million in the U.S., while in contrast, Game 1 of the 2008 World Series between the Phillies and the Tampa Bay Rays brought in just over 10 million viewers, and Game 1 in 2007 between Colorado and the Red Sox came in at around 13 million. Overall viewership was up just over 40% above the series last year, and the 2009 Fall Classic was the most watched World Series since the Red Sox broke their 50,000 year slump by riding steroided-up horse-pill-takers to the World Series championship back in 2004.

But the main feeling I am left with now that the 2009 major league baseball season has come to a close is that it really is sick what the Yankees have done, using the absurd structure of the sport and their deepest of pockets to their extreme advantage. And yet, like most non-Yankee fans I keep running in to in real life, on the internet, national sports talk shows, etc., I do not say this with a whole lot of admiration, so much as rather with a solid helping of disdain. Here's the thing: the Yankees missed the playoffs in 2008 one time. One year. The Bombers were not in the playoff hunt in 2008, after participating in the postseason previously in every year since 1996. And their reaction to missing the playoffs one time -- keep in mind they had made the playoffs twelve straight years before that, equalling the number of times the Phillies have made the postseason in their entire nearly 130-year history -- but after just one year of missing the playoffs, they had had enough. Oh sure, Yanks' GM Brian Cashman had thought he had had enough before already -- several times in fact -- but what everyone involved in the Yankees organization found out quickly during the 2008-2009 offseason was that they hadn't seen anything yet.

Before anyone could say "competitive imbalance" five times fast, the Yankees went out in the offseason before this year and signed the not one, not two, but the three biggest free agents out there in CC Sabathia, AJ Burnett and Mark Teixeira. And it's not like they had to scrimp or anything in paying these guys in order to manage to afford all three of them in one offseason on top of what was already for years the highest payroll in all of baseball. Nope -- they committed to $161 million for 7 years with Sabathia, $82 million for 5 years with Burnett, and $180 million over 8 years on Teixeira. All three of these deals were announced within a few days of December 18, 2008, and it was obvious that the Yankees were negotiating with all three players simultaneously and, clearly, without real regard to the money it was costing them. That's over $420 million committed by the Yankees over the next 8 years on just these three players, again on top of what was already the highest payroll in baseball by about $20 million more than the second-place Red Sox even before last season came to a close.

In 2009, the Yankees spent a total of a whopping $208.1 million on their payroll. Second place on that list is now the New York Mets, but coming in way "down" at 145.3 million. In third are the Cubs, coming in at $134.8 million, with Yankees rival the Boston Red Sox rounding out the top four at 122.4 million. So the Yankees are spending more than 70% more money on their team than their closest rival in the AL, and the team that still has the fourth-highest payroll overall in the majors, and the Yanks are spending 43% more than anybody else in baseball. 43% more than the 2nd highest payroll in the league right now. And lookie there, they went out and won the 2009 title. Shocker.

When a team is spending 43% more than the 2nd place team in a professional sport, and between 70% and 500% more than any other team in their league, that sport is walking a really fine line. Basically, it's fine when that team is not winning the world series title every single year and when, generally speaking, at least a decent handful of other teams are entering every season with a reasonable shot at winning it all. But when someone is spending more than 43% more than the next closest payroll, and more than 70% more than anybody else in their league, and they go out, win more games than anybody else by a mile, and basically show game in and game out why nobody else in the major leagues can even touch them, well, that really causes some problems. Obviously it is bad for the sport as a whole -- take a look at the teams at the bottom of the payroll list in Florida, Pittsburgh and Washington, for example, who cannot compete so have just given up trying, not to mention the teams like Minnesota, Cleveland, etc. who seem to come up every few years in talks of bankruptcy, significant losses and even contraction. But the Yankees just keep chugging along, even in the worst economy of any of our lifetimes. Think about it -- this was December 2008, right smack in the midst of all that shit last winter with the financial meltdown, the markets were in the tank, just about everything seemed to have come to a standstill. Everything, that is, except the Yankees, who in the span of three or four days committed to spend over $420 million on three players for the next 5-8 years in what was without a doubt the most sweeping, literally not believable free agency extravaganza by any team at any time in baseball history.

All I know is that I, like just about every other non-Yankee baseball fan in America it seems these days, am left with a very bitter taste in my mouth about this Yankees team and what exactly they did to basically secure their 27th world series title before the 2009 season has even begun. Sure this team has always spent the most money in the league for most of their history, but what they did prior to the 2009 season was corpulent and gluttony even by Yankees standards, and it bought them exactly what they wanted. I guess if you spend enough money on players, enough more than everybody else in the league is willing to spend regardless of the situation, the economy, the state of the game, etc., you really can buy a championship. And that's exactly what we saw in the 2009 baseball season: the purchase of a World Series. Price tag? $208.1 million. Not even a fraction of a bailout.

And one of the least satisfying aspects of this entire thing is what it means for the future. Look at the state of baseball right now, and ask yourself who you honestly think is going to win the world series in 2010. Think about that lineup we just watched the Yankees trot out there every night against the Phillies, and think about that starting rotation that held the Yankees back for years but which was completely and totally transformed by the addition of Burnett and Sabathia at the top of the list, and think about Mariano Rivera coming in from the pen in the 9th. Face it -- the Yankees are already your 2010 World Series champions. Might as well book it now. The only question is: do the Yankees win 120 games next year? I have very little doubt that this team -- without the issues around A-Rod's getting caught for steroid use, the injury and the poor start without him in April and part of May -- will give the 1998 Yankees and their 114-42 regular season record a serious run for their money. There is some age on the Yankees roster, but outside of Rivera who is still, far and away, the best relief pitcher in baseball today, there isn't much that the addition of last year's three huge free agents can't overcome for at least the next couple of years. The Yankees are here to stay, the $200 million+ behemoth in a league of $30-120 million competitors, unless and until baseball does something to change their system that they have shown no indication of changing whatsoever thus far.

I mentioned A-Rod's preseason revelation about having used steroids from 2001-2003 in baseball. Personally, I find the Yankees' reliance over the past several years on steroided-up players to be one of the most disgusting aspects of this whole nasty team that has been permitted by league rules to completely trump all others in terms of skill and experience amassed on its roster. Think about this for a minute -- although Hideki Matsui won the 2009 World Series MVP award (and deservedly so), who would you name as the Yankees' overall postseason MVPs in 2009? I'll tell you who -- Alex Rodriguez, for starters. Despite an only "good" World Series in which A-Rod won Game 4 in the top of the 9th and contributed solidly on offense to one other win as well, the man ended the 2009 postseason going 19-for-52 for a .365 batting average, with 6 home runs, 2 doubles, 18 RBIs and two stolen bases. A-Rod was an offensive machine for the Yankees and would simply have to be thought of as the MVP of this team's postseason run in 2009. And who would be next on that list for the 2009 Yankees? Andy Pettitte, who pitched and won the series-clinching game in each of the three playoff series in 2009 against the Twins, the Angels and then the Phillies in the World Series. Pettitte really lived up to his career reputation as a stopper for the Yankees, taking the ball in the biggest and most crucial of spots time and again in the postseason, and coming through in a big way. Alex Rodriguez and Andy Pettitte literally led their team 1-2 in postseason contributions in 2009, including both winning games during the World Series itself.

And both are admitted juicers. And guys, might I add, who only admitted their steroid usage after getting outed publicly, A-Rod by the biography of him released earlier this year, and Pettitte in connection with the ongoing investigation into the steroid activities of Roger Clemens, another guy who contributed greatly to the World Series runs of the Yankees several years ago.

Both A-Rod and Pettitte have had their bodies forever altered in immeasurable ways by the illegal and banned substances they knowingly ingested over the past several years in their attempts to ~~cheat~~ skirt the rules. Both found muscles that most people never even know they have, as a result of illegal steroids and other performance-enhancing drugs, muscles which are still more developed in their bodies today as a result of that usage, regardless of how long it's been since they received more PEDs. Both used illegal steroids to rehab from injuries, injuries which we'll never even know if they could have recovered from the same without cheating the rules of the game. And both of those guys are now on the roster of the team with the astronomically high payroll, and the two led the New York Yankees to the first world title in 10 years in 2009. It's disgusting, it's despicable, and most of all, it's just not fair.

A last impression I have after the 2009 baseball season relates to home field advantage and the All-Star Game. It is truly and totally ridiculous that home-field advantage in the World Series is decided by who wins the freaking All-Star game in mid-summer every year. Yes, I mean, everyone has said this and there's no doubt that it's an accurate statement, but I mean it for a slightly different reason, getting right back at the competitive imbalance in the sport these days. For years the Yankees and the Red Sox have led the league in terms of team payroll, and even though this year the Red Sox have fallen to 4th place, the fact remains that the highest-payroll teams are still concentrated in the American League, and the lower-paying teams are still concentrated in the National League. Just the presence of the Yankees alone, stockpiling and overpaying for talent in wallet-busting fashion, basically helps ensure that the American League teams will have homefield advantage in the World Series under the current system because they help tilt the talent scale in favor of the AL over the NL. Four of the top six payrolls in baseball were in the AL in 2009 (Yankees, Red Sox, Tigers and Angels), while the bottom four payroll teams in baseball -- including the bottom three which are each at least 25% below the lowly Washington Nationals' 2009 payroll -- are all in the National League. The result? There is more talent in the American League because there is more money being spent there, year in and year out -- at least partially due to the outdated DH rule in the American League, by the way -- and as a result, the National League is stupidly disadvantaged in the World Series by never getting to have home field advantage.

Prior to 2003, home field in the World Series simply alternated every year between the AL team and the NL team. That's also dumb, in that in a year like 2009, it could have given the Phillies home field advantage despite the Yankees having the best record in baseball by far. Instead, home field in the Fall Classic should simply be based on which team had the better regular season record (just like the other sports have figured out years ago by now). In the seven years that the All-Star game has been used to determine home field advantage in the World Series ever since Bud Selig butchered the 2002 All-Star game after 11 innings, the AL has won the All-Star game with their clearly superior talent every single year -- again buttressed tremendously by the Yankees' and Red Sox's penchant for extravagant spending and bidding wars, as the AL has held at least four of the top 6 payroll spots in each year in the league since 2003 -- and as a result of the Yankees' and Red Sox's largesse, the AL team has had four home games on the World Series schedule every year. In a year like this year, that dictates the correct result, but allowing the league with all the overspending to get this kind of a home-baked advantage in the location of the World Series games is just the final stick in the eye of all true baseball fans in this country who are sick and tired of the Yankees taking extreme (and growing) advantage of this sport being the only one of the major professional sports in this country not to enforce some form of a salary cap to help ensure that all teams have a chance to win it all.

Here is where I normally would make some kind of an optimistic statement about the powers that be in the sport hopefully recognizing the problem in their league and doing something to fix it right away. But that's not going to happen here. So given that, get yourselves ready everyone for another year (or more) of the Yankees on top.

NFL Pick 5 -- Week 9

2009-11-06T09:03:00.005+07:00

As I think I mentioned earlier this week, I had another over-.500 performance in Week 8, going 3-2 on the weekend to raise my overall season record so far in 2009 to 23-12 in 7 weeks of picking five games a week. Given how tough the last few weeks in particular have been to find winnable games, I'm very pleased to have escaped the past three weeks with a total record of 10-5 to raise me to a season high of 11 games over .500. This week there seem to be some more pickable choices among the lines I am seeing, although I suppose only time will tell if that means I can really gain some more ground over break-even in Week 9 or if it will be my first sub-.500 setback since Week 2 of the NFL season, which you know is coming sooner or later. Here are this week's picks, once again in no particular order:

1. Green Bay Packers -10 at Tampa Bay Buccaneers. I absolutely love this game, even though I would like 9 points a heck of a lot more than the 10 this game is currentiy sitting at. The Packers have played three of "The Stinkers" -- my new nickname for the surprisingly large cadre of teams clearly at the bottom of the NFL talent pool this year -- and has trounced them by an average of 25 points apiece. Two of those wins -- the Rams in Week 3 by 21 points and the Browns by 28 points in Week 7 -- came on the road, so I don't have concern that the Pack can't step it up on or score the ball against the bad teams on the road, and let's be honest: Tampa Bay might be worse than both Cleveland and St. Louis as it is. The Bucs are averaging just 11 points per game over their last 5 efforts, and with the Pack averaging over 28 points per game over their last five, 10 points should be beatable for sure this weekend in sunny Florida.

2. Miami Dolphins +10.5 at New England Cheatriots. I'm not trying to say that the Dolphins are on par with the caliber of team that the Cheatriots have returned to this year, but getting more than a touchdown and a field goal in what I think will be a reasonably good matchup is just too much value for me to pass up. The Dolphins have historically played decent defense against the Cheaters on the road -- holding the Cheats to 20 points in New England in 2006, 28 in 2007 and just 13 points in a huge road win for Miami early in the 2008 season in the midst of what was otherwise a nice run for Matt Kassell as the Cheats' backup quarterback. What's more, since Chad Henne took over the Dolphins' starting qb position, the team has now quietly scored 38, 31, 34 and 30 points in its last five games (admittedly some of those points on returns). And those four 30+ point outbursts were more than just the first four times the team broke the 30 mark this season -- they came against what I consider to be four fairly tough team defenses in the Bills, the Jets, the Saints and then again the Jets. So Miami has been finding a way to score some points after Chad Pennington went down in Week 3, and along with always playing the Cheats tough, I just can't pass up the 10.5 points this week. I like the Dolphins as a dog for the third time already this year.

3. Houston Texans +9 at Indianapolis Colts. Here's another road underdog I just can't bring myself to stay away from this week, even though they are facing a clearly superior team overall. Houston has been playing well lately, winning three in a row on their way to their best first half ever in the NFL at 5-3 through 8 games so far in 2009. The last three matchups between these two teams have been close games, shootouts for the most part, with the teams playing to winning margins of 4, 6 and 6 for the Colts over the last three meetings in what has become a regular tough battle every time these teams come together. But what really moves me to pick the Texans here is their road performance so far in 2009, which has been pretty awesome all things considered. The Texans are 3-1 on the road this fall, including outright wins at Tennessee, at Cincinnati and at Buffalo and just a 7-point loss at defending NFC champion Arizona. And over their four road games, the team has scored an average of nearly 23 points per game, with the three road victories garnering 28, 31 and 34 points, including 28 at Cincy and 31 at Buffalo, both teams considered to have fairly good defenses this year. So Houston, whose quarterback remember leads the league in passing yardage and passing touchdowns, should be able to score the ball on the Colts this weekend if nothing else, and that should make it very difficult for the Colts to cover the 9 point spread.

4. New Orleans Saints -13 vs Carolina Panthers. At home or on the road this year, the New Orleans Saints have come to play, and they have scored like madmen. In the dome in Louisiana, the Saints have scored 45, 24, 48 and 35 points, with the only aberration in the 24 points coming against the New York Jets back when they were playing a very solid team defense. And despite their past history, Carolina has not been a strong defensive team this season, giving up an average of over 23 points per game in four road games this season, including allowing Tampa Bay even to score three touchdowns against them in Week 6 in Florida. Jake Delhomme has been beyond atrocious this year, and despite running up tons of yardage on the ground against the Cardinals last week, the Panthers have had a heck of a time trying to establish the running game with their qb situation as bad as it is, having a 100-yard rusher only twice so far in eight games this season. I'm expecting to see the Saints score at least 35 points in this one, which would be the fewest points they've scored in five games against not-great team defenses this season, and I would be surprised if the Panthers broke 20 points themselves given all their problems moving the ball this season. I always always always hate having to give this many points, but I really think the Saints should be able to cover here.

5. San Francisco 49ers -4.5 vs. the Tennessee Titans. Here's another line that just seems a bit too low to me. Everyone knows by now that the Titans are among the worst teams in football this year, just a year removed from starting off the season 10-0, but just because they won their first game of the season last week, that doesn't suddenly erase this team's many problems on both sides of the ball. Sure the Titans have a great running game behind Chris Johnson, but with absolutely no passing game to speak of (and don't forget, Vince Young recorded just 125 yards in the air last week in his first start of the season against the Jags), the Titans' offense has been abysmal on the road so far. In four road games this season, Tennessee has scored 10, 17, 17 and most recently 0 points, and the 49ers are sure to be raring to go on defense after three straight losses including a tough last-minute defeat last week at the undefeated Colts. The way I see it, this game is the 49ers' chance to get back on track with a clear win, and against a very young quarterback making his second start, whose team has had loads of trouble scoring on the road even with a veteran taking the snaps, I expect a very long day for Vince Young and the Titans on Sunday afternoon. The Niners should score somewhere at least in the 20s, and I don't see the Titans keeping it all that close this weekend in San Francisco.

Reflection

2009-11-05T14:32:00.000+07:00

What a fun day to be a Yankees fan, and a terrible one to be among the Phillies faithful. It was terrible for the Phils because you just knew right from the getgo that the team had no chance to win Game 6 of the World Series on Wednesday night. As soon as the first inning, when Pedro was throwing fastballs that were registering a bare 84 miles per hour on the gun, you had to know. Most major league hitters are going to pound on any clown throwing 84-mph cheese up there, but when you're facing a lineup like the Yankees', the whole notion is an absolute joke. They were all over P-Mart from his first pitch to his merciful last in just the 4th inning, and thanks to Charlie Manuel's continued insistence on leaving his pitchers in for too long and for too many bad pitches, the Phils were out of it by the time they finally got Pedro out of the game in the 4th. But as soon as Pedro came out in the first with guns ablazing with 84 mph fastballs, this game was as good as done.

There are so many reasons the Phillies lost this series. Ultimately, they simply could not compete with the Yankees, who overmatched them about as badly as the Phillies themselves outmatched everyone else in the National League in this postseason. As much as I hate to admit it, this was not a close series in my book. It was about as bad of a blowout as the Yankees did to the Angels a couple of weeks back. Sure, like with the Angels, the Yanks lost Game 5 on the road to extend the series to six and come back home to New York, but as with the ALCS, once things got back to Yankee Stadium, the best team in America quickly retook control of the series, on the back of Andy Pettitte, who got the incredible sixth series-clinching victory of his illustrious career, mostly with the Yankees.

Just like I said here how the Phillies had an advantage both in starting pitching and on offense against every team in the National League and both of its postseason opponents in the NLDS and NLCS, the same proved to be true for the Yankees over the Phillies in this series. On the offensive side of the ball, I think the two lineups are fairly comparable, with the Yankees probably retaining a slight edge as far as their five or six "big boppers" at the top of the lineup. The biggest difference in the lineups to me is that the Yankees, as an American League team with a designated hitter, have that one extra big hitter -- I'm talking a 30 HR, 100 RBI type -- who in this case happens to be Hideki Matsui. I'm not just mentioning him because he utterly destroyed the Phillies in the World Series in nabbing his first ever World Series MVP award. I'm saying if you compare the lineups, both teams have a couple of poor hitters at the bottom of their rotation who are mostly in there for their defensive prowess on a team that simply does not need any more offensive firepower, but otherwise the biggest real difference is that the Yankees go one more man deep among the big hitters they can put at the top of their lineup. Sure the Phillies get the benefit of the same DH rule when they play World Series games in their American League opponent's park, but how can you even compare when the Yankees throw Godzilla's bat into that already stacked lineup, while the Phils are adding in Ben Francisco's, or Matt Stairs'? You can't, because there is just no comparison, and ironically that DH position ends up being one of the big items to tip the scale in the Yankees' favor in this series. The fact that the Yanks so thoroughly handled the Phillies throughout this series, even with A-Rod, Teixeira, Cano and Posada basically hitting like shit is really a testament to just how strong their lineup as a whole is when compared to the competition.

Then, moving on to the pitching, once again the Yanks just had a clear advantage in this World Series. Even though CC Sabathia failed to record a win in his two starts against the Phils, he pitched well enough both times, the second time for his team to secure the late victory off of Phillies idiot Brad Lidge in the 9th inning of Game 4 in Philadelphia. Even though AJ Burnett was hideous on three days rest the in Game 5 loss to the Phillies, he pitched extremely well in Game 2, outlasting a valiant attempt from Pedro Martinez to get his Yankees back into the series after the Phils' surprising Game 1 win. And even though Andy Pettitte pitched on three days rest for the first time in over three years in Game 6, the man was able to put together enough good innings to leave his team in a position to win when they needed to to put this series away. And meanwhile, on the Phillies' side of the ball, the story was pretty much totally reversed. Heading into the postseason I had viewed the Phils' likely rotation of Cliff Lee, Cole Hamels, Pedro Martinez and J. Happ as among the best baseball has to offer this season on one team. However, in practice, once the Yankees posed some actual competition to the skill level on the Phillies' team, Hamels sucked balls every time he went out there, Happ didn't even start a game in the entire postseason for some reason I will never ever ever understand, and when he did pitch in the Series it was constantly Charlie Manuel inserting him into games with guys on 2nd and 3rd, nobody out in the middle of a key inning, a situation which Happ was totally and completely unfamiliar with prior to this postseason. And Pedro, well, it looks like the oil well finally ran dry for the old man here during the World Series. After looking great in a dominating start in LA against the Dodgers in the NLCS, Pedro could not find that form in Game 2 of the World Series facing the Yankees' huge bats, and by the time Game 6 rolled around, even on five days rest, Pedro was worthless. As anyone who watched this series knows, in the end the Phillies simply had nobody on their entire team -- other than Cliff Lee of course -- who could stop the Yankees. Ever. In any inning. Period. Whether it was Hamels, Pedro, Blanton, Happ, Chan Ho Park, Scott Eyre, Ryan Madsen, Brad Lidge or anyone else, in the end the Phils simply could not keep those huge Yankee hitters off the basepaths, and when you combine that with the Yankee pitchers success against most of the Phils' lineup not named Chase Utley or Jayson Werth in this series, it's not hard to see why the Phils weren't even close in this matchup.

This morning on Mike and Mike, Buster Olney was on the air and he was talking all about what an amazing postseason this was for major league baseball. "Amazing"? Really? Try again, Robert. This was about as bad and as boring of a postseason as there has been in baseball in a long time, and ultimately the World Series did little to change that conclusion. Think about it -- the four LDS matchups saw three 3-game sweeps, and one 4-game win for the Phillies over the Rockies. I don't even remember the last time I saw that happen, but from there it just got worse. In the NLCS, the Phillies lambasted the Dodgers in five games, never trailing in the series and never even giving the impression that it was going to become close at any point. The Yankees had a very similar experience in the ALCS against the Angels, although as I mentioned they allowed their series to go six games, but again, it was not a series that ever saw the Yanks trailing or that anyone who understands the game actually ever thought the Angels were close to winning. The path of these two teams to the World Series here in 2009 was about as bad and as boring as possible. And then, sadly, even the World Series ended up not coming close to living up to the hype that a bunch of morons like me spread about it heading into the Fall Classic. This was supposed to be that amazing, historic series -- on paper -- and it was destined to go seven games, right? Wrong. Sure, again the Phils made it to six games in this Series and to that extent it might be tempting to consider this a close matchup, but it really wasn't that close if you actually watched the games, and from the moment that Game 1 ended, the Yankees took complete control of the series and just never looked back, like any championship team should.

As the Yankees bombed their way past the Phillies to win the 2009 World Series on Wednesday night, I did the obvious and took some time to reflect on what this Phillies team has accomplished over the past year or so. It really is amazing if you think about it. The Phillies are a team that in their 130-year history as a franchise, had only been to the World Series five times before last year, and only won it once, in 1980 when I was a mere babe. Staying up and watching that 1980 championship -- watching the late Tug McGraw strike out Willie Wilson to eliminate the Royals in Game 6 -- became my first real clear sports memory, the first time I can specifically remember a sporting event having a big effect on me and those around me. In Philadelphia, just making it to the finals in any sport has always been enough during my lifetime to make you a statue in front of the art museum and to be remembered forever in the lore and stories of old men on their porches in Northeast Philly, the local mailmen on Cottman Avenue, and the lifelong blue-collar workers down in Manyunk.

But this Phillies team really changed all that, didn't it? Those in Philadelphia know exactly what I'm talking about. These Phillies went all the way through the postseason last year and never even came close to losing any series. They won it all and did so in fairly dominatory fashion, putting an end to a 25-year drought of misery and failure that no other city with teams in all four major professional sports in this country has ever had to endure before. By the time the 2008 Phillies arrived at the World Series, they were there to win and they just clamped their collective foot down on the Rays' necks and never let up until the series was over.

And then they went back. It's never been done before in Philly -- two straight World Series appearances -- and in the eyes of the fans it really legitimizes what happened last year as not being some kind of a "fluke" or an accident. And that's not to say that the team wouldn't always have been remembered for being good, but I mean even that 1993 World Series Phillies team never made it back to another postseason, let alone another Fall Classic. Philadelphia has never before been a city of dynasties, but the 2008-2009 Phillies actually got people talking in the city about the "D" word for the first time in decades. In the end, I have never made any bones here at the blog about the fact that the Yankees were the best team in baseball this year. It became clear to me somewhere in the middle of the summertime, and nothing that happened anywhere in the season or during the postseason gave me any reason to doubt that the Yanks's superior talent would eventually prevail and they would win the 2009 World Series.

In a way, knowing how great this Yankees team was really helps ease the acceptance process for the Phillies fans out there. Despite all the bravado and braggadocio and pride from the Phillies Phaithful this postseason, despite all the bad calls, all the questionable coaching decisions, in the end in this World Series, the best team won. I can admit that -- I have no doubt about it at all, for that matter -- and so should everyone else out there. For now, it's time to put the memories of another incredible Phillies season on the back burner, and time to really focus on NFL football.

Thank you, Phillies, for another fabulous season. Here's to more to come in 2010!

World Series Game 6 Preview

2009-11-04T23:18:00.006+07:00

Well, I figure I've been basically wrong about every other game of this World Series so far, so why not go ahead and make another prediction that only a jackass would follow with regard to Game 6 coming up Wednesday night in the Bronx. Game 6 pits Yankee ace and winningest postseason pitcher of all time in Andy Pettitte against another all-time pitching great in Pedro Martinez for the Phillies. The Series returns home for the Yankees, who already hold a 3 games to 2 edge in this best of 7 championship series, and as I mentioned they've got their all-time stopper on the mound in Andy Pettitte who has personally pitched the team to clinching five separate postseason series in his time on the mound for the Bombers. The Phils have had a couple of good games so far in the Series, but they've never quite been able to get everyone hitting at once in the series, and the pitching has not quite been able to hold the Yankees' power lineup at bay, at least not quite enough to hold on to any kind of a run advantage over the Yanks. So this one should be a clear clincher for the Yankees tonight then, right?

Wrong. I'm just not feeling it. It's hard to explain, but I just can't get over the fact that the Phillies are going to hit Andy Pettitte hard on Wednesday evening in the Bronx. As I've mentioned here many times over the past few weeks, this Phillies team -- World Champions that they are -- have shown a ton of heart, throughout this season and especially in the postseason. Although so far the series has been devoid of that special moment where the Phillies really rise up and make their greatness known, I can't shake this feeling that tonight we are going to see that moment.

Let's look a little deeper at that pitching matchup for a minute. Andy Pettitte has actually faced the Phillies now twice this season, once at each stadium. The Phils squared off against Pettitte at Yankee Stadium back on May 25, where Pettitte threw 114 pitches in giving up 4 earned runs in 7 innings, including two home runs to Raul Ibanez and the first-ever game for first baseman Jermaine Mayberry. Pettite fell behind 4-1 in the 5th inning and stayed behind 4-2 when he left the game in the 7th, and although he did not pitch terribly, the two homers and 5.2 ERA for the game were enough for him to leave the game knowing he got outpitched by rookie J. Happ of the Phils.

Pettitte also faced the Phillies on Halloween night just last week in Game 3 of the World Series, this time in Philadelphia. There, he threw 104 pitches in 6 innings, again giving up 4 earned runs and 2 homers, this time both monstrous shots to Jayson Werth, for a game ERA of 6.00, although this time he did leave the game with a 2-run lead thanks to his offense stepping up for him in the middle innings against embattled Phillies starter Cole Hamels.

And on Wednesday, Pettitte will face the Phillies a third time, this time back in New York with a chance to clinch the franchise's 27th world championship in front of the home town fans. But Pettitte will have to do so on three days' rest, something with which he is not nearly as comfortable as his colleague CC Sabathia in the Yankees' rotation. This will be the first time that the 37-year-old veteran pitches with just three days rest between outings since late September, 2006, when that arm was a much younger 34 years old. In 18 appearances on short rest in his illustrious career, Pettitte's numbers drop off dramatically: 5-7 with a 4.18 ERA, as compared to much better numbers over the rest of his career. What's more, Pettitte, now an old man by baseball standards, as well as an admitted steroid user who took "the cream" and "the clear" to help heal more quickly from injury but who no (presumably) longer has access to such miracle healing cures, has worked on an extra days' rest in his last eight starts, dating back to early September, and there's a reason for that: he needs it. At 37, his arm is old and used, just the kind of arm that the Phillies ought to be able to take advantage of on Wednesday in New York.

So, looking at all the stats, I think we can paint a reasonable prediction for what Pettitte will pitch like tonight. He was good for 7 innings against the Phils back in May in New York, and 6 innings against the Phillies' lineup in Game 3, and I see no reason to expect Pettitte to last any longer than 6 innings (at the outside) in Game 6 on short rest. What's more, he has given up two home runs and four total earned runs in each of his last two starts against the Phils -- again both on full or even extra rest -- and again tonight I can't see the Phils not at least equalling that feat and probably besting it slightly given the short time between Pettitte's starts. So for Game 6, a reasonable expectation based purely on the facts would have the Phillies scoring, say, 5 earned runs off of Pettitte in, say, six innings of work. Five runs.

The question is, what will the Yankees' run total be at the end of 6 when the Phils have had five men cross the plate? Will it be 5-0? Probably not. The 38-year-old Pedro Martinez was able to hold the Yankees to 3 earned runs in 6 innings in Game 2 of this World Series, and he has had not just the full four days of rest, but five days off since that Game 2 appearance. I still would expect the Yankees to hit him about as well as they did in Game 2, and possibly a little better, although Pedro on extra rest has pitched extremely well for the Phillies this season, and remember he is generally well-rested unlike a guy like Andy Pettitte because P-Mart didn't even play baseball until the middle of the summer this year. So Pedro should have the fresher arm, and Pettitte is likely going to be hit a little harder tonight in my view than the Phillies' starter is likely to be.

5-3 at the end of six tonight? 5-4? Or 5-5? It's going to be one of those, the way I see it. And then the Phillies' job, if they really want to extend this series one more game, is to get to the Yankees' middle relief -- which has performed atrociously all through this series -- without letting the Yankees get to theirs (which has also been pretty bad, but not quite as bad).

It's extremely hard to predict something like this with any precision of course, and as I mentioned above I have basically gotten every guess wrong in terms of individual games so far in the Series, so what do I know. But something tells me that you'll be reading here tomorrow about the anticipation and hype surrounding a Game 7 of the World Series at Yankee Stadium on Thursday night in New York City.

NFL Winners and Losers -- Week 8

2009-11-03T08:43:00.001+07:00

Damn do those Saints look unbeatable or what? On Mike and Mike in the morning this morning on ESPN radio, they went through the balance of the Saints' 2009 schedule, and it's not exactly what you'd call tough. It's Carolina still twice, the Buccaneers still twice, the Rams and the Redskins for probably a damn near guaranteed six more wins right off the bat, bringing the Saints' win total to at least 13 right there. The other three games are all tough, but winnable: the Cheatriots in New Orleans on Monday night in Week 12, at the Falcons in Week 14, and home against the Cowboys in Week 15 when Dallas has not exactly shined over its recent history. 16-0 is not at all out of the question for this team after they've already beaten the Eagles, the Jets, the Giants, the Dolphins and the Falcons in just their first seven games. It's basically the halfway point of the season, and in my view the NFC is shaping up to be a two-horse race, whereas things are much more wide open in the AFC as far as there being anywhere between three and five teams seemingly capable of going to the superbowl.

And with that, let's get to this week's winners and losers in the NFL.

Winners:

1. The Dallas Cowboys and Tony Romo. America's Team won its third straight game on Sunday at Dallas Stadium, besting the Seattle Seahawks 38-17 on the strength of three touchdown passes from Tony Romo and another solid performance from the runningback lineup. What's more, upstart Dallas wide receiver Miles Austin caught a touchdown pass for the third straight week, certifying him in my view as the real deal, and solidifying the fact that the Cowboys now have that legitimate downfield threat they've been missing since running TO out of town in the offseason. Even though this team has still yet to beat any great teams in its 2009 campaign, the last two wins against the Falcons and now the Seahawks at home both go a long way towards demonstrating the staying power that will be necessary to make it through the NFC East come December, which has always been Tony Romo's absolute least favorte month to be throwing the ball.

2. The Minnesota Vikings. I've said it before and I'll say it again: Brett Favre is and continues to be the most exciting -- if not overplayed -- story in the NFL this season. Favre's Vikings headed into Lambeau Field this weekend for a matchup that meant more than just Favre's uber-selfish personal quest to defeat his old team in front of his old hometown fans, as a win would also have left the Packers tied in the loss column with the Vikings for the first time since Week 2 of the NFL season. Even though the game ended with just an 8-point victory for the Vikes, it was never that close as Favre's team jumped out to a 24-3 lead before coasting to victory in the second half, cementing their position as the clear #2 team in the NFC. Unless things change drastically in the coming weeks, it seems all but assured that we'll be seeing a battle of the Vikes and the Saints come the NFC Conference Championship in January, most likely down in the dome in New Orleans.

3. The Houston Texans and Matt Schaub. Since getting crushed by the Jets on opening weekend of the 2009 season, the Texans have not made an appearance yet on the Winners board, but this will be their first as the team has finished the first half of the season at 5-3 for the first time in the franchise's short history in Texas. After leading his team to another big win on Sunday at Buffalo, Texans quarterback Matt Schaub currently leads the NFL in passing yardage with 2342 yards through 8 games, and he is also tied (with Brett Favre and Drew Brees) for the league lead in passing touchdowns with 16, to go along with just 7 picks for the Houston qb. With their Week 8 win the Texans are poised to make a solid run over the second half of the 2009 NFL season at the franchise's first ever playoff appearance.

4. DeSean Jackson. Eagles' rookie wide receiver DeSean Jackson scored on a 54-yard pass from Donovan McNabb late in the first half on Sunday in Philadelphia, lifting the Eagles to a 23-7 lead from which the G-Men could never recover. This would be DJ's sixth touchdown play of more than 50 yards already in just eight games this season, tying a Philadelphia team record that is nearly 50 years old, and it goes a long way towards filling the big-play void left by a certain wide receiver that goes by the initials "T" and "O" some years ago. With Jackson leading the way with the big plays on offense and on kick returns, the Eagles moved to 5-2 on the season, and setting up for a huge game next Sunday night at the Linc against Tony Romo and the Dallas Cowboys.

Losers:

1. New York football took a huge hit this weekend, no matter which half of the city's teams you root for. The Giants received an absolute butt-whipping at the hands of the division rival Eagles, 40-17, while the Jets chipped in with an arguably even more disappointing 30-25 loss at home to the Miami Dolphins that saw the Fins sweep the season series against Gang Green after yet another incredibly frustrating loss. For the Giants, the question now becomes just how good this team really is, after starting off 5-0 beating up on a bunch of awful teams but now dropping three straight games -- never even particularly close in any of them -- to conference rivals New Orleans, Arizona and now Philadelphia. Eli Manning completed just over 50% of his passes for 222 yards and one score, but two costly picks kept Eli's quarterback rating for the game around 50 and really did in his team's chances on the day, with the Eagles all too happy to cash in on Manning's miscues.

But it's the Jets who are the ones whose fans will be pulling the hair out of their heads for weeks after another brutal loss, as the team outgained Miami 378 yards to 104, had 23 first downs to the Dolphins' 10 and held the ball for ten minutes longer than Bill Parcells' team from south Florida, and yet still the Jets managed to give up 27 points to Miami in just the second half of their game and make it impossible for the Jets and rookie quarterback Ryan Sanchez to catch up. And unlike the Giants, who still have at least some air of a solid, playoff-caliber team in the NFC, the vultures are once again circling for the Jets' season after their loss dropped the team to 4-4, sinking them two games in the loss column behind the division-leading Cheatriots and, more importantly, into 9th place overall in the AFC in a league where only the top six teams are going to make it to postseason play.

2. The Arizona Cardinals. Fresh off of drubbing the Giants in New ~~Jersey~~ York on national tv last Sunday night, the Cardinals had a chance to move two full games ahead of the 49ers for a big lead in first place in the NFC West, and go a great deal of the way towards putting to bed the curse of the superbowl-losing teams failing to make the playoffs the following season since the turn of the millennium in the NFL. Instead, the Cardinals somehow found a way to lose 34-21 this weekend to a 2-win Carolina Panthers squad that had only scored more than 20 points one other time in eight games so far in 2009. Giving up 270 yards rushing to the Panthers I'm sure does not help Arizona's cause, nor does their quarterback Kurt Warner's five picks and a fumble on the day, which is enough to keep any team in the league from winning a game against pretty much any other professional football team. The Cardinals will now travel to Chicago to meet the Bears next week in Arizona's quest to become the first NFC team to repeat as conference champions since Brett Favre and the Packers went to two straight superbowls in the 1996-1997 NFL seasons.

3. Special teams coverage. Kickoff and punt return coverage has got to be one of the biggest losers in the NFL this season. How many games have been decided by punt and kickoff returns already in just the first half of the year so far? I personally have watched the Dolphins win two games on the strength of their return game alone, plus one for the Jets and another two games where kick returns played a huge role for the Minnesota Vikings. And I don't actually get to watch that many football games, so this is really saying something. If anyone out there reading this happens to be a stat-crunching type for the NFL, I would be interested to see the official numbers on the frequency of kickoff and punt returns this season -- in particular game-changing ones -- as compared to previous NFL seasons. For whatever reason it just feels like I'm watching way more instances of kickoff and punt returns, followed by a kick return for the other team on the very kickoff from the first team's return touchdown, etc. Something has gotta be the reason for this trend, and it is highly relevant because week after week, actual NFL games are being swung the other way by returns and special teams instead of the actual offensive and defensive action.

The JaMarcus Russell award: Normally I like to save this for the man whose name is forever enshrined on this weekly award. After all, Russell did put up a valiant run at the trophy this week, finishing 14 for 22 for 109 yards, no touchdowns and one INT in a 24-16 loss at home to the Chargers, with a final qb rating of 56.8 on the day. But sorry, JaMark....this week somebody just wanted it more. A now two-time winner of the JR award of the week, for Week 8 the hardware has to return to the mantle of Cleveland qb Derek Anderson. Anderson's line on the day in his team's 30-6 smushing by the Chicago Bears? 6 for 17 for 76 yards, no touchdowns, and two INTs to boot. Final passer rating on the day for DA? 10.8. So sweet.

The Worst Team in the NFL award again changes hands this week, after the previously winless St. Louis Rams came up big with a win on the road at 1-win Detroit to shuffle off this ignominious award for at least one more week. I was tempted at first to return the top spot to its most recent holder, the Washington Redskins, but then I realized that the Skins did not lose this week either, primarily due to the fact that this was a bye week for the anti-Native American team from our nation's capital. So I'm moving to the top spot the latest example of a team that just seems to get utterly blown out every single week, embarrassing themselves and their entire city almost every time they step foot on the gridiron: the Cleveland Browns. I may not have given this "team" enough due during the first half of the 2009 NFL season, but just take a look at what the hapless Browns have managed to accomplish already just by Week 8: a 3-point overtime loss to the state-rival Bungles in Week 4, that thrilling 6-3 victory over the Bills in Week 5, two-touchdown beatdowns by the Vikings and the Steelers, and of course the four other 20+ point drubbings by the Broncos, the Ravens, the Packers and now the Bears as well. Amazingly, the Browns have now managed to score 6 or fewer points in five of their last seven games, while allowing at least 23 points to all but one opponent throughout this season so far. Oh, and head coach Eric Mangini managed to trade away the team's best player in Braylon Edwards a couple of weeks back as well to boot, and now they have fired their GM mid-season (I'm sure that'll solve the whole problem). The Browns as a franchise, from the players all the way up to the owner, are easily worthy of being this week's Worst Team winner.

TO Watch: 5 catches for 39 yards and no touchdowns on Sunday at home against the Texans, although TO did manage to get into the end zone on his one running play of the day, a 29-year touchdown scamper on an end-around early in the first quarter. Still, TO's receiving stats for the season now move to 23 receptions for 281 yards and one touchdown. Ugh. Still sounds more like one big game of his than the eight games he has taken to reach this point so far in 2009. 281 yards receiving through half the season for TO? FAIL!

Phillies - Yankees Live

2009-11-02T20:00:00.008+07:00

It all started with an innocent, if not fairly common, telephone call from my older brother around 10am on Sunday this weekend. I was on my way back from the weekly run to the grocery, and when I picked up my cell, the one sentence I heard would change the path of my day and my weekend:

"The team needs us, man. Joe Blanton needs us."

I couldn't even begin to argue with my brother's sentiment. After Philies manager Charlie Manuel exhibited his mental retardation when it comes to pitchers better than I ever could have dreamt up on my own, opting to pitch Joe Blanton in World Series Game 4 -- a crucial game for the Phils, down 2-1 in the series -- against Yankees' ace CC Sabathia instead of going with Phils' ace Cliff Lee, I knew my brother was right. The Phils simply had to win Game 4, and to do that under the circumstances Charlie Manuel had put the team in was going to take every ounce of support from the real Phillies fans in Citizens Bank Park on the night.

The logic was inescapable. I had to be at that game.

The internet is really a modern day miracle. Within half an hour or so, my brother had not only found us a pair of incredible seats to Sunday night's World Series Game 4 at The Bank via StubHub but sitting in my email box was a printable pdf which included my actual ticket. Unbelievable. I went from spending the afternoon with some friends who were bringing their new baby over to hang with our kids, to heading down Route 95 to Philadelphia to make the trek from Yankees land to Chilladelphia and see my team through to a 2-2 World Series tie.

After the tickets had been procured, the next question was when to get there. In a rare two-game city sports matchup, the Eagles were already playing the Giants at Lincoln Financial Field, just caddy-corner from the Bank, in a 1pm game which would probably end close to 4:30pm. The traffic from that badboy was sure to last until at least 5:30 or 6 in and around the stadium, and I did not necessarily feel like getting involved in that whole morass if I could avoid it. But then with the World Series scheduled to start shortly after 8pm in basically that same space, it stood to reason that the traffic for that game would likely start picking up somewhere around 6pm as well. So, I reasoned, my best bet was probably to make it into parking lot of The Bank sometime around 6pm and try to sneak in during that small window where the football traffic should be winding down while the baseball traffic should just be starting to pick up.

Amazingly, the 124.3 mile trip from my place to my parking lot at The Bank took me under 2 1/2 hours despite having to drive clear through two major cities, and I managed to time things just about perfectly. What's more, my brother arrived just minutes after I did, and we quickly headed upstairs to one of the sit-down restaurants at The Bank for a couple hours of preparations for the big game. This would actually be the third World Series game I would be attending with my brother, having been at both the 15-14 Mitch Williams debacle and the 2-0 Curt Schilling dominatory shutout in the 1993 Phillies-Blue Jays series, so we pretty much have the routine down pat and we executed it to perfection on Sunday night, such that by game time we were nice and toasty in our seats and ready to see the Phils take back control of this series.

Oh, did I mention our seats were incredible?

This is the view of the Fox Sports set on the field just prior to the first pitch. It's also the view from sitting in my seat for the game. We were in the second row of the stadium, not three feet from the dirt in foul ground about ten feet behind first base, where you often see people leaning way over the gate to try to pick up a foul ground ball. We were right on the aisle, second row, right there. It was so sick. Like I said, if you have the money to spend, you can get some pretty effing amazing things from the internet pretty much on demand. While I've been to several World Series games before in my life, I can definitely say that I've never gone in style quite like this. But that's one of the great things about my older brother, which I know I've written about here before in the context of my Vegas trips with him over the past few years -- the man certainly knows how to live right.

The Bank was electric as Joe Blanton threw the first pitch to Carlos Ruiz to start the top of the 1st inning, but right from the first couple of foul balls and even one lineout, it was obvious that the Yanks were keyed on him early. Within minutes, Blanton had quickly given up two runs and somehow had managed to quiet the stadium's 45,145 fans even before the Phillies had come to bat. But a run in the bottom of the first brought the home town crowd back into it, and the Phils spent the next several innings doing what they've been forced to do all through this World Series -- playing catchup. Blanton calmed down a bit and put the Yanks down without further runs over the next few innings, and in the meantime in the 4th, as Sabathia's pitch count ran into the 60s, the Phils eked out another run to finally get back to even. It seemed that Blanton's early mistake had been forgiven and now the team was being given new life to win this game that they knew they had to win. But no sooner had that occurred than Blanton came out and gave up two more runs to the Yanks in the top of the 5th to bring the score to 4-2 and leave the Phils in yet another 2-run hole, and the home crowd once again gasping for its collective breath just minutes after feeling like the team had finally gotten the second chance at this game that it dsperately needed.

The fans in the stadium were amazing. After Blanton was pinch-hit for in the bottom of the 5th, the stadium erupted in support of Chan Ho Park and Ryan Madson as they came in to try to hold the Yanks down while the Phils could chip away at another 2-run lead, and chip away they did. While Park and Madson weaved their way through a couple of mistakes and continued to hold the Yankees at 4 total runs, first Chase Utley smashed a home run deep into the right field seats in the 7th to bring the Phillies to within 4-3, which really got the crowd rocking and rolling. Then, out of nowhere with the bottom of the Phillies' order up in the 8th, Phillies' third baseman Pedro Feliz drove a liner deep to left-center, clearing the wall and sending the hometown fans into a serious frenzy as he tied the game up once again at 4 with just one inning left to go. Carlos Ruiz soon grounded out to end the Phillies' 8th, but one thing was clear to every single person in the stadium -- the fans, the players on both teams on the field, even retard Charlie Manuel as the 8th inning ended -- hold the Yankees scoreless in the top of the 9th, and the Phils were going to win this game with the top of the order coming up in the bottom of the 9th. You just knew, with the way the game had gone, the Phils' unlikely tying of the game in the 8th, and with how desperately the team needed the game. Three more outs from Madson, and the Phils were going to nab a run off whoever Joe Girardi ran out there to pitch to the home team in the bottom of the 9th and tie this series up at 2.

But unfortunately this is not a fairy tale, and when management repeatedly fails to address the team's blatant, glaring weaknesses in the bullpen, stuff tends to happen. Charlie Manuel unabashedly brought Brad Lidge out to hold the Yanks scoreless in the 9th inning, and the whole stadium collectively groaned. Even when Lidge got the first two batters out in short order, and got up 1-2 on third batter Johnny Damon, nobody exhaled. Because on some level we all knew. We all knew this was Brad Lidge, the literal worst player in the entire major leagues this year as I've been screaming here for months. We knew this was a huge, huge spot for the team and for the franchise, and we know how hideous Lidge has performed in this situation over the months and months that have comprised the 2009 season. Despite the refonkulous claims of manager Charlie Manuel that Lidge was "back", that the postseason was a "clean slate" and that Lidge was ready, willing and able to lead this team back to another world championship, I'm not the only one who knows who truly untrustably bad Lidge is and always will be. We all knew, all 45,000+ fans on their feet all through that 9th inning, so when Lidge ended up giving up a hit to Damon after running the count to 3-2, then plunking Mark Teixeira to let two guys on base, and then serving up a delicious swedish meatball to Alex Rodriguez to lose the tie before throwing another soft-tosser in there to Jorge Posada for another two runs and to complete the blowout, nobody was surprised. Stunned, yes. Definitely. But not in a surprised kind of way. More in an I-told-you-so kind of way.

Despite sometimes feeling like I'm completely alone here in this space screaming for months about how horrible Brad Lidge is and how the Phillies had absolutely, positively zero chance of repeating as World Champions when Brad Lidge was our closer, on Sunday night I had the oppotunity to learn how 45,145 of my fellow Phillies fans felt about Lidge, and what I learned is that everyone -- every body in the city -- feels just like I do. Nobody wanted Lidge out there to pitch to this lineup, in this stadium. Nobody thought the inning was over at 2 outs, nobody on, and 1-2 to Johnny Damon. And nobody thought there was any chance whatsoever that Lidge would be able to stop the bleeding at just one run by getting Posada out, down 5-4. Everybody knew. And somehow, for some reason, I actually take a little comfort in knowing that. We were all in the same boat at The Bank yesterday, and walking out with the hordes as that game came to a close on Sunday night, I recognized all too well the dazed looks I saw everywhere I turned my head. I was sporting the same look myself, as I eased into the front seat of my car and started the long trek that would eventually get me back into my own bed shortly after 2am.

Let me be clear about one thing: I still expect this series to get back to New York, which is all I ever felt sure about coming in to the series as far as length. Although I can personally attest that the loss on Sunday night was emotionally draining for the team and for the city, these players have been through this before. Several times. Like, 15 times just this season with Lidge, plus another 6 or 7 with Madson and others. Blowing a game in the 9th in a spot like this is always one of the hardest things to get over, and I can't say I would be completely shocked if the team couldn't muster up enough chutzpah to grab one win in Philly tonight after what has happened in Philadelphia over the past few days. But this Phillies team has been resilient all through the season, and they've come back with tough, hard-fought wins time and again in the face of adversity, even the day after Lidge blows a big game like happened on May 25 to end that Phillies - Yankees intraleague series back in the spring. I like the matchup of Cliff Lee vs AJ Burnett, and I think there is a good chance that the defending World Champions will not let the Yanks off that easy tonight at The Bank. After Game 5 the Phils will have a major uphill battle to wage, but at this point, you know the routine.

One Game at a Time.

NFL Pick 6 -- Week 8

2009-10-30T22:06:00.004+07:00

As I mentioned earlier in the week, my NFL picks went 4-1 against the spread in Week 7, bringing my 2009 season total to 20-10 for a solid 9-bet profit so far through 30 games even factoring in the casino's vig. That said, the games seem to be getting harder and harder to pick as the season rolls on, in particular as Vegas keeps adjusting its lines in the blowout-type of games higher and higher, culminating this week in the Chargers being favored over the Raiders by two touchdowns and a field goal as Vegas continues not to be able to make the lines high enough to approach the inequity in many of each week's games. This week is no exception as I find it nearly impossible to come up with five solid picks against the spread, but I'm going to stay at it and force myself to pick winners in five of this week's 13 NFL contests. Here are my picks, in no particular order as always:

1. Baltimore Ravens -3 vs Denver Broncos. Denver puts its 6-0 undefeated record to the test this weekend at Baltimore, and like with my pick in the Vikings-Steelers game last weekend, I think this is the week that Denver's luck finally runs out. Not only is Denver not quite as good as their 6-0 record would indicate, but Baltimore has the kind of defense that I think presents a very tough matchup for this Denver team. With the only two solid defensive squads the Broncos have faced this year -- the Bengals in Week 1 and the Cheatriots in Week 5 -- Denver needed a miracle last-second deflection to score more than 7 against the Bungles, and they needed overtime where the Cheatriots never got to touch the ball to win that game as well, so tough defenses can definitely get to this Broncos team. And after three straight losses to tough teams, coach John Harbaugh is gonna have his team whipped into a frenzy to get back on the winning path. I can't stand having to give 3 points to a 6-0 team, but in this case I expect the Ravens to cover the spread in a fairly close game to knock the Broncos from the ranks of the unbeaten.

2. Green Bay Packers -3 vs. Minnesota Vikings. This is another game where I like the favorite but do not necessarily like having to give the points to a very good opposing squad. But the bottom line is, as I discussed last week when correctly picking Minnesota to lose their first game of the season, Minnesota is not as good as your typical 6-1 team given the nature of a couple of their wins (Baltimore, San Francisco). What's more, we saw last week that the Vikes' running game is not impervious to defenders stacking the box to stop it, and when that happens and Brett Favre is forced to throw more than the team would otherwise prefer, bad things can happen. As soon as I watched that 4th quarter meltdown from Favre in Pittsburgh last week, I immediately had the feeling that he would find himself trying too hard this week to beat his old team in front of the Green Bay fans. I like the Pack to withstand the Vikes' offensive onslaught in what will probably be a high-scoring game, thus hopefully helping the Pack to build up more than the field goal spread in nabbing its 5th victory of the season on Sunday afternoon.

3. San Diego Chargers -16.5 vs Oakland Raiders. This line is pretty much crazy, and I have to be crazy to still be picking the Chargers to win a game by this amount since they obviously couldn't care less what their margin of victory is over the Raiders as long as they win the game. But, with how hard it is to find quality picks against the spread this week, I keep coming back to this one even as the oddsmakers continue to ratchet up the lines against the NFL's worst teams to try to even out the losses Vegas has been experiencing with all the recent NFL blowouts this year. But here's what I'm seeing that has me willing to take a flyer on this ridiculous line: the Chargers have scored 24, 26, 23, 28, 23 and 37 in their six games this year, and of those games, 24 came against Oakland and 37 against Kansas City in San Diego's only two games so far against the bottom tier of NFL teams. So I would expect the team to score in the neighborhood of 30 points against the shoddy Raiders' defense at home this Sunday in California. Moreover, Oakland has scored in its seven games this year 20, 13, 3, 6, 7, 13 and 0 points, including an average of under 6 points per game over its last five outings. Given this pattern I think the Chargers minus the huge 16.5 is still probably a winning play in Week 8.

4. San Francisco 49ers +13 at Indianapolis Colts. This is one that did not jump out at me on my first pass through the games this week, but I definitely see some value here in the underdog based primarily I think on how badly the Colts have beaten their recent opponents. But when I looked a little deeper at the numbers, I found that the 49ers have played three road games this year, all of them against teams with strong passing games (Cardinals, Vikings and Texans). Even though the 9ers are 1-2 in those three games, all the games were quite close (20-16 win at Arizona, 27-24 loss in Minnesota, and a 24-21 loss last week in Houston). So it's not that I believe the 9ers are going to win this game outright necessarily, but that with 13 points to play with, the 49ers are a good value that their coach Mike Singletary will inspire enough play in this one after two tough losses to keep the game reasonably close. Here I think the line has just gotten too big as again the oddsmakers look wherever they can for opportunities to get some extra points in games involving one of the NFL's premiere teams like the Colts certainly are.

5. Miami Dolphins +3.5 at the New York Jets. I do feel like the Jets may pull out a win by the end of this game, but I'm not confident enough in them winning to be willing to give more than a field goal to the visiting Dolphins on the day. These two teams played a couple of weeks back in Miami, which saw new Miami quarterback Chad Henne make several impressive throws on his way to a 31-27 victory over the Jets and their young qb Ryan Sanchez. In general, the heart of the Jets' offense of late has been the run game (Sanchise has not thrown for more than 172 yards in any game since Week 1), and with Leon Washington knocked out for the season in last week's game against the Raiders, I think the Jets' ability to move the ball and score points will be noticeably hampered. What's more, the Dolphins have suddenly scored 38, 31 and 34 points in their last three games since Henne took the helm, so there is reason to believe that the Fins can run up some points on the Jets again this weekend in New ~~Jersey~~ York. I would probably take either team plus more than a field goal here, but I especially think the Jets will have a hard time covering the spread in this one.

The Ice Man Cometh

2009-10-29T19:22:00.006+07:00

Seriously, everyone. I don't mean to crack out the hyperbole this early in the morning, but I can say with total honesty that I never remember seeing a pitcher dominate with the stoic attitude that Phillies' ace Cliff Lee had right from the first pitch of the 2009 World Series on Wednesday night at Yankee Stadium, lasting all the way through his post-game press conference. In between was one of the most brilliant gems in World Series history, as Lee absolutely mowed down the $208 million Yankees lineup for a complete game earned run shutout in front of the home town fans in the Bronx and a 6-1 victory in Game 1 for Your World Champion Philadelphia Phillies.

It wasn't just that Cliff Lee outdueled Yankees ace CC Sabathia, and it wasn't just that he won a crucial game in the Phillies' quest to become just the fourth team in the long history of major league baseball to repeat as world champions out of the National League. It was the way Lee dominated that has baseball fans still semi-breathless even now, hours after Lee's final and slowest pitch of the night, a 76 mph curve that Jorge Posada swung about a foot over to mercifully send the fans home, all with the first twinges of worry beginning to gnaw at their self-tortured psyches. Even as he faced the best lineup in baseball in his first ever World Series appearance, from the look on Lee's face and the way he performed on the night, you would have thought he was facing a tune-up in single-A ball, because that's just what he made the Yankees look like in Game 1.

The first really striking thing about Lee's performance in Game 1 was his impeccable control. Lee threw 122 pitches in dominating the Bombers, 83 of them for strikes, or more than two-thirds of his pitches. And it's not like he's just serving meatballs up there and getting smacked around. The Yanks recorded six total hits on the night -- three of them from Derek Jeter -- but five were singles with only one double, and none of them came in the same inning until the 9th when the Yanks managed to push their one meaningless unearned run across thanks to a Jimmy Rollins throwing error. So Lee throws a ton of strikes when he's out on the mound, but the players simply cannot him them. Cliff Lee paints the corners and locates the ball as well as anyone in the major leagues when he is on his game, and he certainly is on right now. Take a look at his final line from Game 1 and you will notice that he finished the night with 10 strikeouts and zero walks. 122 pitches, 83 of them strikes, 10 Ks, 0 BBs and 0 earned runs. This is just the fourth time in major league history that a player has struck out double-digits while not walking a single batter, and it's the first time in 107 years of World Series history that a pitcher has done so while also giving up 0 runs. If that ain't the model of a money performance then I just don't know what is.

The other thing that really stood out about Lee if you watched Game 1 of the World Series on Wednesday was how cool his actual demeanor, even his physical presence, was throughout and even after the game. In the bottom of the 6th inning when Johnny Damon hit a weak popup back towards the mound instead of moving out of the way like pitchers usually do in yielding to another infielder as to avoid the pitcher injuring himself on the mound, Lee didn't move his feet at all, instead just starting right up at the ball with his hands at his sides, and waiting until almost the last possible second before sticking his glove out, basket-style, and making the catch:

This was about as blase of a play as could possibly be made out in the field, and yet I'm telling you, Cliff Lee wasn't even remotely trying to showboat. He was just that cool on the day. "You know, it was pretty cool," Lee would later explain in the post-game press conference, "It was 15 feet in the air. Pretty simple catch. It came right to me." Then again in the 8th, Yankees second baseman Robinson Cano led off with a smash right back up the middle. Up the middle, that is, until Cliff Lee calmly stabbed his glove out fully behind his back and half upside-down and snagged the ball clean. He turned, flipped a slow strike to first base, and that was that. And then with a shrug, a la Michael Jordan after that sixth three-pointer in the first half in Portland, Lee was back to completing his pitching masterpiece.

Even after the game, Lee's incredible sense of calm and confidence still exuded all over the reporters that filled the press room to try to get a sense of his magic. I don't think I ever recall seeing someone so confident, so calm in such a big spot, especially the first time he's ever been on this kind of a stage. Lee explained how hard he works and has worked over his career, and that game time for him is just time to go out and let those skills he has worked so hard to develop take over. He explained that he is a very confident guy, but makes sure not to go over the edge from confident into cocky, and it was believable. He wasn't brazen up there in saying any of this stuff, no matter how it sounds when you read it. He was just being candid. And accurate. And he knows it.

A big shout-out should also be made to 2008 World Series clinching Game 5 defensive MVP Chase Utley, who quieted all the doubters about his allegedly debilitating hip injury by smashing two 95-mph fastballs from CC Sabathia over the right-center field wall in the 3rd and 6th innings to give the Phils all the offense they would need behind their ace on the mound. Despite all the talk about there being too many lefthanders in the Phillies' lineup that could be neutralized by the Yanks' lefty pitchers, Chase Utley became just the second lefty ever to hit two home runs in a World Series game against a lefty pitcher, the first of course being Babe Ruth way back in 1928. Utley also set a new major league record by reaching base safely in his 26th straight postseason game, a truly great record that any Phillies fan would not be surprised with if you've watched these games. In general, you knew things were shaping up well as soon as the Phillies saw their first two batters go down on five pitches, but then managed to drag another 19 pitches more out of Sabathia before he could close out the top half of the first inning. That is another big advantage the Phillies have in this series that I failed to mention in my post yesterday -- the Phils take pitches and work the count better than any team in baseball, and not only does that help Philadelphia's batters be selective in the pitches they choose to hit, but more than anything else it enables the team to get through their opposing starting pitcher and into the bullpen faster, which is key especially when facing other team's top starters like what the Phils faced in Game 1 in CC Sabathia. When Sabathia needs 24 pitches to get out of the first, and another 20-something in the third, you just knew the Phils were in good shape to eventually wear down the pitching as they have done better than anybody throughout the past two seasons.

In the end, only time will tell how crucial this Game 1 loss was for the Yankees. If AJ Burnett comes back and nabs a win in Game 2, going back to Philly with a split is not a bad outcome for the Yankees and really was the most likely outcome after two games all along. But several factors about the loss should weigh heavily on Yankee fans. This was the first time the Yankees have lost at home in this postseason, after taking 2 of 2 in New York against the Twins and then 3 of 3 at home against the Angels to win in six. Moreover, now in four games this season between the two teams -- all of them at Yankee Stadium -- the Phillies have won three of them, with the Yankees' only win coming on May 23 when Brad Lidge blew a 2-run lead in the 9th that saw the Phillies once again bash the ball all over the place and lead throughout the entire game until the end.

The Phillies have gotten to the Yankees' ace Sabathia now on three straight occasions in big spots going back a couple of years, and the Phils have already roughed up AJ Burnett and Andy Pettite as well this season going back to that series in the Bronx in May. This is a team that has beaten already this year basically the entire New York Yankees' staff they will be facing this postseason, and now they have wrestled home-field advantage away from the Yankees before things even really got started in the Bronx.

And there were some disturbing trends in the Yankees' lineup as well. As I mentioned above, Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter went 3 for 4 on the day against Lee with two singles and a double. But the rest of the Yankee team went 3 for 28, which is not going to cut in against the defending Champs in the World Series. What's more, the Yankees' power hitters at the core of their lineup -- Mark Teixeira and Alex Rodriguez -- finished the game 0 for 8 between them. This extends a fairly weak postseason so far for Tex, who was easily the Yankees' most productive hitter along with A-Rod on the season, but even more alarming is that it stops what has been a totally dominating postseason at bat so far for A-Rod. Rodriguez had been hitting .438 so far in 10 games this postseason, with 5 home runs and 12 RBIs, so to go 0-4 to start the Series, striking out three out of those four times at that, has got to worry the Yankee fan as much as anything else they saw out there in Game 1, especially given A-Rod's history of megachoking in big spots.

Game 2 is Thursday night at 8pm ET in New York. Yankee fans: your chances of winning the World Series rest heavily right now on the shoulders of AJ Burnett finding a way to quiet down the Phillies lineup. How does that make you feel?

Yankees vs. Phillies

2009-10-28T09:58:00.001+07:00

As previously stated, my #1 prediction for the 2009 World Series is that it should be a great one. After pretty much not a single good series in the entire 2009 playoffs so far on either side -- I know the Angels made it to six games with the Yanks, but in truth that series was never in doubt -- this World Series more than anything else will hopefully deliver. It doesn't have to be extra-innings-in-Game-7 amazing, but damn doesn't a 7-game World Series sound great right now? And despite some really intriguing pitching matchups, we are likely to see some serious power on display over the next week on both sides of this matchup, as this is the first time in World Series history that the #1 teams in home runs and runs scored from each league are meeting in the Fall Classic. I do believe both teams have the talent, the depth and the heart to extend this series to at least six games. Here's how I get to that point:

Game 1 pits CC Sabathia against Cliff Lee in what is probably the only matchup of starters in this series with the potential to create some pitcher's duels. Both pitchers have been absolutely brilliant in the postseason, and they will probably pitch fairly well against these respective lineups although I expect more runs than the roughly 1 per 9 innings each pitcher has ceded so far in the postseason. Looking at the intangibles, I am definitely convinced that Sabathia will come to play, but the Phils have roughed his ass up good in recent years, in particular last year in the NLDS against the Brewers when the Phillies beat Sabathia with the longball to advance to the NLCS against the Dodgers, so that will work to neutralize Sabathia's greatness to some extent. The Yankees went a league-best 57-24 at home in 2009, although the Phillies were a league-best 48-33 on the road, so those two also kind of balance each other out. Game 1 seems to hard to pick in my mind that I find myself thinking how this game is the first World Series game in New York in what feels like a long time, the Yankees and their fans are gonna be hungry as hell. Now I know that over recent history, home field advantage has meant very little in the World Series (see the Phils' championship win last year in five game against the homefielded Tampa Bay Rays), but it's really more the "last licks" thing that matters most about having home field advantage IMO. This is made all the more valuable when the Yankees are at home and playing a team with a shaky closer situation like the Phillies certainly have. In what is really otherwise a complete tossup for me, I'm picking the home team to find a way to eke out a win in the bottom of an inning in Game 1.

Game 2, however, is a different story, as we now know that Phillies coach Charlie Manuel has decided to pitch old man Pedro Martinez in Game 2 against the Yankees' AJ Burnett. And this matchup I think definitely favors the Phillies, for two key reasons. First, P-Mart has simply been awesome since his return to baseball in the middle of the summer, something which I find funny that even most of the big-name commentators in the media, as well as the Yankees fans out there, do not seem to have picked up on yet. There's just no other way to describe how great and gutty Pedro has been this season. His fastball has consistently been over 90 mph and he's been very effective in placing his pitches and mixing up speeds. Pedro has also shown some depth, even throwing 130 pitches a couple of months back in his first complete game in years, and going 7 strong in a 2-hit shutout against the Dodgers last week in the NLCS. Pedro has been really rested over the past 6 weeks or so, and he has had a knack with Philly for showing up for all of his big games. Getting to appear and start in the World Series should really get Pedro's juices flowing, and I expect him to pitch fairly well against the Yankees in Game 2 -- let's say 3 runs or less in 6 innings. And on the other side of the coin, I've watched AJ Burnett pitch a couple of times so far this postseason, and he is just exactly the kind of inconsistent, mentally suspect guy that this Phillies lineup feasts on. I feel confident that the Phils can get to Burnett early, as we saw in the ALCS, and Philadelphia can wear him down in the middle innings as well like they did throughout the Colorado and LA series this postseason. With the heart that this Phillies team has, going down 1-0 in the World Series will mean bupkis to them, and I expect the team to ride on Pedro's back to a Game 2 victory and even up this series heading back to Philadelphia for three key games. And I know this team can get to Burnett even here in the new Yankee Stadium -- let's not forget that these two teams played a 3-game series in NY earlier this season, and the Phils crushed Burnett in Game 1, including Jimmy Rollins hitting Burnett's first pitch out of the park and Jayson Werth becoming the first player to reach the second deck in left field on their way to smashing four homers and easily taking the series opener.

Game 3 will feature Cole Hamels against Andy Pettite. To be honest, I have absolutely no faith in Cole Hamels, which is why I believe Charlie is making the right decision in starting Pedro in Game 2, in front of a hostile New York crowd that Pedro will eat up. Giving Cole his start in Game 3 in front of the home town fans is the best chance the Phillies have of getting a productive performance out of him. Unfortunately, I don't see how anyone can expect Hamels to bounce back here, and he'll probably put up the 4- or 5-run, 4- or 5-inning performance that has become his usual this postseason. The question will be, can the Phillies get 5 or more runs off of Andy Pettite? The Phils did score 4 runs in 7 innings off of Pettite on May 23 in the Bronx, so there is some recent history on this to work from, and we know the possibility is there. I think this will be a very close one, as Pettite is a great ~~steroid user~~pitcher and an incredible stopper for the Yankees over the years, but it's not like the Phillies won't be able to hit him. In the end this has a chance of coming down to the teams' bullpens, and once again I will have to go with the Yankees to win a close one based on favorable pitching matchups.

Game 4 looks like it is shaping up to be a probable matchup of Chad Gaudin against ~~J. Happ~~ Joe Blanton. Down 2 games to 1 in the series, at the Bank, Blanton should be tough and keep the Yankees at bay enough for the Phillies' bats to do the job against Gaudin. I think if the Yanks are not up 2-1 at that point, Girardi may opt to push it and go with Sabathia again on three days rest, but if they are up 2-1 in the series like I am expecting, I think it's going to be a good day for the Phillies against Gaudin to even up the series at two games apiece.

Game 5 then should feature Lee vs. Sabathia once again. And this time, I'm going to go with the last licks thing again, but that means this time the Phillies get the win and take a 3-2 series lead heading back to the Bronx in what should be another very intriguing matchup between baseball's two best teams.

This all is why I find it very hard to believe that this series does not end up for at least a Game 6 back in New York. I do not see the Phillies winning more than one of the first two games in New York, nor do I see them losing more than one of the three games in Philadelphia, and as long as both of those statements are true then this series has to last at least 6 games. The big question I think is whether the series score is 3-2 Phillies or 3-2 Yankees going into that Game 6. What the Phillies can do in one or two must-win games at Yankee Stadium at the end of this series is going to determine the 2009 World Championship. And with the way this Phillies team has played on the road, and especially with Burnett up again in Game 6, the Phillies will know that one is very winnable for the visitors, which could hopefully set the stage for a rockin' Game 7 for all the marbles in the Bronx. And even though Cliff Lee won't be available to start, the Phils could go with any combination of Hamels or soon-to-be rookie of the year winner J. Happ on full rest, Joe Blanton on 3 days rest, and Cliff Lee could always be available for a crucial inning or two late in a World Series Game 7 even on two days rest if it looks like the difference between winning and losing the championship. So Game 7 in New York could go any which way, although to be honest I don't know how you end up picking anyone but the home team Yankees, who once again will get to bat that incredible all-star lineup in the bottom half of the innings against the Phillies' totally untrustable bullpen. But we can cross that bridge of Game 7 when we come to it.

One thing I've seen a lot of analysts doing is comparing these two teams position by position. So, for example, at catcher the Yankees get the nod, as Jorge Posada is better than Carlos Ruiz overall, even though Ruiz is better at playing the position than his Yankee opponent. At first base, it's a clash of the titans in Ryan Howard vs. Mark Teixeira, which is senseless in a way to even have to pick one over the other. Teixeira is really good in the field in a way that even Howard is not, but when I look at Howard's body of work this season and the performance of the two players so far in the postseason, Ryan Howard gets the slight nod on that one. At 2nd base, Chase Utley is a better baseball player than Robinson Cano. Period. At short, you've got Jimmy Rollins and Derek Jeter in a battle of leadoff men who many would argue have been the heart and soul of their teams over the years. This is another one that really feels too close to call, but if pushed I would give the slight nod to Jeter given his career and the better regular season he had than J-Roll in 2009. At third base it's not even close of course, A-Rod takes it down over Pedro Feliz. And then there's the outfield, where I contend that the Phillies win in every single position. In left field, it's Johnny Damon vs. Jayson Werth. Who would you rather have on your team? Exactly. In center it's Melky Cabrera vs. gold-glover Shane Victorino. Exactly. And in right it's Nick Swisher vs. Raul Ibanez. Again, exactly. So, looking at the series this way, the Phils are better in three outfield positions, at first base and at second base for 5 of the 8 total fielding positions, while the Yankees have the big advantage at 3rd base as well as superiority at catcher and shortstop. So does this mean the Phillies will win this series?

Looking at the upcoming 2009 World Series in still a different way, I think there are a couple of distinct advantages for each team over the other. For the Yankees, the biggest and most dramatic advantage over the Phillies as a team has got to be the bullpen. This statement has to be tempered somewhat after the Angels series which saw both Phil Hughes and Joba Chamberlain look pretty much worthless and scared in that late-relief slot the Yanks have relied so heavily on to bridge them to Mariano Rivera in the 9th, but the presence of Rivera there means the Yankees usually only have to go 8 innings with the lead, and sometimes less as Mariano has been known to put in the 4- or 5-out save as needed as well. Not only do the Phillies not have any go-to guy for that spot, but they seem to think that 162 games worth of suckjobiness out of Brad Lidge has now all been erased in the postseason, which seems absurd to me. So the bullpen is a huge advantage for the Yankees over the Phillies, one which take it from me every single Phillies fan fears down to his or her soul for this World Series. I've said this before and I'll say it again now: the thought of Brad Lidge facing this Yankees lineup, in either stadium in this matchup, is enough to keep me up at night. I just don't see that matchup ending up in Philadelphia's favor in this series. The Phils will need to hope they don't need to use Lidge much, as happened in the Dodgers series, if they really want a chance to win the way I see it. Brad Lidge = Big Losses for the Phightins.

It should be mentioned that the existence of a designated hitter in potentially four of the games in this series is also an advantage for the Yankees in my view. They can play a great hitter like Hideki Matsui in that spot, whereas for the Phillies, who obviously do not make any effort to spend money to get a big stick like that who can't play ~~baseball~~ the field, they are likely to be left with a Matt Stairs or Greg Dobbs type to hit in the DH spot in the games in the Bronx. And the Yankees' pitchers include guys like Sabathia and Burnett who have played some part of their careers in the NL, and a guy like Pettite who has appeared in 58 world series, and have thus spent time batting in NL parks as opposed to being those AL pitchers who make themselves look like clowns every October because it's the first time they've picked up a bat in the past ten years.

Another slight advantage I believe the Yankees have going in to the 2009 World Series is in the overall strength of the lineup. This is the first time I've said that about the Phillies in this postseason, and frankly the Yankees are the only team in baseball I would ever say that about, but the Yankees have so many high-priced all-stars on their roster that it's hard to argue they aren't better than what any other team can throw out there, even the Phillies. In Philly, it's Jimmy Rollins (.250, 21 homers, 77 RBIs), Shane Victorino (.292, 10, 62), Chase Utley (.282, 31, 93), Ryan Howard (.279, 45, 141), Jayson Werth (.268, 36, 99), Raul Ibanez (.272, 34, 93), Carlos Ruiz (.255, 9, 43) and Pedro Feliz (.266, 12, 82). For the Yankees it's some combination of Derek Jeter (.334, 18 homers, 66 RBIs), Johnny Damon (.282, 24, 82), Mark Teixeira (.292, 39, 122), A-Rod (.286, 30, 100), Jorge Posada (.285, 22, 81), Hideki Matsui (.274, 28, 90), Robinson Cano (.320, 25, 85), Nick Swisher (.249, 29, 82) and Melky Cabrera (.274, 13, 68). When I look at those numbers, as much as the Phillies' lineup was superior to everyone else it faced in the National League, that Yankees lineup is simply even better.

The last thing I would mention is something that many people -- especially in the Philadelphia area -- would disagree with me on, but I think Joe Girardi is a slightly better manager than the Phillies' Charlie Manuel, and I trust Girardi more not to make key mistakes based on what I've seen out of Manuel in 2009. And don't get me wrong -- with the heart that this Phillies team plays with, their incredible focus on fundamentals, all the wins, Manuel has obviously proven himself to be a far better major league manager than he may come off as. He deserves a ton of credit for what this team has done over the past two seasons, and I won't take anything away from him on that. But unfortunately, that doesn't change the fact that Manuel has made a very annoying and costly habit of sticking with "his guys" for too long. He leaves his starting pitchers in the games for an inning or two longer than he should, pretty much every single game when things aren't going great, like clockwork. Hamels comes out and goes down 2-0 against the first four batters he faces in the Dodgers series, and Manuel doesn't even get anyone up in the bullpen until the 5th inning when Hamels has already given up four or five runs. All this while J. Happ -- one of the best starting pitchers in the NL this season -- just sits on the Phils' bench and rots away his arm that could easily come into any game in the 3rd inning and pitch all the way through the 9th, not even needing to give that shitbag Lidge a chance to ruin another one for the team. But Manuel has demonstrated to me a significant lack of understanding about how to use his pitching staff in this season, from about the middle of the year on in fact when it started to become obvious that Lidge was worthless, and this trend has disturbingly continued all the way through the postseason so far. Despite some idiot Yankee fans questioning his every move of course, Girardi really has done a very good job through this whole season and right into the postseason, and I definitely see another advantage there for the Yankees in terms of the decisions being made by the guys at the helm of the respective teams.

On the Phillies side of the ledger, they also have a few key advantages IMO, the biggest one of which is something that I'm not hearing anyone else talking about: pressure. Or more specifically, in the Phillies case, the total lack thereof. Now I know this team wants to defend its title and win the World Series again this year, of that I think there is absolutely no doubt. But the Phillies don't have to win it. They are already the current World Champions, and unlike the Yankees they don't play in a city that demands at least one sports title every single year. The city of Philadelphia and the Phillies franchise and fans will be just fine if they lose to the Yankees this week. Especially after plowing their way back to a consecutive World Series appearance here, this Phillies team has already proven everything it could possibly have to prove, almost regardless of what happens over the next week along Route 95 in the northeast.

The Yankees, on the other hand, have an immense amount of pressure to win this series. The team spent more than $400 million in the offseason to acquire talent that put it leaps and bounds above any other team in the sport, both in terms of payroll and in terms of raw talent, and their opponent in the 2009 World Series is not even in the top 5 payrolls in the major leagues as far spending money on their players. With all the money spent by this team over the past few years, and with how great that talent has performed here in 2009, for the Yankees not to win this series would be a big blow to the organization and to the fans. They expect to win, they know they have the best talent money can buy on both sides of the ball, and they have home field advantage to boot. Especially given my prediction that this series has to go at least 6 games, those last couple of games in the Bronx are going to be absolute pressure cookers for the Yankees, while the Phils will still kinda be playing with the house's money. This can only bode well for the Phillies, especially given the choke history of some of the Yankees' players like A-Rod, and even Sabathia last year against the Phillies in the playoffs.

One other advantage the Phillies should definitely have in this series is on the basepaths. Yankees catcher Jorge Posada -- who we should see more of this series than in the ALDS or ALCS due to the DH being available on only half the games -- has a great bat but behind the plate has only thrown out 28% of the runners who have attempted to steal a base off of him in 2009. He can definitely be run on. And the Phils have those spark-plug type of players -- the Rollins, Victorino, Utley and Werth types -- who will grind out at bats, get on base, and will definitely run. And the Phils have the big bats behind those players to drive them in once they run themselves into scoring position. Carlos Ruiz is a much better fielding catcher than Jorge and can throw the ball better as well so should have better luck keeping the Yankees runners from wheeling around the bases at will, but this is one area I expect the Phillies to have to take advantage of if they are to have any chance of winning this series.

The last advantage I would mention is the Phillies' incredible road performance this year. Yes the Yankees won 57 games at home in 2009, which is truly sick no matter how you slice it, but my point here is that the Phillies are simply going to feel more comfortable and more confident going into Yankee Stadium -- where they already won 2.9 out of 3 games in May this spring -- than the Yankees are coming into the Bank in Philly. While the Yankees lost two of three games at Anaheim in the ALCS, for example, the Phillies split two games in LA and went 2-0 in two games in Colorado in the NLDS. It's just another game to this Phillies team regardless of the location of the stadium, the unfamiliarity of the surroundings, or the noise of the fans. Just another game.

In all, I keep coming back to the fact that the 2009 World Series is going to end up back in New York for Game 6 (sorry Jimmy Rollins, I don't buy your prediction of Phillies in 5 -- that worked for the Dodgers, but they sucked balls compared to the Yankees and you should know that), and I think the Phillies will have a decent shot of getting to Burnett in Game 6 and turning that game into a Phillies W. If the Phils can get back to New York up 3-2 in the series, then Game 6 is probably the team's best chance to capture back-to-back World Series for only the fourth time in National League history. If the Series extends to Game 7, however, I think the Yankees' chances of being victorious increase dramatically as the starting pitching matchups tend to even out and the bullpen is likely to take more focus as the game wears on, a position where the Yankees have their biggest advantage in the entire matchip between baseball's two greatest teams.

NFL Winners and Losers -- Week 7

2009-10-27T10:47:00.000+07:00

As expected every week in the world's greatest sport, Week 7 in the NFL saw some individual breakout performances, a couple of huge team comebacks, and a whole slew of blowouts. And yet somehow, I just keep chugging along with my picks against the spread, posting a 4-1 week this week, and raising my overall 2009 season record against the spread to 20-10.

Winners:

1. The New York Jets win this week's Back From the Dead Award after going into Oakland and opening up a massive can of whoopass on the AFC's biggest shitpile to the tune of a 38-0 smackdown of the Raiders. Just one week after the sky was falling, the team had lost three straight and a quarterback controversy suddenly seemed to be brewing, the Jets bounced back with another huge game controlling the ball on the ground, grinding out 300+ yards rushing for the second straight week and completely dominating all aspects of the game. Rookie quarterback sensation Mark Sanchez threw the ball only 15 times on the day, so it is less clear whether he has really broken out of his personal slump, but as far as the team goes, the season is back on track. At least until the Dolphins come to town next Sunday for another divisional matchup.

2. Dallas Cowboys receiver Miles Austin. Former Cowboys kickoff returner Austin is really having his coming out party as a wideout this season, in particular over the past two games which have now seen him record 10 catches for 250 yards and 2 touchdowns against the Chiefs, followed by this weekend's 6 catches for 171 yards and 2 more td's vs. Atlanta. All of a sudden, Austin rockets from kick returner to clear #1 option for Dallas quarterback Tony Romo, and you can be sure that defenses, starting with the Seattle Seahawks next week, will be focusing on him as a wide receiver for the first time in his three-year NFL career.

2a. Tony Romo and the Dallas Cowboys team, who are now back from the dead with the re-emergence of a true downfield threat in Miles Austin to replace Terrell Owens who was cut during the offseason. The Cowboys looked strong in handling a good Falcons team, with Romo looking particularly sharp as compared to recent weeks in going 21 for 29 for 311 yards, 3 touchdowns and no picks. This is clearly Romo's best game since at least Week 1, and arguably his finest effort of the entire season so far, which bodes well for Dallas as they head into a stretch that includes games against Seattle, Philadelphia and Green Bay over the next three weeks in what may prove to be a key 3-game set in terms of NFC playoff implications.

3. The Cincinnati Bungles and Cedric Benson. If this keeps up, I may have to stop calling the Bungles the Bungles! After the Bungles lost by 9 at home to the Houston Texans in Week 7, the Chicago Bears and their quarterback Jay Cutler walked into an absolute bee's nest in Cincinnati this weekend, and the Bungles commenced the balls-kicking. This game was 31-0 at one point and long over at 31-3 by halftime, on the strength of four 2nd-quarter touchdown passes from Carson Palmer who ended the day 20-24 for 253 yards and five touchdowns. But the real story for the Bungles, other than another strong defensive effort, was runningback Cedric Benson getting his chance for revenge against the team that refused to re-sign him, as Benson took major advantage of the opportunity by running for 189 yards and a score on 37 carries as he helped his team just all over the Bears right from the getgo. The Bungles now move to 5-2, their best start in several years, and good for first place in a hotly-contest AFC North that is just packed with some of the best defenses the NFL has to offer so far in 2009.

4. The Buffalo Bills. The Bills aren't going to make many appearances on my Winners list this season, but I figured this was as good a time as any to give props to a team that tries real hard despite some serious shortcomings in the talent arena. The Bills' defense has not been so bad this season actually, giving up 6, 13 and 9 points over their last three games, and the team has managed to find a way to win 3 of its first 7 games so far despite facing serious struggles to make plays each time they go on the field. This weekend in beating the Carolina Panthers 20-9, the Bills made enough plays to win despite being outgained 425 yards to 167 yards and giving up 20 first downs while making only 9 of their own, relying heavily on three interceptions and four overall turnovers to nab their third win of the year. Considering the complete lack of quarterback skill, wide receivers, tight end, and really much else on the Bills' offense these days, 3-4 is pretty respectable for this point in the season IMO in a year when so many other teams seem to have rolled over and given up already.

Losers:

1. Jay Cutler and the Chicago Bears. For the first time since Week 1 of this NFL season, Jay Cutler once again looked absolutely, utterly lost in a game against the Bungles this weekend, and Bears fans have got to be getting pretty upset at the former Broncos quarterback's inconsistent play through six games so far this year. After throwing three more key picks against the Bungles, Cutler's raised his season interception total to 10 picks in 6 games, and for a guy who has yet to throw more than 300 yards in a game all season, 10 picks is just not cutting it for the former all-pro qb in Denver. After the crushing loss that was 45-3 at one point in the 4th quarter, the Bears drop to 3-3 on the season, now looking up in the division at both the Packers with one more win and the Vikings with already three more wins on the year, not to mention the 9 out of the other 15 NFC teams with equal or better records than the Bears'. Do you hear that, Mr. Anderson? It is the sound of inevitability...it is the sound of your playoff hopes being doomed.

1a. Matt Forte. After 6 carries for 24 yards and 0 touchdowns in the crushing by the Bungles this weekend, the guy who I might have picked as the #2 overall fantasy runningback if I were donk enough to still play fantasy football coming into this season continued his hideous performance so far in 2009. On the season, Forte has 92 carries for 318 yards and one score over 6 games. Gross for all you fantasy donks out there. But if the Bears keep being forced to play from behind in games and keep giving up the turnover via thoughtless interceptions from Jay Cutler, prospects do not look good for Forte to resume his studliness from last season in the NFL.

2. Brett Favre / Minnesota Vikings. This is the first time the Vikes have appeared on my Losers list so far in 2009 thanks to their 6-0 start, but I did call this game and picked the Steelers even minus the points as one of my games this week so it's not like I didn't see this coming. The bottom line is that the Vikings have been in position to lose a couple of their games so far this year, in some cases (San Francisco) requiring truly miraculous plays to somehow find a way to win, so having their offense reined in so well by a truly great Pittsburgh defense should not really come as that much of a surprise to the real football fans out there. Sure Brett Favre ended the day with 334 yards passing, but when he's doing that on 34 receptions then you know he's not exactly pounding the ball downfield. What's more, Favre was forced to throw 51 times on the day, thanks to an ineffective running game that saw league-best runningback Adrian Peterson garner only 69 yards in the game, and when Favre's attempts get up like that, he ends up throwing interceptions like the pick-6 he busted out with during a drive to take the lead with just minutes remaining in the 4th quarter on Sunday. The ball did scoot through AP's hands, but the bottom line is that Favre just yukked it up there, off his back foot and under pressure, and the throw came out a little bit high and a little bit hard, just enough for the deflection from AP that led to the Steelers' final score and the icing of the game for the defending superbowl champions. Not the worst game Favre is capable of by a long shot, but the Vikings showed today that a potent defense with a solid game plan can for sure dampen the floodgates of the Vikings' previously impenetrable offensive attack.

3. The New York Giants. Now this one really surprised me, I have to say. In losing 24-17 to the Arizona Cardinals at home this Sunday evening, the Giants simply could not stop Kurt Warner and the defending NFC champs when they needed to on defense. And, although bruising runningback Brandon Jacobs seemed to come out of his funk a little bit with a 76-yard, 1 touchdown rushing performance, Eli Manning was held under 50% completions and to 243 total yards on the night, including just one passing touchdown. Most harmful were Manning's three picks in the game, including one in the final drive of the game to try to tie things up, as Eli looked a lot more mortal in this game's fourth quarter than he has several other times this year and over his short career so far. In dropping to 5-2, the Giants now fall even in the loss column with the Cardinals, as well as the Eagles and Cowboys in the division, and the Packers and Falcons elsewhere in the early NFC playoff picture, while they are a game behind the Vikings and two games behind the NFC-leading Saints, who crushed the Giants last week as it is. With matchups against the Eagles, the Chargers, the Falcons, the Broncos, the Cowboys and then the Eagles again coming up over their next six games, this was a game at home that the Giants could ill afford to lose and will probably end up impacting their playoff position as a result.

4. Competitive balance in the NFL was the real loser in Week 7 of the NFL, that is for sure. Just take a look at these scores from the Week 7 games: 31-3 Packers over Browns. 37-7 Chargers over Chiefs. 42-6 Colts over Rams. 35-7 Cheatriots over Bucs. 38-0 Jets over Raiders. 45-10 Bengals over Bears. In fact, over the 13 games on the schedule in Week 7, only the Cardinals (7) and the Texans (3) won their games by fewer than 10 points. Only two single-digit games out of 13, including six of those 13 games decided by four touchdowns or more? Something is definitely up with the bad teams this year in the NFL. I wonder if it is somehow related to the economy or something else external?

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New Worst Team in the NFL award: Even after turning the ball over repeatedly in a 27-17 loss to the Eagles on Monday Night Football, the Redskins proudly pass this baton back to the St. Louis Rams after this weekend's 42-6 shelling at he hand of the Colts. So far this season, the Rams have lost 28-0, 9-7, 36-17, 35-0, 38-10, 23-20 (OT), and now 42-6. That's two shutouts by at least four touchdowns, six of seven games giving up at least 23 points, and five of seven games scoring 10 points or fewer. There are some really awful teams in the NFL this year to be sure, but right now the Rams seem to really be distinguishing themselves from the rest of the crowd.

TO Watch: 3 catches for 27 yards and 0 touchdowns in the win this weekend over the stinky Carolina Panthers. TO's 2009 season stats so far: 18 catches for 242 yards and 1 touchdown, in 7 games. Har har har.

The JaMarcus Russell Award for this week goes to...JaMarcus Russell! JR finished his performance on Sunday going 6 for 11 for 61 yards, 0 tds and 2 interceptions. It got so bad that head coach Tom Cable actually replaced Russell for Brad Gradkowski (!!) around halfway through the game, a move which the team has been clear it did not want to make all season long so far. Finally. Mercifully.

World Series prediction, coming tomorrow right here.

2009 World Series Preview

2009-10-26T20:42:00.005+07:00

And so it has been decided.

With the Yankees' Game 6 ALCS victory over the Anaheim Angels in the Bronx, the AL representative for the 2009 World Series was officially decided, and we now know it will be the New York Yankees who will attempt to dethrone Your World Champion Philadelphia Phillies over the next week starting this Wednesday night. Although the Yankees just won late on Sunday evening, Yankees vs Phillies has been a foregone conclusion in my mind for a while now, so I have had plenty of time to reflect on the reality of this matchup from several different angles.

For starters -- and I acknowledge going in that it is impossible for me to fully eliminate any bias that might be present as a result of my being from Philadelphia -- but it seems to me that this year's Fall Classic matchup of the Phillies and the Yankees is the best World Series matchup on paper, featuring the best core of great players, in several years. Think about it -- nobody would argue that last year's Phillies - Rays series holds a candle to Phillies - Yankees, and then just start going back from there. 2007: Boston vs. Colorado? Ugh. 2006: St. Louis vs. Detroit. Not terrible I guess, but nothing compared to Yankees - Phils. 2005: White Sox - Astros. Oh. My. God. 2004: Boston - St. Louis. Now this is a matchup that was absolutely huge at the time because Boston had just come back from down 3 games to 0 against the Yankees in the ALCS and because the Sox had not won the World Series in nearly 90 years since trading away Babe Ruth, so that one might have been bigger for that reason, but the actual matchup with the Cardinals' roster is certainly no great shakes. 2003: Yankees - Marlins. Not as big as Yankees - Phillies. 2002: Angels - Giants. Fun if you live in the Bay Area or like steroid-pumping cheaters I guess, but it's no Yankees - Phillies. 2001: Yankees - Arizona. Nope. 2000: Mets - Yankees. This one was probably bigger than Yankees - Phils, although it certainly focused the fan base in one very small area of the country moreso than any World Series in recent history.

Even going back beyond 2000, this year's Yankees - Phillies matchup stacks up very nicely in terms of what most people (myself included) are expecting to see from two of the best playoff baseball teams in recent memory. It was Yankees - Braves in 1999 (another great series on paper), Yankees - Padres in 1998, Marlins - Indians in '97, Yankees - Braves again '96, and then Atlanta - Cleveland, Toronto - Philly, Toronto - Atlanta, Minnesota - Atlanta (which turned out to be an absolutely incredible World Series) and finally Cincinnati - Oakland to round out the 1990s. When I compare this Phillies team, the fact that they are the defending champions and have beaten down the rest of the National League now two years running, matching up against this $208 million beast of a Yankees team, as I said I don't see how you can argue it does not stack up very favorably against most or all of those WS matchups from recent history. And the television ratings I can only assume will back that up over the coming week or two. Baseball ratings may never hold a candle to the NFL in the U.S., but obviously this is going to be much more watched than last year's Phillies - Rays series, for example. The inclusion of the vaunted Yankees in the Fall Classic always brings with it the hordes of fair-weather fans (many of them miraculously Mets fans twenty years ago) around the country and around the world to tune in and see if the Yanks can nab their 27th World Series title in this, the franchise's 40th appearance in the final series of the year in Major League Baseball.

And this leads to my second major focus regarding the 2009 World Series: both of these teams are absolutely awesome. You just can't or wouldn't say that about many of the teams in the above paragraph that have participated in the Fall Classic over the past twenty years or so. But one thing the 2009 Phillies did without a shadow of a doubt is put to rest any silliness about anyone claiming that the Phils' 2008 World Championship was a fluke. This team came back out in 2009 hungrier than I ever would have expected to defend their title. After taking over first place early in the spring, the Phils simply never looked back, scoring the most runs in the National League while posting the second-best fielding percentage and featuring probably the three best offseason or intra-season acquisitions in the league in Raul Ibanez, Pedro Martinez and Cliff Lee. And once the playoffs came back around, the Phillies once again elevated their game right to where they were at in 2008. Solid pitching at the top of the rotation, scoring runs in droves and just generally displaying the heart of a champion is what the 2009 Phillies have been all about, and at this point, with the team just the third squad in the divisional area to repeat as National League champions, it is clear as a bell that we are looking at a seriously great Philadelphia team, a fact with which the Yankees certainly would not argue.

And the Yankees, well there are a lot of reasons they are also a great team. 208million of them in fact. Although the Yanks have always been the best team that money can buy during my lifetime, the bottom line is that all that money was not spent very well over the past several years, typically leaving the team with a passable pitching staff but one which would not hold up in the shortened-series format forced by the baseball playoffs every year these days. But this year that is all different. After the team went out and spent over $220 million in the offseason to acquire pitchers CC Sabathia from the Brewers and AJ Burnett from the Blue Jays, the Yankees ended the 2009 regular season with the 4th best team ERA in the American League, the 2nd lowest opposing batting average and OPS against, the third-best WHIP in the AL, and of course, the most saves in the majors thanks to stalwart Mariano Rivera in the 9th. This combines with a lineup of pricey all-star after pricey all-star that finished the season with the most runs in the majors, posted the second-best batting average, and the best on-base %, slugging % and OPS in baseball. In short, the Yankees have been hands-down the best team in baseball in 2009, and have been since the midway point of the season at least in fact, and their 103 wins prove it as they won several more games than their closest competitors, the Angels whom the Yankees just dispatched in six games in the ALCS.

But more than the clear greatness of the two teams involved, there are some individual matchups coming up in the 2009 World Series that should really be intriguing to say the least. To begin with, the matchup that everyone's been looking forward to after the past couple of weeks of baseball is the Yankees' CC Sabathia squaring off on the mound vs. Phillies' ace Cliff Lee in Game 1. On the one hand you've got Sabathia, who was the Yankees' MVP of the ALCS after he pitched two games, going 16 innings and giving up 9 hits and 2 earned runs total in the two starts. Eight innings of 1-run, few-hit ball before giving way to all-time best closer Mariano Rivera for the 9th in each of Sabathia's two starts against the Angels, to go along with 2 runs allowed in 6.2 innings against the Twins in the Yankees' LDS matchup as well. Sabathia's overall postseason ERA stands at an enviable 1.19 so far here in 2009, after less postseason success earlier in his career. And then you have Cliff Lee for the Champs, who might just have outdone Sabathia in the playoffs so far in going 2-0 with an incredible 0.74 ERA in three starts in the postseason, also good enough for LCS MVP honors for the first-year Phillie. That 0.74 ERA, by the way, is the lowest career postseason ERA for any pitcher in major league history with at least three starts, for what that is worth. Lee pitched very similar against the Rockies in the NLDS to what Sabathia did to the Angels in the ALCS, throwing 16.1 innings, giving up two earned runs and a total of 11 hits. But then Lee followed that up by plowing down the Dodgers in Game 3 of the NLCS in his last appearance, throwing eight complete innings of a 3-hit shutout against the team with the best record in the National League. The Sabathia vs. Lee matchup should be a real clash of the titans in the 2009 World Series, and the best part is we should get to see it multiple times, as things have lined up such that both teams can go with their preferred starters in the order they would like, so we could see Sabathia vs. Lee in Game 1, Game 4 and then again in Game 7 on three days' rest, if necessary. That right there should be a whole lot of fun, especially to watch these two aces pitch to these two all-star lineups in two of the most home run-inducing parks in the major leagues today.

But there is another matchup among the starting rotation that I think is almost equally interesting, but for some very different reasons, and that is the likely Game 2 matchup of AJ Burnett for the Yankees against the Philles' Cole Hamels. This is another matchup that we could see in both Game 2 and again in Game 6 of the World Series (if necessary), and yet it is one that the fans of each team will be looking forward to more with trepidation and concern than anticipation and confidence as is likely the case with the Game 1 matchup discussed above. Hamels, the 2008 NLCS and World Series MVP, has had a very inconsistent 2009 that saw him go 10-11 on the year with a 4.32 ERA. What's more, in three postseason starts so far this fall, Hamels has failed to make it even halfway through the sixth inning in any of them, giving up 11 earned runs in a total of 14.2 innings pitched for a 2009 postseason ERA so far of 6.75. Which is quite disgusting. Burnett, meanwhile, who went 13-9 with a 4.09 ERA during the regular season, has fared a little better in the postseason, lasting 6 innings in each of his three outings so far and ceding a total of 9 runs for a postseason ERA of 4.42, but failing to secure a win in any of his three postseason starts so far for the Yankees. But with Burnett I think it is his latest start last week against the Angels that has the Yankees' management and fans concerned as the pitcher was touched up for four runs in the first inning and then gave up two more in the middle of the game before being lifted after looking generally shaky as he did for sustained periods of time during the regular season. Especially given that these are likely to be the World Series starters for two of the games in the 2009 Fall Classic, which of these two pitchers can hold his own better for longer against the opponent's all-star lineup is likely in my view to play a major role in who ultimately is crowned the 2009 World Champions.

The last matchup I will mention today is something which almost always looms large in the World Series -- the bullpen. More specifically, the Phillies' bullpen, and most specifically, the team's closer situation. As I chronicled here in totally unabashed terms throughout the 2009 season, Phillies' closer Brad Lidge -- who went a perfect 47 for 47 in save opportunities in a magical 2008 including closing out the final game of the 2008 World Series -- was just about the single worst player in the major leagues throughout 2009. Plain and simple, can't say anything else about it. And even though Lidge appeared in and closed out two of the games against the Colorado Rockies in the NLDS this year, Lidge was amazingly not needed at all in the NLCS against the Dodgers, mostly because the Phils had the lead from the 4th inning on in their 8-6 win in Game 1, they crushed 11-0 in Game 3 and again 10-4 in the clincher. The Phillies just beat the vastly undermanned and under-hearted Dodgers too badly all throughout the NLCS for Lidge to have gotten any real work, and as a result it is still verrrrrry much up in the air which Brad Lidge is going to show up to face those potent Yankees bats in the World Series. But given the way the Phillies season has shaped up this year, it is likely that the team will rely on Lidge to close out at least one or two of the games it wins in the World Series, should they be in a position to do so. And let me tell you, I'm not the only Phillies fan in the country who is man enough to admit being scared to freakin death about the thought of Brad Lidge against Jeter, Damon, Cano, A-Rod, Teixeira, Godzilla et al in the 9th inning with a 1-run lead. In either of these ballparks particularly. Much as I desperately wish this were not the case, Brad Lidge against the Yankees' all-star bats is sure to be one of the key determinants of how the 2009 World Series shakes out.

That's my preview of the World Series as I look ahead to what should be one of the best pure baseball series in years in the major leagues. I'll be back on Wednesday with my predictions and what I think will be the key advantages and disadvantages for each team before things kick off Wednesday night around 8:30pm ET in New York City.

NFL Pick 6 -- Week 7

2009-10-23T19:32:00.004+07:00

Week 6 in the NFL was another 3-2 week for me, raising my overall season record (remember I skipped Week 1 this year) to 16-9 against the spread over five weeks. Last week I tried to continue my trend of picking some favorites, picking some dogs, picking some home and some away teams, and picking some big lines and some close ones, a trend which is likely to continue throughout the 2009 NFL season if I were a betting man. For a 3-2 week, my Week 6 certainly didn't feel very good, as I squeaked by with my Carolina and Atlanta picks over the weekend -- even though neither one of them played very well or looked particularly like they wanted to win their game -- and I got wiped up picking Seattle by a little at home and picking my Eagles to win huge on the road. So I struggled my way to 2-2 on a very rough Sunday for my picks, and then I was left with my "opposite" pick on Monday night of the Broncos +3 over the Chargers. Just like the game a couple of weeks ago where Indy at 6-0 was only a 3-point favorite over the 0-6 Titans, a line so small that it immediately smacked me and many others who are familiar with NFL betting as one of those "too good to be true" lines that usually indicates something, for the second time this season the "too good to be true" line ended up being, in fact, too good to be true. The undefeated Broncos not only covered with the points, but they beat San Diego outright in a game that wasn't really all that close after the Broncos clamped down on the Chargers in the second half. Anyways, that's about as scrappy a way as possible to get to another over .500 week, so I'm looking to continue the trend this week with some better calls as I attempt to extend my season against-the-spread percentage above the 64% where it currently sits. Documented, bitches! So here come the picks, again in no particular order:

1. Pittsburgh Steelers -5 vs. the Minnesota Vikings. I say the buck stops here this week with the Vikings and their undefeated season. I really can't stand having to give five points when playing the 6-0 Vikings, but Troy Polamalu is back prowling the secondary for the Steelers, Mendenhall is moving ahead having taken the starting runningback job away from Willie Parker with several good performances in a row, and of course Ben Roethlisberger throwing the ball should give the Steelers a good chance to win at home and give Minnesota their first taste of defeat in 2009.

2. Green Bay Packers -7 at the Cleveland Browns. The Packers have scored at least 23 points in every game this season, both at home and on the road, including dropping 36 at St. Louis and then 23 at Minnesota in Week 4, so this team knows how to score the ball away from Lambeau and can be counted on to do so again this week against a bad Browns team. Looking at how the Pack has fared this season against the NFL's worst -- a group of which the Browns are certainly a part -- they crushed the Rams 36-17 in St. Louis, and they also smacked down the Lions at home 26-0. Plus, Cleveland has allowed 34, 27, 34, 23, 3 (Buffalo) and 27 in their six games so far in 2009, including an average of 28.5 points per game allowed at home, while scoring in the single-digits three times and never more than 20 points yet on the year. This one just sounds like a solid beating by the Packers to me, and although you never like to give a touchdown on the road, in this case there seems to be ample evidence to put my money where my mouth is.

3. Indianapolis Colts -13.5 at the St. Louis Rams. Coming off an overtime loss to Jacksonville in the Rams' last best chance to win a game this year, I'm predicting the Rams to be off their game, and let me tell you even when they're on their game it's hard to tell the difference. The Rams have huge problems scoring the ball, with no receivers and only Steven Jackson who faces a stacked box every time he touches the ball, and on defense they're even worse. In six games this season, the Rams have given up 28, 9 (the Redskins), 36, 35, 28 and 23, and the two largest of those numbers both came against good offensive teams at home (36 to the Packers in Week 3, and 38 to Minnesota in Week 5). If the Pack dropped 36 on the Rams in the dome, and the Vikes put up 38 two weeks later, I'm thinking Peyton and crew should be good for at least 30 as well. And since I don't see the Rams scoring more than 15 points or so, that sounds like a Colts cover even with a nearly two-touchdown spread.

4. Atlanta Falcons +4 at the Dallas Cowboys. I know that Atlanta is the better team outright here, and I'm getting four points to boot? That's definite value in my book, even with the Cowboys coming off a bye week. Against many coaches that bye week thing can be a big difference, but for Wade Phillips I imagine the extra week just amounts to an extra week of loafing around and not really preparing for "America's Team". To think that a superior Falcons team is coming into town, and they could lose by a field goal and I still win with the Atlanta pick, this is one I just cannot stay away from this week despite the whole bye week thing.

5. Cincinnati Bungles -1 vs the Chicago Bears. This one is just a "feeling" game, as I don't think there is anything strongly pointing to one team or the other here, but I have a feeling the 4-2 Bungles aren't going to lose two straight games at home to teams with worse records than theirs. The Bears have not played well on the road this season, going 1-2 in giving up 21 to Green Bay, 19 to Seattle sans Matt Hasselbeck, and 21 to Atlanta, so I would expect a similar number around 20 or so for the Bungles this weekend. And at home, Cincinnati only gave up 12 points to Denver in Week 1 (really 6 points until that absurd miracle touchdown catch by Stokely to win in the final seconds) and 20 points to a solid offensive squad in Pittsburgh. The Bears' offense is somewhere between those two teams' in my view, and I expect them to score somewhere in the teens on Sunday at Cincy. So I'm looking for the Bungles to come out hard to avenge last week's loss to Houston which I know bothered them as a team, and find a way to win a fairly close game at home, maybe something in the 23-17 range, over the Bears.

Tribute

2009-10-22T08:27:00.000+07:00

Congratulations to the 2009 Phillies, the first back to back NL Pennant winners in Philadelphia Phillies history!!!

Fun With Phillies / Dodgers

2009-10-21T23:23:00.004+07:00

By now everyone has heard about that incredible ending in Game 4 of the NLCS on Monday night that saw Jimmy Rollins bash in two runs with two outs in the bottom of the 9th of a game that seemed essentially hopeless for the Phillies to win and very close to impossible for the Dodgers to lose. In all honesty, without rehashing the whole thing at this point, suffice it to say that I thought that was truly one of the most dramatic moments in nearly 130 years of Phillies history. And right here you can listen to three calls of that historic play -- only the fourth walk-off postseason hit in Phillies history and just the third time in baseball history that a team won with a walk-off when losing and down to their last out in the 9th inning -- first the television call, which I thought was very good all things considered, then the local Philly radio call which is great mostly because of the clowns screaming and cheering like crazy in the background, followed by the Dodgers radio call which is downright boring and sounds like it's being delivered by an 85-year-old man taking a dump. But it's good stuff, and I definitely recommend taking a listen to this link if you haven't already to enjoy a little bit of what that moment felt like for the fans of the teams involved.

The one thing about Rollins' incredible smash and the Phils' comeback win in Game 4 is that the game had really been ratcheting up the tension for the better part of an hour at that point and that contributed greatly to the tremendous release of that tension when the game was finally won. After giving up the lead in the 6th inning because Charlie Manuel again left his starting pitcher in about two innings too long, the Phils' bullpen clamped down and did not allow another run, leaving the team just one run down at 4-3 after we got one run back in the bottom of the 6th inning. While closing the floodgates on the Dodgers' lineup for the rest of the night, the Phillies went to work in their three remaining innings on chipping away at the Dodgers' slimmest of leads. In the 7th inning, the Phillies got two men on with one out before failing to advance either runner to third base, but it was exciting for anyone ~~awake~~ interested enough to stay up to see if the Phils could reach down into the magic hat one more time. Then again in the 8th inning, the meat of the Phillies' lineup managed to get two guys on base with just one out, but once again they could not satsify the Philly fans' increasing tension by knocking one of those guys in.

So the Phillies had scored one run in the 6th inning to cut the Dodgers' lead to just one run -- and thanks to Manny Ramirez's ridiculously accidental shoestring catch they did not tie it up right then and there -- and then they made a real run at tying it up in both the 7th and again in the 8th inning. So by the time the 9th rolled around and Brad Lidge actually somehow did not ruin yet another game in the top of the 9th, there was no way I was turning it off even though the bottom of the Phillies' order would have to be the hero if the Phils were to come back and win. Which is exactly what happened, including Dodgers' fireballing closer Jonathon Broxton -- throwing 100 and 101 mph fastballs all throughout his short appearance on the night -- walking Matt Stairs on four pitches after Broxton clearly just could not get this blast out of his head from, ironically, Game 4 of the 2008 NLCS. Then Broxton, clearly still shaken just from the thought of having to face Stairs again in the same spot one year later, hit the Phillies' remarkably clutch catcher Carlos Ruiz with his first pitch after the Stairs walk, setting the stage for J-Roll to work his magic. It's one of those games that encapsulates true sports drama at its best, and having sat through the previous four innings of this game, I can tell you that the tension in the 9th was as high as it ever gets outside of a Game 7 extra innings battle to decide the World Series.

Although certainly at this point this series is far from over, and if the Phils don't manage to coax a win out of new father Cole Hamels in Game 5 on Wednesday night then it's back to LA for the final two games of the series, the Game 4 win has given birth to a number of funny things that us Phillies fans have had a blast with over the past couple of days. For starters there was this screenshot:

which was accidentally put up by mlb.com on their homepage just minutes before J-Roll's historic double gave the Phils the win. With two down in the bottom of the 9th and the bottom of the order up at the plate, I guess mlb.com just wanted to get the jump on putting the freshest baseball headlines up on their site. Sometimes, though, I guess a little patience is called for, especially when predicting things as unknowable as sporting events. It reminds me of back in 1986 at Shea Stadium, Game 6 of the World Series, just minutes before Bill Buckner would make -- or extend, as the case may be -- baseball history letting the ball go between his legs, when the Mets accidentally flashed a message saying "Congratulations to the 1986 World Champion Boston Red Sox" on the big screen at the stadium before quickly taking it down (you can read some accounts of that occurrence here). Of course, the greatest example of this is the classic "Dewey Defeats Truman" headline run by the Chicago Tribune on November 3, 1948 which incorrectly reported the result of the previous night's presidential election, but as far as sports go, I really enjoyed seeing the false report of the Dodgers' victory over the Phillies in Game 4 the other night.

Another great snapshot I saw yesterday from one of my Phillies fans was this one, which those of you who enjoy the Fail Blog as much as I do will probably enjoy quite a bit:

The best part of this snapshot has got to be not only the triumphant pre-slide pose captured of Carlos Ruiz just milliseconds before officially ending the Phillies' incredible comeback, but the fact that Dodgers pitcher Jonathan Broxton happened to be right in the background of the picture, already walking off the field and into the dugout before Ruiz had even yet touched home. The Dodger "faithful" can cram it, the tofu-eating vegetarian non-fans that they are. Fail!

Lastly, a few of my Philly fan friends also hooked me on to some incredible message board threads resulting from the Game 4 debacle at the Bank (my new name for Citizens Bank Park in Philadelphia). First, there is the Dodgersblues board forums, where I assure you any baseball fan can find hours of fun and enjoyment, mostly of the unintentinoal comedy variety. But the best board of all has got to be this one, which is of all things a Mets message board where all these loser fans have to focus on is who they will root for if the unthinkable evil of a Yankees - Phillies World Series comes to fruition. Honestly I must have spent two hours (on a very busy work day no less) just reading through all these posts over the past 24 hours or so, and it still isnt' getting old for me. At all. There is so much great stuff for a Phillies fan buried deep in that Mets forum thread that I can't even begin to describe it all or narrow it down to some of the best posts or ideas. One thing I can say for certain is that one post caught my eye more than any others, essentially (I think) implying that the Mets are every bit as good as the Phillies this year and the last, but that it's just the different stadiums the two teams play in that is the only thing separating the Mets from back to back World Series appearances and at least one world title. Uh huh. That post I will reproduce in its entirety here for your viewing pleasure:

We added Shawn Green, at age 33. With a career OPS of .850.
Flash in the pan? 10 straight seasons over 110 OPS+ is a flash in the pan? Watch something besides Mets games, or be older than 16.

The Phillies added Raul Ibanez, career OPS of .826. He posted a .899 in their cheese box this season.

Livan, Alou, Redding and Castillo? That's Fing retarded.
Livan and Redding were brought in to COMPETE for the #5 spot in the rotation.

Like Chan Ho Park and Brett Myers for Philly this season, or Adam Eaton (5.80 ERA) in 2008, Kyle Lohse (4.72) or Jon Leiber (4.73) Chad Durbin (5.15) in 2007.

Castillo and Alou are starters. Alou was awesome but hurt.
Castillo sucked last year and was good this year.

Luis Castillo is better than Pedro Feliz. The Phillies added Pedro Feliz at age 33. Career OPS+ of 83. Last two seasons, 80 and 81.
Last three seasons, Castillo has a .712 OPS and Feliz is rocking a .704. In tiny a** Philly's park.

And both are better than Abraham Nunez, who had a .600 OPS for the Phillies in 2007.

"Oh, the Phillies have good players and not Jeremy Reed, Corey Sullivan, Ramon Martinez, Argenis Reyes, and Anderson Hernandez"

Meet Matt Stairs, Geoff Jenkins, So Taguchi, Tadihito Iguchi, Wes Helms, Andy Tracy, Greg Dobbs, Paul Bako, Miguel Cairo, Eric Brunlett, Michael Bourn, Chris Roberson, Pete LaForest, Russell Branyan, etc.

Take a look at their bench this season. They have one guy with an OPS over .800 this year. Ben Francisco. And we have Angel Pagan with a number remarkably close.

They've had an endless stream of ****ty guys, too. JUST LIKE EVERY TEAM. IT'S CALLED A MOTHERFING BENCH.

Hmmm, how can we emulate the Phillies.

Well, we could get a power-hitting first baseman (Carlos Delgado)
We could get a power-hitting infielder who's one of the best at his position (David Wright)
We could get an All-Star SS with speed and defense (Jose Reyes)
We could get a ****ty fourth infielder (Castillo vs Feliz)
We could get a gold glove CF (Carlos Beltran)
We could get a 38 year old LF to OPS .900 (Moises Alou .916 in 2007)
We could get a great athlete who was a top prospect but his team has given up on because of his .750 OPS at age 25, and hope he's a late bloomer (Werth: .753 OPS guy when the Dodgers cut him. Church was .810. Francouer kinda fits the bill too.
And we'll get a ****ty offensive guy to catch.

For the bench, we'll bring out a pile of crap, because that's what bench players are and hope they match up. See above.

Now we need a pitching staff.
We need one home grown guy top prospect with a sub-4.00 ERA (Mike Pelfrey 3.72 in 2008)
We need an older than dirt veteran oozing puss (Pedro, Glavine, Orlando take your pick)
A young guy who suddenly blossoms at age 26 (John Maine 3.91 ERA at age 26 in 2007)
A guy with stuff who's erratic as hell, but has good stuff (Myers, Oliver Perez)
Now let's go the extra mile and get a lefty ACE who won a Cy Young (Johan Santana)

Closer, what about a guy who Fed up as a closer in Houston? (Wagner)
Ok, how about a guy who was lights out in 2008? (K-Rod)
Can we get a situational lefty? (Feliciano)
No, no, no... we need someone who got busted for steroids! (Shoeneweis vs JC Romero!)
30 year old average guy? (Chad Durbin vs Sean Green)
Old ****ty starter who does a good job as a RP for us? (Darren Oliver, Elmer Dessens vs Park)

Ok, well there's one spot they got us beat...
How about a great lookin setup man with nasty stuff (Parnell vs Madsen!)

See, we shouldn't take a guy like that and F him up by asking him to start! (Madsen 17 GS in 2007, 5.69 ERA)

Our team's are built pretty much the same... only they play in a cheese box; they've been healthy this year; That's basically it except for one difference:

Our team defied logic and rational thought with an epic collapse one year; their team defied logic and rational thought by having a bullpen that was ridiculously unstoppable one year.

Any Fing questions?

Just one question: What color is the sky in your world?

Good luck to Cole Hamels tonight in Game 5 at the Bank. I know nobody on the team wants to have to travel back across the country and win one of two on the road to end this series, so the pressure will actually be palpable tonight to get this one wrapped up and send the Dodgers home in five games in the NLCS for the second straight year. And to Charlie Manuel, if you're reading this: If Hamels looks like shit, pull his ass out of there early and just put Happ in there to finish out the game! Why have a starter like that who is conditioned mentally and physically to go the distance sitting in your bullpen but then never use him for that purpose?

Why I have to keep reminding the Phillies' manager of this I will never understand.

NFL Winners and Losers -- Week 7

2009-10-20T10:56:00.000+07:00

Week 6 was another awesome week in the NFL. Let's get right into the week's Winners and Losers report, along with some special awards I like to throw in for good measure.

Winners:

1. Drew Brees and the New Orleans Saints. The Saints welcomed in fellow NFC powerhouse and undefeated New York Giants, and they summarily dismissed the Giants like they didn't even belong on the same playing field. Even with the final score of 48-27, in reality it wasn't even that close. The Saints ran up 34 points by halftime on what was thought to be a strong Giants defensive squad, and qb Drew Brees finished the day an efficient 23 for 30 for 369 yards and four touchdowns. And the Saints' defense did a great job on the Giants' solid offense, not allowing even 50 yards rushing to any player on the Giants and holding the team to just 17 points before giving up some trash time points late in the 4th quarter. The Saints came out this week and showed the rest of the NFL that they are now officially the clear team to beat out of the NFC this season.

2. The Denver Broncos. What more can you say about this team that has now started off 6-0 in the AFC West? Head coach Josh McDaniel -- a great Erick Lindgren lookalike, btw -- shows himself to be more and more of a genius every single week in Denver, and Monday night's shelling of the Chargers was no exception as McDaniel took control of the game from his headset from start to finish. The Broncos have one of the best offensive lines in the game (as always), but it's the defense that continues to amaze me and to stymie the Broncos' opponents now 6 out of 6 times this season. And talk about doing a great job making in-game adjustments -- McDaniel takes these guys into the locker room at halftime, and so far in 6 games they have now given up 10 total points in the second half. That is one of the sickest things I've heard so far this year, but it's true. Nobody scores on the Broncos in the second half of games, the team has brilliantly-designed blitz packages, run plays, and let's be honest -- Kyle Orton is looking better and better every single week at the helm of what is by far the biggest surprise in the NFL this season in the Broncos.

3. The New England Cheatriots. I know they ran up the score and left in pussyboy Tom Brady a lot longer than they probably should have in the team's 59-0 rout of the spiralling-out-of-control Tennessee Titans. But what in the hike is up with 59 points against an NFL team, huh? I honestly don't ever remember a team in the NFL scoring 59 in a game. I'm pretty sure the Eagles have scored 58 points, once I think in that ridiculous playoff game against the Detroit Lions in the mid 90s and I think once again in the regular season not too many years ago, but I honestly do not recall seeing 59 points in an NFL game, especially when coupled with a 0 on the other side. While the Cheats have had their issues against strong defensive teams this year, against the poor teams they are still the great Cheaters of old, and Tom Brady looks awfully good back there with no pressure put on him whatsoever.

4. Brett Favre and the Minnesota Vikings. Is there any more exciting story week-to-week in the NFL this year than Brett Favre and what is now quite for real a quest for the superbowl? Favre led the Vikes to a huge lead early over a solid Ravens team and then he was able to make the key long throw on the game-winning drive to lead his team to victory, with Favre ending the day with a very productive and efficient 21-29 passing for 278 yards and 3 touchdowns (no picks). On the season, Favre is now a sick 124-178 (69.67%) for 1347 yards over six games, with 12 touchdowns and just two interceptions, for an overall qb rating of 109.5. That is just disgustingly great football out of Old Man Favre, and his team is responding with one of the best records going so far 6 games in to the 2009 NFL season.

Losers:

1. Mark Sanchez. Wow. 10 of 29 for 119 yards on the day, including no touchdowns and an astonishing five picks, for an overall quarterback rating of 8.3 in the game. And no, that's not a typo, Sanchise's qb rating really was 8. Point 3. Not only could Sanchise not find any of his own receivers on the day, but he clearly did not have the arm strength to move the ball well through the wind, a bad sign for a guy heading into his first NFL winter and playing in a northeastern non-dome stadium. Sanchez looked utterly and completely lost in what is clearly his worst outing of the season so far -- the third week in a row we've said that now -- and at this point you have to believe there is a full-fledged quarterback controversy brewing in New ~~Jersey~~ York if Sanchise has one more week as bad as his last couple have been.

2. The New York Jets. Joining in the woes of their rookie quarterback Mark Sanchez, the New York Jets' switch from boom to bust shows just how quickly things can change in the NFL these days. After a nice win to start the season at Houston, an early career-defining victory over the Patriots and then beating the Titans, the Jets started off 3-0 and were looking like the clear favorite to take down the always-tough AFC East. But now less than a month later the team is 3-3 and out of first place in the division, and the scariest part about it is that 100% of the confidence that surrounded this year just three weeks ago is gone at this point. Jets fans might or might not admit it to you right now, but the anticipation of watching Sanchise's and Rex Ryan's next game with the Jets has turned to abject dread at this point, and after losses to Chad Henny in Miami and Trent Edwards and Ryan Fitzpatrick in Buffalo, believe me when I say that Oakland, Miami, Jacksonville and New England over the next four weeks is not something anyone in town is looking forward to. This weekend's loss to the crappy Buffalo Bills is especially painful because the team somehow ran for more than 300 yards but still lost the game to an inferior opponent. The Jets are now at the precipice, and no matter what they do during the week, that's where they will stay until the come out and beat the Raiders on the road next Sunday afternoon.

3. Philadelphia Eagles. What do you even say about the Eagles, who had been utterly trashing bad teams week after week all this season, but then went out on Sunday and lost to Jamarcus Russell and the Oakland Raiders 13-9? I mean, just one week ago, the Giants visited Oakland in their own stadium, took a 21-point lead within minutes, and it was never even as close as that again on their way to a 44-7 rout of the league's thought-to-be worst team. So far in 2009, the Raiders had given up 24, 10, 23, 29 and 44 in their five games, while the Eagles had scored 38, 22, 34 and 33 in their four games, so it wasn't hard to predict where this game was going. But then the Eagles show up and lay a complete egg, managing only three field goals after inexplicably throwing the ball 46 times as compared to only 14 rushing attempts, and at the same time the Eagles' defense allows hapless Oakland qb Jamarcus Russell -- who couldn't even sit the bench in my dead grandma's touch football league -- to go 17-28 for 224 yards and a score. Do those look like Jamarcus Russell numbers to you? 17 for 28? 224 yards? A passing touchdown? Who is this guy, and how on earth do the Eagles expect anyone to respect them after a performance like this? Can they even respect themselves? Easily the biggest embarrassment of the week in the NFL, hands down.

4. Washington Redskins. For what must be the first time in modern history, the Washington Redskins have somehow faced winless opponents in each of their first six games this season. That's the 0-0 Giants in Week 1, followed by the Rams, the Lions, the Bucs, the Panthers and now the Chiefs this week. In the Chiefs game, after finally benching qb Jason Campbell in favor of Todd Collins (omg), the Redskins failed to score a touchdown, gave up a safety and got beat down by Todd Haley's previously 0-5 squad. Against those six winless teams so far in 2009, the Redskins now shockingly fall to 2-4. 2-4 against the NFL's winless, in a year where the worst quarter of the league is worse than it's ever been. And with that and the Raiders' win this weekend over the Eagles, I am thrilled to present the new Worst Team in the NFL award, to your 2009 Washington Redskins.

5. Redskins head coach Jim Zorn. So let's see...Mort, Berman and everyone else in the national sports media is either calling for your job or reporting that you will be fired during the team's upcoming bye week. Now you can't score and lose to the 0-5 Chiefs for your 4th loss to a winless team in just six weeks this season, and after the game you go to the press and directly blame yourself for poor coaching, and within minutes management announces it is stripping you of your play-calling duties. Hmmmm. Hope you have a good real estate agent, Jimmy.

With the Raiders' qb apparently being possessed by someone with some actual skills this week against the Eagles, this week's Jamarcus Russell award has to go elsewhere, in this case to Jake Delhomme of the Carolina Panthers. In a win against the 0-6 Tampa Bay Buccaneers, Delhomme finished the day 9 of 17 for 65 yards, one score and two picks. In a victory. Man does Carolina stink out loud this year or what?

TO Watch: 3 catches for 13 total yards in the overtime win against the Jets this weekend. For the season, that is now 15 catches for 215 yards and one touchdown, in six games for the formerly good wide receiver. Plus at least four or five bad drops for good measure.

Lastly, I was thinking this week how funny it is what perspective can do to one's opinion of a given team. For example, look at three .500 teams right now in the NFL: The Jets, the Ravens and the Jaguars. These teams are all sitting at the identical 3-3 records after six games, but just look at how differently the three teams are perceived by fans (including myself). The Ravens to me are a very solid team, they have a great defense and a constantly improving, strong-armed quarterback in Joe Flacco. I have very little doubt that, come season's end, the Ravens will be in the playoffs and a team that nobody wants to run into in a big spot. Then there are the Jets, who started off the season 3-0 but have now dropped three straight to drop back to .500 through six games. The Jets, sitting with the exact same record as the Ravens, are not confidence-inspiring at all at this point, as I would say it is very much in doubt right now whether the Jets can bounce back and make it to the playoffs. Shit, at this point after watching Sanchise's balls twist in the wind last weekend, I'm not even sure if the Jets have a guy whose arm is strong enough to make it in this league. And then we can look at the Jaguars, who also rose to 3-3 this week after beating the winless Rams in overtime. This team also has that same record through six games as the Jets and the Ravens, but I don't think anybody in their right mind would consider picking the Jags to make a playoff run. They're not particularly strong in the passing game, their defense is suspect compared to previous years, and the team's three wins this year are against 0-6 Tennessee, the 0-6 Rams (in overtime, no less) and the 3-3 Texans who have been up and down. So while the fans in Baltimore may not be worried, believe me when I say the Jets fans in New York metro are crapping their pants right now, and I'm pretty sure the (few) fans in Jacksonville aren't even considering the playoffs a realistic outcome for their team come the end of the 2009 regular season in the NFL.