Somewhat Manly Nerd

- Bobby Orr was a better hockey player than Wayne Gretzky. Orr was Babe Ruth, while Gretzky was Ted Williams. A Canadian convinced me of this — it has to be true.

- A friend just saw two episodes of 30 Rock on a plane trip back from Japan. He bought both season sets and now loves Tina Fey. I feel like he’s behind the curve on this.

- Casablanca still rules, Citizen Kane does not. I might make a post to expand on this thought, we’ll see.

- Heaven is overrated if Christina Hendricks and Monica Bellucci aren’t 69ing up there.

- The decline of America is best exemplified by the rise of Megan Fox.

- Ireland would be the perfect country for an alcoholic American who only speaks English to visit alone. Although, one should perhaps brush up on some soccer beforehand.

- When is Harry Potter going to disappear? Surely interest must be running dry? *looks at box office results* Oh. Nevermind.

- Seeing kids who were already much taller than you back in HS — and finding out face-to-neck that they grew even more while in college — is not cool. Tall bastards.

- I mentioned Casablanca – which is pretty much accepted as the most romantic film ever — but it’s idealistic bullshit. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, even though it’s based around such an unrealistic concept, centers around one of the most realistic love stories on film. It’s so brutal.

Tom Watson is no Tiger Woods, and that was a good thing — until the final putt.

The British Open was over once Watson totally flubbed the 5-foot putt that would have won him the Claret Jug. Yet I kept watching the trainwreck go down. I’m always looking for ways to troll golf, and what better ammunition than an AARP-eligible man winning a major? Federer vs. Tiger arguments would be over forever. I think they already should be, personally, but lots of people play golf, so they know it is pretty difficult. But being a hustler at billiards is pretty hard, too. Or being a champion bowler.

Anyhow, this is taking away from the fact that some guy older than my father almost beat a field of guys half his age over 72 holes of golf. It’s an accomplishment just being to walk the course for four straight days at that point. If he only didn’t pull a Greg Norman choke job. And Tiger missed the cut! *cue laughing* So fucking fantastic. I just love hating. I’ll take any opportunity.

It was sad to watch Watson fall apart in the playoff, though. I can’t hate on him, even if he smashed a drive so far into the rough that he couldn’t even get it out in one shot. No one will remember that Stewart Cink beat him, just like no one remembers who the benefactor of Jean Van De Velde’s choke-job-for-the-ages was. People will remember Watson, and how everyone was rooting for him, and how he came up just short. And people will remember this is why you don’t get your hopes up. /bitter Mets fan

I don’t know how I manage to procrastinate just posting links to other sites. They do all the work.

The first site has to be Flickchart. All it does is pit movie versus movie, and you need to pick. That’s it. Sounds so simple, right? Next thing you know you’ve ranked 500 movies, and they have been ranked in a terrible order, so you need to rank more to fix it up, and then you’ve done another 250 rankings, and holy shit I’ve been on this site for two hours. Sometimes, the matchups are terrible for a dozen straight, and sometimes, you can’t choose:

Apparently, the site is still in beta, but you can click this link to get straight through and register and start wasting your time.

After 1757 rankings, my top 10 looks like:

1         2001: A Space Odyssey
2         The Godfather
3         Die Hard
4         Pulp Fiction
5         Fight Club
6         The Godfather Part II
7         Terminator 2: Judgment Day
8         Dumb and Dumber
9         Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
10      Raiders of the Lost Ark

Think Dumb and Dumber looks out of place? Fuck you.

Ok, enough about a flavor-of-the-week internet time waster. Flip Flop Fly Ball is no wannabe social networking site. It’s just the coolest collection of sports graphs I’ve ever seen. It makes you aware of just how insane Yankees ticket prices are, just how racist the Red Sox organization is, and just how little a percentage of Major League baseball players get into the Hall of Fame. And it does all this with pretty colored graphs that I wouldn’t mind having on a wall.

Last — but certainly not least — is a website with even prettier pictures than Flip Flop Fly Ball. It has to be in contention for greatest Tumblr blog. FUCK YEAH RED is a site dedicated to Christina Hendricks.

Uh, yeah.

One note: she is marrying that dude in those pics on the first page. If you don’t know who that is, it’s the guy who eats a bag of shrooms and says “I’m freakin’ out, man!” in Super Troopers. THAT GUY. THAT GUY IS STICKING HIS PENIS INSIDE CHRISTINA HENDRICKS. I don’t even know how to feel about that. Should I cry? Should it give me hope? SOMEONE TELL ME WHAT TO FEEL…besides that feeling in my pants.

It’s bad enough for the five months baseball isn’t in season, but at least during that drought there are the other three major sports going on to make up for the loss (I refuse to acknowledge NASCAR as bigger than the NHL). But a day in the middle of the Major League Baseball season with absolutely no games equals one bored son of a bitch. On the other hand, the episodes of Burn Notice I watched in lieu of the Mets were no doubt less painful.

It’s just amazing how much of a wasteland this yearly hole in the middle of July is. After no doubt talking about the All-Star Game for much longer than it deserved, ESPN must have had the British Open starting tomorrow as the news of the day. I’m sure they would’ve preferred Steve McNair to have been killed yesterday — would’ve filled the void well.

Oh wait, there’s the Tour De France, and Lance Armstrong is in it again! That’s news, right? Or do we not care until it’s official that he’s won again? I guess it’s the latter, considering the actual race probably gets less viewers in the U.S. than cup stacking tournaments. I watched one of those during a lunch break once. It was fairly impressive. Those kids need to be distributed to bars across the country to set up and clean up beer pong tables in 2.1 seconds.

Tomorrow the grind starts up again, both for the Mets fan in me, and my fantasy teams. I have to say that my fantasy teams are performing above expectations — the opposite of the Mets. I’d trade my two first-place rankings for Oliver Perez to walk less than a batter an inning tomorrow. That contract is working out. Sigh.

Ryan Church traded for Jeff Francoeur straight up. I know I wanted the Mets to sell, but JEFF FRANCOEUR, he who scoffs at OBP and waiting for a pitch in the strike zone? Francoeur has a legitimate claim to being the WORST PLAYER IN MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALL over the past two years. I can’t believe this fucking shit. How do the Mets continue to do it? How do they manage to continually sabotage themselves at the trading deadline? Holy shit. I don’t care about trading Ryan Church, but JEFF FRANCOEUR?!?!? You couldn’t get better than that?

http://www.fangraphs.com/leaders.aspx?pos=all&stats=bat&lg=all&qual=y&type=6&season=2008&month=0

Click on the Dollars column so it flips around to the worst players.

Jeff Francoeur = NEGATIVE 5.7 million dollars

HOLY FUCK I HATE EVERYTHING

I know you read my blog. Don’t deny it.

I thank Windu over at GAF for the GIF. The caption is due to him being a Braves fan. Gross.

That’s as close as I’m going to get to a Michael Jackson reference.

22 innings without a run. Three entire games without an extra-base hit. Holy fucking shit, you have to be kidding me. David Wright couldn’t hit me right now, and forget the rest of the team. Luis Castillo. Daniel Murphy. Nick Evans. Omir Santos. I already had a meltdown, but I feel like at the end of this week the Mets will be 7.5 games back and I’ll be due for another. If Reyes and Beltran don’t come back immediately after the All-Star Break, it’s only going to get worse and worse. It’s almost to the point where the Mets should SELL, not buy. The season is lost, why bother trying to get an Aubrey Huff? Who are we going to trade anyhow? The Mets farm system is a joke.

Trade Sheffield to someone who wants a DH rental. Trade Livan Hernandez while his value is still above zero. I’m not even sure if it’s still above zero. Fuck, just trade Sheffield. Sure, giving up on this year is wasting yet another year of the core’s prime, but what’s another year? The only reason the Mets still appear to be in it is due to the NL East being a black hole. No way they beat the Dodgers or Giants in a short series. Beltran is here for two more years. Wright and Reyes are locked up and still young. Santana is only 30. That’s the core. Delgado was never the core. Fuck him. He can sit on his broken hip for the rest of the season for all I care.

Not that I’m averse to trading Reyes. He’s always been the one I could part with. It all depends on the offer. I think the Mets would need young, major-league-ready talent in return. They need to concentrate on winning in 2010 and 2011, so they can’t just take a whole bunch of unproven prospects in return. Either that, or trade him for Halladay, and maybe even Alex Rios too. You’re going to charge ticket prices almost as high as the Yankees — spend like them. At this point, I’m shocked that anyone is still going to the games. I’m done, unless my buddy who has tickets in the very last row of Citi Field has an extra ticket to a Santana-pitched game.

The Nationals are the only team keeping the Mets from last place. Wow.

I wish this post could have had the title ANDY RODDICK BEAT ROGER FEDERER, but alas, Federer’s only weakness is Rafael Nadal. If Roddick had won, I would have posted this within an hour of the conclusion of the match. I would have been masturbating all over my blog. I would have posted a picture of Rafael Nadal laughing. I would have posted a picture of Godfather Sampras sitting in the stands with a sly smile on his face. I would have posted a picture of Roger Federer crying (it would have happened). Unfortunately, I couldn’t do any of these things, so I ended up staring at my computer screen with no urge to acknowledge the result of this Wimbledon final.

Like everyone else, I thought Roddick had no shot going into the final. Unlike almost everyone else, I’ve always been a pretty big fan of Roddick. Yes, most Americans were probably fans back before the Reign of Federer, but once he started falling off, losing to Federer in straight-sets every match, his bandwagon got fairly thin. I’ll admit that I’ve been a bigger Nadal fan in recent years, but how could I not be? If you love watching tennis, you had to choose a side in the Nadal-Federer battle and I chose Nadal. Unfortunately, Nadal’s knees have already (or finally, depending on how you look at it) started to go, stopping him at the French and keeping him out of Wimbledon. This left an opening in the bracket — and in my rooting interests — for Andy Roddick, the forgotten man.

This meant waking up at 9 am on a Sunday — not that it matters when I can sleep in late on the weekdays — to in all likelihood watch an American getting destroyed the day after the Fourth of July. What I got to watch almost made up for all the matches I saw where Federer totally dismantled Roddick. Almost.

I watched a 5-set nailbiter that showcased one of the greatest serving performances you’ll ever see, and the man behind that performance lost, because his opponent was able to serve with pinpoint accuracy even longer. It wasn’t a Nadal-Federer final, filled with obscenely long rallies; it was a final filled with absurdly easy service games, making every break point seem like it meant the match. Somehow Roddick went 37 service games without Federer converting any of those break points. He seemed to pull out a 135 mph serve down the middle whenever he needed it — except for that second set tiebreak. It’ll be a tiebreak he will no doubt go over in his mind for years. Up 6-2, with two opportunities to blast an unreturnable serve to end the set and go up 2-0, he ended up faulting on both of the chances, giving Federer the opportunity to capitalize on his comparatively weak second serve. Naturally, Federer did.

That was where the match ended. Roddick kept on fighting — even after losing another tiebreak in the 3rd set — and managed to get to a fifth set. I fooled myself into thinking this was an advantage for Roddick, considering he still hadn’t gotten broken. But the match was already over. Federer still wasn’t sweating. After winning the final set 16-14 as Roddick mishit a ball into the stands, he still wasn’t. He was hitting aces with Federbot precision, and only decided to attack Roddick’s serve when it suited him. Roddick had the unenviable position of serving second, but he managed to hold 10 times while the match was on the line. I’d say it was a performance he will never match, but he had already won a fifth set in the 2003 Australian Open 21-19. On the other hand, that wasn’t against Roger Federer, now the greatest Grand Slam champion of all-time.

It probably took me too long to truly appreciate Federer’s greatness, but this past year really has put him in a new light. I used to say I never saw him fight, but how can I say that after a match like this? How can I say it after his fights against Nadal in last year’s Wimbledon and this year’s Australian Open? He still makes it look way too easy, and he still hasn’t proven to have an answer for Nadal, but hey, at least his style of play hasn’t led his knees to disintegrate by the age of 23. I really hope Nadal comes back strong, though. Andy Murray doesn’t seem to be quite there yet, and Novak Djokovic is a massive vagina. So I’m going ahead and predicting a Federer-Roddick final for the U.S. Open. Perhaps Roddick can turn the tide on home soil. I don’t want to see this again.

Pic courtesy of Deadspin.