The Bull in Full

Bad baseball, bad video, and you want HOW much?

It just hasn't been a good week for sports around here, has it?  I'm going to ignore except in passing the pathetic and embarrassing episode from last weekend, as well as the even more pathetic and embarrassing response by UNC fans to Roy Williams wearing a Kansas sticker at the championship game. 

What's on my mind more at the moment was the display of baseball ineptitude I watched at the Bulls' game last night.  Bad pitching, bad fielding, bad hitting, almost all of it on the side of the Bulls. 

But more troubling was one of those silly video spots they put on in between innings, this one featuring the Bulls' head groundskeeper giving tips on how to have a good lawn.  What was the crux of his advice on this one?  (I'm not making this up.)

Water your lawn.  A lot.  2-3 times a week, give it a good healthy soaking.  When in doubt, use more water.  The man even ended the clip with this priceless nugget:

"Remember, no water means no grass!"

Sitting in the stands, I kept feeling like I needed to check my ears to make sure I was hearing things.  Was the image-obsessed Jim Goodmon's baseball team REALLY that tone deaf? 

Here's a tip for the Bulls -- don't run that clip any more, and get Mr. Water-a-lot to shoot a video about xeriscaping for you.

To top it off, there was a nugget in Wednesday's Herald-Sun, now swallowed up in the black hole of their internet policy, about plans for a national Minor League Baseball museum next to the old DAP.  Now, I confess, I've generally been behind this project.  The old ballpark is a great piece of history, and can still continue to function as a good baseball stadium, so I don't have much of a problem with dropping $5 million into the renovations on the park itself.  My assumption was that with those renovations, MiLB would come in and do its museum largely on its own.

But I confess I got classic sticker shock when it came to the plans for the museum.  From the H-S:

Accompanying the ballpark will be the Minor League Baseball Fan Experience and Museum, which is scheduled to open in 2010. 

Plans are to build that facility, which would overlook center and right fields, at a cost of $50 million, with Minor League Baseball providing a $25 million endowment and running the operation after the city comes up with $25 million in construction costs.  (my emphasis)

Okay, on the face of it, a MiLB museum (can we please drop the lame sounding "Fan Experience" part of the name?) is a great idea for Durham.  The Durham Bulls are pretty synonymous with minor league baseball nationwide, so building on that seems like a great idea.  But $25 million is a ton of public money to spend on something that's going to be largely patronized by those from out of town.  For comparison's sake, the new DBAP cost $16 million to build, and was the source of serious controversy at the time.   And all with the goal of opening by 2010?

Now, some might point out that I was a proponent of the new DPAC (SOMEBODY buy the naming rights so we can get away from these freakin' ackronyms), which took something on the order of $32 million in public money.  But I'll also note that we only built that thing after 2 years of intense public debate, which resulted in a theater that ended up costing less and being built with a far better design than the one originally proposed.  I guess I'd hope for a bit more scrutiny of this proposal and a bit less hurry on this one.

Lastly, I'll note that the new Carolina Basketball Museum which just opened in Chapel Hill cost $3.4 million.  If we're helping to pay for a museum that costs $50 million, I sure hope it's going to be fabulous.

[where: 27701]

UNC vs. USC -- Let's do this again sometime...

Tomorrow at 3:30, Steve Spurrier's Gamecocks from Columbia, SC will kick off at Kenan Stadium against UNC.  As much as North Carolina vs. South Carolina seems like it would be a no brainer for a regular matchup, and as much as it was when both were in the Southern Conference and then the ACC together, the rivalry has been dormant lately.  In fact, it's been 16 years since the teams last met in football. 

While this may not have seemed an attractive game at one point in time, the addition of two coaches who built national chapionship programs at two different universities in Florida has added to the intrigue.  Spurrier is further into his rebuilding project than UNC's Butch Davis, so South Carolina should be a pretty heavy favorite tomorrow, but it's not just us rabid Tar Heel fans who think Davis is a good bet to make UNC pretty good pretty quickly. 

After this visit, UNC is scheduled to go play in Columbia in 2010, which is all fine and good, but this thing really ought to happen more often.  In fact, I'll go so far as to say this rivalry should be taken to the Bank.

Bank of America stadium in Charlotte, that is.  It's become more common for ongoing rivalries, particularly "border wars" like this one, to hold their games on neutral sites.  Oklahoma and Texas play the "Red River Shootout" in Dallas, while Florida and Georgia play the "Coctail Party" game in Jacksonville, FL.  UNC tried something similar several years ago, taking their game with NCSU to Charlotte.  That, of course, made no sense, taking two schools 25 miles apart and moving the game two hours away from both.  UNC vs. USC in Charlotte, on the other hand, makes a lot more sense, given that those driving from Columbia up to Chapel Hill for tomorrow's game may very well have seen Bank of America stadium out the window about 2/5 of the way here.  Charlotte even has the symbolic position of sitting right on the line between the two states, with its metropolitan area extending well into the southern half of the old Carolina colony.

Spurrier and Davis, both having flirted with the NFL and failed, and now both appearing to be well established and comfortable (and with "golden handcuffs"), could make this into one heck of an ongoing rivalry.  Let's do this on a regular basis starting in 2010, and let's put it in Charlotte.

Hot party in Boone-town tonight

Wow.  Just... Wow....

Appalachian State beats #5 Michigan, in Ann Arbor.

Heard all over Boone tonight:

"Dude.... Wait, WHAT?!?!?"

Barton's comeback

I'd seen highlights of this, but watching the final 45 seconds of this year's Division II national championship game is worth doing several times. 

Here's the video. (I tried to embed it, but it doesn't work well with this layout...)

An article in today's News and Observer catches up with Anthony Atkinson, and finds him having trouble believing that it actually happened.  I can completely understand that -- I have a very distinct memory of pulling off a very similar comeback for a national championship.  I'd hit a shot to pull us within two, then stole the inbounds pass and sunk a layup, which fell just after the buzzer sounded.  The main difference is there were no crowds there to see mine, because it all happened in my head in our driveway in Asheville, some spring afternoon after school.  This kind of comeback is quite literally exactly what every kid out there shooting the basketball in his backyard dreams about.

I think I'll go watch it again, come to think of it...

A dancing horse.

I'm not making this up.

Word rant: Stick-to-itiveness

I don't want to turn into a language absolutist.  Languages change, and that's not necessarily a bad thing.  Inventing words isn't such a bad thing either -- Shakespeare did it all the time.

But Peter King's column this week at SI.com hit one that I absolutely hate: stick-to-itiveness.  It's not just that it's stupid sounding, awkward, and hard to type.  It's completely unneccessary.  There's already a perfectly good, fun to use word that means the same thing: tenacity.  And, thank's to Jack Black's musical project, it's not even an obscure word. 

(Fun side note: While looking at official Dictionary.com definitions of tenacity and tenacious, I came across a word with a similar meaning that adds a bit of obscurity, in case you get off on that kind of thing: pertinacious.  But then again, never use a big word when a diminutive one will suffice... )

Unfortunate headline of the day

From SI.com:

Slaton, White power WVU past Pitt in "Brawl"

With "White" as the previous word, perhaps a different verb would have been more appropriate...

So long, John

So, as everyone who cares surely knows by now, John Bunting has been fired effective the end of the season. My dad and I have already talked about this a good bit. He's utterly fed up with Bunting, with little better evidence than the 23-0 debacle at Virginia this past weekend. Bunting has had six years to put the program together and move forward, and it's in quite bad shape at the moment.

I completely agree with the frustration and disgust at the inability to win. But at the same time, if I take a step back from the part of me that wants to see UNC beat Florida State, Miami, and Clemson on a regular basis, there's more here than wins and losses.