Robbie Cano saves exhibition baseball

There’s been a good bit of talk (read: whining) lately about what has become of baseball’s All-Star festivities. On his podcast last week, Sports Illustrated senior writer (and my sports writing idol) Joe Posnanski and special guest Michael Schur (the artist formerly known as Ken Tremendous) bemoaned what they see as a laundry list of problems with the game.

As you may know, it all goes back to 2002, when the All-Star game ended in a 7-7 tie because both teams ran out of players after 11 innings. That caused commissioner Bud Selig a great deal of embarrassment, especially because the game was played in his hometown of Milwaukee.

As a result, Major League Baseball has spent the past decade or so continuously tinkering with the All-Star format and selection process. The biggest change is that, in an effort to add meaning to the game, the winning league now receives home field advantage in the World Series. This has resulted in a number of bizarre contradictions:

Feelings: Fifth Amendment, birthdays, Tiger

I have always been confused by the Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. The language of the amendment is clear enough. It simply states that no person “shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself.” This is, obviously, the basis for the phrase “plead the Fifth,” which is pervasive on television courtroom dramas.

But here’s my problem: When a person invokes his right not to incriminate himself, it seems to me that he is admitting his guilt.

The amendment says you don’t have to testify against yourself. But it doesn’t, at least not explicitly, allow you to withhold testimony in any other situation. You can’t refuse to testify for yourself; you have no right against self-exoneration. Thus, it seemed to me, a person can only invoke the Fifth Amendment if they did something wrong, something, um,  incriminating.

Resolving to cut the fat

My father once told me the following joke. A man is at the doctor’s office and asks his physician, “Doc, if I never drink, never smoke, and never chase women, will I live forever?”

“No,” the doctor replies, “but it will sure feel that way.”

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Other than my two most obvious skills — breaking promises about this website and annoying my wife — the thing in life I think I’m best at is setting goals.

Why I should be on every MLB team’s payroll

As you may have heard through email, text message or Facebook status, I’ve managed to procure a full-time job, which I start Monday. Obviously, this is wonderful news, but I’m not sure what it means for this blog. Unfortunately, there is a reasonable chance I will have less time to spend working on the site than I already do.

But I’ve been making empty promises about the blog for quite a while and I have a whole list of half-finished posts, so my goal is to end my unemployment with a bang. If all goes according to plan, which it rarely does, this post will be followed by several others in the next few days. Good luck to me.

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As you may have learned in the previous two posts in this series, I am one of the most powerful good luck charms in sports history. In 2009, I went to five Yankees games, and they won them all. This past season, I went to 10 Knicks games, and they managed to go 5-5 in those contests, despite going 24-48 in games I didn’t attend, a .333 winning percentage.

This year, I wanted to use the baseball season as a sort of luck experiment. I wanted to determine just how lucky I really am.

Feelings: Big threes, Chiefs, mice, facial hair

Every now and then, at random moments throughout my days, I have an idea, sometimes even a decent one. On occasion, I have an opinion that feels original or a feeling that seems unique. For my whole life up to now, I have never really done anything with these small ideas, and I have always regretted letting my thoughts go to waste.

So, I’m starting something new. When I have a thought that seems interesting, I’m going to write it down. And then, maybe once a week, maybe less often knowing me, I’m going to combine those ideas into a post for the site. This is the first of those posts.

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It seems to me that “Big Three” is the weakest nickname in all of sports, quite possibly in all of the world.

My future and starting Phil Hughes

I’ll admit right up front that the idea behind this post is a little half-baked, so I apologize if this ends up a little vague or a little confusing. Although, I haven’t written it yet, so it might end up making perfect sense. I’m just warning you.

Eventually, this is going to be about my outlook on life and maybe some goals, but it’s going to start out with the Yankees, eventually.

Probably like most other people, I enjoy finding parallels in my life, making connections between things that are ostensibly (and often actually) unrelated. In church, for instance, I am always amazed at how the pastor’s sermons seem to be targeted directly at me. Now, I guess this could be a case of divine intervention, but I think it’s more likely that I am simply prone to noticing small coincidences. “A message about community service? Wow. An acquaintance and I just had  a conversation on Tuesday about wanting to get involved!”

The man who was suspended from girls volleyball

I went to Saegertown High School, a small school in rural northwest Pennsylvania located in, believe it or not, Saegertown, Pennsylvania. There were 84 students in my graduating class just to give you an idea of the size.

Or maybe it was 86 students. Memory is funny like that, but you get the idea.

Saegertown (Panthers) is one of three schools in the PENNCREST School District. The other two are Cambridge Springs (Blue Devils) and Maplewood (Tigers).

As is often the case with small schools in rural communities, the sports rivalries between these schools were intense. With not a single other option for entertainment on a Friday night, everyone from miles around would pack the bleachers for a football or basketball game.  The atmosphere at the many Saegertown-Cambridge sporting events in which I competed or that I attended was something akin to a scene from the movie Hoosiers.

The crowds were more sparse and less intense for minor sports, meaning any sport other than football or boys basketball, but the hostility between folks from Cambridge and folks from Saegertown remained.

It was on a Monday night in the Cambridge Springs gymnasium at a girls volleyball match that a small bit of this hostility escaped from my mouth, setting off a chain reaction of reverberation, consequences.

Life’s Lists

This somewhat short post, and certainly the post that preceded it, is mostly fancy. I promise that I will soon return to somewhat more serious, much more lengthy pieces. I have some more to say about Southern obesity. And a massive essay about love and Johnny Rockets. But for now, lists.

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Books I am partway through reading:

1. The Yankee Years by Tom Verducci and Joe Torre
2. Summer of ’49 by David Halberstam
3. Consider the Lobster by David Foster Wallace
4. A Season on the Brink by John Feinstein
5. The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives by Leonard Mlodinow

Questions I wish I were asked more often:

1. Why are you so handsome?
2. Were you always this good at basketball?
3. Would you mind if I waxed your Lamborghini?

Imagined Dialogue: Color Wheel

A: What’s black and white and re(a)d all over?

B: A newspaper.

A: No, a zebra with a sunburn.

A Tennessee catastrophe

July 13, 2010, was the worst day of my life.

It is a strange thing, knowing exactly which of my roughly 8,180 days on earth was the absolute worst.

On July 12, 2010, if you had asked me when the worst day of my life was, there would not have been a clear answer.

I probably would have said the day during my senior year of high school when my volleyball team lost to Cambridge Springs in the district tournament, ending our season. But that was only a bad day within the narrow context of the pscyhe of a high school senior, particularly a high school senior who had yet to learn that there is more to life than volleyball.

That day in the spring of 2006 did present a problem: What would I do with my life now that I could no longer play high school volleyball? But that problem had simple, obvious solutions: college, girls, career.

Tuesday, July 13, 2010, on the other hand posed more difficult questions, real-life questions. Questions about mortality and adulthood and independence and honor.

A brief (yeah, right) timeline: