7/13/09: WBCN hosts Toucher and Rich complain about having to wake up early to do their morning drive time show, and say they can’t take it for much longer.

7/14/09: CBS announces it is shutting WBCN down and replacing it with crappy Top 40.

This is why they’re wrong. All comments are paraphrased from actual Facebook posts.

Maddon insulted Wakefield by picking him and not playing him!

1) Maddon didn’t show disrespect for Wakefield by playing him, he showed respect by picking a 40-something player for the team despite less-than-stellar peripheral numbers (ERA: 4.31; WHIP: 1.38; BAA: .266). Hardly All-Star material – and Maddon understands stats much better than most managers. The honor is in being chosen, not how much you participate. Plenty of other players didn’t play this year and haven’t gotten into the game in the past. Shoehorning 33 guys into 9 innings is a clusterfuck of roster management.

But Francona paid tribute to Mariano Rivera last year by letting him get the final outs at Yankee Stadium!

2) Rivera is a closer, Wakefield isn’t (and once you hit the 7th inning in an All-Star Game, it’s time to use your many closers). Rivera was playing in his home park in its final year, Wakefield wasn’t. Rivera was arguably the best pitcher available for the job at the end of the game; Wakefield was maybe 3rd best.

“He just needed to get Wakefield in for one out, that’s all!”

3) Included in the 33 players per side are upwards of 12 or 13 pitchers. Games are (usually) 9 innings. Fitting that many pitchers into that many innings would require each pitcher to average 2/3 of an inning, and would extend the game with time-consuming pitching changes. And then people would bitch about how long the games take.

3.5) After the tie game debacle of 2002, Bud Selig made the asinine decision to “make the All-Star Game count” by tying it to homefield advantage in the World Series. So now, to avoid ties, managers have to reserve some of their pitchers in case the game goes 20 innings. Considering that there is no possibility of a make-up, wouldn’t it be best to have starters available, as they are more accustomed to throwing multiple innings than closers? The last thing an All-Star Manager needs is for some closer to be forced into 5 innings of work because he’s the last pitcher available.

But Wakefield and Beckett were both on the bench! It’s a conspiracy against the Sox! Wakefield was the first 10-game winner in the majors!

4) Picking an arbitrary number of wins to point out a pitcher’s effectiveness is silly. Who was the first guy to 6 wins? How about 11? Why is 10 important? Judging a pitcher’s efficacy by win total is among the stupidest things this side of this movie. Wakefield’s win total indicates that the Red Sox scored a bunch of runs behind him. Swap Wakefield for Greinke and I guarantee you Greinke would have another 3-4 wins while Wakefield would be around .500.

4.5) Beckett pitched on the 12th – two days before the All-Star Game. He should have been resting his arm, not throwing in game situations. Maddon was sparing the guy.

4.66) Let’s talk about in-game strategy. Since one of Maddon’s responsibilities is to win, it makes sense that he would start using closers (Papelbon, Nathan, Rivera) in the 7th inning. Let them throw gas and shut down the other team for the final third of the game.
The American League took a 1-run lead in the 7th. With a 1-run lead, would you rather have 3 of the greatest closers in baseball, or a guy who allows 1.38 baserunners per inning, almost exclusively throws a notoriously difficult to control pitch, and is throwing to a catcher who is not used to seeing said pitch. If the game had been a blowout, maybe Maddon could have used Wakefield in the later innings. But in a tight game, he was just being a good manager.

4.75) The only reason keeping Wakefield and Beckett both on the bench was a mistake is because it led to dumbass Red Sox fans complaining that all 6 of their players on the team weren’t used (Pedroia of course skipped the game by choice).

5) With 30 teams, MLB needs to eliminate the “every team gets a player” rule and kill the homefield advantage experiment. 2002 was embarrassing enough; managers aren’t going to let another tie happen, even if the game has no external repercussions.
Forcing managers to use all their players while still playing to win, yet not run out of pitchers in case it goes into extra innings in a game that’s an exhibition yet somehow still has an effect on the World Series is a situation only Bud Selig could concoct.
And finding disrespect in a situation when all 6 of your team’s All-Stars don’t get into the game is something that is only possible for an emotionally fragile fan of the (two World Series titles in the past 5 years/fourth highest payroll in baseball) Red Sox.

Without further ado:

“the very young Jackson sang age-inappropriate love songs in a shuck-and-jive style that brought to mind vaudeville blackface.”
“The young Jackson was, to most white Americans, like a singing version of Buckwheat from Our Gang.”

Now I may be a young(-ish) white male, but this is the first comparison I’ve ever heard of Jackson and Buckwheat (or Jackson and vaudeville blackface). If most white Americans saw this, I – and everyone I’ve spoken to about Michael Jackson in the past 30 years – somehow missed it.

“Jackson, whose vocal range was limited and who sang often insipid pop songs that rarely ventured outside of a basic pentatonic scale, was no musical genius.”
“As a culture, it appears that we have accepted the lowest common denominator as the highest we ought to aim. We are told Michael Jackson is the King of Pop”
“To compare Michael Jackson’s twitchy, strange pop singing to the accomplishments of people such as Pyotr Tchaikovsky or Charlie Parker is downright insulting; it is rather like saying the guy who designed the Tilt-a-Whirl is on par as an architect with I.M. Pei.”

I think we’re confusing “pop” with “quality.” He was the King of Pop, not the king of vocal range, instrumentation, or musical improvisation. Last week, he was on 9 of the top 10 albums in Billboard’s Top Pop Catalog Albums chart. The same thing will not occur when, for example, Huey Lewis dies. You can argue that Jackson wasn’t a musical genius, but you can’t argue that he wasn’t the most popular singer in the world for years. And if Jackson isn’t the King of Pop, who is? Justin Timberlake?
PS: The “guy who invented the Tilt-a-Whirl” is named Herbert Sellner. Time it took to research this fact: 10 seconds. Time it takes to realize that sitting on a SUPERAMAZING I.M.Pei building with cotton candy in your hand isn’t all it’s cracked up to be: 2 seconds.

“Did white people like Jackson’s music? Sure. But they came to love him not in the respectful way audiences came to love, say, a young Wynton Marsalis, which is to say observing his unmistakable genius in stunned silence.”

Let me get this straight: since white people were silent at intimate Wynton Marsalis shows, therefore cheering for Michael Jackson at a huge arena showed a lack of respect and love?

Also, I have seen people sit in stunned silence when they watched Jackson dance. And they were even *gasp* white! And Iowan!

“lowered expectations lead teachers to praise mediocrity in black students. I believe something similar is going on in the US media regarding Michael Jackson. ”
“If Jackson is a musical genius, one realizes, it is not such a great leap to imagine Sarah Palin as presidential material, Lauren Weisberger as a great author, or Lou Dobbs as a substitute for real reporting and news.”

Those other people aren’t black, which kind of undermines the racial component of her earlier arguments.

“(I hold a bachelor’s degree in performance from Berklee College of Music)”

So do half the waiters and waitresses in Boston.

“True musical variety has died with the radio monopolies of Clear Channel and others, as we are force-fed the same Lady Ga-Ga tune until we Lady Ga-GAG. Our standards, in other words, have sunk to new lows, and not just in music”

…but in lame puns of current singers’ names, as well.

“Jackson worked very hard not to be black. He hated being black. His self-hatred was deep and public. “

“I’m a black American, I am proud of my race. I am proud of who I am. I have a lot of pride and dignity” — Michael Jackson to Oprah Winfrey in a 1993 interview.

“But did he singlehandedly change music? Nope.”

Tell that to the myriad current artists (black and white, good and bad) who were influenced by him or first interested in music by him. Thriller is the best selling solo album of all time. Jackson’s solo albums have sold over 200 million copies. That’s a big enough influence to change music, whether you like it or not.

“Now, we pretend we care about his music when the truth is more about the selfish communal realization of mortality among Generation X, who in Jackson lost their first big star.”

1958 is rarely considered part of Gen-X. And I seem to remember a Gen-X fellow who died in 1994 that was a pretty big star. Last name Cobain.

▪ While I agree that we should spend more time on education, forcing kids to redo 34 days because the administrators screwed up is ridiculous. Apparently the law states that if a school day is even a couple minutes too short, the entire day has to be made up later, not just the missed minutes. Meanwhile, these kids miss half their summer vacation due to a clerical error.

▪ Commercials for “More to Love” are near-ubiquitous on Fox. But can we stop referring to overweight people as “not size 2″ or even “normal” now? Of course overweight people can be beautiful, and rail-thin people are often ugly. But to keep saying “I’m normal, and not a size 2 model” is seeing the world as made up of only the ultra-skinny and the fat, when there are millions of American women who fall in the middle.
If Fox wanted a show for people who weighed “normal” amounts, it would include someone between the sizes of 2 and 14. Instead, they’ve chosen only fat contestants, and told America it is a show about “normal” people. No. It is a show Fox has created to gawk at fat people, and they are trying to market it as an inspiration. I’m a little surprised they didn’t just go with their original title, “The Fatchelor.”

▪ We have all read how Justin Denny blew a kiss to his mother at his high school graduation and was denied a diploma.
However, there’s another side to this story that doesn’t seem to be getting as much attention: according to this article, the crowd shouted profanities and booed Superintendent Suzanne Lukas. Student Tyler Lamy was asked to move based on his behavior and, in his own words, “…was so upset and so distraught, I had a hard time keeping my composure.” In other words, he went ballistic and had to be escorted out of the ceremony, when a more mature reaction would have allowed him to stay. If you want to be treated like an adult, you must act like one.

▪ The irony of this sign seems to be lost on “English-only” Pat Buchanan.

▪ Finally, Harold Reynolds is the latest baseball analyst to attack the strawman argument that “OPS is the only measure of a player.” Nobody who understands basic math has ever argued that OPS is the be-all, end-all statistic. Furthermore, anyone who complains about sluggers “clogging the bases” with walks proves that they really don’t understand baseball that well at all (would they rather the sluggers got out?). Joe Posnanski’s response to this terribly-written diatribe is epic.

Really? Alleged anal rape doesn’t make it into the top 5 reasons why Kobe Bryant is disliked?

Sadly, Reilly is so far up Kobe’s butt he can’t see the irony.

I can only hope that the police department in Ontario, California is assigning extra officers to the now-publicly-known hotbed of hookers in an attempt to stop this situation from growing worse.

Which President do you think they used as an example of intelligence? Abe Lincoln? Thomas Jefferson? George Washington? No, Andrew freaking Jackson. The President who could barely spell his own name (just ask John Quincy Adams). If Intuit‘s ad agency can’t bother to conduct basic research regarding the subject or premise of their ad – to the point of using one of our least educated Presidents as an example of intelligence – they have no business with such a large account.

While cleaner than the old look, it’s possibly too clean; all the grey and white makes it look like my WordPress dashboard. At least ESPN was smart enough to use actual color with their redesign last week. Hell, even Deadspin uses blue every so often.