2.13.2005
A New Baseball Blog: Do I Need a Reason?
This blog exists because nobody should ever have to wake up on a Sunday morning with an empty schedule and realize he hasn't written about baseball in over three years. Any questions?
Most interesting news item of a slow baseball day in February: the Lakers-Cavaliers game, dominated by Lebron and the Cavs in the game that Kobe chose to be his first back on the floor after a painful ankle injury several weeks ago.
Why is this a baseball item? Because included in the footnotes to the AP game recap was this little nugget: "Always in the middle of controversy, Dodgers outfielder Milton Bradley wore a Bryant No. 8 jersey and at one point taunted the Cleveland crowd from his seat."
Dodgers GM Paul DePodesta has gone on record defending Bradley time after time, despite one "off-the-field incident" after another that keeps sending sportswriters back to the question of his "attitude problems" and "character." He's gone on record as saying he'd take a team of nine Milton Bradleys if he could, and the folks over at BP tend to agree.
I use the quotes because those phrases get used so often that they lose all meaning and after awhile make me wonder if the sportswriter in question has an ulterior motive of some sort. Bradley has the unfortunate distinction of seeing his name come up on the wire alongside the word "incident" more often than most. The last installment involved driving away from a speeding ticket after refusing to sign it, which is probably never a good idea but then again the article doesn't include any possible mitigating factors either (I'll leave you to speculate). But before that was the bottle-slamming incident - understandable to me, as a person who hates getting pegged with objects by an onlooking crowd - which was followed by the dreaded insult-the-reporter story. Who hasn't wanted to insult a reporter, especially a sports reporter, from time to time?
But after this Cleveland-crowd-taunting episode I'm more convinced of Bradley's flawed character than ever before. I mean, who wears a Kobe Bryant jersey in public anymore? C'mon.
Most interesting news item of a slow baseball day in February: the Lakers-Cavaliers game, dominated by Lebron and the Cavs in the game that Kobe chose to be his first back on the floor after a painful ankle injury several weeks ago.
Why is this a baseball item? Because included in the footnotes to the AP game recap was this little nugget: "Always in the middle of controversy, Dodgers outfielder Milton Bradley wore a Bryant No. 8 jersey and at one point taunted the Cleveland crowd from his seat."
Dodgers GM Paul DePodesta has gone on record defending Bradley time after time, despite one "off-the-field incident" after another that keeps sending sportswriters back to the question of his "attitude problems" and "character." He's gone on record as saying he'd take a team of nine Milton Bradleys if he could, and the folks over at BP tend to agree.
I use the quotes because those phrases get used so often that they lose all meaning and after awhile make me wonder if the sportswriter in question has an ulterior motive of some sort. Bradley has the unfortunate distinction of seeing his name come up on the wire alongside the word "incident" more often than most. The last installment involved driving away from a speeding ticket after refusing to sign it, which is probably never a good idea but then again the article doesn't include any possible mitigating factors either (I'll leave you to speculate). But before that was the bottle-slamming incident - understandable to me, as a person who hates getting pegged with objects by an onlooking crowd - which was followed by the dreaded insult-the-reporter story. Who hasn't wanted to insult a reporter, especially a sports reporter, from time to time?
But after this Cleveland-crowd-taunting episode I'm more convinced of Bradley's flawed character than ever before. I mean, who wears a Kobe Bryant jersey in public anymore? C'mon.
