A sports blog by and for Midwest Sports Fans
Earlier this year, I chronicled the story of Fanball Inc., which shut down its fantasy sports franchises (CDM, NFFC/NFBC, and Fantasy Cup among them) that they had bought out previously. Since then, the original owners of CDM and NFFC/NFBC have re-acquired their franchises and now exist under the original umbrella.
This Sunday, ESPN’s Outside the Lines did a piece on another long-time fantasy sports franchise that ran into trouble in 2011 and ultimately shut down.
It is with great pleasure and excitement that we unveil the first MLB Trivia Challenge Podcast sponsored by the M&A consultants and advisors at Generational Equity, and there are multitudes of reasons for the excitement.
First off, we love baseball here at MSF, and this podcast, which was inspired by Jayson Stark’s weekly appearances on ESPN Radio, is going to be a great biweekly feature on the site for all of the fellow baseball lovers out there.
Secondly, there are prizes! We are going to be able to reward one weekly winner with a $20 gift certificate to Chili’s each week, and at the end of the season we are going to be giving one grand prize winner an iPad and a subscription to MLB.tv for 2012.
And thirdly, specific to this week, one of the most well known and controversial moments in MSF history (a result of this article) will come full circle as Ken Rosenthal joins me and Ari on the first MLB Trivia Challenge Podcast.
This will be fun.
Although my area of expertise is fantasy football, I could not leave this subject alone. After taking in the ESPN Outside The Lines debate on Jerod’s article regarding Raul Ibanez, I feel compelled to write in defense of someone I have great respect for.
Over the past five years, we have watched Major League Baseball fall apart right before our very eyes. Decades of baseball players and fans have been destroyed by the widespread disaster of Performance Enhancing Drugs, which has tainted every record broken in the 90′s and beyond, as well as iconic players’ images. In my very own house, I have to deal with the issues of Performance Enhancing Drugs because of these players and their decisions, which affects my children greatly.
Growing up, I idolized Roger Clemens. I wore his number when I played. I tried to pitch just like him, and collected whatever had his name or number on it. My oldest son, only 12, idolizes Manny Ramirez. As he currently plays baseball and is only a few years from high school, I have to explain to him and pray that he does not follow in his idols’ footsteps to get an unfair advantage over his competition. My youngest son, age 10, worships Alex Rodriguez. He also plays baseball on a traveling team, 44 games a summer. This league is extremely competitive, and again, I fear the worst with what his decisions will be when he reaches more competitive levels of baseball as he ages.
I found out about Clemens at an age where I know better, and can make educated decisions on what should and should not be done to my body. But if I found out my idol did this at the influential age of 10 or 12, would I be so smart? Could my decision-making of what is right and wrong be stronger than the influence, positive or negative, that is displayed by those I look up to?
With that said, how in the hell can anyone look at Ibanez’s numbers and not think exactly what Jerod wrote. He did not say he was on PED’s, but after the likes of Barry Bonds and Mark McGwire, how could you look at this in any other light?
Manny testing positive was the capper for me. If he could test positive, one of the purest hitters in all of baseball, ever, I have to believe that everyone could be on them. Think about Brady Anderson and Bret Boone. These two went from single digit home run totals one year to hitting 51 home runs and the other batting clean up in the All-Star Game.
Major League Baseball is tainted, and will be for years to come. Jerod spoke on what everyone else thinks, and yes, this is America, where we still do have freedom of speech. He did not accuse Ibanez of taking PED’s, but based on his numbers, how can you not speculate until the positive tests stop coming forward?
If we have this speculation now, wait until the 100+ names from the Alex Rodriguez list are published.
Jerod handled himself with class while the mainstream media tried to beat on his writing to justify their own existence. Jerod was dead on in his writing and his comments. Baseball is a joke, and the negative influence this has on our youth is frightening.
Jerod, my hats off to you for saying what everyone else thinks!
* – Photo Courtesy: BlissTree.com
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Kurt Fraschetti
Profootballinsight – Now on Facebook
profootballinsight@live.com
As the 24-48 hour sports news cycle chews up and spits out the Raul Ibanez story that I’ve unexpectly found myself at the center of this week, the debate is now shifting to far more important topics that whether speculating about individual players being on steroids is valid or how bloggers and the mainstream media will ever co-exist.
And the most important question was recently posed by a commenter over at Awful Announcing in their take on the current steroids speculation debate, in reference to the picture above (courtesy of Awful Announcing):
shacky316 said…
Who is the freaky one on the left???
I’m going to assume that I was in the process of talking at the point where that screenshot was taken, because I don’t remember hawking a loogie at the camera at any point during the interview.
Either way, I’d like to extend my heartfelt gratitude to Daulerio over Deadspin for shining a bright light on my most sensitive of insecurities: that rather then being your garden variety white guy from the Midwest, I appear to be bordering on a skin pigmentation of clear during the OTL interview. While making many relevant and important points about the OTL interview, Daulerio makes perhaps his most relevant when he says:
Jerod Morris has to go outside. Seriously, son, you’re making us all look bad if you don’t spray tan yourself before you go on national television to get yelled at.
I also have to say that I personally found their screenshot of the OTL interview to be far more amusing, for a number of reasons. Poor John Gonzalez does not appear to be as intense as me or in quite the state of ecstacy as our dear friend Ken Rosenthal.
I would like to personally thank my friends over at Cleveland Frowns for chalking up my “freaky” appearance to the obvious lack of makeup that was offered to me before the interview in their post earlier today. However, the truth is that I probably wouldn’t have worn any anyway, and would have been better served by getting a haircut sometime in the last three months and, as Daulerio suggests, emerging from beneath my laptop to behold the glory of the sun every once in a while.
I guess if I’d known that I’d end up on ESPN I would have been more proactive about these issues. But the truth is that I probably would have procrastinated about doing anything about them to analyze a White Sox draft pick or have some unnecessary fun with Photoshop.
And I mean really, when you’re just a blogger who is living in the glorious age of the MLB Network, Gamecast, and Hot Clicks, who needs the sun?
