The baseball season begins Sunday night, which can only mean one thing.
The Chicago Cubs have exchanged their bleachers for a giant JumboTron.
Well, exchanged isn’t the right word, because the work to replace the bleachers isn’t close to being done. There will eventually be bleachers. Still, a JumboTron at Wrigley Field is a steamingly garish notion, and to the extent that this may make me seem like a luddite, well, bite me. It looks goofier than the naked bleacher girders, and that’s that, and that’ll be that, and that’s the end of that.
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Blake Griffin’s sad comments about the Clippers home crowds are so wrong, because the Clippers really are of no use to us because we need the Clippers to be what they are meant to be – ornery, unpleasant, perpetually on edge. Donald Sterling did that for them last year, and then the Warriors doubled down on their inherent nasty, and given that their bench without Jamal Crawford is flat dreadful, they need to bring all the attitude they can manage.
[RELATED: Paul joins Internet's reaction to Curry juke: 'Got me']
And yes, we know that Staples Center is a useless cavern that eats crowd noise and obliterates ambience, but resourceful teams make their own noise their own way. If the Western Conference playoffs are to be the great entertainment we thought they should be and not a six-week coronation parade for the Golden States, the Clippers need to do their part. I mean, we’ve seen Houston, Portland, Dallas and Oklahoma City, and Memphis may not be the cure-all for the overall degradation of the conference, so the Clippers will have to do their share.
Please note: we are in this for the entertainment value alone, and have no other rooting interest. If the Warriors breeze through the West the way teams typically breeze through the crap East, well, let’s just put it this way: This is the reason so many teams moved west – to find basketball that didn’t have to apologize for itself every year.
[POOLE: Rewind: 'Competitive spirit kicked in,' Warriors outlast Clips]
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In case you were unable to find the reason why Connecticut women’s basketball coach Geno Auriemma is a god among snarly cranks, try this from his Women’s Final Four presser, re: the men’s game.
“ . . . I think the game is a joke. It really is. I don’t coach it. I don’t play it, so I don’t understand all the ins and outs of it. But as a spectator, forget that I’m a coach, as a spectator, watching it, it’s a joke. There’s only like ten teams, you know, out of 25, that actually play the kind of game of basketball that you’d like to watch. Every coach will tell you that there’s 90 million reasons for it. And the bottom line is that nobody can score, and they’ll tell you it’s because of great defense, great scouting, a lot of team work, nonsense, nonsense. College men’s basketball is so far behind the times it’s unbelievable. I mean women’s basketball is behind the times. Men’s basketball is even further behind the times. Every other major sport in the world has taken steps to help people be better on the offensive end of the floor. They’ve moved in the fences in baseball, they lowered the mound. They made the strike zone so you need a straw to put through it. And in the NFL you touch a guy it’s a penalty. You hit the quarterback, you’re out for life. You know, in the NBA, you touch somebody in the perimeter, you whack guys like they used to do when scores were 90 to 75, they changed the rules. This is entertainment we’re talking about. People have to decide, do I want to play 25 bucks, 30 bucks to go see a college scrum where everybody misses six out of every ten shots they take, or do I want to go to a movie? We’re fighting for the entertainment dollar, here, and I have to tell you it’s not entertainment from a fan’s standpoint. So that’s just‑‑ I’m talking as a fan, not as Geno Auriemma, the basketball coach.”
And moral arbiter of us all.
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And finally, Jim Harbaugh did not attack his campaign to become Michigan student body president with an enthusiasm unknown to mankind. In fact, he didn’t do anything at all, the contemptible sloth.
But he still fourth in the voting for CSG president, according to unofficial results released to The Michigan Daily. Harbaugh received 115 votes for president, including 82 votes for “Jim Harbaugh,” another 18 simply for “Harbaugh” and four for the joint ticket of “Jim Harbaugh and Diag Squirrel.”
Urban Meyer has never been treated with such student deference at Utah, Florida or Ohio State. Then again, he has never said, “I don’t take vacations. I don’t get sick. I don’t observe major holidays. I’m a jack hammer.”
Besides, Harbaugh plans to become university president no later than 2017, and intergalactic overlord by 2022. No UM student body president has managed that double – at least not so much as we care to look.
