Now that I'm emerging from the deep, dark hole from which I've been filing premium tax forms since the beginning of the year, I'm getting back into the regular swing of my life and hopefully that means more posts for you sweet reader. Things were literally crazy around the office and I was starting to look a little like Edward Norton in "Fight Club" and feel a bit like Captain Willard at the end of "Apocalypse Now." Not good times, bad times.
But my "rebirth" coincides with the rebirth of Mother Nature and the semi-annual period when my life as a sports fan is awesome. In the fall, when the leaves are coming off the trees, baseball is ending and basketball is just beginning. Then, almost half a year later, basketball is ending just as baseball is commencing. Just like that extra paycheck you get when you get paid bi-weekly instead of twice a month, this cycle continues five-months-then-seven-months as a straight line through my life. There's never a time which isn't filled with either enthusiasm for the playoffs or hope for a new and approaching season.
The NCAA Tournament is approaching and you know what that means. It means I'm going to fill out a bracket based upon what I've off-handedly read through most of the season about college basketball. It sounds like it shouldn't work and it doesn't really. It does however work better than actually paying attention the entire season and then fashioning myself as some kind of expert. I'll admit to following college basketball closer this year (I even went to the Golden Gophers' game at Northwestern.) on the account of needing to know whom I should be enthused to see trimmed in evergreens next year. Yet I remain a casual fan at best. If any college basketball star not named Beasley, Gordon, Mayo, Rose or Hibbert walked into the room and beat me up right now, the best description I could provide is "just a really tall dude with fists." Jerryd Bayless, do your worst.
My fellow sports fanatics wonder how I can survive without seeing the actual sport events I swear allegiance to. Since I only go to games and read about them online (sometimes I'll see nationally televised games like the Super Bowl or Sunday's Rockets-Lakers tilt), I'm somewhat a version of the sportsfan of the past. I've heard more often about LeBron James than I've ever actually seen him play. I can give you scouting reports for Adrian Peterson more readily than I can describe what it's like to see him run. I get most of my sports news from the paper except the paper is a computer which can play highlights. It's both disassociating and engrossing.
Perhaps if I lived at home, then I would be more conventionally plugged into the local teams than I am here in Chicago. The distance between myself and the teams I actually care about (except in the case of their demise) means I am off the pulse of the community. My heart beats to a different drummer than those around me and I feel detached from that sense of unity sports can breed. This leads me onto the Internet to get my news in its obsessive, neurotic variety. When members of the mainstream sports media blast bloggers, they're just admitting they can't keep up with the research necessary to commit yourself to this form of journalism. The bi-product of reading only this kind of media is I end up sounding like I know a lot more than I do. All I really know is where to go to find people who do.
So as I was constructing my tournament brackets, I thought two things. The first was I was going to put my brackets together and with only a little bit of logic necessary (some lower seeds over higher seeds, no "all four #1s" make the Final Four) and almost not research. I was only going to trust what I'd heard from actual experts and only the stuff which actually stood out enough for me to remember. Second, against that backdrop Tennessee was vastly underrated by the selection committee and will probably have a chip on their shoulder. Seriously, they had the #1 RPI and strength of schedule this year. They beat the last undefeated team in Memphis before they got sucked into a trap game against Vanderbilt who made the tourney and then lost to also tourney-bound Arkansas in their conference semis. I guess losing to two other tournament teams in Kentucky and Texas were what really turned the committee off. Somewhere Chris Lofton is focusing his anger and storing it for later use in bracket destruction. Anyway, here's the link to my bracket this year. I also did an NIT bracket but I picked it the same way most people do their money brackets and chose a final four of my alma mater (Minnesota), my brother's alma mater (Arizona State), my friend's alma mater (Illinois State) and Virginia Tech because then I got to make their square-root-looking symbol three times on my bracket.
This year has been a wash for the Timberwolves. I guess that happens when you trade the greatest player your franchise has ever known away for a handful of prospects and an expiring contract. I did get a chance to see the Timberwolves in person when they visited the Bulls at the United Center. One of the the principles of our agency knows I'm a Minnesota guy and knows I'm a die-hard basketball fan. I've been following the Minnesota Timberwolves since their first year in the league and their best player was Tony Campbell. I was nine and I used to sit under a blanket fort listening to the great Kevin Harlan giving the play-by-play. So when I nonchalantly asked him what he was doing with his season tickets for the T'Wolves game, he was gracious enough to turn them over gratis. The bittersweetness of no longer cheering for KG (the only athlete other than Kirby Puckett whose passing will cause me to weep) is offset some by the hope and the enthusiasm for growth of the Al Jefferson-Randy Foye-Corey Brewer-Ryan Gomes-Rashard McCants core the Timberwolves will be adding an aforementioned top pick to this spring. Some of which is, of course, dampened by the same guys being in charge now as were before when we ended up needing to trade away the greatest player the franchise has ever known.
The Wolves' season has been offset two different ways. First off the Western Conference has been bonkers this year. At the beginning of the season it was really good. The Lakers were back, the Warriors were still good, the Hornets were going from good to great, the Blazers exceeded expectations, everyone else from last year's playoffs was staying at the high level they'd been the year before and noone else was falling off. The Garnett trade has flipped this switch in the back of the minds of GMs all of the league. Nothing is as contageous as success and the tear the Celtics began the year on changed the popular mode in the NBA from "Let's wait and see what we've got," to "Fonk it. I'm going for it." First, Pau Gasol was traded to the Lakers. Then Shaq went to the Lakers. Finally Jason Kidd went to the Mavericks. Now the Rockets of all people are on a 20+ game winning streak and they're extending it without Yao Ming. Basically there are ten teams playing for eight playoff spots meaning the regular season has even more meaning as it comes to a close than in any other year and the level of basketball has ratcheted up to an elite level from a month ago until the end of the season. Even if your team isn't in the running, as a basketball fan there is a lot to love this year.
The second part is my brother organized another new fantasy league with other people who read FreeDarko and it has been fantastic. The level of competition has been the right balance between being knowledgable and having fun. We're also playing a head-to-head league which means the key to winning is weekly matchups, not gross points. Though I have been the benefactor almost as many times as not, the scoring in our old league lead to one person jumping out way in front and then never relenquishing the post. That has kind of happened in this league. But there's always something to play for, some reason to tweak your team just a bit instead of letting it fester. I thought I picked a pretty solid team at the beginning of the season. If Gilbert Arenas hadn't been injured, it actually might've been pretty formidable. As it was, I pieced together a .500 season strong enough to be the last team into the playoffs with just this week left to finish out.
Johan Santana wasn't the greatest player the Twins organization has ever known nor was he the greatest Latin player either. He may not have even been the finest pitcher the franchise ever knew, certainly if you extend back to the Washington Senators days. That doesn't change how much the Twins will miss him. Of all the starting pitchers in the years I've followed the team it's pretty much him, a large space, Frank Viola, Brad Radke, Scott Erickson for that one World Series year, another large space and then everyone else. I would often plan to go to the Twins game simply because Santana was going to be pitching. I would count starts and everything. Susie doesn't really like baseball (she tolerates it) and even she would get fired up to see him pitch. So I'm not going to act like everything is okay with the Twins who also lost another thrilling player to watch, Torii Hunter. We'll be lucky to finish with more than 70 wins this season and 60 isn't completely unreasonable. Being in the same division as Cleveland and the Tigers meant playing for third place and when Carl Pohlad talks about the Twins being a small market team, he means there's a small market for a team which isn't going to the playoff. Also these things just happen.
There's an ebb and flow to Life. Anyone can ask the fans of the Cincinnati Reds or Oakland A's or, in an extreme case, the Florida Marlins about being successful in spurts. There are some teams like the Yankees and the Cardinals who hang near the top and some teams like Tampa Bay or the former Expos who hang near the bottom and somewhere in between are all the rest of us pining our hopes on youngsters and guys finally getting it together. Things never get so bad as to be hopeless. Things also never get as good as when you're winning. The most recent Twins renaissance coincided with my return from college in Green Bay and carried me into my first year in Chicago. The last game I saw in the Dome was with my girlfriend of coming up on three years and my grandfather who died shortly thereafter. Chances are it will be the last game I see there since the new stadium will be up by the time Susie and I move home. Like the way things are sometimes, the Twins lost the game at the hands of the Cleveland Indians and C.C. Sabathia.
Black is the new President!
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