Sarah Taylor, the England wicketkeeper, has revealed that she is in talks to play men’s second XI county cricket this summer in what would be a groundbreaking move for women’s sport.
Taylor, widely regarded as one of the best female cricketers in history, has an informal agreement with the coaching staff at Sussex that if their second team needs a wicketkeeper at short notice this year, she will be selected to play.
So just an alternate; no guarantee that she’ll play. But it would be really neat if she does!
Me too, Ken. Also, I think they should be put in Cooperstown in a special “Cheats & Liars” wing. I’m thinking Clemens can go right next to the Black Sox.
Short news story by Gregory Blachier for Reuters (couldn’t really find anything more substantial to link):
Female riders will earn as much as their male counterparts at cycling World Championships from next year, the governing body of the sport said on Friday.
Apparently this didn’t happen before, so hooray for progress!
I also enjoyed the final sentence:
Money has been an issue in some sports including tennis, with some men complaining about women having equal prize money at grand slam events despite playing shorter matches.
So on yesterday’s NBC broadcast of Sunday Night Football, Bob Costas had a ninety second segment during halftime. He used it to talk about Jovan Belcher, who shot and killed his girlfriend and himself on December 1.
Costas spent most of the segment talking about and quoting an online piece for FOX Sports by Jason Whitlock about gun culture and gun control. I’m not going to express an opinion on gun control or focus on that. What I will say is that I’m really just amazed this happened during a nationally televised football game, and I’d have had the same reaction even if Costas expressed the opposite opinion.
What I really want to talk about are the first thirty seconds of the segment, where Costas dropped one of the fiercest burns on the platitudes of sports press conferences that I’ve ever heard:
In the aftermath of the nearly unfathomable events in Kansas City, that most mindless of sports cliches was heard yet again: “Something like this really puts it all in perspective.” Well if so, that sort of perspective has a very short shelf life, since we will inevitably hear about the perspective we have supposedly again regained the next time ugly reality intrudes upon our games. Please. Those who need tragedies to continually recalibrate their sense of proportion about sports would seem to have little hope of ever truly achieving perspective.
Sports press conferences are a disgustingly hollow spectacle where the same words are repeated day in and day out until they no longer mean anything. After Costas finished this thought, I just stared slack-jawed at the television for a while, and then I slow clapped harder than I’ve slow clapped in quite some time.
The disconnect between the way advanced statistics are used in baseball front offices — the Philadelphia Phillies perhaps being the lone, stubborn exception — and the way they are used in media coverage of baseball is so vast that you’d almost think television is covering a different sport entirely. Inside the world of baseball, WAR and OPS+ and so on are simply the way general managers and team staff talk about their jobs, the way CPAs talk about spreadsheets and financial advisors discuss Roth IRAs, the way any profession talks about anything.
But outside, on our televisions, they’re treated as some wonky dork sorcery, pencil pushers trying to pretend they understand baseball more than those who have far more experience (and who may currently be wearing protective cups). Baseball broadcasters treat advanced statistics like Billy Bush and other red-carpet Oscar idiots would treat an experimental short film about lesbian sects in Uganda. They act like they don’t matter, when, in many cases, they’re almost all that does. It would be as if political reporters said, “Who cares about all those math nerds in their mother’s basements with their ‘electoral college’ charts? I want to know what’s in these candidates’ hearts.”
It’s attitudes like this that keep me coming back to baseball on the radio. Which is not to say that radio broadcasters are throwing around BABIP and xFIP. But that the anti-intellectual, vapid, “go git ‘em boys” locker room atmosphere that you hear on most TV broadcasts is nowhere to be found. Maybe because there’s no room for it with all the play-by-play. Maybe because there is a long, proud tradition of calling baseball on the radio with respect, verve and aplomb. Maybe for other reasons entirely.
San Francisco Giants star outfielder Melky Cabrera mounted a campaign to avoid his 50-game suspension that included a fake website featuring a fictitious product in an effort that was quickly uncovered by MLB investigators, the New York Daily News has reported.
…
“There was a product they said caused this positive,” the source told the Daily News. “Baseball figured out the ruse pretty quickly.”
Why would you try this? Why would you even think this would work?
Clive Rose took this photo for Getty Images of, presumably, some sort of elder sea creature devouring a helpless human. This gruesome shot was posted in a set from the 2012 Olympics at The Big Picture with this caption:
Sebastian Stoss of Austria and Derya Buyukuncu of Turkey compete in heat 1 of the Men’s 200m backstroke on Day 5 of the London 2012 Olympic Games at the Aquatics Centre, August 1, 2012.
Hordes of angry hockey fans – presumably Boston Bruins fans — unleashed a barrage of racist rants on Twitter and other social-networking sites after the Washington Capitals beat the defending champion Bruins a week ago Wednesday on an overtime goal by Joel Ward, the Capitals’ 31-year-old left wing. Ward is one of just a handful of black players in the NHL.
According to local media reports, several students at high schools in Gloucester and Danvers in Massachusetts, the Cumberland, R.I., School District, and Franklin Pierce University in New Hampshire were among the tweeters.
What follows is a rather long discussion on free speech of students: what schools can and should do about what students say in and out of school, both legally and morally.
Remember the NBA on NBC? Remember that awesome theme song? Well it’s called “Roundball Rock” and was composed by John Tesh (yes, that John Tesh) in a rather unusual way. I won’t spoil it; hit the video.
I mean, I knew the Augusta golf club, home of the Masters tournament and which famously excludes women from its membership, was run by a bunch of backwards, privileged assholes. But I didn’t think the New York Times was too. From the AP’s story:
“If it were left to me, which it seldom is in the power structure of writer versus editor, I’d probably not come cover this event again until there is a woman member,” [NYTimes golf writer] Karen Crouse told GOLF.com. “More and more, the lack of a woman member is just a blue elephant in the room.”
Contacted by The Associated Press, Times sports editor Joe Sexton said the comments were, “completely inappropriate and she has been spoken to.”
Christ on a crutch. Click through above for some more background and analysis from Digby.
