Sports

[PKMKII]

Outfield dimensions to be reduced at Citifield.

Great, great. Destroy the character of the field, the aspect that it's known for, kill the Great Wall of Flushing, so that a few more home runs get hit there? Guess what, you'll get more people coming to games if a) the Mets start winning more games, and b) you reduce the ticket prices. Being more batter friendly will do squat. And you know these new additions will look ugly as sin, and will painfully stand out as hasty kludges from the original structure of the stadium.

[pieces o'nine]

Dear Santa Claus:

Some of the male-type posters on the FSM discussion board get their panties into horrendous, chronic twists over the antics of over-paid athletes in something called "professional" sports. This seems to plague the nice ones equally with the naughty ones, which seems sad, really. Could you please bring them some better hobbies and pastimes to enjoy in 2012?

Thank you very much,
pieces o'nine

[daftbeaker]

Dear Father Christmas,

Please ignore PoN, she's just grumpy because the US got knocked out at the group stages.

Also, New Zealand are the RWC champions. I hope we can now look forward to Uther complaining about this referee missing a high tackle and costing France the game

[PKMKII]

The science of a broken baseball bat.

[black bart]

Sorry PON...we can't help it! I am in Manchester at the moment where all the talk and all the news is about City beating Utd 6 - 1! If there was an earthquake in the Trafford Centre no one would notice.

[pieces o'nine]

Well, anyone who feels a lack of opportunity to rant about referee calls may head on over to my old stomping grounds in Wisconsin, where the Badgers were cruelly ROBBED, and get some quality bashing time in.

[daftbeaker]

England needs own word for schadenfreude (notty words)

[gronank]

England needs own word for schadenfreude (notty words)

blight delight?

[PKMKII]

The Different economics of American Football and Soccer Football.

In a remarkable bit of irony, the stereotyped socialists of Western Europe root for soccer teams that compete in a ruthlessly free-market system while the supposedly rugged individualists of the American plains root for football teams that share wealth and resources in order to grow the sport as a whole.

I would think that a certain part of this has to do with the size difference between America and the typical European nation. Spain has less than a 6th the population of the U.S. and a footprint a bit bigger than California (which only has 3 football teams), so I could see that it would be easier for the country to coalesce around a handful of powerhouse teams. Whereas it would be impossible (in this day and age at least) to get 300+ million Americans to root for only 3-4 teams. Plus you've got the UEFA Championship, which truth be told is the serious competition for the national powerhouses.

Funny enough, Major League Baseball is much more like the European soccer football in terms of economics than American football.

[black bart]

I loved this quote fron the Daily Mash article:

1745: With seven Chelsea players booked and two sent off, QPR manage to beat them with a squad costing roughly the same as Fernando Torres' smallest eye lash.

Swansea 3 Bolton 1 by the way.

[PKMKII]

Joe Paterno fired as Penn State football head coach.

This stinks. He already announced that he was retiring at the end of the season, which is universally regarded as the polite way for a guy caught in a scandal to quit. Why fire him? And it's not like he committed the real lapse of judgment anyway; the assistant saw Sandusky abusing the boy, he reported it to Paterno, and Paterno reported it to his bosses. They're the ones that pushed this under the rug, not Paterno. Methinks this goes much deeper, and Penn State is throwing him under the bus because they're trying to distract the media from whatever it is they don't want coming out.

[daftbeaker]

Joe Paterno fired as Penn State football head coach.

This stinks. He already announced that he was retiring at the end of the season, which is universally regarded as the polite way for a guy caught in a scandal to quit. Why fire him?

Excuse me? He knew one of his coaching staff was raping children. He did nothing other than mention it to his boss (who has also been fired by the way).

I hope you're never in a position of authority with children if your response to being told one your staff is a child rapist is to ignore it for NINE YEARS!

F*** him and f*** anyone that stands up for him. If anything he, and anyone else that didn't inform the police, should be prosecuted for conspiracy.

Edit -

This is a tragedy. It is one of the great sorrows of my life. With the benefit of hindsight, I wish I had done more.

Right, like nine years wasn't enough to inform the police. Maybe if he'd had another decade of facilitating child rape he might have done something.

Edit again -

Despite a powerful eyewitness statement about the sexual assault of a child, this incident was not reported to any law enforcement or child protective agency, as required by Pennsylvania law. Additionally, there is no indication that anyone from the university ever attempted to learn the identity of the child who was sexually assaulted on their campus or made any follow-up effort to obtain more information from the person who witnessed the attack firsthand.

(My bold.)
I think that speaks for itself.

[PKMKII]

F*** him and f*** anyone that stands up for him. If anything he, and anyone else that didn't inform the police, should be prosecuted for conspiracy.

Oh don't get me wrong, I'm not arguing that he's morally in the clear here (legally, though, the indictment found that he did nothing criminal). He definitively needed to go. But, well, let's put it this way: of the two guys that Paterno reported it to, the Senior VP of finance and business for the school was allowed to resign (not fired), and the school's athletic director is currently on administrative leave. Does it make any sense that the board rushed to fire the guy who reported it to his superiors, but not the superiors themselves that did, for all intents and purposes, nothing in response?

Like I said, something is fishy at Penn State. I wonder if this problem of the management overlooking gross offenses goes beyond just the football program.

[Roy Hunter]

I'm not sure if DB appreciates the amount of money that is tied up in a college football programme: the NFL does not have youth development like we have for proper football, they are fed young players from the college leagues, and the money that they generate from selling those players is income for the college.

Shopping the coach = upsetting the apple cart. If Penn State loses its reputation as a football school, it loses a -load of money into the bargain. Not an excuse, but a potential explanation.

[PKMKII]

Apparently DB and the Penn State student body do not see eye-to-eye: Penn State students riot in protest of Paterno firing.