home Page 63 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights
Hit One in the Handicap Section
So, the odds on the Home Run Derby have been released by venerable betting gurus Covers. Favorites for the derby include Fightin's swatting sensation Ryan Howard (+540), Big Papi (+530), Lance Berkman(+530). Underdog collars go to Jermaine Dye(+1130) and Troy Glaus (+1116)....
Why Your Hometown Columnist Sucks: Rosie DiManno
We don't know what the Canadian eqivalent is of the Navy SEALS, but whatever agency trains underwater commandos in the Great White North probably has Rosie DiManno on their payroll. It takes strong lung capacity to read a DiManno column — even silently. Try this typical passage (warning: take a la...
You Can Own Jim Thome's Home
One of our favorite games to play around here is showing you houses recently traded athletes put for sale on the open market. We showed you Terrell Owens' $4.3 million pad and Manny Ramirez' $6.9 million penthouse....
Why Your Hometown Columnist Sucks: Peter Vecsey
Forgive the analogy, but it occurred to us that a Peter Vecsey column is a lot like going hunting with Dick Cheney. If you're loud and obnoxious enough to scare the little critters out of hiding and keep loudly blasting away, you're bound to hit something eventually. And those innocent people who ...
Why Your Hometown Columnist Sucks: Bob Sansevere
The St. Paul Pioneer-Press has an annual contest called "Average Joe Columnist," in which a field of 16 non-journalists submit sports articles, and are judged American Idol-style by sports editor Mike Bass and columnist Bob Sansevere. The latter, it seems, fancies himself in the Simon Cowell role — ...
Why Your Hometown Columnist Sucks: Steve Serby
Yes, he once wrote that "if Tom Brady were a politician, he'd be JFK." OK, he once, on assignment at the 2001 Super Bowl, wrote an entire column off of radio quotes. OK, sure, he's at times jingoistic, hackneyed and wishy-washy. Yeah, yeah, it's true that Jets' quarterback Richard Todd once smacke...
Why Your Hometown Columnist Sucks: Randy Galloway
Out on the plains of Texas, the setting for John Ford westerns and Cindy Sheehan protest vigils, there once lived a writer who had a lot of promise. He was the kind of a man who would look you square in the eye and tell you want he thought, and be damned entertaining about it in the process. But s...
Why Your Hometown Columnist Sucks: Steve Kelley
"Steve Kelley looked at his column. He had only one sentence so far, so he hit the "enter" key and described it. Then he did that for the second sentence, and he was three paragraphs in. Soon, his column-inch target would be met. But not soon enough for Kelley." Our thanks to DMZ at U.S.S.Mari...
Why Your Hometown Columnist Sucks: Dan Le Batard
We've never met Dan Le Batard, but this is how we picture him: green makeup, pointy hat, always carries a broom. He's looking into a crystal ball, wherein a typical Miami Herald reader is stuck, motioning helplessly, calling: "Dorothy? Where are you?" Le Batard cackles, and flying monkeys then fil...
Why Your Hometown Columnist Sucks: Roger Brown
OK, it's just time to say it: Roger Brown makes stuff up. That's the word on the street anyway. When a veteran Northeast Ohio sportswriter such as Hal Lebovitz (and when we say "veteran," we mean "was the last person to interview Custer") levels the charge, we tend to give it weight. Said the late...
Why Your Hometown Columnist Sucks: Skip Bayless
We've been doing this feature for a while now, but this is the first time we've dressed in a tux to write it. Featuring Skip Bayless on Why Your Hometown Columnist Sucks is like having a play open on Broadway. Which play? Springtime For Hitler comes to mind — a subject so rancid, it can't help but...
Give Us Your Best Skip Bayless Stories
We've received a lot of feedback about our selection of The Boston Globe's Bob Ryan as today's bad hometown columnist, which can be broken down into the following percentages:...
Why Your Hometown Columnist Sucks: Bob Ryan
By all accounts, Bob Ryan was once a good writer. But then something happened. The molten lava, burning his features. The painful reconstruction. The cryptic words: "Rise, Lord Vader." Yes, Bob Ryan's journey to the dark side is now complete. With his ubiquitous presence on Around the Horn and Par...
Why Your Hometown Columnist Sucks: Peter Kerasotis
It was the best of times. It was the worst of times. It was the age of wisdom. Yes, you read that correctly. Wisdom. How did Charles Dickens miss the boat on this whole one-sentence paragraph thing? Clearly today's breed of sportswriters are far better wordsmiths than the old quill pen-and-in...
Why Your Hometown Columnist Sucks: C.W. Nevius
And now it's time for a new category: columnists who left sports to write for the living section but still manage to write about sports most of the time. Frankly, we're not sure why C.W. Nevius left the sports pages of the San Francisco Chronicle to begin with, but one day we looked there and he w...
Why Your Hometown Columnist Sucks: Stephen A. Smith
We're not even going to get into his show on ESPN, which we've well-documented elsewhere. We are here to discuss the many sins of Stephen A. Smith the writer, the columnist. The man absolutely refuses to back up any of his written assertions with sources or facts. A guy who routinely sends in colu...
Why Your Hometown Columnist Sucks: Jim Souhan
OK, we surrender. The white flag you see waving above the rubble means that we're coming out peacefully, kicking several weeks worth of Jim Souhan columns ahead of us. That's it, you've taken all the fight out of us. We have freaking had it with writing like Souhan's — the tortured prose; the slop...
Why Your Hometown Columnist Sucks: Bob Kravitz
OK, our problem with Bob Kravitz isn't that he's a terrible writer. (He isn't.) It's that too often he phones it in. No, check that — he often doesn't even bother to phone, instead stuffing his column into the backpack of a mental patient, who then wanders in the general direction of the Indianapo...
Why Your Hometown Columnist Sucks: Bud Poliquin
There must be a school out there, some sort of Hogwarts-inspired academy where columnists go to learn the art of lousy column writing. It can't just be a coincidence that our worst sports columnists, people such as Woody Paige, Jay Mariotti and this week's featured guest, Bud Poliquin, are all see...
Why Your Hometown Columnist Sucks: Bill Plaschke
We have seen Bill Plaschke's desk. Well, to be more precise, we haven''t actually seen the surface of the desk — just the refuse piled on top. We doubt that anyone working at the Los Angeles Times since the early 1990s has seen what's underneath. To best describe it, think Dennis Nedry's work stat...