I'm not sure how this happened, but The Onion mentioned me this week in an amusing article about the Yankees facing off against the media:
In a spring showdown between two venerable organizations that will battle one another daily during the 2008 regular season, the New York Yankees are scheduled to play a nine-inning game Sunday against their greatest rivals: the media.
[...]
The upcoming game poses a challenge for many players, including Yankee superstar Alex Rodriguez, who tends to try too hard when facing the media.
"The media has a great team with a proud tradition of excellence, professionalism, and fairness," Rodriguez told members of the media Tuesday. "Tim Kurkjian has electric stuff, NBC Sports writer/blogger Aaron Gleeman is young and talented, and The New York Post's George King is one of the greatest defensive centerfielders I have ever seen. To be honest, I wouldn't mind being a part of the media someday."
Pretend or not, that "Aaron Gleeman is young and talented" quote from Alex Rodriguez may find its way on to my resume. I'm by far the least-known of the two dozen or so media members mentioned in the article, so I'm guessing that someone at The Onion is an AG.com reader and decided to throw me a bone (although I'm not thrilled about playing on the same team as Mike Lupica and Buster Olney).
It's early yet, but considering the source this might be the leader in the clubhouse for Quote of the Year: "It's cool, I'm pregnant. I can't get pregnant again!"
The bad news is that this week's "Fantasy Fix" show on NBCSports.com doesn't feature regular host and AG.com comments section favorite Tiffany Simons, who was away in New Orleans covering the NBA All-Star game. The good news is that Gregg Rosenthal subbed for her while providing his own special brand of eye candy and we spent the entire show comparing players coming back from injuries to various Sylvester Stallone movies (seriously):
The show gets going with me comparing a post-surgery Francisco Liriano to the original Rocky and there's a Frank Stallone joke in there somewhere, so it's worth watching.
Actually, it was a big week for Rosenthal. In addition to hosting a multi-camera, NBC-produced video shoot that involved talking with me about how B.J. Ryan compares to Judge Dredd, fantasy football's foremost Fred Savagelook-a-like also turned 12 years old and celebrated by blowing out the candles on his football-shaped birthday cake. We kid because we care, of course. And because his wife's blog provides plenty of material.
As hinted about in this space last month, longtime AG.com reader Thor Nystromhas officially joined the staff at MLB.com and will be assisting Twins beat writer Kelly Thesier this season.
Minneapolis Star Tribune columnist Jim Souhan has been and likely will continue to be the target of frequent criticism here, but his recent lengthy article about Ralph Sampson III was well done and totally different than his typical "Shecky" writing style. It's a shame that Souhan is far more interested in filling his columns with lame pop-culture references, unfunny jokes, and attacks on Joe Mauer than he is in writing more pieces like that one.
YouTube cult hero and former street-fighter Kimbo Slice's second mixed martial arts fight involved making $175,000 for 43 seconds of work against a completely washed up Tank Abbott:
Slice is packing arenas and making plenty of money by beating up opponents who present little threat, but hopefully at some point he'll have a matchup against someone capable of presenting a challenge.
I'm probably going to suffer through an episode or two just because I'm such a big fan of everything that Adam Carolla does, but hopefully he'll get booted from the new season of Dancing With The Stars sooner rather than later.
Dustin Pedroia deservedly won the AL Rookie of the Year last season, but still apparently puts about as much stock in the MLB awards process as me: "That's just something that sportswriters voted on."
Friend of AG.com and Sports Illustrated senior editor Jacob Luft--who was nice enough to ask me to write a column for SI.com about the Johan Santana trade last month--recently started a personal blog that looks very promising.
