Some Weekend Thoughts

The typical smattering of weekend thoughts...

1) I've gotta say, I am 100% in the Ramirez corner regarding Thursday's Manny/Youk dugout throwdown. Thanks to his incessant whining and temper tantrtums regarding balls and strikes, making outs, etc Youkilis has fully embraced his role as the Paul O'Neill of the new millennium (poor man's Paul O'Neill BTW). These actions drive me mad as a fan and I am sure they drive other fans and players mad as well. Now, it looks like they probably drive his teammates mad too. You know how when you are on edge from a previous incident or just generally in a bad mood and somebody or something does something that usually annoys you but you let it slide for one reason or another most times, but then that one time the thing happens on the wrong day or at the wrong time and you just snap? Seems to me that is what happened with Youkilis' little dugout fit and in reading about the aftermath of the fight I think most people on the Sox were on Manny's side here. With that, I hope Youk learns to tone his act down some and amazingly Ramirez' actions here almost make him seem like a team leader by speaking out against a practice which so irked the rest of the club. Big stuff there I think.

2) The last Celtics game I went to in Boston was back in fall of 2005 when they defeated the Charlotte Bobcats on the day after Thanksgiving on a Paul Pierce buzzer beater. As far as I know, that was pre "Gino". Personally, I've never gotten the Gino thing. I guess he is some sort of disco dancing Italian guy that serves as almost the Celtics (gulp) Rally Monkey. This is distressing enough for me. It's not as bad as having the team pass out white towels or t-shirts or god forbid thunderstix but it's still pretty bad.

And then over the weekend I learned that the Wall Street Journal did a hunt for Gino and discovered that he is long dead. Can we stop the Gino stuff now, because it is just plain morbid. Would we feel okay watching a video on the jumbotron of Heath Ledger spitting on his hand to prep himself to enter Jake Gyllenhall on the mountain in order to represent some workmanlike determination in making a comeback or getting a few defensive stops? No we would not. As the great Geri Blank's mother may have said, "It's not the homosexuality that offends me, it's the death".

3) Something tells me that if per chance Nick Kazcur and Carmelo Anthony ever cross paths there will be some serious tension going on there.

4) So I saw a banner ad on boston.com today imploring people to become a "governor" of Red Sox Nation. What the hell?

5) When the DVD of the Coors Lite "Venting" ads cum out something tells me that every single deleted scene will showcase some serious man-on-man action. I really did not think it was possible to make a commercial more homoerotic than the Wrangler or "Gelling" ads but clearly I was wrong.

6) Bradley joined the Rangers' lineup in spring training, after the exhibition season already had begun, and he raced to a triple against the Seattle Mariners; standing at third base, he realized he would be fine. When Bradley returned to the dugout, he hugged a strength coach and thanked him, and shortly thereafter, presented all of the Rangers' trainers with gift cards from Starbucks. With their help, he is back to doing all he wants to do, back to playing baseball.

That is taken from Buster Olney's espn.com blog on Sunday, 6/7 and this absolutely cracked me up for some reason. "Hey man, thanks for helping me with my hitting and putting me in a position to make millions more dollars over the next few years. Next Frappucino is on me." Seriously, don't ballplayers - regardless of sport - normally reward people with things like cars or watches? A Starbucks gift card? really? I re-read that sentence over and over and could not believe that it was actually true.

And with that, let's hope that Pierce is raring to go tonight and effective enough to at least make the Lakers mind him on D. Because he probably will not be able to attack the rim with his usual ferocity it is of the utmost importance that KG takes it upon himself to make Pau Gasol his prison bitch and Ray Allen springs for 25-30. I still think 75 points from Pierce/Allen/KG is the magic number for them. I'll also say that probably needing about 30 minutes tonight from James Posey and having him hound Kobe Bryant for most of that time really is not the worst thing in the world.

Now, I'm out...but I'll probably be back later after the C's game for my wrap-up article.