Sports Beat

That highlight is from the Lakers game earlier this week, and is probably one of the sickest plays I've ever seen. Apparently, at the same game a girl was put on the jumbotron at the Staples Center and she totally flashed the camera. I wonder how often that happens. I've been listening to Matt "Money" Smith on AM 570 and I actually love his radio show. It's kind of ridiculous how much talk radio I listen to now. I think that alone officially qualifies me as an adult. Or maybe just lame.

Back over the summer, I was all about wanting to have regular, weekly posts. I've been dying to post some sports stuff, so I'm going to leave some stuff here. I'll keep it brief though.

Sports is the best reality television there is. Over the course of a season there are so many possible storylines from rivalries to camaraderie, the pursuit of perfection collapses, among other things. And what's more, it's only about the competition and aside from occassional cheerleader shots, it doesn't have anything sexual about it at all. I love that. This quote explains sports fanaticism well:

It is foolish and childish, on the face of it, to affiliate ourselves with anything so insignificant and patently contrived and commercially exploitive as a professional sports team, and the amused superiority and icy scorn that the non-fan directs at the sports nut (I know this look -- I know it by heart) is understandable and almost unanswerable. Almost. What is left out of this calculation, it seems to me, is the business of caring -- caring deeply and passionately, really caring -- which is a capacity or an emotion that has almost gone out of our lives. And so it seems possible that we have come to a time when it no longer matters so much what the caring is about, how frail or foolish is the object of that concern, as long as the feeling itself can be saved. Naivete -- the infantile and ignoble joy that sends a grown man or woman to dancing and shouting with joy in the middle of the night over the haphazardous flight of a distant ball -- seems a small price to pay for such a gift.

I wanted to link you guys to an article about the Angels biggest offseason acquisition in Torii Hunter, but you need a password to access it. I'll just post an excerpt here:

The Angels know who they got in Torii Hunter -- a man who drips energy and preaches hope and potential. There are numbers that will quantify what Hunter is or isn't worth, just as there are politicians who try to tell us that "experience" is far more important than the foundation of hope and potential.

Those numbers don't matter as much as Hunter's ability to energize and inspire his teammates, with character that cannot be quantified. A "bad" contract to a good and generous man is worth a great deal more than a "good" contract to a mediocre and selfish man.

Hunter hopes to inspire fellow players to reinvest in their heritage, their country, their hope. And Arte Moreno knows that a lot of that $90 million is going to all the right places.

What I love about Torii is that he's not just a good bat, the guy is an amazing presence in every way possible. He plays jokes on his teammates, but then in his contract he had a stipulation that 100 underprivileged children come to every Angels game, and they had to put up money to support baseball for kids in depressed areas around the country.

There's a lot more, but I'll spare you. At least until next week.