Michael Barrett: animated cubs catcher.  Fought A.J. Pierzynski.  Fought Carlos Zambrano.  Now, pleads guilty to shadily videotaping Erin Andrews nude?  Yikes, glad the Cubs shipped this guy out of town!  Ok, so the guy who videotaped the hot broadcaster isn’t the same Michael Barrett who played in Chicago, but I don’t think either guy is happy to share his name with the other Michael Barrett. 

This is the kind of thing people joke about, using exaggeration for humor.  ESPN defies the doubters:

EDEN PRAIRIE, Minn. — Brett Favre’s streak is not in danger: He has a bent fingernail.

Favre’s throwing hand was clearly hurting after his last throw for Minnesota in Sunday’s win over Detroit. He was hit by two defenders in the fourth quarter during a touchdown pass to Percy Harvin.

Ugh, you can’t be serious. KILL IT!

You’ve probably already heard about Mark Buerhle’s perfect game, but did anyone happen to check ESPN sometime around the 7th inning? Let’s just say their math didn’t quite add up.  According to this screenshot sent to me by South Side Sheik, Buerhle had retired 23 men and had only 6 outs to go.  Hmmm, A perfect game would mean that Buerhle faced the minimum which is 27 batters.  23+6=29 I’m afraid.  I know its being a bit picky, but for a “Worldwide Leader” in sports, I would hope that they would know how many outs there are in a baseball game.

So I guess the real story is not Buerhle’s perfect game, but the fact that ESPN has decided to change the rules of Major League Baseball from the 150 year old 9 inning game to a more conventional and modern 9 and 2/3 inning game. Makes sense.

The Cubs played the Dodgers on Sunday Night Baseball on ESPN the other night.  As ESPN always does on those national telecasts, it broadcast many live views of Chicago landmarks.  Notice anything wrong with this one?

I’ll give you a hint, take a look at the building on the left.  It’s the Sun-Times building, right?  Well one minor problem, that building came down about 5 years ago and was replaced by Trump’s wonderful new masterpiece.  Can ESPN really not afford to get a live shot of the City?  And if not, wouldn’t it be better not to LIE and make us think that’s a live shot?  ESPN is so awesome.

h/t: Deadspin

Gee, why did the Mets fire him?

Steve Phillips of ESPN has something stupid to say about everything when it comes to baseball.  We can’t really fault him for talking about baseball, it’s his job.  We can yell at him for not doing any research and talking out of his ass though.  Don’t worry though, you don’t have to yell at him.  Lou took care of that for us.  Here are Phillips comments:

“My view is Lou doesn’t have a great deal of patience for assimilation into culture, assimilation into the team,” Phillips said. “He is just not the most patient guy around, and he tends to verbalize his frustrations in an angry way. I think that may have affected Fukudome a little bit.”

Lou’s patience notwithstanding, this comment was made without looking into the situation at all.  Fear not, Lou clued him in:

“I don’t have much respect for Steve Phillips,” Piniella said after hearing the comment Monday. “Let him be around a little more and see what transpires before he makes assumptions. I’ve lost total respect for this guy. If he had something to say, let him say it to me.”

For the hell of it, let’s take a look at how impatient Lou was with Fukudome:

Piniella played Fukudome in 150 games and gave him 501 at-bats, sticking with the right fielder despite his struggles before sitting him for a brief stretch in September. Fukudome then started the first two playoff games before Piniella sat him in Game 3.

If anything Lou was TOO patient with Kosuke.  I’m so sick of ESPN.  I’m not saying I want them off the air, but can they at least not lie and call their people “experts”?  Is that too much to ask?

• Busted Coverage has the 20 best signs ever to appear on College Gameday. Plenty of good stuff there.
• Upon further review of further review…maybe Lebron should get that triple-double at MSG after all.
• Indiana’s Devan Dumes throws elbows to the junk, gets suspended indefinitely. Somehow Indiana manages to get worse.
• Lil’ Wayne will be on Around the Horn today. I’m not sure if this makes the show more or less watchable.
• If that crazy Bulls-Suns trade is okay with Phoenix, do Bulls fans trust Paxson to pull the trigger? If he doesn’t someone will surely shoot his career right in the head.
• Lane Kiffin has to apologize again, this time to a high school. It won’t be long until he is insulting your family.
• Looks like there will be some protesting going on tomorrow against Chicago’s Olympics bid. Whatever gets you out of work I guess.

This video from NESW Sports is priceless. Apparently Skip Bayless said Tim Tebow is the next Brett Favre. Stephen A. Smith rips him a new one for it. You know things are bad at ESPN when I agree with Stephen A. Smith.

As in, whose brow will be part of the “Mt. Rushmore of Sports”? In case the ridiculousness of the idea didn’t give it away, this will be ESPN’s new fan-driven gimmick that we all will hate after…well, we already hate it. Awful Announcing fittingly has the release from ESPN:

SportsCenter, ESPN’s flagship news and information program, and ESPN.com, the leading online sports destination, will combine to present a five-week, fan-based series to celebrate the sports icons from all 50 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico. The series, titled “SportsCenter Mount Rushmore of Sports,” will use fan-generated nominations on ESPN.com to identify the top four sports greats in each state/region, and online voting to select the state with the most impressive collection of sports luminaries worthy of being etched in the state’s Mount Rushmore of sports.

By flagship news and information program, they of course mean advertising mecca and gossip train; and hasn’t Yahoo Sports surpassed ESPN in hits on their site? Oh shoot, I’m getting off message.

This catastrophe will take a little over a month and will be graced with the hosting of Rick Reilly and Michael Wilbon, who will choose representatives from each state to form the nominees. Fans will then vote for the rest…I think. I stopped reading the press release.

I’m really struggling with what to say here. If you follow the link above you can read the entire release and try to wrap your mind around the awfulness of this idea. We saw it with Who’s Now and Titletown, and this one is just as bad. Ryan Leaf bad.

So do we just try to ignore it? Should we try and fix it so it ends up being something like Tebow, Joey Harrington, Pacman Jones, and some WNBA player? I don’t have anything else to say about this monstrosity right now, but I’m open to ideas about how to best make fun of or destroy ESPN’s latest abortion.

One of the best things on ESPN’s website is the column by the Ombuds(wo)man Le Anne Schreiber. It’s her job to call ESPN on all of their crap, not to mention sift through the e-mounds of complaints that the world-wide leader receives every day. She really does a great job and I highly recommend reading the columns.

The latest piece by Schreiber deals with a familiar practice by ESPN: making itself the story. The column points out four recent incidents in which ESPN reporters or personalities drew the spotlight away from the story and onto themselves. Two were courtesy of everyone’s favorite reporters who when they report something you know it is false, Ed Werder and Chris Mortensen. Of course Werder was shoved into the spotlight after all of his unnamed sources made T.O. mad and ESPN followed up with an interview between Owens and Stephen A. where Owens told his side of the story about Werder. Mortensen had a falling out with the Raiders when the Raiders denied that one of his reports was true. Shocking. Morty told the AP that he no longer ran his stories by the Raiders for comment. Awesome.

Another issue was also T.O. related. Cris Carter told a couple different ESPN radio shows that he would deal with T.O. by shooting him. Obviously he was just making a point, but also awesome. Carter, after his second time of the day using the same words said that it was a “poor choice of words.” You think? At least the NFL doesn’t have a problem with gun violence.

Finally, viewers seemed to take issue with the Vitale-Tirico announcer swap. Well, not so much the swap, but the hours ESPN spent promoting their own employees.

I didn’t even know about two of these issues, but I’m not surprised at all. This is common practice for ESPN. Whether it is Skip Bayless arguing, Lou Holtz and Mark May spitting and blubbering on about things, or any of these situations above, ESPN doesn’t just report stories, it makes or shapes the story. This is a point that is brushed over in Schreiber’s piece. While ESPN tilted the spotlight in its direction in these cases, the issue I have is that the guy moving the spotlight has on one of those ESPN fleeces that everyone got with their subscription to the Mag.

I’ve seen countless stories by ESPN that only give one side, have misleading headlines to pump up hits, or simply beat a played out story to death. Reporters, producers, and executives at ESPN will routinely choose the flash of Dallas locker room gossip over the substance of…well, anything has more substance than that.

On a final note of this latest rant against ESPN, I’ve seen extensive coverage on the NFL coaching carousel recently. Is it me, or is the coaching talk starting to overwhelm the playoff talk? I want to float an opinion about this media coverage and the shortened tenure of NFL coaches in recent years. I think ESPN, as the driving force of sports media, is at least partially responsible for the short leash on coaches in all sports. Of course many will say that organizations have developed a “win now or else” mentality, and they have, but this is because anytime a coach struggles, ESPN starts the “Is Bob Stoops on the Hot Seat?” story. Just another example of ESPN shaping and choosing the story so they have something interesting to talk about. We’ll have to wait and see where the guy with the fleece points the light today.

If you are a reader of ESPN.com (I am, reluctantly) then you know about the recent renovation of their site. Obviously there are going to be a few bugs, but pre-writing stories before the game ends? That’s pretty shady. Well they clearly did that with regards to the Bulls game last night, as this picture from Blaze of Love shows (great site by the way, check it out sometime):

Oops. I wonder what the first link said exactly. And who is the guy at ESPN.com that writes the headline about the Bulls winning before the game is over “just in case” they win? By the way, Kirk looked decent and Deng looked the same as he has all year-tentative and in love with his jumper.

When I posted about Schlereth and Wiley slobbering over Tom Brady on NFL Live, I had no idea that hot NFL quarterbacks was a company-wide topic of interest for ESPN. Skip Bayless and Jemele Hill were also in on the party.

Except in this case, they made a list. Apparently this is something that takes place regularly on First Take (the lists, not picking the hottest QBs), but I can’t help but thinking of Skip and Jemele in high school comparing their lists of who the hottest football players are. Anyway, here is Skip’s list:

This is what Skip’s career has come to. Arguing about meaningless sports topics and picking his most luscious quarterbacks. And this is what it has come to for ESPN, sacrificing reporting on real sports for what seems will inevitably end with a weekly reality show called “Temptation Huddle.”

Thanks to HHR for the story and Deadspin for the screenshot.

My quick trip to ESPN’s site tonight yielded an interesting poll. Naturally, I voted for the top option.

I always new they were pretty self-interested, but this is a little much.

Ed Werder has essentially spent the last handful of his dorky existence covering the Dallas Cowboys. I really never liked Ed Werder, but he never really rose to the level of obnoxiousness of a Berman or a Stu Scott. However, this season Werder is pissing me off a bit. First, when the Roy Williams trade went down, I had to sift through Ed Werder’s false reports to figure out if the Lions had traded Roy for the Cowboys personal trainer or if they actually got some value. Every time a seemingly reliable report came through, Werder threw out some erroneous trade like Roy Williams and Jeremy Bonderman for Patrick Duffy. Okay, no big deal.

Recently, Werder has taken to reporting on the soap opera that is the Cowboys locker room. We get it Eddie, TO is bad for the team, Witten and Tony have secret brokeback meetings and Wade Phillips sneaks Garrett’s food when he isn’t looking. None of it is surprising and little of it is news. Plus, your anonymous sources are getting annoying. Just mildly annoying though, I mean I don’t want to stand in the street and yell at you or anything….

This gem comes from Deadspin and is fantastic. I spent too much time rambling about Werder to go through it, but the camera guy is a box of tools (and is likely fired), while the Cowboys fan is…well…I don’t even know. Then you have the security guard come into the picture. “No no, it’s cool, you’re standing in the street. It’s fine.”

Who does this? Wait, I can just imagine Stormin’ Norman standing in the street yelling at Jay Mariotti about the First Amendment.

Sports coverage has changed significantly in our lifetime. A lot of it has been good, but there are some things that have gone horribly wrong. Every week I’ll be taking a little time to whine about one of these things with no hope whatsoever that anything will change.

Somehow when I think of the new deal between the BCS and ESPN for television rights from 2011-2014, I picture the Emperor from Star Wars convincing the BCS to come over to the World-Wide Leader. Well, the BCS has come over to the dark side.

Not that Fox has done a good job, or has ever done a good job at anything sports related (except those Best Damn top 50 countdowns), but there are so many reasons I don’t like this relationship between the BCS and ESPN:

1. I hate the BCS and I hate ESPN. I want to take them out in a field and beat them down, Office Space style.
2. Don’t expect anyone on the network to rail against the BCS system when they have the rights to broadcast. They’d get excited about a checkers match if it made them some money.
3. Now we have to listen to Lou Holtz say “BeeScheeeEsssch” more.
4. Not everyone has ESPN. I know this doesn’t impact most people reading a blog, or most sports fans, but I really think it should be on a major network.
5. There are more reasons, but they mostly stem from number one.

There are obviously some good things about this. The broadcasts on Fox were horrible and no one does a better job showing a sporting event than ESPN. The analysts on Fox were also bad; Barry Switzer didn’t get the job done. While Holtz and May can dig a deep hole and jump in, the Gameday crew is solid and Rece Davis or Fowler will be 100 times better than anyone Fox has hosting their coverage.

This is still a win for the Empire and I can’t support the move to ESPN. The main thing to be disappointed about is that I think this makes things exponentially tougher to get rid of the BCS before 2014. Your move Barack.

Sports coverage has changed significantly in our lifetime. A lot of it has been good, but there are some things that have gone horribly wrong. Every week I’ll be taking a little time to whine about one of these things with no hope whatsoever that anything will change.

This week I want to spout off about preseason rankings in college sports. They’re ridiculous. No one knows which teams will be the best year in and year out. Where were Alabama and Penn State ranked to start the college football season? In the AP poll, Penn State was 22nd and Alabama was unranked. They were 22nd and 24th in the Coaches’ Poll. Nice call boys. Clemson at number nine was another great call, not to mention Wisconsin at 12 or 13. Clemson is 4-4 and Wisconsin is in last place in the Big Ten.

Why do they even bother with these things? People are interested I guess, but what’s wrong with just a preview? You’ll still get people to watch to see what the “experts” think will happen and watch Lou Holtz spit at cameramen.

It even becomes problematic later in the season when teams and pundits start spewing facts at us. “They beat four ranked teams this season.” No, they didn’t. Maybe they beat four teams that were ranked at the time they played those teams, but maybe three of those wins came in the first four weeks, before some preseason hype was proven idiotic.

Plus, if a team is ranked toward the top at the beginning of the season, it effects their ranking the rest of the year. It becomes a little harder to move them down if they falter. It becomes easier to move them back up after a big win.

Polls come out early for one reason in my opinion and that is to try and generate interest so people will watch games, analysis, and the release of the polls themselves. This is borderline moronic. Ohio State and USC would have been an intriguing match-up without fans having to be reminded that both teams are in the top five in the nation.

Why not make teams earn their positions in the first three or four weeks of the season? Don’t worry Mark May, that will give you plenty of time to still argue about the rankings and why Pitt should be in the top ten. A week four debut will be more exciting than a preseason poll because fans will actually have some arguments to make for their team when it comes out.

So as college basketball season gets started up, we have the polls out already, so you know who will be good. You know what else pisses me off? These stories on ESPN’s site that have titles like “Northwestern #1 in new Coaches’ Poll”, then I click on the story expecting to see the actual poll, and it turns out to be a long narrative in which teams are talked about in a random order. Stop that!

Let’s get rid of these preseason polls. Just something else for Obama to think about.