I turned on the radio while I was making the breakfast this morning and heard the following comments about the WNBA on 1540 The Ticket sports station:

Talk show host #1: “Female basketball is hideous! I compare it to boy’s eighth grade basketball.”

Talk show host #2: “What if your daughter was a WNBA basketball player? Would you be proud? What would you say to her?”

Talk show host #1: “It’s like a 4 year old who brings home something from school that looks like a malformed penis. What do you say? “Honey, that looks great.”

1. explain how Alexander Technique works
2. explain David Gorman’s take
3. discuss the violinist’s case and explain what happens in competition
4. this is what people mean when they talk about working too hard (send article to Lanny Basshan) and trusting your game.
5. practice serve while keeping score. This helps you get used to competition. Credit tennisone.com for this idea. One thing you can learn from this exercise is to go for big serves even if you are down 15-40. This is what Pete Sampras did so well and Federer does today. They aren’t so much raising their game as they are maintaining their game level under a lot of pressure.

Looking ahed to the final Federer said, “I am definitely looking forward to a second chance to get him. I have more ideas now how to approach the match.”

Let’s see what his ideas are. He is, after all, probably the smartest guy on the tour. He doesn’t have a fulltime coach and he considers a match as an opportunity to test his tennis skills – not just his strokes but his ability to devise and carry out a strategy. That is unique on the tour. Every other player in the top tier travels with a coach and helps the player develop strategy for their next opponent.

A disgruntled ex-business partner, Lindsay Jones, has accused Lenny Dykstra of taking steroids while he was an outfielder for the New York Mets and Philadelphia Phillies. The bodybuilder who allegedly supplied Dykstra with the drugs, Jeff Scott, says in a sworn statement that Dykstra greatly increased his steroid use in spring training of the 1993 season. That season he hit 19 home runs. The most he had ever hit before 1993: 10 home runs. The most he hit after 1993: 5 home runs.

Oh, and he also led the league in hits, walks and runs and came in second to, you guessed it, Barry Bonds in the MVP voting.

Dykstra averaged 10 home runs over 162 games throughout his career and that includes 1993. So let’s say that steroids accounted for 9 home runs in 1993. Not a lot by today’s standards but almost double Dykstra’s previous maximum output.

As you can see by looking at these figures, more home runs means more money.

He received a four year contract extension in 1994 worth, according to these figures, $24.4 million. I don’t believe that inflation was on a rampage during that period so we can safely assume that his marvelous 1993 season accounted for the jump in salary – a salary that was the highest ever for a leadoff hitter at that time.

True, his salary tripled after the 1990 season but he had 192 hits in 1990, only two less than in 1993 with 47 less at bats. The major difference between 1990 and 1993 is the number of extra base hits.

Information abhors a vacuum. If we don’t have it, we’ll make it up. That means that baseball might well ending up looking worse than if certain players had never taken any steroids at all.

Dykstra was a tough, productive baseball player. No doubt his salary would have gone up without the 19 home runs but it’s doubtful that it would have doubled. He barely played half a season in 1991 and 1992 and only made it through the second year of his new contract before retiring.

As more and more information about steroid use finally makes it’s way into the light, I find myself calculating it’s influence on baseball through inference. Since baseball purposely turned a blind eye, we’ll never really know for sure. That’s unfortunate because many players who would have had fine careers without taking steroids now find themselves subject to a lot of speculation. Hall of Fame careers are in danger.

Information abhors a vacuum. If we don’t have it, we’ll make it up. That means that baseball might well ending up looking worse than if certain players had never taken any steroids at all.

This is the classic failure of a deal with the devil. The hopeful supplicant takes a magic potion to lift their skills above their fellow players and ends up tainting accomplishments that did not need the benefits of steroids.

Would you rather let your career speak for itself or leave it in the hands of people like me?

Lots of times you see lists trying to determine if a sport qualifies as a sport. Is pool a sport, is golf a sport? A better question may be: is the game a sport or entertainment. Clearly World Wrestling Entertainment is entertainment, it says so in the name.

The NBA, well, it used to be as easy call. Sport. But the question is a little harder to answer now. In the attempt to market itself and make the NBA brand a worldwide attraction, stars, not teams, have become the main attraction. This means that the individual stars on a team dictate the game to a much larger degree.

Kobe Bryant was going to walk across the hall to the Clippers if the Lakers didn’t trade Shaquille O’Neal. This left the Lakers with a bad trade since their hand was forced. If they could have waited another six months to a year, they would have had many more options.

Baron Davis explained his unhappy career under Byron Scott by saying that Scott didn’t listen to him. The implication is that the New Orleans Hornets?? would have won just like Golden State winning now that Baron plays there because the coach, Mike Montgomery, apparently does listen to Davis. Whenever I get into a fight with someone and they complain, “You’re not listening to me!”, what they’re really saying is, “You’re not doing what I want you to do.”