Beards Invade Rockies, Wins Follow! Plus, Interleague's Retardedness Revealed

Hello, readers from Earth and planets beyond! I'm mobile today, checking in via my new iPhone. I realize it's fairly tough to get your hands on these, but as a Beard of Infinite Means, I was able to score one no problem. Right now, I'm making the quick jaunt from Pluto, where I visited a cousin at his summer home, to Anaheim, where the Rockies will face the Angels this evening. Coverage is pretty good in this solar system, except in the vicinity of Jupiter, where the damn monolith always creates a dead spot.

I don't know if you've noticed, but the Beard Ratio for the Colorado Rockies is on the rise. Seth Smith, Ian Stewart, Todd Helton, and Jason Giambi are all sporting full beards lately, and of course we can always count on Joe Beimel and this blog's namesake, Ryan Spilborghs, for some quality beardsmanship. And as we all know, Beardliness is the trademark of greatness.

I doubt you'll consider it a surprise, then, that the beard-heavy Rockies (despite having lost Tulowitzki for a month of more) have played good baseball of late against some quality opponents. Since getting embarrassed by the Astros two weeks ago, the Rockies have an 8-4 record, including going 6-3 against some of the best teams in the American League. If not for Dustin Pedroia's heroics last night, the Rockies may well have swept the Red Sox to go along with their earlier sweep of Toronto.

Pedroia is a fine example of what a Beard can do for a player. This is a guy blessed with the perfect build for a career as a Photo Elf alongside a department store Santa, but slap a beard on him and he's the Rookie of the Year and the American League MVP. He killed the Rockies with a 5-5, 3 home run night, including the game-winning shot in the 10th inning. Hats off to him... I'm sure by the time he's done, he'll have a lot more trophies to display on the mantle in his mushroom house.

Now, the Rockies hit the road to Anaheim to finish the interleague portion of the schedule. With three tough games to go, the Rockies have again proven that they aren't scared of the big, bad American League. But the problems with interleague continue to be so obvious that it's puzzling how it retains its popularity. The Rockies interleague schedule this year included the Royals, Twins, Angels, Red Sox, and Blue Jays, whose combined records as of June 25th was 194-172, a winning percentage of .530. Let's look at the rest of the NL West to see what their interleague schedules look like:

San Diego: Seattle, Seattle again, Toronto, Baltimore, Tampa: 132-157 (.457) 
San Francisco: Oakland, Oakland again, Baltimore, Toronto, Boston: 137-156 (.461)
Colorado: Royals, Twins, Angels, Red Sox, Blue Jays: 194-172 (.530) 
Los Angeles: Detroit, LA Angels, Boston, Angels again, New York: 169-125 (.575)
Arizona: Toronto, Boston, Detroit, New York, Tampa: 210-152 (.580)

Does that list look familiar at all? It should, if you're a follower of the NL West, because the strength of interleague schedule almost perfectly corresponds to the teams' current position in the division. The two NL West teams with the easiest interleague schedules also happen to be the two NL West teams at the top of the division. What. A. Surprise.

It doesn't take much to see that the Rockies, Dodgers, and especially the D-backs get royally screwed with this schedule, while the Giants and the Padres get a relative cakewalk. San Fransisco got to see the sub-.500 A's six times, and then another three games against the worst team in the majors, the Orioles. The Padres faced the last-place Mariners six times, and those same awful Orioles three times. That's eighteen games against sub-.500 (sub-.300, in Baltimore's case) AL competition for Sans Diego & Francisco. On the other hand, the Rockies, D-Backs, and Dodgers together had a whopping three games against sub-.500 AL squads. Three.

Why does it matter, you ask? The answer is clear: when you're competing with four or five other teams for a division championship, two or three games can make a huge difference. So it's a huge handicap when you have to play three against Yankees, but your opponents get those three games against the Orioles.

Interleague is a nice idea handled almost completely wrong, and before MLB starts tinkering with the very bad idea of instant replay, you'd think they could at least put together a balanced schedule that doesn't favor some teams while working against others. If that means doing away with interleague baseball altogether, then so be it.

The Beard has spoken!

Will the Real Colorado Rockies Please Stand Up?

The Purple gets pretty much embarrassed by two of the worst teams in the NL. Then they go and sweep the Blue Jays, one of the better teams of the Superior League (despite their Canadian handicap). Will we know more about this team after their set in Minnesota? Your guess is as good as mine, friends. But this is one of the better pitching staffs (rotation and bullpen) in the majors, and every once in a while, they look like they're about to start hitting too. If that ever happens, we may see something special.

I, The Beard, have changed my strategy regarding the Rockies and their universal greatness... at one time, I concentrated my full Beardliness on Ryan Spilborghs, and both he and the Rockies achieved much. The following two years, I focused on the team, with mixed results. Now, I have decided once again to channel all possible greatness through Ryan Spilborghs and his amazing beard, and to allow that beard to act as a beacon towards which the Rockies will affix their eyes and hearts. So go, Ryan, and go Ryan's Beard... let's show them how this is done.

-TB

Rockies Go For Split with Worst Team in NL

...that headline should have read, "Worst Team in NL Before They Got To Colorado." Taking two of three already from the Rockies, the Astros are now half a game ahead of the Pirates, and good for them! If the Rockies aren't going to be winning games, at least they're doing their best to keep their opponents out of the basement.

The Beard is thinking it's about time to fire Don Baylor. It was great to see Groove back in the dugout, but frankly, when a team that looks on paper like they'll hit a ton is hitting this poorly, something has to change. The Rockies as a team are hitting .254 with runners in scoring position, and a crap-lousy .213 with RISP and two outs... the latter number good for worst in the major leagues. Let that one soak in for a bit.

How many times in past seasons, Rockies fans, did we look at the team's explosive offense, and mutter to ourselves, "If they had even average pitching they'd be winning games." Now we look at our pitching (4th in the NL in ERA) and mutter about the hitting. There have always excuses about the failures of Rockies pitching, and many of them are good excuses. But there's no excuse for this team not hitting. No excuse for them failing to score runs against two of the worst pitching staffs in the league, the Diamondbacks and Astros. No excuses!

Pet Peeves

Hello Year Of The Beard readers! The Beard is in San Francisco, doing his best to channel enough greatness throughout the Rockies lineup to complete a sweep of the Giants, so I thought I'd drop in with another of my traditional gripefests. Yes, it's time for: Jim's Pet Peeves.


Pet Peeve #1: "Walk-Off"
The Beard's column yesterday, about Kendry Morales breaking his leg celebrating his walk-off grand slam, got me thinking. The World-Series type celebrations at the end of every single game these days is a Pet Peeve of mine, but I think The Beard covered that one nicely. This Pet Peeve centers on the term "walk-off." This is one of those terms that ESPN has brought to the forefront, and like most things ESPN is responsible for, it's annoying. What's wrong with "game-winning hit?" The term in Japan for a game-ending home run is a "sayonara homer," which I think is a great term.

My biggest problem with "walk-off" is that nobody seems to care what it really means. It's not meant to have a positive connotation... the pitcher is walking off the field, not the batter. The batter is prancing around like a jackass. So I would like to see the term "walk-off home run" replaced with "jackass home run."

Pet Peeve #2: Fantasy Baseball
I have no real problem with fantasy sports; in fact I've been guilty of taking part in fantasy football and baseball leagues for over 20 years. My Pet Peeve is the fact that fantasy sports are now being covered along with regular sports journalism. Sports journalism has long been the ugly, deformed half-sibling of actual journalism, and when you visit actual journalism's home, the only time you see sports jouralism is the rare occasion when it breaks out of the attic and thrashes the house trying to escape the sunlight before frantically humping your leg. With that in mind, covering fantasy sports is pretty much a new low for sports journalism, and that's saying quite a lot.

Do they not realize that fantasy sports is simply "regular" sports, filtered through nerd-brains? If you want to tell the viewer which players have the most home runs and RBI, then just say "Here is a list of the players with the most home runs and RBI." To have some guy come on and tell me which players are producing the most for fantasy teams is simply annoying, because those are the same guys who are producing for real teams!

Even more annoying is the segment where some guy emails in "I just got offered Mark Teixeira for Justin Morneau. What should I do?" (answer below). The "experts" read this question on-air, and then debate that fantasy trade for a couple minutes... and unless you are one of the half-dozen viewers in the entire world who have had this particular trade suggested to you, those will be the most frustratingly wasted and useless minutes of your entire life.

Again, I blame ESPN. What follows was going to be the conclusion to Pet Peeve #2, but it went on long enough that I've just made it Pet Peeve #3: ESPN.

There was a time when ESPN was pretty much neck-and-neck with Milwaukee's Best as The Best Thing In the Universe. I left it on for three or four hours every morning... it had all the sports highlights from every game, and it was awesome. But something has happened, and like a lot of once-awesome things (like Milwaukee's Best), it now completely sucks. The evidence for this is practically overwhelming, and part of me feels like I should not even have to list the reasons why ESPN sucks so badly, but when I get talking about bottom-of-the-barrel journalism and ridiculous fantasy sports analysis segments, it becomes clear that ESPN continues to fill a much-needed void.

Imaginary, nonsense sports (X Games, arena football, poker, WNBA) have long had a home on ESPN, but now the network is covering the way people follow sports, rather than simply covering the sports themselves. It's idiotic. Combine this recent trend with the following:

• NASCAR gets more coverage than hockey. Hockey gets Barry Melrose, and that's it.
• "Brett Favre's birthday should be a national holiday." -- Chris Berman, ESPN
• You'll have to wait through 45 minutes of NBA highlights to see any baseball recap that doesn't involve the Yankees, Mets, Red Sox, or Phillies
• Joe Morgan
• Stuart Scott and every other on-air dingus who thinks that bludgeoning the English language with a "catchphrase" every 15 seconds is what creates interest in their stories
• They inexplicably give Mel Kiper -- a guy with no quantifiable ability or skill whatsoever -- continued employment. Seriously, of what possible use is a Mock Draft?

...put all these together, and I've found it extremely easy to ignore ESPN lately. I rarely even turn it on, in fact. This morning, though, was a particularly bleak day for me, as I saw a Fantasy Baseball segment on my new Best Thing In the Universe channel: MLB Network. After an awesome start, they have become more and more ESPN-y as time has gone by, and with this latest development, I feel like I just saw my long-time sweetheart holding hands with my worst enemy. We've lost something that could have been very special... and so ESPN's ability to not only suck, but to influence the suckness of others, wins them the final spot on today's Pet Peeve list. Burn in Hell, ESPN!

The correct answer to the Teixeira/Morneau trade question is, "Who gives a shit? Go get yourself a girlfriend."