It was a great thought, though

Gino Castignoli made two mistakes: You don't tell anyone about it until construction is complete and you don't bury an Ortiz jersey, you bury a Dave Roberts jersey.

Great Moments in Poorly Placed Advertising Banners

We did not want a belly scratcher

Yorvit Torrealba (a/k/a Yorvit Terribleba, Yorvit Horribleba, Youswing Andamissa, The Anti-Clutch), Colorado Rockies starting Catcher, is beginning this season much where he left the last one: in a 3 for 22 rut with goose eggs in every category (although one of his hits was a double). That's zero walks, zero hr's, zero rbi's, zero runs, and zero stolen bases, for those of you keeping score at home. The guy's OPS is .318 for god's sake. A guy in one of my fantasy leagues (who must not have known much about him) actually added him to his lineup - and it only took about 10 days before that sour taste of Torrealba made this manager drop him in favor of Mr. Anyone Else, Catcher. Ok, the season just started. April is typically a pitcher's month and his bat may not be hot yet. That's fair. So let's take a look at his stats from 2007, when he played in 113 games and had over 400 plate appearances:

In 2007, Torrealba hit .255 with 47 runs, 47 rbi's, 8 hr's, and 73 strikeouts. He had only 31 extra-base hits (including his HR's), but then again he had only 101 hits all season. His refined patience at the plate resulted in 34 walks and his OPS was under .700 - although he did steal two bags. Those numbers are pretty bad on their face, but let's break down the numbers to see how he was in certain situations:

With no one on base and no outs, his average rose to a solid .330. He hit half of his home runs (4) with no one on and no one out, and he only struck out 10 times in over 100 plate appearances in this situation. With the bases empty, regardless of how many outs there were, he hit a respectable .283. Of course, as everyone in baseball knows, this situation is one of the least clutch moments in the game.

However, as we'll see in these next stats, the more clutch the moment was, the worse he performed. With runners on base, he hit only .227. With runners in scoring position, he hit only .201. And finally, with runners in scoring position and two outs, arguably one of the most clutch moments for any hitter, Torrealba belted a whopping .151 batting average, striking out 22 times in only 73 at bats. And although we don't have a large sample to pull our stats from his performance in October, his career batting average in the postseason is .238. Now you see why I call him The Anti-Clutch.

Now let's take a look at his supposed defense that was much touted by the national press during the NLCS and World Series, when I'd put money down that Joe Buck & Co. had never heard of Torrealba prior to October '07. Last year, Torrealba ranked 21st among 29 qualifying catchers, throwing out only 17.6% of base stealers. He failed to stop 23 wild pitches and allowed an additional 4 passed balls. His fielding percentage was a solid .991, but 61 runners stole bags on him. Overall, his defense as judged by Range Factor was slightly below average for Catchers per 9 innings: Torrealba's RF was 7.07 while the league average was 7.39.

Memo to Dan O'Dowd: Torrealba has got to go. He's been given plenty of opportunity and done nothing with it. Maybe it's time to give Chris Iannetta a full season to see how he performs. Or maybe the Rox can rip off the Astros again and trade them Jeff Francis straight up for J.R. Towles and Felipe Paulino. Either way, we have a gaping hole at the C position and we need to fix this if we're planning on ever bring a world championship to Colorado in the near future. Yorvit, if you're reading this, I'm sure you're a nice enough guy - but you definitely should have taken that offer from the Mets.

Absolut Nonsense

Apparently trying to gain favor with those Mexican consumers unfamiliar with Guadalupe Hidalgo, Absolut Vodka unveiled a new ad campaign showing a crudely (and inaccurately) redrawn border of Mexico that includes all the lands lost and sold to the US after the Mexican-American War of the late 1840's. Evidently, Absolut believes that this land rightfully belongs to Mexico, and those Mexican's who agree should imbibe their vodka. Anyone who has passed sixth-grade history has learned that almost every country that has ever existed in this world has seen its border expand or compress based on wars and land-sales. Thus the problem with Absolut's cherry-picking of history.

We all know how chic and cliche it has become to criticize the world's sole superpower, and America-Envy is rampant across Europe and Asia. But how telling that Absolut would have to go back over 150 years to find a war in which the US actually kept the land it had won. Maybe the Swedish company is still pissed about Finland and is just commiserating with our southern amigos. Thanks for the history lesson, Absolut, but I'll stick with my Belvedere and Tonic.

Look for liberal cities to ban them in bars

In a much more grim condemnation of cellular telephones than this, a new study finds that using cell phones over a period of 10 years can double the risk of brain cancer. In fact, the study goes on to claim that the use of cell phones is actually more dangerous than smoking. I'm not really sure what to make of this, so I'll let you read the full story and make up your own mind - the part of your mind that hasn't been ravaged by the heinous rotting pestilence care of AT&T and Sprint.

"Hard Work" Loses All Meaning

Paris Hilton, the slow-witted hotel heiress, earns the Fool's Platinum Quote of the Month for March, with this gem:

"I work very hard and I've built this empire on my own. I think this is an inspiration for a lot of girls out there."

Senility from the Far East

The two-game series that kicked off the '08 MLB season was a little... off. It seemed like the whole thing was a little surreal, and it had nothing to do with the fact that the games started at 4 am local time. We saw a 28-year-old white rookie from Minnesota walking to the plate with 50 Cent in the background yelling "If I can't do it, homey it can't be done..." We had Manny Ramirez and David Ortiz standing back at the plate and admiring long balls that turned out to be outs or doubles. We had guys like Brandon Moss and Mark Ellis hitting the long ball, and guys like Travis Buck and David Ortiz going oh-fer in both games. And then, to cap it off, we had the play-by-play (with some bonus color commentary) by one Gary Thorne. It wasn't bad enough that the guy was calling batters by their wrong name or getting the counts backwards (0 strikes and 2 balls is not an 0 and 2 count). The worst on-air commentary I've heard in a long time happened this morning when old man Thorne apparently confused Jose Canseco with Jason Giambi. Check out the video and full story over at Awful Announcing.

DisappoinTV

So out here in the Mountain Time Zone, the Red Sox - Athletics's Opening Day game began at 4 am. That's just about too late to stay up and too early to wake up. No matter, I thought to myself, I have good ol' DirecTV with my trusty DVR. I can simply record the game and watch it the next morning over Frosted Flakes.

You can understand my confusion when I awoke to find that I had recorded three straight hours of "WE APOLOGIZE FOR THE DELAY - SEARCHING FOR SATELLITE SIGNAL - PLEASE DO NOT CALL AS WE ARE AWARE OF THE PROBLEM". Sure enough, as I fast forwarded from one hour to the next, I discovered that not even one pitch had been recorded. Evidently this was a problem nationwide.

Calm down, I thought to myself. I can avoid the internet, ESPN, and the news this morning until the game is rebroadcast at noon. Then I can just shut off my phone and enjoy the game as if it was live. This sounded like a good idea, so I ran with it. I made sure to keep the TV off, the phone upstairs, and the computer far away from me throughout the morning. And as the minutes slowly crept towards noon, I started getting excited about Opening Day. Sure, DirecTV screwed me, but good ol' ESPN will rebroadcast the game and I'll get to enjoy it all as if nothing ever went wrong! And when noon finally arrived, and I sat down with my noodles to watch baseball - meaningful baseball - for the first time since last October when I was at the World Series, I recoiled in horror at what I saw. While ESPN was going over the starting lineups, I glanced at the little scroll bar along the bottom of the screen, which read "AL: Boston 6, Oakland 5 - Final". These network executives are worse than Jack Cust with an 0-2 count.

It's been a long winter

Ok, time to stop pretending to be mildly interested in hockey and basketball. The Major League Baseball season kicks off in Japan in 12 hours. Ahhhh....

How Not To Defend

Thanks to collegepork.com.