(I updated the year count on this one, but otherwise this is our post from October 30th last year, a favorite of mine from the No Mas annals – L)

Six years ago tonight, President George Bush threw out the first pitch of Game 3 of the World Series at Yankee Stadium. Only seven weeks after the September 11th attacks, it was clearly meant as some kind of a defiant act, the sort of meaningless macho bravado that has since become W’s calling card (“Mission accomplished…”). I do remember that he threw a strike from the regulation pitching rubber. THAT was defiant. Any terrorists watching that shit must have had second thoughts about winning a game 7 with W on the mound. Osama was like, “if Bush starts against us we’re going to have to be patient at the plate and make him waste pitches, get to their bullpen…” And look, say what you will about the 2000 election, but you know Al Gore would have rolled that thing up to Posada.

That same night, another overblown international figure was making a grandiose and otherwise useless appearance in the Big Apple. Michael Jordan kicked off his second unretirement, opening his career with the Wizards in a game against the Knicks at the Garden. There was no double nickel. There was no miracle last-second dish to Bill Wennington for the win. MJ scored 19 on 7 for 21 shooting from the field as the Wizards lost 93-91. He looked old and slow and committed two key turnovers in the final minutes before missing a buzzer-beater three for the win. His farcical third act was under way. In other words, the terrorists had already won.

Seriously, the World Series SUCKS now. Three sweeps in the last four years, interrupted by last year’s single meaningless win by the Tigers. The wild card era has seen five World Series sweeps, as many as there were in the prior 30 years of the Fall Classic. Personally, I think the Division Series is well on its way to ruining baseball, the Division Series and interleague play. By the time the World Series actually rolls around, Jesus, I am so sick of watching playoff games that I hardly even give a shit anymore. The ads, man, the ads seem like they’re going to escape from my television and hunt me down and kill me. They start to appear in my dreams – that fucking song they played for the MLB ad where the kid has the Hank Aaron card – “ding da-ding, ding ding ding…” – that song has been haunting me. I found myself humming it at the gym the other day and felt rage in my heart.

And it’s not just the relentless promotional blitz, it’s the sheer accumulation of playoff baseball, something that, judging by the performance on the field, is a malaise that afflicts fans and players alike. 2003 and 2004 were perfect case studies in that phenomenon – after those Yankees/Red Sox donnybrooks, who the hell cared what happened next? The Yankees/Marlins World Series has to be one of the most anti-climactic baseball events on record. Given the circumstances, it seemed almost surprising that they bothered to play those games.

Meanwhile, interleague play has removed all sense of mystery and magic from a final showdown between the champions of the two leagues. I remember back before interleague play no matter how uninterested you were in the two teams, just the idea that these players would be facing each other – Luis Tiant pitching to Johnny Bench, Steve Carlton to George Brett, Roger Clemens to Darryl Strawberry – it was just so unfathomable, like a big fight – you mean those two guys are actually going to have it out once and for all? that’s actually going to happen? It happened so infrequently that when it finally did, you were eager to see it whether it was your team or not.

Now, everyone plays everyone all the time, and the World Series is basically just another round of playoff games. The Leagues stand for nothing really – they’re just brackets now. Two teams exhausted from an endless season stumble into the Fall Classic after another seemingly endless second season. One gets the edge quickly, and the other folds like a five-dollar hooker in a ten-dollar motel. I’m telling you, I’m already tingling with anticipation to see who gets swept next year.

For all of our longtime No Masians, the name “Franchise” conjures a certain yearning in the heart, but for those of you out there of a more recent No Mas vintage, let me explain. Franchise batted cleanup for a while here in the No Mas batting order with his now collector’s item column, Sharpshootin’ with The Franchise (check out his classic Wrestlemania countdown for a sample of his work). He’s a combat arts specialist, MMA, WWE, etc., and for the time that he was with us we were lucky to have one of the true experts of the genre airing it out every week on our site.

So I suppose you can see where this is headed. Yes, yes, he’s coming back. But there’s more. Chise has his own site now, jarrypark.com, as perfect a name for a Franchise-sponsored endeavor as ever there could be (holms is from Montreal – I’ll leave it at that). Check it out and you’ll see that it’s everything “Sharpshootin’” was and more, along with the fact that he is focusing on podcasts in which he will interview various figures throughout the fight sports universe on a weekly basis. Franchise is plugged in too – on tap for this week are such luminaries as Christian Cage, Kurt Angle and IFL star Brent Beauparlant (I’m guessing M. Beauparlant is also from Montreal).

And, oh yeah, me. Chise and I have had a long, at times contentious negotiation over terms these past few months, and what we’ve arrived at is an agreement that I will make weekly appearances over at Le Parc Jarry in exchange for a partial return of Sharpshootin’. No timetable yet as to when his comeback is scheduled, but you can check out my rather longwinded debut interview on his site right now. It’s a general overview of the big fights of the fall and winter, looking back at Pavlik/Taylor, looking forward to Shane/Cotto and Mayweather/Hatton, giving my predicitions, which as you know are almost always prescient.

I’ll leave you with this – there’s also been talk of a Franchise/Large smackdown. One bout in the octagon, one in the squared circle, and if it’s tied at the end of two (which it won’t be, trust me folks), we head to the chessboard. I’m just putting that out there now to tease you, because the promoters are still wrangling about the numbers. We’re talking straight-up PPV money here people.

Jim Caple has a piece on ESPN.com today calling this the worst baseball postseason ever. There is certainly a case to be made on this count – potentially five of the six total ’07 series will end in sweeps. And despite the fact that the Red Sox came back from a 3-1 deficit in the ALCS to defeat the Indians in 7, not a single one of those games was a nailbiter. As Caple pointed out, the most interesting thing about this playoffs has been a Biblical swarm of bugs in Cleveland.

Then again, that was pretty interesting. And the Boston/Cleveland series did go the distance. I’m not suggesting that that this isn’t the worst postseason ever, but I think some other candidates should be thrown into the mix. To wit (keeping in mind that in my mind the term “postseason” must refer to the post-1968 era of division play):

• 1998 - If you lived in New York in ’98, you’re going to say, “wtf? that postseason was amazing” but if you lived anywhere else you probably remember it as a snooze to equal this year. Three sweeps of a possible six, two intensely boring Championship Series, and then a World Series that despite an exciting game one seemed a fait accompli from the first pitch on. I know it’s hard for Yankees fans to imagine, but when the Yanks have pretty much already won before the playoffs even start, it’s not that much fun for everyone else.
• 1989 – This was a truly craptastic postseason in which the only interesting thing to happen was a natural disaster of tragic proportions. The earthquake definitely makes the ’89 postseason memorable, obscuring the fact that next to nothing of interest transpired on the field. The A’s killed the Jays, the Giants made quick work of the Cubs (exciting game 5, that’s about it) and then Oakland destroyed the Giants in one of the most lopsided World Series on record. Personally I think this was a worse postseason than ’07.
• 1983 – I hate to include this one, because the Phils were in it and my folks and I were actually in attendance at game three of the Series, but objectively I have to say that this postseason blew. Phils skated past the Dodgers 3-1 in the NLCS, and in the ALCS, the Orioles lost game one to the White Sox (complete game for ole LaMarr Hoyt) and then swept the next three. In the World Series, the Phils were listless – the Wheeze Kids were just plain out of steam. Three of the five games were one-run affairs, however, so this probably doesn’t deserve to be considered the worst postseason ever. But it’s in the top ten, I’d say.
• 1976 – A similar postseason to ’98 – anybody paying attention knew that the Big Red Machine would not be denied. Cincinnati didn’t lose a game, sweeping the Phils and then the Yanks. It was one of those “over before you got to your seat” playoffs.
• 1970 - People probably will scratch their heads at this one, because the 1970 postseason has some iconic memories – the acrobatics of Brooks Robinson, primarily, and also the blown call on Bernie Carbo’s great headfirst slide. Otherwise, however, on the question of drama, this postseason was a dud – two sweeps in the Championship series, and then the Orioles won the first three of the World Series.

We’ve all become accustomed to advertising weaving its way into every nook and cranny of a sports broadcast, but Fox took it to some unprecedented territory last night, i.e. talking about the fucking free taco all night as if it were on the same level of importance as the game, and then showing the players having a scripted conversation in the dugout about Taco Bell before going straight to the CEO of Taco Bell to talk about Taco Bell. WTF? Are we really supposed to believe that Royce Clayton and Coco Crisp were unknowingly chatting about the big Taco Bell “Steal a Base, Steal a Taco” farce in the dugout and the microphones just happened to catch their conversation? Come ON. Why the hell is Royce Clayton miked up anyway? He doesn’t even play. Plus, one good thing about athletes – they can’t act for shit. Clayton and Crisp both said their lines as if they were reading them off cue cards – “You know that Taco Bell is offering a free taco to every American if someone steals a base in the World Series, right? So all of America is depending on you to get a free taco!” Back to Joe and Tim – “Wow, even the players are caught up in this free taco thing, it’s really a phenomenon, and hey, wow, Chris Myers has stumbled across the CEO of Taco Bell in the stands.” At which point, Myers proceeds to give King Taco a few minutes of free airtime to tell us that yeah, it’ll be expensive, but Taco Bell is giving away free tacos because it’s good for baseball and good for America. Then Myers catapults this already worm-burning moment to a new low by himself signing off with the Taco Bell mantra – “We’re thinking outside the bun.”

The first pitch brought to us by Budweiser. The third inning brought us by Troy Aikman. The seventh-inning stretch brought to us by Nissan. “God Bless America” brought to us by The Church of the Poisoned Mind. Anal sex brought to us by vaginal sex. Jonathan Papelbon brought to us by Grey Poupon.

A World Devoid of Joy brought to us by The Prince of Darkness.

It’s an ironic day to wake up (yes, wake up… I’m on the West Coast now and I’m getting a late start) to reports of Barry Bonds publicly voicing his bitterness over being “fired” by the Giants, and in the process intoning the name of the great Willie McCovey (in typically self-adulatory fashion) by saying, “they call it McCovey Cove but I’ve rewritten it a little bit.”

It’s ironic because on this day 33 years ago, Bonds’ great and much more beloved predecessor, Stretch McCovey (Daddy Lambchop we call him here at No Mas), was himself unthinkably “fired” by the Giants, traded to the San Diego Padres with Bernie Williams (which is odd, because by my calculations Bernie was five years old in ’74) for pitcher Mike Caldwell. Nowhere near his prime but still a serviceable slugger, Willie would spend only three seasons in San Francsico exile – two and two-thirds with the Pads and then an eleven-game stint with the A’s – before signing again with the Giants as a free agent for a rejuvenated 1977 campaign.

One wonders if Bonds envisions pulling a similar prodigal son routine with San Francisco, although given his recent crticism of the Giants’ ownership, it seems doubtful. My feeling is that whatever Bonds thinks of the team’s brain trust, it’s wise for him when speaking about himself to stop referencing the names of all these legends that came before him as if he somehow belonged naturally in their historic company. It all too egregiously emphasizes the obvious, that despite his obscene (obscene in the truest sense of the word) statistics, Barry Bonds will never occupy the cliff of baseball’s Olympus where dwell the McCovey’s and Mays’s and Aaron’s and Mantle’s and Clemente’s, et al… because, well, none of those guys were on roids.

(Would Evander Holyfield have beaten Mike Tyson in 1990, the year their mega-fight was supposed to go down? Of course, we’ll never know if the pre-prison Tyson would have been able to handle the Real Deal, because Buster Douglas showed up f’reals in Tokyo and ruined everyone’s plans (costing both Evander and Iron Mike a shitload of money). This Classic No Mas piece takes us back to seventeen years ago today, when Holyfield summarily dispensed of the blubbery Douglas, whose fifteen minutes in the spotlight seemed to come and go in, well, about five minutes.)

October 25, 1990 , Evander Holyfield doesn’t get the big payday, but does get the belts, knocking out a listless Buster Douglas to take the unified title that eight months beforehand Douglas had taken from Mike Tyson.

After the big Tyson upset, Buster treated himself to many a peanut buster parfait and precious little training. He came into the Holyfield fight bloated and soft, weighing close to 250 pounds. Evander, who for the past year had been anticipating a stratospheric superfight with Tyson for the heavyweight crown, was instead faced with just the shell of the man who had knocked Iron Mike on his ass. It was easy work for the Real Deal, a third-round KO, a beauty too, a short right hand over the top onto Douglas’s exposed chin after Buster had whiffed on a mighty uppercut.

From there, the trajectories of the two careers parted mightily. Buster retired to a life of fried food and indolence, blowing up to 300 pounds and nearly dying in a diabetic coma before getting himself together and attempting a short-lived comeback. Evander meanwhile became arguably the most dominant heavyweight of the decade, giving us a slew of epic performances , the Foreman fight, the Bowe trilogy, both Tyson fights, and then his two bouts with Lennox Lewis, after which, if the world were a perfect place, his career would have ended.

How thrilled was Fox that the Red Sox pulled out that ALCS over the Tribe? At 3-1 Cleveland with one more game in the Jake, I’m sure there were some Fox execs who were contemplating a skyscraper dive. I actually thought that a Cleveland/Colorado World Series could mark the end of the Fall Classic on network television. They already moved more than half the playoffs to TBS this year, and I’m sure that the ratings for an Indians/Rockies showdown would have sealed the cable deal. After that kind of disaster, next year’s playoffs might have been on Spike.

Luckily for Fox, Big Papi and the (cow)boys persevered, and so we do not have to face a World Series that would have felt a bit like ten years ago and the ’97 edition – Indians/Marlins. Which was, you may remember, an excellent World Series. Then again, you may not remember that, because pretty much nobody watched it.

That was a turning point Series, a year when it felt like baseball sunk to a cynical low, as an owner of a four-year-old expansion team that played in a town with no baseball tradition and seemingly no interest in the sport bought the Fall Classic, bought the manager (Jim Leyland), bought the rent-a-sluggers (Sheff, Moises, Bobby Bo) and the arms-for-hire (Kevin Brown, Al Leiter, Alex Fernandez), and then brought the World Series crown to Miami for about a minute before abruptly selling everything he’d bought because, huh, it turned out that Miami still didn’t give a shit about baseball, World Series or not.

Other than the fact that both franchises entered the bigs together in ’93 and still feel like expansion teams (mostly because of their terrible uniforms), there’s no comparison to be made between that Marlins team and this year’s Rockies squad. Obviously, the Rockies are a young, homegrown squad of go-getters and no-names and they’ve earned their moment in the spotlight by clicking at exactly the right time. They do highlight a fact of the two-tiered playoff system, however, one that I think takes some of the overall integrity out of the game. At this point, with the Wild Card up for grabs and then the interminable second season of the playoffs, baseball is starting to boil down to the invisible mathematics of “whoever gets hot wins it all.” This is exciting, no doubt, and has a compelling element of chance, but at the same time it waters down the meaning of a 162-game season.

But hey – that’s the era of the game in which we live, and no team in this era ever has gone into the postseason as hot as the Rockies are right now. At this stage, I kind of hope they win it all, although it’s hard to imagine them getting past the Beckett factor. On the other hand, they haven’t lost a game since July 17th, so who the hell knows? In closing, let me just say that if they do manage to win the Series, I hope they use all of that residual money to get themselves a better look.

Jose Luis Castillo is fighting this weekend in Mexico against a 33-year-old Mexican tomato-can by the name of Adan Casillas. The fight is almost entirely unpublicized here in the States – it seems that El Temible’s long stay in the boxing limelight is over, and now he is destined to go the way of Mexico’s greatest fighting legend, JCC. Like the man who gave him his start as a sparring partner, it is really hard to imagine Castillo ever hanging up the gloves, and very easy to imagine him fighting into his fifties.

This thought of great Mexicans fighting way past their time for some reason brings to my mind one of the nation’s most treasured boxing icons, a man whose career sadly ended long before its time. Salvador Sanchez was a household name in the fight world in the late 70′s and early 80′s, and had he lived longer than that he undoubtedly would be as famous today as Chavez himself. A hard-punching, light-stepping assassin in the ring, Sanchez, known as “Chava”, won the WBC featherweight title in 1980 by shocking Danny “Little Red” Lopez in a nationally televised brawl that made the explosive Mexican a TV fighting star. He defended that title 10 times over the next two years in what were generally thrilling, action-packed fights, including a rematch with Lopez, a slugfest with Wilfredo Gomez and the fight below, our No Mas Knockout of the Week, the last fight of Sanchez’s career. It was contested at Madison Square Garden and featured an unknown boxer from Ghana appearing for the first time in the U.S. – the man we would come to know as “The Professor”, Azumah Nelson. For 15 rounds, these two principals battered each other in a throwdown that in retrospect makes Castillo/Corrales look like heavy petting. Sanchez won on a TKO in the last round, and was well on his way to mega-stardom and a reputed superfight with Alexis Arguello. But less than a month later he crashed a brand-new Porsche outside Mexico City and was killed instantly, a cruel tragedy that made him boxing’s James Dean, a perpetual “what might have been?” for all who witnessed the fury and magnificence with which he plied his trade.

It seems wrong somehow that on the 30-year anniversary of one of the Yankees’ greatest moments – Reggie’s 3-HR World Series explosion – that we now have to contemplate the sad end of an era for the team that will rank among its finest. Joe Torre has declined the Yanks’ contract offer, and the team is moving forward. If Torre stays in uniform, he only will stave off what will be his certain Hall-of-Fame induction as a manager. One place where Torre’s likeness is definitely headed is Monument Park in the Yankee Stadium outfield, a shrine to heroes past that as of right now contains four of the previous great Yankee managers:

Miller Huggins
Yankee Manager, 1918-1929
World Series Champion – 1923, 1927, 1928
AL Pennant – 1921-23, 1926-28

Joe McCarthy
Yankee Manager 1931-1946
World Series Champion – 1932, 1936-39, 1941, 1943
AL Pennant – 1932, 1936-39, 1941-43

Casey Stengel
Yankee Manager, 1949-1960
World Series Champion – 1949-53, 1956, 1958,
AL Pennant – 1949-53, 1955-58, 1960
(Of the twelve seasons that Stengel managed the Yanks, they failed to appear in the World Series only twice)

Billy Martin
Yankee Manager, 1975-79, 1983, 1985, 1988
World Series Champion – 1977-78
AL Pennant – 1976-78
(Managed the team for only the first 94 games of the 1978 championship season, and for only parts of the ’79, ’85 and ’88 seasons)

Joe Torre
Yankee Manager, 1996-2007
World Series Champion – 1996, 1998-2000
AL Pennant – 1996, 1998-2001, 2003
(Took the Yankees to the playoffs in every one of his twelve seasons managing the team)

(p.s. – Two other former managers of the team have monuments in Monument Park – Bill Dickey and Yogi Berra – but neither of them are so enshrined because of their managerial stints. Two managers who won the World Series with the Yanks are not in Monument Park – Bucky Harris, who managed the team for only two seasons, one of them the championship campaign of 1947, and Ralph Houk, who was the skipper in the Bronx for three seasons, 1961-63. The Yanks went to the World Series in all three of those years and won it in ’61 and ’62.)