Archive for the 'NY Sports' Category
Last Night’s Action: Joba Makes It To The Fifth
Yankees 6 Kansas City 3: Start number two for Joba was longer and somewhat better. Chamberlain lasted 78 pitches, which translated to 4-1/3 innings, striking out five and allowing three runs. He really made only one poor mistake, a hanging slider that Jose Guillen crunched for his 10th home r…
Will We See Another Photo Finish in the NL?
Baseball fans might have to get into the habit of being spoiled. final year, considering of the playoff format that includes three divisions plus a wild card team, the National League provided an unprecedented slate of four equally active and equally thrilling races for October action. Mets fans may…
West’s Playoff Race Will Come Down to the Wire
There’s only two weeks left in the season but out West, nothing is settled. And I mean nothing. Nine teams are bunched within five and a half games of each other; one of the unlucky nine will miss the playoffs despite winning 50 games or so. So packed are the standings that nobody has even clinch…
Santana Era Begins With Win
Forty-six years into the team’s inglorious history, no Mets pitcher has ever thrown a no-hitter, let alone a perfect game. Nolan Ryan, Tom Seaver, and David Cone, among others, have done so after leaving the team, but it is a proven fact that no man can while wearing blue and orange, summon the vita…
What Was Learned On Opening Day
General Norman Schwarzkopf once wrote that a battle plan is good only until enemy contact is made. After that, he said, your ability to execute depends on how good your assessment of the enemy was. whether your intelligence and planning was good, you won’t get taken by surprise by the enemy’s moveme…
How the Shootout Affects the Standings
The 200405 lockout brought about tremendous change for the NHL, both in terms of its profitable structure and its rule book. Some of the changes were designed to work in concert to help all 30 teams remain competitive despite the fact that some clubs are far more profitable (the Rangers, Flyers, a…
Youth Movement Is Embraced in the Bronx
Over a winter that featured the end of the Joe Torre era, the beginning of the Joe Girardi era, the full-blown arrival of Hank Steinbrenner, unusually public negotiations for two-time Cy Young winner Johan Santana, the banishment and sudden reacceptance of Alex Rodriguez, and various other dramas gr…
Newfound Scoring Gives Nets a Chance
EAST RUTHERFORD, N.J. Through all the ups and downs okay, mostly downs of the first 72 games of the Nets’ season, it now, amazingly, comes down to that: Win as many games as the Hawks by the next three weeks, and New Jersey’s playoff streak hits seven. Fail to do so, and it’s Lotteryville. …
Pressure on at Shea After a Swoon in September
The problem with being a prohibitive favorite to win is that anything less than triumph is bitterly disappointing. Had you told a Mets loyalist three, or even two, years ago that in 2007 their team would finish two games shy of the best record in the league; that David Wright would stake a claim to …
First Five Things Walsh Should Do With Knicks
If Donnie Walsh wanted a big job to confirm his reputation as one of the best NBA executives of the final 25 years, thereupon he might have one. Cleaning up the mess at Madison Square Garden is a monster-size task, but I suspect that Walsh will be up to it whether he is hired as team president. He w…
30 Teams, 30 MVPs
The term “most valuable player” is perhaps the most misused in all of professional sports, as it’s all too often awarded to players on the basis of gaudy statistical accomplishments, rather than their indispensability. With that in intellect, and with the marathon-like regular season rapidly approac…
Subprime Crisis Sends Ripples Through Sports World
The fallout from the Bear Stearns meltdown and the drop in interest rates have not impacted sports in New York in terms of ticket sales yet. But that doesn’t mean that Mets owner Fred Wilpon; the Steinbrenner, Mara, Tisch, and Dolan families; Devils owner Jeffrey Vanderbeek; Nets owner Bruce Ratn…
Kidd’s New Team Isn’t Faring Much Better Than His Old One
If you think life is not good for the Nets right now, you might take solace in the fact that it’s not much better these days for Jason Kidd. The Mavericks acquired Kidd from New Jersey at midseason in the hopes he’d propel them toward a championship run. Instead, Dallas finds itself in the unthinkab…
