The Phillies are the failure Yankees

 Everyone who takes umbrage with the way baseball's salary structure has been set up always talks about the Yankees and how they always have the best players on a bloated payroll. While this is true, it's important to note that they wouldn't get so much scorn if they weren't also successful.

The Yankees are in one of their longest ever World Series droughts, but have started to build back. They will get back to the post season this year and with aggressive moves at the deadline, it's clear that they intend to make a deep run this time around.

To make those moves, the Yankees needed to put together a farm system that would produce talented enough players that other teams may desire them. Also, they recognized that great teams aren't necessarily bought from top to bottom. In addition to the assets developed internally for trade purposes, they also have a healthy number of players on the Major League roster, headed by guys like Aaron Judge and Gary Sanchez.

While the Yankees get the rap for buying their team, just down the road and in the National League, you can find the Philadelphia Phillies, quietly bumbling along with their store bought team. The Phillies certainly don't have the historic track record of the Yankees, but they have definitely tried to emulate the purported team building techniques of the Bronx Bombers.

Philadelphia has, in two different seasons signed the biggest name on the free agent market, first on offense with Bryce Harper, then a pitcher, Zach Wheeler. The Phillies also traded for and extended J.T. Realmuto, and kept signing more and more free agents. Not a single one of their every day players now was developed in the Phillies system.

And now, they are in a dog fight for the NL East, in contention because of division mediocrity. They are only 4 games over .500, and worse still, they were unable to supplement their team beyond Kyle Gibson and Ian Kennedy at the deadline because of a dearth of top end minor league talent. 

The Phillies are trying to be just like the Yankees, which makes sense. The Yankees are one of the mot successful teams in baseball history. Philadelphia, though, is really bad at it. 

Purdue is back to normal

 

I went to Purdue immediately after Drew Brees led the Boilermakers to the Rose Bowl. While I was there, they continued to be a decently regarded football team, reaching bowl games each season while I was there. Thanks Kyle Orton! 

The hot ticket in town, as you might imagine, was for Ross Ade Stadium. Everyone wanted to go to Boiler football games, ESPN College Gameday came to town once and the focus of collegiate athletics in West Lafayette was on the football team.

Meanwhile, Purdue basketball was extremely pedestrian in the final years of Gene Keady's coaching career. They missed the tournament a couple of times, and didn't really make much noise in the Dance when they got there. Basketball tickets were easy to come by.

Of course, that wasn't the trend before I got there. Purdue football had enjoyed a couple of good quarterbacks through the year, but before Brees and coach Joe Tiller, Purdue football was bordering on embarrassing. Keady was in the waning years of his career while I was there, but before I got there, that career was long and storied, and marked by 1st and 2nd seeds in the Tournament, as well as superstar players, like Glenn Robinson.

Almost immediately after I left, the Boilermakers football team started veering downhill. Tiller retired, and was replaced by a couple of underwhelming head coaches. Jeff Brohm is there now, and while there is some recent success, nobody is talking about Purdue football like there were in the 2000s. They are a non factor, even when they are at their best.

Of course, on the other hand, Matt Painter seized the helm of the basketball team from his mentor Keady, and quickly recruited teams that steadily got good seeds and made it to the Sweet 16. It started with the Jajuan Johnson, E'Twaun Moore, Robbie Hummel triumvirate and continued with top recruits and eventual NBA draft picks like AJ Hammons, Carl Landry and Caleb Swanigan. They were a whisper from the Final Four in 2019 on the back of Carsen Edwards and Dakota Mathias.

And some how, they might be bringing in their best team yet. Not only do they have Trevion Williams as a veteran presence in the paint, but they also have Jaden Ivey and Zach Edey, who have been playing for their respective countries on the international stage, and will bring more experience to the roster than the typical sophomore provides.

Purdue flipped upside down a bit when I was a student, but things are back as they ever were.

Minnesota might win something

 

It's been a long hard slog for Minnesota sports for the last 30 years, punctuated only by a blazing hot streak from the Lynx since the Twins won the World Series in 1991. But alas, it's been pretty bleak otherwise.

This year, the Minnesota Wild's Jared Spurgeon might be giving Minnesota sports fans something to hang their hats on, take pride in and otherwise boast about. Yes, the Wild captain is a finalist for the Lady Byng Trophy. 

The Byng is awarded to the player who has portrayed the most gentlemanly conduct on the ice in the previous season. It is important to note that there is no statistical benchmark for this award, and doesn't have a lot to do with the success of a team or the particular players, but it does highlight I don't know, holding doors open during line changes? 

Whatever the case may be, it seems that Spurgeon is "playing the game the right way" and it would be nice to have literally any trophy in the trophy case for the state, so chant it with me be, friends.

SPORTS- MAN - SHIP! SPORTS - MAN - SHIP! SPORTS - MAN - SHIP! WOOO!

Taking Umbrage with the Academy's nominations

 Even though you didn't go to any movies in the last year, the Oscars are still happening on April 25th. Because there hasn't been the usual crush of advertising for coming features, it was pretty easy to not hear of any of them, more so than any other year. Reading reviews and descriptions of them, I am sure they are well imagined, deeply contemplative and expertly crafted. In any other year, I have no reason to doubt that those would have been the best movie.

Last year, however, was 2020. 2020 needed something else.

At really no point was I interested in something dark and brooding, something that made me look inwardly, or something that brought to light a problem that exists in society that might not otherwise get national attention. We had all of those things thrust in our face at all times. Between the news and social media, I was certainly not looking to sink deeper into the more grim portions of my psyche.

And so, with all new movies nearly immediately at my fingertips, I actively avoided these so called good movies, and looked harder for stupid movies that gave me some chuckles, had a generally decent heart, and didn't make me think about it for even a second afterwards.

It wasn't the best movie made in the last year, but for me, the Movie of 2020 is definitely Hubie Halloween.

You can live this too

 The big goal in our family this year was to get our boys potty trained. We've been met with mixed success, but one thing that has definitely worked, one challenge we overcame, was getting the boys to sit on the toilet. If you have kids, you probably know this was a tougher challenge than you expected. Those that don't, good luck.

But we eventually did it. We started showing them video clips of their favorite moves, and they would sit for a solid couple of minutes. One of our kids is fully trained in, but he still wants to watch one, sometimes two videos. We change it up from trip to trip, but he and his brother pile into the bathroom and we watch something. It always starts different (lately, it's been clips from Cars) but it often ends the same.

Somehow, the boys got into Trolls movie clips, and, well, I just need someone in the outside world to hear this before we go insane. 

I love you guys. 

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Learning lessons

 When I was a freshman in college, I had a communications class, and one of the lessons in the course still resonates with me. The funny thing is, I don't even remember the name of the class or the instructor, but I recall one of the specific discussions in the class fairly often. 

He was talking about fighting, specifically between men. Often, charged up and angry young men veer towards calling each other a "bitch" or when challenging to a fight, lean into using derogatory anatomical terms. The question was not why men come into conflict, but to challenge us as to why the terminology was what it was. The inherit implication is that there is something shameful or cowardly about being a woman.

Since then, I have tried fervently to avoid using that loaded language. There isn't anything wrong with being female, and if you are a woman, but still an asshole, it's not because you are a woman. It was a good lesson to hear as a college freshman, and frankly, should be more intuitive than it is. 

Finally, though, it seems to be getting through the heads of more people, and people that matter. That's why we saw the Me Too movement, and the reckoning that came with that. Some big news in entertainment lately revolved around Justin Timberlake. He never sexually assaulted anyone, or even harassed anyone, as far as I've heard, but women around him were used as props, even famous ones, like Britney Spears and Janet Jackson specifically. 

The, again, inherit implication by Timberlake was that it was OK to use women, even to their detriment. Spears had a breakdown, and Jackson was literally exposed on the world's biggest stage. The media fell into the teenage, hotheaded male trope that it was shameful and cowardly to be a woman.

But Timberlake is now apologizing, and I hope it's because he has learned a lesson. It appears as though the entertainment media has come to grips with their errors of the past, recognizing how cruel they were to Spears and Jackson, and are driving a lot of their now more conciliatory coverage of the two. 

It took way too long for the message to sink in, even for me, back in college. Take heart in the fact that it is a message that may eventually settle in. We all have wives, mothers, girlfriends, daughters or other women in our lives. It shouldn't be that hard to figure out that they should be afforded respect. 

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Changes in Europe, but there is a line

UEFA, the soccer organizing body in Europe, has come under increasing pressure to kowtow to the top clubs in Europe. They are likely the clubs you have heard of, even if you aren't a soccer fan like me. Manchester United, Real Madrid and the like. UEFA finally got pushed too far, and FIFA, the global organizer of the game, stepped in and put their foot down.

The story is that a plan had been hatched to create a league that featured 15 permanent members from across Europe, and 5 that were exchanged yearly through some undisclosed process. FIFA stepped in and warned that players participating in such a league would be banned from international competitions, like the World Cup. That will probably steer enough players away that the league won't come into being. 

However, that doesn't mean that there wasn't a large amount of pandering to the bigger clubs and bigger countries. One of the more admirable things about international soccer is that, at the very least, every team is given a chance. Every team that starts playing professional soccer in Europe has a path to winning the top prize in Europe, however narrow the path. Or at least they did. 

This year is the first year of the Europa Conference League, which is a third tier tournament now behind the Champions League and Europa League, and collects almost all of the teams that would have once been in the Europa League. The Champions League is, so far, unchanged, in that it will welcome every league champion in Europe, as well as some runners up in the top rated leagues. Europa will only have spots for teams from the top 15 associations, though other places could be filled by teams falling out of the Champions League.

The Conference League will be played, initially, between almost all of the teams that had previously been in the Europa League, including teams that win their National Cup (which is usually played by teams of all tiers), save for some teams that get to stick in the Europa League. It separates further the top associations from the smaller associations, and with an easier path to the top (the winner of the Europa League gets to play in the next year's Champions League) benefits teams like Manchester United, who had recently fallen on hard times, maintain a lifeline to the top continental league. 

Not satisfied, there is a strong likelihood that the Champions League will change format in the next few years to allow teams from the top leagues to start their campaigns later in the tournament, while also allowing for more games and more TV revenue for the teams by an extended group stage. The top teams didn't really need to work so hard to break away from the standard soccer structure, because they had a pliant punching bag already at their mercy.