Now, Nomah is coming home — signing a one-day contract to officially retire as a member of Red Sox Nation. 

“Everywhere I go I get so many [Red Sox fans] come to me and tell me ‘Thank you. We miss you. We still love you,’” Garciaparra told ESPN. “And it’s so genuine and the feeling is mutual. Hopefully from my actions throughout my career in that uniform and hopefully my actions today again tell them what it means to me.”

It feels right. 

It’s just too bad he wasn’t there during the best two months of being a player or fan the Red Sox organization will ever experience.

Now that the Olympic dust has settled, no question has produced more conversation than whether or not curling is a sport.  A few salient points to think about before you answer.

1) Technically, it’s the Olympic Games, not the Olympic Sports, so whether or not curling is a sport is largely irrelevant to whether or not it belongs in the Olympics. 2) If you get better at something the more you drink, a la bowling or darts, it’s not really a sport. 3) Things with a definitive winner are more sport than game, which means curling is technically more of a sport than snowboarding or ice skating, really half a dozen winter Olympic sports. 4) The Russian women’s team creates a weird feeling in my loins 5) The athletes are at least on par with car racing. 6) The Swedish men’s team takes their fashion advice from Jespar Parnevik and that makes them straight pimps.  7) The game/sport is probably more athletically difficult than anyone actually realizes.

Check it out on the Citizen Tube channel at the proper bat time.  CBS News and UStream will be on the case, as will Hulu.  Today sort of feels like it’s going to Tigerfest 2010, no?    [via]

According to a Wall Street Journal study of four recent broadcasts, and similar estimates by researchers, the average amount of time the ball is in play on the field during an NFL game is about 11 minutes.

We’re talking football, as in NFL here.  This is a bit surprising, but not shocking.  Football and baseball are low-action games that thrive on suspenseful drama and coaching strategy.  Whereas basketball and hockey are all action all the time.

Vikings Quarterback Brett Favre proves why he’s still awesome at 40-years-old by dropping his own rendition of the American Idol viral hit song “Pants On The Ground” by General Larry Platt during his celebration of the Vikings trouncing of the Cowboys yesterday. [via]

How the 2010 FIFA World Cup match ball is made. [via]

While [Calvin] Broadus’ [aka, Snoop Dogg]  larger-than-life figure was not the motivation for the kids to play football, his personal involvement boosts the self-esteem of boys who often receive little attention at home. The rapper attends games and allows his bodyguards to let players approach him freely.

Those intangibles, said coach [Robert] Garrett, are invaluable for inner-city youth. The burly coach sees his job as much about taking a troubled team member home for food or clothing as it is about football. He lectures about keeping up grades and has imposed a rule requiring neckties, dress shirts and trousers on Fridays during season to get players out of the ”hood culture.”

The success of Crenshaw [High School] and the Snoop league is capturing widespread attention. College recruiters have already approached players such as Thomas and Hall, and the league is fielding calls from cities such as Dallas and Pittsburgh that want to replicate the Snoop model.

What makes this story more enjoyable is that Snoop Dogg wouldn’t agree to be interviewed for the story, and considering he has an album out to promote leads me to think this is something he just wants to do for his community and not because he’s looking for publicity.

Out on Oahu’s famed Waimea Beach, for the first time in five years the waves were big enough to hold the prestigious Eddie Aikau big wave surfing contest. The contest was supposed to happen a few days ago, but the waves never materialized above the 20-feet threshold.

They finally did on Tuesday and San Clemente, California’s Greg Long won the event by riding the “monster drop” of the day, a 40-foot wave that broke during the competition’s final heat. There are a ton of awesome photos in which you can gawk at the magesterial size fo these waves. 

Below is a promotional video for the contest put together by the contest’s sponsors that features some of the biggest waves and wipeouts from The Eddie over the years.

Click here to view the embedded video.

In light of Tiger Wood’s nine, NINE!, mistresses, skankbags, whatever you want to call them, the above flow chart should be kept handy if you are the spouse of a pro athlete. 

As a side note, is the only way Tiger Woods breaks Jack Nicklaus’s record for career grand slams in affairs at this point?

It’s 100 % salacious and feels icky, but I can’t help but be intrigued by the ongoing developments of Tiger Woods’s marital woes.  Did you see the photos of him wearing his Sunday Victory Reds at a nightclub or hear that cellphone message.  Nice to be reminded every now and again that everybody is human.

Woods has since been released from the hospital after suffering several lacerations to his face, there is no indication alcohol played a role in the accident, and according to the Orlando Sentinal almost no indication an accident took place at all.

Seems a bit weird, timing wise, given the recent allegations of Wood’s affair, but then again even world-class golfers are prone to stupidity now and again.

Update: It didn’t take long for the rumor mill to churn out the domestic altercation theory, ahead of the release of the 911 tapes, with TMZ now reporting the accident and facial lacerations were due to Wood’s wife confronting him on his alleged affair.  I’d be lying if I said their story wasn’t one of the first things I thought of when reading the original news report, that the car accident was a cover up.  But then again, Woods has never really given anyone a reason to think he’s nothing but a stand up person.

UNM junior defender Elizabeth Lambert was suspended indefinitely from soccer following the most some mean gamesladyship.  Anyway, safe to say that if I were to meet her in an ally I would run like hell in the other direction. [via]

San Antonio Spurs shooting guard Manu Ginóbili shut down a pesky bat with his bare hands during the Kings-Spurs match on Halloween night, which means that, Manu Ginóbili should be hired to take down Edward Cullen.  From the video evidence there is no indication that Manu took a flop to lure the bat in.  [via]

Crazy, just crazy.  I mean the wig, not Agassi on meth.  Which, I suppose is just as crazy.  But man I loved that dude’s hair.  It was so zeitgeisty.  So indicative of his “rebel” image.

“I asked myself: you want to wear a toupee? On the tennis court? I answered myself; what else could I do?” But the wig began to disintegrate as he took a shower the night before the Paris final — “probably I used the wrong hair rinse,” Agassi writes. He panicked and called his brother Philly into the room. Together, they managed to clamp the wig together using clips and pins.

Agassi, 39, writes: “Of course I could have played without my hairpiece, but what would all the journalists have written if they knew that all the time I was really wearing a wig? During the warming-up training before play I prayed. Not for victory, but that my hairpiece would not fall off. With each leap, I imagine it falling into the sand. I imagine millions of spectators move closer to their TV sets, their eyes widening and, in dozens of dialects and languages, ask how Andre Agassi’s hair has fallen from his head.”

“There were tears because you have visualized your dream and your dreams have become reality,” Keflezighi told the NY Times. “The other part as I’m running is Ryan. I know how proud he would have been of me.”

Ryan would be his close friend Ryan Shay, who collapsed during the 2007 Olympic time trial marathon on the New York course and subsequently passed away from a heart ailment at the ripe age of 27.

What do you get when you take six very talented footballers (Paul Wood, Paul Klein, Darryl Stewart, Tom Pett, Lewis Foster & Harry Adcroft) and create a giant game of Guitar Hero controlled with footballs?  The track is Kasabian’s “Underdogs,” which, um, could have been something better.

“The Vancouver Olympics made a smart choice in deciding to use precious metals from old electronics. By salvaging medal materials from old products, the Olympic committee is saving perfectly good gold, silver, and bronze from ending up in landfills,” writes Ariel Schwartz. “ Because it makes no sense to mine for new gold when a single junked PC has more of the stuff in it than 17 tons of ore. And if the medals are promoted well, they could bring awareness to the cause of recycled scrap. With the entire world watching what happens at the Olympic games, there is no better venue to promote such an important–and easy-to-implement–solution to electronics recycling.” 

Word.  It makes for a good story, except that, according to the Ottawa Citizen, less than 1% of the metal used to make the medals came from recycled materials.

It all seems like innocuous fun, at first, and in the end the cameraman seems pretty stoked about the whole thing.  Me?  If that were me?  I probably would have Winnie the Pooh’d myself and never gone kite boarding again.  He gets some major air.  [via]

Produced by Bill Simmons, the lineup is fairly tight.  Well-done sports documentaries are hard to come by because often times the subject matter is just not interesting enough.  Here, Simmons has given his filmmakers the opportunity to explore less-familiar stories, or familiar stories with a new wrinkle.

“We were especially attracted to stories that resonated at the time but were eventually forgotten for whatever reason. Like the unique connection between Hank Gathers and Bo Kimble,” Simmons writes.  “Like Tim Richmond taking NASCAR by storm, disappearing just as quickly because of an “illness” (later revealed to be AIDS), then having his story covered up and dismissed. Like O.J.’s car chase, Escobar’s own goal and Jimmy the Greek’s career imploding in just a few sentences. Like the 2004 Red Sox winning four incredible games in four nights against the Yankees; even if the big picture theme had been beaten to death, the small picture theme (every remarkable twist from Game 4 through Game 7) had never really been told. We wanted people to say, “Wow, I forgot how (fill in a word: great, amazing, poignant, crazy, depressing, unbelievable) that was” or “I can’t believe I never knew that whole story.” We didn’t want to check off a laundry list of the 30 biggest stories from 1979 to 2009.” 

Barry Levinson, Albert Maysles, John Singleton, Barbara Kopple, Spike Jonze and Ice Cube are just a few of the directors who contribute. Tonight the series kicks off with Kings Ransom, Peter Berg’s piece about Wayne Gretzky being traded to the L.A. Kings.

The docs air Tuesdays at 8 p.m. ET on ESPN.  You can preview several of the movies and scope out the lineup here.

The two Russian grandmasters will play 12 rapid and semi-rapid games over four days in Valencia beginning tomorrow.  The matches will air online.

Possibly continuing a trend from just about every major news organization, ESPN rolled out ESPN Boston today.  There are no other cities to date, but it would seem like Boston or New York would be the logical places to roll this out. 

Of course, they have Bill Simmons participating, but also Peter Gammons makes an appearance and they’ve managed to poach Mike Reiss from The Boston Globe to be their new Patriots writer/blogger. 

It’s an interesting experience from ESPN and if any sports media company has the cache and wherewithall to put local sports sections out of business, they would be it.

From his 7-6 (3), 7-5, 7-5 semi-final match win in today’s U.S. Open against Novak Djokovic, Roger Federer called the shot seen above, “the greatest of his life.”  And let’s be honest, Federer has had a lifetime of great shots.

Not sure how it’s going to end, but if “the flue game” against Utah in the 1997 finals is #6, then I can’t begin to imagine what the top 5 holds for us.  I’m guessing the layup against L.A. in the 1991 finals, the 68 he dropped against the Celtics in the 1988 playoffs, etc.

YouTube is also paying reverence to his airness. [via]

Here’s the mascot’s, Berlino, insidious plan to destroy 400m hurdle champ Melanie Walker at the 2009 World Championships. [via]

But after watching the race over and over and slowing it down to watch his stride and just marvel at his conservation of energy, we noticed that it looked like he was fully across the finish line in 9.3 flat. According to the competition rules, the sprinter’s torso must be breach the finish line and again it looks like Bolt has accomplished that.

9.30 seconds is an absurdly low time and yet seemingly contradicts the study by two scientists which puts the human limit at 9.51 seconds.

Think about that for a moment.  It’s been calculated (erroneously or not) that the absolute fastest time a human can run 100 meters is in 9.51 seconds and Usain Bolt is already clocked in at 9.58 and from the look above it might be possible for him to run closer to 9.30.  That alone makes him, in my book, the fastest human being to ever exist.

Holy moly.  While most of the sports watching world was engaged in Tiger Woods utterly choking away his first major, track speedster Usain Bolt of Jamaica set a new world record in the 100 meters.  Anybody see this race? Bolt’s stride and gallop is a thing of artistry. Amazing what happens when an athlete pushes himself to greatness by his own desire and from the competition of others.

If you’re counting, Bolt has now set the world record at 9.72, 9.69 and now 9.58.

Huh.  So they made a movie out of Michael Lewis’s book, The Blind Side. Looks like it could be decent, if not schmaltzy.  Hopefully, this is more like Friday Night Lights and less like a Lifetime Original. 

Nice to see Sandra Bullock looking good and doing something other than a terrible rom-com.  It even looks like she may be using Michael Oher to open a lane to Oscar-baiting daylight. 

For those scratching their heads, Michael Oher was the Baltimore Ravens’s #1 pick in this year’s NFL draft.  But back in high school, before the football glory, he was struggling to live in a Memphis ghetto; then he was adopted by a white family in rural Mississippi and given a second chance.  Because he was built like a Mac Truck, with the grace of a ballerina, the high school football team turned him into a left tackle, one of the NFL’s most highly sought-after positions.

What’s the easiest and most profitable way to do so?  Open a 14-room gentleman’s club.  Prostitution is, after all, legal there. 

However, the decision to become a “pimp” for Logan Campbell may cost him a spot to compete on the team. 

“Selection takes into account not just performance but also the athlete’s ability to serve as an example to the youth of the country,” Team NZ funding manager John Schofield told the country’s Sunday Star Times newspaper.

Still, the financial rewards of running a legal business are enough for him to risk that.  

To take the financial strain from his parents Campbell has gone into partnership with Hugo Philiips, a 20-year-old accountancy graduate, to set up what the pair insist is a “high-class” escort agency.

He hopes to take a couple of years off to work full-time on the new venture, before returning to training in 2011 with a NZ$300,000 Olympic kitty.

When people think of a pimp they think of a guy standing around on a street corner with gold chains,” he told the Sunday Star Times.”Pimps are more tough-type guys. I’m an owner of an escort agency.”

He accepts that his chosen profession carries with it a certain reputation.

“Mum was hesitant but she met the girls, a couple came over to her house and she was sweet as. She realised they were just normal people supporting their kids and stuff.”

If you’ve ever seen a picture of the goofy looking QB, you would know why htis was inherently funny and quite puzzling.  But now, a full decade later, the story behind Grbac’s selection makes the story that much better and manages to generate a little simpathy from us. 

From Jeff Pearlman, a writer at SI:

One of my favorite all-time stories is about Elvis Grbac (left), Rich Gannon (right) and People Magazine’s Sexiest Men issue from 1998. It is both outlandish and 100-percent true.

Back in the day I knew many People staffers, and they were all cool, fun, intelligent-and woefully ignorant about sports. Every year, in planning the Sexiest Men issue, People’s editors would ask a bunch of us at Sports Illustrated for suggestions and insight. In 1998, for a reason I’ll never understand, they decided not to seek out help.

The magazine chose Rich Gannon as its Sexiest Athlete. At the time, Gannon was a member of the Kansas City Chiefs. Still a couple of seasons removed from his golden tenure with the Raiders, Gannon was 33, handsome and likable. In other words, a solid choice. Yet People, being People, simply informed the photographer assigned to the piece that the Sexiest Athlete was the Chiefs’ quarterback. Hence, he took pictures of the Chiefs’ quarterback. Well, one of the Chiefs’ quarterbacks: Elvis Grbac.

Yup.

The pictures made their way back to the New York offices, and editors were dumbfounded. This was their Sexiest Athlete? Yet upon learning the truth, no one with the magazine had the heart (guts?) to tell Grbac that an unfathomable mistake had been made. As a result, Elvis Grbac reigns as People’s 1998 Sexiest Athlete.

The article’s final line says it all: “His personality makes him sexy.”

Amen.

Oof.  [via Deadspin]

Wow. Leave it to Shaq Daddy to find a guy more impressive than then kid doing the forward flip and hitting a full court shot.

Obviously, there’s a lot of editing going on here. Not necessarily in the shots shown, but I imagine for every shot like this hit he had to take dozens or maybe a hundred attempts. That doesn’t make these shots any less impressive.

Also? Shaq is offering the kid a $1,000 to play him in HORSE.

Brady’s kayak tipped over on the Charles River and Robin was there to save him.  The best part of this story is not the actual story, but the comment thread over email between all the guys from Buffalo, NY.  They weren’t congratulatory at all, but rather peeved that a Buffalonian would sabotage the Bills season before it began. And that’s why I love the Buff.

To wit:

Wil Shephard: “Dude that’s crazy.  I can’t believe she didn’t let him drown.  Obviously not a real Bills fan.”

And Seamus Gallivan:  “My first reaction was texting Robin to congratulate her on becoming a real American hero. But I’ve since come to regret it and consider her a traitor to her hometown – if she would’ve let him drown, the Pats would have to sign JP Losman, and the Bills would have a much better shot at winning the AFC East, both of which would greatly improve the quality of life for all Buffalonians.”

I can’t wait for football to start back up.

And apparantly the Olympic committee took the city’s warm-fuzzies for gettin’ high as a reason to design the Olympic torch to look like a joint. 

Shit is hot. 

Composed of stainless steel, aluminum and sheet moulding, the torch was designed to evoke snow, ice, skiing and skating, but to many, the metre-long white torch looks suspiciously like a marijuana joint, especially when lit.

The observation has become so common in this city that it’s hard to know who was the first to say, “Hey, doesn’t that look like …”

But the torch’s resemblance to British Columbia’s biggest cash crop was evident right away to Jodie Emery, editor of Cannabis Culture magazine.

“A lot of people come to Vancouver because it’s marijuana-friendly, so I think people who already enjoy a joint themselves will feel a little more kinship to the Olympics,” said Emery, who ran as a Green party candidate in the provincial election this month.

The alternative, of course, is that the sleek torch is supposed to resemble futuristic skiis.  All I see is a squiggly bullet train, a shiny pen and dental equipment.  Don’t ask, but I love having my teeth cleaned.

Olympic Champion Usain Bolt set a world-record in the 150-meters Sunday  running it in a blistering 14.35 seconds on a temporary surface set up in Manchester’s city center. Right away, you’ll notice that the other schlubs running with him are no match for the Jamaican lightening bolt.

The Sports Scientists offers a bit of background on Bolt’s performance, which seems even more impressive with a little context.

Despite cool temperatures, and a reported lack of fitness thanks to a few minor injuries sustained in a car-crash about a month ago, Bolt’s first big showing on the world stage in 2009 lived up to the hype (Bolt’s love of speed extends beyond the track, apparently. The Jamaican taxi drivers are reported to have a nickname for him – “lead-foot”).

The 150m dissected – splits and projections

Bolt’s running is anything but lead-footed. He ran the first 100m in 9.90 seconds, which is an extra-ordinary time and a sign of things to come. But even more amazing, the final 100m (from 50m to the finish line) were clocked in an astonishing 8.72 seconds! That is being reported, though it’s so fast I’m almost skeptical.

Both exchanges are worth reading, if for nothing else than they’re sports food for thought.  The most memorable aspect is Gladwell’s thoughts on sports drafts and his suggestion that there shouldn’t be a draft, but rather college players should go on job interviews with their respective teams.

That suggestion alone, is worth wading through 20,000 words or so.

“Ball two stands alone, above any of the other dull business on the diamond. The intentional walk at least adds a base runner to the game. The halfhearted throw to first to check the runner is a sign that the pitcher is feeling tension. But ball two signifies almost nothing,” he writes for the Boston Globe. 

It is disapointing then, that for a self-professed baseball lover, Scocca misses the mark of the significance of ball two.  Baseball is a game of long con, of team chess, where winning depends largely on strategic decisions and subtle variances. 

Contrary to signifying nothing, ball two is one of those subtle variances.  Ball two can indirectly change the entire complexion of a game of baseball. 

Using a statistical measurement from Sports Illustrated’s Joe Posnanski, Scocca argues that not much changes when a batter takes ball two. 

But the numbers also show the points where nothing happens. Batters who fell behind 1-2 batted .190. If they got ball two, their average crept up to only .205. “[T]here is nothing really even about a 2-2 count,” Posnanski wrote. “The pitcher is still firmly in control.”

But those numbers are completely misleading.  The statistics you need to examine are the players batting averages when ball two affects the count.  Based on statistics from the 2007 MLB season, ball two had a significant, if subtle, effect on games.  Here are the batting averages based upon count.

You’ll notice that there isn’t much difference between 1-2 and 2-2 counts, as Posnanski notes and Scocca reiterates. 

0-0 = .344
1-0 = .341

2-0 = .351
3-0 = .394

0-1 = .324
1-1 = .327

2-1 = .338
3-1 = .368

0-2 = .166
1-2 = .178

2-2 = .195
3-2 = .233

But there is a markedly huge difference between counts 2-1 (.338) and 1-2 (.178) and a slight difference between 2-0 (.351) and 1-1 (.327).  Those are the counts when ball two matters.  Ball two matters in relation to it not being a strike. 

So yes, while ball two, may on the surface, have little significance to the overall complexion to a baseball game — at least in comparison to say, more impactful offensive strikes like: the triple, the walk-off homerun, the stolen base or suicide squeeze, — it is the essence of baseball.  It is a minor event that can have drastic impacts.  For ball two is the minor rumble which makes all major quakes possible.