Here’s my own quick little story about the Great One, Old Number 99 Wayne Gretzky, the hockey great whose tenure as coach of the star-crossed Phoenix Coyotes officially ended yesterday. I am browsing in the magazine section of a Barnes and Noble bookstore. It is just after last season ended…
The Arizona Cardinals and Indianapolis Colts played two of the most interesting games of Week 2. The Cardinals (1-1), who everyone was ready to label as the bumbling losers that they were before last season, jumped out to a 31-3 lead on the Jacksonville Jaguars. Kurt Warner completed 92.3 percent…
There’s a reason baseball has plummeted to third place in the national-pastime sweepstakes. In a word: ennui. In a few more: great, shrieking, tedious torpor. This is true of most places in this year’s drama-challenged MLB, but nowhere so much as Phoenix, where the 2009 Arizona Diamondbacks have suffered through…
The San Francisco Giants kept their slim playoff hopes alive for at least one more day after beating the Arizona Diamondbacks 5-2 on Wednesday night at Chase Field. The poor D-Backs have lost four of their past five and, ugh, 14 of their last 19. Yeah, the season pretty much…
In the 26 games in which he’s worn Sedona red, the Oklahoma-born ballplayer has amassed close to a .300 batting average, knocking in four RBIs and blasting out 14 hits (three of them homers) off some of the NL’s best pitchers. And that includes former D-Backs superstar Randy Johnson, who…
As football fans, we have come to expect various degrees of pissing and moaning from wide receivers when they aren’t getting the ball. Call it the nature of the beast. It usually happens on the sidelines, or in the locker room and now, like everything else, has found its way…
At 10:13 last night, San Francisco Giants’ closer Brian Wilson struck out Arizona Diamondbacks’ slugger Justin Upton on a 3-2 pitch. Upton barked at the home-plate umpire in disagreement. The crowd, numbering in the thousands, booed in unison. We’re not sure if it was over the call or the fact…
The Arizona Cardinals are off to a skitzophrenic start after yesterday’s impressive road win over the Jacksonville Jaguars and last week’s embarrassing loss to the San Francisco 49ers. Make up your minds, fellas. Either be the Super Bowl-caliber team we saw last year or the lovable losers we saw last week…
The Arizona Diamondbacks did very little this weekend to stop the Colorado Rockies from steamrolling their way toward their third postseason berth in franchise history. The hometown zeroes won only one of the weekend’s three games (Friday night’s 7-5 thriller) and all but assured that the Rockies will go to…
Congrats Phoenicians! You are officially not the worst football fans in the country. After confronting our own fair-weather attendance patterns last week at the Cardinals’ home opener, the Cards-Jaguars game is getting blacked out this week in Jacksonville. As part of a policy designed to punish a cities bandwagon fans, the NFL blacks out games for…
Even after the Arizona Cardinals came within 157 seconds of carting home the Lombardi Trophy last February, some naysayers continued to label the Cards the worst Super Bowl team of all time. Were they right? Well, the Redbirds haven’t done much to naysay the naysayers since, losing all four preseason…
The Arizona Diamondbacks have nothing left to lose this year, so here are a couple of achievable goals we think they should aim for going into this weekend’s series against the Colorado Rockies: 1) get the hell out of the cellar, which is an embarrassment to all the fans who’ve…
The Phoenix Suns are in the process of reducing their players to NASCAR-driver status with a new deal that allows corporate sponsorship of practice uniforms and the team’s practice court.The team announced today that they have struck an agreement with the Annexus Group, a Phoenix-based annuity-design firm, to put the company’s logo…
After a pathetic showing in the ’09 season, most D-backs fans would probably prefer that the lovable losers not play anyone next season, let alone the soon to be World Series Champion New York Yankees.Unfortunately for Phoenicians who don’t just go to Chase Field when the Cubs, Dodgers, or Mets…
As far as Eric Byrnes is concerned, 2009 has been the “year of the goat.” The 33-year-old left fielder has been consistently railed on by fans and sports wags over the bulk of the last two seasons for his incompetent ballplaying, repeated whiffs, occasional tantrums, and failing to justify his…
donating his brain to science? Well, we never… Arizona Cardinals receiver Sean Morey announced yesterday that he has agreed to donate his brain, plus some spinal-cord tissue, to a medical study being conducted at Boston University. The donation, after death of course, is part of the “Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy — a…
The Arizona Diamondbacks versus the San Diego Padres. A battle of bottom-heavy NL West teams playing in front of nobody at SD’s Petco Park. Totally not-see TV, right? Well, we will see what happens in the latter two games of the three-game set, but last night’s donnybrook was actually pretty…
It’s official: Mark Reynolds, Justin Upton, and the rest of your 2009 Arizona Diamondbacks won’t have a shot at this year’s Fall Classic. While said factoid has pretty much been a forgone conclusion since like, uh, May, it didn’t become set in stone until Friday evening’s 6-3 loss to the…
After nearly not selling out on opening day, after a lackluster training camp, after a quiet off-season, and after winning the NFC Championship, the Arizona Cardinals are finally back. We don’t just mean that it’s football season again, we mean that the Cardinals are back to playing, well, like the commiserable…
How much stock should one put in a team’s performance during the NFL preseason? In our opinion, not a damn thing. That’s why Arizona Cardinals’ fans should give a rousing “so what?” and “who cares?” when talking about the team’s zero-win preseason. Yeah, the starting offense only tallied one touchdown…
A few weeks back, we were chortling while listening to the wildly optimistic worldview of Arizona Diamondbacks president/CEO Derrick Hall on one of the morning talk shows. Hall’s team may be bad, but dude’s an ace. He’s the sort of enthusiast who could sell Otter Pops to Eskimos, firewater to…
By playing a solid nine innings of baseball Wednesday night, the Arizona Diamondbacks helped keep the race to win the National League West an interesting one. In their 4-3 win against the Los Angeles Dodgers at Chase Field, Dan Haren was excellent, the defense was airtight, and strikeout king Mark…
