Bleacher Report - Articles by corby anderson

Real Time: Where Shakey, Superman, Rush, and A-Rod Chase The Pig

corby anderson — Fri, 01 May 2009 00:55:02 -0400

Real Time

by Corby Anderson

“It’s going to be the year of the sharp elbow and the quick tongue.” – George W. Bush

Marina, California - (August 29, 2009) - Somewhere, out on the morning breeze that flows out of the Pacific towards the impossibly green, rolling coastal strip just south of Point Arena, California, a long slab of fine American metal slides by. Shakey is inside, singing his latest batch of insightful, foresightful songs, in real time.

The term is emphasized several times in the video. Real Time.

Time for reality. Time for instant art, instant feedback, the growling, grungy stuff that the driver has made a partial living cultivating, like bacterial cultures growing hairy in the gleaming works of his guitar apparatus.

The video that Shakey, better known as musician Neil Young, is filming of himself while cruising the California coast in his “Linc Volt”, a 1959 convertible Lincoln powered by innovative hybrid technology, and singing these new songs will make its way to his Garage, a website that has probably done more to budge the American psyche towards the high road than any other music-based site has.

Once posted, this new video will join in ethereal form with the rest of Today, where all manner of strange items await absorption for the curious news seeker.

Odd news items abound today in Real Time, such as the angry elbows of Superman, mild mannered Dwight Howard by day, sinus shattering terror by night. In minutes, he managed to take out two-fifths of the starting lineup for his NBA team, the Orlando Magic during a hotly contested playoff match up with the Philly side.

His first awful act came in the form of a vicious swipe at the prominent cheek structure of Sam Dalembert, who made like a duck and saved himself several months of painless smiles. Howard, whose physique represents the perfect male, had Michelangelo found a large enough slab of marble to carve, came down from a rebound attempt and wiped his diamond-tipped jackhammer elbow across the distressed bridge of Dalembert, who narrowly avoided facial reconstruction surgery.

Howard’s teammate, Courtney Lee was not so lucky. Minutes after the attempted manslaughter of Dalembert, Howard’s elbow caught his own teammate in the face as he fought for yet another rebound.

This was just a glancing blow, but the impact was enough to send Lee home in a facial cast, sounding strangely like an urban Willie Nelson when asked to describe the play that injured him, putting his participation in serious question for the rest of the series. Soon after, Superman was grounded, forced to wrap his pile driver arms in kryptonite for Game 6, which he was told to skip by NBA commissioner David Stern.

But if Superman could fly, it is doubtful that he would. No sir.

Flying is out these days, for a variety of reasons, first and foremost is the Swine Flu, which has grounded most business travel not just to the blue agave flats of Mexico, where the flu reportedly spontaneously combusted, but all over the United States, and the World. Not even Air Force One is in the air today, despite a perfectly clear spring day over the obviously gun-shy island town of Manhattan.

No, the flu has wiped out school tests, and sporting events, drug runs, and illegal immigration. The whole world is holding their breath, hoping not to catch “The Pig.”

Meanwhile, pharmaceutical stocks are strong, and so are those of 3M and other masking agents. Yet doctors are convinced that the masks are worthless, other than to give some semblance of confidence, a shred of hope to a doubly stunned populace that is still trying to figure out how to pay the cable bill with an unemployment check that has yet to arrive.

And on Capitol Hill, the swine are eating themselves, a rare side-effect of the H1N1 virus not seen anywhere other than Washington, D.C. Congressional Republicans are dizzy with welling venom towards their former partier Arlen Specter, who yesterday went full-Brutus on the GOP, switching to the Democratic Party. The Republicans are nearly insane with power-envy, forced to sit in the corner and pout as every hallmark of their failed worldview is dismantled by the “socialists” in charge now.

Rush Limbaugh, who has emerged from the Republican dung heap as the strongest pig standing, is reportedly so furious that he lined up a herd of small ponies outside of his Florida studio and forced himself to pet the whole herd until he could calm down enough to go live again and tell Specter “good riddance,” and to “take John McCain and his daughter Janet Reno” with him.

McCain shot back a Twitter, an astounding event unto itself, that said simply, “Red till I’m Dead baby!” which might have raised a few eyebrows back when McCain’s congressional career was just getting off the ground.

Fox News covered the news by convening a panel of youthful tyrants, including “writer/comedian” Alison Rosen, who, in attempting to criticize Janeane Garafalo for her comments linking Limbaugh to Hitler, told a worldwide Fox audience that “Hitler might have also been a tender lover, bad for the Jews, but…”

And this passes for news coverage these days, in Real Time. It is a magical time, a time when the Governor of the Great State of Texas declares publicly that he might just think it a good idea for Texas to spilt from the union, just two months after their Favorite Son nearly ruined it in just eight years of overt corporateering.

When protesters call themselves “Teabaggers” and see nothing wrong with the term, yet howl in ironic protest over racism allegations when someone suggests that they may as well call themselves “Dirty Sanchez’s.” They seethe with indignation, seeking to find some new way to go with every old way to blame anything at all on the socialists and communists who have taken over their country with the aid of the left-wing media, Sean Penn, and Paris Hilton, who the tittering Republicans seem fixated on for some reason.

Meanwhile the Yankees sit at 10-10. A rough start, punctuated by the foul discovery that their billion dollar stadium is both unfillable, due to the overpriced tickets, several thousand of which they attempt to sell for more than $500 per game, and also uncontrollable, witnessed by the flocks of fly balls that have gone for home runs due to the unprecedented wind-tunnel effect that the new stadium construction inadvertently, and karmically created.

The Yankee winds, which may indeed simply be the ghost of Lou Gehrig giving his opinion of the overwrought economical monstrosity that the Yanks now represent, have neutralized the effectiveness of their new, free-market pitching staff, which cost them over $300 million dollars this off season to build.

And that is on top of the $300 million dollars that they paid Alex Rodriguez last year, just before he was outed for being a steroid user. He countered those allegations by at first denying them firmly in a softly lit interview with Katie Couric on 60 minutes, and then attacking the reputation of the reporter that wrote the now-famous story about A-Rod’ alleged positive drug test in the 2003 season, Sports Illustrated’s Selena Roberts, and finally by donning a Mr. Rogers sweater and tearfully admitting to Peter Gammons that he indeed had dabbled in the juice, but only in 2003.

Back in Real Time, Robert’s new book, A-rod is in the news today, along with Superman’s fearsome elbows, Shakey’s Lincoln, and the continued move to the far right by the Republican Party, as allegations pile up that Rodriguez not only continued to take steroids after coming over to the Yankee’s from the Texas Rangers, but that all the way back in high school he was suspected of doping.

Wherever the third-baseman actually is, Vail, or Tampa, or the Circus (where he was seen recently, narcissistically kissing himself in the workout mirror) “recovering from necessary surgery”, it is likely that Alex Rodriguez is feeling pretty exposed, trapped in the biggest shit storm of Real Time.

Sports Fans: Don Your Raincoats! The Sports Bubble Is About to Burst.

corby anderson — Sun, 23 Nov 2008 07:59:35 -0500

With the money I'm making, I should be playing two positions. ~Pete Rose, 1977

News hounding has taken on a surreal quality the past few months. As the world economies convulse and reel like a flock of headless chickens, watching the news has become more akin to watching pregnant bubbles drift and swell to their bursting point, than scanning standard fare news fish wrap.

One by one, the bubbles went up, floating free and easy, inflated by the hot gasses of greed and over speculation, until the harsh reality of living in air too pressurized for their thin shells to withstand forced them down into the sunlight, where the super agitated bubbles collide and stick to one another, the unwieldy weight of each pulling the other closer toward an explosive end.

And then, in the light of day, they all popped at once. First went the real estate bubble, which wrecked headlong into the stock market bubble, which took down the credit bubble, and so on.

Every day, vital industries come screaming down out of the sky, wings on fire, engines shot through, their pilots searching desperately in their shattered cockpits for a bailout handle to pull, crashing back down to earth, where reason dictates that to rise again, the captains of industry will have to launch their jets with new energy, or stay stagnant and flaccidly mothballed.

But there in the dawn of a new era of fiscal reorganization and responsibility, a single bubble wobbles upward into the stratosphere. The sports bubble holds the news hound's attention raptly. He watches it nervously, knowing the inevitable decline is near.

What keeps it aloft even now in these turbulent winds? The modern American sports industry is built on corporate sponsorships, bloated television contracts supported by outrageously expensive advertising rates, and large doses of discretionary income from diehard sports junkies.

Owners rake in exorbitant profits by casting wide nets into these revenue streams, extracting billions of dollars like fat, mindless trout. In turn, and perhaps, rightfully so, the players and athletes, the men and women who at times risk life and limb to entertain the beleaguered masses fleece the owners for their own, considerable take.

For example, on some cold night during this not-so great, depressed winter, some "lucky" baseball team will win the services of one Manny Ramirez, a 37-year-old professional hitter with the hand-eye coordination of a savant quilter.

Widely sought after for his preternatural ability to weave his silver bat expertly through the filthiest of darting laces, Ramirez is expected to sign with his next squad for upwards of $25 million a year, for perhaps the amount of years that a sloth has toes.

To spank a baseball solidly, this man ram makes over 500 times the median income of the average American household. Every time that he takes the field, assuming (ahem) that he plays all 162 games for whichever team is ballsy enough to gamble on a historically dodgy, half-assed player like Ramirez, he stands to take home $151,151, and 15 cents, or, in lame terms—Ramirez will make somewhere north of $18,900 an hour this next baseball season.

To experience the sheer ecstasy of bathing in the sunless shadow of Ramirez and (s)crew, a family of four will shell out around $200 per game.

Of course, players of Ramirez's (b)ilk drastically skew the numbers for the average Joe just trying to make a living swatting flies in the Bigs. Last year, the average player earned only $3.1 million dollars, and plenty of them were way down at the minimum of $390,000, not even eight times the take home for an average dual income family.

The space allowed for this column does not lend itself to a larger study of other sports a field, or out on the tracks, but suffice to say, when the top Bass Master is making over a $1 million bones in one event, as 24-year-old Michael Bennett did this summer in the Forrest Wood Cup in Lake Murray, South Carolina, it is a good (strike?!) indicator that finances in sports are seriously and totally out of whack with reality.

But look anywhere in the wide, weird world of sports and you will see it: The books are cooked, and the fools manning the buckets keep trying to douse the fire with gasoline. Soon enough, they too will all catch fire, and flee for the pool.

The real question is, what happens when the car company and financial sector sponsors disappear, when discretionary income becomes a novel concept reserved only for those with long memories and Mexican drug czars?

Who is going to go to the games, swill the beer, buy the shirts, the sushi-dogs, or even stay home and watch the games, when joblessness sweeps the nation like a vague plague and broadcast and internet advertisers can no longer justify the expense of footing the network bills?

Not to mention the drastic and unholy evisceration of the cable bill from the necessities lists of potentially hundreds of thousands of Americans. Forced to chose between a new sack of rice and clean water to drink, or a scaled back, intern produced, two camera shoot of an out of market game (don't forget the blackouts! When the stadiums fill up with emptiness, the owners jam the local feed), most folks are going to yank the plug on their TV's, done in by the cable companies definitions of a reasonable cable bill.

When things get truly desperate, and the fish flopping at the end of the pond begin to whither and die, how is a four year contract for $100 million dollars going to a seemingly ungrateful 40 year old freak case going to play, and just whom is going to pay?

If you ask me, the sports bubble has grown unwieldy and irrationally obese, and is an obvious indicator of another overwrought industry that has gorged itself into a diabetic stupor, over-saturated with the sweet plasma of fan money, which once flowed like the Niagara.

Now, cellularly unstable after decades of excessive, unreasonable growth at the expense (literally) of the fans that it is supposed to cater to, and so interdependent on all of the other failing markets, the Sports Bubble seems destined to self-cannibalize and burst, showering all of us down below with a terrible coating of soapy, oily scum.

*Corby Anderson writes Hang Time for the Aspen Daily News from a crowded bail out shelter buried underneath a new Hummer dealership near Carmel Valley, California, where he spends his days pondering what the antonym of "nonchalant" is, or why being "laid on" is never used when discussing hiring practices.

Bailout Fever! Catch It at an Nationalized Football League Stadium Near You!

corby anderson — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 07:22:32 -0400

"Oh, look what you've done
You've made a fool of everyone
Oh well, it seems likes such fun
Until you lose what you had won"

—Jet

"Look what you've done."

Bailout Fever, it’s catching on everywhere! It’s in your banks, your local real estate agencies, and your investment firms…and now Bailout Fever has really hit home—welcome to the NFL, Amerikan style!

Imagine, if you will, the drastic sight of longtime Oakland Raiders owner Al Davis groveling at the feet of NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell. See the conflicted emotions of megalomania and great depression wrapped around his face like designer glasses, Davis pleading “Just do it, baby! Sign the deal! We gotta have it Rog-baby, else, this league is cooked!” as he tugs at the neat hem of Goodell’s pressed Armani slacks.

Davis needs Goodell to sign his historic reappropriations measure, allowing teams to now purchase each other. If Goodell fails to agree, the league that Davis helped to build is sure to collapse come Monday night.

For now, with the bottom dropping out all around him, Davis is multitasking. He is a miner at heart, and knows from experience that there is no time to wait for answers when the diamonds are being flushed along with the muck. Davis works Goodall for his decision while pulling up his sleeves, proceeding to mergitate. He holds in his trembling hands the newly programmed card keys to the front offices of the Seahawks, the hated Broncos, the Panthers, and the entire AFC West.

But this unlikely scene is ever weirder than that. Down the oaken table from where His Excellency is begging Goodell to sign, fellow owner Jerry Jones blows up four cell phones at once, juggling them between his ringed fingers like a Vegas barkeep on dollar Cosmo night. Normally a calm and collected man of savvy business instincts, something seems amiss on Jones serene-deficient face today.

Though his signature cracked smile remains plastered on his unnaturally boyish face, Jones seems clouded in the resigned air of a firing squad member who knows that his gun held the only real bullets.

On one of the phones that he shuffles between, Jones has Washington Redskins owner Daniel Snyder ready to capitulate his team and the stadium that it plays in. An overly leveraged Snyder blubbers into the phone, asking if he can just keep one player—exposing a strange affinity for tight end Chris Cooley. Jones soothes Snyder in a shushing tone, but tells him softly that Cooley too must go. It all must go. There is no other way. The jig is up.

Jones knows that he and Davis are the only ones who have the money to float the league, other than the League itself. Jones deftly flips the Snyder-phone into his left pinky and rotates to a mass conference call with millions of shocked shareholding fans of the Green Bay Packers. They too, he shushes quietly. It will all be OK, he tells them, all 115,000 disgusted Mid-Westerners. Lombardi would want it this way, he assures them. Now, let’s cut the cheese…

Davis and Jones work the virtual rooms of this rare mid-season emergency league meeting like Thresher sharks in bloody water. The rest of the suddenly broke NFL teams trail sweet red calling cards of capitol hemorrhage in the murky waters. Big fish are wounded and foundering, and are Jones and Davis’ for the taking, and on the cheap.

They beg to be saved from drowning as they drown in their own excess. When the last holdout—those pesky Mora’s of New York are pinned down and gobbled, the new super-team owners eye each other warily, waiting for one another to so much as flinch.

How they got here—two powerful owners, now locked into an unimaginable real estate grab, nobody really knows. There is speculation that the modern NFL trend towards obese rookie contracts has spurred on unsustainable salary levels. Even the kickers drive Maybachs and own small islands now.

Some weary commentators point fingers at themselves. The $21 billion dollar TV contract seemed so sure and easy that the owners started getting reckless, spending millions on dove-armed QB’s and dial-up speed tailbacks.

We, the fans were asked, as an aformention, to foot these outrageous expenses now leading to this unprecedented bailout. Now, during these incredible negotiations, all that we are told is that unless we allow the teams to swallow each other, and for the league to eat it’s own, that the great American sport of football will be exneyed come Sun-sney.

Not that we have much say in the matter. The numbers, they tell us, are too complex. There are at least 700 billion factors that would have to be explained in detail, and there is no time for that. The market will correct itself, and, if the plan works, when things loosen up, the old boys will sell back the rest of the teams to their downtrodden owners, minus a few key players who will, of course need to stay with their master teams when the crisis is over. What is fair is fair, you see.

Goodell knows that the “league” will be seen as a joke with only two teams, so he insists that some of the older teams—the Steelers, the Dolphins, Vikes, and Bears, for example, be propped up by the windfall of this massive bailout. Some of the players will be allowed to stay where they are, on their Nationalized Football League teams. But most of the veteran stars will transfer to the new super-Cowboys, or the mega-Raiders.

Jones pauses to hear Goodell when he approaches the head table. His face is grim. One of Jones’ phones rings. It’s Hank Steinbrenner, from New York, via Tampa. He sounds frantic, and needs advice on how to save baseball.

*Corby Anderson writes Hang Time for the Aspen Daily News from a foreclosed beach house in an abandoned neighborhood near Carmel, California, where he has been seen muttering the phrase “WaMu, wammo, WaMu, wammo” to himself while creating small bonfires of useless checkbooks. For comments and/or subpeonas, contact him at corbyanderson@hotmail.com.

A Wordy Problem

corby anderson — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 10:30:40 -0400

A steaming freighter leaves Haiti at 200 miles per hour, blasting across the Caribbean like a cooped up puppy that has eaten through it's plastic universe, chewing apart boats, gargling with surveillance buoys, dumping on islands and pissing on the fringes of the Southeast.

Up along the Florida strip, a new force has been unleashed. The newly exorcised Rays hopscotch around the American League landscape with the wanton destruction of a Class 5 twister. Normally dismissed by the masses as impotently organized and irrelevant after August, this system has kicked up a blinding dust from Boston, to Detroit, to Toronto. It has silently swept through Louisville and the International League, and then immediately sat down on top of New York, and buried the Yanks with a factory full of fresh bats and strong arms

To add to this troublesome equation of Autumny convergence, thirty two jets simultaneously leave their pig leather and mud stained hangars on circuitous and tense five month bomber missions that they all hope sees them emerge as the better of two who will come gliding effortlessly into the PHX come February. There is a grey domed pilot guiding one of these Jets, fresh out of re-unretirement, who looks to add to his record mileage and add another sticker to his helmet. But he will have to deal with plenty of recharged foes, including a talented Horse with a freshly rebuilt knee and an advanced case of brotherly one-upmanship. Not to mention an installation of Patriots who thought that they had perfection in hand last winter, only to fall to the luck and destiny that was somehow mustered by the cross-town rival of our white haired Captain. Add to this swarm some Bolts of lightening, a rowdy group of starry-eyed yahoos from Texas, some veteran Cats from this Carolina's, and a fleet footed Viking or two.

Meanwhile, down on the ground level, near the very roots of the fertile grass that blankets our union of states, two trains join the aforementioned cacophony. One is painted a bright, hopeful blue, promises change, and plans to pick up along its meander a few disenfranchises from the middle of the road. The other is swathed in deep, Patriotic Red and White and stops in towns small and obese for patriotic straight talk, banking on of a wealth of experience and some change of their own. And, while each engine sports a fresh coat of expensive paint, the cabooses that they haul are the home of the real artistes. These political Pollack's spend their time between whistle stops working out their masterpieces, painting their rival as contemptible lunatics who will greedily blow up the bridges that unite in order to Engineer the Earth.

The unruly convergence is on. Politics, Sports and Weather are this Fall's national elements. The question is, will they all blow up at once? And if they do, what then?
Football season is on once more. And hark! There across the mournfully dwindling sports pages, the Boys of Summer are now the Men of Autumn after being forced to clean up their hardball act and downsize considerably. Wounded by scandal, a few have still mustered enough energy to beat each other up, and after a long wet summer, the destined leaders have emerged from their packs, give or take a few frantic momentum surfing Wild Cards. But wait, it remains highly likely that it will all have to hold while storms of fierce wind and rain and words whip us into a frenzy of self-preservation and distrust.

Those slacker delinquents and chronic bellyachers among you whining about ADD, ADHD, HDTV, or TV ADitis can skip the equating that this column requires. The rest of you I challenge to study this quickening convergence and plot a course through the muddy seasons to come. Report back to Hang Time. And, for those of you who don't like to wait, the equation is listed below, as proven by resident socio-disasticaster Bear Anderson in a recent scatologically unveiled formula.

32x(NFL)-13 (Jets chances of winning AFC) x $5,000,000 (Bellicheck's video late return fees) >3 (games out of playoff race = NYY)+600(Rays Fans) x Gustav x Hanna x Ike x X % 50/50 = A FALL TO REMEMBER! (Duck!)

Corby Anderson writes Hang Time for the Aspen Daily News Roaring Sports Magazine from the fishy decks of an observation sloop docked off of Lovers Point, California. Answers to this week's word problem can be submitted, in triplicate to corbyanderson@hotmail.com

Fantasy That You Can Bank On

corby anderson — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 04:36:50 -0400

"Life is just a fantasy, can you live this fantasy life?"

-Aldo Nova

People love to fantasize. With billions of people hugging the Earth's flaky crust, there are many reasons for this dreamy passion: total boredom, hyperactive imaginations, disappointment with the meandering course of their own lives or the failures of our collective societies, lack of connectivity to the outside world, or even the natural urge to compete.

Writer Daniel Okrent is credited with inventing the genre of fantasy sports when he developed what he dubbed "Rotisserie League Baseball" nearly 30 years ago. And while Okrent was the first to actually create and market a game for the masses, pimply-faced ball fans had forever devised fantastic scenarios and statistical contests. Amongst countless other less-famous afflictees, Jack Kerouac was known to have devised his own fantasy league as a youngster in Massachusetts. There is no word on whether his early schemings were written on a scroll, or included chapters or paragraphs.

Now, in the Instant Age, the sports fan is inundated with opportunities to publicly fantasize. What was once a darkened basement activity has become mainstream, widely accepted as a way to socialize, to belong. The fantasy genre has grown to be an unwieldy behemoth, growing like a pixilated Chia Pet on steroids. Because of the sheer fun of guessing an outcome, of mixing up rosters of players who are not otherwise on the same teams, of hazarding a wad of dough on a singular notion, fantasy sports have become nearly as popular as the real ones that they shadow.

Now all of the sporting world can play these rainy day games. Professional football, baseball, basketball, soccer, tennis, golf, NASCAR, bass fishing - they all have massively popular fantasy games with millions of devoted fanatics. Fantasy football alone has a net drain on our national economy to the tune of billions of lost dollars due to workers who fantasize on their company's dime.

The integrity of the sports themselves, the real sports that is, have been challenged with new generations of "fans" who care not for the outcome of the teams that they should know and love, but for a disparate group of wealthy athletes who hold the key to temporary, smack-talking glory and enough new money, for the winners, to splurge on a new gutter system or tickets to the Cheech and Chong Reunion Tour. Come playoff time, most fantasy owners are a conflicted mess, an unruly band of traitors and disloyal capitalists.

It goes deeper, the spider hole widens. Down in that twisted web, sub-genres of fantasy have sprouted up. There are fantasy games of fantasy games - a weird mind-twisting practice in which teams are made up of players who never even lived at the same time, let alone played together. Somewhere, sitting in a pile of digital weeds on a corporate server farm, a tiny brain hums and zips, simulating results from gigaflops of statistical data, and spits out an update on the potential future of the past, which enriches some lucky synthesizer of sporty hope in greater Old Snowmass, Colorado. It's really wicked, when you think about it.

When the popularity of fantasy sports jumped the rails of the average sports fan and lurched off into the stinted Chunnel's of broadband success, the game that was originally (organically one might even surmise) about sports and the happenstance chance of statistics has morphed into popularity contests and celebrity gossip. The "dead pool" has gone interactive. With Wal-Mart and Target's cheap stash of Chinese plastics all but burying the Tupperware party circuit, a vacuum has been created in the competitive world of neighborhood social gatherings.

There are now fantasy "leagues" for the soaps, for stock markets, red-carpet fashion and Congress, of all things. I must assume, without any way of confirming my hypothesis that won't end up with me being fired or arrested or both, that there exists somewhere on that broad plain of information a subterranean cave where Fantasy Fantasy is played. You know, that kind of Fantasy - the lurid, contortionisticly nude kind. The mind reels and revolts with the statistical possibilities. Back into the basement you go, Fantasites. But before you go, don't forget to name a starting fluffer.

Corby Anderson writes Hang Time for the Aspen Daily News from a converted dentist's chair in his Marina, Calif. garage, where he tinkers with game-changing inventions, including his patented Wireless Toilet.

Mike Hampton Is the Human Titanic

corby anderson — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 20:45:56 -0400

Mike Hampton is the human Titanic, lugging a shipload of treasure with a paper-thin hull, a penchant for icy water, and a taste for disaster. So take heed, ballfans and paramedics alike, Mike Hampton is back on the mound, for now.

After more than three years of patchwork surgery for ailments more numerous than he would like to admit to, Hampton pitched a Major League Baseball game once more, recently. It didn't go so badly either. Nothing fell off and nothing came apart.

I watched "the Frail One's" return sympathetically, with a can of disinfectant and a pile of sterilized gauze piled high on the couch, and my cell phone in hand, 911-Philidelphia (where his Braves were playing) pre-dialed into my cellular roaster.

It is a rare occurrence to see actual self-dismemberment in the course of a baseball game.

I recall myself as a teenaged baseball fan, watching my Giants plow through a rough stretch in August, the lifeless doldrums of the major-league season. All was well and good, and cast in the golden hue of a teenage summer, when to my zitty dismay, my favorite pitcher, Dave Dravecky, coming back from cancer of the pitching arm, which is not at all the joke that it sounds like, had his left arm snap in half during a pitch.

The startling sound of a chopstick echoed through Candlestick Park. My eyes bulged. I was never the same.

Dravecky had a similar career arc as Mike Hampton. Early success, including playoff victories, and then mid-career crisis, in his case a tumor that claimed much of the muscle in the lefty's moneymaker.

But the preacher needs his pulpit, and the mound called, and pride gives way to no fat, anti-social reliever. For some time, Dravecky's valiant comeback was a success, until….SNAP! Look away! Do not watch the unhinged arm as it dangles to and fro!

Most people watch NASCAR for this kind of sadism, tuning in only for the spinning, flipping, burning, helmet-punching carnage. These are the same people that camp out near high-volume train crossings and secretly pray for some hot car-on-locomotive action to come their way.

They are instant gratificites that number in the thousands and are a sure sign that our society is in deep doodoo. I do not consider myself one of them.

I only watch the races when I am back in my homeland, the tar-stained Kudzu hills of North Cacalacky, and only then because it is the only way to spend any time with my relatives. Wrecks disturb me. I always imagine myself as the giddy guy heading for checkered glory, only to have some young runt plow my fender and spin me into fiery oblivion.

Mike Hampton was once a professional baseball pitcher that got things done. He pitched in key playoff games and won. He faced down the juicers and meat heads of the recent foul era alike and racked up over a hundred wins, earning the reputation of a stone-faced surgeon, a stopper, and a feared competitor that no losing streak wanted to meet in a darkened power alley.

The Colorado Rockies thought so much of his abilities that they gave Mike Hampton an eight-year contract that sill ranks in the top-25 all time fattest in all of sports, signing him to a $121 million contract in the first year of this young century, in hopes that his low-slung cap, fierce gaze, and darting junk could elevate the chronically mediocre franchise to respectability.

In what may have been the biggest blunder in Colorado team-sports history, the Rockies watched as Hampton languished in the thin mountain air, his trademark control vanquished by an atmospheric condition, while his fellow savior, signee Denny Neagle, eventually leapt off of the cliff of sobriety and landed in the seedy ravine of prostitution.

Combined, the contacts of these two pitchers exceeded the gross national budgets of sub-Saharan Africa, and the Rockies faded deeper into the funky dankness of the NL West cellar as a result of their crippling financial gambles.

If not for the freakish development of Generation R, Hampton's gold-rush signing could very well have been responsible for 10 years of cursed gloom and a decade or more consigned to the likes of Neifi Perez and Shawn Chacon.

Luckily, a state Holiday arrived in time for us all to see a glimpse of a hopeful September, a fighting chance.

And his signing was not all bad, of course. Other than giving a decent, if zombie-boned, man hundreds of millions of dollars to lead the Rockies, the team also, in part, helped to develop baseball fields across the state. Hampton's foundation was a big factor in building Basalt's Field of Dreams, which we can all be thankful for.

His first start back did not go that well, by baseball standards. He gave up six runs in four innings to a belligerent Phillies lineup in Philly—home of the bandbox field, a real war zone for NL pitchers these days, with a mortar crew of Ryan Howard, Chase Utley, Pat Burrell, and Jimmy Rollins to contend with.

Similar results came against the resurgent Cards this week. Four runs, five innings.

Neither game came at a loss for Hampton though, personally. Appropriately, in both cases he took a no-decision. But look at the numbers. Is that not a distinct pattern? Is it not safe to calculate that in four short weeks, barring disaster, we should be celebrating a complete game no-hitter!?

Anything is possible, especially in the Dirty South. Let's just hope the wheels don't come off. Or the axles, the gas tank, the crankshaft….

Corby Anderson writes Hang Time for the Aspen Daily News from a Major League Free Trade zone near Oakland, California, where rumor has it that he has just been offered to the Toledo Flatlander for a writer to be named later. Billy Beane thinks that this will be an improvement. Send your comments to: Billy Beane, 7000 Coliseum Way  Oakland, CA 94621