Hole Punch Sports

There have been a few great moments for me in baseball this decade: Luis Gonzalez’s bloop single to win Game 7 of the 2001 World Series and defeat the hated New York Yankees; the Red Sox winning the championship in 2004; and, of course, the Colorado Rockies’ run to the World Series in 2007. To be honest, Boston’s first championship of the decade has held up the best. The D-Backs in ’01 finally beat the three-time defending champions when no one thought they could, but the Yankees have never been the same since. It’s easy to take for granted how awesome it is when they lose. The Rockies’ hot streak was out of this world and came with nigh-perfect timing, except for its ending, but it was such a short burst of excitement. It wasn’t like the whole season had been awesome, or the next year was. But Boston’s win is still the stuff of legend. In 2003, they suffered a heartbreaking loss in the ALCS to the Yankees following a surprising meltdown from the once-incomparable Pedro Martinez. The...

Alberto Contador, known best in America as Lance Armstrong’s teammate, won the Tour de France Sunday. It was his second victory in the race, having also won it two years ago. Is finishing third at 37 more impressive than winning it all at 26? Eh, I don’t know. They were both impressive, which, you know, you can usually say about podium finishers on the Tour. Personally I’ve had more fun this year badmouthing Lance, probably because people get so mad about it, but it’s pretty unbelievable he could jump back into it like that. Well, I got nothing else, but didn’t think I should let this pass by…

This is more of a thought than a full-blown post. Thursday Blaine e-mailed me with the news of Mark Buehrle’s perfect game in a 5-0 win against the Tampa Bay Rays . On my way out of work a couple hours later, I saw two co-workers downstairs, one of whom is a big White Sox fan. I asked if he had seen what happened in the game, and he hadn’t, so I urged him to go check a computer. But he just sits down as I start talking to the other guy, so I pull up ESPN.com on my phone and hand it to him, leading to an immediate stream of celebratory swearing. The other guy’s curiosity now piqued, he comes over to see what it is, and I tell him the Sox threw a perfect game. He shrugs his shoulders, completely unimpressed. The next day I the non-fan comes into my office, and he asks if I heard about the baseball game yesterday where nothing happened. Very funny, but it made me think. The boxscore listed an attendance of 28,036 at U.S. Cellular Field Thursday. Of those twenty-eight thousand, surely so...

A concerned reader wrote in to ask why I hadn’t posted about Todd Helton’s 500th career home run. I had similar feelings when I first misread last night’s recaps; turns out Helton hit his 500th career double , and also hit a home run in the eighth inning to break the tie and lead the Colorado Rockies to a 4-3 win over the Arizona Diamondbacks . If you’re looking for video highlights, I like MLB.com’s sadly unembeddable package . Two things. First, five hundred career doubles, while not as cool as the same number of home runs, are incredibly impressive. Helton has been playing for years, sure, but the mark takes a ton of consistency, durability, and skill, and he’s had all three in spades. I can still remember when he first joined the team in 1997, my first year as a Rockies fan; he showed up late in Larry Walker’s MVP season, but showed enough promise to run wildly popular first baseman Andres Galarraga out of town. The Big Cat was beloved in Denver; known best for his hitting (w...

The MLB All-Star Game was tonight and, shock of all, the American League won. The A.L. has now won seven games in a row. Back in ’02? The game ended in a tie. Before that the A.L. had won five more in a row. If it hadn’t been for that public display of spinelessness in 2002, when the commissioner called the game before it was through, surely we’d be looking at a streak equal to that of the NFC’s Super Bowl dominance of the ’80s and ’90s. I wanted to enjoy tonight’s game—I really did—but gosh, they sure made it hard. Strike one: FOX saying the game would start at 6. I remember seeing that and thinking, this game’s not really going to start at 6, but I decided to start watching then anyway. Of course, there wasn’t an actual game on at the time. Yeah, I could stand to be a little wiser, but they could stand to be a little more honest. When I first turned on the game, they were showing President Obama meeting some of the players, and I was thinking, wow, he’s like the biggest star at th...

Microsoft just updated its Silverlight browser plug-in to version 3.0, which adds some new features , my favorite being its ability to leverage your computer’s graphics chip for smoother video playback. You can download it from their Silverlight website . They have a demo of their streaming video up that is just breathtaking if your connection is good enough. Seriously, check it out . Silverlight, as you may remember, was the technology NBC chose for their streaming Olympic videos last year. I just watched a sweet Dwyane Wade-to-Kobe Bryant alley-oop on their site , and it looks just like it did last year, which is pretty good. But can you imagine how sweet it will be if they can get the 2012 stream from London looking half as good as that cartoon? That’d be so cool. I will never feel like waiting for one of NBC’s “Live” broadcasts to hit my TV again.

Just a heads-up in case you didn’t notice the link to the side: I’ve started a new blog, Hole Punch Etc. , for when I feel like posting about stuff that isn’t sports. I figured that would be less annoying than if I just randomly threw stuff on here. So far it only has one post, but I think in the future I will write about a bunch of different topics. It’s pretty open-ended on purpose. Last year I would have written there about the election, I’m sure, and I imagine I’ll put some technology-related stuff on there, but then again I also might just use it to vent about why Transformers 2 was so awful. I’m sure the updates will be sporadic, just like they are here. Anyway, feel free to check it out.

I was just gonna write about this on Twitter , but didn’t know if anyone would see it. (Does anyone read that?) The Broncos are letting you pick your 50th anniversary Broncos team on their website , and it’s AWESOME. (Thanks, Lindsay .) Some of the choices are great. Because I know Elway’s going to win at quarterback, I was tempted to vote for Frank Tripucka (whose No. 18 is one of the team’s three retired jerseys), or maybe Jake Plummer. And now that I know that the all-time team is going to be honored at a Broncos’ game this year, I really, really hope Jay Cutler wins it. But, in the end, I decided I’d rather be part of the 96.2% or whatever who go with Elway. Some positions are really, really hard, because we’re so loaded. It’s funny that the Broncos spent the first part of the decade looking for the next Steve Atwater, who was just one in a long tradition of great Denver safeties (Dennis Smith, Billy Thompson, Austin Gonsulin). Leaving Smith off was tough, but I literally had ...

Many NFL fans knew that already, of course: Ware led the league with twenty sacks last year for the Dallas Cowboys (okay, that last part isn’t very awesome). And it’s not his eighty-plus tackles or his six forced fumbles that make him cool, either. No, what makes DeMarcus Ware awesome is his willingness to go into hiding. Just ask ex-Cowboy Greg Ellis, which is what former Cowboys star Michael Irvin did Wednesday . ‘It's a disgrace when DeMarcus Ware comes off the field just so I can get in the game and when the coaches tell him to come on the field, he tries to hide so I can play,’ Ellis said on Irvin's show. ‘And you're telling me we're trying to win the Super Bowl?’ Seriously? During the interview Wednesday, Irvin asked Ellis to clarify his statement that Ware would take himself out of games. ‘On his own. He would say, 'G, come on.' And I would tell him, 'No, DeMarcus, go ahead, man. You're coming up on your contract year. Don...

Former Nuggets shooting guard Dahntay Jones has agreed to terms on a four-year deal with the Indiana Pacers. Jones was a starter, sure, but his minutes went down each round in the playoffs, and he only averaged 17.5 minutes per game over the entire postseason. So he was really more like a sixth man, except with Chris Andersen and J.R. Smith playing such huge roles off the bench, he was actually the seventh man in terms of PT. He also wasn’t much of a jump shooter even when teams were leaving him open. But he also had a sweet dunk on Erick Dampier in Game Three of the Dallas series, and he was part of one of the memorable moments of the Lakers series when he tripped Kobe Bryant. I was much more concerned about the fate of Chris Andersen this offseason than I was with Jones. I tend to criticize filthy-rich sports owners when they cheap out on teams, but if the NBA salary cap is really shrinking before the 2010-2011 season, then losing Jones is a minor sacrifice. J.R. Smith can st...

John reminded me that longtime Colorado Avalanche center and captain Joe Sakic will retire tomorrow. Like many Coloradans, I started following hockey right around June of 1996, right as Sakic was wrapping up his masterpiece postseason that would earn him the Conn Smythe trophy as playoff MVP. Over the next few seasons his reputation soured a bit among some Denver fans as his postseason numbers often didn’t match his lofty standards, which is sort of hilarious considering he led a Colorado team to the state’s first-ever major pro sports championship. Sakic was outstanding again in 2001, when the team won its second Stanley Cup. I don’t really have any specific Sakic memories, but he’s been a leader and star of the Avs ever since they came to Denver. I want to call him the steady hand to Forsberg’s flash but that’s selling Sakic, who was a spectacular player, way too short. He will be missed.

Hallelujah. Five years. Saw it on ESPN.com , which cites a Denver Post report . To me, this was the biggest question mark of our offseason, and it’s already taken care of. I’m very pleased to see ownership and management step up like this.