Thoughts While Watching Baseball on a Sunday Night

-- There's an infielder for the Phillies named Pedro Feliz. I just realized tonight that his name is Spanish for "Happy Pedro." He's been in the league eight years; I can't believe I never noticed this before. Why doesn't everybody call him Happy Pedro? Surely I can't be the only person who's noticed this.

-- Starting this year, first and third base coaches have to wear batting helmets for protection. We live in a society where anything worth reacting to is worth overreacting to, and this overreaction is the result of the death of Mike Coolbaugh, a minor league first base coach who was killed by a line drive last year. That death was a tragedy, but it was also a freak accident. There's no reason to think we're about to see a rash of line drives to the heads of base coaches. Meanwhile, about half a dozen pitchers get hit in the head with line drives every year, and nobody's screaming for them to start wearing helmets. I guess they'll have to suck it up until one of them gets killed, so then we can overreact to that.

-- Watching SportsCenter, and Scott Van Pelt is talking about lady pro golfer Lorena Ochoa. He tries to say that she's the first woman to win four straight weeks on the LPGA tour in however long, but it comes out, "She's the first straight woman to win four weeks..." Ha! Freudian.

-- And speaking of ESPN, what's with their week-long freak-out over Miguel Tejada's age? When he was nineteen years old, he told baseball scouts that he was seventeen. ESPN found out about it, and now they're acting like Tejada was the man who ordered U.S. troops into Laos. What lame, pseudo-journalistic posturing. As Shakedownsports says,

It was simply entrapment. Tom Ferry tricked Tejada into lying and then he had the brazeness to keep yelling questions as Tejada left the room.

I guarantee Tejada was led to believe the interview would be about something else. How do you even describe what E60 did. Unethical? Sleazy? Ruthless exploitation?

The last question Ferry yelled was “does the U.S. government know your real name?” He was indirectly implying Miguel Tejada was some sort of terrorist or a threat to the U.S. government. That’s insane. What’s even more insane is millions of people wasted 30 seconds of their lives being exposed to that idea.