I'd Like To Thank You All

"You don't have friends. You have associates." - An associate at my poker game last week

You may want to skip this post, as it's going to be Not Sports and long and not useful. Like a fair number of things I write, it will be for me, not you.

Twenty-plus years ago, when I was a teenager, I started planning events. The first was street hockey, and I'm not sure what prompted the behavior, but soon afterward, I was using my pocket money to buy sticks, a goalie mask, pads and nets, arranging transportation and times to play, and writing out over-the-top e-mails and flyers promoting games. Eventually, the hockey game took on a life of its own, with a standing Friday night game, and I didn't have to do much in terms of organizing it anymore.

I made the error of thinking I was good at planning events.

Hockey was fun and I was better at it than some; I'd play until I couldn't walk. While recovering from games, I'd look to fill up the time with all of my new friends, maybe with Strat-O-Matic hockey games or an offline fantasy league for the NHL. That league actually still exists today, again having taken on a life of its own. While away at school, I started a basketball fantasy league and played in two fantasy leagues for baseball with a couple of the guys from the hockey games.

In all of this, I made the tactical error of thinking that the people I was spending my time with were my friends. They weren't. They were associates -- happy to participate in the single activity, but more than that, no.

After college, I started a rock band and spent the better part of five years recruiting players, audiences, booking agents, club owners, radio DJs, lawyers, A&R and more, more, more to the cause.

Again, it was a simple transaction, but instead of buying into my team activity or my fantasy league, it was to be part of my music. Four studio projects and tens of thousands of dollars later, when it became apparent that the mission was hopeless from a commercial standpoint, I gave it up. People sometimes ask me if I miss it, but not very often now, because no one outside of my immediate family listens to it.

In the transition period between the rock band and having kids, I played golf. Again, there was the recruiting of other players, the sense (if not the reality) of friendship, and the hard cut-off where the activity ended. Once the kids arrived, I more or less put the clubs away under the sense that (a) I wasn't good enough at this to really enjoy it as much as I probably should, and (b) golf's too expensive for a father with bills to pay, especially in California.

For the six-plus years that my immediate family was in California, my work hours increased at busy start ups and my commute got longer. My event-planning more or less stopped, with the exception of trying to get people to go to the occasional Oakland A's game, or in 2004, to try to prevent the second Bush Administration.

I didn't have that much of a social life, partly because we moved three times to accommodate different jobs and locations, partly because I was focused on our growing family, and mostly because I didn't work at it.

Three years ago, I got an offer to come back East, and became the first person in the history of the world to move to New York City for more affordable housing.

I've tried to develop roots here. I started this blog, launched two new fantasy leagues with live drafts, and hosted a monthly poker game. All of it follows the same pattern as before. I recruit, people participate or not, but their commitment is single-event deep.

I'm useful.

Liked, in the Willy Loman sense.

Tomorrow, I turn 40.

It's time to make some changes.

This blog gets first attention. It's updated nearly every day, with what I'd like to think is some reasonably good work, but the marketplace begs otherwise. I don't know what to do about that. I keep thinking that there's got to be some kind of market for what I do, but there probably isn't. The traffic and site usage pattern usage bears that out; the world, for the most part, does not care what I think about the NBA, MLB and NFL.

I'm not quitting. Writers write or they explode. But I am saying that it's going to be different.

How, I'm not entirely sure. I don't need the money so much as to go down the titty image hole. But after 2,142 posts, it's crazy to think that doing more of the same is going to make anyone happy. It's also not as if the usage pattern of the blog is that it's anyone's first read.

So, no more sleep-deprived nights to fill the hole. No more micro-blogs of games. Labels for posts are going to take a walk, since they increase the scroll of the site and I'm not really interested in having that happen anymore.

In all likelihood, you'll get less work but more long pieces. Blogrolling links that have little to do with sports. Stuff that I write just to get out of my head, rather than to get the attention of some linking angel.

The pre-40 Shooter would welcome your comments and feedback on such matters, since you have many other choices to make in Blogfrican reads, and it's not like a writer really wants to antagonize the audience.

The post-40 Shooter?

He'll be turning off the comments (or, well, moderating them), because He. Could. Not. Give. A. Shit.

Play me out, boys.

205 Drop: Top 10 reasons why this MLB season sucks

Today's drop has all kinds of misery, which I'm starting to realize is why the people who read this wildly unpopular blog, well, read it. Go click if you care.

It's going to be a long summer

Tonight in the seventh inning in Cleveland, in the scene of the insect crime that derailed his only playoff experience, Joba Chamberlain reared back in the longest outing of his season and hit 98 on the gun.

The pitch was high and away, in an inning where he'd give up a run, but in many respects, that didn't matter worth a damn. What mattered was that Chamberlain, after two months of mostly iffy performances in the starting rotation, was throwing hard and easy deep into a game, even if it was against a wildly disappointing opponent that he should dominate. What was the point is that Chamberlain wasn't trying to manage his arm, his velocity, or his pitch count, since he had worked economically to get to that point.

The Yankees now find themselves in the position, maybe for the first time in years, of having too many viable starting candidates. CC Sabathia and A.J. Burnett have the money, the pedigree and reasonable results; they aren't going anywhere. Andy Pettitte has the rings, a 5-1 record and a 4.10 ERA; he's not going anywhere. Chamberlain might have the best stuff and has been slowly managed out to actually take the ball in the rotation; despite his past success as a breakout set-up man on a team that could use one, he's not going back to that role, and assuming he stays healthy, really shouldn't.

Which leaves the final two candidates for one chair -- Phil Hughes and Chien-Ming Wang. The former has been good for five out of six starts; the latter was terrible early this year, but seemingly is back on track now and has won too many games over the years to be a long man in the bully. In the long run, someone in the rotation will falter or get hurt, and it's not as if the Yankees are cash-strapped to the point of needing to deal for, say, someone in the pen to strengthen the team's only real weakness.

Meanwhile in the rest of the AL East, the Rays can't stay healthy or effective in the bullpen, the Blue Jays fell apart as predicted by everyone outside of Ontario or with a childlike faith in the power of the Jays' farm system, and the Orioles are, well, the Orioles. (Albeit it with a better everyday lineup than usual.) Which leaves us back to MLB+ Time, as usual in the division, with the Rex Sox a game back and with the inferior everyday lineup -- and when I say inferior, I'm being way too kind. David Ortiz is a corpse, Jason Varitek's bounce-back year is bound to end in tears, Jacoby Ellsbury isn't getting on base, Dustin Pedroia isn't having an MVP year...

Well, far be it for me to root for Boston in this century. At least when the Yankees win, their fans don't ask you to hug them. But four more months of living in this soap opera is going to make me a National League fan, really. (That, and the fact that the Oakland A's may be the very worst team in all of MLB. That's just great, too.)

Now let us all create a non-controversy

So the story in the absence of actual things to talk about was how LeBron James left the playoffs without saying the meaningless platitudes at the end. There's really only two reactions to have this.

1) What an awful spoiled rotten person he is. Boo! He should shake hands like the hockey players do at the end of everything, and the fact that he didn't means the world is going to hell in a handbasket. Hell in a handbasket!

This view is best shown by Michael Rosenberg at (where else for moralizing?) Fox Sports.

"It's hard for me to congratulate somebody after you just lose to them," he said.

I'm with you on that, LeBron. Absolutely, it is hard. Not as hard as, say, putting in 12-hour days at a manufacturing plant, and certainly not as hard as getting laid off from the aforementioned manufacturing plant, but it's hard.

Oooh, playing the laid off card, Michael. Why not go all the way and say it's not as hard as starving to death in abject sub-Saharan poverty? Oh, right, because you're trying to fluff your mouth-breathing readers. Yawn.

2) Who on earth cares? I prefer my athlete to fight to the bitter end of life, the universe, and everything. His refusal to make the pleasantries means that he's just more real than all of these other phonies.

My reaction? Somewhere in the middle. It's not ideal to have the best player in the world look like a sorehead at the end of his playoffs. It's also not very important. As Charles Barkley said lo these twenty years ago, athletes are not (should not be) role models; when they are, that speaks to a long-term deadly failure on the part of the parents. Also, anyone that's idolizing James isn't doing it for his reaction at the end of a season.

Finally, there's this: people who really want to tear down James probably have other issues involved, most of them involving some need to tear down a guy. I don't get that. James isn't an NBA champion; that doesn't mean he isn't the best player in the world, or that the presence of a ring somehow speaks to some moral superiority on the part of the bearer.

In another two weeks, we're going to be calling either Lamar Odom or Rashard Lewis an NBA champion, as if they were an elite player without faults... when Odom is an erratic head case who is one positive marijuana test away from his career ending, and Lewis is an erratic (and wildly overpaid) head case who gives you nothing if his jumper isn't falling, and everything if it is. A ring on the finger doesn't change that for either of them.

Oh, and finally this: in another two days, not weeks, no one will give a damn about James being less than thrilled at the close of his playoff. And, well, a good rule of thumb to live your life is to try not to get bent out of shape by the stuff that isn't going to matter later. So, moving on...

205 Drop: Top 11 consolations for the NBA for Orlando beating Cleveland

Tonight's list is for all of those conspiracy lovers who wanted to run down the Association as being sold out for Kobe and LeBron. So go click and enjoy the slightly new content, or at the very least, in a shorter form.