Going For It?

Wednesday's trade between the Mariners and the Pirates can be viewed two ways:

1) Despite being 7.5 games behind the surging Los Angeles Angels of Orange County, the M's still believe they have a chance to contend this year.

2) This was a precursor to an eventual Jarrod Washburn deal. Ian Snell replaces Washburn in the rotation and Jack Wilson shores up a shortstop position that has been manned by glorified bench players all season.

Being an eternal optimist when it comes to the 2009 Mariners, I'd like to believe in the first option (Witnessing the 1995 M's overcome a 13 game deficit also emboldens my feeling that crazier things have happened) .

In Wilson, the Mariners get a slick fielding shortstop who will provide some stability to an area that hasn't had any since long before Yuniesky Betancourt burst onto the scene, swinging at every pitch thrown his way.

Snell seems like a guy who has the stuff to be a legitimate second or third starter on a good team. Unfortunately, he's been stranded in Pittsburgh for his entire career. (The only thing missing from the Pirates is that they don't hire Bill Bavasi as GM. Bavasi might actually succeed in a situation where he doesn't have good players to trade for crappy players.)

Having to include Jeff Clement in the trade stings a little bit. It's like being the guy who was still building his Laser Disc collection long after DVD's hit the market. Clement, the third overall pick in the highly regarded 2005 Draft never showed he could hit major league pitching. Throw in his questionable catching skills and you've got a guy who had lost his place in the organization.

But look at the positive, at least the Mariners didn't draft some kid named Braun from Miami.

For whatever reason, this Mariners team has suffered multiple MJ style cardiac arrests, only to avoid being resuscitated for 30 minutes by some quack doctor from Trinidad.

Before Wednesday's trade, the Mariners starting lineup boasted four players who had spent most of 2009 in AAA (Chris Woodward, Jack Hannahan, Chris Shelton, Ryan Langerhans). Does that sound like a team that should be 5 games above .500 heading into August?

Yet the M's continue to win on guts, guile and superb managing in the clubhouse and in the front office.

The Mariners have 61 games left on their schedule, including 17 against LAAOC and Texas. The season is far from over.

Sidebar:

Yesterday's win against Toronto provided yet another all-time great Griffey moment. With the bases loaded and the M's down 1 in the seventh, Junior steps to the plate with the bases jacked and one out. He's facing Roy Halladay, arguably baseball's best pitcher. Since Junior hasn't hit his weight all season, I'm saying to myself, "Please don't strike out, or get called on an infield fly. Please God. Please don't let this happen".

All Junior does is line a vintage laser shot down the right field line, driving in the tying and eventual winning run. It was a moment I will never forget.

The low gas light has been on for a few miles. Griffey might be close to empty. But being the true legend he is, there have still been plenty of times this season when you realize you are witnessing one of baseball's all-time greats.

Erin Pageviews

Leave it to ESPN, the beacon of legitimate sports journalism (E:60, Who's Now, Fan Feast), to find a way to benefit from having a sportscaster's privacy violated.

If you haven't heard, some Battlestar Gallactica loving perv placed a camera in ESPN sideline reporter Erin Andrews' hotel room. And get this - she was....NAKED!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The truth is this video is the best thing that could ever happen to Andrews career.

Where would Kim Kardashian and Paris Hilton be without their sex tapes? This is essentially Andrews' sex tape.

So ESPN's holier-than-thou response is as laughable as it is hypcritical.

Isn't ESPN saying they won't report on naked Erin Andrews making the story even bigger? What about their move to ban all New York Post staff from programming for running still photos of the video in their newspaper?

Nope. That difuses the situation.

If anyone involved (including Andrews) truly wasn't trying to milk this non-story for all it's worth, they would ignore the entire situation.

This entire melodrama has exploded in large part because of the reactions by Andrews and ESPN.

While it is wholly reprehensible that some tortured pervert decided to put a hidden camera in Andrews' hotel room, it's not like we saw anything groundbreaking. It would be one thing if Andrews was filmed having sex, or if she secretly was a he. But that's not the case.

What we've got is a five minute, grainy video of a hot, naked blonde woman, flat ironing her hair. Great. Now all the Maxim readers have some new masturbation material.

Think millions of people would flock to no-name websites to see Mary Carillo walking around nude? Suzy ("I want to kiss you") Kolber? Andrea Kramer?

If Andrews wasn't the hottest female sports reporter ever, and if ESPN and Andrews didn't go all John Ashcroft in response, nobody would care.

Not Your Superhero

Every professional sport is littered with athletes who hung on for a little too long. You cringe as you see them hobble through a statistically unremarkable final season. Ultimately, it doesn't tarnish their legacy. But those bad memories always lurk in the back of your mind.

Well the same thing happens to TV shows. And two episodes into its sixth season, it looks as if HBO's Entourage is limping around on worn down knees and a bad hamstring.

After recovering from subpar Seasons 3b and 4, Entourage came back strong with a great Season 5 that recaptured the show's original greatness. We'd seen Vinny Chase's star rise, then fall, then seemingly rise again with news that he'd been cast in Martin Scorsese's "Gatsby".

Realistically Entourage could have ended there.

Instead, viewers have been subjected to an hour's worth of a sappy relationship show. Gone are the days of extreme Bromance.

Now we're left to ponder how E went from a 10 with Sloan, to a 4.5 with the E.T. looking, stalker girl he's now decided to pursue. (I realize I shouldn't be so tough on looks. But the show is predicated on vanity. At least cast a hot actress. It's not like Sloan can act).

Entourage flat out sucks right now. Why is Lumbergh a regular cast member? What does he bring to the table? He might be a crappier character than Billy Walsh.

Maybe I'm a little harsh. After all, Entourage remains the only series I've continued to watch long after its premiere episode. I feel this odd maternal loyalty towards upholding its quality.

Ask yourself this - after these two trash episodes, have you laughed once?

Hopefully this is just a slight lull, eventually leading to an intriguing season arc. But for some reason, it seems like this is the year when everyone starts to cringe.

UnHuman Nature

If you watched Michael Jackson's funeral extravaganza last week, then chances are you saw MJ's close, personal friend (pssst...they never met) John Mayer perform a guitar solo of MJ's classic cut from Thriller, "Human Nature".

Because Mayer didn't do enough emotional harm with "Daughters", he had to go along and show the world his orgasmic facial expression while plucking his guitar strings.

Driving in my car the other day, wanting to hear some mellow MJ, I put on "Human Nature". From the first note, I couldn't escape the images from Mayer's guitar solo.

He looked like Andy Samberg in the "Jizz in my Pants" video.

Now I give Mayer credit for compiling a nice list of Hollywood starlets to his dating history. But it's a damn shame he had to potentially make a great song unlistenable.

Halfway Home

At last year's All-Star Break, the Seattle Mariners stood dead last in the AL West with a 37-58 record, 20 games out of first place. Inept manager John McLaren had already been booted. Same goes for Bill Bavasi, their high functioning retard of a general manager. (The team would be far better off if Bavasi made absolutely no personnel moves during his four year reign of terror).

And if those things weren't enough, the players wanted to beat up Ichiro.

The 2008 season was an unmitigated disaster, years in the making. It was painful to watch, more painful to support.

Needless to say, going into 2009, very few had high hopes for a franchise on a five-year downward spiral that seemed destined to result in a battle with the Pittsburgh Pirates and the Kansas City Royals for irrelevancy.

M's CEO Howard Lincoln and president Chuck Armstrong, the two men responsible for crafting a team built on over priced, aging free agents were tasked with righting the ship they aimlessly lead off course.

Ultimate cynics such as myself had little doubt Lincoln and Armstrong would fill their GM vacancy with Kim Ng from the Los Angeles Dodgers - making her the first ever female general manager. The managerial post surely would go to some retread like Ned Yost or Lloyd McClendon.

But the Mariners chose a different path. They hired a guy whose last name nobody could spell or pronounce to be GM.

The GM with the funny name promptly hired a first-time manager who few knew anything about.

Yet over the course of the last eight months, GM Jack Zduriencik and manager Don Wakamatsu have transformed the Mariners from a lock to repeat as AL West losers, to one of the great surprises in baseball's first half.

It hasn't always been pretty (the month of May, Double Stuff Silva, YuBet). But at the half-way point in the season, the Mariners find themselves four games above .500 and only four games out of first place.

Zduriencik masterfully cobbled together a roster full of guys nobody wanted (Russell Branyan, David Aardsma, Franklin Guttierez), or thought they needed (Junior, Mike Sweeney). And Don Wak has made a great argument for Manager of the Year.

Stat heads will complain that the Mariners run differential (348 RS/366 RA) points to a certain drop in the standings. But this team was counted out in March and they're still hanging around.

The Mariners play the game the right way. Theirs is built on solid pitching, slick fielding and timely hitting (most nights). They won't slug teams out of the park. But they will grind out wins.

And with the subtraction of the maddeningly frustrating Yuniesky Betancourt, they no longer have a lackadaisical, free swinging,error machine constipating the lineup.

There's still a lot of baseball to play. With the trade deadline looming, the M's will be forced to make crucial decisions on Erik Bedard, Jarod Washburn and Miguel Batista.

Will they sink or swim? At this point, with multiple players coming into form, there's no reason to think life preservers will be necessary.

This team is for real.

MJ

In the week following Michael Jackon's untimely death, we've learned the following:

• None of MJ's three children are (surprise!) actually his. (How anyone could think otherwise is beyond me. MJ used to be black. Becoming a white man doesn't give him white genes).
• Al Sharpton needs to have his voice box removed.
• Joe Jackson is a bigger opportunist than Speidi.

MJ's death is as tragic as it is intriguing. How someone equally talented and tortured could spend his final years with absolutely no resemblance to his former self, speaks volumes to the severe mental issues MJ dealt with.

What's even more disturbing is that despite the breaking news aspect to it, MJ's death wasn't sudden at all.

There's good reason to believe he suffered from anorexia for at least the last ten years, and possibly much longer. Couple that with his addiction to prescription drugs and you have someone who has been slowly killing themselves for a decades.

One thing that continues to blow my mind is the realization that MJ spent almost half his life as a white man. It's beyond absurd. Imagine looking in the mirror and seeing the complete opposite of what you used to be. It's like me deciding to go "Soul Man" for the next quarter century.

But before the surgeries, Bubbles and Blanket, what originally made MJ famous was the music. Granted, nothing post Dangerous has aged particularly well, in large part due to MJ's voice turning into a glorified grunt.

Regardless, after spending the last few days going over his entire catalog and watching his old videos, it's clear that Michael's contribution to pop culture is unrivaled and will never be matched.

To commemorate his 50 years, I thought it would be fitting to list his 50 best songs.

1. Billie Jean
   
2. I Want You Back (J5)
   
3. Rock With You
4. Remember The Time
5. Maybe Tomorrow (J5)
6. Don't Stop Til You Get Enough
7. Say, Say, Say (McCartney)
8. I Want To Be Where You Are
9. Wanna Be Startin' Something
10. Shake Your Body (Down To The Ground) (Jacksons)
11. The Love You Save (J5)
12. Never Can Say Goodbye (J5)
13. Beat It
14. Who's Loving You (J5)
15. Leave Me Alone
16. Off The Wall
17. Can You Feel It (Jacksons)
18. Smooth Criminal
19. Human Nature
20. Jam
21. P.Y.T.
22. Somebody's Watching Me (Rockwell)
    
23. Scream
24. You Rock My World
25. Ready Or Not (J5)
26. Dancing Machine (J5)
27. Working Day and Night
28. Lady In My Life
29. ABC
30. Blame It On the Boogie (Jacksons)
31. Thriller
32. In The Closet
33. The Way You Make Me Feel
34. This Place Hotel (Jacksons)
35. Tell Me I'm Not Dreaming (Jermaine Jackson)
36. Dirty Diana
37. Blood on the Dance Floor
38. Baby Be Mine
39. Another Part of Me
40. Man in the Mirror
41. You Are Not Alone
42. Torture (Jacksons)
43. I Just Can't Stop Loving You
44. Let Me Show You (Jacksons)
45. Enjoy Yourself (Jacksons)
46. They Don't Care About Us
47. Liberian Girl
48. Whatever Happens
49. Life of the Party (J5)
    
50. Who Is It

A few notes...

*I firmly believe that MJ's voice hit its peak post Thriller, pre Bad. It's like he realized he was the shit and you can hear that. He didn't record much during this period, but almost all his work from this period is great.

*"Say, Say, Say" made up for MJ and McCartney's first duet, "The Girl Is Mine". Undoubtedly the weakest song on Thriller, it should have been titled, "The Boy Is Mine".

*For a guy who never had a sexual experience with a woman, MJ sure had some stage 5 clingers on his hands - Billie Jean, Dirty Diana and Susie ("Blood on the Dance Floor").