Starting Five

It’s an early steakateria morning, folks. Sorry for the brief entry.

1. Some Ware, Out There

Honk if you have yet to interview Kevin Ware. Sorry. He seems like a wonderful young man. This isn’t about him. It’s about the race by news organizations to head to Louisville to see which one can out over-sensitive-ize the other to share his story. Meanwhile — and, yes, the videotape does not lie — the more wrenching interview yesterday was the impromptu one that canned Rutgers coach Mike Rice gave outside his home.

Hard. Ware.

Did anyone ask Kevin Ware an actual soup question? Did anyone ask him WHY or HOW he thinks the injury occurred? Even if he replies, “I have no idea” or “It was just a freak accident”, don’t you at least ask? I know I’m in the minority here. We are all supposed to fall over ourselves fawning over the job that Rece Davis did (and I love Rece as much as you do; I have two throw pillows, one that reads “Rece” and the other that reads “Davis”; okay, I have a third that reads “Get Outta Town!” but that’s only because I love Steve Levy’s hair). After all, Kevin did cry. Rece did fine. It’s just that, well, aren’t there still five Louisville starters who have a job to do this weekend who we may want to discuss a little more? And, well, isn’t THIS the height of exploitation? And how much money will Kevin Ware see from this?

2. The New York Yankees will be at least six games under .500 by the end of April. If not by tax day. I’m not sure what the most games NYY have been under .500 during a season since the dawn of the Derek Jeter Era in 1996, but I’m going to fathom that they will break that mark this season. Overreaction after two games? Perhaps. But right now I’d keep Edgar Nunez, Robinson Cano, Curtis Granderson and reliever David Robertson and throw away the rest of the team. And, by the way, how much value is Mariano Rivera when your team trails by three to five runs entering the ninth inning? Oh, and Hiroki Kuroda left with an injury in the second inning. And have you seen how empty the stadium has looked in each of the first two games in the late innings (granted, the weather has been colder than Yankee bats). The current era of NYY ended on the play that Derek Jeter broke his ankle in Game 1 of the ALCS. Everything beyond that is just wishful thinking and avoiding the inevitable.

And they’re only two games out of first place right now!

3. If you are Sports Illustrated, you have a dilemma on Monday. First, you had a terrific story by one of your top smiths of verbiage, Michael Rosenberg, on Tiger Woods. Also, you had one of the more iconic photographs shot in some time. The perfect cover, with clouds in the background that Rembrandt would have liked to have painted.

Pure perfection

The problem? You also have a compelling Kevin Ware story. And you know that your next week’s cover is going to come from the Final Four, so you cannot hold this Tiger cover for a week (and the Masters follows that). So, if you’re SI, you run this cover as a regional. And that cover actually receives more play because all the morning news programs use it when introducing their very special Kevin Ware interview. I feel for the editors of SI on this one. But it’s too bad this Tiger cover is not receiving more attention. It is sublime.

4. I think it is safe to say that Auburn alumna Selena Roberts will not be welcome at any class reunions any time soon.

5. ESPN’s Chris Fowler tweeted this two days ago. I don’t know how he got this photo (maybe this is how). It is “spectacular”, but as a New Yorker, it’s also a little eerie. Haunting. No?

Reserves

Erin Andrews and Michelle Beadle are actually both in New York City this week. However, I don’t see the two of them meeting for lunch at Per Se. Not after this, especially.

C-c-c-c-c-c-c-catfight

Starting Five

1. RICECAPADES at Rutgers

Homer Simpson: “I’m a rageaholic! I’m addicted to rageahol!” If Homer ever did attend an RA meeting, he’d meet Rutgers men’s basketball coach Mike Rice, who’d be tossing a chair at him. Yesterday ESPN’s “Outside the Lines” aired a video that showed Rice devoting far too much of hoops practice to Dodgeball. Except that he is the only player allowed to hurl the balls, and sometimes at players’ heads. Rice also yelled at a player and called him a “(bleeping) faggot.” This at a school where an undergrad tossed himself off the George Washington Bridge in 2010 after his roommate outed him on Twitter.

“We MUST beat Seton Hall!”

As of this moment, Mike Rice is still employed at Rutgers. (UPDATE: Rice has been fired)

Simmer down now. Simmer down. Simmer.

2. Yu Were So Close

The calculus of Yu Darvish losing a perfect game on the last out when pitching against the Houston Astros translates to this: your shot at baseball immortality was broken up by the 9th-position batter in the Astro lineup (Houston moved to the AL this season, so their pitcher no longer bats). His name: Marwin Gonzalez, who hit a screaming grounder right between the legs of Darvish, who fanned 14 batters.

There have been 23 perfect games tossed in MLB history, but six of them took place in the past four seasons (by comparison, there have only been 15 unassisted triple plays turned in MLB history). The last two potential perfect games that went down to the final batter were broken up by dinosaur-denier Carl Everett (Mike Mussina’s) and first-base umpire Jim Joyce (Armando Galarraga’s).

Darvish, pitching in his business formal attire

3. The Los Angeles Lakers retire the number of Shaquille O’Neal, while former teammate Kobe Bryant upstages him with a triple-double (23, 11 and 11) as the Lakers defeat the Mavericks by 20 (Can you dig it?). The win keeps LA tied with Utah for the 8th spot in the playoff race while it all but knocks out Dallas. Kobe delivered a nice, pre-recorded testimonial to Shaq to open the festivities, breaking new ground in the “Nicest thing ever publicly said by one man to another considering that the latter man once asked the former man how his ass tasted.” Fellow Laker Steve Nash, from whom Shaq once pilfered an idea for a TV show (“Shaq Vs.”) when both were on the Suns, was also there. As was Dwight Howard, who is currently inhabiting the role of Orlando Magic-turned-Laker center.

After the ceremony concluded, CBS’ Doug Gottlieb felt the urge to tweet, “Shaq is still all about Shaq.”

You’d forgotten about this era, hadn’t you? Shaq: 8 years in LA, 11 years with 5 other franchises.

In case you were wondering, Shaq is 6th all-time in scoring and 14th all-time in rebounding, and if he’d ever had Kobe’s determination to be the best, he’d be top five in both categories.

Earlier on Tuesday on ESPN, former Laker power forward Kurt Rambis was asked to name the five best Lakers of all time and excluded Wilt Chamberlain from the list. (Magic, Kobe, Shaq, Jerry West, Kareem). That’s a fantastic five, Kurt, but the Big Dipper is No. 5 all-time in scoring and No. 1 in rebounding. He’s in the top five, if not the top one. (And Harvey Pollack, who has only been an NBA employee since 1946, agrees with me).

4. So it turns out that Kathie Lee and Hoda are not the closest female duo on the Today show. Oh, no. Recently Weekend Today anchor Jenna Wolfe, 39, and NBC foreign correspondent Stephanie Gosk, 40, revealed that they have been a couple for three years and that Wolfe is pregnant. Back to you, Matt.

Stephanie Gosk: Pants Wearer

5. This is the lineup for Coachella, which begins next weekend (go ahead and peruse it, and then come back to me here in an hour). Old Fart alert here, but would Coachella be better if you cut the number of bands in half and had those remaining bands play sets that were twice as long? The godfather of Coachella, as far as California-based concert festivals go, was the US Festival (the judges will also accept the Monterey Jazz Festival, which began in 1958), whose lineup included just 20 bands, but among them were Tom Petty, Fleetwood Mac, The Ramones, The Cars and The Grateful Dead. Again, noted, this is an Old Fart item (if you get a chance, check out the lineup from the inaugural MJF; pretty sick) (also, note that the US Festival was a “Labor Day Weekend show” that included Jimmy Buffett, so what better way to listen to “Come Monday” ).

That horrible feeling when your favorite band is about to take the stage and you realize you need to take a dump

Reserves

The New York Knicks won their 9th straight versus a Miami Heat team that sat LeBron, D-Wade and Mario Chalmers. More notably, Carmelo Anthony scored 50 points without ever attempting any shot from closer than 15 feet. So, yeah, his ankle is still bothering him and, yeah, the Heat might have done a better job making adjustments.

This is Holly Sonders, and she just may persuade you to obtain a subscription to Golf Digest. Or even watch The Golf Channel. Either way, I don’t see Holly being relegated to the fringes of cable sports TV for very long.

Sonders has duffers working on their –wait for it — schwing

Do your want your son or daughter to grow up knowing how to properly shoot a basketball and not be “a chucker” ? Then send him or her to the Mike McCollow Fundamentals Basketball Camp. Seriously. This man has tutored Sam Mitchell and Jon Leuer, among many others.

Pac-12 commissioner Larry Scott appears on ESPN Radio with Scott Van Pelt and announces, in regards to Ed Rush, that “I’m not a ‘fire the guy’ kind of guy.” Most sports journalists adamantly believe that Scott must fire Rush if for no other reason than to disassociate the league with even the perception of officiating impropriety. Here’s my column on the story. Here’s Gary Parrish, from CBSSports.com. Over at ESPN.com, Eamonn Brennan agrees. So does Andy Glockner at SI.com. Want a contrarian view? Read Bryan Fischer. And for whom does Bryan write? Hmmmm. It is not that Bryan does not make some good points, and as a former CBSSports.com staffer, he has a well-deserved, solid rep — it’s that, as a voice for the state-run organ, does he have any choice other than to take this side?

Larry Scott is demonstrating managerial skills more akin to Michael Scott

The Pittsburgh Penguins finally lose after 15 straight wins. Sydney Crosby had no comment.

Spend the summer in Colorado. Get in the best running shape of your life. And earn college credit. Where do I sign up?

The readers of Rolling Stone vote on the “10 Best Fleetwood Mac Songs.” Not on the list: “Second Hand News”, “You Make Loving Fun” and, shockingly, “Don’t Stop.” Granted, that last tune has been played to death, but if you were alive in 1975, it was THAT tune that launched the band into stratospheric success. You can make an argument, I guess, that Fleetwood Mac recorded 10 better songs than “Don’t Stop” (“You Make Loving Fun” would definitely be ahead of it on my list), but it almost seems that voters went out of their way to deny its value. My top three: “Go Your Own Way”, “Landslide”, “Silver Springs” (the last of which was left off Rumours because Mick Fleetwood told Stevie Nicks, who penned it, that they didn’t have room for it).

Music’s true Mac daddies

Dear Axe Apollo: The astronaut campaign just isn’t working for me. It’s not 1969, by the way. Maybe if we had a space program.

Both 2012 Cy Young Award winners (David Price, AL; R.A. Dickey, N.L.) lost in their season debuts yesterday.

A punishment worse than death? Only in the Middle East. Hammurabi approves, by the way.

Bummer: Cancer has returned for Roger Ebert, who has only become more prolific since it robbed him of his ability to speak and even eat or drink a few years ago. Few, if any, writers over the age of 50 have embraced the internet as zealously as has Ebert. Last year he wrote over 300 film reviews.

New York Yankee second baseman Robinson Cano ditches Scott Boras as his agent (Yay!) in favor of Jay-Z. Newphemism alert: niggotiate!

 Remote Patrol

San Francisco Giants at Los Angeles Dodgers

ESPN 10 p.m.

The World Series champs and Chavez Raviners have split the first two games of the series, with both teams winning by shutout. El Gigantes will hand the ball to Tim Lincecum (10-15, 5.18 ERA last season), who last October discovered that he was actually a superb middle reliever (who knew?). Through two games no Giant fans have been beaten senseless in the Dodger Stadium parking lot, so that’s progress.

Is probably bummed that he will be unable to attend Coachella next weekend when SF is in CHI (but will he fly down from SF the following weekend?)

Starting Five

1. Ed T. Rush (the “T” stands for “Technical”) must go.

The Pac-12 Director of Officiating joked about giving referees $5,000 or a trip to Cancun if they gave Arizona coach Sean Miller a technical foul (which in fact they did, infamously) or “ran him” during the Pac-12 tourney in Las Vegas, according to this excellent piece of reporting by Jeff Goodman of CBSSports.com

This should be the lead story in sports this morning. Judges don’t joke, “Well, you LOOK guilty” and airline pilots don’t joke, “Hey, I think the right wing just fell off.” Likewise, referees don’t joke about being partial, and certainly directors of officiating do not.

Rush T’ing up Atlanta Hawk coach Richie Guerin back in 1970. I think Richie’s upset.

Pac-12 commissioner Larry Scott must fire Rush — immediately.

Background: Rush, a Philadelphia native, became an NBA official in 1966 at age 24. In the past 30 years an inordinately high number of refs have hailed from the Philadelphia area — three from Cardinal O’Hara High School alone — and some of them have been the league’s more notorious refs. Joey Crawford, who tried to bait Tim Duncan (that incorrigible delinquent) into a fight and Tim Donaghy are just two. Those two, like Rush, became NBA refs before their 32nd birthday. Highly unusual.

When, in 2007 I wrote a story marking the connection between Donaghy and the preponderance of Philly area refs, and noted that Rush was also from the City of Brotherly Love, Mark Cuban wrote me an email that read simply, “You are so close.” Last night Cuban, who was once fined $500,000 for saying that “Ed Rush is the most powerful man in the NBA”, reacted to Goodman’s piece by tweeting, “Not surprised. It will get worse.”

This should, and likely will be, a much bigger story by week’s end. Once more referees feel courageous enough to speak.

2. It was Tom Boswell who wrote, “Time begins on Opening Day.” It was Tom Bosley who said — as Mr. C. — , “Marion!” (“Are you getting frisky, Howard?”). Anyway, happy days are here again now that baseball has returned. Notes and trivia from Opening Day:

Chicago Cubs pitcher Jeff Samardzija became the first man we know of to start and win an Opening Day game (eight shutout innings and nine K’s versus the Pirates in Pittsburgh) who is also a former first-team All-American in college football. Worth noting that the Shark’s coming-out party as a college gridder also occurred in Pittsburgh, in the stadium right next door to PNC Park. Samardzija had three catches, one for a TD, in Notre Dame’s 42-21 pummeling of Pitt. Until that opener of his junior season Samardzija had been a forgotten man on the Irish bench…

Samardzija briefly held the school record for career receptions

With yesterday’s win, Shark is now 22-22 in the majors.

The Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim struck out 17 times and still won, 3-1, at Cincy. It’s the most strikeouts a winning team has had on Opening Day in the Live Ball era…Has anyone at Citi Field handed Mets rookie pitcher Scott Rice a copy of erstwhile Met pitcher R.A. Dickey’s memoir, “Wherever I Wind Up”? Rice, 31, spent 14 years in the minors and played for 18 different teams before finally making his Major League debut yesterday during the Met’s 11-2 (sports verb alert!) drubbing of the Padres. The (sports term alert!) southpaw threw a 1-2-3 inning, whiffing two… The Mets scored 11 runs but cleanup hitter Ike Davis went 0-for-5 with four strikeouts…Jose Iglesias of the Red Sox became the first player in 14 seasons to have three infield hits on Opening Day; I’m not amazed by Iglesias’ three hits, I’m amazed that someone actually would be able to access that stat… The Yankees used the Star Wars theme during pre-game player production. The film is 37 years old, or the mean age of the Yankees. Seriously: Mariano Rivera (43), Andy Pettitte (41), Derek Jeter and Ichiro Suzuki (39), Hiroki Kuroda (38), Alex Rodriguez (37), and Travis Hafner and Lyle Overbay (36). All Yankee games will air in past-their-primetime this season… On the other end of the scale, Bryce Harper became the youngest player in MLB history to bash two home runs on Opening Day. That was all the scoring Stephen Strasburg needed in the Nats’ 2-0 win… Clay Kershaw of the Dodgers became the first pitcher since Bob Lemon in 1953 to throw a shutout and hit a home run in the season opener (and Kershaw’s HR came in the 8th of a 0-0 game) while the Red Sox’ Jackie Bradley, Jr., (the Martin Short joke quota has already been surpassed) became the first player ever to record three walks and an RBI in his MLB debut.

That’s Jackie ROGERS, Jr., and he won’t be patrolling the Green Monster this season.

3. USC names Andy Enfield its new basketball coach, giving the Trojans an unbeatable one-two punch of coaches’ wives (Layla Kiffin and Amanda Enfield). Let’s note that Enfield was an NCAA-record 92.5% FT shooter at Johns Hopkins, but UCLA’s new coach, Steve Alford, was an 89.8% FT shooter, a two-time consensus All-American, an NCAA champion, AND he weathered a season of John Feinstein following the Hoosiers. To me, that’s more impressive.

Their first date ended at a Taco Bell. Now he’ll get to introduce her to Del Taco.

4. Over at The Daily Show, host Jon Stewart notes, with a certain degree of alarm, that Egyptian “television presenter” Bassem Yousef, whose show pokes fun at the president, has been arrested for insulting the president. Yousef’ specific crimes were making fun of President Mohammed Morsi’s funny hats and his mangling of the English language. As Stewart noted, referring to the years 2001-2009, “I made my living doing that for eight years.” Attempting to assuage Morsi’s fears that a comic’s quips could in any way destabilize his power, Stewart said, “Silencing a comedian doesn’t qualify you to be president of Egypt. Just…president of NBC.”

Watch the video, which meets the shows high standards for wit and insight. Even the title of the segment, “Viva Hate”, is a good pun on Morsi/Morrissey.

5. “Introducing a monocle…for dogs.” They’re right, this was an outstanding April Fool’s joke.

Reserves

UConn advances to the Final Four with a 30-point win versus Kentucky. The Huskies have won their four NCAA tourney games by an average of 37 points so, yeah, I think Geno has them focused after that Big East title game loss to Notre Dame. The Huskies advance to a record-sixth consecutive Final Four.

Trail Blazer rookie Damian Lillard returns to the state that was home to him during college (Weber? No, Utah) and buries three three-pointers to bring his season total to 169. That’s an NBA rookie record. Yes, he’s your Rookie of the Year.

Hong Kong International Airport has a movie theater. I’ve never understood why every major airport doesn’t have at least one movie screen. Sure, most travelers have tablets now, but wouldn’t you still pay to sit inside a theater to help kill a five-hour layover? “Now playing, a double feature: ‘Flight’ and ‘The Terminal’.” (by the way, Changi Airport in Singapore has a pool).

Remote Patrol

UEFA Champions League Quarterfinals

Bayern at Juventus

Paris Saint-Germain at Barcelona

Fox Soccer and FoxSportsNet 2:30 p.m.

Three of these legendary sides (Bayern, Juve and Barca) are former Champions League champions. Barcelona possesses the world’s best player (Lionel Messi) while Bayern has the sport’s best name: midfielder Bastian SCHWEINSTEIGER!”

I said, “The first round at Hofbrauhaus is on me!”

xxxx

Starting Five

1. “LOUIE, LOUIE, LOUIE, LOUIEEEE….VILLE”

Within a span of a couple of hours on Easter Sunday night, both the Cardinals men’s and women’s basketball teams created tremors in their resepective NCAA tourneys. First, the No. 1 seeded men found themeselves tied at 42-42 with  No. 2 seed Duke at the 16-minute mark only to outscore them 43-21 the rest of the way. They advance to their second consecutive Final Four.

It was that type of night for Griner

The No. 5 seeded-women pulled off the biggest shocker of either tournament, dethroning No. 1 Baylor, the defending national champion, 82-81. The Bears had won 74 of their previous 75 games and beaten their first two opponents in the tourney by 42 and 38 points, respectively. How did the Cardinals do it? By shooting an outrageous 64% from beyond the arc (16 of 25) and going all African fire ant on Baylor’s 6-8 physical marvel, Brittney Griner, whenever she stepped into the post.

History will show that Baylor went 74-2 in the final two seasons of Griner’s career (and that of Odyssey Sims, who had 29 points in the defeat). Both losses came this season, to the Cardinal of Stanford and the Cardinals of L’ville.

Thus endeth the career of Griner, who finishes 111 points shy of breaking Southwest Missouri State’s Jackie Stiles’ NCAA career-scoring record. Had the Bears gone all the way to the championship game –three more contests –that prize would have been in reach.

Jackie Stiles: 3,393 points

Brittney Griner: 3,282 points

2. WHO. WHAT. HOW. WHEN. WHY. AND WARE.

Of course, the indelible moment of yesterday’s contest occurred when Louisville’s Kevin Ware broke his lower right leg in two places, a gruesome sports moment that belongs in the Joe Theismann/Marcus Lattimore/Randy Livingston/Lindsay Vonn pantheon of the Hall of Pain. Ware broke his leg while landing awkwardly after leaping to block a jump shot by Duke’s Tyler Thornton. Ware never touched anyone else. The break released a torrent of tweets, of course, and was itself a spark in terms of how the media handles, well, everything:

1) SB Nation tweeted: “We’ve made an executive decision not to gif that Kevin Ware injury.” (If you want to know how far –although in what direction, I might ask?– sports journalism has traveled in the past 15 years, just reread that sentence to someone from 1998. It’s a foreign language). Dan Wetzel replied on Twitter — well, I cannot tell you exactly what Dan tweeted, because he has since deleted his Tweet (OWN YOUR ERRORS!!!), but it was something akin to, “Do they want a cookie?”

No, it’s not pretty.

2) Pete Thamel of Sports Illustrated won friends in the Commonwealth and elsewhere when, only minutes after Ware suffered the horrific injury, he tweeted out a link to a story he had written for the New York Times that revolved around Ware’s recruitment.

3) CBS, which on Thursday demonstrated how sensitive it is to whatever Twitter’s prevailing mood happens to be (hello, Mr. Barkley), chose not to re-air even one replay of Ware’s injury at halftime, even though it was certainly the most eventful moment of the first half, if not the tournament.

4) SI’s “Extra Mustard” column had an entire story about Kevin Ware-related tweets without ever mentioning Thamel’s. The piece had 39 tweets — two by Thamel himself — and yet not THAT tweet. That’s like a synopsis of the Old Testament that never mentions Abraham.

5) Finally, immediately after the injury occurred, while most of us viewers were still unaware of what had happened, CBS showed an overhead shot of three Louisville players (none of them Ware) sprawled in the free throw lane as if they had all just been mowed down by a hit-and-run vehicle (go to the :23 mark). I wondered if two of them had collided. It took a few seconds to realize that the trio were reacting to the injury they had just witnessed. That aerial view, whether or not the CBS producer who cut to it intended it or not, was one of the most provocative and poignant shots I have ever seen.

My Thoughts: They dovetail pretty much with those of Clay Travis, who had his up first last night. Let’s tackle Thamel first. I honestly don’t think Pete was attempting to be self-promotional — he works for SI now, for one, and this is a story from his tenure at the New York Times — as much as he is guilty of being tone-deaf. Yes, Jason Whitlock, nobody died, but it was still an awful moment for Ware. That Pete found a link to his old story and then tweeted it out at the speed of, well, Peyton Siva, is a huge, huge tell about where his priorities rest. I really just think he was trying to provide more information. But that tweet revealed far more about Pete than it did about Kevin Ware…

…AS for CBS, they blew it. Nobody needs to see the torture porn that SportsCenter is oft-guilty of committing when it comes to epic moments no matter who is the victim (How many times did they air Jadeveon Clowney’s ht in the first days of January?). But at halftime CBS took the supposed high road by not even showing the replay of the injury once. This was huge news and CBS is choosing not to show it? Why? So as not to unleash a Twitter backlash and then Charles Barkley will have to come on later and remind us, yet again, to get ourselves a life (because watching basketball for a living and opining on it apparently means that you have a life)? CBS should have had Greg Gumbel inform viewers that they were going to show this, once, that the footage was graphic in nature and so that we should not watch if we did not want to toss our Honeybaked hams, and then air it. And react to it. CBS abrogated its responsibility here.

…I’m even more disturbed by those in sports media who are saluting SBNation, USA Today, and CBS for not re-airing either the gif or clip of Ware’s injury. I’m quite certain that those of you who share my sentiments feel every bit as bad about Ware’s catastrophic injury as those people do. But we recognize that news is news.

…Finally, if you’ve ever stood on a raised basketball court inside a football stadium (as last night’s court, at Lucas Oil Stadium, was), you quickly get an appreciation for an altered frame of refrence. The closest analogy I can make is being on a trampoline and, when you leap, being keenly aware of how close you are to leaping off the edge. I have no idea if that altered frame of reference has anything to do with why Ware landed as awkwardly as he did. Perhaps not. I know that other players have suffered gruesome leg injuries when that was not a factor. I guess we’ll never know. But I don’t discount the possibility.

3. Happy Anniversary to Bobby Petrino and Jessica Dorrell, and to the motorcycle ride that shook up the SEC West. As Coach Petrino can now tell you, curves are a dangerous thing to navigate.

Easy, riders.

4. The man whom sports fans saw on-air more often than any other talking head last month? It’s not complicated. It was the AT&T pitch man, whose name is unknown to most. Until now. He’s Beck Bennett, 28, an alumnus of both New Trier High School (located in the John Hughesian North Shore suburb of Wilmette, Ill.) and the University of Southern California. Here’s Beck and a pal from his comedy troupe, Theatre of Life, pulling a Mystery Science Theater 3000 at the Strand at Venice Beach.

“I’m watching this.”

5. It’s Opening Day of baseball season (pipe down, Astro fans) and it’s April Fool’s Day, and so I’d direct you to a link of Jason Gay’s classic 2007 piece for GQ, “The Boy of Summer”, if I could find it anywhere on-line. Very sorry that I cannot. If any of you do, please send it along and I will link it. Simply outstanding, and it fooled some huge names in the sports media biz.

RESERVES

She cannot get into her dream school, perhaps, but Suzy Lee Weiss did get published in the Wall Street Journal. So she has that going for her, which is nice.

Game of Thrones meets Game of Throws. Winter is here! Spring is here! The third season of Game of Thrones premieres just an hour or so after the first pitch of the 2013 baseball season. Lots of gruesome deaths and all, but notice that every Lannister and Stark child still lives.

Kaleesi, stop dragon my heart around

REMOTE PATROL

Opening Day

ESPN 1 p.m. to midnight

Last Friday: Pray. Bawl. Today, Monday: Play ball! Let the true start of spring –and summer! –begin.