Your Blog Request Fulfilled

By Amstelboy's request, I did some due diligence* on the following topics. As always, my judgment is absolute, and final.

1. Freddy Adu joins Benfica

Freddy Adu, the overhyped teenage soccer phenom is on his way to Portugal to play for Benfica. This is a good opportunity for him, playing in a second tier European league but for a team that will play in European competition. Actually it's more like tier 2A for Portugal and the Netherlands, with a Tier 1B above them that has the French Ligue Un and everybody in the German Bundesliga besides Bayern Munich in it. Tier 1A is Spain, Italy, and everybody from England except Spurs, who mathematically can't win anything until 2011 (do the math). I'll put Russia, Greece, Scotland, and Belgium in Tier 2B at present, and maybe a 2C with Turkey, Ukraine, and the Czech Republic, regular contributors to the CL who would be upwardly mobile in good years. But anyways, Benfica is a good spot to find out if he's any good, because he'll get playing time, and if he's any good he'll play some European games in the CL or UEFA Cup, and won't get buried on the bench like Landon Donovan and Claudio Reyna did in Germany.

An American player in a comparable situation was DaMarcus Beasley who played in the Champions League semi-finals for PSV Eindhoven, who has since moved on to Rangers, another tiny league superclub like Benfica or PSV. When Rangers got Reyna from Wolfsburg, my impression is he was like they stereotypical American soccer jock, a big fish in a small pond who pictures himself as a playmaker through which the chi of his team flows. Talented, but not aggressive, always in midfield because he has to touch the ball but isn't a finisher. There's a breed of world class midfielder who stamps his mark on a game: a fantasista like Zidane from the middle, a striker like Henry or a mezzapunta like Francesco Totti from up top, or wingers like Beckham with his crosses or a Franck Ribery with his long runs last summer for France... lots of ways to do it, if you're that kind of chi-focal player, and that's how the coddled soccer jock imagines himself. Then there's a different breed of world class midfielder, including linchpin players like Clarence Seedorf and Andrea Pirlo who switch the whole team from defense to attack, and versatile defensive midfielders like Patrick Vieira, Edgar Davids, and Roy Keane who were tough as nails but could roam both ends of the field.

While Reyna was not in the class of the players I've mentioned as archetypal, it seemed that he went to Rangers as a soft soccer jock imagining himself as a Zidane-style fantasista, and they made him into a holding midfielder, a supporting role that required him to be tougher and play off of other people. When he was fit enough to play in the 2002 World Cup, the US team had the middle of the field locked up with Pablo Mastroeni as ballwinner and John O'Brien as distributor, both playing supremely well, so there was some expectation that Reyna as the Captain and darling of US Soccer would screw that up. came in to play on the right side of midfield, and immediately made an impact as an aggressive presence on the wing. My opinion is he became a much better player for getting an opportunity that made him stretch himself at Rangers, as did arguably John O'Brien when he got playing time as a defender at Ajax. The two bad situations are the two Landon Donovan has found himself in: too good to need to push himself in California, and not needed enough to get playing time in Germany.

So hopefully Freddy Adu gets slapped around in Portugal where nobody cares if he's Freddy Adu, but gets an opportunity that challenges him. But all in all, youth phenoms have a poor track record at the top level... if you look at some of the teenage phenoms who've blossomed, like Cristiano Ronaldo, or Cesc Fabregas, or Nicholas Anelka back in the day, they weren't making their bones in U-17 World Cups and playing for youth teams, they were signed with big clubs (Manchester United, Arsenal, and Arsenal, respectively) and playing for their countries' senior national teams (Portugal, Spain, and France, respectively) by the time they warranted so much hype. So let's see what he does outside of second flight football when nobody gives a shit about his marketing deal.

2. Kevin Garnett Trade Rumors

There are no Garnett Trade Rumors, he's gone. Speculation is Kevin McHale still loves the Celtics, because in two trades, he did more to help them rebuild than anybody in the last 15 years. They have a core of veteran all-stars, the Timberwolves now have some young talented players, some expiring contracts, and a couple draft picks back to replace the various ones McHale gave away (including the Celtics giving back the one they got in our last trade). The most important part of the deal for cynics is the Wolves get under the luxury tax threshold and save Taylor some money, and for the optimists, that while we'll suck next year, we get to rebuild a team with a new identity not based around jump shots, and one more good trade could pretty much clear out the rest of the garbage.

3. All Things Cub

Is 99 the Cubs lucky number, is the Hope Train leaving the station for Clark and Addison or are they the ninja loan of Midwestern baseball, due to shinobi their way out of the playoff race in September? They may make the play-offs, provided no naive bankers with too many stamps in their passport don't pay attention to the game, pull a Bartman, and haul in a critical foul-out as a souvenir. However, while they may lead the NL Central (the subprime mortgage market of Major League Baseball) the Brewers just had a rough patch and are 0 games back, and the wild card race is distinctly unfriendly, with the Cubs and like 3 others tied for second. Are they clutch? Are they a team of destiny? Their Pythagorean win total at this point in the season is 61, while their actual win total is 57. For those of you whose statistical training didn't include the Pythagorean theorem (no, not the one with the triangles from 8th grade) that's a sophisticated system somebody drew up on a cocktail napkin to predict a team's record based on their offensive and defensive productivity. Even after the walk-off wild pitch in their last game, the Cubs are under-performing slightly, which means they lose close games... not good for a tight play-off run. Then again, maybe it means they're due to pick up four more wins and pull ahead in the NL Central.

The long-awaited sale of the Cubs by the Tribune did have some interesting fall-out. One of the Cubs suitors is Mark Cuban, and White Sox owner Jerry Reinsdorf is expected to oppose his purchase of the team, despite an OBVIOUS conflict of interest. Cuban is the guy most likely to "get" the appeal of the Cubs, which ironically makes him the perfect guy to own the White Sox. Cuban bought the hapless Dallas Mavericks and turned them into a major success as both a contender and a profitable contributor to the NBA, and stated that his philosophy in doing so was that the Maverick's product was not basketball, it was "sore throats". Unable to insure victory, Cuban tried to make sure the experience of a Mavericks game was a good one for paying customers regardless of the outcome of the game, with a competitive team and energetic atmosphere, so everybody left with a sore throat from cheering. This is how the Saint Paul Saints came close to outdrawing the Minnesota Twins in the mid-90s, by making a day at a Class C game more fun than the MLB game at the other end of the #3 bus line. The experience of a day at Wrigley is an American legend, and my Dad still has the scorecard from his first Major League game at Wrigley Field back in the 50's. The Cubs stink because they can... nobody cares and they won't go out of business, because it's still fun to be a Cubs fan. The Black Sox have traditionally only had two real lures: winning teams, and the best food court in the majors (allegedly). My cousin (a Cubs fan) tells me Black Sox fans describe themselves as political, staying away to protest managerial decisions and make their displeasure known, which is kind of a sophisticated way of saying they're fair weather fans who don't really even want to watch their own team half the time. Frankly, the experience of being a Black Sox fan doesn't sound all that much fun, eating churros while the Piranhas from Minnesota nip away bases and having to listen to endless Shoeless Joe jokes (like me continuing to call them the Black Sox after 88 years).

And that addresses your last Cubs question, about rebuilding the stadium. For the Cubs, Wrigley Field is their product. It's the CDO^2 of baseball tickets, all risk has been heavily diversified out of the product. They can renovate a bit, open up new revenue streams with a club and luxury boxes, a discrete new stand, but some places are special. The Knicks survived leaving the Mecca of Basketball (the old Madison Square Garden) but it helped being the crown jewel of the city that has an unbelievable cradle of basketball legends across the East River, but the Celtics never recovered from leaving the Boston Garden. If they did something truly tragic, like moving the Cubs to a soulless, gargantuan new facility in Evanston or Skokie where they had a development deal, they'd quickly become a curiosity, lose mindshare to the Black Sox, and the mystique would continue to surround the field and the history of the club, but the ability to step back in time to a pre-Vietnam, or even a pre-WWII America would be lost, and that's what they're packaging and selling at 1060 W Addison.

4. Skol! Let us drink from the skulls of our enemies!

Ever since the debacles of 1998 and 2000 I've been unable to commit to being wildly optimistic about the Vikings season, because I know my emotional state is too fragile to leave it in Ragnar's hands. They may be better than last season, and they could hardly be less watchable, but the major flaws may still remain: no passing game, and no pass rush, leading to horrors like the Patriots game last year. I'm still irritated with my ex-girlfriend from Connecticut over that game, and we broke up 12 years ago... it produces that level of irrational bitterness, which is why I have to manage it carefully. With our weak implementation of the Tampa-2 defense exposed and not a single reliable receiver to revive our weak implementation of the West Coast Offense, we're screwed, that's your Vikings outlook, so you can go ahead and hop on the Bears bandwagon early, Amstelboy.

5. Triathlons and Tattoos

The Singapurrr triathlon is an experience I can only imagine. What is it, running, running while being caned, and swimming in salt water with sharks circling your raw, bleeding fresh caning wounds? How does it compare with the Chicago triathlon, where take your bike on the red line to 95th street, ride it north until it gets stolen, then run like hell until you get stabbed and thrown into the river, with a finish line in Indiana where your body washes up on the shore? I'll stick to the Minnesota triathlon: 30 miles by dog sled, 5 miles on foot chased by wolves, and eating deep fried candy bars at the state fair until you throw up, and then we all celebrate with a glass of root beer milk from Senator Boschwitz's milk stand. In the relay my team's a dead lock for the gold... I marked every tree in northern Minnesota until I'd established my alpha status amongst the native wolf population, and the Captain is like the Eddie Merckx of eating deep fried candy bars.

*-By due diligence, I mean I thought about each topic for upwards of a minute before forming my opinion, and made occasional trips to wikipedia to verify small details I couldn't bluster over.