Wednesday, March 18, 2009

It's B&B Time...Basketball and Baseball, That Is

At the time of this posting, it's only hours until March Madness officially begins. Oh wait, didn't the NCAA copyright "March Madness"? Did I just open myself to a lawsuit? Oh well, on to multiple sports items.

For those of you who don't regularly read The Washington Post sports page, today's edition had two interesting stories on basketball in the D.C. area. The first story was on the players from the D.C. area who Jay Wright has recruited to play at Villanova. The second story was on the sports program at Alexandria's T.C. Williams High School and how it ties the community together within the Alexandria city limits. (You may remember T.C. Williams from Remember the Titans fame.) T.C. (as it's called around here) has had the dominant boy's basketball team in Virginia's northern region over the past few years and they always seem to put a hurting on my alma mater, Wakefield. (And, Wakefield has consistently fielded winning teams during that same time.)

Love him or hate him, sports talker Steve Czaban has developed this mega-mother NCAA tournament bracket which has just about every piece of information you could possibly need, including the announcing teams and the all important point spreads!

Meanwhile in Florida, Nationals coach Marquis Grissom and instructors Jose Cardenal and Cesar Cedeno were interviewed by MLB.com's Bill Ladsonto. Grissom, Cardenal and Cedeno frankly discuss the defensive play of the Nationals outfield. They voice both their frustrations with the Nationals outfielders and their belief those same players will vastly improve. The three also discuss their own playing careers. Read the piece here.

Nationals shortstop Christian Guzman is day to day with a cut on one of his pinky toes. The Washington Post's Chico Harlan reported the cut was caused by a case of athlete's foot. If that's the case, I guess that means Guzman never got the speech Crash Davis gave Nuke in Bull Durham about making sure you have clean shower shoes.

Finally, there were all sorts of happenings today at the Nationals' camp. Often injured pitcher Shawn Hill was released, pitcher Joe Beimel was signed, and both Lastings Milledge and Ronnie Belliard were injured. Acting GM Mike Rizzo talks about the roster moves here.

Good luck to those of you who are in a tournament pool. The fun starts soon.

2 comments:

  1. The range metrics like Dukes and Kearns, and hate Milledge and especially Dunn. I'll buy that Milledge can improve, given his athletic ability, but you'd think they'd want to keep Dunn where he can do the least damage (i.e. 1B).

    Is the plan Johnson at 1B, and Dunn LF / Milledge CF / Dukes RF until Dukes gets arrested and Johnson hurt, at which point Dunn shifts to 1B, Kearns to RF, and Corey Patterson or someone in LF?

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  2. Correct. Dunn in left until Nick is hurt or traded. To be the devil's advocate, Dunn did make 3 errors at first last night in the WBC.

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