Monday Links and E-Mail

Ricardo Rodriguez continues his bid for the rotation with a great outing …

Lebreton on Cordero, Pedro …

From the Rangers Blog, A solid essay on Hank Blalock’s production …



Carl Edwards nips Jimmie Johnson at the line …

Down the backstretch, Edwards kept inching closer. But Johnson was still clear as they came through Turn 3 and into the final turn. Off the final corner, Johnson came back down off the high line he'd tried the previous time around. That left Edwards just enough room to get outside of the No. 48 Chevrolet, and from that point it was a drag race.

Edwards won it by 28 one-thousandths of a second - maybe two feet.

"I am disappointed, I hate losing," said Johnson, who could perhaps find consolation in the fact that his fourth straight top-five finish of 2005 leaves him 82 points ahead of Biffle in the points standings - even with the 25-point deduction he suffered for a rules violation found in inspection after his win last weekend at Las Vegas.

Knight twists off on Indiana …

Kravitz says to not get carried away on Knight …



Duncan hurts ankle …

Golf coach in big trouble after hiding in ceiling of girl’s lockerroom …

A Parrott Middle School golf coach was arrested Friday, accused of hanging from the ceiling in the school gymnasium and watching a 20-year-old female gym teacher and two students undress.

Dan Madril, 39, of 2507 Ambassador Ave., in Spring Hill, faces three counts of voyeurism, all misdemeanors. He was being held in the Hernando County Jail Friday with bail set at $1,500, a jail spokeswoman said. The Hernando County School Board suspended Madril without pay on March 16.

He is currently still under investigation by the school board, officials said.
Detective Carlos Douglass of the Hernando County Sheriff's Office wrote in a report that on March 9, a 20-year-old gym teacher at the school entered an equipment room in the school gymnasium in order to retrieve a jump rope.

The lights were off, so she did not see anything.

Realizing she had the wrong jump rope, she went back and heard a noise above her head, the report said. She turned on the lights and saw Madril climbing down from a shelf leading up to the ceiling, Douglass wrote.

After asking why he was in the ceiling, Madril told the teacher he was going to scare her and two other students by throwing basketball at them.

The teacher told authorities that Madril did not have a basketball in his hands.
Just before the incident, the teacher had just been to the bathroom and an 11-year-old student and a 13-year-old student were changing clothes.

From the position of where Jensen was in the ceiling, he could observe the female locker room and showers, authorities said.

Doug Christie’s wife, Jackie’s website: Jackie Christie.com …

Napoleon Dynamite at the X-Games …

West Wing back for Season 7? …

Buy Pedro’s House if you don’t mind living in Idaho…

Best Comedy movie of all-time? …



Thanks to Gerrard (above), Liverpool overcomes Milan Baros’ poor decision to take a red card …

And now, some killer E-mail:

Hey Bob, do you remember that article, I think it was on Mack Brown's website, from a couple of year's ago when one of his players wrote about how they watched Legally Blonde and had a pillow fight on the team bus? This story is legendary to me and I would really like to find the link to it if it still exists.

Thanks,

Neil

I had to look for a while, but I did find it! This is a classic.

Longhorns admit to very odd road-trip activities …

On the way to Iowa on the plane, it was clam. Everybody fell asleep or watched movies. But on the way home, we had pillow fights and guys were throwing stuff all over the place. I was trying to watch a movie on the way back, but (Associate AD for Football Operations) Cleve (Bryant) picked the worst movies. He tried to say it was someone else, but we weren't buying it. They were "Foreign Affair," which was ridiculously boring. Then, on the way to Iowa we watched "Legally Blonde 2." It was a whole football team watching "Legally Blonde 2" and one of the worst movies I had ever seen in "Foreign Affair." We got on the loud speaker and convinced the stewardess to say, 'These movies are horrible. Everyone wants the movies to be better next week or we're going to bring the movies.'

How amazing. Can we rule anything but gay?
Here is Email #2:

Bob,

I don't know if you watch the sports news on the local channels, but last night Babe Laufenburg had an interview with John Hart. In the interview, John Hart was quoted as saying something to the effect that he doesn't respect certain people in the local media and that it was the lowest thing on his list of priorities to keep the media happy.

This was his excuse as to why he remains out of the public eye. Well he and Mr. Hicks are certainly not improving the team very much, I wonder how he does spend his time. I can't stand this "new regime". Does he not realize that the media is the direct connection to the fans? We listen to you guys on the radio and read the paper to follow the team. I don't think any fan cares about whether he has a problem
with any media member, we want to know what's going on with our team.

I loved it when Doug Melvin was GM and would come on and talk about an acquisition or trade that was just made. Not all of Melvin's moves were spectacular and he was often criticized, but at least he had the ability to explain himself. There is no attempt to connect with the fans anymore, and it is Hicks and Hart to blame. Tom Hicks wants 200,000 - 500,000 more of us to come watch? With this change in
spending habits of Tom Hicks, blaming us the fans for him not being able to turn a profit, I am totally turned off from wanting to pay to go watch a Rangers game as long as he owns the team. I long for the 1996-1999 years......

mlalloobhai@gmail.com

Melvin spoiled us all. It is a very interesting conversation about which area sports figures played nicely with the media, and which hated the media. I always think that it is very smart to at least fake your way through a nice relationship with the media.

Bob & Dan,

I'm disappointed in you for not doing your homework. Dan - in today's 12:10 segment you asked "why does congress have the right to stick their nose in baseballs business? Why not go after rock fans? etc"

2 words - Antitrust Exemption.

That is why baseball always bends over backwards when congress intervenes. That is what McCain threatened baseball with to get testing in place.

What is antitrust? Any business that operates across state borders -- and therefore participates in interstate commerce -- is subject to antitrust legislation. Attempts to control trade and monopolize may be deemed illegal by federal circuit courts under the Sherman and Clayton acts. Baseball has been exempt from these antitrust laws since 1922, when the Supreme Court ruled in its favor. The Supreme Court determined even though there was scheduling of games across state lines, those games were intrastate events since the travel from one state to another was "not the essential thing," Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote in the decision.

Why does baseball care about antitrust exemptions? Means a team can't move unless MLB allows it to move. No other sports have this exemption that is why you have what seems like teams moving every year. Before the Expos when was the last time a MLB team moved? 1972 with the Rangers. That's why the Giants didn't move in the early 90's to st. petersburg etc. etc. etc.

If congress revisited the exemption than - don't you think teams in small markets would move? Like the Twins or A's or Brewers?

ryodh@kbic.com

I don’t think Dan was suggesting that he did not understand why Congress CAN hold these hearings. He was suggesting that that he did not understand why Congress SHOULD hold these hearings. Basically, the thought was “doesn’t Congress have anything better to do?” But, after seeing the hearings, I think we can all agree that Congress made a fine decision.

And finally, this:

Don Nelson has this way in games of getting ejected at certain point in a game so that his team will wake up enough to win the game. Do you think maybe this is a bigger extension of that? Like he has been seeing this thing develop through the whole year and realized that he needed to get the boot here, so that down the road the Mavs will be what they are supposed to be, instead of a disappointment, which would result in his firing anyways.

jordannewsom@hotmail.com

That is a very interesting angle. I will write plenty more on this soon.