I genuinely felt bad for Joyce. He handled it as well as anyone could.

I remember hearing that Joyce was one of the best rated umpires around

There are only two reasons to know an umpire: they suck or they make an absolute ass of themselves off the field (I think Cowboy Joe West checks both boxes!)

I agree, if that’s the case. Then you have to look at who’s applying to be an umpire by working at the lower levels, and how promotions work there.

Laz Diaz comes to mind, too. Or did he retire?

How many minority umpires are there? If, say, half of them are minorities, then having none of the last ten or whatever crew chiefs being minorities seems very suspicious. But if it’s ten percent minority, then there’s nothing out of the ordinary.

Oh, I know. It’s quite the uphill climb. The media serves to entertain, and really nothing more. Sports and celebrity media perhaps most of all.

Oh, I don’t mean that she shouldn’t be playing. She has every right to play, and I don’t begrudge her one bit for doing so. I just mean that I don’t want to hear from the media about how this tragedy is impacting her on the court. THAT, I would say, is being exploitative. I think it’s fine to talk about her…

I get you, and you’re not wrong from that angle. Here’s my problem with it: I don’t care that she’s playing Wimbledon. I feel like the right move here is to remove the sports angle entirely (although I admit that her role as a star is the only reason the story is being told).

We did that for a few years, made the playoffs and exited in the 1st or 2nd round. It didn’t feel good, and only made it more apparent that we had no where to go but down.

I could see how one could make her look like the victim here, and ignore the other, and greater, aspect of this tragedy. And that would be wrong, of course. But I didn’t get the sense that that’s what they were doing. It’s a human tragedy, on different levels of course. I feel like our culture focuses so much on…

I don’t think he meant the word lynch in its racial sense.

Just because there are people who are suffering more doesn’t mean that you can’t report on Venus’ own personal hell regarding this matter. I couldn’t imagine losing a loved one like that, I also couldn’t imagine how it would it feel to know that I caused that tragedy. Her story is worth sharing.

This is excellent +1

Anytime a team is bad at something, and comically so, it’s interesting. I don’t have to live in Sacramento to find Vlade Divac’s pitiful attempts at team-building humorous.

We need more comments like this.

Shhhh, Tim! You’re wrecking the Kayfabe!

But you kind of have to deal in hypotheticals, don’t you? The word “valuable” is right there in the middle. The value of what one produces is truly only recognizable when he isn’t producing it. A difficult (impossible?) thing to prove, to be sure. And, furthermore, who’s to say what was produced by one person is or…

Curry is a poor defender. Advanced stats have done wonders improving how we think about offense and even team building, but they’ve lagged on defense (which is understandable). Being shitty at one half of the game is a fair argument against him winning the MVP, I just personally found what he did that season with the…

As someone who never liked the Thunder (totally petty feelings about how the Sonics deal went down), I would find that rather funny.