Land Shark Stadium, Sorry Dolphin Marlin Fans

Dolphin Stadium is set to be renamed Land Shark Stadium [Miami Herald], as part of a corporate naming rights agreement b/w Land Shark Beer and cash hungry Dolphin owner Stephen Ross.

Today, it's Dolphin Stadium. But get ready soon for Land Shark Stadium, named for a brew that's obscure now but has big aspirations: Land Shark Lager is a joint project of Anheuser Busch and Key West icon Jimmy Buffett.

Dolphin Stadium president Bruce Schulze confirmed Friday that a naming rights deal with Land Shark Lager is likely. The Dolphins are expected to unveil the new name at a news conference next Friday.

The deal's payoff for Land Shark Lager is marketing. The payoff for Dolphins owner Stephen Ross -- just like it is for the owners of U.S. Cellular Field in Chicago, Petco Park in San Diego, Safeco Field in Seattle, Bank of America Stadium in Charlotte and Gillette Stadium in Foxboro, Mass. -- is money, although no one was saying Friday how much the deal would bring the team.

Buyer's market for baseball fans

Looks like the resale market for premium seats at Yankee Stadium has plummeted [ESPN/AP]. The super expensive seats are selling for less than half of its face value on places like Stubhub.

"We're seeing an unprecedented number of season-ticket holders selling. The market has been flooded. It is a buyer's market for baseball fans," said Mike Janes, chief executive officer of FanSnap.com, an Internet search engine that finds tickets on resale sites.

Rain on Friday afternoon might have depressed the price of tickets for that night's game, and more rain was possible later in the weekend.

For Saturday's game, seats that originally sold for $500 were available for $150 Friday on StubHub and $850 seats could be had for $225. Field level seats the Yankees sold for $325 behind the plate were listed at $60.

There were similar prices for Sunday's game.

"The market has flipped," Janes said. "Supply has totally exceeded demand. That's why you see this downward pressure on ticket prices."

In a lot of ways, it's worse than steroids and HGH

Ex-teammates of A-Rod on the Texas Rangers respond to allegations of pitch tipping [SI.com].

That explanation wasn't sufficient for Glanville or Dickey, who said "There's no situation that would ever justify him doing that on any level. That's somebody's ERA that's somebody's livelihood, that's somebody trying to provide for their family. I'm holding on to the belief that it's not true. No one with a conscience could do that. Blows me away."

Dickey does, however, have first-hand knowledge of Rodriguez's involvement with calling pitches. "My first year there (2001) there were a couple of games where he called the pitches from shortstop or helped the catcher called pitches, in a couple of my starts I know he did that," he said. "Einar Diaz was our catcher and Alex did that on occasion on a couple of my starts. I never knew it until after the fact but he helped [our] catcher out a couple times. But as far as giving away pitches I couldn't speak with any amount of knowledge on that subject."

Dickey pitched in several blowout games with the Rangers during his years there but said he had no recollection of anything like this happening. "I can't recall any of those games and even if I could I would never be thinking along those lines that my teammate could be giving away pitches" he said. "I could never think 'For sure he must have done it then.' That's just so far off the radar dude."

Glanville suggested that perhaps A-Rod's mannerisms that led to suspicion were actually a way to alert his fellow defenders what pitch was coming next, something the shortstop often does during a game. But Roberts' sources said that the key difference is when Rodriguez would signal. "The thing Alex would do, and this is the critical difference between signaling your infield as quarterback and giving away the pitch to the hitter, is when you flash the sign," she said. "This was done to give the batter plenty of time to see it and figure what to do about it. What would usually happen would be for Alex to do something as the pitcher is in the windup; that way the batter is focused on the pitcher. These signs Alex would flash came before the windup and that made it even more noticeable."

Nas show @ Hunter College

Nas is doing a show at Hunter College tonight at 7PM.

Each student with a valid Hunter ID can purchase *two* tickets. Non-Hunter students may be brought as guests, but a Hunter student must buy their ticket.

I’m telling you he did not do it

Former A-Rod teammate Jeff Brantley doesn't buy that A-Rod tipped pitches to opposing batters. Excerpts of his Chris "Mad Dog" Russo interview can be found over at Watchdog.

Host, Chris Russo: “It says here in the excerpts [of the book] today [in the New York Daily News], that the opposing team, in a blowout game, a friendly [player] would tell A-Rod what pitch was coming to help break him out of a slump. How about that?”

Brantley: “No, no, no. That’s b.s. There’s no way. There’s nobody that is going to do that, not in this game. Not even the worst of the worst.”

Russo: (reading from the NY Daily News article) “’In one shocking disclosure, the book accuses A-Rod of “pitch tipping” when he was with the Rangers – letting a friendly opponent at the plate know which pitch was coming in lopsided games.’”

Brantley: “That did not happen. There’s no way that happens.”

Russo: “So there’s no way A-Rod could tip off a friendly opponent batting against Jeff Brantley in a blowout game one way or the other? That could not have occurred?”

Brantley: “Now, I’m not going to say that he couldn’t do it but I’m telling you he did not do it.”

Russo: (reading from the NY Daily News) “’Rodriguez expected players he helped would do the same for him when he was having an off night and needed to get his batting average up and it would not affect the outcome of the game.’ You’re saying that is not accurate?”

Brantley: “No way. No way.”

Lorenzo Pietro

NY Times review Allen Barra's new Yogi Berra biography.

Certainly, Yogi’s is a quintessentially American story. Christened Lorenzo Pietro — Lawrence Peter — he was reared in an Italian enclave of St. Louis known as the Hill, or, in another era, “Dago Hill.” His father, an immigrant from a small town in northern Italy, was a manual laborer. Yogi had little interest in school, and though he hardly had the physique of a typical athlete — “Being knock-kneed as well as barrel-shaped, he gives the impression of being welded together from hips to knees and of running only from the knees down like a fat girl in a tight skirt,” a Life magazine reporter wrote of him early in his major-league career — his sandlot prowess became the stuff of local legend.

Still, Yogi’s ungainly appearance, ­coupled with his less than graceful style of play, turned off what at the time were the two big-league clubs in St. Louis, the Cardinals and the Browns. In the fall of 1942, he was working as a tack puller at a shoe factory, having all but given up hope of playing professional baseball, when the bullpen coach for the Yankees appeared at the door of his parents’ home with a $500 signing bonus and a contract worth $90 a month.

Yogi’s rise through the minor leagues was interrupted by a stint in the military during World War II, and his service was by no means limited to running baseball clinics for the troops on the home front. He was in the thick of the D-Day invasion, on a small craft assigned to spray rockets in advance of the troops landing on Omaha Beach. (Years later, a sportswriter would quip that Yogi had survived D-Day and George Steinbrenner, the source of his aforementioned exile from Yankee Sta­dium, “and all in 40 years.”) Here and elsewhere, Barra sticks to the facts, relying on other writers, in this case Cornelius Ryan, to set the scene for him. The book suffers as a result; as deeply immersed as the author is in the life and times of Yogi, one can’t help feeling that he never takes full possession of his material.

A-Rod's Man Boobs

Fast forward to the :40 mark to see A-Rod's infamous man boobs. Freaked me out the first time I saw it.