*The Steve Phillips Awards (patent pending) are a set of honors for the players, coaches and front office members who most exhibit stupid "skills" in baseball, which, more often than not, anachronistic baseball writers and analysts value highly.
Most Talented Dugout Puppet of the Year (or Manager of the Year)
How blasphemous of me to mock a manager's influence on a game. Well, I'm kinda of the opinion that the players do most of the baseball playing. Most. So, for this year's Most Talented Dugout Puppet, I have to go with Ron Gardenhire. His team had no business winning 70 games, let alone 88. Unfortunately, Ozzie Guillen managed the fuck out of Gardenhire in the play-in game. Guillen's pinch running of Brian Anderson completely changed the dynamic of the game. Did you see when he caught the final out? That pretty much won the game by itself. Ozzie Guillen is a brilliant mastermind. I mean Dewayne Wise is a much better hitter than Nick Swisher. Can you tell I'm being sarcastic?
Driven Cologne Clutch Performer of the Year
Stephen Drew (sort the clutch column on the right). Stephen Drew! He must have been eating Clutch-O's (patent also pending) for breakfast this season. More than any hitter in baseball, Drew increased from his average production in "clutch" situations. Move over Derek Jeter, here comes Stephen Drew. If Drew can be "clutch," I will forever and always believe in clutch hitting. I should change these to the Sarcasm Awards, but then I might get Bronze, or Best Live Action Short.
David Eckstein Memorial Gamer of the Year
Though technically David Eckstein should always win the award, I figure variety is best. As much as I'd like to give this awards to the entire Dodgers team, I suppose I should choose one player. Jeff Francouoeuoueuoer is a good choice, since he was one of the least valuable players in baseball, but still gamed out 653 plate appearances. The problem is he is too "talented." So, I'll go with Khalil Greene. He's untalented and white. Alas, I wish he was 5'3" and had a beard, but his incredibly awful year hitting and, to some degree, fielding is enough. He went out there for 105 games and played his ass off to no avail. Now, that's what I call a gamer.
Executive of the Year
The winner of this award is whoever can explain to me how you can boil and executive's abilities down to one year. Everyone talks about Ned Colletti and Andrew Friedman. Well, Friedman's work was all done in the last 5-6 years trading for and drafting all of his players. Ned Colletti helped his team win this year, but he also screwed them over in the future. Then there's Billy Beane, who's A's played like ass this season, but he took one of the worst farm systems in baseball and turned into one of the best--in one season. So does he get the award in 3-5 years win the A's win 100 games? I'm confused. If someone can explain this award to me, I will give them Executive of the Year.
The LaMarr Hoyt Award for Best Run Support
This one goes to Ted Lilly. Sure, Glen Perkins led baseball in run support, but Ted Lilly got 17 wins! Lilly must be BFFs with his offense. Or he gives good mid-inning inspirational speeches with reverbed-out intsrumental guitar rock in the background. Rich Harden may have struck out 800 batters per inning with a 1.06 WHIP, but Lilly's inspiring of his offense led to 17 wins! I'd much rather have Lilly on my team than Harden! And the award for most quantity, not quality, of sarcasm goes to... me.
I'll do the Rockies awards next week and the football picking charade before Sunday.
Thursday, October 2, 2008
The Steve Phillips Awards*
Sunday, June 22, 2008
Broncos capitalized with several exclamation points as such: BRONCOS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Well, I decided to take a short break from writing my screenplay--it's called Elway Vs. Predator. It's basically about John Elway saving the country of Armenia from an onslaught of vicious predators. He has to take on about 20 of them with only his awesomely tubular super powers. Right now, he can shoot lightning from his eyes, fart-fly (fly through air using the power of his farts as a propelling mechanism), and, obviously, throw footballs with such velocity that they explode predators upon impact. But I am open to suggestions, so let me know if you've got any good ones. I was trying to get Robert Altman to direct, but unfortunately he died. Now I'm thinking maybe Spike Lee or Roland Emmerich--to write a quick post. Remember from before? My many English teachers have taught me over the years that the hallmark of a truly effective sentence is a long, hyphenated, tangential interlude, strewn with adjectives, and commas, that causes the audience to completely forget what you were talking about in the first place. They also taught me that every sentence should have at least thirty words. That was a bad sentence. So was that. And that. Etcetera. Now that I have sufficiently bored and confused you, I'll get to the actual post...
Go Broncos.
Even though the Rockies are playing kinda ok lately, and the Broncos season doesn't start for two months, and the Broncos kinda bloweded last year, and some other reason, I've kinda got Broncos fever. In fact, I got an orange nose bleed this morning. Maybe I should see a doctor.
OTAs, workouts, and mini camp have begun hopefully. Well, I guess only the actual Broncos, maybe some coaches, and me have hope for the Broncos new season. They have several million dollars of hope in Ryan Clady. He scored a magnificent 13 on the Wonderlic, which is borderline illiterate. Hooray for America--the country where dumb people can get rich too. If there were commercials to celebrate America's amazing freedom, I feel I'm most qualified to write the slogans. Hey, Toby Keith has commercials to celebrate America's amazing freedom. He calls them "music videos" for some reason. I'm going to give that guy a call.
Today is National Tangents in Blog Posting Day, so I feel I must celebrate in my own little way. That was a tangent about tangents--so meta.
What was I talking about? Hope? Yeah, I think the Broncos are going to have a winning season. The defense is a huge question mark. But, the offense could be gosh darn good. Shucky dang darn good. Jay Cutler is good, I swear. He may not have shown it yet, but he has a monster lurking inside of him--the kind of monster with 30+ touchdowns. Selvin Young is stuck of the realness. He be dah infamous. Though, I'm pretty sure he doesn't murder people on Queens Bridge-- at least not officially. If he were, the Bengals would have already traded for him(cheap joke, I know). And Ryan Clady may not do good at book-learning and word-papers, but he look like he do good on football field. Plus, outside of last year, the Broncos have always had a stellar offensive line. Yes, last year's offensive line was, well, offensive, but I think Michael of Shanahan and Rick Dennison will whip them into shape. Now whip it. Into shape. Shape it up. Shanny is widely known to be a huge Devo fan (at least in the fantasy world inside my head). When the Broncos won the Super Bowl for the first time, he ended his rousing half-time speech with: "Question: Are we not men? Answer: We are Broncos!" And everyone screamed Broncos. There was also reverbed-out, instrumental guitar rock playing in the background. I know for a fact that this happened; I was there (in the fantasy world in my head).
Dear Broncos,
Claw with your fingernails for that inch, because when you add up all those inches that's gonna make the fucking difference between winning and losing; between living and dieing.
Sincerely,
Your most convoluted, tangential fan
