His First Name Ends in "y". His Last Name Ends in "otti"

Who are we writing about?

Tony Massarotti

Hey Rockies, who’s the hot team now?

Hear that, Garrett Atkins? Tony Massarotti is talking shit to your team!

BOSTON - Maybe we all had it wrong. Maybe the Red Sox are the team on the roll.

For some reason, the stupid momentum topic was the focus of tons of debate prior to the series (it would be a sin for ESPN analysts to try to analyze the Rockies). After much useless debate, most people decided the Red Sox had the "momentum". So I don't see who "we" is when you say "we all had it wrong".

For all of the talk about the miraculous run of the Colorado Rockies, after all, Game 1 of the World Series was nothing short of a bloodbath on the hallowed ground of fabled Fenway Park. The final score was Boston 13, Colorado, 1, which might be entirely meaningless were it not for one small fact.

What fact, pray tell? What is the grand saviour of the meaning of the score of the first game of the World Series?

Since the sixth inning of Game 4 of the American League Championship Series — the Cleveland Indians led by a 7-0 score at the time en route to a 3-1 series edge — the Red Sox have responded by outscoring their opponents by the preposterous total of 46-6.

Ah. If it weren't for beating the Indians in the ALCS by HUGE margins, winning Game 1 of the World Series would be meaningless. Good point.

In New England at this time of year, those kinds of numbers typically are generated only on Sundays.

Wha...Sundays? New England? High scores? I couldn't possibly fathom what you're getting at!

By the Patriots.

THANKS DUDE! I WAS SO CONFUSED!

“It gives us a lot of confidence,” Red Sox shortstop Julio Lugo said following Boston's resounding victory. “We know we can hit anybody. Some days you're not going to hit, but we know we can hit anybody.”

Given Lugo's recent history, that is quite a statement. Prior to going 3-for-4 in Game 1, Lugo batted .237 during the regular season and was hitting just .229 in the postseason, which made him one of the few sure outs in Boston's lineup.

Getting on base 29.4% of the time = sure out. I like what Massarotti has done here, likening a Major League hitter to that guy who bats last on your Little League team who strikes out every time, then cries about it afterwards. (I always think...."dude, shouldn't you be used to it by now?")

Can you imagine how confident David Ortiz and Manny Ramirez must feel at the moment?

Can you imagine just how little a sentence can fit into a column? You write 2 paragraphs about Julio Lugo sucking, then randomly you write this, and then transitionless, go into talking about Jeff Francis! This sentence is a desert island, my friend. You sorely need an editor.

A 17-game winner in the National league this season, Colorado starter Jeff Francis today must feel like a college freshman.

Better comparisons can be drawn. Something like "Jeff Francis today must feel like Casey Fossum". When I see "college freshman", images of being bad at pitching or being defeated don't exactly just jump into my head.

The possessor of a 2-0 record and 2.13 ERA in two postseason outings before Game 1, Francis learned what so many others have been preaching for the better part of the last several years. Pitching in the American League is an entirely different animal

Jeff Francis, 2007 regular season, vs AL: 26.1 IP, 2.07 ERA, 1.15 WHIP.

Two of the teams he faced were the Red Sox and Yankees.

The Red Sox didn't score against him.

My only logical conclusion is that Jeff Francis lacks some NL-borne illness that prevents him from getting American League hitters out.

which is why aging pitching icons like Pedro Martinez go out to pasture in the National League.

This has nothing to do with why Pedro Martinez is in the National League.

The Red Sox, naturally, are not your average AL lineup, finishing third in the league in runs scored this season.

Granted, important, true. How can you make the rest of this paragraph as irrelevant and pointless as possible?

Still, Boston's lineup scored nearly 100 fewer runs than it did in, say, 2003, when the Red Sox reached Game 7 of the ALCS. In 2004, when the Sox went 45-15 in their final 60 games to win their first World Series since World War I, they also made this current club look like, well, the Arizona Diamondbacks.

Oh. Like that. Talking about the high-scoringness of past Red Sox teams.

Poor Jeff Francis.

Wonderful transition.

He must have felt as if Dorothy were looking down at him and declaring, “We're not in Kansas anymore, Toto.”

What if, in the movie, Toto decided to look back up at Dorothy and say, "Bitch, I been here before. I tossed 5 innings of shutout ball here a few months back!"

What's also funny about that game was that Josh Beckett was the one thumped in the 7-1 Rockies win.

Now, with their karma sufficiently stifled, the Rockies enter Game 2 entrusting rookie Ubaldo Jimenez with the responsibility of shutting down a Red Sox team that clearly has more than just David Ortiz and Manny Ramirez. And so the question now isn't whether the Red Sox can derail the Rockies, but whether the Rockies can derail the Red Sox.

“I mean, I know it has to come, so just let it come,” Jimenez before Game 1. I'm not worried about it. I'm just going to go out there and just face everybody like it's the same, just throw strikes and go after them.”

Think he's aware that they'll be coming after him?

Nope. Someone inform Ubaldo that the Red Sox will be carrying bats to the plate as a countermeasure to his pitchings.

Michael Jeremiah Celizic, Hat Vendor

More Hatguy

Here we are with 10 reasons to watch the World Series. Most people watch the World Series because it's the championship of baseball, a sport they like a lot. But for those of you who aren't sold by watching exciting, high-pressure baseball games, or championships in general, you're lucky our fedora-wearing friend was kind enough to point out some things that you may have forgotten about.

I’ve been around for a lot of Super Bowls, and I don’t remember ever writing about how the broadcasting network or the NFL is worried about the ratings because marquee teams aren’t playing.

Could be because it's the most watched TV event in the world.....

Instead, every year I get a list of Roman numerals telling me the XLI things to look for in Super Bowl XLI. They’re silly things, most of them, because they’re designed for all those people who are going to a party on the first Sunday in February and feel the need to know the names of the teams that are playing so they won’t look as ignorant as they are.

Why do you get these lists if they're for ignorant people? Tell the truth, are you speaking from experience, Mike?

Nah, he was never invited to a "party".

Several more dumb comparisons of the World Series and the Super Bowl later, we get to the reasons.

I: The Rockies

Ah. One of the Ten reasons is the Rockies.

Reason II: The Red Sox.

List concluded.

Okay, so you don’t know who they are because the nasty East Coast media

No need to address this again. We've covered it before.

which is responsible for all of the world’s ills going back to the plague, didn’t bother to mention them until the very end of the season, and you didn’t notice them winning 21 of their last 22 games on the way to the first World Series in franchise history.

Booooooooooring. Fantastic run-on, by the way.

But aren’t we a country that loves things that are fresh and out of the ordinary? And aren’t sports fans always whining about overpaid and arrogant stars? Well, the Rockies are fresh and extraordinary. They also have one of the lowest payrolls in baseball.

Everyone get excited for some fresh, non-whiny, low-paid action!

Here’s our Cinderella, folks. You love Cinderella during the NCAA basketball tournament, why not in the World Series?

Your stated problem isn't that not enough people are rooting for the Rockies, it's that not enough people are watching. Keep it straight.

Plus, they wear black uniforms with purple numbers. How often do you get to see that in baseball?

Plenty. All you have to do is pay attention to the Rockies when they aren't in the World Series.

II: The Red Sox

Wow....I actually hadn't read the 2nd reason before now. It actually was the Red Sox!

That loveable team from Boston was even more popular as a road draw than the Yankees this year. Unlike the Yankees, no one outside of the New York metropolitan area hates them.

Wow. Wowwwwwwwow. This is fantastic. Anyone need more proof that this clown doesn't know anything that isn't about New York. If only he read Fire Jay Mariotti and took note of the "i hate boston's sports teams" label!

When they won the World Series in 2004, it was their second crown in just 86 years. This year, they can make it their second in three years. Do you want to miss out on the establishment of the Red Sox dynasty?

Winning the World Series 3 years apart = sole criteria for establishing a "dynasty".

III: Snowball

This better be a pet name for a player, because if it's about the precipi-

It snowed over the weekend in Denver, the mile-high home of the Rockies. With any luck at all, it will snow again when the Series moves West.

Ugh.

Will they break out the orange baseballs? Will the players need chains on their shoes to negotiate the base paths? If you saw Matt Holiday sliding on his face in the dirt earlier in October, can you afford to miss him with snow to slide on? I’m also thinking chimineas in the bullpens — maybe weenie roasts, too. And, instead of bench-clearing brawls, how about a bench-clearing snowball fight?

a) That was when Celizic learned who Matt Holliday was (2 "l"s please!)

b) Rather than giving him the benefit of the doubt, I'm going to believe Celizic thinks that angry athletes would rather throw snow at each other than punch each other.

IV: Tulowitzki — No, it’s not an exotic Denver ballpark snack that comes from a part of the cow you don’t want to know about.

Right. It's a tropical disease. Remember?

It’s the Rockies' exciting rookie shortstop, Troy Tulowitzki. The kid could be rookie of the year, but you have to watch him because of the name alone.

Read: His name is the only thing Celizic knows about him.

V: Pedroia — Dustin Pedroia, like Tulowitzki, is a rookie and a middle infielder, playing second base for the Red Sox. He says he’s 5-2 and 115 pounds, but that’s just bragging.

Don't even know how to respond to that one.

VI: Defense

VII: Offense

Very specific to this World Series. I like it.

If you find defense boring, don’t worry. The thin atmosphere in Denver makes for a lot of home runs and Coors Field has an enormous outfield that generates hits like few other parks. One of those others is Boston’s Fenway Park, built in 1912 for guys who weren’t strong enough to get the top off a mayonnaise jar. It’s only the most venerable, most charming and most beloved park in baseball. Just looking at the field is reason enough to turn the television to the game. Plus, the Red Sox score a lot of runs there.

Awww, Celizic's getting a hard-on for the east coast again...isn't that cute?

VIII: Manny — There’s not a freer spirit in any game than Boston’s dreadlocked left fielder, Manny Ramirez

Chad Johnson. Your move.

who also happens to be as good a hitter as there is in the game, especially in October.

Manny Ramirez, 2007 EqA: .291
As Good a Hitter as There Is in the Game, 2007 EqA: .339

(Okay, Barry's is better, but we get it)

He’s also guaranteed to produce multiple moments that make you scratch your head and wonder which planet he calls home. He’ll stand at the plate admiring the wonderfulness of what he thinks is a home run, only to be held to a single when it bounces off the wall. Or he’ll say something that makes no sense at all.

What a free spirit.

And whenever he does something that would get other players roasted alive in the sports columns, all you’ll hear about him is, “It’s just Manny being Manny.”

Only from dumbasses.

IX: Big Papi — We’ve mentioned David Ortiz’s nickname once before, but a guy as big as the Red Sox’s designated hitter deserves his own paragraph, not to mention his own zip code.

HAHHAHAHAHHAAHAHAHAHA

::Celizic opens and begins frantically flipping through an MLB rule book.::

What will make this Series fun is watching him play first base in Denver, where National League rules will apply and there will be no designated hitter.

::Celizic breathes a sigh of relief and closes the book::

He’s as nimble as an ocean liner, except his team isn’t allowed to employ tugboats to nudge him around the infield.

Where does someone get the idea that it's good to write this?

At the plate, he’s always a threat to hit it out. In the field, he’s just a threat.

to......

X: River Dance – If the Red Sox win it all, their relief ace, Jonathan Papelbon, is going to do the most frightening rendition of that Lords of the Dance thing you’ve ever seen. No one this side of Simon Cowell can adequately characterize it. So just hang in there to the last game and see for yourself. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry — and if you’re actually a dancer, you’ll probably throw.

That one is actually pretty interesting.

Great list....except...

1) You listed both teams, and then 4 individual players.
2) Of those 4 players, there is 1 Rockie, and 3 Red Sox.
3) The Red Sox best player this year, Josh Beckett, was not one of them.
4) The best player in the World Series this year, Matt Holliday, was not one of them.
5) Offense and defense are listed were two reasons. Another good reason to watch: baseball. And does this mean that pitching is not a reason to watch the World Series?
6) ZOMG SNOW????

But you know, other than that, it was pretty interesting.

Who Are These Guys Again? The Colorado Mountains? Is That a Real Team?

This, ladies and gentlemen, is Mike Celizic. I'm not sure if he's been made fun of here before or anything, but he sure is a bad journalist. That...thing...on his head is the reason I'm going to call him HatGuy, which is an original nickname that I just now made up for the first time ever, and definitely isn't copied from some really funny website. Ol' Hatty usually dabbles in writing about baseball twice a month. Yesterday was once such day. Let's check out the column.

Rockies would be royalty if on East Coast
Amazing run by no-names is like nothing we've seen in baseball before

Oooh, a Rockies column. That bunch of no-namies that plays is Colorado. 25 men who don't have names (and a manager who may or may not have one). This looks intriguing.

This is a terrific team that’s stormed out of the thin air of Denver and into the even thinner national TV ratings they’re drawing from an audience that has no idea who the Colorado Rockies are.

A play on words making fun of the nationwide popularity of a small market team? Genius! No one has ever done that before!

It’s doubtful that any team has ever arrived at the World Series with less cachet and name recognition than the Rockies.

I'll see your 2007 Rockies (a team that likely contains both the NL MVP and the NL Rookie of the Year, despite both of them lacking a name), and raise you the 2003 Marlins. Granted, they have a lot of players who are famous now, but we're talking about when they arrived at the World Series. And at that time, other than Ivan Rodriguez and ROY Dontrelle Willis, it was 23 guys who weren't given names at birth (some people on the team made up names mid-season, in case you were wondering how they communicated with each other, or why there was a player on this team listed under the alias "Tim Spooneybarger").

Most of the team’s players couldn’t be more anonymous if they were in a witness protection program.

Ah ok, thanks for writing this sentence. I really didn't know where you were going with this before now, especially because the title and first two sentences did not have the same essential meaning as this one.

And it’s not like many fans are bothering to get acquainted. Those TV ratings for their NLCS romp over the equally unknown Arizona Diamondbacks?

Hockeyesque, folks. Hockeyesque.

Who are these guys?

Get to the point, please. That's 4 statements, 2 rhetorical questions, 2 fragments, and one subtitle saying the exact same fucking thing. Maybe if you watched baseball before (minus Yankee games, and I'm still not sure if you even watch those), these players wouldn't be so foreign. You see, that's the important thing about being an "analyst". You learn about the entire league of teams so that if one of the lesser-known ones makes it to the World Series, you have more important and interesting things to say than, "BREAKING NEWS: World Series Team Not As Famous As Country Initially Hoped".

Brad Hawpe? Is that a right fielder or a typo?

Typo. Definitely a typo. (Side note: typo of spelling what word, exactly? Hawke, I guess?)

Tulowitzki — that’s a tropical disease, right?

Yep, death tolls from Tulowitzki virus are reaching the thousands in Hawaii.

Josh Fogg? Is he any relation to Phileas?

No, actually, but we're still trying to figrue out if he's the distant cousin of Kirk Fogg, the host of the ever-popular kids' game show "Legends of the Hidden Temple"

Then there’s Yorvit Torrealba. I know Torrealba — that’s a resort in the Yucatan, or maybe Majorca, right? But Yorvit? Sounds like one of those designer Scandinavian vodkas that comes in a frosted bottle and costs $12 a shot. Even their manager, Clint Hurdle, is named after a piece of track equipment.

Yadda yadda yadda, we get the point. This is so stupid, and can be done to the players on any Major League Baseball team.

It is a shame, because the Rockies are on an amazing winning streak, a roll like nothing baseball has ever seen. And that’s part of their problem: until the last couple of weeks of the season, they weren’t even in the playoff picture.

If I'm reading this right, Celizic thinks that the Rockies aren't getting any attention becuase they've been on a miraculous comeback run. Makes sense to me!

By the time they went on their almighty tear down the stretch, winning 13 of their last 14 games to force a playoff for the NL wild card with the Padres, sports fans around the country had already moved on to football.

What? Football happens every year. Why is this specific to the Rockies?

Besides, it was all taking place in the NL West, the games starting too late and the division too weak to make more than a ripple in the dreaded East Coast media.

Division too weak!?!??!???! The division with the highest winning percentage in the NL and 4/5 teams finishing the season over .500 is too weak???? Really?

They won the playoff and then seven straight playoff games, removing any sense of drama and competition from the NL playoffs, shrinking their audience even more.

Those IDIOTS!

They arrived too late and too quickly to pay grasp what they were doing

There is definitely something wrong with the 2nd half of this sentence.

especially since for nearly six months before the middle of September, there wasn’t any reason for the country to pay attention to them. Their line-up was made up of kids — a gang of first- and second-year players too new to the business to know that what they hoped to do is impossible.

Welcome back to www.doesnoresearch.hatspot.com

We'll throw out the fact that this last sentence doesn't make any sense. Rather, we're going to count the number of seasons that players in the Rockies' starting lineup have played in the major leagues, removing seasons in which they've played less than 50 games. Sound good?

Taveras - 3 (WS 2005, shoulda known that one, Mikey)
Matsui - 4
Holliday - 4
Helton - 10, a relative dinosaur
Atkins - 3
Hawpe - 3
Tulowitzki - 1 (HE GOT ONE RIGHT!!!!!)
Joetorrejessicaalba - 6 (dude's been bummin around the league since like 2001)

If these kids, who are so fresh and enthusiastic and devoid of braggadocio and bluster, were busting into the game in Boston or New York, they’d have been on the cover of Sports Illustrated by the All-Star break.

Unlikely, seeing as how they were 44-44 at the All-Star break. If they were in Boston or New York, people would be doing nothing at the All-Star break but bitch about how bad they are.

We’d have hailed them as the new faces of a game, the standard-bearers for a new generation of stars who are taking over the game.

Intelligent baseball minds have already done that. Ignoramuses like yourself are still trying to find out how you can suck Joba Chamberlain's proverbial dick.

This year, Troy Tulowitzki, Matt Holliday, Brad Hawpe, Josh Fogg and company were learning their trade and putting up their big numbers in Denver, where the game of choice is football.

It's time to play dan-bob's favorite game! One of these is not like the others.....

Josh Fogg, 2007: 4.90 ERA, 1.46 WHIP.

Hmmmm...well I guess these numbers are technically sort of "big".

And it’s not as if the Colorado franchise is wrapped in a mantle of heroic history and legend. It’s known for its mile-high home park, which is to ERAs what Denny’s Grand Slam breakfasts are to cholesterol levels. It’s not known for its great accomplishments in the regular season, much less the playoffs.

Gotta love it....Hatguy continues to put allusions to unhealthy foods in his columns.

The Rockies have one player with a national reputation — Todd Helton. He’s also the team’s only player making more than the $4.4 million that Holliday, the National League batting champion and the best outfielder most fans don’t know much about, pulls down.

Holliday, to the casually-informed fan, has more of a reputation than Helton. And he still hasn't touched home plate!

The team payroll is around $54 million — one of the bottom five in the game, and if you take away Helton’s $16 million, the other 24 guys are making a combined $38 million, which isn’t enough to pay the left side of the Yankee’s infield.

That’s another reason we don’t know much about them — their salaries. We live in a society that equates income with importance — what other explanation is there for the national obsession with Donald Trump and Britney Spears?

That's just a weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee bit of oversimplification there, Mikey. Is Prince Fielder really less "important" than Jason Kendall because Kendall makes more money?

The average salary in major league baseball this year is $2.7 million. The Rockies have at least 15 players making less than that, 11 players making under a million, and 10 — including starting outfielders Hawpe and Willie Taveras and starting infielders Tulowitzki and Garrett Atkins — making $400,000 or less. That’s not even enough to buy a house in one of Denver’s pricier suburbs.

"Willy". And where is this going?

None of that should diminish what they’ve accomplished or lessen the luster of the terrific crop of kids the team’s management has assembled. In an ideal world, which is one in which people are celebrated for the accomplishments and not their bank accounts, their presence in the playoffs would swell the national television audience instead of shrinking it.

If this is true, then you, Mike Celizic, are one of the chief reasons why we do not have an ideal world.

Go ahead and ignore them if you can’t be bothered to get to know who they are. Then sneer at the ratings they bring to the World Series, if that’s how you get your jollies.

I've made it clear several times that YOU haven't bothered to get to know who they are. And I'm reasonably sure that you think Josh Fogg is the only pitcher on the team. Nice choice, by the way. Fogg. I hear he's the best one!

But don’t turn around and whine about how the game has been ruined by all the spoiled-brat players who are making more money than third-world countries. And don’t ask what happened to innocent kids who play the game for the sheer joy of it.

Ummmm...those "spoiled-brats" were once "innocent kids". Did A-Rod make $20M his first few seasons? A lot of these Rockies players are very good, and will make a lot of money, and will be (mostly unjustly) thrown into the "spoiled-brat" category. Are these Rockies so innocent that they're going to say when they're 30, "No Mister GM, I want to play for less money than I'm worth in the market, because I'm innocent"?

They’re right in front of you. Playing in the World Series. Turn on the television and enjoy the show.

Scene: Celizic's living room, Game 1 of the 2007 World Series.

Celizic: (turns on TV) "Who the fuck is Francis?"

Isn't that some sort of species of fruit fly indigenous to Uruguay?