Due to circumstances beyond my control – a confluence of the flu, work, and late night World Baseball Classic games – Snedden’s Take took a brief one week hiatus last week. I appreciate all of the encouraging letters and email I received from my worldwide fan base, asking about my health and general wellness. Being the generous humanitarian I am, I sent every single one of those fans a personalized fruit basket. I hope you both received them and didn’t get sick from the spoiled mangos.
In the meantime, the steamroller that is March has rolled on, and we are oh-so-close to March Madness, the favorite time of the year for degenerate gamblers and the weird dude from your office I.T. department who somehow always end up in the money despite his assertion that “Those damn dirty hippies from Gonzaga will never win a game! Pittsburgh Technical Institute for all the marbles!”
Since our economy is just now “recovering” and many people are in new jobs this Tournament season, what is the proper protocol for introducing a NCAA March Madness pool in your new digs? When you took this job and were forced to read the 400-page employee handbook, it stated pretty emphatically that “No Gambling is allowed on company premises.” Now, usually there are two exceptions to this rule – Super Bowl box pools and March Madness – however, if your company is very strict and doesn’t allow ANY paper trail in the physical cubicle maze that is your office, you do have an option.
Many sites provide a free online pool that can be used by up to 300 work buddies and scored using a variety of methods. The most popular – and in my opinion, the best – is the ESPN Fantasy Games Tournament Challenge pool. Besides being very clean and easy to use, as well as FREE, it also has an App that can be downloaded onto your nerdaphone and the nerdaphones of your fellow cube dwellers. This circumvents the office policy and keeps you in the clear. Step two is getting the site excluded from the internet site blocker used by your I.T. guy – yup, same guy. I find that generous gifts of mix-tapes featuring Mumford & Sons and handlebar mustache wax make great items to bribe these guys with, so get out there and spend some cabbage – so you can win some cabbage the old fashioned way – by gambling for it!
Speaking of cabbage, it turns out that the Steelers don’t really have any to dole out this spring, and with the green they did have they decided to re-sign William Gay, a player who was bar-none the worst player on his team last season. That team was the Arizona Cardinals, who finished 5-11 and fired their head coach. Gay is pulling the old “Shoe on the Other Foote” move made popular by ILB Larry Foote a few years back after he signed with his hometown Detroit Lions for a season, only to return to Pittsburgh on the first thing smoking the following off-season. Bottom line, football players LOVE the Steel City. The fans are great, the owners are first-class, and real estate is dirt cheap.
Unfortunately, the Steelers are in another situation this offseason like they were a year ago, too many free agents and not enough (fabulous) moolah to spend. OLB James Harrison was released this past weekend, ending his productive yet odd term of service with the black and gold. Harrison should be remembered for his amazing 100-yard interception return in Super Bowl 43 that essentially decided the outcome of that game. However, he has a better chance of being remembered for rock bottoming a Browns fan in Cleveland and posing with handguns in a Sports Illustrated article a few clicks back. Harrison wants paid, and he will get paid by a fellow AFC rival very soon – perhaps as early as today. WR Mike Wallace took his talents to South Beach, which even a novice NFL fan knows is a career-ending maneuver. We wish the speedy, butter-fingered former Ole’ Miss Rebel all the luck in the world in Miami. He overextended his welcome here in Pittsburgh with his contract demands and inability to do anything to live up to his reputation in 2012. Wallace is a player that reached his peak way too soon, and the chances of him reclaiming his perch as a top NFL WR in Miami is slim.
The Steelers still have some work to do as Free Agency hits today; DB Keenan Lewis is the top target in-house after the resigning of OG Ramon Foster to a three-year deal yesterday. Once again, the Steelers are in a sticky situation with the cap space issue, and will need GM Kevin Colbert to pull a few Easter bunnies out of his hat. It will be very interesting to see how the team shapes up as they get ready for the first round of mini-camps and the 2013 NFL Draft in April.
Speaking of April (and speaking of seamless segways), the Pittsburgh Pirates continue their Grapefruit League schedule in lieu of their opening of the 2013 season on April 1. The Bucs have created a rash of wonderful objectives for themselves by Manager Clint Hurdle predicting a 95-win season and Bob Nutting saying publicly that it is time for this franchise to win a championship. This team will be fun to watch, with players like CF Andrew McCutchen and Pedro Alvarez developing into star players and the “Pittsburgh Kid” Neil Walker continuing to be one of the most underrated players in all of baseball. The pitching staff looks much more solid that it has in past years, with ace SP A.J. Burnett leading the charge. SP Wandy Rodriguez is in the fold for his first full Pirates season, and the kids Gerrit Cole and Jameson Taillon are both close to being ready for big-league debuts sometime this summer. As a lifelong fan of this team, I’m hoping for nothing more than a .500 season and anything more will be a pleasant surprise. We will have more Pirates columns coming soon on Snedden’s Take.
Rumors out of the NHL offices have the league looking to expand from 30 to 32 teams, according to articles posted on Monday. The NHL always seems to get into these phases where they believe they can move into non-hockey markets at the expense of traditional markets. While some of these teams have gained a foothold in their regions (San Jose was one I never thought would be able to draw enough fans to sustain business, but proved me wrong), this is the time that the league should be exploring moving back into mid-size Canadian markets and perhaps even adding a second team in the Toronto, Ontario area. It has been amazing to see the way the Penguins have become a part of the culture of Pittsburgh, and as great as that is, hockey is a sport that should be played in Canada as much as possible. Hopefully the success of the new team in Winnipeg has shown the Bettman administration that they need to explore those cities.
Speaking of expansion, the NBA in Pittsburgh? Nahhh.
If you haven’t been watching the World Baseball Classic, you are missing some fantastic baseball in early March. This has been the best of the three WBC tournaments since its inception in 2005. Upsets abound, and the USA Team is doing well enough to start gaining the hearts and minds of fans who may not have been interested in the Classic at the outset. The WBC is fun, and despite all of the talk about players leaving their teams during Spring Training and foreign players getting the itch to defect to Major League Baseball, the time to anoint the WBC as a quarterly fan-friendly event is upon us. I look forward to the next round of games and seeing some of these younger stars both foreign and domestic show their skills on the global level. If you haven’t watched the WBC yet, do yourself a favor and tune in for the next round of games.
On a sports-entertainment note, Snedden’s Take would like to take a moment and congratulate “Pittsburgh Living Legend” Bruno Sammartino on his impending induction into the WWE Hall of Fame next month. Sammartino is a true legend of his sport and a great ambassador for the local area. It’s about time that Sammartino gets his moment in the sun.
That pretty much sums up the Potpourri of the March sports scene. If you have comments, leave them below. If you have hate mail or want to send me a fruit basket, contact me at sneddenstake@yahoo.com. Thanks for reading and see you all next week!
Photo Credits: Yahoo! Sports
