Book Review: How Thomas Pynchon's Novel Bleeding Edge Hit Close to Home

When the miasmic shitstorm of authoritarianism and real-life Idiocracy gained full force earlier this year, I felt compelled to dive into Thomas Pynchon's novel Vineland in search of informed, anti-authoritarian entertainment and guidance. The novel mostly takes place in the year 1984 (a recent edition of Orwell's 1984 has an introduction from Pynchon) depicting Californians fleeing the militarized police state carrying out Reagan's war on drugs, with frequent flashbacks to the impact of COINTELPRO's insidious dismantling of resistance movements in the 60s. It sounds dark and bleak, but Vineland is a hilarious and uplifting adventure.

Nobody does it like Pynchon. His works feel like an essential road map for navigating our contemporary political madness. It seems every damn dumb, absurd or gross thing that unfolds in the Trumpocalyptic age begs the question of whether this is actually Thomas Pynchon's world and we're all just living in it. Even the fucking names! When I saw that the source behind a recent NSA leak was a 20-something blonde girl from Texas named Reality Leigh Winner, I thought: go home Thomas Pynchon, you're drunk!

I've been seeing tweets like this every day:

tony "the mooch" scaramucci cucks reince priebus? the new pynchon sounds 🔥

— nick laureano (@nick_laureano14) July 27, 2017

fitting that all trump associates look like they could be a pynchon character named wolf smilestein or something pic.twitter.com/HCtZRfsjw2

— john (@john__wallace) July 15, 2017

After zipping through Vineland, I was craving more Pynchon but had my own anti-authoritarian writing to do, an essay on the treatment of warfare and invasion in Finnegans Wake for the Diasporic Joyce Conference in Toronto (an experience chronicled here). Once that was completed, I took a much-needed break from Joyce to crack open Pynchon's latest novel, Bleeding Edge, and holy shit what a treat it turned out to be.

Bleeding Edge completely stunned me. Not only is it a funny and engrossing web of stories carried by characters engaged in sharp, witty dialogue, but also the setting of turn-of-the-millennium New York City spoke directly to me and my background in a way Pynchon's work never has before. More than anything else, the prime display of the master author's precisely researched rendering of setting just blew me away. Pynchon was born in 1937, a year after my dad. He's a pretty old dude. Yet the cultural milieu he recreates out of the minutia of video games, TV shows, internet culture, rap music, pro sports, etc from that 9/11 time period in Bleeding Edge (published in 2013) suggests an old man who's as with-the-times as anybody alive. He references Dragon Ball Z and Pokémon, for instance, and describes nuances of the Metal Gear Solid video games in such shocking detail that one internet reader suggested the only explanation is he must've had input from his then-teenage son. The book is littered with nuggets of culture like a character holding "a mug that reads I BELIEVE YOU HAVE MY STAPLER." (p. 77)

That mug appears in a scene with weed smoke hovering in a hacker's lair, as our protagonist Maxine Tarnow explores the dimensions of her techy friends' creation called DeepArcher, a sort of cross between virtual reality and online multiplayer games. Maxine (who Pynchon helpfully describes as a Rachel Weisz doppelgänger early in the novel) is a fraud investigator in Manhattan in the years following the dot-com bubble, hot on the trail of a shady Internet security firm called "hashslingerz," itself a sort of pun encompassing Pynchon's penchant for pot references and the term hash used for computer coding. This is a novel full of tech geeks, subversive bloggers, radical filmmakers, hackers, stoners, Mossad agents, Russian mobsters, shadow government assassins, and every other variety of spooks and weirdos. A typically Pynchonian web of colorful characters expanding so far out that I finally had to jot down a who's-who primer in the back of the book.

A book jacket blurb mentioned that, "We are all characters in Pynchon's mad world" and that starts to feel true. He creates such a broad network of characters, male and female, with all range of backgrounds and quirks, that I begin to see myself and my friends appearing in there. That's part of what is so special about Pynchon---his fiction hems fairly close to realism while always keeping things zany, off-beat, and funky with every person, place, and thing having some deliberately weird or funny name (I burst out laughing on a flight when I read of a strip club called "Joie de Beavre") so that you eventually start to view this world a little differently, noticing its inherent weirdness.

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To Witness the NBA Renaissance

(Credit: Getty Images)

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.

Amid the backdrop of a crumbling country, the NBA has been experiencing a new golden age.

And while the league reaches new heights, its storied New York Knicks franchise achieves ever deepening levels of rock bottom.

The frantic artistry and entertainment of last year's seven-game NBA Finals between the Warriors and Cavaliers sparked a surge in my basketball interest. When the 2016-17 season began, I was latched on to my favorite team, the increasingly frustrating and weird New York Knicks, keeping up with basketball mostly through them while they showed plenty of early promise. They were 14-10 at one point, creating the early illusion of a shot at playoff contention. During that first month of the season, when family members asked what they could get me for Christmas I figured some new Knicks gear might be a good idea.

Lots o' Links: Roundball Edition

Following a sudden shift of surroundings when I moved (for the 5th time in 4 years) four weeks ago, I seem to have fallen off the blogging groove. I try now to climb back onto it as the baseball season approaches, the NBA season runs on by, and I absorb books and music much too fast for me to stop and compose reviews about them. So, in the interest of getting the ball rolling, today we'll do what any good blog does and take a look at some other people's work that I've enjoyed around the web.

First, I've got a little treat for you:


Not very long ago, a large conglomerate of talented bloggers and sportswriters gathered together to launch a new website featuring interesting, perhaps "high-brow" pieces on sports and its surrounding culture. Led by Free Darko mastermind Bethlehem Shoals, the site (called The Classical) seemed a perfect rival to Bill Simmons' recently launched Grantland project. As someone who prefers Shoals' writing style to anything Simmons could possibly devise, I had very high hopes for this endeavor but The Classical has, in my eyes, gotten off to a slow start. In the meantime, Grantland has gathered awesome writers (Jonah Keri, Rany Jazayerli, Bill Barnwell, Katie Baker, Jay Caspian King) covering every sport and I can't help but check out their content almost every day.

With the locked-out basketball season finally starting to get its wind and a fresh baseball season showing its first signs of life, The Classical is responding with some excellent pieces. I don't want this post to turn into a collection of nothing but Grantland and Classical pieces but... they've written a bunch of great stuff lately. These works in particular have really grabbed my attention:

Catching up with the NBA fireworks

The NBA has certainly had a lively last few weeks. This new billboard by FreeDarko's Jacob Weinstein seems to embody it all pretty well.

The Dunk Contest and All-Star Game were as good as they've been in years. Blake Griffin (the dude on the billboard) put the ultimate exclamation point on everything with a jaw-dropping dunk, jumping over a car with a choir singing "I Believe I Can Fly." Outlandish? Yup. And one of the Dunk Contest's best participants, the gifted Toronto Raptor with the euphonious appellation of DeMar DeRozan, has made a stink about all the extra bells and cannons. He says he's done competing in the Dunk Contest if they continue to bring in so many props and gimmicks (JaVale McGee brought in a second hoop and dunked on both at the same time---cool, yes, but it's a dunk contest not a circus).

It's a shame because DeRozan is one of the more naturally gifted high-flyers in the league as evidenced by this (organic) dunk he did that night. Witness the grace and sheer athleticism in this video. (And I love the look on Darryl Dawkins' face as he watches proudly.)



I missed the entirety of the All-Star Game itself (still didn't have internet or TV hooked up) and have had to settle for highlights but it seems to have had a great ending, with Kobe Bryant kicking ass and taking home the MVP in his home arena.

Not long after all those fireworks, the NBA trade winds came blowing through town like a tornado, picking up pieces and tossing them to and fro. There were about a bajillion trades and you can read a nice analysis of all the deadline deals here and here.

The biggest trades involved my own hometown favorite New York Knicks and New Jersey Nets. After six months of public haggling, the Denver Nuggets and the Knicks agreed on a deal that sent forward Carmelo Anthony, point guard Chauncey Billups (a favorite player of mine), and a few other small pieces to the Knicks in exchange for about 60% of the Knicks' roster as well as a bunch of other assets. The Knicks absolutely gave up a shitload to get Anthony, a great player but one who is definitely a notch below the game's biggest stars because he's a bit one-dimensional.

The former baseball stats genius and now famous election poll analyst Nate Silver actually chimed in on the value that Anthony provides to a team. First, he had an interesting piece about how Carmelo tends to make his teammates better by being such a good shooter (an article that Basketball Prospectus' Kevin Pelton responded to with a numbers-heavy piece of his own) then he wrote a huge article analyzing the State of the Knicks after giving up so much to get just a couple of players. The verdict: the immediate future for the Knicks is good. Not great because they'll have a top-heavy stars-and-scrubs lineup for a while, but good. For all the hoopla, I'm not sure that's a big success. But Pyrrhus would be proud.

I've tried to watch all the Knicks games since the trade and I can say that I'm definitely glad Chauncey Billups was in the deal. I love watching that guy play. Other than that, they look good...not great.

Across the river in New Jersey, the Nets made a pretty daring trade, one-upping their rivals by acquiring a better player in point guard Deron Williams from the Utah Jazz (whose fans are ready to bum rush the front office now). Williams is an all-around superstar and arguably the best point guard in the NBA. The problem for the Nets is that his contract is about to expire and they've got no guarantee that he'll stay with them. If he does, the Nets have themselves a great piece to build around. If not, they're shit outta luck.

Sports Guy farts, pulls potato chip from couch crevice and eats it, disrespects women, scratches nuts and pens epic NBA philosophy tome

So I've been immersed in The Book of Basketball by ESPN's Bill Simmons (known as The Sports Guy) for a few weeks now and, as I'm now about halfway through the enormous (704 pages) book, I'd like to share a few thoughts on it. Specifically, I'd like to take a closer look at his list of undeserving MVP award winners throughout NBA history but first, some thoughts on the first five chapters.

Simmons' writing style is extremely readable. This book was one of many that I received for Christmas but once I started reading a couple pages, I was sucked into it and have mostly neglected the other books so far. There's really no doubt that he writes very well. What gets annoying very quickly, though, are the comically absurd number of footnotes on every single page. A glut of footnotes will always get annoying in any book because they interrupt or distract the reader's flow of information absorption, but here the footnotes almost seem to mock and tease the reader, bothering him to stop and look to the bottom of the page when all that's there is a horrifically inane or misogynistic sex joke, reality TV or pop culture reference, or some other bullshit.

He also has a tendency to be self-aware and self-conscious (basically, talking about the sentence he's writing while he's writing it) a bit too much and while his background as a comedy writer allows for some gems (I laughed out loud about 5 times already) it also leads to plenty of overdone jokes that completely miss the humor target. I find myself zooming past sentences and passages at times just because I literally don't want to waste the 2 seconds of time (and 2 milliliters of brain juice) that it takes to read a joke about Desperate Housewives or a Vegas strip club experience. Or dicks. Or cocaine. Enough already.

I'm giving complaints and criticism about it not because it's a terrible book, absolutely not. Overall the book is great and universally acknowledged as such. It was a New York Times bestseller, has a rating of 4 out of 5 stars on Amazon, and Simmons remains an extremely popular sportswriter. The New York Magazine book section had a nice series of columns discussing the merits and demerits of Simmons' basketball epic. I've been reading his NBA columns on ESPN.com for probably 5 or 6 years now and they alone usually awaken my NBA fanhood each season and get me following and caring about the games. I've definitely enjoyed the book and, when you dig past all the cloacal excess, there certainly is a basketball book in here and a very good one.

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Simmons is positively obsessed with basketball and has been for many years. His sheer depth of knowledge is entertaining in and of itself sometimes. His thoughts are long-winded but precise, well-delivered, and always organized either in lists, bullet-points, or a marked tendency to title his own theory or award name which occurs on pretty much every other page ("Dumbest Commish Moment Ever"; "The Mom Test"; "Great Player Turned Bad TV Analyst"; "The League That Was Too Black had become the League That Raked in Shitloads of Money"). The Sports Guy is highly opinionated and he pretty much always states his case convincingly. In the Wilt-vs-Russell chapter, he does occasionally take his subjective snark too far but he definitely has me convinced Bill Russell was a greater player than Wilt Chamberlain. The What-If chapter didn't seem like it would be that appealing at first but it turned out to be the best chapter thus far. He properly lambasts the Trail Blazers for their selection of Greg Oden over Kevin Durant in the draft and deftly deconstructs the follies of the Phoenix Suns during the Steve Nash era. This book is truly Simmons' philosophical treatise on the NBA.

But when I was reading the "Most Valuable Chapter," cutting through the vines of his many arguments, I couldn't stop thinking about the stats. Simmons describes eight past MVP choices as "Outright Travesties" and delivers his reasons but I was left thinking what the advanced NBA stats might say about it. Particularly the stats that work to come up with a single number for a player's value, like Win Shares. In the chapter, Simmons takes a small swipe at these kind of stats and the analysts who have developed them saying "over the past ten years, a series of stat freaks inspired by the baseball revolution pushed a variety of convoluted statistics on us." But then his first question in the criteria for evaluating the true MVP is: "If you replaced each MVP candidate with a decent player at his position for the entire season, what would be the hypothetical effect on his team's record?" Those "stat freaks" have come up with something to measure exactly that.

While I'm still pretty new to the highbrow basketball stats world (I read Basketball Prospectus for the first time this year and loved it), I think it would be interesting to look at whether the basketball Win Shares statistic agrees with Simmons' assertions. Win Shares was originally a baseball stat created by Bill James to determine in one number, congealed and drawn out of a steaming stew of many statistics (including defensive numbers), how many wins a player was worth during a given season (it bears mentioning that, in baseball, a bunch of newer and better win value statistics have come about and surpassed James' relatively sloppy Win Shares by now, particularly Baseball Prospectus' WARP or Wins Above Replacement Player).

The stat was later adapted to measure the value of NBA players (you can read all the boring details here). While it's certainly not perfect, and I'm not positing that Win Shares should be the main determinant of the MVP award, I think it'll be worth looking at.

In Chapter 5, after elaborating 14 "features and subplots" that distinguish basketball from every other sport (most of which don't seem particular to basketball at all), The Sports Guy asserts that the Most Valuable Player award in the NBA matters more than in any other sport. His argument:

Wait, you don't believe me? Can you name the last ten NFL MVPs? You can't. Can you name the last ten MVPs in each baseball league, then definitively say which guy was better each year? Nope.

Then he insults hockey, a common punching bag for ignorant sportswriters (if you and SportsCenter don't have interest in something that doesn't automatically disqualify it from being cool---hockey's awesomeness is at its heights right now, same with basketball) before traveling back in time to "correct every mistake in MVP history." He has three categories of false MVPs, in order: Fishy But Ultimately Okay, Fishy and Ultimately Not Okay, and Outright Travesties.

Let's look at his eight travesties starting with #8 and comparing the Win Shares leaders (taken from basketball-reference.com) for each season in question. (FYI: Win Shares shows how many wins a player has created compared to what a dude-off-the-street, replacement player would produce.)

8. Kobe Bryant (2007-08 MVP)
Simmons rips Kobe often in the book and here he says this "should have been Chris Paul's trophy---nobody meant more to his team or his city---and if not him, then Garnett."

2007-08 Win Shares leaders

1.	Chris Paul-NOH	17.8
2.	LeBron James-CLE	15.2
3.	Amare Stoudemire-PHO	14.6
4.	Kobe Bryant-LAL	13.8
5.	Chauncey Billups-DET	13.5

He's certainly right about Chris Paul. In fact, Paul is already leading the NBA in Win Shares this current season and he finished 2nd in 2009 but still hasn't won an MVP yet. So here, Simmons is on the money except for throwing Garnett in. He was 2nd in the league in Defensive Win Shares but overall was at just eighth in overall Win Shares with 12.9. (Although he was the leader and catalyst on the champion Celtics that season.)

7. Steve Nash (2004-05 MVP)

This one is preposterous for Simmons because it was the first time that "(a) a table setter won the award; (b) a non-franchise player won; and (c) a defensive liability won." He certainly admires Nash's game (who doesn't?) and describes him perfectly: "Here was a Canadian dude with floppy hair and a nonstop motor who looked like Kelly Leak, made throwback plays (like his trademark running hook), knew how to handle a fast break, made teammates better and always handled himself with class." But he feels that, in the MVP awards voting, "poor Shaq ended up getting robbed."

2004-05 Win Shares leaders

1.	Kevin Garnett-MIN	16.1
2.	Dirk Nowitzki-DAL	15.6
3.	Amare Stoudemire-PHO	14.6
4.	LeBron James-CLE	14.3
5.	Shawn Marion-PHO	12.5

Looks like two of Nash's teammates may have been robbed. Though you can definitely argue that Nash propelled Amare and Marion to top-5 status that season and deserves a lot of credit for that. KG had a monster year but his team missed the playoffs, Dirk was great too but his Mavericks were knocked out of the playoffs by Steve Nash's Suns. Simmons (admitting "I'm no Bill James") makes the outlandish assertion that Shaq was responsible for a 40-game swing that season (the Heat gaining 17 wins once they acquired him and the Lakers losing 23) although Shaq sat out injured for 10 games and Win Shares-wise doesn't come close to the top even if considered on a per-minute basis. So, yes: Nash was a bad pick. But there are a few guys that should've had first dibs before Shaq.

6. Magic Johnson (1989-90 MVP)

"Everyone remembers Charles Barkley getting screwed when Jordan had a bigger gripe," he says before stating MJ's choice. He's got this one exactly right. 

1989-90 Win Shares leaders

1.	Michael Jordan*-CHI	19.0
2.	Charles Barkley*-PHI	17.3
3.	Magic Johnson*-LAL	16.5
4.	Karl Malone*-UTA	15.9
5.	David Robinson*-SAS	15.1

Simmons explains why Jordan didn't win the vote for this award, one of the reasons was because "the media kept perpetuating the bullshit that Bird and Magic 'knew how to win' and Jordan 'didn't know how to win yet.' (What a farce.)" That perpetuated bullshit "know how to win" idea seems to be dying a slow death in sports coverage right now. Baseball especially is seemingly starting to move from that penumbra of ignorance.

5. Dave Cowens (1972-73 MVP)

Simmons concludes: "Kareem got robbed" and it certainly looks that way.

1972-73 Win Shares leaders

1.	Kareem Abdul-Jabbar*-MIL	21.9
2.	Wilt Chamberlain*-LAL	18.2
3.	Tiny Archibald*-KCO	14.2
4.	Walt Frazier*-NYK	13.0
5.	John Havlicek*-BOS	12.1

Kareem had won the MVP in both seasons prior and, during a turbulent '72-73 season both on and off the court (seven friends were murdered at his house), led the league in Win Shares while carrying his debilitated team to 60 wins. Cowens does show up at the top of the Defensive Win Shares list but Kareem is far ahead of the rest of the pack on this one.


4. Charles Barkley (1992-93 MVP)

Here's where it starts getting heated (and the argumentative tone often produces the most entertaining and engaging writing in Simmons' opus). He lists the numbers for the top 3 MVP vote-getters that year: Michael Jordan, Hakeem Olajuwon, and Charles Barkley. "That's right, signature seasons from three of the best twenty players ever! Unfortunately, eighty-six voters overlooked the fact that Jordan and Hakeem were two of the most destructive defensive players ever and Barkley couldn't guard Ron Kovic."

1992-93 Win Shares leaders

1.	Michael Jordan*-CHI	17.2
2.	Hakeem Olajuwon*-HOU	15.8
3.	Karl Malone*-UTA	15.4
4.	Charles Barkley*-PHO	14.4
5.	David Robinson*-SAS	13.2

On point once again. Sports Guy says it should have been MJ, Hakeem, then Barkley. MJ's Bulls went on to scorch the Suns in that year's championship giving Jordan vindication. The underappreciated greatness of Hakeem's 1990s domination was covered lengthily and brilliantly at FreeDarko not too long ago.

3. Steve Nash (2005-06 MVP)

So, Nash has to hand in both of his trophies, huh? This was the part of the chapter that made me want to look up the Win Shares, as Simmons asserts that Kobe was worth a minimum of 25 victories for his Lakers that year.

2005-06 Win Shares leaders

1.	Dirk Nowitzki-DAL	17.7
2.	LeBron James-CLE	16.3
3.	Chauncey Billups-DET	15.5
4.	Kobe Bryant-LAL	15.3
5.	Kevin Garnett-MIN	14.9

He's about 10 wins off on Kobe. He doesn't even mention Dirk who carried his team to 60 wins and the NBA Finals (losing to the Heat). Regardless, it's definitely fun to read about Kobe's performance that season. "The dude scored 62 in three quarters against Dallas, then 81 against Toronto a few weeks later." And he was sure as hell fun to watch.



2. Willis Reed (1969-70 MVP)

Willis starred for the Knicks team that year that won a league-high 60 games and was such an endearing team that over a dozen books have been written about that Knicks season. As covered in The Undisputed Guide to Pro Basketball History , even a bunch of the players on that team wrote books. One of those books, Rockin' Steady: A Guide to Basketball & Cool, was writ by the great Walt "Clyde" Frazier whom Simmons mentions as a viable candidate for co-MVP with Reed for 1970. But that's just because, with the way the Knicks took the league by storm that year, "a Knick was getting the MVP and that was that." But Simmons argues that Jerry West was the best player in the league that year.

1969-70 Win Shares leaders

1.	Jerry West*-LAL	15.2
2.	Walt Frazier*-NYK	15.0
3.	Willis Reed*-NYK	14.6
4.	Kareem Abdul-Jabbar*-MIL	13.8
5.	Oscar Robertson*-CIN	11.4

I'm impressed with how on point he is with this one. It's no wonder he has this one at #2 on the travesties list because West was indeed more valuable than Reed and just a tick above Frazier, while dragging his beaten-up team (Wilt Chamberlain and Elgin Baylor missed a big chunk of the season) to 2nd place in the Western Conference and taking them all the way to a Finals matchup with the Knicks (they lost). He argues that this was West's finest year and, as one of the 8 greatest players of all time, he should've won at least one MVP trophy in his career. This was his best chance, and he lost it because the Knicks were so damn entertaining. As a Knicks fan, I say: tough shit.


1. Karl Malone (1996-97 MVP)

Jordan had won the previous season, would win the award the following season, and should've won it this season too. The voting was pretty close and Karl Malone somehow came out on top. Simmons bubbles up a Vegas bachelor party story to state his case then blames it all on a silly "Malone-for-MVP" campaign among sportswriters that "got the ball rolling, and within a couple of weeks, this became the cute story du jour."

1996-97 Win Shares leaders

1.	Michael Jordan*-CHI	18.3
2.	Karl Malone*-UTA	16.7
3.	Grant Hill-DET	14.6
4.	John Stockton*-UTA	13.6
5.	Scottie Pippen*-CHI	13.1

Not only was Jordan clearly the best player in the league, but his team won more games (69) than anybody that year and eventually met Karl Malone's Utah Jazz in the NBA Finals, smote them mightily and Jordan won Finals MVP. So there. Moral of the story: don't mess with Jordan.


While researching this post, I came across a cool piece by Kevin Pelton at Basketball Prospectus using win statistics to look at all the best players from the 1990s. Check it out here.

Braindrizzles

My favorite musical group of all time, the Wu-Tang Clan, is performing right now and I reluctantly gave up on attending the show after getting over to the venue and seeing the line spanning all the way around the corner. Really, though, for a number of reasons I was at least ambivalent and at most uninterested in going to see the Clan in concert and seeing the humongous line just solidified my apprehension into nonattendance.

I've been physically ill, just feeling cruddy and cloudy with a boogery head cold and a combo of other ailments for the past 7 days, most likely brought on by the stressful work environment I'm in each day. Pretty much every day at work features me having to ward off angry vendors to whom we owe tens of thousands of dollars and tell them "we just don't have it" and variations of that pathetic statement. The owner, who is also my co-worker, is a trampled man. His company is crumbling to dust before his very eyes.

I actually saw Wu-Tang perform live here in San Diego exactly two years today and it was a spectacular show. My reluctance to go see them again though is partially because of their never changing up the set list when they perform together as a group; they play the same exact tracks every time. All the mid-90s classics. Never any more recent (last ten years) material. Plus my favorite member, The Rza, won't be performing on the current tour because he's in China directing his first movie, The Man with the Iron Fist starring Russell Crowe.

If one of the members was performing solo or alongside some of the lesser heard but highly skilled Killa Bees then I would be a lot more eager to see it because they would certainly delve deeper into their vast catalogue. I'm glad to hear that 1990s Wu affiliate La the Darkman is one of the opening acts on this tour, though. And I heard he performed this classic song at the San Francisco show on Thursday:


It'd be really special if he got the chance to perform this relatively obscure Wu gem with Masta Killa and U-God, "Element of Surprise" produced by 4th Disciple:




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R.I.P. to the great Ron Santo who died at the age of 70 yesterday. The should-be Hall of Fame third baseman was a Chicago Cubs legend. He suffered from diabetes which eventually led to him having both legs amputated but he was still always a mainstay at Wrigley Field. Sad to see him go.

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I received a phone call while still in bed sleeping this morning from my friend and co-worker informing me that the Padres had officially traded hometown hero and superstar Adrian Gonzalez to the Red Sox. I'm shocked at how quickly it happened but it really seemed inevitable. Gonzalez is one of the best players in baseball right now and he was entering the last year of an extremely underpaid deal, while it was becoming more and more clear that there was no way the Padres would be able to re-sign him with the money he'd inevitably demand on the market as such a great commodity. It's sad because he's a San Diego native of Mexican-American descent which makes him a perfect fit here but such is the business of baseball. The Padres don't have much money (though I'm not sure why) and he was going to undoubtedly command a huge contract.

The Padres' GM Jed Hoyer is a former whiz kid from the Red Sox front office and so we can be confident that he knew exactly which minor players to snatch up from his former team in return for this most precious trade piece. According to Marc Hulet from FanGraphs, the new arrivals from the Sox already slide right into the top 5 prospects in the Padres system.

While I'm glad I got to attend so many Padres games this summer and see one of the best hitting Padres of all time lead his team through a pennant race, I'm not quite as emotionally attached to the players as some of the Padre diehards and, objectively, this seems like a great deal for the situation they found themselves in. It will be fun rooting for Adrian to kick the Yankees' asses. But I wish this deal didn't have to happen.

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For the last few weeks I've been absorbed fully into the happenings of the NBA, watching multiple games every night. Having watched games featuring almost every team in the league, I'm starting to wonder if there are any truly boring teams to watch. There doesn't seem to be right now as even the crappiest teams have a player or two who's worth watching. The best example of this is the perennially pathetic Los Angeles Clippers who have become must-see TV for me lately with rookie Blake Griffin exploding onto the scene with nightly highlight reels of him doing things you normally only see in NBA Jam or old Shawn Kemp highlights.



Even the Knicks, that formally destitute, dilapidated franchise I've always rooted for but most recently shielded my eyes from, seem to be crawling out of their years in the sewer. Mike D'Antoni has the offense clicking, playing fast-paced, exciting and high-scoring basketball while Amare Stoudemire is settling into a consistent streak of awesomeness and starting to have great chemistry with new point guard Raymond Felton. The Knicks are actually fun to watch.

The NBA world was abuzz all week about LeBron James' return to Cleveland to play his former team but after the bullshit about his famous powder toss and the player introductions, there was really nothing special to the game at all. The Heat absolutely scorched a clearly inferior team right from the start and that was the end of it.

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I've been reading and loving two excellent but very different basketball books lately, The Macrophenomenal Pro Basketball Almanac and Pro Basketball Prospectus 2010-11, and I will write a review for them soon. I can't speak highly enough about both of them. In the Macrophenomenal book, the team over at FreeDarko uses sleek artwork and graphs to examine the culture and essence of the contemporary NBA and the Prospectus book is an absolute gem, reminding me of Bill James' Baseball Abstracts. Glad to see this infinitely awesome sport inspiring such great material.