A glamour venture between two of the most recognizable names in world sports? With deep pockets, no less? MLS has come a long way from the Tampa Bay Mutiny (pour one out for Carlos Valderrama’s beautiful hair).

This picture is totally irrelevant to the rest of this article. But...that hair.

Of course, the move is not without curiosity. The league already has a team (at least nominally) in the New York area, and a founder member of MLS to boot. Several cities with no MLS team have been pining for one, and a few aren’t bad options, such as St. Louis, San Diego, Minneapolis or Atlanta (on second thought, scratch Atlanta, which has never been a good idea for any sports team, ever). MLS has always been a plucky league whose goal was to carve out a niche within the crowded sporting culture of the United States by identifying soccer-sympathetic pockets of the continent where the sport can thrive. This model, after some initial hiccups, has located Portland, Kansas City, and more recently Montreal to go with showpiece teams in Los Angeles (not Chivas USA, the other one) and New York.

The creation of NYC feels like a shift in the league’s persona. This is inherently a gamble, and one that the United States has lost before. The NASL went upscale in the seventies, and by the early eighties was a doomed, disastrous husk of a league. By the mid-eighties it was gone.

That is not to say that the MLS will suffer the same fate. The league is, if nothing else, seemingly stable, and even thriving in the locations mentioned above. Under the stewardship of Don Garber, the league has been calculated in its growth. Gone are the days when MLS teams were tenants in massive football stadiums which they could never fill. Every team has at least a home. The talent level of the league has improved dramatically, both from imports (Beckham, Henry, etc.) and the growth of American players. Things aren’t bad in MLS land. On the surface, this move is two huge corporations and one eager league taking a good thing and making it better.

But listen to your gut. Do you trust this move? I had a good talk with my gut this morning over some oatmeal, and we thrashed out some questions about NYFC. Here we go:

1. What does this mean for the Red Bulls?

New York’s team is about to become New York’s “other” team. And in case you haven’t heard, New York’s other team ain’t bad; currently tied for the league’s best record (with FC Dallas) on 24 points. But they play in Harrison, NJ, accessed by the New Jersey Turnpike. NYFC will move into Flushing Meadows park, on the 7 train. I don’t live in New York, but I know how New Yorkers feel about their travel. If the option to be entertained without leaving the boroughs is there, it wins. This one’s a n0-brainer.

But with 19 million in the Metro area, New York can support two teams, right? Maybe. A quick look at the attendance figures shows that as of May 13, the Red Bulls were averaging 16,021 per home contest, just 11th of 19 MLS teams, despite playing in the third largest venue in the league. By percentage capacity, the numbers look even worse, with only three clubs filling less seats than the Red Bulls 63.6%. Furthermore, team attendance is down over 12% from 2011.

Already flagging attendance and new, more convenient competition (with mega-dollars behind it?). Despite the fact that those currently involved with the Red Bulls are saying all the right things, this could mean curtains for them over the long haul.

2. What does this mean for the league as a whole?

Um…visibility? Who the hell knows? One thing is clear, this club is not meant to be Toronto FC or Chivas USA. It’s clear, even without saying it, that Garber and the MLS brass mean for NYFC to be a flagship team, on par with the Los Angeles Galaxy and Seattle. While the league has moved closer to a competitve balance as teams have transitioned to their own ownership groups, MLS has never been shy about locating players in advantageous spots. In the league’s youth, players were doled out on largely ethnic grounds, the better to attract fan bases rooted in those same communities in certain cities (latino communities in Florida and Southern California, traditionally Eastern European communities in Chicago, etc.). More recently, star imports have more or less “found their way” to the league’s glamour spots. Ever wonder how Thierry Henry ended up in New York? David Beckham and Robbie Keane in L.A.? Wasn’t Frank Lampard also headed there before he signed his extension with Chelsea? These don’t seem like accidents, but rather careful calculations.

Now, with another big boy entering the league fray, will the MLS become a league of haves and have-nots? Possibly. Consider Chivas USA. Initially popular upon their inclusion in the league. A club that has always felt like an altogether too direct and rather needless effort to pander to the Mexican-American community has fallen on hard times. Last in the Western Conference for the third consecutive year, they are averaging just over 8,000 per game. Similar smaller outposts like Colorado and Columbus are also struggling for fans, as the rich continue to get richer. Now, this model is well entrenched in Europe, where teams are divided into tiers upon tiers upon tiers. West Bromwich Albion doesn’t have the pretense that they are on the same level as Manchester City, Chelsea or Manchester United, despite nominally being in their league. MLS isn’t supposed to work like that. Theoretically, Chivas USA is supposed to be on the same level as the Galaxy. In reality, they already seem to be a cut below  NYFC, a club that won’t play a game for another two years. For the same reason that Garber has rejected the promotion/relegation model, MLS cannot afford a de facto caste system. Without the pretense of balance that is central to our sporting experience  (Major League Baseball notwithstanding), fans will disappear and teams like Chivas USA will likely not survive. That being said, MLS appears to be sliding that way, all in the name of visibility. That could be to its detriment.

3. Why Manchester City?

Why not Manchester United? They have always seemed like the European counterweight to the Yankees. Both are behemoths. Both have a truckload of titles to point to, and the global brand that comes with success in this era of sports. On top of that, United sports American owners. They seem like the most logical business partner for MLS to leech onto.

That being said, United has been under a questionable financial cloud since the Glazers took hold in 2005. While the team continues to make money hand-over-fist, no one besides perhaps Malcolm Glazer seems to know exactly where it is going. A bizarre and ultimately lukewarm stock float last year confirmed United’s status as an enigma in terms of global finance, even while the team continues to bag EPL titles on the field.

City on the other hand, appears to be a bottomless pit of money. Nouveau-riche owner Sheik Mansour bought the team in 2008 and has splayed cash around on players and toys at a rate that could generously be described as “reckless.” Before the 2011-12 season, City spent more on new players than the rest of the EPL combined (in doing so, they also bought themselves the 2012 title). Mansour has spent this money like a man who never fears going broke, mainly because that’s exactly what he is.

However, new European financial regulations may be driving Mansour and City’s ambitions. FIFA’s Fair Play financial initiative, the brainchild of former French midfield maestro and current president of EUFA, Michel Platini, theoretically could punish any club without balanced financial books by banning them from elite club competitions. City, with its early nineties MC Hammer-esque financial model, has some of the least balanced books in Europe.

The Fair Play regulations are more complicated than a Joyce novel, so to save a long explanation (which I do not have the wherewithal to deliver anyhow) I’ll say this, one of the ways to circumvent the policy is by investing in business matters tangential to the day-to-day running of a football that show a profit on their own. These profits are then factored in to the total business output of a club, mitigating the bloated spending of a club like Manchester City.

Therefore, the optimistic fan could look at City’s investment in NYFC as a major financial boost to MLS, while the cynic could point out that this investment is an underhanded way to offset club-crippling financial debt. Before you ask yourself, what the difference is, think of it this way. Will City be running NYFC as a club that they actually want to win, or as essentially an easy tax write-off? That motivation could drive the success of the venture as a whole, and the results likely won’t be known until it is too late.

So, as Manchester City and the New York Yankees put ink down on the creation of a sports supergroup, is it a brilliant business investment or boondoggle? The brave new future of MLS or the indicator of a wide financial chasm in American soccer? The next few years will tell us a lot about the future of soccer in the United States.

I’ve never liked Johnson’s “style” of shouting, shouting, and shouting some more. I have grudgingly accepted the fact that the percentage of the American sports-viewing population that does not immediately hate all sportscasters responds to Johnson’s all-action “this one goes up to eleven” milieu. Actually, comparing Johnson to Nigel Tufnel is an understatement. Whereas Tufnel’s amp goes up to 11, Johnson’s voice starts at a  35 and never comes down. Listening to Johnson call his more comfortable sports of college basketball and NFL football is less a broadcast than a 2-3 hour assault on one’s auditory canal.

So it was with a morbid, scientific curiosity that I tuned in to yesterdays game. I felt that I could have written this article three days ago, and the underlying message would be the same, but I decided to wait. Recognizing that Wednesday was Johnson’s first step on a decade-long journey towards becoming a tried-and-true soccer broadcaster, I wanted to give Gus the faintest of chances to prove to me that he could tone down his act and call a soccer match with the precise amount of controlled intensity required. As a “non-traditional” (read: British) soccer voice I wanted to see if Johnson was in-tune with the players and the culture of the game in Europe. I wanted to give him a fighting chance to prove to me that he may be a good appointment, eventually, by the FOX network. He did not.

Picking on Johnson’s in-game performance is a little reductive and not necessarily the overall point of this piece, so I will get it out of the way early. Overall, I thought he was out of tune with the game and the players in it. Beyond mis-identifying players on several occasions, making a special note that Robin Van Persie crossed the ball with his left foot, which is of course Van Persie’s dominant appendage, or generally sounding like he had a glossary of soccer terms sitting on the table in front of him for easy reference, Johnson never gave me a sense that he knew anything about the players in the game. I never got the sense that he knew that Diego Lopes, the Real goalkeeper, was signed as a January stop-gap for the injured Iker Casillas, or that Fabio Coentrao and Luka Modric have both struggled to make their way with the Real squad this campaign. On the Manchester United side, there was no note of David De Gea’s struggles to be a complete goalkeeper, or Phil Jones’ special assignment as an extremely deep-lying midfielder to counteract the dangers of Madrid’s attacking quintet of Ronaldo, Ozil, Di Maria, Benzema and Higuain. Sure, he knew, and spoke at length about, Cristiano Ronaldo, but people who never watch soccer know what Ronaldo looks like in hot pants, so that doesn’t really count. An announcer needs to dig deeper, and acquire the knowledge that only comes from being around a sport, any sport, as much as possible. Johnson clearly hasn’t done that.

Of course, every issue I mentioned above can be corrected over time, and with a virtual guarantee that he will be on the job until Cristiano is 37 years old, Johnson has time to grow and gain knowledge. The main issue with Johnson was, is, and in the case of soccer, always will be, one of style. The man simply does not fit the sport.

I had the fortune of watching the match twice. For some odd reason, while Johnson and Warren Barton were picked up on the over-the-air FOX soccer feed, the online feed on FOXSoccer.tv carried the call of English legend Martin Tyler (whom you may remember from ESPN’s coverage of the 2010 World Cup final, if you aren’t a regular viewer of Champions League or EPL matches), and former Manchester United defender Gary Neville. Like most of the U.S., I was at work when the game was being played, so I kept the online feed on in the background.  Comparing Tyler to Johnson is patently unfair to Johnson, but it did provide a first-hand look at exactly why Johnson is the wrong man for the job.

What makes Tyler, and others, so good, is that they recognize what soccer is not, which is an action sport. In the U.S. those that present the sport to us seem hell-bent on bringing the sport to air with the idea that its comparable games are basketball and hockey. Beyond the nets and to some extent, the shape, hockey and soccer are little alike. Beyond the level of athleticism, ditto for Basketball. Soccer’s rhythm lies somewhere in between the stop-start of football and the operatic structure of baseball. The game has its natural breaks. An attack is made, successful or otherwise, and after every repelled charge the game re-sets. The disguise of soccer is that while these re-sets are taking place, the players are still in motion. It is easy to look at the movement and think that more should be happening. This attitude is where, I believe, many newcomers to the sport become hung up on soccer. They see something that isn’t there, which is an “action” sport, and they expect the game to be something that it is not.

Where seasoned veteran broadcasters like Tyler succeed, and where Johnson is a failed appointment, is that Tyler and his brethren understand these rhythms, and know how to fill the time in between a game’s natural upswings. This is how soccer resembles its closest American counterpart, which is baseball. Both sports lull and wait, building to brief eruptions of action, most of which end up as anti-climaxes. The thirteen-pitch at-bat which ends in a ground out is akin to the 12 pass sequence which ends with a shot rifling over the bar. Where American broadcasters, including Johnson, have failed to rein in the sport is in this narrative. They insist on calling each individual pass between defenders as if it drives the narrative of the game, when this is time that could be spent building the games back story, thus informing that same narrative in useful way. By not doing this, and highlighting action that needs no description, broadcasters in this country unwittingly detract from the sport, which provides further fodder for the “soccer is dull” majority of this country.

This group is one of three main sections of the United States’ population vis-a-vis the sport. There are those that despise the game, those that casually watch the game (roughly every World Cup), and those that follow the sport with a passion that borders, and sometimes exceeds, Europhilia.

On a Venn diagram, those that despise the game are also those who would likely intersect with Johnson’s target audience. They are those that live for NFL Sunday, and consider even hockey too foreign for their liking. Having met more than my share of these fans in my lifetime, I can safely say that no matter what happens, these people will never come around to the sport. They also seem to be the very same audience that Network Executives are constantly trying to court. They are the majority, as well as the group that dominates advertising demographics. They are also the group that the more they are collectively forced to experience something they do not enjoy, the more they resist. If Johnson’s appointment is a calculated play to draw this group in, what makes them think it will work? Besides, if Wednesday’s game was any indication, Johnson was clearly trying to sound like a traditional soccer voice, thereby fighting his inner-Gus Johnson. If he completely tones down his act, will he have the same appeal?

Much of the same argument can be made for the casual fan. If this group’s main complaint when they tune in to the World Cup is the lack of American voices on the air (and I’m hard-pressed to believe that they care at all about this) and Johnson is meant to draw them into the world game, then FOX is setting them up for disappointment. For when the Jules Rimet trophy is handed out, and all the internationals go back to club games, I sincerely doubt that FOX is planning to send American broadcasters to cover every game each Saturday in The EPL (whose rights FOX is losing to NBC in any case, La Liga, or Serie A. When these fans tune in to those games and hear British, Spanish or Italian announcers, wouldn’t logic dictate that they turn off their set once again?

Which brings us to the third group of fans. This group may be the only part of the spectrum that actually cares who delivers their game to them. They want their voices to be knowledgeable, non-invasive, and not cartoonish. Most fans I know (native English speaking, in any case) don’t even like Spanish broadcasts because the commentators tend to take away from the game with their histrionics. At this point in time, the voices they want to hear are British. Furthermore, none of this group, whom I have spoken to, have expressed anything less than disgust for the appointment of Johnson. What no one seems to realize is that one of the main reasons that this group enjoys soccer in the first place is that is specifically NOT American. Hardcore soccer fans in this country appreciate the sport because it provides an alternative to the normal sporting experience. It exists, for the most part, away from canned Jock Jams at stadiums, bro culture, and useless cheerleaders. The more television tries to Americanize the sport, the more they will resist that culture shift. These people simply want the best product presented to them. They care little about what accent that presentation comes with.

It is to this end that the appointment of someone like Gus Johnson as the “voice” of soccer in America is just as likely to drive established fans away as it is to reign in new support. The time will come when someone who grew up in this country will be able to  present the game up to the established standard, but I severely doubt that Gus Johnson will ever be that man. I understand that in the macr0-world of television, where quality is a distant second to quantity, the search for a wider audience will render my plea for the best product (read: imported) available, I make it anyway.

And since that won’t work, I’ll just implore Gus Johnson to surprise me and improve, because I can’t go through another nine-years of viewing experience like I received on Wednesday. Rise and Fire, Gus. The soccer community is, through gritted teeth, praying you get better, for their sake.

John Calipari has created a beast. It started with Tyreke Evans and Derrick Rose’s Memphis teams, and it has grown to leviathan proportions at Kentucky. Last season’s national championship wasn’t seen necessarily as the culmination of a half decade of elbow grease on the recruiting trail and in the practice gym, but a mastery of college basketball through questionable recruiting pitch, and turning Kentucky into a fast-track NBA first round pick haven. Calipari was, through fair and foul means, gaming the system created by the NBA’s rule requiring one year of “college.” In doing so, Calipari was building a basketball program on a higher plane of existence, one that would win a national championship, shuttle their stars into the lottery, and simply hit the reset button; title, rinse, repeat.

That’s what we expected, anyway. So when Kentucky free-fell out of the rankings after losses to two decent teams (Notre Dame and Baylor) last week, what should have been a scathing indictment of preseason polls became a week-long debate about ”what’s wrong with Kentucky?” A team that had been ranked 8th was now unworthy of our votes, and it is hard to tell what was a bigger overreaction, whether Kentucky was dropped from the rankings, or whether or not they deserved to be that high in the first place. The reality of the situation rests somewhere in between (as does Kentucky’s deserved place in the rankings, somewhere from 15-25?) but these days, when you play at Kentucky, your reality is already created for you. Are you a hotshot freshman? No, you are Anthony Davis re-incarnate. Are you a good basketball team? No, you are a great basketball team, or you are nothing. These are the expectations that we, the sporting public, have foisted onto the Wildcats, and they can’t possibly be expected to meet them.

Maybe because we saw the names roll in for Kentucky throughout the recruiting season. Four players, all top ten at their position, rolled in to replace the three freshmen and two sophomores that stylishly led Calipari and the ‘Cats to the NCAA title in March. Willie Cauley-Stein, Alex Poythress and Archie Goodwin would have been a recruiting coup for every school, but when Kentucky added consensus number one recruit Nerlens Noel to the mix, we were all ready to hand Kentucky another final four appearance (or better) before the season began.

Those expectations, however were based not on this seasons’ Kentucky team, but the 2011-12 vintage, which is patently unfair to Cauley-Stein, Poythress, Goodwin and Noel. Kentucky’s 2011 recruiting class ranks as the equal or better of Michigan’s Fab Five. Even adjusting for post-internet information age hype inflation, Kentucky’s 2011 kids may not have reached Fab Five level upon their arrival in Lexington, but they were a better team wire-to-wire. Remember, the Fab Five went 25-9 in the regular season and entered the NCAA tournament as a six seed. Kentucky’s bunch rolled through a one-loss regular season and entered the tournament as the clear, deserved, favorite. They boasted a player who invoked seemingly realistic comparisons to Bill Russell in Anthony Davis, and perhaps the best team-basketball freshman you’ll ever watch play in Michael Kidd-Gilchrist. The team was so good, it counted perhaps the most purely talented player in the lineup, sophomore Terrance Jones, as its fifth-best player.

So when the banner went up and the Championship ’Cats went pro, we turned our attention to the next crop of greats that John Calipari had rounded up, because that’s what Calipari does, and we didn’t see the players they were, we just wanted to see the players they were replacing. We didn’t want to see Alex Poythress for his game, we just wanted to see if he could be Kidd-Gilchrist, or Jones, or, gulp, both. We didn’t want to see Nerlens Noel’s retro Kid n’ Play high-top fade, we wanted to see Anthony Davis’ unibrow.

Strip away the comparisons, and what you will find at Kentucky is, wait for it…a normal basketball team. Noel, Cauley-Stein, Poythress and Goodwin are good players, but they are just freshman trying to figure out what they can do. Beyond them, you’ll find Kyle Wiltjer, the least heralded of last year’s freshman and the only one still around. A good player, but not a world beater. Farther down, you find two transfers from less pedigreed programs, Ryan Harrow (N.C. St.) and Julius Mays (Wright St.). Of course much has been made of Harrow’s poor play at the point guard spot and his subsequent illness and absence, with many chalking his struggles up to the pressure of replacing Calipari’s former point guards; Rose, Knight and Teague. Perhaps Harrow’s strange condition is the only tangible evidence that we have that this Kentucky crop isn’t ready for the big time.

And shame on us for expecting them to be. Kentucky’s “failure” in the early part of this season is less a story of Kentucky players and more a story of the fans and media who stand outside their fishbowl. We built the Kentucky beast by expecting Calipari to do something twice in two seasons when it had never been done before, and when they couldn’t do it, we left them for dead.

So let Kentucky live, whether you hate them or not. Let them be average for now, and perhaps they will grow into the greatness that their recruits theoretically possess. And if they fail? Perhaps some of them will stay in school for a sophomore year, in which case Kentucky may be set up for another title run in 2014. For next year’s recruiting class includes the highly touted Harrison twins, as well as fellow top-100 recruits James Young and Marcus Lee. And after all, don’t great recruiting classes equal great teams?

If you answered yes, please re-read this article.

The answer, of course, is of course.

Manziel is the most enjoyable player of this fairly bland college football season by a Texas back-country mile. He’s picking up the Robert Griffin slack, not only in Texas, but now nationwide as the legend of “Johnny Football” explodes all over the map.

Let me start by saying that the nickname is perfect for Manziel. Johnny Football evokes a backyard game of mud ball with your friends, and that is what it’s like watching Manizel play. Everything he does looks unscripted (i.e., his fumble pass from Saturday, which will be the most overplayed replay of the week, hands down) even when it isn’t. He looks, and plays, like a little kid. Watching Manziel play quarterback makes you feel American, on the level of cooking your apple-pie with your gun-store purchased flame-thrower while hanging out with your pet Eagle. The kid is fun.

And he’s fun for all the right reasons. While his peers are holding press conferences after the Army All-American Game to decide where they are going to bide their time before the NFL, Manziel is an old-fashioned college football star. The one who showed up on campus one day, and had greatness thrust upon him for nothing less than inspiring on-field play. He’s short (relatively) at 6’1,” and he looks like the goofy kid at the end of every block. If he weren’t a quarterback, he’d be wearing a mesh-back hat down at the feed store after a long day, and I say that in no way to mock Manziel. He’s all substance, the flash has been insterted upon his persona by the rest of us.

Then there is the issue of “Johnny Football,” trademark pending. Nothing made me more depressed than to read that the Manziels, in conjuction with Texas A&M, were working to lock down the nickname for future merchanidising purposes. I’m sure by know anyone who is interested in the story knows the legal mumbo-jumb0, so I’ll skip that part and move directly on to my personal plea to Manziel:

Johnny, don’t be that guy.

Don’t be the guy who looks out for his bottom line over his offensive line. Don’t be that guy who wants to have his own breakfast cereal, comic book likeness and clothing line (Johnny Football’s Footie Pajamas!)

For one thing, trademarking a nickname is perhaps the most presumptuous thing a person can do, especially one as basic as “Johnny Football.” And furthermore, what if the person whom he ends up wrangling with for the rights turns out to be John Elway? Johnny Unitas’ kids? The estate of Johnny Heisman? It’s not too late to rebrand a legend. It’s way to early to brand a colleged (redshirt) freshman, whose team, despite giant-killing on the weekend, is still only 8-2 (“Johnny Football goes to the Capital One Bowl” coming to a children’s bookstore near you). There are far more John’s and Johnny’s (John Brodie? John Hannah? John Matuszak?)  that have accomplished more in the game than Manziel.

Finally, trademarking the nickname runs counter to everything that Manziel has done to get here. In a short span of weeks, the little spark plug of College Station has gone from regional quarterback to national hero through a combination of skill, guts and pluck. Those are things that he seems to stand for, and the nickname goes with that. Anyone child-like (do not confuse with “childish”) enough to accept the moniker of “Johnny Football” shouldn’t care what happens to that nickname when he isn’t on a football field. Anyone who would willingly admit to such a name should care about one thing. It’s worrying to thing that Manziel is just another athlete that cares more about Johnny than he does about football.

So go with what got you here, kid. The defensive line is coming at you, pivot away, find Ryan Swope in the back of the end zone all alone. Beat ‘Bama. Let the rest of your celebrity grow (and fade) gracefully. Because that’s what “Johnny Football” would do.

Be that guy.

I’ll give you a moment to process that image.

Guillen seemed to be the perfect man for the job, a successful Latin American male in a community that wants and needs Latin American role models, a bombastic presence on a team that was looking to make a bombastic return to relevance in the National League, and a ratings producing mouthpiece on the Showtime documentary that was set to follow the team’s progress last season.

One year later, Guillen looks like the worst managerial decision ever made in baseball. He offended Miami’s Cuban community by openly touting respect for, Fidel Castro. He battled openly with Miami’s hierarchy, who aren’t the most stable group to begin with, and showed a general disdain for his players, specifically Heath Bell.

In truth, Guillen never changed his style from his White Sox days, and the Marlins should have known what they were getting into. In Chicago, Guillen openly ripped his players, but the team was steadily improving while he did so, so the World Series-starved fans and organization on the South Side was willing to put up with it. When his approach brought them a title in 2006, the win meant that even though many people hated him in Chicago, you couldn’t question his results.

In Florida, Guillen’s brusque could only ever ruin the feel-good factor that was the Marlins coming into their new ballpark. Instead of a city focused on a young, talented team ready to compete in the National League, everyone turned their attention to the travelling 38-ring circus that was Ozzie. On a team filled with outsized personalities (Logan Morrison, Giancarlo Stanton, Jose Reyes, Heath Bell until his trade), the Marlins brought in a man whose idea of handling such players is to be more colorful than they are. Just by being himself, Ozzie torpedoed what should have been a special season in Miami, win or lose.

So when Larry Beinfest and Jeffrey Loria went looking for a new manager, they went and found a man who has the potential to be Guillen’s polar opposite. Mike Redmond’s name may have come out of the blue, but anyone who remembers Redmond as a player can probably see the logic in his hire.

Of course one of the main reasons that the inexperienced Redmond was hired is strictly financial. Guillen will be paid $7.5 million over the next three years to stay far away from the Marlins, and since Redmond has not managed above the Florida St. League, he comes cheap. A closer look at the man, however, sees that he has a chance to succeed.

Redmond was a major league survivor. Never drafted, never thought of, but he played fairly regularly and well for a thirteen years in the major leagues based on two traits: steady defense and personality.

As a catcher, Redmond was the ideal backup. In 687 career regular season games, he committed just 18 errors and 23 passed balls. Furthermore, he seemed to understand, even embrace, the idea that he was not an everyday player. He spent the balance of his career backing up three excellent catchers in Charles Johnson, Ivan Rodriguez and Joe Mauer, and took his opportunities when he could. On what will undoubtedly be a young Marlins team in 2013, a manager who understands the mentality of all players can be crucial. Handling players was never Guillen’s strong suit, and he could be downright brutal to those who lacked experience.

After the torment of the 2012 baseball season, there is little doubt that the Miami Marlins would like to make baseball fun again. Redmond may just be the man. A talker with a wry sense of humor who was known for taking batting practice naked to get out of slumps, Redmond has experience keeping it loose. his press conferences will certainly unpredictable, but in a different fashion than the unhinged Guillen. Furthermore, he knows the Marlins, having played for the team for seven seasons, one of which wsa their 2003 World Series triumph.

Who knows what will happen to Redmond in Miami. Loria and Beinfest don’t have the best track record when it comes to managers and it remains to be seen how patient they will be with their new man. For now, however, it appears the Marlins have what they need: the anti-Ozzie Guillen.

For what succeeded was a made for national television double-header that featured all of the NBA’s important storylines for the 2012-13 season. And I do mean all of them, because on the surface, this upcoming campaign felt like a long, slow trudge towards the inevitability of the finals matchup between Miami and Los Angeles.

But a funny thing happened on the way to an early coronation. Miami certainly did their part, but that was to be expected. For who thought that the Heat would do anything other than show up, get their incredibly gaudy championship rings (219 diamonds!), raise their terrible looking banner, and then rub it in the face of the increasingly irrelevant Boston Celtics (we took your Ray Allen). No wonder Rajon Rondo resorted to a petulant flagrant foul on Dwayne Wade as time ran down. We may be seeing just the tip of the frustration iceberg from Rondo, who perhaps knows more than most that the Heat cannot be challenged in the Eastern Conference.

What happened in the late game is of interest. The Lakers, with their shiny new Dwight Howard and their shiny old Steve Nash, seemed to be the only thing going in the West. That position was further bolstered earlier in the week when the Thunder traded James Harden to Houston, thereby weakening the only team that might have a shot at taking down the latest Los Angeles super team.

But the game was a different story. The Lakers’ performance on Tuesday should be seen as a major red flag. Forget the fact that the Lake show has a bunch of new personnel, and that they say that they are instituting a new offensive scheme for Mike Brown. The bottom line is that the Lakers appeared to not know that they were in a competitive game on Tuesday night. They were slow, uninspired and completely out of sorts. They were beaten by a Dallas team that is in the midst of an identity crisis at the moment. They have zero players on their roster who are on long-term contracts, and the only foundational player on their team, Dirk Nowitzki, was of course absent through injury. This grab-bag collection of NBA journeymen a cut below the upper echelon of player (Elton Brand, Eddy Curry, O.J. Mayo) then proceeded to manhandle a team that could easily feature four of the five Western Conference All-Star starters.

How did they do it? Simple. The Mavericks did the one thing that we assume our athletes should do at all times. They showed up and played like they gave a rat’s ass that they were professional basketball players, whereas the Lakers sleepwalked. Every put back from Brand, or Shawn Merian was met with chest-bumping, high-fiving, and general enthusiasm rarely seen in the emotion-bereft regular season in the NBA. The Lakers response was to set a meager pick to (sort of) free up a jump shooter, who would casually pop a shot, shrug his shoulders when it didn’t go in, and slowly slog towards the defensive end of the court.

This has to be the fear for the Lakers. While no team in the Western Conference appears capable of beating them, they may turn out to be more than capable of beating themselves. Their roster appears to be built perfectly. Howard is meant to the dominating inside presence, with Gasol operating in the space he creates. Nash is meant to be the distributor, while Kobe does his Kobe thing and Metta World Peace operates as the ultimate (and I do mean ultimate) wild card.

On Tuesday night, none of those players did any of those things. Howard looked lackadaisical, Gasol looked lost. Bryant looked bored, Nash kept running down blind alleys with the ball and World Peace looked like his “wild card” idea of the night was to try and be a scorer, which he did to the tune of three points on 1-8 shooting.

Of course, this is only one game. The Lakers should be fine. But I’m backing off my stance that the NBA season is a foregone conclusion. The Lakers can be taken down this year, but only if they do it themselves. They’ve already done it once.

Multiple teams’ fans know this feeling. The Yankees have tied you up, and they are going to finish you off in the most soul-crushing, “f__ this I’m burning my jersey and cancelling my season tickets because baseball is soooooo rigged” kind of fashion possible. Since the mid-nineties, at least in the American League, the playoff theme in baseball has centered around the Yankees, their superiority, which at times has been more perception than reality, and their opponents’ inability to overcome the unrelenting leviathan has been the modern Yankee dynasty.

It has been sixteen years since the Yankees reclaimed their perch as the pace car of baseball. In that time, they’ve gone through multiple eras of players. It began with grubby, workaday battlers like Jim Leyritz and Joe Girardi, who founded the modern incarnation of “America’s most hated team” and evolved into the preening, mercinary superstars that populated their roster for much of the 2000′s. There were two constants to the roster, one was Mariano Rivera, who would haul the carcass of a defeated opponant away after the Jeter and the res of the assassins had done their job. Rivera was the Yankee’s undertaker, and Jeter was the captain of the hit squad.

Before you stop reading because you think that this is another love letter about the greatness of Derek Jeter, I would ask you to bear with me. I will say Jeter is certainly not the greatest Yankee ever. He was probably never the most talented player on any of the Yankee teams he played on. Jeter’s gift, however, was his ever-present ability to be, well, present. Most of Jeter’s career accomplishments, even his 3,000 hits, seem more like inevitibilities of time rather than amazing skill.

Jeter is the face of the Yankees because he personifies, more than anything else, everything about the Yankees that was stated in the first two paragraphs. Yankee fans love Derek Jeter because his team almost always wins. Opposing fans hate him for the exact same reason. Jeter has been there for every one of those moments of Yankee glory over the past decade-and-a-half, but rarely as the central player. Rather, Jeter was the man on the top step of the dugout, looking suave and unconcerned as Scott Brosius or Tino Martinez (or Raul Ibanez or Russell Martin) breaks your spirit in the bottom of the 12th inning.

Perhaps no story personifies this more than Jeter’s admission that he was in the bathroom during Russell Martin’s go-ahead home run against the Orioles in game 1 of the ALDS. So certain was he that the Yankees would get the job done, he didn’t need to be engaged.

No player likes to invoke the existence of Yankee “ghosts” more than Jeter, but even he is missing the point. The “ghosts” aren’t the disembodied spirits of Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig, etc. come back to twist the fortunes of a game in New York’s favor, but rather Jeter himself. His mere presence on the field, with his steely glare and proud stance. Everything about the man exuded an air of “my team is better than yours, and eventually we will beat you.”

But even to Jeter, sports can be a cruel and unfeeling world. Which is why I will print the end of this era of Yankee mystique in as cold and unfeeling terms as possible:

This is what the end looks like:

In a way, this had been building. The Yankees couldn’t hit at all in the Division Series. Alex Rodriguez is no longer Alex Rodriguez, and he was never really Alex Rodriguez come playoff time anyway. Their rotation is propped up by a man who looks to be one cheeseburger away from a total cholesteral meltdown, and their roster contains so many 35+ players that it is starting to look like a rest home for untradeable contracts. But as long as they had Jeter, the Yankees had a shot.

The game transcript above tells us the rest. Without even mentioning his name,  it tells us that Jeter is removed from the game for Jayson Nix, which is a bit like removing Daniel Day-Lewis from “Gangs of New York” and replacing him with Jim Varney. Nevermind that the Yankees had already been sunk by Delmon Young (of all people!) by that point. The game wasn’t over until Jeter went down and didn’t get up. Now, not only is the game over, but the series is likely done as well. The Yankees are fully de-stabilized at this point, and they likely won’t recover this post-season.

When Derek Jeter was helped off the field, He took the Yankees' hopes with him.

And after that, what is there? Jeter will heal, and he will likely play on, but he’ll be 39 next year, and time has been catching up with him for several years now. Alex Rodriguez seems finished as a Yankee, one way or another, and the rest of the lineup, bar Robinson Cano, just doesn’t seem frightening. And even Cano will be 30 in eight days. Don’t even get me started on the pitching staff. I want to keep this thing under 3,000 words.

Of course these are the Yankees, and they will reload. They will likely be back in the playoffs next season. The question is, what will they look like then?

There comes a sudden point near the end of every great athlete’s career when it seems like their relevance disappears. For Johnny Unitas it was the day he trotted out in a powder-blue San Diego Charger uniform. For Wayne Gretzky, it was being traded to St. Louis.

For Jeter, it just might be the night his ankle snapped, and as he left the field, he took all of the Yankee hopes for glory with him.

They were replaced by Jayson Nix.

Nothing against Detweiler, who has perfectly good numbers for a fourth starter, but he probably shouldn’t be pitching tomorrow. However, the Nationals cast their lot when they made the single most ridiculous choice in baseball history by shutting down Stephen Strasburg on September 7th. It stunk then and it stinks even worse now. It should get Mike Rizzo fired, or at least severely embarrassed in public by Davey Johnson after Kyle Lohse sends the Nationals packing on Thursday.

Of course, Strasburg wouldn’t likely be starting tomorrow’s game. He would have started game 2, when Jordan Zimmerman was pummeled in a three-inning nightmare stint. Zimmerman should have been starting game 3, and with Strasburg on the hill after Gio Gonzalez, he likely would have been pitching with a 2-0 series lead. But the Nationals brass decided that Strasburg’s long-term ability to put on a Washington uniform was more important than the team’s best shot at a title since 1994, when the then Expos had the league’s best record on August 12 and, well, you know the rest.

By choosing commodity over player, Mike Rizzo has sunk his team's chances.

No one wants to see Stephen Strasburg injured, and maybe he is just one pitch away from snapping his right arm off like a Thanksgiving wishbone, but maybe he was poised to put up a legendary October, and lead a city to the World Series for the first time in 89 years? The Nationals are loaded with young talent, but maybe this is their only shot at the ultimate prize? If we don’t know what the future holds for Strasburg should he pitch right now, how do we know what the future holds for the Nationals as a group? Strasburg could get injured, yes, but so could Gio Gonzalez, or Ryan Zimmerman, or (gasp) Bryce Harper.

Rizzo’s decision to treat Strasburg like a long-term commodity was insulting. It was insulting to the fans, who have waded through nearly a decade of awful teams anchored by horrible pitching staffs (come on down, Odalis Perez). The Nationals seemed to be doing everything right. They built a swanky new ballpark to replace the awful RFK. They drafted the right players. They built a winner. Two million-plus fans came out for the first time since Nationals Park opened in 2008, and they came because they were watching the best all-around team in baseball, and they thought that they had a shot at a title. Benching Strasbourg sends the direct message that filling the seats for years to come is more important than giving the fans a moment they can be proud of. What incentive do you have to follow a team that will think like that?

Rizzo’s decision is insulting to the players. Every player’s goal is to play in the World Series, and chances to compete for baseball’s ultimate prize are few and far between. Over the course of 162 games, many things have to break right for a team to come out on top. So what would your reaction be if you got the breaks, only to have your GM, the man charged with improving your team, take away one of your most dangerous weapons when you need him most? Doesn’t that send the message that Strasburg is bigger than the team? Also,  isn’t a “shut-down” Strasbourg just the same as an injured Strasburg?

Ultimately, Rizzo’s decision is insulting to Strasbourg. Sure, at 24, Strasburg has many theoretical years of pitching ahead of him, but how many of those would he trade for a World Series ring right now? When Strasburg is remembered twenty years from now, will he be remembered solely as the pitcher whose GM made him quit when he had his best shot? Time will tell.

In the big money world of professional sports, there will forever be a thin line between gutsy athlete and marketable commodity. By shutting down Strasburg, we will forever know on which side of the line the Nationals stand. They chose commerce over championships, and their players, especially Strasburg, as well as their fans will pay the ultimate price.

Then there is the case of Jozy Altidore. Head coach Jurgen Klinsmann decided to omit his most naturally gifted out-and-out striker from this roster, and while he seems to have his reasons, the move is still a curious one.

Altidore, while always talented, is still not a production machine in a U.S. uniform. His 13 goals in 51 appearances for the national team suggest the American version of Emile Heskey, rather than the player who announced himself to the world at the 2009 Confederations Cup by manhandling a much more experienced Joan Capdevila en route to scoring the winning goal against Spain. Ever since that moment, Altidore has been living a strange soccer life. Fans keep waiting to see that goal again, and the more time passes, the more it seems like a fluke.

Altidore's goal vs Spain in 2009 set fans' expectations abnormally high. He has struggled to live up to them ever since.

The reality of the situation, however, is that Altidore is still an incredibly young player, who won’t turn 23 until next month. The folly of his goal against Spain is that it possibly occurred too early in his career. Altidore scored that goal on raw instinct, and still had so much to learn about his craft (and still does).

Altidore’s relationship with Klinsmann does not seem particularly cordial. After dropping his striker, the manager stated that it was due to his play in games as well as his work in training “over the past 14 months.” There has been talk of a much-publicized (and now deleted) tweet from Altidore in which he allegedly disparages Klinsmann for “blaming his failures on other people.”

Sparing you the sports cliché about how these men don’t have to like each other for this situation to work out, it is time to get to the point. It is crunch time for the national team, and Altidore needs to be wearing red, white and blue this weekend, for no other reason that he is the best that we’ve got.

Jurgen Klinsmann might be picking the wrong time to send a message to Altidore.

Klinsmann’s stand is admirable, in a way. Modern players in all sports are quick to cite their reputation as a reason they should receive playing time, or awards, or special treatment. Klinsmann clearly doesn’t care for reputation, but he is still making a mistake. The United States simply does not have the talent depth for him to be making these types of choices, especially in the attacking positions. With Shea and Donovan already out, this team is in danger of relying too much on Dempsey for a creative spark. The strikers that Klinsmann did select are a mystery bag. Herculez Gomez has had a decent year for country with three goals in 2012, including a decisive free kick against Jamaica in September, but he has seen some time on the bench for his Mexican club Santos recently. Conversely Altidore is co-leading the Dutch Eredivisie with 8 goals this term.

Beyond Gomez, Eddie Johnson’s strike rate for the national team is similar to Altidore’s (12 goals in 42 caps), but his last one came on June 15, 2008. Alan Gordon is third on the list, but he is a 30-year old with zero international experience. This is the reality for U.S. soccer. Once you get past the elite players, a group in which Altidore should be considered, the drop-off is swift and precipitous.

2012 has been a strange year for the U.S. National team. For every historic victory (Mexico, Italy) there has been a strange negative result to counter-balance (drawing with Canada and Guatemala). Goalscoring has been at a premium for a team that, in eleven matches this calendar year, has turned in only one truly great performance offensively (a 5-1 demolition of Scotland). On paper, the United States should easily be able to achieve the four points necessary to survive to the next round of World Cup Qualifying, but wouldn’t we all feel better about that prospect if we knew the best players were playing?

Before you commend Klinsmann on his gutsy choice, consider whether or not he actually had a choice to make.

This is not a post about who is wrong or who is right in either of these situations. It doesn’t matter if Gary Bettman needs to resign as NHL commissioner and Donald Fehr needs to calm his hard negotiating line. This is not a post about whether or not Golden Tate pushed off, or caught Russell Wilson’s hail mary pass, or how many timeouts the 49ers got on Sunday, or how many yards the Lions were penalized, etc., etc. Those things have already been covered by so many flailing armed journalists and bloggers who are ready to show up at the NFL negotiations and hand the real officials a big sack of money, then drive the replacements to Juarez, blindfolded, drop them in a bad neighborhood without passports and tell them to find their way home.

This is a post about what you, the average sports fan, can do about either of these situations.

The sports fan in the big business era of sports has become a vestigial organ. We pay through the nose to attend a game, or subscribe to the overpriced cable package to make sure that we can see the game. We buy jerseys, $42 dollar beers and team-colored Zubaz in support of our local teams, and yet we have increasingly little say in the direction and future of the leagues that we have become so addicted to.

So, when labor disputes inevitably arise between owners and players, or leagues and officials, fans can only watch helplessly as the legal slog towards a conclusion drags on and on and on.

Recent history has taught commissioners, and negotiators, and unions, that there is no impetus to end negotiations quickly. Within three years of the 1994 baseball strike, attendances were once again skyrocketing. The NHL rebounded after its 2005 lockout to be arguably more popular that it had ever been previously. Few people even mention the player lockouts in the NFL and NBA that so recently were front page news. The reason, of course is that the average sports fan’s threshold for outrage is far outweighed by his/her need to watch sporting events. So with that in mind, what heed should owners and players ever pay to complaining fans? If they know that, eventually, they’ll forgive and forget, who cares how angry they are now?

This morning, on Mike and Mike, former NFL Defensive End Hugh Douglas stated that (serious paraphrasing here) “no matter how angry fans are about the officiating crisis, come Thursday, everyone will be glued to the TV, and come Sunday, everyone will be tailgating before heading into an NFL stadium.” Mr. Douglas, as arrogant as he sounds, is spot on. And the NFL owners know this, which is why they announced today that even though they need Ed Hochuli right now more than Cookie Monster needs a double-stuffed Oreo, they won’t be giving the officials one more penny than they already make. 

But what if, somehow, Mr. Douglas could be wrong? What if, simultaneously, 30,000,000 NFL fans said, “Screw this, I’ll watch the college game (for all its problems, at least they always play…) on Saturday and go apple-picking on Sunday. And here are my season tickets. I won’t be renewing.”

Sure, that’s a dream, but it may be the only way. The last option for fans to exercise a modicum of control over the games they watch, and sleep and breathe, may be to ignore them, at least in the short term.

Most tickets that will be sold for NFL games this weekend already have been sold, so the financial impact would be minimal, but feel free to stay away from Lambeau this weekend, or Ford Field, or the Georgia Dome. Or any of the other dozen stadiums where NFL football will be “played” this weekend. Feel free to keep the TV off as well, just to see how Roger and his 32 thieves feel about a 0.2 rating for the Sunday night game.

As far as the NHL is concerned, eventually they will decide to play hockey again, but don’t feel like you have to go. A week full of empty arenas should let them know that they can’t keep pulling this crap.

It’s a dream, but it’s a good dream. And it may be the only option we have left. After all, why financially support a team that wants to deny you every opportunity to do just that? If Golden Tate commits egregious offensive pass interference, and steals a touchdown pass in the same fashion that some people win a new Chevy, but no one is watching, then who cares?