The Basement View

  Happy Holiday’s and welcome back to the annual tradition of my fake Major League Baseball Hall of Fame Ballot. Hopefully one day this column will be the real deal but for now, we will play pretend, but use the real reasons I would use to select these players as the newest members of the most prestigious group in all of sports. Let’s begin by going back yet again to the dreaded “Steroid Era.”     The Returning Members: 1. Alex Rodriguez Yes, like Barry Bonds, Alex Rodriguez should be in. You cannot tell the complete history of the game without recognizing A-Rod’s place within it. No matter how dark his place in the game is, we need to acknowledge that it happened instead of continuing to run away from it. Rodriguez might be the most complete player an entire generation of fans has witnessed with their own eyes and perhaps ever will. Getting away from the hate, let me remind you that A-Rod has over 3,000 hits, 690 Home Runs, 2,000 runs scored, 2,000 Runs Batted In, 300 ...

  I want to like the NBA Cup. I really do! In theory it is an incredible idea that not only makes the NBA more like European Soccer, but it also adds a little wrinkle into the season that wasn’t there before, and it just seems like a fun thing to be a part of. But no matter how hard I try, I cannot get there with the way the NBA has set up the tournament. Again, I want to like it, but I have many problems with the format. The first I can’t stand is the group stage aspect of it. I hate the fact there are completely arbitrary groups created before the season just so the league has a moment to get into the news cycle at the end of the summer. The NBA already has divisions—so why not have the group stage games be divisional matchups? The incentive to win the division has gone away completely in the recent years and this would add just a small piece of those divisional matchups back to the game. If you are insisting that the group stage must be the way we go about determining who plays ...