Spanning the Globe To Bring You....

Apparently Jim Salisbury is not just your everyday anonymous baseball writer any longer. Not only does his column now appear replete with a picture of the author, but Jim is branching out from his normal beat, the Phillies, to pen a lengthy piece in Sunday’s Inquirer on the Daytona 500.

Perhaps the NASCAR column is just another sign of the times. Financially strapped newspapers are less likely than ever to send their reporters scurrying around the country let alone globe providing live coverage. But, hey, as long as we have a guy in Florida….

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Tight times notwithstanding, newspaper editors feel compelled to have some presence at the Winter Olympics if their papers entertain even the slightest aspirations of respectability. The Inquirer has at least three columnists in Turino, including Phil Sheridan. Despite the European dateline our intrepid columnist still found time to try out a Philly Cheese steak while on the job. In a column entitled, improbably, Found: A cheesestake in Turin Sheridan takes a break from game coverage to describe his culinary adventures. Now, if I were going to Italy, a cheese steak would come in somewhere around 900th on a list of 100 dishes I would want to try. And if, perchance, I stumbled onto an establishment offering said local fare, I’d be more than a little hesitant to devote an entire column to it.

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We’ve all seen the hot-dogging football player who is just about to strut across the goal line, dragging his feet in an exaggerated motion and styling a la the Heisman trophy pose, when, lo and behold, he is stripped of the ball by an opposing player who literally appears out of nowhere. Ignominy? No, just hot-dogging.

So, when Lindsey Jacobellis blew a sure gold medal by hot-dogging it near the finish line, everyone clucked and admonished her for such foolhardiness. But snowboarding is about hot-dogging in part and apparently Jacobellis has performed the exact same move dozens if not hundreds of times. The only difference is that this time, she missed it at the worst possible moment.

But what do the organizers expect from a 20-year old X-Games look-alike?

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I like Aaron Rowand already. In an article in today’s Inquirer, Todd Zolecki paints a portrait of a no-nonsense guy who is eager to patrol center field for his new team.

Among the many points Rowand makes is one that has been recently discussed at length in the local blogosphere: getting a good jump out of the gate in April. Rowand is on record as saying he doesn’t want to hear the marathon vs. sprint analogies of the long baseball season. He believes, correctly, that losses in April count in the final standings as much as those in July and September.