The Zong

It became evident to me this morning exactly what is going on with the Barry Bonds Grand Jury, which according to reports has extended its term for 6 months:

“Do I look concerned?” he said.

That is how Bonds answered the question of whether he was concerned that the grand jury investigating him might soon hand down an indictment. Asked to directly answer whether he was concerned, Bonds said, “No.”

The term of the grand jury, scheduled to expire this month, has been extended another six months, and a federal indictment on perjury and/or tax evasion charges could come as soon as September, the New York Daily News reported Saturday.

As “soon” as September, huh? Doesn’t seem that soon to me. I’m no legal scholar, but something tells me that due process doesn’t usually take this long when there’s a strong case against someone. I mean, I suppose one could posit that they’re waiting on Greg Anderson to get sick of the food in prison, or that they think Bonds still might confess during one of his friendly press-conferences, but I know what’s really going on here.

Chances are, you won’t have to wait for September for the indictment. They’ll indict him just as soon as he ties Henry Aaron at 755. The way Bonds has been hitting, it might take a little while, but then again, it’s Bonds. He might get pissed at someone about something and do it tonight.

I don’t know if Barry fucked a senator’s wife or cut off a federal prosecutor on the freeway, but there is an inordinate amount of time and money (yours and mine!) being spent on trying to indict a baseball player for lying under oath and tax evasion while Paris Hilton and Scooter Libby, both convicted criminals, are allowed to walk around on the street, presumably littering everywhere and mugging old ladies. Rest assured, someone in the Fed’s office grew up watching Hank in Milwaukee, and is really pushing to try and end Barry’s year, and possibly his career, right before he’s able to break the record. What a bunch of assholes!

I was kind of hoping that he’d do it in Milwaukee over the weekend, but it was a long shot because he sat 3 out of 4 games in Chicago. Good thing that the Giants aren’t actually in the race or anything, because it’s pretty obvious that the season isn’t about winning games at the expense of the fucking dog and pony show.

Uh oh.

In a significant hurdle to bringing the NFL to the South Bay, the Ohio-based company that controls the San Francisco 49ers’ proposed stadium site in Santa Clara said Friday that it opposes the project - at least for now.

Cedar Fair Entertainment Co. has been in talks with the 49ers since before the team announced plans in November to build a 68,500-seat stadium adjacent to the amusement park. But based on the “limited information” the 49ers have provided, CEO Dick Kinzel recently concluded the stadium could damage Great America because of the loss of parking, traffic issues, and during construction, the impact of noise, dust and inconvenience for Great America patrons, a spokeswoman said.

I guess that could be a problem. This all came a few days back, right before NFL officials came to tour both sites, making it obvious through public statements that they’d like to keep out of the smelly streams of piss coming from the collective urethrae of the York and Newsom camps.

On the San Francisco site:

Neil Glat, a senior vice president with the NFL, called the view “pretty terrific.”

Hunters Point is “right there on the water and could be a special place, but the devil’s always in the details and those infrastructure issues can be thorny issues,” and environmental “remediation issues can be time-consuming and costly,” he said.

On the Santa Clara site:

 After Tuesday’s tour, Glat called the Santa Clara site “beautiful” and “very doable for an NFL facility” but said he didn’t want to compare it to Hunters Point.“Every site is different and every site has different potential and different opportunities,” he said.

Inexplicably, Jed York’s heart is still in Santa Clara. I’m not sure what the young prince has been reading, but it certainly isn’t the same shit I’ve been talking about.

“We’re still focused 100 percent on Santa Clara, and I think we’re getting pretty close to something in Santa Clara,” Jed York said in an interview with the Mercury News. “I think we are getting close to the point where we see there’s a big light at the end of the tunnel.”

Getting close to the point where we see there’s a big light at the end of the tunnel, huh? When will we be getting close to approaching a strategy to begin to stop starting conversations and where we might be getting close to planning a solution for beginning to draw up some preliminary blueprints so that we can get close to the point where the team is playing in a new fucking stadium?

Is it possible, nay probable, that the San Francisco Giants are the worst franchise in Major League Baseball? I was definitely getting my hopes up that they weren’t so bad after a brief stretch of great pitching and timely hitting, and then the Giants did what they always do to my hopes when they’re up: They bring them right the fuck back down again.

It’s not time to chastise ownership and the front office for their ridiculous method of fielding a team each year; it was time to do that four years ago. How many times do I have to listen to fans calling into talk radio after the Giants get beat despite great pitching performances, saying the team has been too old for years now, that the farm system is thin on position players, and that nothing is going to change until Bonds is gone? I’ve been hearing it for as long as I can remember, and now that the Giants are in DEAD LAST in the National League West, maybe it’s time to realize that if all the writers, fans and bloggers knew about it before the season began, then how the fuck did it get past the owner and general manager?

The answer isn’t so simple. It would be easy to say they don’t know anything about baseball, if only that were true. It would be even easier to say they have a strategy that didn’t work, which is only half true. They have a strategy, and it has worked exactly the way they wanted it to.

Until now, I would have been willing to hear that the dipshits who run this team really want to win, that they’re willing to put time and money and personnel into achieving that goal, that they’ve just been hamstrung by injuries or larger market teams. I wouldn’t have agreed outritght, but I would listen to someone telling me that without resorting to violence. Now, the gloves come right the fuck off. I mean, I’m a terrible fighter, but if someone tries to tell me that the Giants’ strategy has had anything to do with winning for the last 5 seasons, I’ll punch them in the fucking face, I swear.

But their strategy has worked! The reality is that anyone who thought re-signing Bonds was anything but a ploy to sell tickets to corporate idiots who don’t know anything about baseball was just another reason the plan worked.

Wanna know why people in San Francisco still cheer for Barry? It’s because everyone who actually cares about baseball in this city has stopped going to games on a regular basis. Your everyday season-ticket holder isn’t a person but a corporation, and the people in the seats are there to eat, be seen with their fellow suck-ups, and to get home in time to watch American Idol. This is what Seat Licenses do to a team, but that’s a different post.

Still, the Giants are selling a lot of tickets, so the strategy is working. The last game I went to was a sellout with a third of the seats empty. The money continues to come in, the ballpark is a beautiful place to see a game, and so it doesn’t really matter what the end result is. The thing is, even people who don’t know anything about baseball can enjoy it, if their team wins. The Giants are not going to be doing any of that for awhile, and maybe Peter Magowan and all the people he’s about to fire will realize how fucking stupid their strategy really is in the long term when even the businesses stop buying tickets to see a worthless team get shut out twice a week.

I used to think economists were full of shit, especially when they tried to tell us that deficits don’t matter. As it turns out, maybe they’re not all that worthless. As it turns out, economic science has revealed that the land in Santa Clara that will be used to build the proposed $160 million stadium for the Niners might be a more economically viable site if they built a big frigging office park or mall there.

Keyser Marston Associates, a real estate consultancy, generally validated a 49ers-commissioned report that said a new stadium would produce roughly $42.5 million per year in new direct, indirect and induced economic annual activity in the city of Santa Clara.

But Keyser Marston also concluded in a report released by city officials Friday that a 15-acre Class A office complex would produce $3.3 million in revenue for the city annually, while a stadium would produce just $650,000, slightly less than the $700,000 predicted by the 49ers. The findings will be presented to the Santa Clara City Council next Tuesday. Those numbers do not include construction activity.

In addition, because the land the 49ers are targeting sits in a designated entertainment district, the firm suggested that the council “may wish to seek an entertainment/tourist use, which could be more compatible with the nearby Convention Center and Great America Theme Park.”

Well, lord knows that Santa Clara is pretty damn good at building Class A office complexes. It’s almost like they invented it.

Anyhow, the Santa Clara 49ers of San Francisco are spinning the shit out of the report.

49ers spokeswoman Lisa Lang said team officials’ initial reaction to the report was positive.

“We’re very pleased that the city’s economic analysis validates our study. It reinforces that a new stadium would create thousands of jobs, generate millions of dollars in new tax revenue, and provide an important economic stimulus for Santa Clara,” Lang said.

Right, except for the fact that it’ll be more economically viable if they install a bunch of cubicles on the field.

Maybe this is why the Niners have resorted to threatening Santa Clara with moving their headquarters if the city doesn’t suck it up and give them their $160 million.

The San Francisco 49ers say that if Santa Clara doesn’t pay about $160 million toward building a new football stadium, then the team probably will move its headquarters and training facility.

Sounds great. Although team officials have stated that this isn’t a threat, one can probably assume that it’s a promise. Those 49ers sure do know how to treat a girl!

Thank. Fucking. Christ.

General manager Brian Sabean said on his weekly KNBR radio program on Thursday that, “It’s safe to say the bullpen is being reviewed,” and that, “we’ve got to the point where we are going to have to do something.”

That’s what I’ve been talking about!

I don’t know who the fiddly-fuck Randy Messenger is. I don’t really care, because if the Giants had paid Benitez the rest of his money to go fishing then I would have been fine with it. I’m sure he would have found a way to fuck that up, too, but that’s only good news for the fishes. He’d probably have some other guy on the boat catch like 9 of them, then he’d go throw the fish back into the ocean and then blame it on the guy driving the boat.

As it is, Sr. Gasolina gets to go to a team that plays the Mets a bunch more times. Life is sweet, and even if he saves 30 games for the Marlins for the rest of the season, I give props to Brian Sabean for admitting that he made a mistake.

Now, about that anemic fucking lineup…

Man, it must be good to be a Mets fan these days. After all those years of being pissed on by the Braves and outnumbered two-to-one by guys wearing Jeter jerseys on the subway, you finally have a team of brawlers that are good enough to draw a crowd to that giant blue septic tank you call a stadium on the weekends.

Life only gets sweeter for you when Armando Benitez takes the mound at Shea. I watched the proceedings last night, and after seeing Omar Vizquel save the game in the 9th with his spectacular play, then seeing him score the go-ahead run in the top of the 12th, I was just about ready for bed.

I woke up this morning with my fists still clenched, but for a moment I forgot what I was angry about. Benitez fucked my mind so violently that I actually forgot what happened.

Then I turned on the radio, and it all came back to me. KNBR has been taking phone calls all night, since Delgado’s walk-off, and people are still calling in this morning trying to make up new cuss words for what Benitez did last night. On national television, no less.

Oh Mets fan, it must have been tough to hold your beer, so great was the euphoria at seeing Sr. Gasolina balk the tying run into scoring position just before balking him home, but I’m sure you managed. Still, seeing Delgado end it with his second homer of the day might have been too much for you to take. That kind of condensed sweetness can have adverse affects on the brain after so much misery. I advise you not to watch the rest of the series. Go take it easy for awhile.

Over here in Giants country, the tiny win streak that the starting rotation put together has been nicely flipped by Armando Benitez, that fat fuck who has all our money. Two losses in the last few games, plus countless examples of his inability to get more outs than runs allowed, and we get this quote right on cue:

“I have to take the consequences. Tomorrow’s a new day. I’ll come back tomorrow. You’ll see. You’ll see what I can do.”

In front of God and everybody, he says this.

If Benitez is still a Giant by sundown, I’m gonna find me a gypsy to put a curse on the front office of the Giants, ensuring that Peter Magowan barfs all over himself every time he tries to say the lineup is “better than OK,” and that Brian Sabean’s feet start burning with the fury of a thousand suns every time Joe Nathan records a save. A pox on all your houses!

News Flash: Curt Schilling is a fucking asshole. But in true Christian fundamentalist fashion, I guess you can be whatever you want as long as you apologize for it later.  From Curt’s pulpit/blog:

The only perfect human to walk the face of the earth died a few thousand years ago, that much I know. I am far from perfect and make more than my share of mistakes, which is something I have no problem with because that’s part of being human. However when my mistakes adversely affect other peoples lives, that’s a big deal. It was a callous, wreckless and irresponsible thing to say, and for that I apologize to Barry, Barry’s family, Barry’s friends and the Giants organization, my teammates and the Red Sox organization as well as anyone else that may have been offended by the comments I made.

Great, then. While you’re apologizing for stuff, why don’t you apologize to the entire world for campaigning for (and presumably voting for) George W. Bush? I mean, I realize Barry Bonds cheated at baseball, but is that really as bad as supporting the re-election of a traitorous, mouth-breathing war criminal to the presidency just because he says he digs Jesus? I’m gonna say no, and I’ll bet there’s a lot of innocent dead people who agree with me. How does your boy’s foreign policy fit in with your religious views, Schill?

Have fun walking Barry four times when he comes to Fenway looking for #756.

The Zong puports to be about the absurdity in both politics and sports, and the nexus thereof, when it seems like the glittering, guilt-ridden sweat beads rolling off the scalp of Alberto Gonzales morph seamlessly into the glittering, steroid-laced sweat beads rolling of Barry “Who, me?” Bonds, as he hits another dinger.

A few weeks ago, in front of a Senate hearing, an event took place seemingly so custom-made for The Zong, I’m surprised one of my compatriots didn’t scoop me on it. Beneath the glare of those made-for-TV lights and overexposed, in both senses, by the paparazzi with the automatic shutter hold, Pvt. Jessica Lynch and the family of Pat Tillman, professional football player and public servant, stood their ground and had their say.

To their credit, they did much to reverse the sanctimonious tapestry that had been woven around their familial names, all to the end of bolstering the The Decider and his covey of cronies. For Lynch, the less jarring of the two testimonies, she had the guts to admit she wasn’t the action figure pre-packaged for the media consumption that she was made out to be, with a kung-fu action arm and repeat-firing Patriot-missle launcher. She did much for her own rep, as well as what this country actually stands for - truth, justice, the power of free speech - regardless of whatever jingoistic PR mission the tail-waggers sent her on a few years ago.

“The bottom line is the American people are capable of determining their own ideals of heroes and they don’t need to be told elaborate lies,” Lynch said. Someone give this girl her civics merit badge.

But the real heart-breaker was the testimony about Tillman, from all accounts a nice and civic-minded guy, who broke with decades of sports tradition and actually took the smaller paycheck for the better cause. That alone should get him in Canton . As his parents and brother Spc. Kevin Tillman spoke about how betrayed they felt by the government, by the mission, by military, and lastly, by The Administration who led the charge, you couldn’t help but a get a twinge there’s something very, very wrong going on here.

I’m not a big fan of the word “hero”, - it’s too simplistic, and deification does no one any good -and I don’t think I’m going to use it here. Tillman was a man of great ideals and unfortunate circumstance. I will say, however, that if more folks in this country, and professional althetes in particular, were like him, we’d probably be better off. He was braver than I’ll ever be, someone who believed in higher ideals, and when feeling a call to higher duty, heeded that call.

And where was his Commander in Chief during all this?

Where was The Decider in the weeks since Tillman’s family called bullshit on the propganda? Staying up late nights, on conference calls with Syria and the Arab League to try and bring our boys out of harm’s way? Comforting injured soliders by making sure their care is the best in the world? Making a whistlestop tour around the country and speaking with war widows? No, sir, he was accepting a Purple Heart from a solider who found out how torn up poor Laura was about all those kids slaughtered in Iraq. How nice. Laura can’t sleep, and to make her feel better, The Decider does the manly thing and takes some guy’s medal, who actually won it fighting for this country. What a guy!

I thought I was out of outrage a while ago. But this event rekindled the fire stronger than ever. While men like Tillman die defending the country, and their memories are disgraced by lies manufactured to cover more lies, chickenhawk phoney-baloney fake cowboys with degrees from Yale like The Decider mince about in Crawford, Texas, putting on flight suits and medals, and playing army-man dress up. Isn’t that nice?

I’ll say it. You want me to say it? Fine, I will.

Our President is a big fat, coward.

Come get me, you pussy. Or should I say, “Bring it on.”

A few thoughts on the Warriors dismantling of the frauds from Dallas…

1. Contrary to what I’ve been told by Glaser, there really are NBA fans in the Bay Area. Now that’s what I call a home court advantage.
2. This whole time zone thing is getting to me. Even though I live on the east coast, I stayed up to watch Game 6, which started at 10:40ish. I fell asleep a little after midnight during halftime. There really wasn’t anything that could have been done about it. It makes no sense to start the game at a time other than local primetime since this was the biggest NBA game in the Bay area in around 92 years. My solution: Move all NBA teams to the East Coast.
3. Stephen Jackson is a baller. He practically single handily took Diggler out of the series. I won’t be surprised if he ends up in the middle of a brawl in the next round, but I’d take him on my playoff roster any day.
4. Baron Davis is a top 7 player when healthy. You could clearly see he isn’t 100% and he still played like a man on a mission. If the C’s don’t get one of the top two picks in the lottery, we should trade for him. He’d sure look good in green. I’d make the trade if I were Chris Mullin. Glaser, give him a call, pronto.
5. Josh Howard is the best player on the Mavs.
6. NBA officials drive me nuts. I cannot stand the offensive charge and the inconsistencies of the calls in general. I’ll spend some more time on this in the future, but the offensive charge might be the demise of the league.

The short answer is: “Maybe!”

After all the complaining and bitching and throwing my hands up in the air at the start of the season, the San Francisco Baseball Giants are maybe the hottest team in the majors. The starting pitching has been outstanding, and Barry Bonds looks like he might still be juicing. Wherever the magic is, they’ve won 6 straight and are in Secret Touching-Distance of the first place Dodgers, who going into tonight had the best record in the bigs.

As if it wasn’t good enough, they’ve been doing it basically without the top of their lineup. Dave Roberts and the Viz have been pretty stinky up until now, and one wonders how good los Gigantes will look if they actually start to get on base. On top of all this, Armando Benitez hasn’t blown a save yet! What the fuck is going on here?

I really, really want to believe that Barry, Barry and Sons are as good as this, but it’s way too early for anyone to say that I was wrong about them yet; they could drop their next six and then I’ll be back to my bitching. Nevertheless, the more they make me look like a jerk, the better I feel.