Are Rivalries Good for Baseball?

If you ask me, rivalries are excellent for baseball. Fans and players love that kind of tension going into a game. It makes it more fun, entertaining, and makes the players play at a higher level then usual. You cant let the other team have bragging rights for the year or till the next time they play in the regular season. Its one of the worse things a team can allow to the other. Newspapers, magazines, radios, and TV stations will talk about it for the whole week. Players, coaches, owners, and fans hate having to listen to it.
One of the biggest rivalries is between the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox. When these 2 teams meet up, its always a great game. Players go at with each other. Fans go at it and sometimes the coaches will even go at it. It makes a game that people find lazy and boring that much more exciting to watch and they even enjoy it. Other rivalries like the Cubs and Brewers, Braves and Mets, Yankees and Mets, and Chicago White Sox and Chicago Cubs all make the baseball season that much more enjoyable.

The Yanks and Red Sox have been dueling it out ever since the famous trade these 2 made that sent Babe Ruth to the Yanks some think its from the 1904 pennant race. The Sox and Yanks have given us the pennant races of '48 and '49, Aaron Boone's unlikely walkoff, and Boston's impossible comeback in the 2004 ALCS. And as with any good blood feud, there's been plenty of on-field violence, including Pedro Martinez's judo-toss of Don Zimmer and any number of brawls involving Carlton Fisk.This is one of the most heated rivalries in all of baseball which makes me, a Yankee fan that much more excited for spring training to get and eventually the regular season. Its America's past time, how cant you enjoy the sport of baseball?

2 Football Leagues and their Differences

Why is American Football sometimes confused with Euopean Football? They don't use the same balls. They have different rules. They look nothing a like but yet people still get the 2 confused. The difference is just simply by definition. Football is a sport where the hands are used to control the ball during the game. Where Euopean Football or what we know it as, Soccer is controled by the feet and only the goalie can use his or her hands to stop the ball from going into the net.

American Football

• played with a ball that is shaped like a lemon
• when the ball carrier is tackled it is considered a down
• the play starts again in a formation where one team has the ball and the other defends.
• Unlike in soccer, you are allowed to tackle or bring the player with the ball to the ground
• Yellow flags are thrown by the refs in american football for penalties such as holding, facemask tackle, unsportsman like, clipping, and offsides on the offsense or defense

European Football

• A football match has two halves of 45 minutes each
• A referee and two linesmen supervise the game
• A player can use any part of his body except the hands and arms
• yellow and red cards are given out by the refs depending on how severe the penalty is. If youre awarded a red card, youre thrown out of the game and suspended for the next one

European football was created before American football was in the turn of the 21st century. American football has only been around since 1869 when the Rutgers played Princeton, 2 college teams now a days.

The Baseball Season From 2012....

Was the baseball season from 2012 full of more cinderella stories or was it a typical season with the same teams winning the division crowns? Was it just a fluke that the Washington Nationals and Baltimore O's made the playoffs and almost won their divisions or is this a sign that both teams are now contenders and should be looked at as a threat? The O's snuck into the playoffs as a wild card team but they seemed to have some luck by their side by winning 16 straight extra-inning affairs. The Nationals on the other hand were in first place for most of the year while riding on a picture who could only pitch 160 innings during the season before being shut down because of a past Tommy John surgery(Stephen Strausburg). They also were riding on a 18 year outfielder who ended up winning rookie of year for the national league (Bryce Harper).

However i believe that the O's did have some luck in winning 16 straight extra-inning games that helped them get into the post season. Winning that many extra inning games is very difficult because eventually you run out of a bullpen that can keep you going. So who do you turn to after the bullpen is shot? Well for the O's they turned to a first basemen who hasnt pitched since college ball and he came in and won the game for them. Clearly that night they had some angle looking down on them.
I dont beleive the critics out in the world that say they had one lucky season

I do think the Nationals earned their spot into the playoffs but just didnt have enough experience to make it any further then the first round. Should they have shut down there ace and let him pitch in the playoffs? I say yes only because he wasnt showing a slowing down near the end like everyone thought he would but im also not a doctor, im just a fan who wanted to see a team make a great story for me to tell my kids when im older. 

Overall the 2012 baseball season was one to remember. Baseball had its first triple crown winner in 45 year with Miguel Cabrera of the Detroit Tigers. 2012 was just another season with its up and downs but it certainly did have its exciting moments with history being made. Lets just hope baseball will continue to be this exciting for the future years to come.

 

The Story Behind the Beloved ESPN

The Entertainment and Sports Programing Network or what most people know it by, the ESPN channel was founded by a guy named Bill Rasmussen, along with his son Scott Rasmussen, and an Aetna Insurance agent, Ed Eagan.  Bill, who was one of those guys who absolutely loved sports and always tried to be around them, was fired from his position as the communications manager for the Hartford Whalers in 1978. This was where Bill ended meeting Eagan who displayed an interest in building a career in television. Eagan shortly approached Bill with the idea of creating a monthly cable show covering Connecticut sports and was curious to see if the Whalers Company would be interested in being the main feature on the show. After being jobless for a few months Bill came up with the idea to start a cable network that would cover the whole state of Connecticut. With both of them having very little cable television knowledge, they knew it was going to be a difficult challenge to get this idea to actually work. It also would become very difficult because of low percentage of families receiving cable at there home. The rate was only at 20% for families who had a cable TV in their living room.

In the summer of 1978, Bill, Ed and his associate Bob Beyus, who owned a video production company, began to look for support from other cable operators and potential investors for the sports channel which they had come to name ESP(Entertainment and Sports Programming Network). They began to pitch their idea on June 26. They ended up inviting 12 representatives from local cable operators, only 5 accepted the offer. In spite of these initial difficulties, the ESP Network was incorporated on July 14, 1978 for a fee around $91. Eventually more and more cable companies would become highly interested in the ESP Network and end up signing them to a TV contract. Even though they would not be hitting the air for about 6 months, in 1979 when the NCAA basketball tournament kicked off there was an audience of about 24.1 million people watching from there living rooms due to a match up between Larry Bird and Magic Johnson the tournament is regarded as having an instrumental part in ESPN's eventual success due to the fact many viewers called their cable operators complaining they wanted "that channel that has all the basketball".

Over time there have been thousands and thousands like when the Connecticut mens and womens basketball teams both won the NCAA titles for basketball. Still to this date, they are the only school to run the table and win both titles. Now ESPN can be seen in HD where you can see and hear almost everything that happens during any kind of sporting event. March 20, 2001 was the first time when ESPN introduced the idea of everything being in HD for almost every sporting event that occurred on that day. Then on January 5 in 2010 they introduced the idea of sporting events in 3D. Not exactly something I would want to watch in 3D but to some people its the best thing that has happened to sports.