Five Things I’m Looking Forward To

Here we are, mid-July. Training camp is still on the horizon, as is the college football season. The Cavs won’t be back in the gym and the Jackets won’t be back on the ice for a couple of months. The Tribe and Clippers eat it. It’s kind of a Dead Period for us. Likewise, I’ve largely been persona non grata on this blog with the exceptions of writing once a week about the aforementioned Horrible Clippers and my neuroses about Rick Nash.

So, in an effort to: a) write something, and b) offer my ironic protest against how bad the two baseball teams I’ve been paying the most attention to actually are, I thought I’d take a moment to offer up my list of the Five Sports Things I’m Looking Forward To.

Feel free to denigrate my selections (I suspect one in particular is just me “asking for it”) and offer your own in the comments.

1. The Sound of the Crowd When Rick Nash is Announced at the Jackets Home Opener.
If you follow hockey at all, you probably read my ramblings about the Rick Nash negotiations, and if you’re a Jackets fan like me you probably breathed a rather loud sigh of relief when he signed his 8-year, $62.4 million extension earlier this month. Well, I made no secret of how important I thought that signing was and is for the Jackets. Now that the ink is dry on the contract, let me elaborate.

Even if I wasn’t a big-time Jackets fan, Nash’s conduct was a breath of fresh air for the landscape of sports free-agency. It’s not often anymore that a star player comes out publicly saying that he loves where he is currently and wants to stay… and then actually backs it up. Nash did just that. He probably could have gotten more from Toronto next summer in free agency. But he didn’t want to. At the end of the day, it was reported that the team and Nash’s agent were close, but the team needed something to bring the yearly cap number down. Nash immediately came to the rescue and offered to sign an extra year on to make the yearly cap number go down. He not only cemented his legacy with the franchise, but recognized that squeezing every last dollar out of them would in the end hurt the team’s chances to have flexibility to make itself better in the latter stages of that deal.

In short, he not only put his money where his mouth was, but he clearly recognized that he alone would not make this team successful, and gave them some wiggle room to keep their young core together in the coming years of his contract. And, I expect the Jackets fans will recognize him quite warmly for doing so that night. I plan on being there myself to do so.

2. Watching USC Dismantle Ohio State
I swear, I’m not being a jerk. It is widely known that I am the WFNY Black Sheep (how you gonn rip it like this, son?) when it comes to college football, so understand the angle from which I’m approaching this. And also understand that there’s a bit of self-indictment of the team I follow in this as well. Here’s the thing: until the rest of the Big 10 can offer some kind of competition to the Buckeyes, they will continue to be overrated year in, and year out. I throw this out on the table realizing that it’s being recorded in the public domain should it come back to bite me in the nether-regions: USC is going to DEMOLISH Ohio State. And it will offer further proof that everyone else in the city I live in is delusional about how great Ohio State is, and also will entertain me with how annoyed they get at the national mockery that comes with them losing to every other highly ranked team in the country that they play. Tired of getting “disrespected”? Try not to lose by 32 this year.

Schadenfreude? Absolutely. But there it is. And, before you all say it in the comments, yes, it also has a bunch to do with the fact that if the team I follow somehow wins 6 games it will be a minor miracle.

3. Hoping to See the Browns Run the Ball 35-40 Times a Game… With Some Success
While I know right away that counting on this to happen—thus making it something to look forward to—is a bit of a stretch (and, while I have been ambivalent at best in praising/hating Mangini and company thus far), it’s hard to argue that, on paper at least, this appears to be his offensive goal/philosophy. The quarterback debate is secondary, in my opinion, because this team will be the most successful in 2009 if whomever the QB is spends 60-70 percent of his snaps turning and handing the ball off.

Joe Thomas, Eric Steinbach, Alex Mack, Porkchop Womack, and some blending of Ryan Tucker, John St. Claire, Rex Hadnot, and Hank Fraley as depth basically says to me that Mangini would LOVE to run a ball control offense, allow his QB to manage the game, and keep his defense on the sidelines as much as possible… especially when nursing the occasional lead. And I, for one, am looking forward to this approach. In addition, I’m looking forward to the notion of “playing the best guys”. If Jerome Harrison rips off three 9-yard runs in a drive, I expect Mangini to play him more over the rest of a game. What a concept! I guess I’m just looking forward to the potential for better in-game coaching than we’ve been forced to sit through for the past four seasons.

4. Title Focus LeBron – Version 2.0
We caught a glimpse of this guy in the playoffs this season. He was the guy that took the ball in Game 5 against Orlando and single-handedly won a game the Cavs probably had no business winning. He was the guy who—rightly or wrongly—refused to be a gracious loser and didn’t want to talk to the media. He’s the guy who picked up from Kobe Bryant that you have to have intensity on both ends of the floor for every second you’re on it.

And, I think what we saw this year was only Version 1.0 of “Title Focus LeBron”. If the word in the ether is correct, he’s already challenged himself and his teammates to elevate that focus to an even higher level. Adding a guy like Shaq, who himself has the title-winning pedigree, to the mix can only help; if practicing for the Olympics with Bryant lit LeBron’s fire, what is practicing and playing every day with a guy who has just as many titles and definitely knows what it takes going to do? I’m looking forward to finding out.

5. The Day Eric Wedge Gets Fired
Hypothetical, again. But, a guy can dream, can’t he? I’m not looking forward to Wedge losing his job in and of itself, necessarily, so much as I am looking forward to seeing how the team handles it and in what direction they subsequently head. To be fair, it’s time for Wedge to lose his job, though the factors aren’t all entirely of his own making (for example, who the heck is he supposed to send to the mound to protect a late inning lead on this team?).

What I’m really interested in, however, is seeing if the house-cleaning starts and stops with Wedge. Is Carl Willis gone, too? One would certainly suspect so. Ditto Derek Shelton (this team’s batting with RISP is vomit-inducing). But, who in the front office might also get the axe? Shapiro is probably not going anywhere. However, many have pointed out that the pitching development of the Tribe has definitely headed south ever since the departure of John Farrell. Whose job is that now, and why does he still have a job at this point?

Shapiro has generally always gotten the benefit of the doubt from me relative to hs deal-making, as without that we wouldn’t have players like Sizemore, Lee, LaPorta, Choo, Brantley, Cabrera, and on and on. But, having spent considering amounts of time this year watching guys like Chris Perez, John Meloan, and Zach Jackson—all of whom came in recent trades—struggle mightily, it begs the question… doesn’t the Tribe’s front office also have a hole or two?

So, really, in the grand scheme, I’m looking forward not to the “end of the Wedge era” so much as I’m looking forward to finding out how much of an overall crap I should give about this franchise for the foreseeable future. Are they content to just swap out non-functioning parts, or are they interested in, and maybe more importantly willing to, take a good, long look in the mirror to see if there might not be bigger issues here? I surely hope so.

Well, there you have it. Let it rip, readers!