Josh Hamilton
Small balls: Hamilton up, Nolan down
La première étoile: I’m sorry Justin Morneau. You actually won the Home Run Derby—first Canadian to ever do so. By right, the first star should belong to you. (Christ, you weren’t even invited until Sunday, after A-Rod and Jason Giambi each took a pass.) But even you conceded, graciously, that, derby crown or not, the night belonged to someone else.
Perhaps this is why I don’t care about baseball anymore
Based on the incredible quantity of saccharine praise Fox’s ESPN’s broadcast team offered the Texas Rangers’ Josh Hamilton as he belted 28-and-counting “homers” out of Yankee Stadium tonight, I think younger viewers could be forgiven if they concluded that getting hopelessly addicted to drugs and then belatedly discovering functional, adult sobriety was roughly the moral equivalent to winning the Nobel Prize in chemistry.
Small balls: home runs, redemption, and Brett Favre’s tears
La première étoile: As baseball reaches the All Star break, the story of the season is, without a doubt, Josh Hamilton. The Dallas Morning News does a nice job of telling the tale of Hamilton’s battle against drug and alcohol addiction, to claw his way back into the major leagues. Batting over .300, with 21 homers and 95 RBIs, just two years after he was completely out of the game. We at Balls don’t often get teary over tales of redemption and the power of the human spirit, but, you know…sniff…we’re not made of stone either.