Sammons Sombraro, Sorry Sal

I'd like to thank the Richmond Braves, AAA affiliate of Atlanta, for making last night an evening of disappointment.

Legend Sal Fasano, donning the #25 and possibly a biker mustache sat all 9 innings on the bench last night in Rochester as the Braves beat the Red Wings 5 to 4. He made one small appearance warming up a pitcher but was quickly dismissed.

The worst part about the night was that the man playing in Sal's spot was a catching prospect named Sammons. Ok, we understand, let the young guys play....but Sammons was awful. Passed balls and wild pitches galore must have had Fasano's head in his hands...not to mention an 0 for 5 performance with 4 K's....the Golden Sombraro for this kid while our man sat idle.

Sorry Sal, we were pulling for ya.....

The number one overall pick is...

So, a few days ago I posted the idea of what happens to the number overall pick. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't pan out. So looking back the past fifteen or so years, we're going to look back on the NBA Draft from 1993 on.

1993 Chris Webber:
The Michigan Grad, more well known for the Fab Five incident and calling for a non time out and less for his playing career. He went on to win the Rookie of the Year with the Warriors and was named an All-Star five times. Throughout his career, he scored over 17,000 points and grabbed over 8,000 boards, not too shabby. Despite many questioning his ability to play in the clutch (King's tenure), he had a great career. I'm not going to say he's a Hall of Famer but he did quite well for himself.

Best known for: Being better than Juwan Howard on those Bullets' teams


1994 Glenn Robinson:
To follow up C-Webb, the Purdue product didn't fare too well in the Association. Apart from having the shoes by Reebok that I wore for my first year on the JV squad in grade school, he really didn't do much. He lost the Rookie of the Year Award to Grant Hill and Jason Kidd and was voted to the All Star team twice (2000 and 2001). Apart from being a key starter on the 2001 Bucks Eastern Conference semi-finalists he really didn't do much... apart from having a Reebok shoe I owned.

Best Known for: Being the "Big Dog"

1995 Joe Smith:
Where do we begin on this one. Apart from destroying my best friend's basketball card collection with his Platinum Players Club Collector's Choice Rookie that once fetched around $120, he really did nothing. He went from winning the Naismith College Player of the Year Award to being a bench player on the Cavs. He's been bouncing around from contender to contender every few seasons.

Best Known for: Not answering a lot of Warrior fans' prayers

1996 Allen Iverson:

The Georgetown grad went on to a great career with the 76ers and Nuggets. NBA Rookie of the Year and MVP (2001) but his off the court issues have plagued his career and image. He fueded with Larry Brown in route to a NBA Finals appearance, a team he single handedly carried (Eric Snow could not do anything to push that team).

Best Known for: "Practice? We're talking about practice!"




1997 Tim Duncan:

Teams pretty much wanted to tank games to get the lottery ball in their favor. This Demon Deacon was a demon his junior and senior year, winning ACC in both years and won the Naismith Award, Wooden Award, USBWA Player of the Year Award. The Spurs were able to create the Twin Towers of David Robinson and Duncan in route to two Championships together. They beat a Knicks team led by Latrell Spreewell that was a stong Eastern team. Now he's won a few more titles since then and won the Rookie of the Year, NBA MVP (2002, 2003), Finals MVP (1999, 2003, 2005), NBA All Star Game MVP (2000).

Best Known For: Whining when calls don't go his way.

HOLY SH*T!

Ladies and Gentlemen, something amazing has occurred.

Sal Fasano's 401k is headquartered out of Rochester, New York. Tomorrow, the Rochester Red Wings are hosting Richmond Braves and at Frontier Field tomorrow, the man, the myth, the legend, Sal Fasano will be playing. This website will be there will photos of Fasano and his 'stache is possible.

Stay tuned for more details...

Hitters say, oh K

When I played little league, striking out was embarassing. If you got sat down on 3 strikes, you took the walk of shame and sat alone at the end of the bench. Well, in the major leagues, that attitude is no more.

Ryan Howard struck out 199 times last season to set the major league record in K's. This is a record that has been broken three times in the last four years (Twice by Adam Dunn, now thats something to be proud of).

So with this, it seemed that some research was in order.

First off, at Howard's current pace, (510 K's in 423 games) he could break Reggie Jackson's record 2597 strike outs in around 500 less games...pathetic.

In 2007, only three NL and five AL teams failed to strike out 1000 times. In 1965 (a year that Koufax sat down 382) only six teams in the entire league were over the 1 grand mark.

As resently as 1991, only 8 teams were over a thousand strike outs. So what the hell happened in the last 15 years?

The idea of awarding power over contact, defense and baseball IQ leaves us with Ryan Howard winning the 2006 MVP over Albert Pujols (49 HRs, 51 K's and a gold glove) and players like Alex Rodriguez being dubbed the best in the game (120 K's in 07)

Old Joe Sewell would turn in his grave. The man struck out just 4 times in over 608 AB's in 1925


It should be mentioned that Sal Fasano K'd 310 times in just 1063 major league ab's....

Oh my God! A myth is revealed!

So I was doing some surfing, while I was really supposed to be doing work, but I made it all up when I found this.

If you scroll down and read, Michael Olowokandi was spotted in public and somehow it ended up on Fox Sports' Rumors section on their website. It is amazing that O-kandi (I'm not going to spell his name out all the time) is still alive and well... is he actually playing basketball still?


(Note upon further review, O-Kandi is not playing with the Celtics or anyone right now)

How bad does it have to be for him?

Kwame Brown still plays basketball despite not really playing basketball, but he's another failed prospect that everyone thought was going to be so great. It really makes you think about how bad some number one overall picks have been in the NBA recently (with in the past 10-15 years).

It's interesting to think about it this way too, in that with football and basketball everyone places so much pressure on the number one overall pick, but no one really cares about who is numero uno in the NHL or MLB draft (this goes beyond not being able to pronounce some of those French-Canadians).

I'm going to take time and look back on the past 15 years of NBA overall picks and see how they panned out to what people expected. Obviously this sucks for all players drafted from UNC since everyone is supposed to be Michael Jordan.

Sal Fasano Facts: Sal Fasano was actually drafted after Kwame Brown and played three seasons with the Washington Bullets and Vancouver Grizzlies.