Bloggers To Be Named Later was Paul Caputo’s fabulous sports-blogging empire of the mid-2010s. My role in the enterprise was to promise to write humor articles and then not do that, or at least not remotely on time. Ultimately, after a flirtation with viral Internets fame, the site basically turned into an excuse for Paul to get free baseball tickets, which is actually about the only good reason to run a blog of any sort. After the BTBNL site wound down, I realized that I hadn’t kept local copies of most of the stories I had written, so I ended up scouring through The Internet Archive to find as many as I could in order to prevent a tragic loss to the world’s cultural canon of blog posts complaining about the Seattle Mariners. You’re welcome.
It is an immense honor for a podunk blog of this type to add The NFL Super Insider to its roster of writers. The NFL Super Insider has a hidden identity because he, she—or it—is constantly in contact with the league’s most elite and powerful. That’s why the NFL Super Insider is privy to the biggest scoops, the deepest secrets, and the hottest insider knowledge that prick Jay Glazer can only dream about.
WHO is it??? Is this the NFL Super Insider???
With that being said – on to this week’s NFL Super Insider Report!
Maybe THIS is the NFL Super Insider! Could it be???
Hot Item: At least one of the Green Bay Packers is spending his offseason well: B.J. Raji is starring in a new set of TV commercials. In these commercials, he has even invented his own dance, called the Disco Double-Check! Personally I don’t think the dance is very good, but I’m just happy to see an under-appreciated offensive lineman like Raji getting work. Rumor has it that in future commercials a certain Green Bay quarterback (maybe Matt Flynn!) plus a Packers sideline dancer with a beard will make a guest appearance as well!
Is THIS the NFL Super Insider??? Probably not but you should check closely.
Breaking News: Chicago Bears fans have been looking forward to next year, as their legendary offense returns in healthy form. But I’m hearing from those “in the know” in Chicago that quarterback Jay Cutler may not be 100% next year as he continues to struggle with what one team source called a “hurt vagina.” I’m not familiar with with the injury but from what I’m hearing it has been a recurring problem throughout Cutler’s career—stay tuned!
Is this the NFL Super Insider? Unlikely, but do you notice a trend? Keep reading to find out if your answer is correct.
Flash: Very highly placed League sources tell me exclusively that a blockbuster trade is on the way for the Indianapolis Colts! According to these Mega-Insiders, the Colts are set to deal away Peyton Manning to a dark-horse suitor: the St. Louis Cardinals! It’s said that new Colts General Manager Bill Pullman is pulling out all the stops to deal the longtime Indy quarterback for the Cardinals’ first-round picks in 2012 and 2013. The last holdup to getting a deal done is the Cardinals’ request for a “left-handed reliever” which may be a code name for a cornerback, or it may be some slang reference to gay sex. Best of luck to Peyton with the Cardinals either way!
Yeah, at this point it’s just gratuitous
Hot Item: One of the NFL’s most prolific tweeters has caused a scandal yet again! Fox on NFL’s beloved robotic mascot Cleatus (@CLEATUSonFOX) ignited a firestorm last week with this verbal barb:
Infamous Cleatus tweet
Whoa, big guy – let’s leave the politics out of things. I prefer the “classic” Cleatus, known for his hilarious insightson everyday life covering the NFL like:
Like we all haven’t thought that before!
That’s all for this week! Keep your ears to the ground, keep reaching for the stars, and keep your hands to yourself – just like famous bluesman Leonard Skinnerd used to say!
Bloggers To Be Named Later was Paul Caputo’s fabulous sports-blogging empire of the mid-2010s. My role in the enterprise was to promise to write humor articles and then not do that, or at least not remotely on time. Ultimately, after a flirtation with viral Internets fame, the site basically turned into an excuse for Paul to get free baseball tickets, which is actually about the only good reason to run a blog of any sort. After the BTBNL site wound down, I realized that I hadn’t kept local copies of most of the stories I had written, so I ended up scouring through The Internet Archive to find as many as I could in order to prevent a tragic loss to the world’s cultural canon of blog posts complaining about the Seattle Mariners. You’re welcome.
Since the runaway success of Bloggers To Be Named Later, every week I get hundreds of e-mails from avid fans asking me common sports-related questions, like “Do you need C1AL1S or V1AGRA cheap???!?”
Apparently she’s very excited to meet me and just needs a credit card!
But occasionally I get actual questions from readers, and by far the most common one is “how to save Major League Baseball?” Each time, I patiently explain that it’s complicated, because you have to have pitched at least three innings unless the lead in the game was less than three runs, in which case you only have to pitch one inning. Then they tell me that I misunderstood their question and we start over.
So here are the most popular questions I get about how Major League Baseball can be saved and the honest answer to each one:
Q: Is MLB suffering from the lack of a roster of fan-friendly superstars in the post-steroids era? What can be done to restore a pantheon of baseball players with mass market appeal like there were in the ’90s?
A: There is a lack of big-name baseball players today that hurts the sport as a whole. (Unless you are looking at key growing fan demographics, such as “Venezuelan families with 12-year old Yankees pitching prospects” or “Puerto Ricans who hope to come to the mainland under the name Bruce Wayne.”)
The fact is that the league has tried belatedly banning Performance Enhancing Drugs (PEDs) with little real result. (True fact: the official MLB test for PED use is looking straight at the players with a very serious expression and asking, “Did you take any drugs, son?” So far only Manny Ramirez has been caught that way, although they blood-tested Ryan Braun because he couldn’t answer the question since he was so high on Angel Dust.)
If Cheech or Chong ever dies, there’s your replacement.
So what does that tell us? Simply that PEDs aren’t really the problem, and to regain its popularity MLB should go completely in the other direction: mandating the use of PEDs, but taking it to the next level. A competition between ‘roided-up hulks to hit 70 home runs a year? Boooring.
Instead, we need a close 12-way race between full-blown mutants, doped up on elephant aphrodisiacs and freebasing Ben-Gay, trying to break the 140-home run barrier … while struggling with the societal prejudice brought on by their third arms and occasional feeding on the blood of children.
The Yankees will pay this guy $25M a year for 10 years, even after he has turned 300.
Just think of the competition between this new breed of hitters vs. a new generation of pitchers throwing 110 mph change-ups while hallucinating from their massive infusions of Velociraptor Growth Hormone and horse tranquilizers. Not to mention the first base coaches high on Orangutan pituitary secretions mixed with Day-Quil and constantly waving all the players from 3rd base in, the wrong way around the bases.
That is must-see baseball, my friends, and I challenge anyone who disagrees with me to fight after I take my next intravenous shot of Armadillo liver and Grape Ludens Coughdrops.
Q: Do you want cheap drugs from Canadian Pharmacy to Enhance Male Performance tonight??!?? Rare Chinese herbs Three-Penis Wine for low cost!!!!
A: Sorry, I think I put this question in the wrong pile.
Q: What can be done about the chronic competitive imbalance in the AL East?
A: The obvious answer is to create a special two-team league with just the Yankees and the Red Sox in it so they play each other every day. This will create three key benefits:
Can you imagine a book like this written by a Royals fan about the Indians? That’s why these people need to be quarantined.
It will generate huge TV ratings for MLB, and allow ESPN to stop pretending like it cares about any other team in the league.
Having the Sox and Yankees play each other constantly will lead to enough stadium brawls to thin their respective herds of devotees a little.
Best of all, it will prevent the legions of unruly Red Sox Nation acolytes from crowding out the home fans at every other team’s away games, drowning out the local 7th inning stretch song with “Sweet Caroline” and complaining loudly about the lack of “lobstah rolls” at the stadium cotton candy stands.
Q: Can’t we just fire Bud Selig somehow? That would fix a lot right there.
A: Bud Selig cannot be fired. He cannot be made to retire, and he cannot even be killed. Bud Selig can only be destroyed by casting him back into the fires of Mount Doom in the Land of Mordor, where he was created.
The Lord of the Rings doesn’t specify the exact location of Mordor but from the pictures I’m guessing Pittsburgh.
So if any of our readers live in Mordor, you might try to do that if you have some free time.
Bloggers To Be Named Later was Paul Caputo’s fabulous sports-blogging empire of the mid-2010s. My role in the enterprise was to promise to write humor articles and then not do that, or at least not remotely on time. Ultimately, after a flirtation with viral Internets fame, the site basically turned into an excuse for Paul to get free baseball tickets, which is actually about the only good reason to run a blog of any sort. After the BTBNL site wound down, I realized that I hadn’t kept local copies of most of the stories I had written, so I ended up scouring through The Internet Archive to find as many as I could in order to prevent a tragic loss to the world’s cultural canon of blog posts complaining about the Seattle Mariners. You’re welcome.
Oh, your city doesn’t look like this at night? Suck it, Cleveland.
Sometimes I will tell a friend how February and March are my least favorite months of the year because there are no professional sports to watch. They will say, “but what about the NHL?” And we will both laugh and laugh and laugh.
After a few minutes of convulsive laughter, though, we pick ourselves up off the floor and they will follow up:
Friend: Seriously, what about professional basketball?
Me: I don’t think the WNBA season starts until September. Or maybe that’s the Curling Premier League.
Friend: No, I mean men’s professional basketball.
Me: I don’t know what cable package you have, but mine definitely doesn’t include the Italian-Serbian All Stars League.
Friend: No, the NBA.
Me: Who?
That’s right, the NBA has been on the official Jeff Carl Dead To Me List since July 2nd 2008 when the Seattle Supersonics officially left town to become the Oklahoma City Ford F-250 With Optional Towing Packages or the Oklahoma City Trailer Park Tornado Debris Scavengers or whatever they are now.
Please understand that this was not an ill-considered or capricious decision to add the League Who Must Not Be Named to my highly select Dead To Me List. After spending 10 years in Washington DC subjected to the “basketball” practiced by the Washington Wizards, I was already pretty disposed to stop caring about the NBA. To me, NBA players seemed like little more than a horde of spoiled prima donnas and feckless thugs who starred in terrible genie-themed movies and occasionally had NRA-sponsored gun shows in the locker room.
That just happened.
But the factor that pushed me over the edge to permanently “un-friend” the NBA was an issue that I call Seattle Sports Insecurity Syndrome.
Seattle sports fans have a chronic insecurity problem. Despite the facts that Seattle is the 13th largest media market in the country, a thriving technology industry growth area and inarguably the most naturally beautiful major city in the nation, its sports teams seem to be perpetual also-rans or transplant candidates.
This is due to a variety of factors. Sure, Seattle does have some disadvantages in attracting sports teams: we have one rain shower a year (it starts on November 15th and ends in late May); the looming threat of multiple nearby volcanoes seems to turn off a few timid souls; and some people get jittery after their 14th cup of coffee in the afternoon. I have even heard a local sports radio host suggest that Seattle fans don’t have the same rabid sports interest seen in other cities because “people in Seattle have actual things to do besides watching sports.” (I think he was talking about you, Cleveland.) But none of these can adequately explain how Seattle and its teams are forever outside the “cool kids club” of the professional sports world.
This first hit home for me when I was watching a Fox NFL pre-game show in 2005 and Jimmy Johnson was discussing why the Seahawks’ running back Shaun Alexander wasn’t a national media star despite the fact that he was on pace for a 2,000-yard rushing season. “I think,” said Mr. Bob’s Big Boy Hair, “that it has something to do with the fact that he plays in Southeast Alaska.” TRUE FACT.*
That was bad enough to give Seattle sports fans a permanent case of the relocation jitters. But then, to top it all off, in 2006 the SuperSonics were sold to an ownership group led by Tom Joad or whoever the hell lives in Oklahoma. This was especially galling since the Sonics were Seattle’s only championship-winning team.** (The city came close twice when the Mariners lost the 2001 ALCS to the Yankees and the Seahawks lost Super Bowl XL in 2006 to the referees.)
The city of Seattle had a strong case against the NBA and the Sonics’ new carpetbagger ownership for breaking their lease. But Seattle’s doofus elected officials fumbled the trial strategy, and ultimately let the team go for a $45 million lease termination payment and a vague promise from NBA commissioner David Stern that Seattle might get a team again someday once they had filled up all the long-time proven basketball markets. You know, like Toronto and Charlotte.
Seattle’s then-mayor, Greg Nickels
Seriously, the team left for Oklahoma City. I’m sure it’s lovely there and crap like that, but… really? Oklahoma City? That’s a little like having the following conversation with your girlfriend:
Girlfriend: We have to break up, I’m leaving you for another guy.
You: What? Is it the tall blond jet fighter pilot I saw you talking with earlier?
Now Ex-Girlfriend: No… it was the guy next to him.
You: The brilliant wealthy neurosurgeon?
Ex-Girlfriend: No… the guy on the other side.
You: The little kid with a backpack?
Ex-Girlfriend: He’s not a little kid, he’s 4’2″. And that’s not a backpack, it’s a hump.
The point of all this being that until such time as the “Why Does Anyone Care What Team Juwan Howard Wants To Play For?” league returns to Seattle, they are on the official Jeff Carl Dead To Me list. Until then, I will know Kobe Bryant only as “that guy who’s in the commercials with Tom from Parks and Recreation” and February/March will be the Months Without Professional Sports.
Except for the NHL.
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* P.S. Screw you, Jimmy Johnson.
** Yes, Seattle has an actual championship-winning pro sports team, the WNBA Seattle Storm. They are awesome and deserve mad props and lots of fans, but it ruins the narrative of my rant. Go Storm.
