Baseball has the smallest difference in winning percentage between the top teams and the bottom teams of all the major sports. Looking at most recent seasons, we have:

Basketball:

The top team (Detroit) won 3.05 as many games as the bottom team (Portland).

Hockey:

The top team (Detroit) won 2.76 as many games as the bottom team (St. Louis).

Football:

The top team (Indianapolis) won 7 times as many games as the bottom team (Houston).

So far in the current season, the top team (Detroit once again) has won only 1.91 as many games as the bottom team, Kansas City, and the average over the last four seasons has been just over 2.

This suggests to me that luck plays a bigger role in baseball than in other sports. It's not that luck evens out over a season, it's that luck evens the teams out over the course of a season, more so than in other sports.

As for cycling, I understand that it's not everyone's cup of tea, but those at the top may well be the best athletes in all of sports. Look at what it takes to be a top rider in the Tour de France--endurance, speed, strength, agility, courage, the ability to ignore crowds inches away while travelling at high speed, nerves, and teamwork.

Let's see, Tiger Woods needs strength, nerves, and I suppose some level of agility, but he can do most of those at his own pace. That's not to say he's not a great athlete, but top golfers require far fewer athletic skills than top cyclists.

My main point about the ranking of the stories, though, is that a historic effort in cycling's top event should rate a higher story than anyone's second place showing after the first round of a golf tournament.

That must be one that comes around every 248 years. Ya gotta be patient to have one of those, I'm telling ya.

Great list, hnutsworth, (though I'd substitute Gin-n-tonic for Vodka-tonic), but there's one more to add:

Platoonic: There are actually two definitions for this one. The first is the relationship among soldiers, the second is the relationship between two players who share playing time at the same position (see, I was able to make it sports-related).

We're living in a difficult time for sports. Individual sports, for the most part, are taking the biggest hit. As I've written here before, when an athlete in an individual sport tests positive, the fans lose the ofject of their fandom. When an athlete in a team sport tests positive, the fans just lose a piece of that object.

There are numerous problems with the current approach to drugs in sports. Two of the problems stem from the same issue--the tests themselves aren't perfect, so it appears to the public that some people are able to cheat and not get caught, while others test positive even though they weren't cheating. It seems unlikely that we'll ever perfect the testing technology to eliminate false positives and false negatives.

Given the status quo, which I don't foresee ending anytime soon, one way to reduce the damage caused by false positives is to strictly enforce a policy of non-announcement of a first positive test. Every time there's an announcement that an athlete's A sample has tested positive, that athlete will be under a cloud of suspicion for the duration of their career, even if the B sample tests negative.

Another part of the problem is that some of the marker tests use assumptions that may be faulty--we don't really understand how exercise effects hormone levels, but it's clear it does have an effect. Floyd Landis' elevated testosterone level may simply have been a result of physiological processes.

I'm sad to see the effect of multiple doping scandals on cycling--it truly is an exciting sport, demanding more from its athletes than any other sport. It may take a very long time for the sport to recover.

So it's a little strange to go to the IHYH site and see ads for Hummers.

Besides, if they really wanted to be edgy, their site would be "igaveahummerinyourhummer.com".

It seems not many people have caught this part of Tony Snow's remarks yesterday:

"Now, when the United States walked away, in the opinion of Osama bin Laden in 1991, bin Laden drew from that the conclusion that Americans were weak and wouldn’t stay the course and that led to September 11th."

This says to me that he's putting a large part of the blame for the attacks of 9/11/01 on the first Bush administration.

The video can be found at http://thinkprogress.org/2006/08/09/snow-lamont/

I can't believe that King's Wikipedia article doesn't mention his main claim to fame--his offspring, Buster, the coin-flippingest (however many years old he happens to be at the time)-year-old in America. An accompanying picture of Buster's thumb would be appropriate, too.

It's sad about Maurice Clarett.

We can never know what would have happened if Maurice Clarett hadn't tried to, and been prevented from, entering the NFL early, but if anything, his case can be an argument against the ambiguity at the time. If it had been clear that he wouldn't be allowed to enter the NFL early, then he wouldn't have lost his NCAA eligiblity, at least not in the way he did.

On the other hand, if he had been allowed to enter the NFL draft in 2003, perhaps he would have been drafted early, shown up to camp in shape, and be well on his way to a successful career. That's also a plausible scenario.

smileyy, was that you who added the Buster reference to the Wikipedia article?

Whoever did it, good job. Now it just needs to mention King's obsession with curling. Oh, and the What The Heck™ Pick (or is it What the Heck Pick™?)