I think we need to put to rest the incessant complaining when small-market teams, allegedly without good storylines or history or a national following, make it to the championship. If no one wants small market teams to win, then why have small market teams to begin with. If all anyone wants is NY/Chicago/LA series, then fold all of the other teams in the leagues. Sounds dumb? Yes it does.

King only mentions this point in regards to what Fox TV execs is thinking, but his is just one of a torrent of comments about how "no one wants to watch Colorado" or other small market teams. Watch the games for the competition, the quality of play, the tension that comes from the championship being on the line . . . I just want to see good baseball, and Colorado and Cleveland have provided that in spades. Who cares about "characters" and "stories" and all that crap! Why have sports turned into a soap opera for men? Just watch the games and enjoy!

P.S. I agree with LW#1 and thought the exact same thing when that shot of the red face people came on Fox. Now, it isn't exactly analogous to black face because of the latter's long history in this country, but it is still pretty offensive. Can we please get rid of these caricatures as team mascots?

Just about all the accounts of the Cleveland kick say that the officials ruled the kick no good and then conferred and overturned their call. I have seen a number of replays, and after the ball landed in the end zone, the officials under the goal post made no call at all. They immediately looked at each other and started to discuss where the ball had hit. Did they signal no good sometime after that? If not, then the idea that they "overturned" a call, or that they must have used replay, doesn't make any sense. The refs seemed to see exactly what happened. Still, I'm not sure why it took five minutes to agree that it was good. Is the rule on field goals that confusing?

I think that Planet Earth might just be the most amazing damned thing I have ever seen on television. Everything from the raw camera work to the clever editing, from the narration to the narratives constructed out of the footage, is just outstanding. Sometimes the narration stops to offer a quick message about global warming and preserving the planet, but it seems unnecessary. Each picture is worth the proverbial thousand words. All of the things shown in the series carry on whether any humans are watching it or not; it is a testament to how in many ways we are so insignificant, yet we have an impact on natural life far beyond what we can understand. Planet Earth should be required viewing.

Professional sports began to lose me when it all became a soap opera for men. I used to joke that professional wrestling filled that role, but I soon realized that sports coverage is all about generating the drama. One constant example now, I think, are the endless stories about pro and college coaches and where they will or won't be coaching in the near future. Why are we supposed to care about this so much?

The games just can't be games, they have to have compelling "stories," otherwise we apparently won't care. This need for stories is what has made off-the-field stuff more and more of the focus of sports coverage. I like Deadspin a lot for exactly the kind of deconstruction of the sports-entertainment complex that this book is after, but it feeds into this drama also (usually to comedic effect though). The more I think about it, though, the more I just want to see good, competitive games played by the athletes who are the best in the world at what they do . . . and hopefully by the teams that I have grown up rooting for. You can keep the rest of it.

Prop Joe's end is a story line that just doesn't ring true for me. He is one of the smartest men on the street . . . why would he take a street thug like Marlo and essentially teach him everything he needs to know and make himself unnecessary? He is the most "civilized" of the drug dealers, able to take Stringer Bell's vision of the business and put it in practice, but there is no way he would be so naive as to think that Marlo would appreciate his efforts to "civilize" him.

The key thing that I think I missed in the Prop Joe saga was that he in fact did not know that Marlo was talking with the Greeks. (When Marlo goes to Joe and asks for "clean money," he didn't tell him what it was for, did he?) In that case, other people's readings of the story make sense, in that Joe "civilizing" Marlo was not making himself obsolete because he always figured that he was protected by being the source of the co-op's dope supply. Damn Greeks!