This jives pretty well with my experience as a sports fan.  Not only the pro sports, but college sports as well.  The misery comes not from just plain sucking – you can kind of get used to that and just go do something else.  It is that every year they have a chance, or at least you think they do.  Your teams get close.  They make the playoffs, win a round.  Then, of course, like always, they tank.  Ugh.  It is brutal.  And spare me the “poor me’s,” Cubs fans.  That is one team.  Chicago has had many other championships over the years.  Apparently Forbes thinks Seattle is the only more miserable city to be a sports fan in.  Sigh.  Second place.  Again.

Just a reminder not to get complacent about our future in bondage to robot overlords.

Screw you, Jim Leyritz. Seriously, I hate you.

Mark Bradley is calling the Hawks’ most recent loss worse than Jim Leyritz homer in 1996.  I didn’t catch the Hawks game tonight, and it sounds like an epic collapse.  But I have a hard time believing it is “worse” than Jim Leyritz, because nothing is worse than Jim Leyritz.  Not even Kent Hrbek or Kriby Puckett.  Braves fans will know what I mean – the thought of Hrbek and Puckett just make me sigh and wish what could have been.  The pain is still there, but it is a dull disappointment.

Jim Leyritz.  Just thinking of this man cause my face to twist into a scowl.  I am literally writing this with a curled lip.  Jim Leyrtiz and his crazy legs, twirling his bat.  WHO BATS LIKE THAT??  My heart rate increases, I grind my teeth, and I honestly kind of feel like vomiting.  I hate this man.  I imagine it is comparable to what Bostonians felt about Bill Buckner or that guy who caught the foul ball at Wrigley.

See, this Hawks collapse, you could sort of see this coming.  These Hawks haven’t been able to hold a lead for the last month of the season.  I told James that the Hawks would break his heart when he decided he would start following them.  ”Even if they get good, it will only be to tease you before they let you down.”  James doesn’t know what it is like to be an Atlanta sports fan, so he gets a pass.  Sure, he’s a Cubs fan, which comes with its own neuroses, but he doesn’t know our franchises.  The Hawks, they are simply playing their role.  This loss doesn’t really change anything about the franchise.

Leyrtiz.  Leyritz killed the Braves.  The Braves had finally, finally escaped decades of ineptitude and won the whole deal in 1995.  They shook the “always a brides’ maid, never a bride” stuff.  They were dominant, and they had just won the first two games in New York.  Against the g-d Yankees.  This series was OURS.  Welcome to the New World Order, baseball.

And then Leyrtiz hit that hanging slider.  The Braves lost four games in a row, lost the series to the damn Yankees, and were never the same again.  In 1997 Florida (Florida! who we beat by 9 games in the regular season) beat us in the NLCS.  We lost to the Padres in 1998.  The Yankees swept us in 1999, and only one game was even close.  We only got out of the divisional round once in the next six years.

Jim Leyrtiz killed what was becoming the most dominant franchise in baseball and ushered in a new era of Yankee worship.  He ripped out this franchise’s heart and left it beating on home plate.  Fourteen years later, the Braves still haven’t recovered.  I defy the a lowly first round loss by the fourth best team in the lesser division to compare to Jim Fucking Leyritz.  Yeah, maybe as far as single game choke-jobs go, it was pretty epic.  But worse?  Not even close.

I was most surprised by the source of the comeback.  This was my thought process during the last two innings:

• Troy Glaus comes up with two outs and a runner on.  He had come up with the bases loaded earlier in the game and one out, and prompted grounded into a double play, just as I expected.  The fans were booing him the at-bat before this one.  I thought, “This game is over.”  I was pretty slack-jawed when he actually knocked it out.  ”Well, good for him.  He really needed that.”  Still down a run with two out, no point in getting TOO excited.
• Heyward comes up.  ”It is too much to expect him to do it again.  Maybe he’ll get a hit, keep it going.”  Holy crap.  This kid is the real deal.  It says a lot about him that this event was the LEAST surprising part about the comeback.
• I see that McLouth, the pitcher’s spot, and Diaz are up in the bottom of the 10th.  ”Great, the worst part of the order.  This will go to 11 innings.”  How wrong I was.

One thing that was great about the early 90′s Braves (the completely biased standard by which I judge all great baseball teams) is that they had very timely hits.  Guys like Lemke and Belliard didn’t put up great numbers, but they came through in the clutch.  That kind of clutch performance has been missing for what feels like a decade.  When Glaus hit into that bases loaded double play, it just felt like typical Braves.  The 9th inning was NOT typical Braves, although I hope it becomes typical of THESE Braves.

I’ll believe these new Freakniks are the real deal when I see it, and until then I’m not wasting my energy.  I think the combination of the Braves game, basketball playoffs, Dogwood Festival, and Robotics competition will be worse than this so-called Freaknik.  Seriously, there is no way these events live up to the name.  Ask some Atlanta natives about stories from the real thing.  One middle school teacher of mine walked out of her house and found some X-rated behavior in progress on her front lawn.  True story.  I think.  And that was part of the deal with the original Freaknik – someone could tell you that, and your reaction was, “sounds plausible.”

However, I did check out Creative Loafing’s piece on the two events this morning.  I actually clicked the link for “twurking” just as La Madre walked past the kitchen table.  That was a great idea.  I highly recommend following that entirely NSF-anywhere-with-company link.

So I was catching up on my Google Reader items, and found this lovely video.  At first I thought, “hey, cool, this guy gets knocked out.”  Then I realized, “hey, the guy doing the knocking out is a Thrasher.”  Turns out it is the Thrashers’ first round draft pick Evander Kane.  Turns out it is also the first Thrashers highlight I’ve seen all year.

h/t goes to Raiford, who shared with this advice: “Why you don’t pick a fight with someone named after Evander Holyfield.”  That about sums it up.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qIjEQHMjNcM[/youtube]

He is a beast, and is generally regarded among Michigan fans as being at least equal to Pro-Bowl Steelers Linebacker LaMarr Woodley, another monster DE out of That State Up North.  Michigan has really sucked the last few years, so Graham has flown under the radar, but check him out tearing up the Senior Bowl:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AINhjlisAMk&feature=player_embedded#[/youtube]

Also, I want some Wolverines around to root for around these parts.  I keep an eye on Chad Henne and Jake Long down in Miami, but I want some Wolverines to play for the Falcons!

Some random thoughts after today’s game:

• John Smoltz isn’t bad as a broadcaster.  I really enjoyed getting some insight into the thought process of a world-class pitcher.  Don Sutton is a hall of fame pitcher, but maybe since I never saw him pitch he just sounded like another announcer to me.  When Jurrjens was struggling in the 5th, Smoltz said something along the lines of, “He’s not trusting his pitches.  You have to just focus on making the pitch, and let the pitch take care of the result.”  Rather Zen.  I liked it.  I still think he took ‘roids, but he’s a decent announcer.
• When the Braves were down 2-1, I thought, “this might begin to tell us something about this team.”  I probably judge every Braves team against the 1991 team – there weren’t any world-class players on that team, but it was maybe the best team I’ve seen.  It was hard not to just love the chemistry and the grit.  For most of the 2000′s, I haven’t really felt the same connection with the players that I did in the early 90′s.  That started to change with guys like McCann, Prado, and Jurrjens coming up.  Young guys that grew up in the organization (yeah, yeah, we traded for Jurrjens in 2007, I know).  Last year the Braves were 27-25 in one-run games, which I think is telling.  They were 11-30 in 2008.  These Braves don’t quit.
• If Chipper can keep this up all season we will be real tough to beat.  This lineup has the potential to be very, very tough on opposing pitchers.  If McLouth can get some production out of the 8-spot and Glaus can put up around 20 homers, pitchers don’t really get a break.  No automatic outs (ahem, Franceour).  Those are some pretty big ifs, of course.  I’d like to see more out of Cabrera, as well, but I don’t get the same bad feeling as I do about Glaus.  My gut feeling is that McLouth will do okay, but I’m not sure about Glaus.

Like every spring, I’m gung-ho about the Braves, and as usual I’ll probably go to four of five games, until about the end of June when I’ll start asking myself, “when does fall football practice start?  Denard Robinson sure is fast… ”

I’m quite appreciative of the tix, but I’m definitely wearing my Braves jersey from little league back in the day.  Unbelievably, it still fits.  I’ve never owned a REAL jersey, like James’ Mark Grace jersey, but I’m considering getting one today.  Do you think they have Heyward jerseys yet?  He’s the savior of the franchise, right (it is that time of the year after all)?  Y’know, other than Jeff Franceour.  Or Jarrod Saltalamacchia.  Hey, remember Wes Helms? Or Wilson Betemit?

So Tommy Hanson has worked out nicely, but I’ve just seen too many franchise saviors get traded or fall flat.  All signs point to great things for Heyward, so I’m hoping of the best.

Why are we sports fans?  We must all be masochists.  I usually remember this about the 9th inning of the first game the Braves lead when they pull out whoever the lame closer is for the year.  By mid-year we’ll have a rotation of three decent guys, and no real closer.

For today, though, it is opening day.  The weather is great.  Heyward is still a demi-god on the way to full-fledged deity status, and hopefully I’ll get to see the Braves ruin James’s day.  I’ll thank him for the ticket by simply smiling and not gloating TOO much.

“Garbled garbled garbled…. Walter’s….. garbled…. Downtown is secure!  Downtown is secure!”

WTF?  I mean, that’s good to know of course.  Five minutes later everyone standing outside class gets a phone call.  I check my message, and its again garbled.  A post on GSU’s website indicated that a shot had been fired near Walter’s, which is across the street from the main undergrad classroom.

It turns out that some local rapper name WAKA FLOCKA(for real!!!) got into a fight with Gucci Mane’s crew at Walter’s.  Who is Waka Flocka?

Waka Flocka, aka Juaqin Malphurs, is a member of Gucci Mane’s 1017 Brick Squad. His pseudonym alludes to the sound of cocking a semi-automatic pistol.

“Whoever he is he’s got a big swollen eye now,” [witness Patrick] Morrison said.