Been watching some Aussie Open tennis and they were talking about Roddick's serve having some bite on it. His slice was working well. And I remember someone, and I believe it's Krukow, having a better word for it. My brain for some reason associates the word I'm thinking of with "language" but I know that's definitely not the word.

So maybe a fill in the blanks?

"Dayum. That ball/serve/pitch had some _____ on it."

or

"Dayum. That ball/serve/pitch had some _____."

Thanks in advance for the help. This is gonna bug me all day.

There's an article in the New Yorker this week about Scott Boras and in it he mentions his fleecing of the Giants and his affectionate nickname for Zito:

He brought up, as an example, Barry Zito, the San Francisco Giants' lefty who is known almost as much for his surfer persona as for his sweeping curveball. "What we did with Barry Zito a year and a half ago is one of my better pieces of work," he said. "It was really about getting him to be him. I call him Zicasso. The thing is, he wants to pitch powerfully, and I'm saying, `No, you're Zicasso! You got to be the artist-poet-intellectual. That's what you're out there to do.' He feeds off it. `You're Zicasso. You come out and you paint!' " He added a wavelike flourish with his arm to punctuate each new mention of Zicasso--whose performance in the past couple of years, incidentally, has not been discernibly better than it was before.

Zicasso. I'm going to be sick. I don't like the stroke, the paintings, or the price, but okay. Perhaps he should be called Zollack.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/10/29/071029fa_fact_mcgrath?printable=true

Could have sworn I saw the Red Sox v. Indians game on the HD scoreboard while driving into the city. Is this likely just someone wasting money for a party or is there actually a way to watch postseason games at the ballpark?

I'm sure anyone who's been driving into or out of the city at night has seen the new scoreboard lit up with a lot of Barry Bonds homer footage. The screen looks super wide, like the ones at the newer NFL stadiums (well, I guess Candlestick has a relatively large, wide screen but it never looked high definition to me). Not what I was expecting. I was expecting this massive, hulking square of a screen but this looks much cooler. It does, as expected, replace the old scoreboard entirely but it looks like it basically retains its footprint.

Color me psyched.

Satan has a new hobby.

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Well, that's one down.

"Several national reports have linked the Orioles to free agent Barry Bonds. However, the Orioles, wary of the baggage that comes with Bonds, have no interest at this point in the San Francisco Giants slugger, according to several team officials."

Out of curiosity, does anyone else at the major league level even receive more than one locker?

I know there are a few architects and/or ballpark design buffs lurking on McCovey Chronicles, so I thought I'd point this out just in case those potentially interested "didn't get the memo." While I'm not quite sure how much overlap there may be with the regular ballpark tours, it's of course interesting to note that an HOK rep will be the one leading the tour.

Inside the Ballpark: An Architectural Tour of AT&T Park

What's your caption?

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"I think it's fair to say with free agents, we're going to go through a huge transformation," general manager Brian Sabean said. "It's going to be a huge makeover. ... I don't know if you say the last hurrah, but you can do the math. I can see us getting younger and attacking the market as aggressively as we can. The one thing we can hang our hat on is our young pitching."

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