In seeing that we started the month of May with a series against the Nationals, I wondered how our May looked.  In doing so, I figured maybe I’d do a fanpost to preview the month, so here goes:

 

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Since it had so many comments, I'm doing to assume it was a success here.  Of course, I posted it right before going on a 4 day retreat, so I didn't really post much on the thread, but I was looking at it.

First off, the sports winners were the top four seeds, the only close one was Hoosiers/Slapshot, which shocked me.  I figured Natural/Bull Durham would be closer than it was.

Anyway, many of the movies you guys said outside the sports bracket were on one of the other brackets, but I'll give you what's left, and if I have time later this week (probably Wednesday), I'll go ahead and post the original brackets, so you guys can see what the actual bracket itself was.

Anyway, here are the remaining picks:

War/Action movies

8 Braveheart vs. 4 The Matrix

2 Star Wars: Empire Strikes Back vs. 6 Gladiator

Sports

1 Rocky vs. 4 Caddyshack

2 Hoosiers vs. 3 Bull Durham

Comedy

1 Ferris Bueller's Day Off vs. 4 M.P. and the Holy Grail

2 Animal House vs. 3 The Big Lebowski (this one's basically this high because of my personal bias).

Gangster/Drama

1 The Godfather vs. 4 The Usual Suspects

2 Shawshank Redemption vs. 11 American History X

American History X is the lowest seeded movie left.  The only 1 seed out so far is the Lord of the Rings conclusion, Return of the King, which was the #1 seed in the War/Action bracket.  The closest 2nd round matchup was also in War/Action when The Matrix went up against Fight Club (5 seed) and Matrix won by 1 vote.

Another close vote that involves a movie mentioned here was a 1st round matchup between Gladiator and the Dark Knight where I actually had a tie and had to find someone to cast a deciding vote.  The first person I found online to vote that I hadn't already gotten was my cousin who went Gladiator.

Anyway, on Friday, I'll cut off the voting.  Next time I'll post not only the overall winners, but also the VEB vote.

Hey everyone.  I'm undertaking a project with some of my friends to pick what is the Ultimate Guy Movie.  I actually kinda ripped the idea off from the Chicago ESPN station, which is doing this, but I thought it was fun and decided doing it myself.  I considering posting it here to get votes as well, but I figured it was off topic.  However, the more I thought about it, the more I thought:  "Well, one of the 4 16 movie brackets is a sports movie bracket, so even if it isn't Cardinals baseball relevant, it's still kinda fun."

Anyway, I'm in the 2nd round now, so I'll post the full Sports bracket and then list the choices for the vote now, and if you feel so inclined, you can vote on them.  I'm going to tally up votes for this round sometime in the next couple days.  

Furthermore, I'm taking the VEB vote as a community vote, so this is a collective vote, so a landslide or one movie edging the other out still gets the VEB vote.

1st round matchups: (This voting is already done)

1 Rocky vs. 16 Friday Night Lights

8 Rudy vs. 9 Field of Dreams

5 Rounders vs. 12 Major League

4 Caddyshack vs. 13 The Hustler

3 Bull Durham vs. 14 White Men Can't Jump

6 The Natural vs. 11 Remember the Titans

7 Raging Bull vs. 10 Slapshot

2 Hoosiers vs. 15 The Longest Yard (original one)

 

The 2nd round matchups (which obviously tells you who won each of the above rounds) are listed below.  These are all open for voting:

1 Rocky vs. 8 Rudy

4 Caddyshack vs. 12 Major League

3 Bull Durham vs. 6 The Natural

2 Hoosiers vs. 10 Slapshot

Three baseball movies left in the fold, with only Field of Dreams losing as far as baseball movies (and that was a very close vote)

Feel free to vote on any or all matchups.  You don't need to vote on all 4 matchups if you don't feel you know enough about one of the films or matchups to vote on it.  I'll announce sports bracket winners later.

Lastly, this will conclude the 2nd round for all brackets, bringing it down to the Sweet 16.  The other brackets are War/Action movies, Comedies, and Gangster/Drama movies.  One last thing you can vote on is if this is too off-topic for VEB or if I should vote all the Sweet 16 Matchups for you guys to vote on.  I don't want to load up the fanposts with stuff that's completely off topic, but if this seems fun to everyone involved here, I'd be happy to post this for you guys to vote on as well.

http://www.baseballamerica.com/today/prospects/rankings/top-100-prospects/2009/267698.html

Colby Rasmus comes in at #3, Brett Wallace #40, Chris Perez #91

There's also descriptions (a relevant # for each player) that are kind of interesting, but not a whole lot of analysis really.  More just a random quip about each player that gives you at least an idea of what their best attribute is.

I'm sure this could better fit as a fanshot, but for some reason it wouldn't post (I've never done a fanshot before) and I figured this would actually potentially be a good source of discussion, so I put it here.

 

Link to Part 1:  http://www.vivaelbirdos.com/2009/1/17/726610/curveballs-a-short-story-p

Link to Part 2:  http://www.vivaelbirdos.com/2009/1/19/727817/curveballs-a-short-story-p

Link to Part 3:  http://www.vivaelbirdos.com/2009/1/21/731291/curveballs-a-short-story-p

I hope these aren't becoming laborious and wasteful, since the last one has 0 comments and recs.  I just assume that maybe people are waiting for the conclusion, like one commentor said.

Anyway, this is the conclusion of "Curveballs"

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Link to Part 1:  http://www.vivaelbirdos.com/2009/1/17/726610/curveballs-a-short-story-p

Link to Part 2:  http://www.vivaelbirdos.com/2009/1/19/727817/curveballs-a-short-story-p

This takes it up to page 24 out of 29.  Last section will be posted later this week.

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Part two of four of "Curveballs."

For anyone that missed it, part one can be found at:  http://www.vivaelbirdos.com/2009/1/17/726610/curveballs-a-short-story-p

This part takes the story through approximately page 14 in the double-spaced Word document form of the story, so this serialization of the story should be a total of four parts, and I'll try to continue to post every 2-3 days for the next two parts.

Without going into too much plot discussion so as to reveal a spoiler, this 2nd section is where we see the main issues of the short story reveal themselves.

Anyway, without further delay, here is part two of the story.

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With this being the slow part of the year for baseball and with the lack of topics, I thought it might be fun to give everyone something different to read.

What I'm posting is a short story I wrote about 5 years ago while I was still getting my BA and was taking a creative writing workshop for my minor (creative writing, of course).  Luckily, I had two excellent editors to help me mold this into what I, and they, thought was a pretty good story.  One was my professor, who is at least a casual baseball fan and an expert on the writing side of the situation.  The other was a fellow student in the workshop who incidentally also worked as a high school umpire, which helped tremendously, since I had some issues with rules and with interactions between players and umps that were unrealistic on the high school level that he helped me with.

In Microsoft Word, the story is 29 pages, double-spaced, so I'll post about the story basically as a serialization over the next week or so probably.

Anyway, I'd like to think the story is pretty good.  At least as far as prose goes, it's the thing I ever managed to write.  Despite my opinions of it though, if anyone has critiques of the story, I'm always open to listening to what other people think of it. 

So without further discussion, below is approximately the first 6-7 pages of "Curveballs"

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It's another sad day in sports blogdom.

I've become very attached to reading sports blogs.  I've tried to create my own, but without any significant niche that made mine unique, it kind of went to the wayside, so I appreciate how difficult it is to have a very good sports blog that gets decent readership.  I check in from time to time all over the SBNation network.  I try to check out Future Redbirds from time to time to see the good work they're doing there.  There's the intermittent posts by MLB.com Cardinals writer Matthew Leach that give new insight into what's going on in and around the clubhouse.  But there are only a few blogs that have entered my regular rotation.  I always check VEB, I always check MLBTradeRumors, and I always check Fire Joe Morgan (http://www.firejoemorgan.com -- The link thing seems to be broken right now otherwise I'd link it the right way).

Sadly, they are closing their doors.  If you've never checked them out, it's still worthwhile even though there won't be new posts most likely.  They do an excellent job of ripping apart bad sports journalism.  Many of the articles are very prominent writers who get quite a bit of coverage on a national scale, including an article fairly recently by the LA Times' Bill Plaschke.  Of course, the original purpose was to bring down Joe Morgan, by pointing out how ridiculous and contradictory he really is, and they did an excellent job of keeping up with the regular Joe Morgan chats on ESPN.com, but with the news that Joe Morgan will quite possibly no longer be doing Sunday Night Baseball, and with time constraints taking them away just like they did with lboros, Fire Joe Morgan will be no more.

The writers do acknowledge that there might be an occasional post if they find something really egregious and want to do a post, but those of you who are regular viewers, like myself, will certainly not find the amount of new content going up to be what you're used to.

So, with lboros hanging them up, and now the boys over at FJM ending their shenanigans as well, it's certainly a sad period for blogdom (at least for MY regular viewing of blogdom).