Daily Brew 7/27

The Brewers picked up another big win last night, and Rookie shortstop JJ Hardy is really starting to come around offensively. Where are all those "Bill Hall should start over JJ," or "Send JJ down to AAA" naysayers now? Hardy has been on an absolute tear as of late, he homered to give the Crew the lead on monday and then singled to give them the lead last night. His batting average has raised to .214, not great but considering where he was two months ago I'll take it. You had to expect some early offensive troubles from him, the guy basically missed a full year of baseball. Even when he was struggling the encouraging thing was he was never overmatched. He didn't look bad at the plate, and rarely struck out. He is going to be a .280 hitter and will probably replace Ricky Weeks in the two hole next year.

Greg Maddux picked up his 3000th career strikeout last night. He became the 13th member of this elite club, and it couldn't have happened a more appropriate way. Called strike three.

The Red Sox beat the Devil Rays 10-9 in 10 innings last night, but a real scare came in the third inning when Carl Crawford drilled a line-drive off the right side of Matt Clement's head. The game was delayed for 11 minutes while Clement layed on the mound only blinking his eyes. This is the scariest sight in baseball, and it's truely remarkable that it doesn't happen more often.

Sammy Sosa blasted his 586th career home run last night tying him with Frank Robinson for fifth place on the all-time list.

Larry Brown will be introduced tomorrow as new coach of the Knicks. It's still uncertain where this leaves Herb Williams, and why the two had lunch the other day. Why Larry? I understand this is who he is, but you leave the Pistons for the Knicks? Isiah Thomas has no idea what he's doing, the roster is in bad shape, and theres no real possibility of improving it anytime soon. There you go Larry, you got what you wanted.

I had the chance to see "Real Sports" on HBO last night and they ran a feature on our favorite agent, Drew Rosenhaus. It was on this taping where he announced that Javon Walker would not report, and where he spelled more ludacris statements. While asked by Bernard Goldberg "If you can hold out for more money when a player overperform their contract, what about when they underperform thier deal, will you give back money?" Good question, an argument all of us have made. Rosenhaus' answer was absolutely not, that player deserves that money, he worked for it. What? Isn't that a double standard? He also tried to make the arguement that no one cares when Tom Cruise makes $25 million for a movie but when TO wants to renegotiate his contract he's a villan. Well maybe becuase Tom Cruise isn't threatening to hold out and breaking his contract with MGM to make that movie, TO meanwhile is holding out and breaking his contract. He also said the longer this goes on with TO and Javon, eventually the teams will break because the games start to count and their jobs are on the line. The longer it goes on, the more I get the impression the teams will defeat Rosenhaus. If you're so highly underpaid and not making that much money, then it's really going to hurth when those game checks aren't coming in and you're still getting fined for breach of contract, isn't it?