Author: Scott Lavelock

A disgusting overreaction to a Week 2 football game

85 Comments

We the People of Kansas City, in order to form a more perfect Chiefs Kingdom, establish accountability, insure civic loyalty, provide for a common 2-minute defense, promote the general Fanfare, and secure the blessings of championships to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Declaration in Address to our sovereign leader, Head Coach Andy Reid: Dear Coach, Two score and 15 years ago, our founding father – Mr. Hunt – brought forth upon this turf a new Kingdom. It was conceived in liberty from a tyrannical NFL commissioner, not unlike the one we currently serve, and dedicated to the proposition that, “All pro football leagues are created equal.” Now we are engaged in the war for the championship of the NFL, testing whether that Kingdom – or any Kingdom so conceived and so dedicated – can win anything anymore. We gathered on a great battle field of that war on Thursday night, hoping to consecrate it with our patriotism and a victory over a foreign enemy – Denver – [Read more...]

Everyone just calm down, Royals aren’t getting screwed out of All-Star votes

54 Comments

I feel it necessary to clarify the potentially misleading headlines you've been reading. When MLB says they've cancelled more than 60 million all-star votes, that means they've been doing it throughout the process and that's just what the running total is at. They didn't just cancel 60 million votes yesterday, and the totals you've been seeing have been the official totals with none of the cancelled votes ever being published at any time. Also, for those who are too lazy to read anything more than a headline before jumping to conclusions, MLB has stated that the roughly 20% of votes that have been cancelled is typical compared to years past. So no, this isn't some sort of unusual behavior for baseball fans. It just so happens that it's Royals fans whose votes are being thrown out - and counted legitimately - this year. So in other words, if MLB didn't closely monitor illegitimate voting, the Royals' players would probably have even bigger leads. But as it stands - barring any [Read more...]

Posted in:

Border War renews in Softball Regionals, Mizzou wins (twice), advances to Super Regionals + Border War Notes

66 Comments

A funny thing happened in Columbia this weekend. Missouri played Kansas. It’s a rare sight these days. And one that happens only on an impromptu basis now, except in club sports where the two teams still schedule each other because they aren’t governed by the universities’ athletic departments themselves, which are of course the birthplace of conference loyalties. But in NCAA-sanctioned sports, the two ancient adversaries don’t schedule each other anymore, despite having a rivalry on the playing field that dates back to 1891 and a rivalry on the battlefield that dates back to the 1850s. And we all know why they don’t schedule each other anymore. From Kansas’ point of view, Missouri is like the cheating spouse who bolted from years of commitment to the allure of newer, greener pastures, while Missouri views Kansas as the stubborn ex-spouse who ran off with half the stuff even though they couldn’t use it, then refused to negotiate a way to move forward which would be good for both [Read more...]

In case some still compare Kobe and LeBron, add this to the list of why LeBron > Kobe

116 Comments

Food for thought as LeBron James advances to the conference finals for the fifth straight year: Since 2001, when stats first started being computerized in accordance with when they occurred during the game, both James and Kobe Bryant have attempted 10 shots in the final five seconds of regulation or overtime in a playoff game. James has made five; Bryant has made one (Michael Jordan, for comparison, has also made five, but, in 11 attempts). If you compare the number of points each player scored in those situations compared to what the league averages, and then give each situation appropriate leverage depending on how much it increased or decreased the percentage chances of victory, James has contributed 8.51 points above average - far and away the best in the NBA. Bryant has contributed 9.14 points BELOW average - far and away the worst in the NBA. In fact, he's more than five points behind the next-worse guy. He's 17.65 (!) points behind James. Hell, he's 11.69 points behind Hedo [Read more...]

Posted in:

The Greatest Game in the History of Ever…for this 28-year-old Royals fan

99 Comments

Scott Lavelock is a badass, hardcore Royals fan. After the EPIC Royals 12-inning Wild Card game win over the A’s on Tuesday night, he wrote this, and it was phenomenal. Before I give my customary props, in the greatest triumph I have ever witnessed in-the-moment as a baseball fan in my life, I’m first going to get all the negatives out of me that festered during the middle innings of this game – the 2014 American League Wild Card Game between Oakland and Kansas City – as I thought to myself how I was going to possibly sum up how the Royals blew the most glorious opportunity they’ve had in 29 years. But now, there is a different way to sum it up. And the best way for that to happen is for Ned Yost, with the 40,502 paying fans all still loyally in their seats in the wee hours of the morning in a game that had once looked hopeless, to walk to the center of the diamond with one solitary microphone and address the multitude. “Today,” Yost should say, “I consider myself the luckiest man [Read more...]