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Tuesday Rundown: Athletes In Politics

Your daily random roundup:

• Listen up, sports gamers: Two MLB video games hit store shelves today. MLB 08: The Show is available for the Playstation 3, while Major League Baseball 2k8 is available for pretty much any current gaming system you could imagine — including my beloved Nintendo Wii. Of the four major sports, baseball definitely seems to be the one that’s best suited to the Wii’s motion sensing controls…I’ll have to give MLB 2k8 for the Wii a rental in the next few days, and report back.
• At Sports Agent Blog, Darren Heitner poses an interesting question: Is it a smart business decision for athletes to publicly back a candidate when election season rolls along? I think it is. I’m convinced that we look at politically-active athletes in a more positive light than we do those who don’t profess an interest in politics…stories of athletes misbehaving away from the field have become popular fodder for the media and bloggers alike, so players who get involved in the political scene are viewed as a refreshing break from our stereotypical image of the troublemaking athlete.
• I’m certainly not convinced that a player’s endorsement of a specific candidate would alienate people…I think sports fans can admire the mere act of standing behind a political figure. Either that, or they just don’t care who their favorite athlete supports.
• Look at what you’ve done, Dana Jacobson. Your drunken, curse-laden rant at the Mike & Mike roast caused ESPN to ban future roasting of its personalities. Well, it looks like insult extraordinaire Jeff Ross just lost his opportunity to do a few jokes about Stuart Scott’s lazy eye at a future ESPN roast. But on the bright side, I’m sure a Skip Bayless roast would have been a total waste of a few hours…from that standpoint, perhaps we should be thankful to Jacobson, and the considerable amount of booze she consumed at the Mike & Mike roast.
• Scott Van Pelt Style spotted a very funny picture of four members of the Lakers standing in a row, lined up from tallest (Pau Gasol) to shortest (Jordan Farmar). That either happened completely by accident, or the players were doing their best impression of Cingular’s “More Bars in More Places” campaign.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 4th, 2008 at 5:08 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.