Today is my 30th birthday.

Some interesting things in sport that happened on July 14:

• In 1969, El Salvador launched bombing raids on Honduras, beginning the Football War. The war was fought over a pair of soccer games for CONCACAF qualification to the 1970 FIFA World Cup, where riots ensued following both matches in their tie as well as a tiebreaker in neutral Mexico City that June. El Salvador won the war militarily, but were sanctioned internationally for the brute force they exerted over Honduras. They ultimately qualified for the World Cup, but failed to score in their group, where they were dominated by the Soviet Union, Mexico and Belgium.
• Being the period of the MLB All-Star Game, several occured on this date. The first was 1953, at Cincinnati’s Crosley Field, when the NL beat the AL, 5-1. Warren Spahn of the Milwaukee Braves was the winning pitcher. (They didn’t name MVPs until 1962.) In 1970, again in Cincinnati but at the brand new Riverfront Stadium, the NL beat the AL, 5-4 in 12 innings. Carl Yastrzemski of the Boston Red Sox–yes, an AL player–was named MVP. This was the infamous game where Pete Rose careened into Ray Fosse at home plate to score the winning run. Examination of replays showed he initially wanted to slide, but stumbled and rammed directly into Fosse, injuring the catcher. Fosse, an up-and-coming star to that point, would never be the same. In 1987, at Oakland-Alameda County Stadium, the NL beat the AL, 2-0 in 13 innings. Tim Raines of the Montreal Expos was MVP. In 1992, at what is now Qualcomm Stadium in San Diego, the AL beat the NL, 13-6. Ken Griffey, Jr., of the Seattle Mariners was MVP. Last year’s All-Star Game at Busch Stadium III in St. Louis was also on July 14. The AL beat the NL, 4-3. Carl Crawford of the Tampa Bay Rays was MVP.
• This date also sometimes falls in the window for the FIFA World Cup. In 1930, the first tournament, two opening round games were played on July 14 in Uruguay. Romania beat Peru, 3-1, and Yugoslavia beat Brazil, 2-1. Beyond that, the date itself has seen no action. It was a rest day in the final group stage in 1950 (the final was determined by a round robin at the time), and was a rest day between the semifinal and finals in 1994.

Among the sports birthdays are football players Roosevelt Grier and Darelle Revis; baseball players Robin Ventura, Jose Hernandez, Tim Hudson and Bernie Castro; basketball players Erick Dampier and Renaldo Balkman; soccer players Nilmar (Brazil), Billy Celeski (Australia), Adam Johnson (England) and James Vaughan (England); and professional wrestlers Jeff Jarrett and Mark Lamonica (Brother Ray in TNA).

It also would’ve been the birthday of golfer Erica Blasberg, but she died earlier this year. Her death in May was under suspicious circumstances, and is still under investigation at this time.

If I win the lottery, I want to buy a sports team.

Be it the Orlando Titans, the Orlando Predators, an MLS franchise, or if I had the money the Orlando Magic themselves.

And I would invest all my money to make them the greatest team ever.

Just like George Steinbrenner.

In 1973, George Steinbrenner did what every die-hard sports fan wishes they could do. He used the fortune he made in his father’s shipping business and bought his favorite team. That team happened to be the New York Yankees.

Not by himself, initially, but eventually he would own it all.

He got to work on building a team that would live up to the then-20 championships it already owned.

He did it by spending money. He made it cool, and exploited the new concept of free agency to hire the best players and staff money could buy.

Wouldn’t you do the same if you had the money?

37 years and seven World Series Championships later, the New York Yankees are at the top of the sporting universe again.

It certainly wasn’t foolproof. If it were, the Yankees would’ve won closer to 25 titles under George’s ownership. And not everybody liked the changes his way of doing business brought. But if he hadn’t have done it, somebody else would.

Plenty of people hate the Yankees–and, by extension, hated George–because of their success. But no matter how they try to pass it off as something else, you have to be honest. The primary factor is jealousy.

You want your team to have what the Yankees have. You want what George had.

It’s the same reason why many people hate the Red Sox now as well, because they decided to try to beat George at his own game. It’s the same reason many people hate the biggest European soccer franchises.

George made winning at all monetary costs cool. That is his legacy.

Whether you love him or hate him, you can’t say he didn’t make things interesting.

And you can’t say you wouldn’t do the same thing if you had the ability.

This article is also featured on Bleacher Report.

Everybody’s seen it by now, how Armando Galarraga got stiffed out of a perfect game by one of the worst calls in MLB history.

We need to make sure this never happens again. By now, even baseball purists are calling for the expansion of instant replay.

That expansion could happen today if Major League Baseball and the World Umpires Association wanted to get it done. We already have the technology in place with replay implemented for “boundary calls” (i.e. whether or not a ball is a home run).

I have come to believe that a model similar to the NFL is doable for MLB. Distribute replay flags to every manager, and give each team two replays per game on non-boundary calls. The following calls would fall into this category:

• Whether a catch for an out is “on the fly” or a “trap”
• Whether a ball put in play is fair or foul
• Who beat who to the bag on force-out plays
• Whether a tag was made in time or not on tag-out plays
• Whether a pitch hit a batter or not

Boundary calls for possible home runs will remain unlimited, and not affect the number of non-boundary replays a team gets.

The following would not qualify for replay, and would not be reviewable:

• Balls and strikes
• Whether or not a fan interfered with a ball in a non-boundary call
• Balks
• Catcher’s interference
• Whether an individual play was a hit or an error

A flag must be thrown before the first pitch of the next plate appearance is made. If a flag is thrown inappropriately, that team will be assessed a ball (if it’s the team on defense) or a strike (if it’s the team up to bat). If it is thrown for balls and strikes, it’s grounds for ejection under the “arguing balls and strikes” rule.

Replays on boundary calls have tended to range three to five minutes normally. An initial time limit of five minutes from the umpires leaving the field can be implemented, and adjusted accordingly as the system is put into practice.

Umpires may feel a bit offended by having to defer more to instant replay at first. NFL referees felt the same way. But I’m sure if any umpire wants instant replay expanded, it’s Jim Joyce. He’s a well-respected game official who has seen two World Series (1999 and 2001), and has been involved in a host of historic moments, including Nolan Ryan’s 5,000th strikeout. And now he’ll be remembered as the umpire who blew “that call.”

Armando Galarraga may not officially have his perfect game. And whether or not he should get it anyway is a discussion for another time. But his moment may, at least, be remembered as the watershed that finally brought a more complete implementation of instant replay to Major League Baseball.

Hopefully, we won’t see history get robbed from us like this anymore.

This article also appeares on Bleacher Report.

The UCF men’s golf team claimed their second consecutive Conference USA championship earlier today after a three-day tournament.

The individual winner was Christopher Brown of Rice, with a -7 for the tournament, shooting rounds of 70, 69 and 70 on the par-72 RedTail Golf Course in Sorrento, Lake County. But three Knights golfers, junior Nuno Henriques, and sophomores Connor Arendell and Brad Schneider, were among four golfers at -2 under for the tournament. Their rounds were 74-74-66, 73-74-67 and 73-68-73, respectively. Last year’s individual winner, UCF senior Simon Ward, finished tied for sixth at even par with consecutive even-par rounds.

As a whole, UCF finished -6, winning by a collective 18 strokes, with the top four scores tallied together. Southern Miss and Rice tied for second place, each at +12 combined.

UCF will play one last regular-season event, the one-day Golden Ocala Invitational on May 6, before going into NCAA regional competition on May 20. We’ll keep you posted as they push for UCF’s first sport national championship.

********

According to the blog’s counter, this is my 250th post here. I know sometimes I don’t have the meat that some bloggers have. That’s what happens when blogging isn’t where your money comes from. Most of the time, I just don’t have the time to go into great detail about events. I will continue to strive to bring you information on Orlando’s other sports. For those who actually read this, thank you.

I saw something come across on the Twitterverse recently that made me think. And it may be the most accurate argument in the whole search for “the next Michael Jordan”.

Michael Jordan did something that neither Kobe Bryant nor LeBron James will ever be able to claim: MJ never lost an NBA Finals series. The only one of the “next Michael Jordans” who can claim this is Dwyane Wade, but he’ll need to win a few more before he can reach that level.

But Michael also won all his titles with the same team. D-Wade is rumored to want to leave the Heat, which is totally different in his prime than MJ un-retiring to play a couple inconsequential years with the Wizards.

Check and mate. There will be no other “Michael Jordan”, and I am sick of the media trying to find “the next Michael Jordan”.

Although you know they’ll keep trying. Next up: Kevin Durant.

Earlier today, Tiger Woods gave an exclusive first post-November interview with ESPN’s Tom Rinaldi. According to Rinaldi, no question was off-limits, only a time limit of five minutes.

He did not elaborate on the now-infamous car accident that led to the public revelations of a sex life out of control, and his entry to rehab for his sexual compulsion. But he reiterated his disappointment in himself for letting everybody down, and for getting away from his core values.

He did not explicitly state his infidelities. At this point, I think it would not mean anything for him to do so. Besides, he already said in his statement that he cheated. What is important is that Tiger moves on from this and gets back to the game he loves.

My opinion is that I think we now know why he’s seemed off his game for the last few years. It’s been the stress of his sexual compulsion, and the fact that he was hiding all this from Elin especially. At least the good thing about this is that he has gotten help, and he is trying to work through the error of his ways.

Time will tell if he is truly willing to rise above this. But we are a society of second chances. He deserves that from us more than anyone else.

The perfect bracket. The one where you successfully guess every single winner in the NCAA tournament.

Doesn’t look like we’ll get it this year. ESPN, where over 4.8 million brackets were submitted to their Men’s Tournament Challenge fantasy game, only has 56 brackets left that have thus far gotten every matchup right. And we’re only half-way through the first round.

But the chances of carrying a perfect bracket are the absolute most remote odds in the known universe.

Assuming you don’t have to guess the play-in game (which you don’t on ESPN or Yahoo!), you have to guess 63 games. The odds of hitting all of them is 1 in 2^63.

That’s one in 2 to the 63rd power.

Or one in 9,223,372,036,854,775,808.

Over 9.2 billion billion.

Assuming a standard thickness of 0.1 mm for a single sheet of copier paper, if you stacked each possible bracket, the stack would be over 922 billion kilometers high. That’s about 125 times the maximum distance from the Earth to Pluto. At about 1/10th a light year, it’s about 1/40th the distance from the Sun to the nearest known star, Proxima Centauri. It would take Voyager 1 about 1,800 years to make it to the top of that stack (it travels around 530 million km per year), and that’s with the 33-year head start it already has.

If every one of the world’s 6.8 billion humans counted brackets non-stop, 24 hours a day, at a rate of 1 per second, it would still take over 43 years.

If every bracket were digitized at the smallest size possible, with one character representing each team that won each game (63 bytes per bracket), it would still be 581,072,438,321,850,875,904 bytes. That’s still over 581 million terabytes! (528 million tibibytes) It would take nearly 291 million of the largest hard drives currently in mass production (2 terabytes) to carry every possible bracket. Almost one for every person in America.

According to one estimate I saw, you’re 60 billion times more likely to hit the Powerball than to get a perfect bracket.

In other words, if you manage a perfect bracket, I’d play the lottery if I were you.

UPDATE: With Texas A&M’s win over Utah State, there are now zero perfect brackets left on ESPN Men’s Tournament Challenge. It only took 24 games in the first round to tarnish all 4.8 million of them. Better luck next time.

I think, for a large part, Tiger Woods said what needed to be said.

As I expected, there are many who are pre-judging the conference because of its format, it’s timing, the fact that he read his thoughts, etc. What’s important is what he said, and what’s important now is how he lives it. And I don’t care that he didn’t take questions. He’s not coming back to golf yet. There will be a time for those questions. The important thing right now is contrition, and that’s exactly what he expressed.

For now, he returns to therapy, and tries to make things right with his family. I think he should not return to golf until he comes to a resolution on his family life, whether it ends in reconciliation or divorce. He should make things right. Golf can wait for him.

Before Tiger Woods speaks, I would like to share my thoughts on the press conference he is holding. After all, Orlando is Tiger’s home last I checked.

I’ve been hearing a lot of negative things about how Tiger has chosen to first go public. It’s like the media feel they own him, and that he should do things their way.

Earth to media: You do not own Tiger Woods. He has every right to run his press conferences his way, to invite who he wants to invite, to say what he wants to say, and to refuse to take questions. You don’t like it? Tough.

To the golfers who are upset about the “timing” of his press conference: He’s not doing this during play, so don’t complain. You should be glad he’s doing this now. I mean, how much media attention was the Accenture Match Play Championship getting before this? And no, he cleared this with the tournament’s sponsor, Accenture, so he’s not trying to jam them by doing this when he is.

********

To Tiger: If you are not going to answer questions, then for your sake I hope you plan on spilling your guts. You’ve been in the public eye for nearly 15 years. You should realize by now the way the media works. They won’t stop hounding you until you tell them everything. The quicker you get everything out in the open, the easier things will be.

Tiger, if you want to make this whole press conference worthwhile, you’ll need to tell us the following:

• What possessed you to go wild the way you did, especially after years of bemoaning your father’s infidelity.
• What you plan on doing from here on. How you will rectify the situation, and when you will be returning to golf.
• While you are gone, no matter how long, remind the media that golf is going on without you, and they need to continue to support your brethren on the PGA Tour.

********

Some of the many stories now connected to Tiger have gotten so very fantastical. For example, I find it hard to believe that a porn star got pregnant twice by him. Usually porn stars are on the Pill.

But honestly, why was anybody shocked that this all went down? We should not fall for the false fronts some athletes and other celebrities put up to cover their faults. No matter how gifted they are, in the end they are still human. And these false fronts always come down eventually.

Tiger had his moment of weakness and is dealing with it. We shouldn’t look at him the same way again, but we should give him the chance to make it up to us. He’s already paid a very high cost for his mistakes.

The big story happened literally while I was exercising today. Mark McGwire finally confessed to what we thought all along: He did steroids during his career.

His admission has been the most candid admission of guilt to come out of the steroid era since Jose Canseco published his first book on the subject. Unlike those who were outed by the list (Sammy Sosa), or those who tested positive but never explained themselves or tried to blame others (Rafael Palmeiro), he flat out said he did steroids and when he did them (including during the 1998 season).

He also showed the greatest contrition of any admitted or outed steroid user thus far. He expressed regret for doing it. Honestly, I think he’s been regretting it since his de facto pleading of the Fifth Amendment before Congress in 2002. Not ready to admit it, but not willing to lie about it, he instead told Congress under oath that he wasn’t there to “talk about the past”.

So the journey that began when Jose Canseco supposedly jammed a needle in Mark’s rear end early on at Oakland has finally come full circle. It’s an admission eight years in the making. It’s long overdue, but at the same time, welcomed.

I know there will be a lot of people who will feel anger for this. For many, it will be yet another ripping-off of the bandage over the steroid era of baseball. But I’m tired of that pain. Long ago, I gave up being angry about the admissions and the revelations. I pretty much assume steroids were widespread in baseball through the 1990s and move on with my life.

It feels kind’ve like The Shawshank Redemption. Like Ellis Redding, so eloquently played by Morgan Freeman, giving his soliloquy on regret and remorse, and the true meaning of rehabilitation, at his 40th year parole hearing. The question is, will his contrition set Mark McGwire free?

It all depends on how you are willing to weigh his merits. You obviously cannot weigh his merits historically, though there’s no way of knowing just how far back, or how huge, the influence of steriods is since nobody tested before 2001, and testing wasn’t regular until 2002. But if you weigh his merits as one of the dominant players of his era, it has a little more weight to the argument.

Do I think he gets in? No. Maybe in the future through the Veterans Committee, but the current BBWAA voters’ pool is too tainted by the spectre of the steroid era to allow anybody who is even remotely alleged to have done steroids in. No Mark McGwire. No Rafael Palmeiro. No Sammy Sosa. No Manny Ramirez. No Barry Bonds.

Would he have my vote? Yes. I think he meets the criteria of being among the most dominant players of his era–the steroid era.

He never actually lied about using steroids when pressed on it. It’s not like Pete Rose, who lied about gambling on baseball for over 15 years and then sold the truth in a book. It’s not like Barry Bonds, who continues to fight allegations of steroids in courts even though a vast majority of people do not believe he was ever clean.

It does not feel quite as bad with Mark McGwire, who clammed up and simply dodged the subject. It must have been Hell for him, not feeling ready to admit it but not willing to lie about it. I can’t help but feel sorry for him.

Hopefully he will be permitted to do his penance now as a coach for the St. Louis Cardinals. It probably won’t save his Hall of Fame credentials, but it should permit him to at least rebuild his reputation as a man and as a baseball player.

There is still one burning question left for me. Because in my mind, I believe steroids were widespread in the 1990s. I don’t believe everybody did them, but I do believe a large number of baseball players did.

The only thing that angers me is that the higher-ups continue to deny knowledge of steroid use during that time. In my opinion, the apparent usage is way too widespread for nobody in a front office capacity to have known about it.

Are Bud Selig, Fay Vincent and Bob DuPuy as wracked with guilt as Mark McGwire has been?