It’s hard to defend curling as a sport, but it sure is an interesting game. And one of my favorite parts of these Olympics.

I’m not alone. Wired:

Like many geeks who have come before me, I’ve become absolutely mesmerized by curling, and I haven’t even made it to the venue. But watching the matches on TV, I’m fascinated by the blend of precision and strategy that the game offers. What is it about sliding big granite rocks that can be so compelling?

Part of it is the endlessly morphing nature of the game’s strategy. I’m a big baseball-statistics guy, and I realized this morning that there are a couple of strong parallels between the two sports. Let me explain.

One of the revolutions in thinking about baseball in the past decade is the concept of expected runs. By analyzing the reams of play-by-play data available, you can determine how many runs you should expect to score in any situation in the game. So, for instance, if you have a runner on first and nobody out, you’d expect to score 0.953 runs that inning.

Now, obviously, you can’t score exactly 0.953 runs. But expected runs let you evaluate strategic decisions like stealing a base and bunting, to figure out if they’re good plays.

OK, now back to curling.

One of the key strategic elements in curling is which team has the hammer — the curling term for the last rock in an end. It’s obviously an advantage, but how much? And how important is it? Again, math to the rescue. My new favorite website, Curl With Math, has collected data on years’ worth of elite curling matches and broken down the winning percentage of teams in all sorts of score situations.

A curling game has 10 ends (like innings, a complete set of stones for each team). At the start of the game, with a tie score, the team with the hammer has about a 60 percent chance to win the game — that is, the hammer gives them about a 10 percent edge. Significant, but not huge.

It’s more interesting to look at decisions during the game. Often, teams with the hammer will chose to blank an end, knocking out the rocks so that no one scores, and so they can keep the hammer. That is, they choose keeping the hammer over scoring 1 point. Does that make sense?

Stefan Fatsis in Slate:

A common theme in virtually every profile of Peyton Manning is the Super Bowl quarterback’s legendary devotion to football. At age 12, he exhorted his pee-wee linemen to block harder. He started deconstructing NFL game video in high school. He arrived at college six weeks early to work out with upperclassmen. A few days after the Indianapolis Colts made him the first pick of the 1998 draft, he had the team playbook memorized. He orders rookies to meet him on the field at 8 a.m. the Monday after they are drafted. He falls asleep watching tape in the basement of his Indianapolis home; his wife slips the remote from his hand. Isn’t that sweet?

Then there’s Manning’s line-of-scrimmage foot-stomping, finger-pointing, signal-shouting choreography. It looks like an act, a bluff, deliberate misdirection—and it often is. It also looks like a twitch that jibes with the nonfootball personality quirks Manning is said to possess. Manning doesn’t know how to work a can opener. Manning needs to look at Polaroids of shirt-slacks-and-tie combos in order to get dressed. And there’s this, from a 2001 interview with Dan Patrick, who asked Manning for a “trivia question” about himself:

Manning: Why does Peyton Manning lick his fingers after every play or throw?

Patrick: Yeah, I’ve noticed. What’s that, a signal or a good luck thing?

Manning: Nope. The finger lick is just a really bad habit—I do it all the time. My wife, Ashley, is going to kill me if I do it at dinner one more time. I look like an animal about to dig in.

Patrick: Wait, you do it at dinner?

Paging Dr. Sacks! If Manning weren’t a star athlete, you might tally his social foibles and physical tics, lay them beside his 3.0 GHz mind, and conclude that the dude has obsessive-compulsive disorder. A more plausible lay diagnosis is obsessive-compulsive personality disorder. The difference? People with OCD want to stop a particular behavior; people with OCPD don’t. “With Peyton Manning, he clearly doesn’t want to stop doing what he wants to do,” says Lennard Davis, an English professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the author of Obsession: A History.

And neither do football fans. After a tenth 4,000-yard passing season, a career-best 68.8 completion percentage, and a chance to win his second Super Bowl ring this Sunday in Miami, it’s time to state the obvious: Yes, Peyton Manning is obsessive. But he’s also a genius.

The two go throwing-hand in football-glove. It’s understood that extraordinary athletes like Manning and Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods are freaks. But they’re respected freaks because they do something valued by society. As opposed to, say, David Gibson, a South Carolina math teacher who studied word lists four hours a day every day for 12 years to become a champion Scrabble player. If Manning did that—or stomped his feet and licked his fingers while watching Jersey Shore all day—we might not be so interested.

Like those other elite jocks, Manning has the attributes of what Malcolm Gladwell has called the popular definition of genius: obsession (notebooks filled with observations on offenses and defenses), isolation (a darkened video room), and insight (a second-half evisceration of the New York Jets’ defense in the AFC Championship Game). The 18th-century writer and naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, quoted in Nobel-winning neuroscientist Santiago Ramon y Cajal’s 1916 book Advice for a Young Investigator, put it even more neatly: “Genius is simply patience carried to the extreme.”

Read it all.

Chris Erskine in the LA Times:

As usual, I’ll be spending Christmas morning in front of the fireplace, flicking in credit card receipts and users manuals . . . bad ties the kids gave me . . . holiday newsletters with sentences like: “It’s so hard to believe that Braymer is already in his third year at Cambridge. . . . ”

So I just wanted to say thank you, Santa. Thank you for the Christmas Day Lakers game, the little moment of pixels and light after all the other gifts are gone.

I love the Christmas Day game. In L.A., anything that happens twice in a row is considered a tradition. So for us, the Christmas Day Lakers game is like brushing sheep in Bethlehem. It’s what draws us closer to the Lord.

There is so much to admire about the Christmas Day game, which for 11 straight years now has matched the Lakers against the NBA’s closest competing carnivore.

The Lakers are just something you can count on at Christmas. Derek Fisher is what, 87 now, and he still comes down the court like a teenager with a bag full of cheeseburgers. I like that in an NBA player. I like that in anybody.

I like the way Kobe clenches his jaw at crunch time — all sinew and heat. I wouldn’t want to be the enamel in his teeth, nor would I like to be the poor sap-defender who has to decide, “Do I get in his face or do I give him . . . whoa, where’d he go?”

All on national TV.

I like the way Pau Gasol pretends it’s nothing after making a big play, the rare humble man in a world full of chest-thumpers. I saw Chad Ochocinco score a touchdown the other day, freeze for a moment as Tantric spirits invaded his head, then strut around like some sort of goose.

Gets old in a hurry, that bird stuff.

Read it all.

We linked last week to the hilarious Chinese TV “reenactment” of Tiger Woods crashing his car.

Also cashing in is Break Media, with a pretty lame online game that’s been played  1.5 million times.

LA Times columnist Chris Erskine has an interesting take, remind us of the counter example of Laker A.C. Green.

…”Just do it,” you said. And you did.

Pro jocks? Maybe they shouldn’t wed at all. Maybe they shouldn’t make life commitments until they are no longer on the road half the year, surrounded by beautiful cocktail waitresses who are barely covering the rent (and themselves).

Women with few scruples — and crippling debt — only seem to be your friends. In that moment, near closing time, when they are pretending to hang onto every word of your dull, self-centered stories, what they are really hearing is “ka-ching, Bloomingdale’s, ka-ching, ka-ching, Tiffany’s.”

Hugh Hefner, the Brett Favre of sex, weighs in to say he’s not surprised at the Woods scandal, for monogamy is a flawed concept.

“I think the only surprise in it, quite frankly, is that anybody would be surprised,” the Playboy mogul told E-Online.

Marriage, he says, “is very nice for raising kids, but the notion that monogamy lasts forever is a wish!”

Thus spake the most famous and creepy case of arrested development.

Ex-Laker and tower of integrity A.C. Green says he believes that Tiger’s drive to succeed might be what brings him through this mess.

“The thing about him is that he is a great competitor,” Green said. “He has a history of coming back from behind, and I think that will serve him well.”

You no doubt remember Mr. Green. He won three championship rings with the Lakers, and became known as the NBA’s iron man, playing in a record 1,192 straight games. He didn’t miss a basketball game for almost 15 years.

But there was another streak in Green’s life that may be even more remarkable: the abstinence streak. The deeply religious Green took a vow of chastity until marrying in 2002, meaning he remained “pure” through the Lakers’ “Showtime” era.

Think of that. The Lakers are probably sports’ most sexually charged franchise. Laker Girls do the sort of hip thrusts that can take the rust out of Jerry Buss’ hair. Through all that, Green remained a virgin. Talk about an iron man.

A.C. Green was the 40-year-old virgin before there even was a “40-Year-Old Virgin.”

For you youngsters out there, “virginity” is a rare and often controversial condition. To be a virgin means that you have not engaged in sexual intercourse. It’s a quaint notion that went out with buggy whips, coal furnaces and the Clinton administration.

Admittedly, it’s difficult to maintain a moral equilibrium when all your preachers and congressman seem to be living life on the edge.

Now, welcome the extremist views of Mr. Green, a man who led a moral life, an actual role model. His views may seem saintly and Victorian — but his behavior and personal code of ethics certainly make things feel less hopeless.

Dignity, he reminds us, remains an option.

Looking back, Green said Tuesday, his Lakers teammates initially didn’t buy into his chastity vow.

“But as time went on, when the guys saw some consistency to the way I was handling my life, they gradually came to accept it, to the point where some asked me to talk to sons and daughters,” he said.

Green, who majored in speech communication at Oregon State, speaks carefully and well. He doesn’t scold or proselytize. Through his youth foundation, he aims to alert adolescents that there is another way.

“The future is yours to define,” he tells at-risk kids. “It’s not defined by the public or what people think is popular. It’s defined by you.”

Doc Ellis was something of a loose cannon.

Rick Reilly in ESPN:

This is the time of year when parents all over America take their children to the nation’s sports facilities, sneak down to courtside and show the youngsters how dangerous it is to drink and ink.

How else do you explain Golden State Warrior Stephen Jackson’s hands? Not the hands at the end of his arms. The tattooed hands on his chest and stomach, holding a handgun, praying. I am not kidding — two hands praying with a gun between them. Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition.

What is the message Jackson’s stomach is trying to leave us? “God, please help me knock over this Kwik Stop?” “This is the Glock the Lord hath made?” Neither. Jackson says it represents him praying that he doesn’t need to use a gun again.

Damn, Stephen. Where’s your commute, Fallujah?

How else do you explain Kenyon Martin’s lips? Not the lips on his face — the lips on his neck. They’re fire-hydrant-red women’s lips, smooching there for all time, a permahickey. They’re a tracing of his girlfriend’s lips, the rapper Trina. I hope they stay together. Because hell hath no fury like a woman who has to stare at another woman’s lips every day and night. You’re talking turtlenecks in July.

You need look only a foot farther to see something even more puzzling on K-Mart, whose skin is a kind of human bathroom stall — his ornate “I Shall Fear No Man But God” scrawled on his back. Uh, see Kenyon, the thing is: God isn’t a man. Did you mean, Fear No Man. Fear God? That’s the unfortunate thing about tattoo guns: no delete key.

Chris Erskine in the LA Times:

A while back, I developed the concept of “sportsenfreude,” based on the German term “schadenfreude,” which means taking glee in the misfortune of others.

Sportsenfreude is a close cousin to the concept of rooting for the underdog. It means you’re not really rooting for one team — you’re rooting against the other.

When the Dallas Cowboys lose, that warm little glow you feel — it’s almost sexual — that’s sportsenfreude. When the Yankees lose, same thing, assuming you don’t like the Yankees — hardly anybody does, the pinstripers having come to represent every overfed frat boy or silver spoon who got the girl you didn’t. They are baseball’s trust-fund babies, the Yankees are. It’s a little like cheering for Comcast or General Mills.

Though it is my concept, I am not particularly proud of sportsenfreude. No one should take joy in another person’s failures. Of course, a certain ambivalence can be forgiven. I mean, I would never exactly feel sympathy if Bill Belichick were caught cheating again. Or if someone popped that smug Jim Harbaugh in the snout.

The secret to sportsenfreude is to base your selection on some perceived moral issue. For instance, I rooted against the Tampa Bay Rays last year based on my dislike for their moldy indoor park. I dislike Philly because of Sylvester Stallone’s spotty record on marriage. In real life, he never married Talia Shire, which just seemed wrong.

I generally root against the Indianapolis Colts on the basis of one lousy, overpriced turkey sandwich I had at the airport there. That’s all you need, really. What this does is soften sportsenfreude and makes it a more spiritual and life-affirming process.

The Raiders and Notre Dame always provide me a rooting interest — for their opponents.

Because he makes impossible shots. The final angle is the best.

The NFL has been playing a regular season game abroad in an attempt to spread our version of football. Here’s how the UK Times covered yesterday’s game.

Last night’s clash of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and the New England Patriots at Wembley was supposed to be the occasion when American football began to break out from its once-a-year North London residency to capture the hearts and minds of the rest of the British sporting public. Unfortunately, Wembley Stadium was about the worst place in Britain in which to judge the success or otherwise of the project.

The NFL wants to spread the word, increase the number of games played here and even, perhaps, establish a London franchise. For its third regular season game at Wembley, it had brought over the team of the decade in the Patriots, and arguably the leading star of the sport in Tom Brady, their quarterback. But inevitably, they were preaching to the converted — 84,000 of them.

The Wembley game has become an annual gathering of the British NFL-loving clans, as anyone using the London Underground yesterday afternoon can testify, while fans from France, Belgium and farther abroad have been pouring in for several days, clad in jerseys proclaiming loyalty to the Seattle Seahawks, Green Bay Packers and Oakland Raiders

I’ve followed baseball for 50-plus years and never heard an announcer call a batter a “batsman” until Chip Caray of TBS did so. Repeatedly.

It’s the sort of pompous usage that makes you wish TV more truly interactive, so you could reach through the screen and slap him.

I’m not alone in this. Richard Sandomir writes in the NYT:

The other day I noted, somewhat critically, that TBS’s Chip Caray referred to hitters as “batsmen,” which prompted a reader to comment that if it was O.K. for Ernest Lawrence Thayer to use the term in “Casey at the Bat” in 1888, it was kosher for Caray.

Duly noted but still arcane, and better to use the word when talking about cricket.

Tonight, during Game 3 of the Dodgers-Phillies L.C.S., Caray added to his lexicon, calling relievers “pensmen”; again, technically accurate, but unnecessarily awkward. But what if we applied the lessons of CaraySpeak (before Caray could speak it) to other characters at a ballpark? In this exercise, catchers shall henceforth be “platesmen,” managers “pinesmen,” announcers “talksmen,” umpires “strikesmen,” reporters “beatsmen” and fans “cheersmen.”

Charges of racism are a weapon. Classical Values writes:

So the NFL won’t allow the likes of Rush Limbaugh within its hallowed tent, but dog torturer Michael Vick is just fine.

Yet another in a long line of mind-numbing double standards. (See this post from Stephen Spruiell which Glenn linked yesterday.)

The message? Uttering opinions with which powerful activists like Al Sharpton disagree is worse than feloniously torturing animals.

Of course, whether the remarks that make Rush more unwelcome in the NFL than Michael Vick were in fact racist doesn’t seem to matter any more than whether they were true.

In his notorious ESPN comments last Sunday night, Rush Limbaugh said he never thought the Philadelphia Eagles’ Donovan McNabb was “that good of a quarterback.”[...]

McNabb, he said, is “overrated … what we have here is a little social concern in the NFL. The media has been very desirous that a black quarterback can do well — black coaches and black quarterbacks doing well.”

I’m not much of a football buff, but the author (sportswriter Allen Barra) says Rush was right.

…the truth is that I and a great many other sportswriters have chosen for the past few years to see McNabb as a better player than he has been because we want him to be.Rush Limbaugh didn’t say Donovan McNabb was a bad quarterback because he is black. He said that the media have overrated McNabb because he is black, and Limbaugh is right. He didn’t say anything that he shouldn’t have said, and in fact he said things that other commentators should have been saying for some time now. I should have said them myself. I mean, if they didn’t hire Rush Limbaugh to say things like this, what did they hire him for? To talk about the prevent defense?

OK, Rush may have been right, but rules are rules, and apparently whoever the authoritarians are that run things decided that you cannot express the opinion that the media wants black quarterbacks to do well. Rush got booted out of ESPN for saying that. And apparently there is no such thing as forgiveness in the sports world. Unless…Unless you electrocute and drown dogs, and slam them to death?

Baseball fans saw Matt Holliday drop a routine fly ball that would have ended the game and given his Cardinals a victory over the Dodgers.

Instead, the Dodgers rallied from one run down and two outs to load the bases and win the game.

In a 162-game season, Holliday had committed only one error.

Holliday is a great player. Which shows that anyone can screw up and at the worst time.

In sports, a loss stings but isn’t fatal. For those piloting airplanes or trains, human error can become human tragedy.

Not to mention doctors.

Atul Gawande, a third generation doctor and surgeon, has written on the subject of medical mistakes and malpractice. Here in the New Yorker, he offers insights rarely found in the media.

A French gay soccer team says its members were victims of homophobia when a team of Muslim players refused to play a match against them.The Paris Foot Gay team says Tuesday it received an e-mail from the Creteil Bebel club canceling a match scheduled for last Sunday.

“Because of the principles of our team, which is a team of devout Muslims, we can’t play against you,” the e-mail said, according to Paris Foot Gay. The e-mail received Saturday said, “Our convictions are much more important than a simple football match.”

The season opener for Law and Order featured a storyline about Bush administration torture with a plot that was as logically tortured as it was pompous and sanctimonious.

Afterward, my wife wondered, “Why would they want to offend half the audience?” My answer: they can’t help themselves.

Jay Nordlinger focuses on the injection of politics — little snarky asides usually — into sports writing.

It’s an old story, but one that deserves retelling now and then: I’m talking about the injection of politics — partisan politics — into sports columns. And into other areas where partisan politics have no place. As I’ve taken to lamenting in recent times, there is no “safe zone.”

I did a little note about this on NRO, and it struck a nerve — struck it hard. Readers responded with an avalanche of mail, much of it anguished. A typical letter went (something like), “I always loved reading So-and-so” — Bill Simmons of ESPN.com, for example. “But finally I had to stop because he was constantly insulting my political views with little asides. Why do they have to do that? Why do they have to alienate half their audience, or at least some part of it?”

I could give you a thousand examples of “safe-zone violations” in sportswriting. Why don’t I give you a more modest, less choking number?

A columnist for the Boston Globe was writing about hockey, and he said, “Bigger nets will likely bring, at most, a teeny-weeny uptick in scoring. Focusing on bigger nets, in many ways, is hockey’s version of cutting taxes — eye-catching, but ineffective.” You see, he knows about economics. And has college football’s Bowl Championship Series ever reminded you of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney? No? You’re weird.

In 2007, the Washington Post’s John Feinstein wrote, “The BCS Presidents are a lot like the current President of the United States. They think that if they keep repeating their lies and half-truths and remind people who they are enough times, people will buy into what they’re selling. According to one poll, only 21 percent of the American people are buying what President Bush is selling, but it sure took a long time and lot of deaths to get there.” The next year, Mike Celizic of NBCSports.com wrote, “Is Dick Cheney a member of the BCS? That’s got to be the explanation for the latest load of nonsense to come out of the outfit that runs the system by which college football does not choose a legitimate champion.”

Biiig screens. Lots of food. No commercials.

Today’s Wimbeldon men’s final was a classic, with Roger Federer outlasting Andy Roddick, who lost his serve just once in the match — in the deciding game.

Roddick’s gracious remarks afterward reminded me of this column by Burt from 2004.

___________________________________________________________

JUST DANDY, ANDY

by Burt Prelutsky

If you’re anything like me, you are constantly having people e-mailing you nostalgia lists that ask you if you’re old enough to remember Blackjack gum, Jack Benny’s Maxwell and the Lone Ranger’s theme song. Yes, I’m afraid I’m old enough. What I’m finding harder and harder to remember are examples of good sportsmanship.

What brings that to mind was a sterling example of it displayed recently by tennis professional Andy Roddick. He was playing in the finals of a tournament when the umpire called a double fault on his opponent, thus giving Roddick the victory. But, to everyone’s astonishment, Roddick over-ruled him. He pointed to the mark left by the serve that clearly showed the serve had in fact been good. What made Roddick’s action especially newsworthy was that, given new life, his opponent proceeded to beat him!

Of course Roddick had no way of knowing that his generous act was going to cost him a victory and a good deal of money, but he certainly knew that was a very real possibility. Still, he did the right thing. Isn’t it amazing, and very sad, that the right thing should be so rare in public life as to be worthy of comment?

I recall once reading an essay by the great English journalist Alistair Cooke. He had just arrived in America in the 1930s, his assignment was to inform his countrymen what Americans were really like. Thanks to the movies, they assumed we were a nation full of cowboys, Indians and gangsters. Cooke, a golf enthusiast, decided to cover a tournament in which the legendary Bobby Jones was a participant. On the last day, Jones hit his tee shot into the trees. While out of sight, he inadvertently moved a twig or some such thing. As a result of which, he called a two-shot penalty on himself. Because of that, he lost the tournament by a single stroke.

The story doesn’t end there, however. The next day, when the big story in the papers wasn’t about the man who won, but about Jones’ fine display of sportsmanship, Jones, a normally even-tempered fellow, blew his top. He was outraged to be held up as a paragon of virtue. As he put it, he had done nothing so wonderful. He had merely played by the rules.

It had a tremendous impact on Cooke, who felt that Jones’ action, as well as his response to the acclaim, was typically American, and he told his readers so.

Those days seem very long ago. Since then, we’ve seen the canonization of Vince Lombardi, whose inane comment that “Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing” has come to be regarded as being every bit as inspirational as the Sermon on the Mount. These days, we see professional athletes using steroids in order to defeat better men than themselves, and being rewarded and idolized when all you can say about them is that they’re cheats. These days, the infantile winning-is-everything philosophy is so pervasive that fights are as likely to break out among Little Leaguers, their coaches and parents, as they are at hockey games.

I wonder if Mr. Cooke ever had occasion to write that second essay, the one in which he acknowledged that he might have jumped too quickly to a conclusion about our national character. For, while we’d all like to think that we are a nation of sportsmen, the fact remains that over 70 years separated the acts of Jones and Roddick, making such honorable displays just about as rare as appearances of Halley’s Comet!

The young man is just a couple weeks away from returning home after sailing around the world.

Zac Sunderland is attempting to be the youngest person in history to sail around the world alone.

Though the goal is simple, achieving it is not.

Sailing around the world is one of the oldest and most difficult adventures of all time. Man has tested himself against this task for over 500 hundred years.

Sailing around the world alone is akin to climbing Mount Everest, sledding across the Arctic, or canoeing the Nile River.. The difficulty and the danger cannot be underestimated.

Out of all the billions and billions of people that live or have lived, more people have gone into space than have sailed alone around the world.

Less than a handful of people have done it under the age of 20.

No one has accomplished this under the age of 18.

His blog, linked off his main site, has plenty to savor.

The Lakers advance to meet the Nuggets. After a see-saw series with Houston (win by 40 points, lose by 15 points), Kobe Bryant was asked what he’d learned about his team: “We’re bipolar.”

Joe Montana has joined the coaching staff of Oaks Christian, a local high school powerhouse.

A friend, Teddy Tannenbaum, has an opinion piece about Manny in the Boston Globe:

I happened upon the final of the World Baseball Classic between Korea and Japan. It was fine baseball, with Japan winning in the tenth with a masterful at-bat by Ichiro Suzuki.

It was amusing to see the starting lineup for Korea had three players named Lee, two named Kim and two named Park. Late in the game, a substitution added yet another Lee.

As it happens, 50% of all Koreans share one of those surnames.

There was no Hu in the lineup, but they were playing in Dodger stadium where, during the regular season, Hu plays shortstop.

Chutzpah.

Elgin Baylor, the Clippers executive vice president whose 22-year tenure with the club ended in dispute before the season, filed an employment discrimination lawsuit against the NBA, the Clippers, owner Donald Sterling and club president Andy Roeser in Los Angeles Superior Court on Wednesday.

The lawsuit maintains Baylor was “discriminated against and unceremoniously released from his position with the team on account of his age and his race” and that he was “grossly underpaid during his tenure with the Clippers, never earning more than $350,000 per year, when compared with the compensation scheme for general managers employed by every other team in the NBA.”

In a statement from their general counsel Robert H. Platt, the Clippers said it “intends to vigorously defend itself against these false allegations and will prevail when all the facts are heard.”

Platt added that he had not yet seen the complaint, but “I can categorically state that the Clippers always treated Elgin fairly throughout his long tenure with the team. Prior to his decision to leave the team last October, Elgin never raised any claims of unfair treatment.

“It’s hard to believe that he would now make these ridiculous claims after the organization stood by him during 22 years and only three playoff appearances. It would be hard to find any sports team that has demonstrated greater loyalty to its general manager.”

Sweet. And in OT, no less.

There’s no question that Manny Ramirez saved the Dodgers’ season, not just with his bat but with his goofy manner.

Arguably the most mentioned plot line of Manny’s Ramirez’s time in L.A. has been his ability to loosen up what formally felt like a Merchant Ivory version of a baseball clubhouse:  Very buttoned down.  Very quiet.  Cast members performing while rarely cracking a smile.  Manny arrives and the joint starts jumping with pregame music, wall to wall looseness, Angel Berroa’s various remote control vehicles, M.I.A.’s “Paper Planes” blaring after every win (it played on a non-stop loop after the game 3 win), etc.  Plus, that whole “laughter” thing that’s rumored to surface every now and then in your everyday average clubhouse. 

But for the most part, Many’s been subdued around us media types.  Camera in his grill, he’s mostly limited talk to standard baseball cliches and constant reminders that he’s happy to be here.  And before today’s practice, Ramirez seemed to be in that mode.  Save an admission that he “partied like a rock star” over the Dodgers’ NLDS clinching weekend (his description of the night didn’t even sound all crazy, truth be told) and cracking a joke about fans not figuring out where he lives to crash the shindig, nothing we haven’t already heard in some way, shape or form was offered.  But then a reporter asked if Manny thought he could pull off such a productive comeback as Rafael Furcal’s after spending four months rehabbing a balky back.

“I don’t think so.  Maybe I could come and contribute in another way.  Maybe like a defensive replacement.  Maybe something like that.  Furcal is 28 (Editor’s note to Manny: Raffy is actually 31).  I’m 35 (Editor’s note to Manny: You’re actually 36).  He’s a great player.  He can bunt.  He can hit.  He can do it all.  He’s like me, a five tool player.”

Tongue practically dead-bolted inside his cheek, an impish grin crossed Manny’s face and he began to enjoy the roll. 

“Now that I can do all those things, I think I could ask for a raise,” mused Manny.  “I don’t DH anymore.  I play the outfield.  Run, hit.  I could do it all, so why not.  When I was in Boston, everyone expected me to be a DH. I’m just an all-around player.”

To clarify, I’m 100% positive Manny was talking purely tongue in cheek when waxing poetically about his versatility.  The pay bump talk?  Not so convinced he was kidding.  If nothing else, I guarantee Scott Boras thinks he wasn’t kidding.   

I asked which team he figured was on the lookout for a rare five tool player.  “I don’t know.  I think, everybody,” responded Manny, a giggle fit immediately following.  Assuming he’s correct (and why wouldn’t he be, since those types of athletes are so very rare), there could very well be a rush to, as Teddy KGB so famously put it, “Pay that man his money.”  Should that team end up L.A., as a member of my media brethren reminded him, he’s playing for the Dodgers free of charge. “That’s right,” nodded Ramirez.  “The Red Sox are paying my salary.  I’m on vacation right now.”

Slate:

Can we please stop fussing over every new Olympic record?

A new record means that an athlete using today’s equipment outperformed an athlete using yesterday’s equipment. It’s not a fair fight.

In swimming alone, today’s advantages include:

1. LZR Racer suit. It reduces friction (compared with skin) and is structurally designed to compress and streamline the body for maximum speed. Estimated drag reduction: 5 percent to 10 percent. Estimated average improvement in top swimmers’ best times: 2 percent. Designed by NASA scientists and computers, among others. Cost: $500.

2. Pool depth. This is the deepest pool ever used in the Olympics. Depth disperses turbulence, reducing resistance.

3. Pool width and gutters. Two extra lanes at the margins disperse waves to gutters, reducing ricochet and resistance.

4. Lane dividers. The plastic ones in Beijing deflect turbulence down instead of sideways, reducing resistance.

5. Starting blocks. Nonskid versions have replaced the old wooden ones, boosting dive propulsion.

Keep reading.

…it’s because the French are all at the Grand Canyon, Zion National Park, Bryce Canyon or Monument Valley. We just visited all those glory spots (what a country!) and can attest I heard more French than English.

No exaggeration. Plenty of German and Italian, too. But way more French.

After days of nature and dust, we overnighted in Las Vegas, aka Chuck E. Cheese for adults, at South Point. It’s a new hotel with large rooms and flat-screen TVs. We switched on the Olympics in time to watch the American swim team beat the boastful French in the 4 x 100 relay.

Sweet.

The build-up to this race helped to make it extra special for the American swimmers. The very fast French team was heavily favored and tried to psych out the American team in print by stating they were going to “smash” the Americans.  But a funny thing happened to the U.S. underdogs.  They swam the race of their lives, with the only thing smashed being the previous world record. 

Michael Phelps has arguably the two hardest gold medals in his possession in his quest for eight in this year’s Games, and he has clearly demonstrated that he is the greatest overall swimmer of our era, and perhaps ever.  But the hero of the race was anchorman Jason Lezak, who closed a gap of over half a second behind the French in his last 50 meters, and was able to pass Alain Bernard, he of ’smashing Americans’ fame, and touched by a fraction to claim the gold. 

The Lakers are ascendant, which means a lot to us fans and nothing to everyone else. But for sheer entertainment, “Sir” Charles Barkley cannot be beat.

The LA Times “column one” feature took us behind the scenes of Inside the NBA.

With the NBA playoffs in full flower, we’re reminded again that the most entertaining figure in professional basketball, maybe in all of sport, is not Kobe or LeBron or any other mere player. It is Barkley, just one-third, or sometimes one-fourth, of a talking-head panel — most of it bald — that introduces and analyzes the games.

In addition to these duties, Barkley, 45, is a declared 2014 candidate for governor of Alabama; a member of the basketball Hall of Fame; co-star of a mobile telephone advertising campaign wherein he, nearly a decade past his playing days, and not the current NBA star who shares billing with him, is clearly the main attraction; a compulsive gambler (on Tuesday he paid off a $400,000 debt to a Vegas casino); an erstwhile hero of the political right, from within which one blogger hailed him as a philosopher, poet, genius and the next president of the United States; inspiration for the chart-topping group Gnarls Barkley; and gracious butt of a thousand jokes.

Barkley, above all else, is someone who will say whatever occurs to him when it occurs to him, whether or not he’s on the air.

To wit:

Talking during a game recently about a free throw missed at a crucial time by a high-percentage free-throw shooter, he said: “That 90% doesn’t mean nothing when you have a tight sphincter.”

Talking about a bad team: “The Nets are like the Democrats . . . they don’t win even though the rest of the division sucks.”

Talking about whether New York Knicks Coach Isiah Thomas’ job is safe: “He’s about as safe as me in a room full of cookies. If I’m in a room full of cookies, the cookies ain’t got no damn chance.”

Ernie Johnson recalls that the first time Barkley appeared on the show, in 2000, Barkley asked Smith during a break what he was going to talk about during the next segment. Johnson recalled, “Kenny said, ‘You’ll find out.’ ”

This was perfect, said Kiely the producer. Kiely’s notion was to have a show that was spontaneous, dynamic, like an overheard conversation. His ideal was closer to the PBS political shout-fest “The McLaughlin Group” than to conventional television sports post- and pregame analysis.

Barkley was more than accommodating. That first year, he accused the league of giving TNT all the bad games: “NBC gets all the good games. We get the Little Sisters of the Poor.” He said he could beat the Detroit Pistons with a team of studio technicians. He said All-Star Grant Hill’s ears were too big. He delivered these comments and many, many more in a voice that ranged between a bray and a sonic boom.

Read it all, it’s a fun read.

Just watching this video gives ‘em to me. Via Last of the Few. A walk on the wild side, indeed.

For information about El Caminito del Rey, go here.

The walkway has now gone many years without maintenance, and is in a highly deteriorated and dangerous state. It is one meter (3 ft) in width, and is over 700 feet (200 m) above the river. Nearly all of the path has no handrail. Some parts of the walkway have completely collapsed and have been replaced by a beam and a metallic wire on the wall.

Many people have lost their lives on the walkway in recent years. After four people died in two accidents in 1999 and 2000, the local government closed the entrances. However, adventurous tourists still find their way into the walkway.

This day in history. Listen close at the beginning as Vin Scully says, “There’s an animal loose.”

Yesterday marked the 61st anniversary of Jackie Robinson breaking the color barrier in major league baseball. It also marked the release of a “report card” on racial diversity in baseball.

Major League Baseball has received its first A-minus for racial diversity in hiring, even as the percentage of black players continues to drop.

The grade comes from Richard Lapchick, who’s the director of the University of Central Florida’s Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sports. MLB’s grade was B-plus in last year’s report.

Honestly, does anyone believe that teams discriminate on race anymore? Sports teams are so competitive, if it turned out Osama bin Laden could throw a 98 mph fastball, some team would be trying to rehabilitate his image and sign him to a contract.

Of course, progressives never see progress. Get a load of how Lapchick is described on UCF’s website.

The Institute’s founder and director is Dr. Richard Lapchick, a scholar, author and internationally recognized human rights activist and pioneer for racial equality who is acknowledged as an expert on sports issues.

Described as “the racial conscience of sport,” Lapchick also serves as director of the DeVos Sport Business Management Program at the University of Central Florida (UCF) and is president and CEO of the National Consortium for Academics and Sports (NCAS), a group of more than 210 colleges and universities that helps student-athletes complete their college degrees while serving their communities on issues such as diversity, conflict resolution and men’s violence against women.

Oh, puke.

Funny how no one gripes about foreign workers when they’re athletes. Consider the current Los Angeles Lakers:

There’s a Spaniard playing in the low post. A man from Serbia and Montenegro stands on the perimeter. Meanwhile, a Slovenian, a guy from Martinique by way of France and a fellow from the Congo by way of Belgium wait their turns on the bench.

This season, Southern California’s favorite professional basketball team looks and sounds a great deal like Southern California. The Lakers are one very large tossed salad, just like the city and the region they call home.

Most nights, almost half of the Lakers’ active roster hails from someplace outside the United States. Many times, the dominant language spoken in the locker room is something other than English.

“Every day before practice starts we go into the film room and Phil puts in a Rosetta Stone DVD and we go through everyone’s language,” veteran guard Derek Fisher said with a wry smile. “We try to pick one or two words to communicate with Pau or Sasha or Ronny or DJ and Vlade. Even Kobe throws in some Spanish or Italian.”

No, not really.

Fisher, who was born and raised in Little Rock, Ark., was only joking about Lakers coach Phil Jackson’s pre-practice routine.

There’s no need for Jackson to hire translators for his players.

Pau Gasol (Spain), DJ Mbenga (Congo), Vladimir Radmanovic (Serbia and Montenegro), Ronny Turiaf (Martinique) and Sasha Vujacic (Slovenia) each speak fluent English, even though their native tongue is something else.

Bryant learned Italian and Spanish as a child living in Europe while his father, Joe, played abroad after ending his NBA career. He has picked up more Spanish since the Lakers acquired Gasol from the Memphis Grizzlies on Feb.1. Bryant and Gasol often speak Spanish on the court, the better to confuse opponents whose only language is English.

“We were in New Jersey (in early February) and (the Nets’) Marcus Williams is guarding me and Kobe said something to Pau and Williams said, `This dude is speaking Spanish now?”‘ said guard Jordan Farmar, a former standout at UCLA and Taft High of Woodland Hills.

What’s more, Turiaf and Mbenga have helped Bryant with his French. Vujacic and Radmanovic have taught Bryant to cuss out referees in Slovenian and Serbian, the better to avoid technical fouls. Bryant says he prefers French because its tone is softer.

Presented by John Tierney, with the answers.