Beaver County Times, February 9, 2014

Let's nip this non-controversy in the bud and be blunt: Should anyone be surprised that Ryan Clark said some Steelers smoke marijuana?
Doesn't anyone remember the 2008 Santonio Holmes traffic stop that turned into something bigger when police searched his vehicle? When Holmes was Tweeting "wake and bake," he wasn't talking about popping a tube of Pillsbury biscuits into the oven.
Does this mean that when the Steelers called themselves a band of brothers, they were really doobie brothers?
Clark said players use marijuana as a pain killer and a way to wind down. That's understandable.
The players live in a bowl where they must perform. Most people can make mistakes in their job without listening to them enumerated on talk radio. Players function in a here today, gone (ganja?) tomorrow world. It's lucrative, but it isn't easy.
A past generation of Steelers' stress-relieving joint was a place called Dante's, where they got stinking drunk. It was considered a bonding experience.
A lot of NFL players come from environments where having a stash is no different than having a liquor cabinet. They all go to college, a traditional weed garden.
Once they're pros, they get invited to the best parties. They're surrounded by flunkies who delight in being able to deliver the goods to a celebrity.
It's not 1970. Attitudes have changed. Even squeaky-clean Rick Santorum admits to smoking when he was in college. Presidents and Supreme Court justices have, too.
Wasn't it just a few years ago when the Steelers invited hometown rapper Wiz Khalifa to perform at a game? Aside from Cheech & Chong, what recording artist has done more to glorify marijuana use?
Before anyone starts singing, "Here we go Stoners, here we go," understand that Clark was speaking of the Steelers because that's his frame of reference. It would be safe to assume that use is widespread across the NFL.
You can buy recreational marijuana at retail in Colorado. It looks like a mom and pop business now, but major corporations will probably get involved. There's profit in vice.
Someday the NFL merchandise catalog might include rolling papers with official team logos. Wait until Zig Zag bids on stadium signage alongside Budweiser. Synergy? NFL sponsor Frito-Lay can promote its products as the answer to midnight munchies.
Who knows, 50 years from now there may be a need to post a disclaimer at the Art Rooney statue explaining that the fatty in The Chief's hand is just a cigar.
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--HISTORY NOTE
At the first outdoor cold weather Super Bowl, the NFL charged $11 for hot chocolate.
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--PAINFUL REMINDER
The Seahawks defense -- fast, aggressive, violent -- brought back memories of the way the Steelers used to play.
It also served as a reminder of how much work the current Steelers have to do.
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--KINER'S CORNER
Ralph Kiner's passing brought back the famous Branch Rickey quote of, "We finished last with you, we can finish last without you."
What Rickey's dismissive putdown didn't note was how many tickets Kiner sold for the Pirates when the teams were pretty rotten.
Kiner was a genuine drawing card. The Pirates were last in a lot of categories in those years, but attendance wasn't one of them.

Beaver County Times, February 2, 2014

If the Pirates don't re-sign A.J. Burnett, what will they do to replace him?
You can make the case that Burnett is far from Cy Young, that he wants too much money, that he's near the end of the line, and that he's often a tattooed pain in the neck.
All valid points, but here's the overriding issue: He was a durable and dependable starting pitcher on a team that succeeded mostly because of its pitching in 2013.
There's a price tag on every player. Teams decide what a player is worth, and that doesn't always coincide with the figure the player has in mind. That's why salary arbitration and free agency are part of the process.
The Pirates may have decided Burnett is too expensive, and that's fine. But if he leaves, they have to make up 191 innings and some pretty good work.
What makes abandoning Burnett risky is the Pirates don't have a rotation that should inspire a lot of confidence.
Wandy Rodriguez didn't pitch after June 5 last year. He's 35. Jeff Locke made the All-Star team, but had a terrible second half. He was only trusted to start four times over the last 31 games.
Francisco Liriano did a tremendous job. He showed signs of wearing down at the end, though, and wasn't nearly as good in the last month of the season.
Charlie Morton, as always, has tremendous talent. But is he a go-to guy?
Gerrit Cole got better as the season went on, and was the Pirates' best starter at the end of the season. However, his resume consists of 21 major league starts.
Free agent Edinson Volquez has been signed with the hope pitching coach Ray Searage can engineer the kind of rebuild he did with Liriano. Searage is good, but he couldn't fix Jonathan Sanchez last year, and he didn't find a way to straighten out Locke in the second half.
GM Neal Huntington has said more than once that a team needs seven or eight starters rather than five. Injuries always happen.
The Pirates have Jameson Taillon in the wings, and he could be up by mid-season. He's a prospect, but Jim Leyland was fond of saying, "A prospect is somebody who hasn't done anything yet."
Brandon Cumpton was competent, but his track record is five major league starts. Jeanmar Gomez was a capable swing man.
The Pirates will still apparently have a spotty offense. Marlon Byrd, who helped greatly down the stretch, is gone. They're going to rely on pitching again, and that currently appears to be a risky proposition.
They don't have to re-sign Burnett. But they do have to replace him.
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--WINTER WONDERLAND
The New York Rangers had a two-game stand at Yankee Stadium last week.
They won outdoor games on Sunday afternoon and Wednesday night.
The NHL has struck gold with outdoor games. Not only do they get a gate that's two to three times larger than a standard game, they also sell commemorative merchandise at the customary mark-up.
One of these days fans are going to wise up and realize they're paying premium prices to freeze and sit a mile away from the action.
Until that happens, though, the league is redefining the term cold cash.

Beaver County Times, January 26, 2014

There are a couple of ways to look at Richard Sherman's rant following the Seahawks' victory in last Sunday's AFC Championship game:
1. It detracted from the Seahawks' accomplishment of beating San Francisco.
2. It made a lot of people aware of who Richard Sherman is.
The lasting effect will be No. 2.
Sherman suddenly has a national profile. He may be the best-known player among the Seahawks, who don't have a lot of names easily recognized by casual fans.
But everyone knows Sherman, thanks to his loud and hostile response to a basic question after the game.
Sherman came across like a pro wrestling heel, insulting his opponent and bragging about his own talent. He turned Erin Andrews into a blonde version of Mean Gene Okerlund. The only surprise was he didn't drop any profanity in his monologue.
Give Andrews credit for handling the situation. She asked a quick follow-up question, then threw it back to the booth when it was obvious a producer communicated it was time to end the interview.
For as overbearing as he was in the moment, Sherman rebounded and expressed regret about the way he approached the opportunity to speak.
By most accounts, he's an intelligent player who got caught up in the moment. It happens. Defensive backs play with a gunslinger mentality. The world sees when they fail.
It's a high-stress business, and it figures there's going to emotion attached, especially on the big stage. Interviewing players as soon as a game ends comes with risk.
Sherman's performance will live forever, thanks to the Internet.
But he'll probably get some commercial opportunities out of this, too.
You can debate whether he's the Seahawks' best player. There's no doubt he's now the best-known.
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--STORMY OFFSEASON
You'd think winning 94 games, reaching the postseason and ending a 20-year losing streak would create a happy offseason for the Pirates.
That hasn't been the case, though. Most of the attention has been focused on their inability to fill the holes at first base and right field, and the apparently one-sided game of phone tag with A.J. Burnett.
(People who can't remember their wife's birthday seem to be able to instantly calculate the current Pirates' payroll within $10,000).
If there's any consolation, it's two-fold: 1. The core of last year's team is still intact (although it will be a major challenge to make up Burnett's 191 innings) and 2. The other contenders in the National League Central haven't made significant improvements.
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--HE'S LIKE MIKE
It might be just a little too subtle for its own good, but the car dealer commercial that features a news conference setting is notably clever.
The guy answering the questions has obviously gone to school on Mike Tomlin's televised Tuesday sessions. He nails the stone-faced gaze, the dismissive tone, plenty of "obviously's."
Well done.
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--MOVING ON
John Seibel, who was co-host of the afternoon show on 93.7 (The Fan) from its inception until December 2012, has a new job.
Seibel starts Monday as co-anchor of the morning news on the NBC-TV affiliate in his home town of Dayton.
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--LEGEND SNUBBED
When concert promoter Rich Engler goes into the Pittsburgh Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame before Porky Chedwick does, it's obvious baseball isn't the only business with baffling hall of fame issues.
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Beaver County Times, January 19, 2014

The Penguins take a 13-game home winning streak into Monday's game against Florida.
There were times when the Penguins didn't win 13 home games in a season, much less in a compressed time frame. The woeful 1983-84 team, which was bad enough to secure Mario Lemieux as the No. 1 draft pick, only won 16 all season, home and road.
The Penguins are currently 34-12-2, their 70 points best in the Eastern Conference and third overall in the NHL. It's been a successful season so far by any measure, even more impressive given the number of important players who have missed games with injuries.
It's been nothing but good, yet there's a "yes, but..." sense of waiting for the other skate to drop.
After what happened last season, there's a heightened awareness that all of this can become insignificant quickly if it isn't followed by playoff success.
The Penguins aren't built to make the playoffs, they're constructed to make a serious run at the Stanley Cup. They did that last year, getting to the final four.
Yet it felt like failure when they wilted in the conference final against Boston.
Maybe that's why crowds seem reserved at the Consol Energy Center, and why people tend to leave early. Not many people match the manic enthusiasm Mike Emrick has on his NBC game calls. What's happening now is nice, but none of it really matters until the spring.
You could hibernate and not miss much, provided you set the alarm for mid-April.
That seems an odd approach considering the prices of tickets in the regular season, but the playoffs now define success for the Penguins.
The regular season is a six-month play-in to get to the tournament.
There's an occasional game that sparks emotion, but most of them are pretty perfunctory. That's what happens when a team is too good for its own good.
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BUS DETOURED
There's a theory making the rounds that Jerome Bettis is not worthy of the Hall of Fame because he only averaged 3.9 per rushing attempt.
This is a case of looking so intently through the microscope that a bigger, more obvious point is missed.
Bettis ran for 13,662 yards in his career, most of it with the Steelers. His yardage total is sixth in NFL history.
Except for No. 5 LaDanian Tomlinson (13,684 yards and not yet Hall eligible), Bettis is the only back in the top 10 who is not in the Hall of Fame.
It is worth noting that of Bettis' 91 rushing touchdowns, 56 were runs of three yards or less. That includes 43 one-yard runs, where it would have been impossible for him to gain more than one yard on the attempt.
If you amass 13,662 yards, it shouldn't matter if they came on 13,662 attempts. It's an impressive number.
Bettis probably won't get in this year, but he should get elected eventually. He deserves to be there.
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MAD MONEY
Most households could live comfortably on just 10 percent of the money Alex Rodriguez is spending on lawyers.
But don't you love commissioner Bud Selig getting self-righteous about cheating when his industry profited handsomely from the pharmaceutical-aided home run chase of 1998?

Beaver County Times, January 12, 2014

Back when baseball teams still played doubleheaders, a player named Ron Swoboda had a wise observation about playing two games in one day.
If a team was destined to split, he said it was always better to win the second game. His theory was that team ended the day feeling it had accomplished something while the first-game winner left the park with regrets even though both teams were 1-1.
That theory came to mind when Steelers president Art Rooney II offered a mostly upbeat assessment of his team's just-concluded 8-8 season.
He liked the way the team reversed its 2-6 start, and the way Mike Tomlin was able to hold things together.
But the Steelers were still 8-8, the same as they were in 2012. The journey was different, but the destination remained the same.
They ended the season beating a woeful Browns team that would fire its coach before the buses got back to Cleveland. Did that somehow offset losing a key home game to the warm-weather Dolphins in a snowstorm? That flop became even more egregious when the Dolphins used the game as a springboard to a collapse that also left them outside the playoff field.
The Steelers season wasn't a disaster. It wasn't a success, either. It was 8-8.
The most important takeaway from the season is it reinforced the need to rebuild a defense that is a shadow of what it used to be. Rooney II acknowledged that, but there was no overriding sense that he understands the urgency, or how big the task really is.
These end of the season State of The Steelers addresses from ownership are a new wrinkle. They're interesting, only because they offer a hint that ownership often doesn't seem to have a better idea than some of the cranky people who call talk shows.
The difference is that ownership has the hammer to implement its ideas, like firing the offensive coordinator, then dishonestly spinning the move as his "retirement."
But that's the way it goes. You just wish ownership had a stronger handle on things and recognized that alarming early-season losses to awful teams like Minnesota and Oakland matter just as much as what happens at the end.
After all, 8-8 is 8-8, no matter how you get there.
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--REMEMBERING DIRT
Chris Speier was a rookie shortstop with the San Francisco Giants in 1971 when he approached the Three Rivers Stadium groundskeeper to tell him about a rough patch in the infield dirt.
If Speier expected the guy to grab a rake and fix it, he was surprised.
Instead, the grounds crew guy looked at Speier and said, "Don't worry about it. I hear you're going back to Triple A anyway."
That was Steve "Dirt" DiNardo, who became a minor celebrity when the Steelers rose to Super Bowl fame in the 1970s. He carried that nickname even though the carpeted Three Rivers had less dirt than most fields.
The Steelers were so big that fans even knew the groundskeeper.
When DiNardo died last week at 82, we lost another of those chops-busting only-in-Pittsburgh characters from a different generation.
By the way, he fixed the infield -- but not until he savored the shocked look on Speier's face.

Beaver County Times, January 5, 2014

Forget about the missed field goal and the missed call and confront this truth:

The 2013 Steelers never were a playoff team.

They just weren't good enough, not even in an AFC where there's mediocrity after Denver and New England.

The Steelers are sitting out the postseason on merit. Fixing that is not a complicated issue. It all starts on defense.

For all the groaning about Todd Haley, the Steelers could win 10 games if the 2013 offense came back intact.

It won't, of course. Emmanuel Sanders is likely to leave as a free agent, which will require getting another receiver. But what they have is basically good enough to at least reach the playoffs.

A team with a franchise quarterback always has a chance, and the Steelers still have Ben Roethlisberger. Fix the defense, and the Steelers are back in the playoffs.

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--LESS STATIC?

Sports talk 93.7 The Fan (KDKA-FM) rolls out its new lineup Monday, reflecting changes that have been in the works for two months.

Paul Alexander and Vinnie Richichi have exited the station after nearly four years on staff. The changes were made with at least one eye on finances. Several CBS-owned stations cut personnel at the end of the calendar year, and The Fan also dropped a couple of producers.

Richichi's departure ends an awkward midday partnership with Ron Cook that never worked. The two had strikingly different approaches to the show. For a time, it seemed as though management saw their squabbles as some sort of Felix/Oscar odd coupling.

But it was apparent there was no underlying good nature to the conflict. It was simply a case of two hosts who didn't enjoy working together.

Andrew Fillipponi takes over as Cook's partner, and that will be a totally different dynamic. Fillipponi prepares diligently, has a lot of opinions and confidence in them. Richichi, who took a more seat-of-the-pants approach, wasn't as committed and tended not to take things quite so seriously.

(Richichi has been doing some fill-in work on KDKA-AM and could be a potentially comfortable fit there).

These shotgun marriages don't always take. All three of The Fan's original teams have been dissolved because of dissension, so it will be interesting to see how this pairing goes as the partners start sharing 20 hours a week together.

If there's a surprise, it's that program director Ryan Maguire says the 10 p.m. to 2 a.m. shift will remain live and local. When the station has Pitt basketball or Pirates play-by-play in the evening, the 6 to 10 p.m. show hosted by Colin Dunlap will be bumped to a later time for post-game discussion.

When the normal schedule holds, Maguire says the station will fill 10 p.m. to 2 a.m. by using its roster of part-timers, specifically mentioning Tab Douglas and Paul Zeise.

There's an easy alternative The Fan is not choosing. Pittsburgh native Scott Ferrall does a 10 p.m. to 2 a.m. national show for CBS that could be easily plugged into a time slot that rarely generates much revenue on the local level.

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--JUST CHILLING

Today's projected arctic temperatures in Green Bay are a reminder of the classic line Jack Buck had when he broadcast the original Ice Bowl on CBS: "I'm going to take a bite of my coffee."

Beaver County Times, December 29, 2013

It's almost time to unwrap the new Equibank calendar as 2013 fades into history.
It was the year the Pirates finally won after 20 years and had PNC Park rocking the way it was supposed to. The Steelers took a frenzied path to another mediocre season, losing games on two continents to start 0-4.
The Penguins got through two rounds of the Stanley Cup playoffs before they hit a brick wall with a Boston Bruins logo.
Pitt said goodbye to the Big East and inaugurated ACC competition. Robert Morris knocked Kentucky out of the NIT. Duquesne lost a lot. Again.
It was a memorable year for a variety of reasons, and it's time to take one last look back before focusing completely on Tuesday's AdvoCare V100 Bowl game. Grab a couple of sharpened No. 2 pencils, and get after the traditional dozen puzzlers.
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1. If you have no power, you are likely:
a. Oppressed.
b. Downtrodden.
c. In the Pirates' mix for first base.

2. When Neil Walker was married at St. Paul Cathedral, many guests said:
a. "What a lovely couple."
b. "What a majestic setting."
c. "I wonder how much St. Paul paid for the naming rights."

3. What was the year's most bitter rivalry?
a. Steelers-Ravens.
b. Penguins-Flyers.
c. UPMC-Highmark.

4. Arizona State coach Todd Graham was on a flight that suddenly dropped 25,000 feet. When he landed safely, he:
a. Kissed the ground.
b. Said a prayer.
c. Checked to see if the pilot was wearing a Pitt class ring.

5. What did Santa bring bad boys and girls?
a. Nothing.
b. A lump of coal.
c. Zoltan Mesko jerseys.

6. Mike Tomlin needs:
a. Better players.
b. New assistants.
c. Fluorescent sidelines.

7. When The Sporting News named Clint Hurdle manager of the year, what was the most common reaction?
a. Congratulations.
b. It's well deserved.
c. The Sporting News still exists?

8. The biggest question about the Steelers season is:
a. Where does the offense need help?
b. How can the defense be improved?
c. How does Bruce Gradkowski have a weekly radio show?

9. Penguins players know they have:
a. A championship opportunity.
b. The support of sellout crowds.
c. No better friend than Dan Potash.

10. What is the key moment at any Mike Tomlin Tuesday news conference?
a. The injury report.
b. The evaluation of the previous game.
c. When Jory Rand's question gets Tomlin's laser stare of contempt.

11. What's been impossible for the Pirates to get this offseason?
a. A proven clean-up hitter.
b. An All-Star caliber shortstop.
c. A return call from A.J. Burnett.

12. What lesson can be taken from this Steelers season?
a. It's hard to stay on top.
b. The salary cap forces hard choices.
c. Don't complain so much when they're 12-4.