Today at THT

I’m tired this morning because I stayed up watching the Fiesta Bowl. But it wasn’t the hour, really. After all, the game ended before midnight, and even at the decrepit age of 35 I can handle midnight. No, I am tired because of the stupid emotional gymnastics I once again put myself through for the sake of a bunch of oversized 20 year-olds. I like to think I’ve grown over the years. That I no longer care all that deeply about a Buckeye game and that, win or lose, my blood pressure won’t deviate from the norm. That I’ll, you know, behave like every other adult that doesn’t live in a town like Columbus, Ohio or Lincoln, Nebraska, or Tuscaloosa, Alabama or wherever bigtime college football reigns supreme.

But it never happens, and it didn’t happen last night. No matter how much cynical detachment I tried to cultivate during the third quarter when it looked like Texas would run away with it, I couldn’t bring myself to turn it off and wait to read the results in the morning paper. No, I watched. And I got all excited when the Buckeyes scored a couple of touchdowns. More excited than a 35 year-old father of two should ever allow himself to get over a silly game. And then Ohio State decided to cease playing defense on the final drive and allowed Colt McCoy (who the hell names their kid “Colt” anyway?) to go some 80 some-odd yards for a touchdown, and I got depressed. More depressed than a a 35 year-old father of two should ever allow himself to get over a silly game. I feel rather cheap and dirty about the entire business, really. It would have been way easier to get blown out again.

Anyway:

In Part I of what will be an ongoing series, Steve Treder takes a look at players who throw from the right side but bat in a sinister fashion. Personally, I’m against this left handed form of human endeavor.

Brian Fuentes is laid out on the slab, sliced open, and his component parts weighed and indexed in Josh Kalk’s latest Anatomy of a Player feature. Wait, that’s just a figure of speech? Oh my . . . someone had better find Mrs. Fuentes quick. We have some terrible news for her.

Sean Smith, taunting the sorts of people who will be voting Jim Rice into the Hall of Fame next week, investigates whether he was any better than Brian Downing, a guy who never got any Hall consideration at all.

Finally, over at Fantasy Focus, Paul Singman hooks the Consistency Meter up to Joe Mauer. He would have done it earlier, but the meter is in the basement, and no one was around the Mauer house to let him in to read it.