Joe, Write! » Sports

On success, and the Colorado Rockies’ nine-game winning streak

Joe Murphy — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 19:36:11 +0000

Denver Post sports columnist Dave Krieger (catch Krieger on twitter here) juiced out a good quote on the Colorado Rockies’ season, and what’s different now, from Rockies shortstop Troy Tulowitzki:

“The biggest thing for me is the mood on the field has changed,” Tulowitzki said. “Early on in the season, we were expecting bad things to happen. Now we’re expecting good things to happen. We’re waiting for the big pitch, we’re waiting for the big hit, and we’re getting it. Whereas before, we were thinking out there, ‘What’s going to happen? What’s going to go wrong? How are we going to blow this lead?’ “

Adam’s new college and pro-sports aggregator site: Sportsify

Joe Murphy — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 01:20:42 +0000

The most successful web geek I’ve known personally, Adam Howell, launched another site. It’s his first Django-powered site, and which for no legitimate reason makes me feel a little proud inside (when we worked together at the Winston-Salem Journal, Adam started down the Ruby on Rails path at about the same time I started down Django’s trails).

Sportsify aggregates what the major sports sites (CNN, ESPN etc.) are saying about upcoming games / races / mathces (NCAA Football, NBA, MLB, NASCAR, NFL), and turns that aggregation into a consensus pick on who’s going to win. According to the blurb on the site: “Sportsify combines the picks and power rankings from dozens of sports sites to build more accurate consensus picks and rankings.”

According to the blurb Adam wrote up on his personal site, “You can think of Sportsify like a Rotten Tomatoes/Metacritic for sports picks and power rankings, aggregating all the #1’s and weekend favorites from around the web into one site.”

I like it.

Paragraphs I liked in today’s Chicago Trib column about the Chicago Bears, Sox, Cubs and Blackhawks

Joe Murphy — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 03:14:10 +0000

Rick Morrissey wrote a bang-up Sunday piece for the sports section of the Chicago Tribune today. It’s about Chicago’s sports teams, and what the heck is happening / going to happen to ‘em. Here are my favorite paragraphs:

What’s happening in our town does have a certain scent to it, a very familiar Chicago bouquet. Autumn is in the air, with suggestions of decay wafting on the wind. This really isn’t our time of year. We’re much, much better in the spring. In the spring, we’ve shoveled our way out of the winter, we’re hopeful, we’re wearing clothing that is better suited for the summer, but we can’t help ourselves. We’re optimistic, goose-bumped people in March.

By September, we’re suspicious and guarded.

For the longtime Chicago sports fan, what happened here last week is met with a knowing nod. The nod says: “Ah, yes, you again.’ ” The nod would like to say, “Hello darkness, my old friend,’ ” but it doesn’t want to have to pay royalties.

I also like the last sentence in this paragraph:

Does hope exist in this town? Absolutely. You just had to look for it a bit last week. The Bears open their regular season on Sunday night in Indianapolis, and there is optimism, though it is a heavily guarded optimism, bordering on a maximum-security optimism.

In case you missed the link to the column above, here, here is another link to it.