Congratulations Yankees. You did it. You spent more money than the rest of the league, built a fancy new launching pad, and delivered the 27th championship in your franchise’s proud history. Pat yourselves on the back.

All jokes and disgust aside it’s great to see Jeter, Pettite, Posada, and Rivera pick up their fifth rings. Steroids blemish Andy’s career but those four guys are about as likable as guys on the other team can be.

The same can’t be said for Yankees fans. Even though they lost the Clash of the Cretins to Philadelphia these videos show New Yorkers in all their glory.

This video gives you a feel for the crowd outside of the stadium during and after the game:

Here’s another angle from outside the stadium:

They were partying in Times Square too:

I feel sorry for anybody in Philadelphia colors in New York after the game. These two Phillies fans got harassed after Game 6 of the ALCS. It had to be 100x worse following a World Series victory.

The Chicago Cubs are continuing their 100 years of World Series solitude, and are taking the appropriate amount of crap for their effort. The Daily Show with Jon Stewart broke out a pie chart that shows Chicago Cubs fans are stupid.

Hey Cubs fans.. There’s still a silver lining here. At least you’re not Red Sox or Yankees fans. Granted, would’ve seen your team win a championship in your lifetime, but you’d also be labeled a Fucktard or a Douchenozzle.

As the New York Yankees prepared to turn out the lights on one of the most famous stadiums in the world, Yankees’ third basemen Alex Rodriguez was getting himself prepped for the occasion. Rodriguez didn’t take photos or try to take home pieces of the ballpark. No, nothing like that. Alex decided to take a trip to the beauty salon.

From the New York Post via FanIQ:

ALEX Rodriguez wasted no time embracing single life. With the ink not yet dry on his divorce, the All-Star was spotted Thursday getting his blond highlights touched up at the Frederick Fekkai Salon. Wearing faded jeans and skin-tight blue T-shirt, A-Rod embraced his feminine side when stylists wrapped his head in a plastic helmet and put him under a heat lamp, reports The Post’s Lukas I. Alpert. Later, A-Rod asked his yes-men if “it should be darker,” to which they responded with stunned silence.

Alex Rodriguez should have read the fine print before signing that deal with the devil. Yeah it got him a quarter of a billion dollars, but the “Priss/Jackass Clause”, as in A-Rod will always come out of any situation either looking like a priss or a jackass, doesn’t allow Alex to enjoy his money. Only A-Rod can wind up in the paper for getting his hair done and embracing “his feminine side.” Alex Rodriguez will hit a World Series winning home run before you hear of Albert Pujols or Ryan Howard in a situation like this.

By way of The Soup comes this clip of former A-Rod two night stand Candice Houlihan discussing one of her nicknames. It’s Yankee Skank and it was given to her by adoring Boston Red Sox fans as they watched her climb in a car with Alex Rodriguez. This woman is in her 14th minute so unless she’s rumored to be in a sex tape with A-Rod like Madonna is, this is the last we’ll be seeing of Miss Houlihan.

Alex Rodriguez, Cynthia Rodriguez, Candice Houlihan, The Soup, Joel McHale

JT: It all really started with the Yankees. My uncles are huge Yankee fans, everyone in my family, it’s a Yankee family. I remember a little bit of the ‘81 World Series with Dave Winfield stinking up the joint. I remember the ‘80 World Series Phillies-Royals. I think my first baseball memory is that World Series, when Bob Boone bobbled a pop-up in foul territory and Pete Rose caught it. So it started with the Yankees, but I watched football and basketball too as a kid. As I’ve gotten older I’ve gotten into football more than anything. I follow the Yankees, Jets, and Knicks. One outta three ain’t bad.

HG: You work for Sports Illustrated but it’s online. Do you consider yourself an extension of the magazine?

JT: I think of the magazine and the web as two different entities. You just can’t do the same things. I think they have two different audiences, and I’m not smart enough to figure out how you make them one audience, that would be really good for me if I could figure that out, but online is this world that I don’t know if anyone was prepared for. It’s almost like online was made for sports with the scores, the stats, the news. And obviously the magazine doesn’t do stats and scores so they’ll just be two different entities.

HG: At last count there were a gazillion sports websites. How much is too much, will sports reach a limit on the net?

JT: Like I said before sports and the internet are the perfect marriage so it’s only gonna get bigger. We have a couple of guys here in the office and we can’t even imagine how we did fantasy before the internet. Everything’s gonna expand and get bigger. What’s good is, what’s good for bloggers like you and the quote mainstream sites is that the real sports fans want different outlets. I know for me, I like to go on Si.com and read a Tom Verducci column but I also wanna go on the blogs and see what’s going on. The web has something for everyone and I think for real sports fans, they’re the ones that get a bonus because there are so many things for them to read and check out and experience, and it’s just gonna keep growing.

HG: The highlight of your career has to be meeting Erin Andrews right? You two hang out, what’s that been like?

JT: It’s been fun. It came about in a natural way. It really started on her end because I was doing Hot Clicks one day and surfing the web as I do in the morning and I saw a link to a story on One More Dying Quail. They interviewed her and asked her what sites that she read and she said that she loved Extra Mustard. The people in the blogs know me for Hot Clicks but I run that whole Extra Mustard page. So she says she loves Extra Mustard, and after that I wrote something on Hot Clicks like “We love Erin Andrews and Erin Andrews loves us“. That day I actually got an email from her, and after that I did a Q&A with her, we sorta just kept up through email. Sometimes you wanna discuss things in email that are better said over the phone than email so we’ve done phone calls and emails. And she’s great. I don’t wanna come off as just a psycho fan but she’s been great.

HG: Do your friends stalk Erin through you? Like “hey, call Erin Andrews, let’s see what she’s up to?”

JT: Believe me it’s been done. I have her cellphone number in my cellphone and my friends will say “text Erin”.

HG: How many stories get sent to you on a daily basis for you to review for Hot Clicks?

JT: It’s pretty out of control right now to be honest with you. It was a slow build but now it’s pretty overwhelming. I feel bad because I wanna respond to people, I wanna link things, but I just don’t have the time. Once Hot Clicks is posted at about 10:30 in the morning I have to start doing other things. So on a daily basis I get sent around 100 stories or links. I get a lot of stuff and I have to whittle it down. It’s tough but there are tougher jobs out there.

HG: What audience are you trying to reach with the links on Hot Clicks?

JT: What I’m finding is..I’m serving two different audiences. Obviously I’m serving the blog audience and the bloggers. Who are tremendous. They’re huge and I wouldn’t be able to do Hot Clicks without them. I’m also serving this audience that comes to us from CNN.com. They might not really care about blogs, but they want interesting stuff, funny stuff. I might get something sent to me from a blogger that’s sort of “inside bloggish”. Like the Will Leitch/Buzz Bissinger thing. Outside of the blogs that’s not really a story. So I’m serving two audiences, yes I’m serving the sports fan, but there are things that the bloggers are into that I don’t think the average sports fans are into so I gotta try to go with the stuff that’s gonna appeal to both audiences.

HG: How do you determine or what determines if a story is qualified for Hot Clicks?

JT: You have to know what’s gonna fly and not gonna fly. I know in the back of my head what I won’t link to or can’t link to. Most blogs out there, for the most part, are linkable. There’s only a couple of topics that I think it’s best to stay away from just because we have advertisers, we have readers that we don’t want to piss off. I don’t think it’s rocket science to figure out what’s gonna fly what’s not gonna fly. You gotta use judgment, but I like to push the envelope, which I think you have to do. You don’t wanna be boring, that’s the worst possible thing you can be. You gotta be careful, but you still gotta try to push the envelope a little bit.

HG: Do you have a soft spot for any subjects, things that are guaranteed to get a blogger a link?

JT: This is the question I get asked the most and I always give a crappy answer and I feel bad. I can’t say that it’s one thing but I can give you multiple things. At the end of the day if it’s something unique, something original, if it’s something that stands out and it’s not on 1000 blogs already, that’s a good place to start. There’s two sites I’ve been linking to a lot lately Tirico Suave and this one site, I still don’t know how to say it’s name Flatusyahu or something. They do some unbelievable photoshopped stuff. Good photoshops are great, that’s great stuff for Hot Clicks. We do a lot of lists because people who are reading Hot Clicks at work, they come on ten minutes, or they’re killing a half hour while they’re eating lunch so they can read a list because it’s a quick hitting thing… I can tell you what not to send me. I really feel bad about this but somebody will send me a link to something, it’s really good writing, really in-depth reporting, and it’s a 800 word story that’s an analysis of something.. that’s not gonna get on Hot Clicks. We already have that on the site. Somebody sending me why the AL East will win the World Series this year is just not for us. I still get stuff like that sent to me and I feel bad because these people put so much work into it but it’s just not a fit and that usually gets left on the cutting room floor. If I see the word steroids, 99 percent of the time I will not read it. I just could not care less. We get a decent amount of traffic from CNN.com so anything that’s borderline, like the Brady Quinn picture on the gay website, it’s not worth it for me to go there.

HG: Have you been enjoying the perks that come with working at SI?

JT: A little bit, not a ton. I interviewed Derek Jeter two weeks ago which is pretty much the highlight of my life. I don’t think I had a chance of doing a good interview with him because I was blown away by just doing the interview with him. It’s been good though. I’ve interviewed Alyssa Milano, Minka Kelly from Friday Night Lights, Jeter, Joba Chamberlain so it’s been cool. It hasn’t been an overwhelming amount of perks so I can use more perks. More perks!! Actually a company sent me something and I meant to post this on Hot Clicks, but I got some disposable flasks. That’s a cool perk.

HG: What would you fill the flask with?

JT: Probably some vodka and Seven-up.

HG: What brand of vodka?

JT: I’m not one of those people that can tell the difference. Absolute, Kettle One, Grey Goose, it’s all the same to me.

HG: Do you get emails complaining about the subject matter on Hot Clicks? I mean from players or teams that mistakenly think you’ve written something that you’re only linking to..

JT: I don’t think there are any teams or athletes that know my name. I’m not that important. Here’s something though. A lot of times I get emails from readers, not necessarily bloggers but readers who get very mad because sometimes the videos don’t work in Hot Clicks. All you have to do is refresh the page two or three times and the video will work. You don’t have to call me an asshole or an idiot or say ‘what’s the point in linking to these if they don’t work’. They actually work, it’s a You Tube glitch, not a Hot Clicks glitch. You just need to refresh the page two or three times.

HG: Speaking of glitches.. You’ve crashed my site a few times with the Hot Clicks traffic. Is this something you take pride in? Knowing you can bring down a website with a link..

JT: Yeah we’ve gotten that many times. That’s something I can’t really control. What’s funny is, the guy who sits next to me at work, Gennaro Filice, he calls getting linked at Hot Clicks “The gift and the curse“. Obviously the gift is the traffic and the curse is we’ve crashed some sites. So whenever a site gets crashed he does a routine about the gift and the curse and we get a little chuckle out of it. We’ve probably crashed 10-15 sites. The only time it’s really a problem for me is if it’s the lead item in Hot Clicks and the site gets crashed. We usually have a very attractive female up there and that’s what people wanna see and they click the link and the site doesn’t work and I start getting those angry emails again.

HG: You don’t have comments on Hot Clicks.. You could open up the comments and let people speak to you that way instead of by email.

JT: I have to say this and I know this is blasphemous in the blog world and I’ll probably get ripped for this but I don’t get the whole comments thing myself. Maybe I shouldn’t say don’t get, I never read them. I guess because I’m moving so quick from blog to blog but I’m not a big fan or reader of the comments. What I like about not having comments in Hot Clicks is that if somebody actually emails me a criticism or praise, I know they mean it a little more. They’ve put their name to it and email address. I have no problem with criticisms but I’d rather the criticism comes from somebody that has an email address, sends me something, I can send something back to them instead of some guy in the comments named davidsternblows.

HG: We’ve talked about the good that comes with working for Sports Illustrated, Extra Mustard, there has to be some bad too.

JT: If you ask me what’s the one thing I dislike the most about Hot Clicks it’s that I can’t curse in them when I write them. I’d love to be able to say, well I better not say it, but for instance, if somebody falls down I don’t know anyone, any co-worker, any friend, any one in my family that would say “he fell on his butt”. Everyone would say he fell on his ass. I can’t do that.. And you guys use so many pictures that I can’t use just because of copyright issues. At SI, we have lawyers and they follow all laws. So for instance if there’s a picture of Kyle Orton with a Jack Daniel’s bottle or Matt Leinart in the hot tub, I can’t use those. Which is why I think Hot Clicks is really cool because I can link to the sites that use those pictures but I can’t use them. I get very jealous of the bloggers for that, I would like to use some of those pictures but I can’t get Time Inc. sued.

HG: Never say can’t. Jimmy thanks for your time.

JT: No problem. Thanks for asking me.

Jimmy Traina, Sports Illustrated, Hot Clicks, Extra Mustard

New York Yankees third baseman Alex Rodriguez finds himself in some sort of media storm every couple of months. He’ll walk out of a hotel with a buxom blonde friend, yell at opposing third baseman while they’re trying to field a pop up, or exaggerate the number of drug test he took in a given year. In all of those instances A-Rod brought the heat on himself. He didn’t need somebody manufacturing drama for him.

Things must have gotten too quiet on the A-Rod front for MLB.com over the weekend. Rodriguez was planning to go to Miami on Monday to be with his expectant wife. A pretty normal thing for a man to do. MLB.com ran this headline:

He’s spending Monday with his wife doing what? Getting his toes done at the spa? Going shopping? What the hell? They made it sound like the guy’s just taking off from the team to take his wife on a date. I don’t know about you, but to me the title sort of implies that Alex is gonna miss a game. That’s fine except that the Yankees had an off day Monday..

As luck would have it Alex strained his right quadriceps Sunday during the Yankees 7-1 victory over Baltimore. That forced MLB.com to change Sunday morning’s headline of ‘A-Rod to spend Monday with wife’ to ‘Injury derails A-Rod’s trip to Miami’ … Which is still crappy. Trip to Miami? Makes it sound like he’s hitting South Beach while the rest of the team struggles.

A google search for the original MLB.com story returns this page. You’ll see the headline ‘A-Rod to spend Monday with wife’ but you’ll be directed to the new, equally lame in title article. It’s highly unlikely that Major League Baseball would want to portray the heir apparent to the home run crown as a deserter and a creampuff, but these suspect headlines make me wonder.

Tags: Alex Rodriguez, MLB.com, New York Yankees,

With Theo Epstein and Mike Mussina exchanging words, now is the perfect time to revisit this banned ESPN baseball commercial. Deadspin posted this video back in 2006, and it’s standing the test of time.. The New York/Boston hatefest has been pushed to a new level thanks to Super Bowl XLII, and MLBers such as Pedro Martinez and Aramis Ramirez love cockfighting… As far as the fight goes, my money’s on Epstein. He’s a little scrappy guy and a go getter. He’ll put on a gorilla suit if he has to. Mike Mussina would approach the fight with the best intentions, but would only be able to throw a punch or two before going down with an injury.

Tags: Mike Mussina, New York Yankees, Theo Epstein, Boston Red Sox, baseball, cockfighting, video, youtube, ESPN

Alex Rodriguez knows that the media and fans are going to scrutinize his performance as he nears the career home run record. Rodriguez has been loosely linked to the steroid and HGH era by Jose Canseco and John Rocker.. They’re not the two strongest character witnesses, but rumors take on a life of their own. In an attempt to pick up some good karma down the road, A-Rod is going above and beyond for admitted HGH user and teammate Andy Pettitte.

“Andy is one of the greatest human beings I’ve ever met. I have two daughters — well, I have one and one on the way. If I had a daughter, I would want ‘em to marry Andy Pettitte. The age difference might be a little awkward, but in today’s day and age anything is possible.”

If there really is a such thing as karma, I doubt that offering your first born child’s hand in marriage to Andy Pettitte is what clears your slate.. A-Rod’s not known for his sense of humor, but he was kidding.. Right? I mean, I hope he’s kidding. Cause if not, 50 year old Andy Pettitte (still looking good due to HGH use) is gonna dump his wife to hook up with A-Rod’s 18 year old daughter.. That will take these two guys version of Yankees keeping it in the family to a new level.

A-Rod Expects Questions. Courtesy of The Associated Press
Photo courtesy of The Associated Press

Tags: Alex Rodriguez, Andy Pettitte, New York Yankees, Steroids, HGH

Back in the day.. Before Alex Rodriguez fired Scott Boras, before Alex Rodriguez opted out of his Yankees contract during the World Series, before Jose Canseco said he had steroid related dirt on A-Rod, before Alex was seen with the chick with the tig ‘o bitties, and before Alex was beefin with Jeter, Super Agent Scott Boras helped Alex Rodriguez sign a $252 million dollar contract with the Texas Rangers.

How did Boras do it?I don’t know.. But I do know one of the tactics that Boras used. He, well his staff at the Scott Boras Corporation, put together a sharp blue binder full of Alex Rodriguez stats and mailed it to every team in MLB. The book is full of statistical breakdowns and projections for A-Rod against current (2000) and former ball players.

There are pages and pages like this, mixed in with quotes from guys like Larry Bowa and Dusty Baker. All of it was done to celebrate the greatness that is Alex Rodriguez. Funny how times change.. Fast forward 7 years, Alex has a bigger contract but Boras almost blew it, and now they don’t speak.

If you’ve got a little time on your hands you can check out the entire Alex Rodriguez Historical Performance binder.

Alex Rodriguez Historical Performance
a-rod-hp-binder.pdf

Tags: Alex Rodriguez, Scott Boras, MLB, New Contract, Fired Agent

Derek Jeter loves him some Michael Jordan.. Not only is he on Mike’s shoe team, but DJ has gone the gatorade route and done the cologne thing as well. I figure, 2 more rings, and about 10 commercials with Cuba Gooding Jr./Kevin Bacon, and Jeter will officially become Jordan Jr.

DJ’s shoes aren’t bad, and their definitely better than 80% of these NBA shoes.

Tags: Derek Jeter, Jumpman, Nike, New York Yankees