Nippon....Cha Cha Cha

         

JAPAN ARE THE CHAMPS:  In what could be deemed as a mild upset, Japan won the inagural World Baseball Classic by beating Cuba on Monday night.  That championship game featured all of TWO Major Leaguers...and featured a bunch of guys most of us have never heard of.  A friend of mine is from Okinawa, and her dad is a huge baseball fan and has been watching this tournament from afar this whole time.  So, it's really cool to actually know of at least one person who is half the world away that is celebrating right now. 

HEY LADIES!!!:  Alright, since the boys are done...I can put my attention on the Lady Tar Heels.  Those Heels are #1 in the nation and are the top seed in the tournament.  In a big flaw of the women's game, UNC had to play their 2nd round game in Nashville.....versus Vanderbilt.  How is that fair??  North Carolina did win.  Interesting.  In 1993, the men's team won the NCAA title.  The next year, the women's team did.  Last year, the men's team won the ring again.  Ladies.....

SORE-IANO:  Alphonso Soriano is supposed to be an outfielder this year for the Washington Nationals....but in his first start there....he refused to show up.  When the team took the field, he stayed in the dugout.  He was replaced in the lineup soon after.  This is the concrete line drawn in the sand between Soriano and the Nationals.  Washington is viewing this as a breech of contract and, if the next two games Soriano still refused to go into the outfield, the Nats will ask the commissioner's office to place him on the Disqualified list.  That would mean that Soriano gets no pay and no "time of service" while he's on that list.  It means that if Soriano is on a 1-yr deal.....he can't just sit a year and wait for the contract to expire.  He has to honor that deal on the field. 

NOW.....OH, NO....IT'S T.O.:  I hate hearing or talking about Terrell Owens anymore....but I gotta.  Dude has a book coming out about his "Eagles experience" and a rap song that takes stabs at the Eagles.  This is a guy that just 48 hours ago said that he wanted "the past to be in the past".   Way to convince everyone that you are a changed man.  The book, I'm sure, will be filled with child-like explaining of why things went so badly for him in Philly.  It cannot be his fault at all, can it?  As for the rap song, it sounds like something a 15 year old white kid in Topeka can spit on his DJ software on his computer.  Or at least just a smidge better than Kip's song after the credits in Napoleon Dynamite. 

PETER GAMMONS GRADUATED FROM UNC????  Chalk this up to something I did not know.  On Peter Gammon's ESPN Insider blog, his bio states that he graduated from UNC in 1969.  After doing some research on this....here are a few other people I didn't know graduated from UNC:  Comedian Lewis Black....Reds radio announcer Marty Brenneman....David Brinkley....Billy Crudup [for you Almost Heroes fans].....former MTV talking head Dan Cortese....Hardball's Chris Matthews....Jeff Richards [the dude that played Drunk Girl on SNL]....and the guy who invented Pepsi.    I did know that Andy Griffith, Jim Lampley, ACC commish Jim Swofford, Presidend James K Polk, Stuart "Booya" Scott, Charles Kuralt, Jack Palance, John Edwards, Davis Love III, Marion Jones, Mia Hamm, Lawrence Taylor and some dude named Michael Jordan.