Today on With Leather: I wanted to call it “Celebrity Dugout Week!” or “Guest Dugout Week!” but I’m always swamped on Mondays, and I’m not sure how many readers would buy Wednesday to Tuesday as a legitimate theme week. Anyway, welcome to Celebrity Guest Dugout Week!

Today’s comic is by “That Sports Guy!” Bill Simmons, of ESPN and Grantland.com fame. Simmons is an incredible talent and the only person in the history of sports journalism to have seen movies or watched TV shows. Can you imagine Peter Gammons dropping “I Love Lucy” references into his columns? “Vlad Guerrero hacked at the ball like Ethel Mertz desperately stuffing chocolates into her mouth to keep the chocolate factory from firing her.” It doesn’t work. It doesn’t work for anybody else!

Enjoy the strip, which we hope to be the first of many. The first of many, or the first part of one really, really long one.

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In case you haven’t read about it, that Tweet above has Pittsburgh Steelers running back Rashard Mendenhall in a little hot water this week. Of course it doesn’t help that there is no other NFL news to discuss right now, but most people generally see the death of Osama Bin Laden as an accomplishment and closed book for the United States, particularly for the families of American soldiers and the victims of 9/11.

People were naturally going to have dissenting views about Bin Laden’s death, so this is less than surprising. What is surprising is that Mendenhall continued to defend himself on his Twitter, egging on the responses of rage, scowls from the media and even the shame of his team’s owner. Mendenhall maintains his point that he is an American and is protected by freedom of speech. His critics say he could have just kept his mouth shut. Either way, he finally deleted the controversial Tweets.

There’s a reason that we haven’t mentioned this story until now – why bother? A lot of other people just want to embrace the idea that something great happened. So I threw together this collection of Tweets from professional athletes and some of the more famous talking heads in sports with their thoughts and feelings about the death of one of the greatest villains the world has ever known.

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The Sacramento Kings must be nervous about the emotional maturity of their first round draft pick, DeMarcus Cousins, because there’s no other reason the franchise would hire Cousins’ high school coach, Otis Hughley. Cousins, the fifth overall pick in this year’s draft, is like a 10 year old in a giant 10 year old’s body, so hiring someone to serve as an authority figure is a good idea. Better to be safe than sorry, and in this case, sorry is having the second coming of Eddy Curry.

Cousins was the No. 1 pick by the Kings and Hughley coached him at Mobile (Ala.) LeFlore High.

“Otis has a wealth of experience working with young players and is ready to jump to the NBA,” said coach Paul Westphal. –USA Today

The Kings are hoping that Hughley can be the Bizzaro Don King. Here’s a tip, Sacramento management, when DeMarcus starts dressing like JaMarcus Russell cut him. At which point, you should hire me to run the team, because I know everything about basketball. I’m sorry, I forgot to tell you I was Bill Simmons. Read the rest of this entry »

Syracuse won that game, by the way

“First pitch got me right in the rib area,” Vitale told Fox Sports’ Todd Kalas. “(It was the) first time I’ve ever had a line drive in 11 years come into this box since I’ve been here. And I’m going to tell you, man, it came like a bullet, and I was really worried. But fortunately, I feel fine.” –USAToday

Video of said shellacking after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »

Look, podcasts are still too tech-intensive to be considered out of Dork Domain yet. Any given podcast will never be mainstream, because you have to go off the damn stream to find it. I would know, as I host such an on-and-off piece of media that you could find on your own. But podcasts basically lo-fi radio on the internet–and that’s fine–but let’s not pretend that these things are shaping culture or society in any way. Which brings me to Adam Corolla.

Corolla’s podcast, which was spawned after his nationwide radio talk show was canceled, might be Numero Uno on the internet, iTunes, and anywhere else. So you can imagine his surprise when he was told that ESPN would not allow its staple web writer, Bill Simmons, to make an appearance on Corolla’s show.

CAROLLA: Let me just say a little something to the retards who call themselves bosses over there, because we live in a f`cking time where everyone does that, “good call, good call, good call.” You’re running a f`cking business. This is one of the most popular podcasts on the Internet. Your two clients — Bill Simmons does a podcast, popular, probably not as a popular as this podcast but very popular, and Dave Dameshek does a podcast as well, not nearly as popular as Bill Simmons’, but he still does a podcast. Now, you guys generate income via those podcasts. We share the same audience, essentially. White guys who don’t have delicate sensibilities who are in their 30s and like to play fantasy football.

TERESA: There’s no white guy in his 30s who does not read Bill Simmons.

STOP. I don’t know who “Teresa” is, but there are PLENTY of people that either don’t care about Simmons or have given up on his Boston-centric sports ramblings. Because Simmons, whose writing DID admittedly pave the way for other media outlets like this one, has shut himself off from the outside world. Some people still read him all the time. Great. But he is not this all-encompassing figure in sportswriting. Dude peaked. Bill Simmons is too busy being Bill Simmons now, and while that’s not a bad place to be, Teresa Strasser, Carolla, and their circle o’friends need to wake up and realize that, yeah, we don’t really care.

Turns out Simmons wasn’t banned from the show after all. Either way, Craggs transcribed the Corolla rant in full, which is worth reading for the “retard chicken p`ssy coward” alone. That’s amazing, really, because that’s exactly what I had planned for dinner tonight. Maybe the podcasts are catching on…

Satisfying the demands of at least one person, a game of H-O-R-S-E has been added to the NBA’s All-Star Weekend in Phoenix.

TNT today announced the addition of the popular basketball shot-making game H-O-R-S-E to its programming lineup during its four days of NBA All-Star 2009 coverage… The H-O-R-S-E game will air live during TNT’s two-hour Inside the NBA (5 – 7 p.m. ET) on Saturday, February 14.

Honestly, this news would barely register with me if I hadn’t read Bill Simmons’s constant demands for such a game over the years.  I’m sure he’ll approach this triumph with modesty and deflect any and all attention away from himself.  Except, um, the exact opposite of that.