Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling hanging up the bloody sock once and for all. Schilling, he of the three world championships, made the announcement on his blog, 38pitches.com.

The game always gave me far more than I ever gave it. All of those things, every single one of those memories is enveloped with fan sights and sounds for me. Without the fans they would still be great memories, but none would be enduring and unforgettable because they infused the energy, rage, passion and ‘feel’ of all of those times…I did everything I could to win every time I was handed the ball.

I am and always will be more grateful than any of you could ever possibly know.

Schilling has fielded criticism for being a once-every-five-days guy that runs his mouth like an everyday player. And some of that’s deserved, but the right-hander deserves credit for his understanding of the fan’s perspective, and his attempts at culling that perception (in no small part with his blog) before any mainstream athlete was doing so.

And, oh yeah, he was a pretty awesome pitcher, too. Guys like that have earned the right to be pricks.

|via Y! Deportes (now in English!)|

Also excited: Jesus

Florida beat Oklahoma 24-14 in the BCS Championship Game last night, cementing its status as the best non-undefeated team in the nation, which equates to a national championship this year.  Sorry, Utah.  Try not being in Utah, you’ll get some more respect.

Maybe I’m the only one who doesn’t care that the Sooners’ streak of 60-point games stopped, but I actually enjoyed seeing an evenly matched game with defensive stops and a couple turnovers (the Gators’ two goal-line stands were the difference in the game).  The only problem I had with the game was the announcers, Thom Brennaman and Charles Davis.  Here’s a sample of the commentary:

Brennaman: …and Tim Tebow is just putting this team on his back.  What an amazing leader!
Davis: I’m even more impressed by the person he is, Thom.
Brennaman: And such a considerate lover.

I couldn’t stand it, and I like Tebow.  I can’t imagine what it must have been like for Oklahoma fans.  Their malformed, shrunken brains must have been so angry!  More photos, links, video, and commentator screw-ups after the jump.

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Mark Titus (pictured, with a fan) is a junior guard for Ohio State who has logged one minute of playing time for the Buckeyes so far this season.  While he may not be All-America material on the court, his blog, Club Trillion, is easily the best athlete blog I’ve ever read.  That’s right — Rod Benson, Paul Shirley, even Gilbert Arenas: not as good.

I’ve spent a good chunk of my morning going through the archives, and here’s a typical passage, from the team’s intrasquad scrimmage in October:

I spent a majority of the scrimmage talking to two 8 year old kids… Drake and Jake explained to me that the funniest thing ever would be to put a Sweet Tart in my water bottle. I told them the funniest thing ever could probably be found on YouTube. Jake then told me that he has a locker room pass and I told him I wasn’t impressed in the slightest because I have a locker room pass too.

Anyway, without getting too rah-rah for Titus, I recommend checking out the whole blog.  It’s chockful o’ deadpan delivery, self-deprecating humor, and lobbying for the adoption of short-shorts.  And he’s even got excellent grammar and punctuation, which is way more than I’ve come to expect from an Ohio State student.  Or a blogger, for that matter.

(thanks to KSK reader Andy, who listened to the Bill Simmons podcast recommending this so I didn’t have to)

Redskins tight end Chris Cooley (not pictured; that’s his wife Christy) has come through with another gem on his blog.  This one is a splendidly homoerotic tale of celebration following the ‘Skins’ victory over the Seahawks on Sunday.  Following an attention-grabbing lede (“There is no better way to celebrate a win than getting grabbed and punched in the balls by a bunch of offensive lineman on the bus”), Cooley goes on to explain his quality time with teammates:

Last Thursday in practice… I had just finished off my block and turned back to see [a teammate] wallowing around on his hands and knees trying to get back to his feet. I don’t really know why, but I thought it would be funny as hell to air hump him in while he was down…

So, back to the bus, when the game ends I usually load up on bus #2 and move towards the back with the offensive line, [tight end Todd] Yoder, and the kickers. Kind of our little after the game club.

We call it “The White Guys on the Team Club.”

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It’s a sad day for sports blog enthusiasts (read: dorks), as the guys at Fire Joe Morgan are bringing the site to an end.  Since With Leather tries to avoid going down the rabbit holes of media criticism and reporting which sports bloggers are writers for “The Office,” FJM never got a lot of attention here, but it was a vital read for anyone who likes to see idiots mocked ruthlessly.  And I am ALL about that.

FJM weren’t whores for attention, they didn’t feast on gossip or rely on tits to get page views (ahem), and they didn’t start blogging in an attempt to become the next Bill Simmons.  They didn’t spend ten hours in Photoshop creating a shitty collage of images for their header (they didn’t spend any time on site design). They just took idiot columnists’ idiot columns and broke them down, sentence by mind- numbingly stupid sentence.  It’s a marvelous conceit, and they did it with wit and élan.

Seriously, I’m depressed about this.  There are 800 million sports blogs, and maybe twenty don’t absolutely suck.  And now it’s more like 19.  Dammit.

What follows is somewhere between a literary review and a book discussion.  Sorry about the headline being a complete lie.  But let’s be realistic: people aren’t going to click a headline with the word “book” in it.

It was almost two years ago that the collection of basketball philosophers at FreeDarko introduced the Competitive Style Guide, a series of sketches on graph paper that illustrated perfectly what the website’s authors had been trying to communicate for years with thousands of slippery words.

Two NBA seasons later, Bloomsbury USA is publishing FreeDarko’s The Macrophenomenal Pro Basketball Almanac, a field guide to the lens of style through which FreeDarko views the NBA.  And while the en vogue book in the blog world right now is Drew Magary’s excellent and hilarious Men With Balls [Ed. Note: Drew will handle posting duties on With Leather tomorrow to promote the book], I found FreeDarko’s move from blog to book the more rewarding of the two.

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