Every few years, a TV network or a shoe company decides that sports guys should be super heroes. It happened with NFL Superpro, it happened with the Super Sluggers and now it’s happening to Kevin Durant. Or a Powerpuff Girl that sorta looks like Durant, I haven’t figured it out yet.

From the YouTube description:

The evil Dr. Deflation has escaped from Air Max security prison and is hellbent on stealing all of the world’s air. The Air Alliance made up of Charles Barkley, Ken Griffey Jr., Bo Jackson, Clay Matthews, Kevin Durant, Megan Rapinoe, and Allyson Felix, are on a mission to defeat him. Nike’s best Air products are available at Foot Locker including the Nike Air Max Griffey Fury, Nike Diamond Turf II, and the Nike Air Max NM.

If I’m making a Kevin Durant super hero named “Durantula” I’m gonna give him eight arms, or at least some sort of spider power more obvious than creating basketball Hadoukens.

Regardless, check out the preview video after the jump.

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I went to an interleague game at Safeco last May. Giants at Mariners: Randy Johnson was looking for career win #299 in his final start in Seattle (he gave up one run in 5.1 innings and left to a standing ovation), and the game ended in 12 innings on Jose Lopez’s RBI single off the left field wall, but the most memorable part of the night belonged to Ken Griffey, Jr.

With the bases loaded and two outs in the ninth inning of a tied game, the 39-year-old Griffey approached the plate to the loudest I’ve ever heard a sports stadium — and I’d seen Griffey hit a home run in the bottom of the ninth to tie a game in the Kingdome some sixteen or seventeen years prior. For four pitches, we were all on our feet, refusing to stop screaming or clapping, generating electricity, doing everything we could do to will this aging hero to one more feat of greatness.

On the fourth pitch, Griffey unleashed that classic swing, hit a towering fly ball to deep center, and for a few breathless seconds, as I tracked the ball’s flight, I was a kid again, full of wonder at my childhood idol… until Aaron Rowand made the catch at the wall.

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One of the most ignorant and irritating aspects of the steroid discussion engulfing baseball is the presumption of innocence that still exists with regard to certain players. How a person that knows anything about baseball could say,”This player did steroids and cheated; and my favorite player would never do that.” This idiocy was exposed to some degree last week when Ortiz and Ramirez were both revealed to have tested positive in MLB’s 2003 PED audit. And yet that attitude still seems to exist, as presented in a reader submission to GameOn, posted yesterday (emphasis added):

If a player is injured, or is just a contact hitter, then that player does not receive the love that the power guys do. Take Ken Griffey Jr., for example. He has had a great career but during the years that he was injured, he was largely dismissed by fans. Griffey did not take steroids to get back into the lineup like he could have. Instead, he let his body heal naturally. via.

There are two types of players in baseball right now: those that have reportedly tested positive, and those that haven’t. There is no “clean” or “dirty,” because nobody knows who’s “clean.” There’s no point in outing anyone as a “cheater” if we don’t know who didn’t “cheat.” How can you chastise those that failed when (a) there’s still the equivalent of more than three entire teams’ worth of players that failed the 2003 test, and (b) you have absolutely no idea who those players are?

This whole witch hunt is the only thing keeping baseball in the national consciousness. It’s time to pull the plug.

That hipster moan you heard in the greater New York City area yesterday was Ufford enjoying the return of Ken Griffey’s return to the Mariners in his own special way. Junior hit a home run and the Mariners won, and then Matt had a scary trip to the dentist, but he was really nice and everything turned out fine!

And how the hell did Griffey get lauded with the public’s certainty of never having done steriods? We don’t know that he never did steroids. And if he’s really the only one that never did steroids, can we then assume that everyone else actually did do them? And then admit that Barry Bonds is being persecuted simply for being a crabby black guy that doesn’t feel like talking to people while he’s changing clothes? Or is that a crime in California, also?

Whatev. Here are some more scores, and here‘s a vid of something so creepy, it would be an injustice to even describe it. And eventually we’ll do coverage that doesn’t involve complaining about steroids and non-sequitur vomit-inducing videos. Just not today.

Reversing course on what seemed like a done deal with the Braves, Ken Griffey Jr instead opted to return to the Seattle Mariners, signing a one-year deal worth everything in the world to me $2 million, plus incentives.

It’s important that we few Seattle fans celebrate this signing not just with nostalgia, but with spite and vengeance.  To wit: IN YOUR FACE ATLANTA!!!  What were those assholes trying to do, anyway?  Griffey is an oft-injured 39-year-old who’s a liability in the field — he’s not exactly the missing component from a team that needs just one more piece to be a contender.  But dammit, he’s SEATTLE’S oft-injured 39-year-old defensive liability.  And those Atlanta assholes tried to ruin it.

Man, this really couldn’t have worked out any better.  I get to celebrate the return of Junior to an M’s uniform AND I get to hate something new.  Suck it, Braves.

I usually don’t write about being “happy” or “liking” things, but the word of Ken Griffey Jr’s imminent return to the Seattle Mariners — pending a physical this weekend — is making me feel… what is this?  Nostalgia? Wow, what a feeling.  I can see why Baby Boomers are such self-indulgent dicks.

It was almost 20 years ago that I began collecting everything and anything Griffey — baseball cards, posters, t-shirts, even the crappy candy bars that bore his visage — and I did it all while living outside a pair of NL towns (Philly and St. Louis) before interleague play or the internet.  I lived to read box scores, and I cursed the Eastern time zone for late games.  But in the span of just a couple years, major league baseball had a strike, Griffey left for Cincinnati, the steroid scandal exploded, and before I knew it I liked football better than baseball.  Which is fine.  We get older; our tastes change.

I know that Griffey’s old now.  I know that he’s useless in the field and can only help the team as a DH.  And I don’t care.  I’m going to watch more baseball this summer than I have in a decade.  For nine innings at a time, I’m going to feel a little younger.  Here’s hoping Junior will, too.