Remember earlier this month when Justin Smoak of the Mariners hit a foul ball into a fan’s beer, so the fan fanned-up and chugged it? Here’s the food version of that.

Drew Stubbs of the Cleveland Indians hit a solo homer, and a fan lost a bag of popcorn in a beautiful explosion. To be as cool as the Mariners fan, dude needs to walk around, find every piece of popcorn and eat it. Do it. Do it. (via MLB.com)

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Links

Nerd Crush Veronica Belmont Has A Surprise For Anyone Who Googles To See Her Naked |UPROXX|

Meet The Woman Responsible For Saturday Night Live’s Celebrity Host Photographs |Warming Glow|

Will Ferrell & Jack Black making a movie about grown men who play tag |Film Drunk|

Baseball Comes Back To Fenway, David Ortiz Declares Boston “Our F**king City” |With Leather|

5 Classic Disney Games That Need To Be Remade (And 5 More That Absolutely Don’t) |Gamma Squad|

Listen To Kanye West’s Unreleased Demo Tape From Circa 2001 |Smoking Section|

NFL Superheroes, final round |Kissing Suzy Kolber|

Read the rest of this entry »

We’ve done fantasy sports at With Leather before and I’ve been notoriously bad at them (I finished in 800th place in a 200 person league), but I’ve got something going for me — baseball season is officially underway and regular season games (and The Dugout) start rolling out next week, and between my knowledge of the Cleveland Indians and how computers work I’m a shoo-in for a first place finish. You know, with the Indians.

Anyway, our latest fantasy baseball game through FanDuel.com is free to enter and can win you a Bank Of America duffel bag full of cash money — $1000, to be exact, with over 100 entrants taking home money. First place bags you 200 bucks, and if you’re as good at these games at me, you’ll at least walk away with a dollar.

It’s a one day contest (April 5, to be exact) and works like you might expect it to … you draft the best team you can under the salary cap and play them against the league. You can track your team’s progress through live scoring, and you get paid out at the end of the day once all games have ended. Then you look at how I’ve performed and see if you’re better than me. Which you are not.

And again, totally free. So hurry up and sign up for this immediately so you can brag about how well you’ll do on the 5th when I bug everyone else about signing up again on Friday.

In news that could make me the happiest blogger who also runs a Jim Thome-themed baseball webcomic on the entire Internet, Minnesota Twins designated hitter Jim Thome was claimed on waivers by the Cleveland Indians. Jason Kubel was also claimed by the Chicago White Sox, but does anybody care about Jason Kubel, honestly? It’s all about JIM, the latest member of the 600 home run club, the man who spent twelve years, three All-Star Game appearances and two World Series Championship near-wins (okay, one World Series near-win) in Cleveland. He accepted a contract with the Phillies and everyone in Cleveland turned on him, but I am not going to care about that because CAPITAL LETTERS and BASEBALL JOY.

Of course, the deal isn’t official yet.

The claims do not mean that either player will change teams. The Twins can trade Thome and/or Kubel. They also can keep one or both or allow one or both to leave on a claim.

Thome, who holds a full no-trade clause, and can reject any deal. He prefers the Phillies to the Indians, one source said, but it’s doubtful he could circumvent the waiver process to land with Philadelphia.

The Twins must decide on Thome and Kubel by 1 p.m. ET Friday. The Indians are six games out in the AL Central, the White Sox 61/2 out. But Thome could fit well in Cleveland, and the same is true of Kubel in Chicago.

Of course, getting Thome to the Phillies (again, argh) would be a pretty complicated process — the Twins would have to pull him off trade waivers and place him on release waivers, and Thome would have to reject every team claim besides Philadelphia … and even then he’d have to give up 500-grand in salary, convince the Twins to let him do this even though they’d get nothing in return, and not piss off every rival team with wire manipulation. All he’d have to do to get to Ohio is hang out, switch back to brown mustard and renew his season tickets at the Cleveland Play House.

More on this story as it develops, possibly involving me jumping up and down and clapping.

Why I’m Happy: The Cleveland Indians are going to compete! The Tribe added Kosuke Fukudome (yeah 3 home runs YEAH .260 BATTING AVERAGE) and sorta-ace Ubaldo Jimenez to bolster the line-up and push them back ahead of the Tigers before it’s too late. Sure, we had to give up our entire farm system and our prized Pomeranian (and we got that farm system by trading away all of our good players a few years ago), but hey, it’s now or never. It’s Tribe Time Now Or Never!

Why I’m Unhappy: Friday was our July edition of Free Fantasy Baseball With DraftStreet, and as per usual I dropped about 20 spots to finish 91st out of over 200. I’m in the upper half, but still, I think the Indians get worse every time we do these. Friday they lost 12-0 to the stinking Royals, and the guy who won had Billy Butler and Alex Gordon on his team. Welp! Thanks again to everyone who played, and here are the readers who won money.

On to the links~!

Sports

We’re All A Little Jealous Of Philadelphia Sports Teams Right Now - I mean, I’M not, but I could see why YOU would be. Tomorrow they’re going to announce that the Philadelphia Flyers have invented time travel and come back through the wormhole with teenage Wayne Gretzky and some sort of weird future cyborg Gordie Howe. Why did the Phillies need to add All-Stars? They’re an American League team playing in the National League already. [Smoking Section]

#Podcast: The Patrick Willis Interview - Be sure not to miss Punte’s podcast interview with Willis, where he asks him what it’s like to play in the NFL and then suddenly quits. In all seriousness, I feel like I keep having to say goodbye to Josh and that sucks, because I shouldn’t have to once. Good luck in your future endeavors, Punter, you’ll be missed. [KSK]

Strikeforce: Fedor vs. Hendrson Live Results and Commentary - I should start doing The Best and Worst of MMA Pay-Per-Views. Best: Fedor getting trounced in the first round and saying the ass-beating was God’s Will. Worst: Literally everything else. [Cage Potato]

Lily Anderson - She counts as sports! Our last post on Friday was about her performance of the Star-Spangled Banner at an Atlanta Braves game, and after struggling all day to have something worthwhile to say they were nice enough to link back to me on her Facebook fan page. So go “like” it, because it’s probably the one thing you can like on Facebook that makes you a better person. [Facebook]

With Leather

The 2011 U.S. Air Guitar Championship - I can’t think of anything weirder or lamer than this and I’ve been watching pro wrestling for like 30 years. It’s like a bunch of guys got together and decided to act like The Darkness, but didn’t want to get paid. [With Leather]

The Montreal Expos Are Dead, Long Live The Montreal Expos - Montreal wants baseball again and I’m all for it, as I want baseball and stadiums and mascots all over the damn place. Also worth reading is Nick Dallamora’s The Mouse That Never Roared, written way back when the Expos spirited away to Washington. [With Leather]

Carmelo Anthony Holding A Panda Bear? Carmelo Anthony Holding A Panda Bear - I’m getting a hang of these UPROXX titles. [With Leather]

Jay Cutler Faked It - … or so says Kristin Cavallari. Linking this here because it’s been online long enough for weird girls who are oddly defensive of Laguna Beach to find it and start leaving comments like ONLY THEY KNOW WHAT HAPPENED WHY DON’T YOU GET A LIFE AND A REAL JOB AND STOP WRITING even though I just copy-pasted most of this from a gossip website. [With Leather]

Not Sports

Scarlett Johansson Declines Marine’s Invitation To Ball - which makes sense, because she’s declined my invitation to ball about a thousand times. Unpopular Opinion: Marines need to stop guilt-tripping celebrities into doing things. [Film Drunk]

Avengers Cosplay - More women should dress like Mockingbird. I’m a little disappointed that this gallery isn’t full of hot girls dressing like Ultron, but that might be a fever fantasy I’ll never live to see. [Gamma Squad]

Spoiler Alert: Parks & Rec Has Cast Tammy 1 - The only way I’m okay with this casting news is if they explain how Ron and Tammy met with “We found each other. We found each other in the dark”. They should’ve been like “Community” and stunt-casted the sh** out of this. Let Oprah or some lesser form of Wendy Williams be Tammy 1. [Warming Glow]

Internet Explorer Users Dumb, Says Science - What’s next, a study revealing that people still using their @AOL.com e-mail addresses in 2011 are functionally illiterate? Yeah, we know all this. Science used to be for important things. When I was growing up they were all SCIENCE CREATES SPACE SHUTTLES AND UNLOCKS THE MYSTERIES OF LIFE. Now science is just a more boring version of Encyclopedia Dramatica. [UPROXX]

You wouldn’t normally think of Match.com as a place to go for sports news, but here we are: The online dating company has polled their 20 million-plus members to find out which U.S. cities have the highest number of female baseball fans. This is the kind of thing Baseball Reference should be doing. I don’t need to know how many pitchers have tripled in the 8th inning since 1972, I need to know that if I walk into Progressive Field wearing a Ryan Garko jersey I can walk out dating something besides myself.

So who topped the list? If you’ve been staring at that picture of Anna Kournikova in the header, you should already know.

So where are the hot beds for ladies who love baseball? We looked up the top 10 cities for baseball crazed gals and we found that our community has some serious baseball fans! In fact, nearly half of the women in St. Louis are baseball fans according to their Match.com profile. Even in our 10th ranked city, the Twin Cities metro, over a third of the women are fans of the boys of summer.

That’s not a huge surprise. Everyone I’ve met from St. Louis who wasn’t one of Nelly’s St. Lunatics has been awesome. Milwaukee, Fresno, Cincinnati and Worcester fill out the top five, which seems to have been decided upon based on the cuteness and strength of their closest team’s most popular player. So no, if I tried to pick up girls at the Prog it wouldn’t work — I’d have to travel 40 minutes south to Akron, Ohio (#9) where “the women of The Tribe are showing their support”. I wondered where they were doing that. Most of the women I know in Cleveland assume the Indians suck whether they’re in first place for three and a half months or not.

Akron comes in just behind Des Moines, Iowa, referred to on the list as the home of the movie The Field of Dreams. That’s probably my third favorite baseball movie, behind 61 Home Runs and Eight Of The Men Are Out.

[via Match.com]

But the question remains: Are the Cleveland Indians “for real”?

Okay, so a one-and-a-half game lead in the AL Central might not constitute “awesome”, but watching Travis Hafner crush a ball into right field to defeat the Toronto Blue Jays and give the Tribe their second walk-off grand slam victory of the season felt that way. Blogs great and small have been asking that “are the Cleveland Indians an actual baseball team” question since the first week of the season and chances are they’ll be asking it well into September. If the Indians are three outs away from winning game four of the World Series to sweep the Phillies (or the Pirates, or whoever) the announcers will be on their Twitters, asking followers if now is the time to consider Cleveland a contender.

IT IS TIME TO DO THAT NOW. It is five past Tribe Time.

I’ve been watching this video over and over for the last half hour, so I thought I’d put it up on my website, where I could at least get a little traffic, and maybe a disgruntled Toronto fan stopping by to point out how the Jays play in the AL East and the Tribe plays in a ball pit with some kids dressed like the Twins. That’s true. It’s also true that we’ve got three months left in the season, and Cleveland could still finish 14 games behind the Tigers. It’s true that Cleveland is a terrible town full of terrible sports fans who still aren’t supporting their team and won’t buy an Indians shirt until they’re in the ALDS, but I love them all, dammit, and I am totally and completely expecting four-to-five more walk-off grand slams before the season is over.

Now isn’t the doldrums of sports fandom, folks. Now is the best.