In a story TMZ.com is calling an exclusive because someone paid them to write about it, Anna Benson, wife of former New York Mets Baltimore Orioles pitcher Kris Benson, shocked and upset producers of ‘Baseball Wives’, a reality show debuting tonight, when she threatened Chuck Knoblauch’s wife with a stun gun and a 12-inch dildo she’d produced from her purse. I find three things wrong with this news blurb:

1. There is no way somebody married Chuck Knoblauch.

2. Who tries to threaten somebody with a dildo, and furthermore, what kind of porno-ready Magic Murder Bag is Anna Benson carrying around where she can comfortably transport and whip out a 12-inch dong? My girlfriend barely has enough room in her purse for my keys.

3. Shouldn’t your husband have to be playing baseball to make you a “baseball wife”? I think I’ve started more Major League games in the last five years than Kris Benson.

Anyway, if “reality show person shocks reality show people with reality show behavior” wasn’t enough to clue you in, TMZ’s finishing line of

Sources tell us … show execs are trying to contain Anna.

should be enough to tip you off to the bullsh*t. I don’t know what’s funnier, the idea of Baseball Wives producers trying to wrangle a terrible baseball player’s gold-digging stripper wife in a circus cage to maintain the integrity of their Celebreality fame-whore Thunderdome or TMZ’s use of ellipses making it read like they’re on the end of a 1950s newswire with bated breath, breaking the sentence up into fragments to get us the news as fast as possible. BREAKING NEWS, STOP. BASEBALL WIVES DRAMA, STOP. CHUCK KNOBLAUCH’S MOTHER-WIFE STRUCK BY PHALLUS, STOP.

You can check out ‘Baseball Wives’ tonight on VH1, or even better, you can’t.

Bobby Valentine has been named manager of the Boston Red Sox. The report, with just the right amount of snark, from the New York Post:

The Yankees-Red Sox rivalry took on an entirely new dimension last night when Boston reached a verbal agreement with Bobby Valentine — who never met a spotlight he didn’t try to outshine — to become the 45th manager in franchise history.

Valentine, according to a source, was flying last night from Japan, where the former Mets manager participated in a charity event and made personal appearances, to Boston to sign a contract. A news conference is expected to be held tomorrow.

Two important things you need to know:

- Keeping in mind that the only real quantitative success the Boston Red Sox have had in the last 100 years was through thinking outside the box with a roster of eccentric personalities, an eccentric personality who thinks outside the box like Bobby Valentine is a great fit at manager. Also, he’s not Terry Francona, who can be be singularly blamed for every Boston-related problem to happen over the last 2-5 years.

- Bobby Valentine doesn’t just give the thumbs up or thumbs down to sandwiches, he invents them. According to Bobby Valentine, Bobby Valentine invented the wrap sandwich when a customer at his Bobby Valentine’s Sports Gallery Cafe ordered a club and the toaster was broken. You can thank today’s Hot Clicks for that little chestnut. Bobby Valentine also invented the chestnut when a hungry squirrel wandered into his restaurant and they were out of tater skins.

Personally I think the best part of the story is that it was broken by Tommy LaSorda, as all good stories are.

[Ed. note - In celebration of this week's theatrical release of The Muppets, here's our thing about Muppets. If you haven't seen it yet, you're in for a treat.]

We’re still a few months away from the release of The Muppets, starring and written by Jason Segel, but my excitement couldn’t be higher. Hold on, I’m receiving a breaking news message… *squirrel in a hot air balloon drops a note tied to an acorn on the table* … it appears that The Muppets also stars Rashida Jones and Mila Kunis, so I may have an awesome heart attack soon. In the meantime, it’s Friday and now I’m all Muppety, so what the hell can I do to resolve this?

Thankfully, while looking for something completely unrelated yesterday, I stumbled across the Muppets Wiki site and started perusing the history of the happiest shows of my childhood – The Muppet Show and Sesame Street. Eventually I realized that a lot of athletes have been told how to get to, how to get to Sesame Street over the past 42 years, and it all started with Jackie Robinson in 1969. From there, children and adults who are still children at heart watched with glee as their favorite athletes stopped by to teach us about the alphabet, sharing, numbers, living in garbage cans, depression, being a giant bird, same sex partnerships with bottle cap enthusiasts, and building motor skills, among others.

After the jump, I’ve compiled an extensive history of athletes making appearances on Sesame Street and with the Muppets. If you don’t enjoy this or smile the whole way through, then I’m afraid we’ll never be friends. And that would make Big Bird very sad.

Read the rest of this entry »

ESPN The Magazine has released a batch of photos from the 2011 installment of their annual “The Body Issue”, and while full-on nudity isn’t something we can really share with you at With Leather, we can’t see a picture of Blake Griffin dunking with his pants down and not share it with you. It gives the whole “dunking over a car” thing an extra degree of difficulty.

This year’s issue isn’t as conservative as 2009, when most of the athletes were wearing shorts, but it remains tasteful and doesn’t tread near the whole “seeing Patrick Willis’ pubic hair” thing from last year. There are a lot (a lot) of gorgeous women from nearly every corner of the sports world featured, including-but-not-limited-to Hope Solo, LPGA rookie Belen Mozo, foxy roller derby star Suzy Hotrod, the WNBA’s statuesque Sylvia Fowles and the lady pulling a LeBron James in the image up top, Olympic silver medal gymnast Alicia Sacramone. I’m really glad that isn’t LeBron James.

Of course, the following gallery is only a sampling, and you should head on over to ESPN The Magazine The Website to see more, including the pictures I’m not authorized to show you (or, “Wow, time to Wikipedia the sh*t out of Stephanie Gilmore”). Also, consider buying the magazine itself, if that’s your bag. Now please click through and laugh at that weird picture of Jon “Bones” Jones peeing in his swimming pool.

Read the rest of this entry »

[header photo by way of Amanda Rykoff]

Links

A Short Time Ago In A Stadium Not Far Far Away - The only thing Jason Fry of Faith and Fear In Flushing knows more about than the New York Mets is Star Wars, so it is super awesome that he got to be a Stormtrooper for the Mets. Read about his story (he’s the one in the picture). [Faith and Fear]

Twitter Reacts To The News That Basketball Star Glen Rice Allegedly Banged Sarah Palin In 1987 - This is a great follow-up to yesterday’s article on With Leather for two reasons — one, it’s funny, and two, it gets the Tea Party yahoos googling “Sarah Palin Glen Rice” shuffled off to a different section of UPROXX. [UPROXX]

Six TV-Inspired Video Games That Were Nothing Like The Shows That Inspired Them - I remember playing that Home Improvement game and thinking it was one of the dumbest things ever. Somebody should make a King of Queens game where you have to drive post-apocalyptic battle cars. [Warming Glow]

The 15 Best Singing Performances In Non-Musical Films - Do the Country Bears count? What about “Don Henley as a Country Bear”? Because that was pretty amazing. [UPROXX]

Christina Hendricks Would Still Like To Be Wonder Woman - I would like for Christina Hendricks to stop smoking, get a part of her body other than the boobs in shape and display some sort of athleticism anywhere ever before getting to be Wonder Woman. [Gamma Squad]

AKNITomy: Amazing Knitted Dissected Animals - This is cute, and is the only way dissection should be done. The only thing I ever dissected was owl poop, and I didn’t get much farther than OH GOD THAT IS BONES. [Gamma Squad]

Awesome Mash-Up Alert: Twilight Plus Slapshot - Awesome mash-up idea alert: Slapshot plus anything. [Film Drunk]

Tyler Perry Tops Forbes’ List, Proves There Is No God - Mr. Brown is pretty funny, but no, not “millions and millions of dollars” funny. [Smoking Section]

Behold, the Greatest Book of All Time - This is number two all time, right behind The Bluest Eye. I’m gonna guess they have similar plots. [Buzzfeed]

Amanda Seyfried: ‘I can’t believe nobody wanted to see Megan Fox and me hitting it’ - I did, I totally did, I just didn’t want to sit through 45 minutes of Diablo Cody dialogue to get there. I checked out somewhere after “honest to blog”. [FARK]

20 Other Anticlimactic ‘Star Trek 2′ Confirmations - “Deep Space Nine will not appear, and we will continue pretending it didn’t exist, except in video packages about how we’re ahead of our time when it comes to gender and race relations.” [Moviefone]

Internet Browsers as Pretty Ladies - what [Unreality]

“I heard his mom screaming, looked back and blood was squirting out of his forehead,” said Mets second-basemen Justin Turner. “I felt sick to my stomach.”

That comment puts into perspective this video of a young boy getting his face rearranged by a Greg Dobbs line-drive. The shot happened top of the ninth inning of Monday’s game between the Mets and the Florida Marlins, and while most fan and ball interactions in the stands are funny (the Astros fan side-stepping a pop fly to let it hit his girlfriend) or facepalm-worthy (Steve Bartman, any whimpering little kids), this one is just unsettling. Thankfully we never get a clear look at the shot or the squirting blood, but what we can see is enough.

The boy got a bat as a souvenir, but chances are he’ll be carrying this frozen rope to the head with him for the rest of his life. Eventually we’re going to have to play baseball games in aquariums to keep people from getting hit, tripping down flights of stairs or falling to their death.

[h/t Ted Williams Head, by way of Jimmy Traina]