Cue Cards is a series designed to assist with the common small talk about high-profile recent sporting events that is so omnipresent in the workplace, the bar, and other social settings.
Yesterday — Wednesday, September 24
- More champagne in baseball — It’s traditional in baseball to celebrate division titles or even just making the playoffs in flamboyant fashion. This tradition has evolved over time and today it involves wearing ski goggles and spraying champagne all over the locker room. For a sport whose regular season is an almost-every-day grind with teams playing 162 games over only around 180 days, the release is well earned. Yesterday the L.A. Dodgers clinched their division, the National League West division and celebrated ecstatically after beating the San Francisco Giants 9-1.
Line: I should celebrate my next achievement at work that way… Wonder what would happen to me if I did? - ESPN VIP suspended — Bill Simmons is one of the biggest names in sports media. He’s one of the original independent bloggers but as long since moved into the mainstream media within ESPN. He’s now a television personality, the driving force behind Grantland.com, a television producer, and one of the biggest podcasters out there. None of that kept ESPN from suspending him for three weeks for (we assume) critical comments he made about NFL commissioner Roger Goodell on his latest podcast. This suspension is a big news item because of Simmons’ celebrity and because it fans the flames of outrage among people already angry at sports establishments. There’s a #freesimmons going around on twitter with some great stuff which, as of now is the third highest trending topic on all of twitter. The first is just “Bill Simmons”… so yeah, people are paying attention to this story.
Line: No matter how big you get, you’re still an employee, I guess. [Lots of people are also saying:] Wow, that’s one more week than the NFL originally gave Ray Rice for the domestic violence itself.