Post Mortem

Where is the love for Ryan Howard? The Phillies first baseman is only eight home runs away from tying the single-season all-time record and yet he is receiving no attention. Ryan hit his 53rd home run of the season, leaving him eight behind all time leader Roger Maris.

Oh yeah, what about Barry Bonds, Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa? Yeah, not really feeling them anymore. Sure it would be na�ve to think that nobody is using steroids (*cough*AlbertPujols*cough*). But baseball is testing right now, so you have to give Howard the benefit of the doubt. Something that can�t be said for Bonds, McGwire and Sosa. It is obvious that Major League Baseball will never admit a mistake (must be taking a cue from President Bush), so it is up to the fans to make the distinction.

Maybe baseball fans can take a cue from the writers of Dallas who long ago wrote off a bad season as a dream. In other words, the tainted accomplishments of Bonds, McGwire and Sosa are obsolete and THN will now be following the �Chasing Maris� story as it develops over the next couple of weeks. As an added bonus, all THN participants are encouraged to sport one of those ridiculous crew cuts that the Maris kids made famous in 1998.

• Your Angels update: The team actually gained two games on Oakland over the holiday weekend, meaning that they will only have to go 28-1 over the final month to move within five games of the A�s. Even Chokeland could not blow this lead.

• You knew Jered Weaver was eventually going to be roughed up like he was against Seattle last week. You didn't know how he was going to respond. Seven shutout innings against Baltimore shows that it really didn�t effect the phenom that much.

AND FINALLY
Tiger Woods was able to chase down Vijay Singh to win whatever tournament Tiger won this week. (Seriously, that was the offcial name of the tourney.) Vijay would be such a perfect foil to Tiger, seeing that he is already established as an (expletive). But it�s hard to take a guy like Vijay seriously seeing that he is afraid of a woman.