Who wants to be a pitcher and who wants to be a catcher?

The time after the Super Bowl is always an odd point in the sporting year, mainly because it is the time of year that where there is no real sports story since some of the sports are in midseason (NBA and NHL), some are just starting to get interesting (College Basketball), and others have not even started again yet (MLB). As such, sports fanatics like myself find themselves wondering what they should focus on for the next couple of weeks until those seasons really get amped up. (Note: The NHL could be playing with a nuclear warhead strapped to the puck that may or may not detonate upon contact, and I still would not care enough to watch that stupid shit.)

As a result, we meaning me and the rest of the sporting nerds, start caring about things like signing day (today) in college football where college fans across the country find out who will be the future of their school on the grid iron and who at their school will someday find themselves in the police blotter for idiotic act that will undoubtily involve some type of narcotic, a halloween mask, a "borrowed" vehicle, and a paint or pellet gun. (If you are lucky both weapons will be involved along with an indescribable sex act.) An entire site dedicated to my alma mater's class can be found here.

Others of us start counting down the days till pitchers and catchers report to Spring Training as these are the first players to start the annual migration to either Florida or Arizona in Major League Baseball for the upcoming season. (My teams countdown to pitchers and catchers arrival can be found here.) For Red Sox fans like myself, this time of year used to mean that we would get our hopes up that this could be the year. Since 2004, however, with the winning of the World Series and the subsequent over exposure of our team, I now just obsess over whether or not this will help the team embarass those t-bags from the Bronx and avoid hopefully avoid the embarassment that was the 2006 season.

Another option is to find other sporting events to fill the void that football-less Saturdays and Sundays have created. This year, I have taken to watching real Football i.e. soccer in the form of the Premier League, which has games on Saturdays and Sundays on Fox Sports Network or is that Fox Soccer Network and features the best clubs in England. The current standings are here, and for those of you out there that want to find a team too cheer on, your research should start like with most things here. I tend to support Arsenal mainly because that is the team I use on FIFA Soccer 07 when playing on my Xbox. (Yes, my obsession has now creeped into my video game playing. What can I say, I am a catch.)

Finally, another popular source of distraction is to focus on a crazy little sport stories that otherwise would get no run at any other time during the year. One such story is that Alex Rodriguez, possibly the biggest tool in baseball, wrote a children's book called, Out of the Ballpark, which per HarperCollins is about a boy named Alex who knows what it’s like to swing at a wild pitch or have a ball bounce right between his legs. Now, for those of you out there who do not know, Alex Rodriguez had one of the most criticized seasons of his entire career in 2006. It was a season that featured more errors than ever in his career and plate appearances that made the average baseball fan wonder if Mr. Rodriguez had ever picked up a bat before. Of course, now he claims that the book has nothing to do with last season but more is a story about a child overcoming adversity and learning valuable life lessons on the way. (That is not a quote but isn't that what every crappy kids book written by an athlete is about?) Fact of the matter is the book is probably just another part of the annual Alex Rodriguez campaign to get people to like him instead of just realizing that he is trying way to hard and probably should just go the complete opposite direction becoming a villaneous wretch of a human being. Atleast then he could stop this charade.

So that is where we stand in the sports world at the present time in weird holding pattern where any random stories, sporting events, or feats of athleticism seize our attention without warning and for indeterminate periods of time. Waiting for the other sports to hit their stride or to start again. Now, if you will excuse me, the United States is playing Mexico this evening in soccer, and I have to figure out who exactly is on the US team so that I can scream at the television appropriately.