The other day, a guy selling stuff on the sidewalk saw my Sox hat and started yelling about how optimistic he is and how he thinks we're gonna win the east. Good to hear. And why not? The Yankees are a turd factory in the making, though you can never assume they're out of it, the O's can't possibly duplicate that one-run-game-win-athon (can they?), the Rays are supposed to be some kind of sleeper but I'm not buying that, and the Jays...are good on paper but the rest of us are just assuming there's no wolf. Meanwhile, the Red Sox have good pitching and good hitting. So we win. Right?

Today Jackie Bradley went deep, on TV, opposite field, off Cliff Lee! Apparently this dude wants to make the team. And Castig said today that he's named after Jackie Wilson, not Robinson, which is cool because it's less obvious. If he were a singer, I'd prefer he was named after Robinson.

The Yanks got Vernon Wells. And they're saying Jeter will probably start the season on the DL. The boos for Noony on Opening Day will be a little louder than normal, that should be sweet.

As for Smarch Smadness: The Zags lost. Kim and I always root for them since she shares a last name with the school, but this year, with them being a legit top-notch team, I went ahead and picked then to go all the way. It stinks to lose your champ the first weekend. And the rest of my final 8 are alive! But without a champ, I'm probably dead. Unless maybe I get no more losses the rest of the way, and Florida Gulf Coast wins it all so nobody gets any points for having the champ. Anyway, it was that inbounds play that killed the Zags. And the network missed it! And the announcers never explained what happened! I'd say 90% of people watching didn't know why suddenly the ball was given to the other team after they scored to take the lead. What happened was that one Zag gave the ball to another. That guy thought he was going to inbound the ball so he walked out of bounds with it, ready to throw it in. But the guy who gave it to him was out of bounds. Meaning that was the inbounds pass. We at home saw somebody's parents in the crowd instead of this. And got no explanation.

The Davidson ending was crazy on Thursday. I actually had them for $1000. Which means I bet them to win it all for $2, at 500/1. And they had that game in the bag, but threw the ball away while basically trying to run out the final 10 seconds. Other team gets it back, makes lay-up as Davidson forgets to play D. I still would have been five wins away from the grand, but that would have been a nice first step.

I hope you used my Vegas theory in your pool. In the 5-12 games, I nailed them all, and three of them were won by the 12s. All because Vegas told me in those games that the 12 wasn't that much of an underdog.

This year's tourney HQ was a bar in SoNo called Bradford's. I always base bars on how closely they resemble the mythical bar atmosphere I learned about while watching Cheers as a kid: well-lit, quiet, roomy, and smoke-free. Turns out the person who created Cheers had never attended a bar. Anyway, Bradford's had the room and the lighting, and of course smoke's jersey has long been retired, but some shitty DJ was playing shitty music at a shittily loud level, so I had to scream all night. Plenty of TVs which is good for my Smadness needs. Oddly, though, they seemed to have no waiters. Even in the half of the establishment that was clearly made for table-style dining. We finally asked at the bar and they sent a waiter over. About 45 minutes later I got a pizza. At least it was good pizza. Place was mostly dudes watching games, and everybody kept to their own groups, not much stumbling or fake-machismo fight threats that never turn into real fights. So it was okay, if a little Yankee-centric. And I got to see my old pals.

So I guess from here on in I'll root for Gulf Coast and former MAAC members LaSalle