Sports this 'n' that

The US Women's soccer team was honored with a ticker tape parade in New York on Wednesday. Two days prior, some numb-nutz decided to deface some posters of one of the team's biggest stars, Megan Rapinoe. Have to figure the vandal is in the tank for President Trump, whom Rapinoe has criticized in recent times.

A speculative poll was taken, placing Rapinoe just slightly ahead of Trump in the event she decided to primary the President next year. While that's not likely, and the pollsters who concocted this see Rapinoe as a flavor of the month, similar polls place some of next year's Democratic hopefuls ahead of Trump as well, suggesting that the novelty of this Ugly American President has worn off. Recent approval polls show 46 percent of those polled favor Trump.

If it hasn't been done already, the next time you'll see Rapinoe and her teammates is likely on Ellen DeGeneres' daily yap-fest.

Just the same, congratulations to Team USA.
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Aside from some poor judgment on the part of the scoreboard operators at Progressive Field, the Mets were well represented at the All-Star Game. You know, of course, that rookie phenom Peter Alonso won the Home Run Derby, clipping fellow rookie Vladimir Guerrero, Jr. (Toronto) in a final round for the ages. Guerrero, though, appeared to be out of gas by the finals after going to overtime to put away Dodgers star Joc Pederson.

On Tuesday, Mets utility ace and NL batting leader Jeff McNeil was unintentionally embarrassed by the scoreboard dweebs, who put Jacob deGrom's picture with McNeil's profile. Seems there were issues all through the three day festival.
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While he's a hero now in the ring, after starring in the last 4 "Marine" movies, Cleveland native Michael "The Miz" Mizanin, the lone WWE representative in the celebrity softball game on Sunday, acted like his old braggart self, and wound up a loser in front of his homies. Miz, last year's softball MVP, got hammered on the mound, then jetted to Newark the next day for Monday Night Raw, and was on the winning end of a 6-man tag match.

With WWE having consigned Jerry "The King" Lawler to a form of limbo, at least Miz gets to represent for his hometown, even though he now lives in Dallas with wife Maryse. You'll recall he also cut a video promo on Instagram after the Browns won their first game of 2018 vs. the Jets last fall.
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Back to the Mets. The New York Post showed their true colors in today's editions. The Mets' mid-season report card was brutal, to say the least, with mostly B's & C's and some D's for players. Manager Mickey Callaway and GM Brodie Van Wagenen, as well as off-season acquisitions Robinson Cano & Edwin Diaz, got the "what have you done for us lately" treatment from the tabloid, getting failing grades.

Alonso & McNeil, of course, were graded A+, but watch. Should they slack off the rest of the way, with 72 games remaining, the grade will be lowered. Beat writer Mike Puma should find another line of work, like selling sneakers........
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The Atlantic League, an independent baseball league, is experimenting with electronic umpires. Fans would love to see something like that in the bigs, as long as it hastens the retirement of veteran umpires such as Angel Hernandez and part-time country crooner Joe West, whom fans think aren't very good anymore, assuming they ever were. What commissioner Rob (Not so Mighty) Manfred should be doing, though, is evaluating the boys in blue on a more regular basis, and call some of the short-fuse types on the carpet well before the playoffs.

Hernandez, you might remember, had the stones to complain about racial discrimination in the last off-season, which some folks might think was a means of keeping his job.

Looking at all those compilation videos on YouTube of called strikes leading to player and/or manager ejections, the takeaway I get is that if the ball crosses the plate at the knees, even if it's outside the strike zone, the umpires will call it a strike anyway. On a checked swing, if the bat crosses the plate just enough above the ball as the latter passes through, it's going to be called. How these players and managers fail to realize this, I don't know.