Sports

Bad news for the Broncos, Smith out for season

Jeromey Balderrama

Well the bad news keeps piling up for the Broncos.  Two players placed on IR, one of them being the legendary Bronco Rod Smith.

From ESPN:

Denver Broncos wide receiver Rod Smith, the franchise leader in every major receiving category, will not return to the field in 2007, the team decided on Thursday, and his future in the game is now uncertain.

The team also lost first-round defensive end Jarvis Moss, the 17th player selected overall in this year’s draft, to a season-ending leg injury sustained in practice. Moss broke his right fibula and suffered torn ligaments in his right ankle when his foot caught in the turf during a nine-on-seven drill.

…Smith was bothered by persistent soreness in the hip, however, and that prompted a recent visit to a specialist. Based on the specialist’s findings, the Broncos and Smith decided that it was fruitless to continue the comeback attempt. It is not known if Smith, 37, will attempt to play in 2008.

Bummer.  While we weren’t hurting at WR, Smith would have been a welcome addition to the roster, especially with Javon Walker hurt.  We definitely can’t stand to lose more defensive linemen.

Why the "Stampede" tramples Bronco fans

Jeromey Balderrama

When the Broncos unveiled their own drum-line – the Stampede – for the 2004 season, I was ecstatic.  I love the marching band presence at football games, and for the Broncos to have the presence of a drum-line was a welcome addition.  However, over the years the Stampede concept hasn’t panned out to it’s potential, and has grown into an annoyance, ultimately drawing irritation and resentment at Broncos games.  As a drummer, I may be sensitive about this issue, the problems plaguing the Stampede are someday going to spill beyond annoying the musically-inclined at the games.

Among the Stampede’s struggles, many stem from the following dilemmas:

  • Their in-game repertoire is extremely limited.  As the Stampede enters it’s 4th year it still manages to play the same 3 cadences every game.  Based on my anecdotal observations the Stampede usually gets 5-6 opportunities to be featured throughout the game.  Rather than learning new cadences they’ve resorted to adding additional instruments (more on that later).  I realize that they may not have a lot of opportunity to rehearse, but the fact that they’ve played the same cadences for four years without any incorporation of new material is far-fetched for a high school drum-line, let alone a line made up of former Blue Knights. To be fair, they take part in pre-game festivities and may have parking-lot cadences they don’t play, but why haven’t they rotated those cadences into the game performances?
  • The expansion to non-percussion instruments.  Rather than learn new material, the drum-line incorporated a trumpet player.  The trumpet player increased the repertoire of the Stampede by a whopping 2 songs: Shakira’s “La Tortura”, and a popular jazz song that escapes me at the moment.  At this point the 16-member drum-line has relegated to “rock-band” mode: becoming a glorified drum-set.  The trumpet player takes center stage and defeats the purpose of having a drum-line out there.  The trumpet player is plagued with the same inability to learn new material, and still manages to to play the song with a poor tone and out of tune.  Two years ago they managed to put a guitar player out there with the drum-line, luckily someone came to their senses and we haven’t seen the guitar in over a season.  I had hoped we’d seen the last of the trumpet player when the season began with only the drum-line, but the Green Bay game squashed that hope.
  • Their lack of discipline while they perform.  The coolest part about a drum-line is when they play with a military-like precision, appearing uniform and focused.  In my drum-line days, we made it a point to appear serious (even intimidating), and locking it in: both visually and audibly.  The Stampede has thrown that concept out the window.  During performances the drummers take every opportunity to self-promote themselves, and often stop playing so they want wave at the camera or draw attention to themselves.  This results in their playing looking and sounding sloppy.
  • They’re a closed, nepotistic operation.  The Stampede is presented by the Blue Knights drum corp and due to that sponsorship are completely made up of Blue Knight alums.  This looks good on paper, but in reality turns out to be a bad arrangement.  Where the intention was to have personnel who understand the concept and work-ethic of drum corps, you turn out to have drummers with chops that aren’t what they used to be, as well as the perceived security in their position that gives way to an acceptance of mediocrity and the lack of desire to improve (hence the lack of repertoire and discipline).  You also have drummers who have corp-level ability and experience that are ignored, simply because they weren’t Blue Knights.

    I don’t mean to call out the work-ethic or qualifications of the drummers, but I do have to wonder how the quality could improve if there was a yearly, open audition for the drum-line – just like the cheerleaders.  The healthy competition would not only result in an improved drum-line, but could also be a good PR move for the Broncos organization – just like the Cheerleader auditions or the spring.

 

Obviously a change in attitude and work ethic regarding the drum-line could lead to improvement, but I have two alternatives as to how this could be fixed overnight:

  • Hold yearly auditions, open to all drummers in Colorado.  The Blue Knights could still have an active involvement in facilitating auditions, holding rehearsals.  This may be self-serving (as I would give my right sticks away to have the opportunity to represent the Broncos through drumming), but I can guarantee you that I’m not the only drummer that feels this way.  This would pave way for certain expectations, diversify the Stampede, as well as give the Blue Knights an opportunity to work with drummers over 21 or who maybe didn’t have the opportunity to devote their summer to a corp.
  • Do away with the “static-personnel” Stampede and have a “rotating” Stampede: in the form of high-school and college drum-lines that play for the home game that week.  Each drum-line has their own repertoire of cadences that they can feature.  With marching being in-season (or recently in-season) they would be in-form to give off an impressive performance at the Broncos game.  This would be a great opportunity to offer a unique experience for the drum-lines, as well as diversify the opportunity to participate in the Stampede.

With all the struggles the Broncos are having on the field this season, the Stampede may be the last thing on their mind.  Nonetheless, there is always opportunity to improve and I wanted to offer a few humble thoughts and suggestions on how the Broncos can have the best drum-line in the NFL.

Even in leaving, Pay-Rod finds a way to anger people

Jeromey Balderrama

They say that timing is everything, and in the case of A-Rod it seems that his timing couldn’t be worse.  In a move that has angered many Yankee fans, Alex Rodriguez managed to anger many in the baseball community as well – by choosing to announce his departure from the Yankees while the World Series was going on. 

“There was no reason to make an announcement last night other than to try to put his selfish interests and that of one individual player above the overall good of the game,” [baseball’s Chief of Operations] DuPuy said. “Last night and today belong to the Boston Red Sox, who should be celebrated for their achievement, and to the Colorado Rockies, who made such an unbelievable run to the World Series.”

It seems Pay-Rod is too good to hop a plane to Colorado to accept a batting award from Legend (and true home run king) Hank Aaron.  It turns out he had better things to do, like call attention to himself over the game.  Pissing off fans is not the best way to start your free agency tour.  Somehow this seems like an appropriate end to his lackluster time in New York.  A-Rod is an amazing talent, but seemed like he couldn’t do anything right in New York.  I think most of that came from Yankee fans, but this incident shows that some of it may have been justified.

As for the Pay-Rod sweepstakes – my bet is the Cubs.

Begin: Rockies Ticket Disaster Part II

Jeromey Balderrama

By now everyone is sadly aware that the Rockies ended up getting swept by the Red Sox, and thus there is no game 5. The tickets to game 5 that I was lucky enough to buy are now essentially useless. Next step: trying to get my money back for the canceled tickets.

I went to the Rockies web site this morning and clicked on “Ticket Refund” information, only to find this extremely vague statement:

TicketDisaster2

I understand why we’re supposed to mail the actual tickets (for the poor folks who resorted to buying eBay’ed tix), but how the heck can you expect a refund when you’re not instructed to send them more information? Would it be too hard for someone in Rockies management to make a quick form that you can print, fill-out and mail with your tickets? I guess I’m going to write a letter asking for my refund and include it with the tickets.

After the debacle that was the sale of World Series tickets, would it be too much to ask to not have a potential cluster**** with the return of the tickets? Geez it’s going to suck going through the 50,000+ tickets by hand, hoping the people in the ticket office can read the return address.

How the Rockies pissed away good will

Jeromey Balderrama

At the Broncos game last night they had one of those "Mascot v. kids" competitions to kill the minutes of half-time.  They went through and introduced various mascots from the NFL and around the Denver area.  When they announced Dinger from the Rockies, the crowd at Mile High went nuts.  Bethany made a comment that the excitement for a mascot shows you how crazy Denver is about the Rockies.  The electricity buzzing up here in Colorado has been amazing over the last week, and the Rockies stockpiled so much good will that they could do no wrong.  Unfortunately their management managed to screw everything up with this World Series ticket debacle.

I don’t really blame the Rockies for having web site troubles.  I’m all-too familiar with capacity issues with web applications.  The writing was on the wall and I was expecting the ticket site to get slammed.  Their actions leading up to the situation are questionable and how they’ve reacted to it has been inexcusable.

First and foremost: what do you expect when you go with a small company to save you money, you’re going to get what you pay for.  When the Rockies announced they were taking sales exclusively on-line, it was easy to see this coming.  I hate Ticketcrapster, and they are definitely the Evil Empire with their fees, but I give them this: they’ve never had capacity issues in recent history.  I’m not familiar with Paciolan, and although they say they sell tickets to 200 markets they obviously dropped the ball on World Series Ticket forecasting.  I’m not familiar with their infrastructure, but from what I could tell they didn’t have nearly the capacity to handle the hits they received.  With good planning it should have been easy for them to increase capacity ahead of time, but someone screwed up.  Now they have a black eye and have probably lost their MLB contracts.

Which leads me to how they’ve reacted…  As the day moved on, the latest excuse has been that we were a victim of malicious attack.  Can anyone hear that sound?  It’s the "Baaaa" of a SCAPEGOAT.  While a DOS attack is always possible, this wasn’t the situation.  Everyone was looking to buy World Series tickets and were pointing every computer and browser they own right at the site.  The symptoms may be the same as DOS – you’re site’s down – but this is far from an attack.  I won’t subscribe to the notion that this was some pissed Bo-Sox, Diamondback or Padre fan pissed at the Rockies.  Give me a break, this reeks of a capacity issue.

Rockies management isn’t responsible for the technological issues, but they were definitely caught with their pants down and don’t have an excuse for their behavior during and after the incident.  How could you not go into this scenario without "Plan B"?  It’s called risk-management – web site down and the best solution they had was to hide in their Coors Field compound.  When they finally suspended ordering they offered no details or no ETA for a fix.  They simply stated they hoped to be back soon.  People had no choice but to continue to fire their browsers at the site.

We finally get word that Rockies management will emerge and announce their next steps at 4pm.  4pm turned into 5pm, then 5pm turned into 6pm.  They finally manage to come out right before 6:30 and simply say "We’re sorry, we have nothing and we don’t know when we’ll be up."  Then they have the gall to get defensive with the media, as if they couldn’t understand why people would be upset with a 2-sentence update.

Finally they put their heads together and came up with their master plan: do the same thing on Tuesday.  Good thing they made up – I mean – discovered the "malicious attack" excuse and are assuring everyone that Tuesday will be ok.  Oh and that Plan B?  Still missing…  Tuesday’s going to be interesting to say the least.

I don’t hold the Rockies team & players responsible (and still stand by my apology), but I do have to admit that I’ve lost a little bit of excitement.  Rockies management has put a bitter taste in my mouth with this whole situation.  The Rockies players have done the unbelievable – won 21 of 22 game to get into the World Series – while their management has done the unthinkable: piss away all of the good will through their incompetence.

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