Welcome to Rodriguez and Granderson Are Dead!

I’m not going to regale you with some epic story about the genesis of this blog.  It wasn’t something that was long in the making; there’s no interesting circumstance under which it was born; hell, we weren’t even drunk when we came up with the idea.  I think the best way to put it is that one day I figured we’d write about sports, and then made it happen.

I’m a pretty direct guy, so I’m going to keep this short.  Here’s what we’re about: 

1. Analysis.  We’re all guys who like things that aren’t strictly speaking obvious, and we like finding and talking about these sorts of things.  Like -  who was the best player to hit only four home runs in a season?  We think that’s worth talking about.
2. Whimsy.  I’m the wrong guy for this.  I’m Jason Bateman to Gavin’s Will Arnett.  Even so, I swear that I like jokes, and I promise that if you’re willing to slog through my dry prose you’ll find some gems in somebody else’s.
3. Adventure.  I don’t know what we’re going to do next, and neither do you.  That’s pretty cool, right?

We’ll address these three priorities with varying degrees of seriousness.  I’m starting out with a rather bookish and academic profile of salaries in the NHL and NBA, and Gavin is starting with an NHL Draft diary.  (He went to the Draft.  That’s pretty fucking cool.) Ryan’s writing something about Matt Stairs and will probably rattle off a really interesting series of articles on the curious phenomenon of fandom, and Kunle will invariably write something brilliant and prescient about soccer.   We’re just as likely to write about the economic ramifications of the NBA lockout as we are to look at the best NHL analog for Charlie Conway, and we think this is a healthy way to look at sports. Basically - fandom really is silly and irrational, and yet we spend hours each day obsessing over what LeBron means for society.   There’s something interesting there.

We’re interested in just about every sporting event known to man (or at least, to illegal Internet streams).  Expect us to write about damn near anything, but we probably only think seriously about the MLB, the NFL, the NBA, the NHL and various aspects of international soccer.  That’s a decent spread, but we’ll write about cricket, and we’re not experts.

As for our name – we believe in the power of positive thinking, and in the power of bad puns.  We’re not going to profess any sort of official bias toward any sports team here, but we will exhibit one against the Yankees.

Most of all, we’re in this to have fun and to think a little bit differently about sports.  We hope that you will too.

- Jose Mena