Barry Bonds Seeks To Join Sport Where Additives Are Encouraged

In other miscellaneous Red Sox news, NASCAR team owner Jack Roush is in continued negotiations with Red Sox owner John Henry to sell part of the Roush team to Henry's Fenway Sports Group. Roush's team includes NASCAR drivers Matt Kenseth, Greg Biffle, Carl Edwards, and Jamie McMurray. The deal would likely result in marketing and sponsorship opportunities from the largely untapped northeast market, who care about NASCAR generally about as much as most people care about ESPN2's broadcasts of the National Spelling Bee or World Scrabble Championship. Additionally, it may result in one of Roush's cars being painted Red Sox colors, and maybe one of their drivers will don the Wally the Green Monster costume during the race. Who knows. Regardless, it'd be a win-win for both teams, considering NASCAR could have the Red Sox stump for them in the northeast and the Red Sox wouldn't have to revenue-share their NASCAR marketing earnings. Granted, first talk of negotiations between the two surfaced in February of 2005, and the latest article says it "could be a while" before the deal is finalized. So, maybe not.

And that's where I share my dirty secret - despite being from Massachusetts, I actually do enjoy NASCAR quite a bit. In fact, I like nearly anything that can be called sport and contains competition and winners. (Which rules out things like hunting and fishing - murder isn't quite sporting. Now, if the hunters got mauled every so often, that would be a much different story.) NASCAR is especially good as background on those lazy Sunday afternoons where I'm puttering around on the internet and completely wasting the remaining vestiges of my weekend. You don't really have to pay attention, and the times you do there's usually loud crashing sounds or the announcers get all excited. Those tight races and daring passes towards the end are, ok, exciting. I don't have a favorite driver or anything, so I default to my usual "root for the underdogs and newbies" rule. That means I get excited whenever anyone I haven't heard of is in contention, or relative newbies like Biffle, Edwards, and Denny Hamlin are doing good. And I've always had a soft spot for Matt Kenseth because he's a good driver and I feel like his 2003 championship, whose consistency apparently bored everyone into instituting the Chase, was unnecessarily disparaged.

So, if you're looking for sports coverage about sports you don't usually see blogged about, I'm your guy. There's some Super Bowl thing coming up and we'll probably be typing our thoughts on that over the next few days, so I'll probably take the time personally to research more into curling, badminton, and professional pillow fighting. I'll leave you with a little of what NASCAR hopes to bring to New England. Good luck, boys!