By JIMMY D / Trade sends Jimmy's fantasy hopes out West | Jimmy's archive

‘Hey baby, wanna fix a match?’

Jimmy was never the king of pickup lines and he didn’t have any time to use any good ones last week as he visited Montreal on business.

But there sure seemed to be a lot of opportunity to roll out some cool lines. Hot, young, athletic-looking babes strolled around Jimmy’s hotel everywhere. There were so many of them, Jimmy got a little nervous that maybe they were stalking him.

It turned out he was staying at the same hotel as many of the tennis crowd playing in the women’s Rogers Cup event (won by Dinara Safina, whom I think bumped into Jimmy in the elevator).

In any event, there were no Maria Sharapova sightings, although Jimmy went looking when he realized the hotel was awash with Eastern European tennis babes. And no takers on the ‘Hey baby, wanna fix a match together and live happily ever after?’ offer.

Not a single one of them found it funny, which makes sense in the wake of recent match-fixing controversies involving the men’s tour. No tennis fix with tennis chicks.

Go west, young Manny 

Zany, behaviourally troubled, RBI-producer extraordinaire Manny Ramirez talked his way out of Boston last week. And his former bosses sent him as far away as possible – to a different league on a different coast.

Ramirez made an immediate impact (on the Dodgers and Jimmy’s fantasy roster), hitting into a double play in the ninth to squelch a rally in his first game, then homering while going 4-for-5 and driving in three runs against Arizona Sunday.

The man who hit 99 homers and drove 310 runs in between 1998 and 1999 for Cleveland has been a solid, clutch, bizarre fixture in the middle of the Bosox order since 2001. Dodger Stadium is huge, so expect his power numbers to falter a bit, but his average should spike up for the final two months. It was troubling that he didn’t hit very well in interleague play for Boston, but he is a professional hitter who will figure out the NL pitchers.

Speaking of fantasy baseball, Jimmy’s Jackals remain well back of the leaders, the result of the league-worst ERA and second-worst WHIP. To try to change that, he dropped two position players and stacked his rosters with more starters including young fireballer Ubaldo Jimenez in Colorado and geezer fireballer Randy Johnson.

Both have pitched well of late. The Jackals need a Colorado Rockie-like run of luck and hot play to make it close. With new players in Los Angeles, Arizona and Colorado, it’s the NL West that will decide Jimmy’s fate. Just like Manny Ramirez, Jimmy D goes west to find baseball success.

Boxing McFails to grab attention

Boxing used to look down its nose at MMA/UFC as a small-time gong show. Imagine Don King and the rest of boxing’s assortment of crooked misfits looking down on someone else?

Anyway, Montreal’s Georges St. Pierre headlines a major pay-per-view MMA event this weekend at a major-league venue - the Target Center in Minneapolis. Meanwhile, boxing seems a little punch-drunk this summer and hasn’t exactly rebounded from the Floyd Mayweather retirement news.
Wanna talk about small-time gong shows?

Take the big boxing event Thursday in Michigan. Yup, it’s at The Farmer’s Market in Royal Oak. You can see Pete Cantu (who?) take on challenger Jamie Castellano, that hard-working, soft-punching dude with the 4-17 career record. That’s four wins and 17 losses. He must have just missed making the US Olympic team.

On Saturday, you get the notion that a boxer is being set up for failure against 25-1 Travis Simms at the Radisson Hotel in Columbia South Carolina. Why? Because the challenger is 12-34-2 and his name is Mike McFail. It’s one thing to be named MacPhail, but to change your name to reflect your lack of aptitude makes it seem like the fix might be in on that one.

Jimmy will wager a McChicken sandwich and a McFlurry drink on McFail.

Jimmy D

jpoole@herald.ca