Good Luck, Joe

Joe Lacob understands how to succeed against long odds. That's what venture capitalists do: they put money on the table (and sometimes double down), hoping for a big payoff. They're also known to fold 'em when they have a weak hand.

But the gambling analogy isn't perfect, because VC's don't just sit back and let their wagers ride. They get very involved in the companies they fund (Lacob sits on a number of corporate boards), actively working to arrange mergers or recruit executives.

Studying the VC way of doing business may help understand what kind of an owner Joe Lacob will be, now that he's pulled off a bit of coup by purchasing the Golden State Warriors for $450 million (it's not all Lacob's money; Hollywood mogul Peter Guber is in on the deal). Everyone was reporting that Oracle CEO Larry Ellison was going to win the Warriors (and by his own admission, Ellison outbid Lacob), but a Sand Hill Road moneyman is now in charge.

One thing sacred to a venture capitalist is a business plan. Lacob has already said he has plans for the Warriors, and you can bet there's some PowerPoint in there somewhere. But let's hope he's ready for some surprises. Businesspeople (and those who invest in businesses) may think they know how to react and adapt, but what do you do when a significant asset like your first-round draft choice ruins his wrist and will miss most of his first season?

By all accounts, Lacob is a serious sports nut and a guy with deep Bay Area roots. He may not have Ellison's star power (though I believe those who thought Ellison would have been a Mark Cuban-like figure would have been sorely disappointed), but I'd be shocked if he treated his ownership role the way Chris Cohan did. Expect Lacob to be firmly in charge. Venture capitalists don't do hands-off very well.

Whether that will be enough to clear the bizarre curse that seems to have settled over the Warriors franchise is something we'll learn as time passes.

Blown Call at the All-Star Game

Tim Lincecum goes to the All-Star Game and doesn't play.

Are you kidding me?

There's no good explanation for Charlie Manuel's decision not to use Lincecum in the Midsummer Classic. The Freak is the two-time defending NL Cy Young Award winner and the kind of player fans love to watch. Younger fans, in particular, gravitate toward the guy with the flowing locks and the skate-punk mystique. Plus, the dude can pitch a little.

Yet somehow, nine pitchers not named Tim Lincecum managed to get in some work. What was Manuel thinking?

Many people fault baseball commissioner Bud Selig for the "this time it counts" baloney, making the All-Star Game into a contest to decide home field advantage for the World Series. That's still a dumb idea, but the truly damaging aspect of it may now be coming to the surface. If baseball people like NL manager Manuel perceive the game as anything more than an exhibition game to showcase the sport's most popular stars, the fans lose.

Unfortunately, Giants fans will have to wait until next year to boo Charlie Manuel (the Phillies played their lone series in San Francisco two months ago). It's OK. I can wait, just like Lincecum did last night.

Rooting For Laundry

Once upon a time in a land far, far away, your sports heroes stayed put. Kids could roam the neighborhood wearing the hometown star's jersey for years with no fear of obsolescence.

Poof! Your dream is over. That little slice of Never-Never Land is long gone.

We sports fans invest our emotions (and money) in multimillion dollar franchises, which in turn hire multimillionaire athletes. The athletes are interchangeable. With rare exceptions (mostly New York Yankees like Jeter, Rivera and Posada), these people move on every few years in search of greener pastures.

We fans want our teams to win so we can whoop and holler and go to the victory parade. We like to think the players share our desire for success. And they do--to a point. What they're really in it for is the money. Sometimes one leads to the other, but there is no absolute correlation. At the end of the day, the athlete is, understandably, motivated by economics.

The LeBron James spectacle forces us all to confront this dichotomy. Did he spend the last two years hyping his impending free agency so he could increase the odds of winning an NBA Championship? Or did he do it to increase the value of Team LeBron?

You make the call. And you decide whether to keep wearing that Cavaliers jersey with his name on the back.

The New New Kid

Madison Bumgarner got a beer shower in the Giants clubhouse last night, and if he licked his lips to taste the suds, he broke the law.

Bumgarner can't legally order a brew for a few more weeks, but his teammates doused him in celebration of his first major-league win. He threw 8 shutout innings in Milwaukee to precipitate the locker-room precipitation.

Three years ago, Bumgarner was mowing 'em down for South Caldwell High School in Madison, NC. Last September, the Giants gave him a taste of big-league life. Last month, they called him up and tossed him into a nationally-televised start against the big, bad Boston Red Sox.

After 5 starts in the majors, Bumgarner is sporting a 2.53 ERA, that one win, and a very bright future. He doesn't throw wicked-hard, but he's a big, sturdy kid with a ton of stuff and a commanding presence. If you close your eyes when he talks, you hear a little bit of Roger Craig, the former Giants manager. The Humm Baby was also from the Tarheel State and also a pretty fair pitcher.

Bumgarner's arsenal includes a nice little bit of below-the-radar reality. While he was a first-round draft choice (#10, in 2007), he wasn't Number One (see Strasburg, Stephen under the heading of "Pitchers Under a Microscope"). Heck, he's not even the most-scrutinized starter on a staff that includes Tim "The Freak" Lincecum and Barry "Big-Contract" Zito. Staying out of the headlines can be a nice way to build a big-league resume'.

Bumgarner's way-beyond-his-years presence on the mound gives the Giants a very solid starting rotation, three of whom are lefthanders and four of whom are 27 or under. Given the economics of baseball, a young starting pitcher is truly money in the bank (money that can be spent on offensive players). Even if he doesn't spark the Giants into a playoff run this year, he gives their fans hope for next year and beyond.

An Unforgiving Game

Baseball is a harsh teacher. The game has a way of picking at a player's flaws and weaknesses until they're rubbed raw. Those who can adjust prosper. Those who can't often end up talking about the career that never quite took off.

Those who never played the game probably don't know how difficult this process really is. They see a guy like Pablo Sandoval or Tim Lincecum achieve early success and assume it'll always look easy.

But both of the young Giants stars are struggling right now. Lincecum is throwing too many pitches and while he's still good, he's not the kind of crazy-good that won him two straight Cy Young awards.

Sandoval is in the deepest down-phase of his young career. His batting average is down more than 50 points from last year. And he's hitting into double-plays at an alarming rate: in the first 787 plate appearances of his career, he grounded into 16 DP's. This year, in 314 plate appearances, he's hit into 17 (leading the free world in that category).

And then there are those two horrible base running gaffes in consecutive games against the Dodgers, the last of which had some fans booing The Panda as he left the field.

It's clear that Sandoval, still just 23 years old, is pressing. Hard. It's tempting to let him keep playing. But it's clearly time for the Giants to give him a break. It's not punishment; it would be an act of mercy to pull him out of the fray for a couple of days.

Let's hope Sandoval and Lincecum will adjust and bounce back. Both are serious about their craft, but baseball is a hard taskmaster and offers no place to hide.

The Greatest Match Ever

Nicolas Mahut was the loser, but no one who has a casual interest in sports will ever forget him.

The unseeded Frenchman said it in the aftermath of the longest tennis match in history: "We played the greatest match ever."

More than 11 hours, stretched over 3 days, before John Isner finally hit the winner that broke Mahut's serve and gave Isner a 70-68 win in the 5th set of their match at Wimbledon.

Isner couldn't have been more gracious in victory. But it's Mahut who gives us all something to cheer. Why? Because he had to hold serve 65 times as the epic dragged on. His back was against the wall for hours on end, and yet he dug down to a place most of us can't even imagine and found will, resolve, and calm.

You had to feel for Mahut as the Wimbledon people and the media made an event of the match. He was forced to pose for photos and accept gifts in honor of the match, all while he was surely replaying those unforced errors that kept him from playing on.

Yet the same well of strength that got him through all those hours on Court 18 provided him with the grace to get through the aftermath. As he French often say in honor of a valiant effort, "chapeau, monsieur."

Horn Fight

Everybody's in a lather about those vuvuzelas. Maybe you'd never heard the word before, but if you've watched any World Cup soccer the last few days, you've certainly heard that darned things.

A vuvuzela is a plastic horn. You can buy one for less than 8 bucks. By itself, it makes a sort of sad, bleating sound. But put a whole stadium full of vuvuzelas together and you have quite the cacophony. Some World Cup TV viewers are muting the broadcast. My esteemed colleague Steve Bitker is in high dudgeon, demanding that FIFA ban the noisemakers.

Full disclosure: I once blew into a vuvuzela. Only back in the 60's when we would get these things at Kezar Stadium or Berkeley's Memorial Stadium, we just called them "horns". And though time has dimmed the memory somewhat, I'll bet we blew those horns just as indiscriminately as the South African soccer fans.

I'll admit, the sound is weird. I was watching US-England when my wife poked her head in, saying "What are you watching? I was afraid you'd found some endless documentary about life inside a beehive."

Self-appointed purists don't like the vuvuzelas because (pick your gripe) they overwhelm all other sound in the stadium, make it hard to think, drown out the often-profane chants and songs from the fans, and seem to have no relationship to the action on the field.

To which I say: so what? This is how African fans enjoy their soccer. Who are the rest of us to tell them how to have fun? Plus, soccer fans being soccer fans, there's probably some social value in having people busy blowing horns instead of beating each other up.

Steve and others compare the vuvuzelas with the notorious ThunderStix that were inflicted on the 2002 World Series by Major League Baseball. They miss the point on two counts: first, MLB handed out ThunderStix to fans at Anaheim Stadium and AT&T Park. The vuvuzelas are the fans' own noisemaker of choice. Plus, there really is a musical quality to the vuvuzelas. If you let yourself drift, you'll start to hear an ebb and flow to the drone. It's actually sort of relaxing.

Having said that, I wonder if ESPN ought to think about doing a little audio-sweetening of its telecasts. Surely a way could be found to tweak the crowd microphones so that the frequency range of the vuvuzelas could be pulled down in the mix.

Short of that, my advice is this: get used to it. What may sound like noise to you is music to the fans in South Africa, and it's their World Cup.