Wednesday, February 18, 2009

Out With The New And In With The Old

Both hockey and baseball have players who think that they are boxers...or Brett Favre.

The NHL recently welcomed back super pest Claude Lemieux at age 43 after a lengthy retirement. He has seemed to pay his dues and worked very hard to get into the kind of game shape needed to play in the "new game". In a league that has made men close to 10 years younger look too slow for the more high paced, no obstruction game, Lemieux seems to be up for the challenge. Nobody expects him to be the player he was back in his prime, but perhaps as a 4th line role player he may be a serviceable asset for the San Jose Sharks.

Meanwhile in baseball there were just recently reports that Denis "Oil Can" Boyd is looking to make a comeback of his own...at age 49. Now this may be more of a stretch as he is even further removed from the game as well the fact that he wasn’t the most dominating player in the game by any stretch of the imagination when he was playing. In baseball it is usually the left handers who can hang on for way longer then they should because they are only needed for 8 pitch, or one batter whichever comes first. In 2005 Boyd came out of retirement to play in the Can-Am league.

We will see how both of these fountain of youth reclamation projects pan out, but I think that Lemieux may have an inside edge on this one. Time will tell

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Would you believe I once saw Oil Can Boyd in Ross' Independent? It's a true story.