One does get the impression from the video below that country-music singer Faith Hill does not believe that former American Idol Carrie Underwood should have received the Best Female Country Singer Award at Monday Night’s Country Music Awards Show in Nashville.
The Hill-McGraw public relations machine was in full gear afterward.
The all-consuming football season in Texas tends to blot out news on virtually any other sporting front, but the fall is also an important period for development purposes in professional baseball. And with the Stros currently trolling the expensive free agent market for some desperately-needed hitting and better left-handed relief pitching, a couple of top prospects are turning heads this fall.
Baseball Prospectus’ Joe Sheehan likes what he sees ($) in the Arizona Fall League from Stros pitching prospect Troy Patton, who played last season at A Lexington and AA Corpus Christi:
The Astrosí Troy Patton looked very good in two shutout innings. He has been a starter his whole career, but he looks like he could be a lefty reliever for the ëStrosówho have struggled to find one over the yearsóas early as this spring. He’s not just a specialist; he has four pitches, including a very effective change-up according to [Jason Grey, author of the AFL Scouting Guide] Grey. His sizeóa slight 6-1óand his slider may doom him to a limited role, but heís capable of much more. Ron Villone comes to mind.
Goodness knows that it’s high time that the Stros quit rolling the dice on situational lefties out of the bullpen such as Mike Gallo and Trevor Miller.
But even more importantly, Sheehan reports that one of the most impressive players in the Arizona Fall League was Stros OF prospect Hunter Pence, who tore up the Texas League last season at AA Corpus:
An organization called Perverted Justice — a so-called “Internet Watch” group — goes around the country and induces men to correspond with what they think are minor boys via email, instant messenging and chat rooms. However, the minor boys are really Perverted Justice operatives, who then turn over the evidence of solicitation to police authorities while notifying the news media about the impending arrest of the men for soliciting sex over the Internet with people they thought were underage boys. In turn, the police enjoy the publicity and allow the news media to tag along to video the arrest for the 10 o’clock news.
This past Sunday, a well-regarded 56-year old prosecutor, Louis Conradt, Jr.. of the North Texas town of Terrell killed himself as the police were knocking on his door to arrest him in a Perverted Justice-inspired sting operation. Of course, a Dateline NBC camera crew was outside Conradt’s house when Conradt killed himself.
Although there is forensic computer evidence that Conradt had communicated over the Internet with other minor boys, there is no evidence that he had ever actually met any of the boys. Conradt clearly needed help for a personal problem, but that therapy did not include having a camera crew show up on his front porch to film the most humiliating moment of his life. What Conradt did is shameful, but what Perverted Justice, the police and the Dateline NBC reporters did to Conradt is much worse than the crime that they contend that their actions are attempting to deter.