Easy like Sunday morning...

Easily the best thing about Jon Lieber’s complete game, three-hit shutout over the Kansas City Royals last night wasn’t the Phillies’ victory or the pitcher’s relative gabfest post-game chat with the scribes. Nope, easily the most important part of Lieber’s outing was the time of game:

Two-hours, ten minutes. That’s 2:10.

That is outstanding.

With deadlines and the pressure to compose coherent stories closing in on the writers like the walls in that trash compactor scene in Star Wars, it’s nice to see the gang get a little break. After all, without the writers covering the team leading the way, the folks on TV and the radio wouldn’t have anything to talk about.

So big thanks goes out to Jon Lieber for his uber-efficient outing last night…

He must really like the writers.

Nevertheless, Lieber spent some time talking to the broadcasters after the game and had a few interesting things to say. One nugget he later reiterated with the writers was that he was feeling good while pitching, but because he’s such a location-type pitcher, he’s been getting tattooed a bit lately.

“I know it's been, ‘Here we go again. He's pitching like it's 2006.’ I'm not even close to that,” Lieber told the scribes. “The results can be deceiving, especially if you watch the game. I don't think I've done anything differently. It's just being able to throw the ball, get strikes, pitch ahead, and get the guys on and off the field.”

He certainly did a swell job of the last night. In fact, it seems as if Lieber got everyone out of the ballpark before the sun went down. Not bad for a 6:05 p.m. start time.

Apropos of nothing, does anyone think Lieber's new buzz cut makes him look like Brando as Colonel Kurtz?

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There has been much speculation regarding the end of The Sopranos series tonight on HBO. Is Tony going to live or die? Will he flip to the feds or come out ahead in the war with New York?

Visit any message board and there are tons of theories and ideas floating around though I’m not really sure they’re based on anything tangential. Because show creator David Chase never ever wastes anything on his show (all dialogue and music has explicit meaning to the plot) anything could happen tonight.

That means I have no idea what will happen, though it’s hard not to think about an interview I read with Little Steven Van Zandt (Silvio Dante) where he said a movie based on The Sopranos series would have to be a pre-queal.

But it’s no fun not predicting anything. In that regard, I say watch out for Janice. Everyone seems to be forgetting her and she’s could be trouble.

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Jim Thome returns to Philadelphia tomorrow.

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The big bike race is underway in Philadelphia today, and the Tour de France kicks off on July 8. Nonetheless, we neglected to update on Floyd Landis’ first outing since last year’s Tour de France and his hip-replacement surgery in the Teva Mountain Games. There, riding a mountain bike (of course), Floyd finished an 49th in a two-hour ride through the mountains in Vail, Colorado.

“I haven't suffered in a while,” he said when it was over, happy he simply finished his first mountain-bike race in nearly nine years. “I figured this was a good place to start.”

Without a much of a chance to train or work out with arbitration hearing in full swing, Landis will race again in Leadville, Colorado in August in the well-known Leadville 100. But that race will come after a book signing tour that will bring him home to Lancaster and to West Chester later this month.

Meanwhile, listen to Floyd talk about his first public ride in nearly a year.