Baseball Quiz: Sports Illustrated had an article on the baseball draft and listed the overall No. 1 picks. Name the following…all of whom played at least a few years in the big leagues.
1965: Athletics…R.M. 1969: Senators…J.B. 1970: Padres…M.I. 1978: Braves…B.H. 1982: Cubs…S.D. 1996: Pirates…K.B. Answers below.
John Wooden, RIP
John Wooden won ten NCAA men’s basketball championships, 1964-65, 1967-73, and 1975, after which he retired. Wooden, in 40 years of coaching high school and college, also had only one losing season, his first. He finished with 885 wins and 203 losses, and his UCLA teams still hold the NCAA record for winning 88 consecutive games from 1971 through 1974 (a record that the UConn women’s team will be gunning for next season).
As Bill Dwyre and David Wharton wrote in the Los Angeles Times:
“By the mid-1960s, the Bruins were so confident in their system that Wooden rarely bothered to scout opponents. He figured it was their job to stop the Bruins.
“In the 1973 book ‘The Wizard of Westwood,’ longtime college coach Jerry Tarkanian told Dwight Chapin and Jeff Prugh, the authors of the book, that Wooden ‘does a tremendous job of organizing and getting his teams ready to play. He makes very few adjustments during games. Other teams worry about what he’s going to do – his press, his fast break. You’re extremely conscious of them. They’re hardly conscious of you at all.’
John Robert Wooden was born Oct. 14, 1910, in Hall, Ind., the third of six children. His father was an uneducated farmer who stressed hard work, honesty and the value of an education. Wooden once recalled: “My father would always tell me: ‘Don’t look back, don’t whine, don’t complain.’”
John Wooden would go on to play basketball at Purdue, becoming a three-time All-American, and led the Boilermakers to their only national championship in 1932. That same year he married his high school sweetheart, Nell Riley. He called her “the only girl I ever went with.”
Eventually, Wooden made it to UCLA in 1948 as head coach, where he had some solid success, but a 14-12 season in 1960 forced him to make changes. As he would later say: “Failure is not fatal. Failure to change might be.”
“For much of his coaching career, Wooden had relied on his starting five, believing that he could get them in good enough shape to play most, if not all, of each game. Now, realizing that his teams were wearing down near the end of the season, he began rotating more reserves into the action.
“Through 1961 and ’62, Wooden also began listening more to his prized assistant. Jerry Norman felt the small, quick UCLA teams could benefit from running the zone press, which meant pressuring opponents the length of the floor instead of falling back and defending the basket.
“At the same time, Norman brought new passion to recruiting. Whereas Wooden had been content to pick from among local high school and junior college prospects, his assistant went after the best players nationwide.” [L.A. Times]
The UCLA team of 1963-64 had no one taller than 6 feet 5 in the starting lineup, but it had guards Walt Hazzard and Gail Goodrich. This Bruin squad defeated Duke in the championship contest, 98-83. The next year Goodrich scored 42 as UCLA defeated Michigan to make it back-to-back.
Then Lew Alcindor arrived, Curtis Rowe and Sidney Wicks, Bill Walton, and the championships flowed.
In the 1980s, however, years after Wooden had retired following his tenth title in 1975, the Los Angeles Times did an investigative series on Sam Gilbert, a former UCLA student and wealthy contractor who befriended the players and violated NCAA rules in handing out improper benefits, such as buying players’ tickets at inflated prices. Gilbert also supposedly helped arrange abortions for their girlfriends.
Notre Dame coach Digger Phelps called Gilbert the “Sugar Daddy” of the UCLA program. UCLA was placed on probation following the Times’ series, but Wooden, out six years at this point, was never tied to the violations, while former players spoke of his see-no-evil relationship with the booster. Wooden himself said, “Maybe I trusted too much.”
In one of his last major appearances, a question and answer session with Dodgers broadcaster Vin Scully, Wooden shared his insight into his longevity: “Not being afraid of death and having peace within yourself. All of life is peaks and valley. Don’t let the peaks get too high and the valleys too low.”
“When the great ones leave our courts and fields, don’t they usually leave our lives?
“Jackie Robinson died young, Muhammad Ali lost his voice, Michael Jordan lost his basketball sense, and Joe Montana refused to be honored at the Super Bowl unless he was paid.
“When the great ones retire, so, often, does their greatness.
“Has any sports figure ever broken every record in his field, then contributed more to the world after the games ended?
“Wooden will be remembered today as Coach by those who never even knew he coached….
“Everyone called him Coach, and he was a teacher, and that is how he will be remembered, the sports world’s greatest teacher, a man whose quiet voice somehow rose above the clatter of those who had long stopped listening….
“During a time when the sports world was drastically changing, John Wooden never budged an inch, and in doing so, he moved us forever.”
“A quintessential American life ended inside Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center last night. John Wooden was blessed by achievement and he was blessed by longevity, winning 10 championships in 12 years in building the greatest dynasty college sports has ever known, living every day of his 99 years in a manner to which we all aspire and so rarely reach.
“ ‘It’s so difficult in this business, after you strive your whole life to reach a certain place to come to grips with who you are,’ Giants coach Tom Coughlin told me a few years ago, on the eve of an epic NFC Championship Game in Green Bay. ‘Coach Wooden says if you prepare, and give your effort, you win no matter what the final score says.’
“Coughlin managed a quiet laugh then. ‘Of course, he also won a lot of important games, too.’
“Coughlin is an example of just how long Wooden’s grasp was, how far the tentacles of his philosophy truly went. Coughlin’s game was football, not basketball, and his home turf has mostly been northeast, not SoCal. At that moment, the men had spoken exactly once. But Coughlin had admired Wooden from afar for years, read his autobiography, and was instantly struck by the depth of the thinking and breadth of the perspective.
“ ‘His words are so simple but profound, and you can’t help but be attracted to the way the man thought and to his philosophy,’ Coughlin said. And that’s how I think of him. As a great philosopher. He has very simple explanations for a lot of things….
“ ‘Stuff I laughed at,’ Bill Walton said not long ago, ‘I now have written on my walls, and I tell my kids, and I hear my kids saying to their friends.’
“ ‘Failure to prepare is preparing to fail,’ was a favorite. So was ‘Be quick but don’t hurry.’ And ‘Never mistake activity for achievement.’ The passage that captured Coughlin forever went this way:
“ ‘You can make mistakes, but you are not a failure until you blame others for those mistakes. When you blame others you are trying to excuse yourself. When you make excuses you cannot properly evaluate yourself. Without proper evaluation, failure is inevitable.’….
“He wasn’t perfect. There are some who always will pounce on the presence of Sam Gilbert, the UCLA booster who made life for Wooden’s stars of the ‘60s and ‘70s far more comfortable. A famous rival coach whose name you certainly would know once said, ‘Wooden can keep his pyramid of success, just give me Sam Gilbert.’ [Ed. Gotta be Digger.]
“Yet Wooden never blanched at such shots, which is a side his players knew too well. He never earned in a full year as a coach what Calipari makes in a week at Kentucky, but unlike aging ballplayers who resent the riches of free agency, Wooden never once complained that he was born too early. If anything, he was right on time. He was the perfect coach of the perfect dynasty, a picture of dignity to the very end, when it was right to recall one last Woodenism:
“ ‘Learn as if you were to live forever,’ he said. ‘Live as if you were to die tomorrow.’”
“It occurs to us today that our friend Bill Walton, who is no stranger to hyperbole, probably thinks he was guilty of understatement that time he described John Wooden as an ‘intergalactic treasure.’
“The reason being, in this particular case, Walton feared someone else would express a more sweeping panegyric of the greatest coach of the 20th century….
“He will be memorialized as the game’s most sacred figure, with a legacy unmatched in American sport. But more than anything else, he was a mentor to young men, and a beacon for what amateur athletics should be – in any kind of arena, on any level….
“He governed his UCLA teams using the simplest virtues, expressing them with terms that might get a coach laughed out of the locker room nowadays – loyalty, cooperation, team spirit, self-control, industriousness, which are some of those elements to his signature ‘Pyramid of Success.’
“These virtues were not proprietary. But they seem so banal, because few could ever embody these qualities as Wooden did – the possible exceptions being Vince Lombardi and Eddie Robinson – and if they can, they are not likely to be employed as college or professional coaches for long.
“He may not have been the last true sportsman, but he may have been the last coach who put the development of his student’s mind and character ahead of his own prestige and wallet (fact: John Wooden never made more than $32,500 a year at UCLA, because he thought any more would be immodest), or the pursuit of a better job.”
“Through the years, there have always been milestones in sports thought to be untouchable. Once, Lou Gehrig’s string of playing in 2,130 consecutive baseball games was on that list. Then Cal Ripken Jr. came along. Jack Nicklaus’ record of 18 professional major golf championships was thought to be completely out of reach since no one else had won more than 11. The record still stands, but Tiger Woods now lurks just four behind. Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak is considered sacred, but Pete Rose did get within 12 of the magic number.
“There’s one men’s college basketball record, though, that not only will never be broken, the likelihood is it will never even be threatened: 10 national titles. That’s how many NCAA championships John Wooden won at UCLA….Perhaps even more remarkable: Wooden won those 10 championships during a 12-season span, beginning in 1964 and ending in 1975, when he retired after UCLA beat Kentucky in that year’s national championship game….
“Some may talk about how Wooden won his titles in such a different era. Others will bring up the whispers about UCLA players being taken care of by the famous booster Sam Gilbert in ways that ran outside of NCAA regulations.
“Either argument misses the forest for the trees. Wooden won in 1964 and 1965 with a small team that pressed all over the court. He won from 1967 through 1969 with center Lew Alcindor, the greatest player in college basketball history. He won the two years after that with Steve Patterson, very decidedly not the greatest player in college basketball history, replacing Alcindor. Then he won twice more with Bill Walton in the middle, and he won his last title with a team that probably should have lost to Louisville in the national semifinals and easily could have lost to Kentucky in the championship game.
“He also saw to it that almost all of his players graduated, and if freshmen had been eligible when Alcindor was a UCLA freshman in 1966, he might easily have won 10 straight national titles instead of nine in 10 years, from 1964 through 1973.
“Wooden won with more talent and more size than the opposition, and he won with less talent and size than the opposition. He won playing fast, and he won playing slow. On the rare occasions when he did lose, he never blamed his players or the officials. He was as gracious in defeat as he was in victory….
“As a coach, he had no peers. And he was a better man than he was a coach. That, more than anything, is his legacy.”
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, in his autobiography, “Giant Steps,” recalling his first meeting with Wooden.
“Coach Wooden’s office was about the size of a walk-in closet. I was brought in, and there was this very quaint-looking Midwesterner. I’d heard a lot about this man and his basketball wisdom, but he surely did look like he belonged in a one-room schoolhouse.
“I found myself liking Mr. Wooden right away. He was calm, in no hurry to impress me with his knowledge or his power. He called me Lewis, and that decision endeared him to me even more. It was at once formal, my full name. I was no baby Lewis. Lewis. I liked that.”
Of course there was Wooden’s unique relationship with Bill Walton. As reported by Frank Litsky and John Branch of the New York Times:
“At the start of Walton’s senior season, in 1973, his UCLA teams had won 75 consecutive games and 2 NCAA titles. But when Wooden walked into the locker room before the first practice and saw Walton’s just-trimmed but still long hair, he said:
“ ‘Bill, that’s not short enough. We’re sure going to miss you on this team. Get on out of here.’
“Walton jumped onto his bicycle, raced back to the barber shop where his hair had been trimmed the day before, got his head almost shaved and rode back. He made the last half-hour of practice.
“During the Vietnam War era, Wooden’s young players, including Walton, asked permission to stage an antiwar protest. ‘He asked us if this reflected our convictions,’ one player, Steve Patterson, told Sports Illustrated in 1989, ‘and we told him it did. He told us he had his convictions, too, and if we missed practice it would be the end of our careers at UCLA.’”
In the end, all you needed to really know about John Wooden was how his players rushed to his side in his final days and even hours. Jamaal Wilkes, Michael Warren, Keith Erickson, who observed, “Everybody wanted to give their last regards to him and let him know for sure that we had been there and how much we loved him.”
Kareem rushed back from Europe, reaching Wooden’s side hours before he died Friday night.
Bill Walton had seen Coach earlier and if any single player represented the feelings of them all, it was he. Walton issued this statement.
“The joy and happiness in Coach Wooden’s life came from the success and accomplishments of others. He never let us forget what he learned from his two favorite teachers, Abraham Lincoln and Mother Teresa, ‘that a life not lived for others is not a life.’
“I thank John Wooden everyday for all his selfless gifts, his lessons, his time, his vision and especially his faith and patience. This is why our eternal love for him will never fade away. This is why we call him ‘Coach.’”
Armando Galarraga and Jim Joyce
“We had a truly wonderful moment this week. Somebody hit the pause button on the daily noise in our world of sports. The anger and finger-pointing went on hold. The win-at-all-costs, the pressure-cooker pursuit of power and prominence, momentarily halted….
“Wednesday,(umpire Jim) Joyce called a Cleveland Indians batter safe at first base on what would have been the game’s last out. That ruined a perfect game pitched by the Detroit Tigers’ Galarraga.
“There was immediate outrage. It wasn’t only a bad call. It was a sacrilege. It would have been only the 21st perfect game in the history of baseball. Baseball needed more instant replay. Commissioner Bud Selig had screwed up again. This was awful. A breach of history. An affront to the game. Within hours, there was a website up and running called firejimjoyce.com.
“Thursday, in place of Manager Jim Leyland, Galaragga carried the Tigers’ starting lineup to the plate for the pregame meeting with the umpires. That was done so Galarraga and Joyce could shake hands. By now, Joyce had seen replays, said his call was wrong, said he was sorry, said he understood the magnitude of the moment. He had personally apologized to Galarraga after the game and Galarraga, who had smiled bemusedly after the call and merely gone back to the mound to pitch the final out, accepted the apology.
“ ‘He even gave me a couple of hugs,’ Galarraga said.
“We have been given an oasis of decency in a desert of fist-pounding and bulging neck veins. Instead of implosion, we got perspective….
“Galarraga handled it like a kid on a sandlot. He heard the call, smiled one of those ‘you’ve got to be kidding’ smiles and let it go. He was playing a game.
“Joyce handled it like a professional. He called what he saw, watched the replay, realized he had seen it wrong, and apologized….He said he screwed up. Nobody else was to blame. His mistake, his apology. Corporations, politicians and sports heroes pay thousands of dollars to public relations firms for guidance in crisis management. They should hire Joyce. He got it right.”
“Baseball umpire Jim Joyce made a hideously incorrect ruling Wednesday night that cost Detroit Tigers pitcher Armando Galarraga one of the rarest achievements in the sport: a perfect game. But 15 hours later, when Galarraga made his way to home plate before Thursday afternoon’s game to present his team’s lineup card to Joyce, the umpire’s reception was just as clear-cut.
“The fans in Detroit cheered, and baseball and sport had one of its most inspiring and least expected moments….
“Fans of the recession-scalded Motor City brought themselves to cheer for a man who admitted his mistake, which had denied one of their own a perfect game, a feat accomplished just 20 times And, everywhere, observers shook their heads that a thing that was so sad and screwed up late Wednesday night could, simply by good will and compassion, be turned into something sparklingly fresh, unexpectedly strong and best-of-baseball by Thursday afternoon….
“In an age of stage-managed news-conference remorse and corporate shirking of responsibility, the Galarraga Imperfecto now shines with a fresh-scrubbed sense of honor. Sometimes, maybe we can tell the difference between what matters and what doesn’t.”
As to overturning the call…Commissioner Bud Selig, while he didn’t officially say he wasn’t, until further review, will not overturn it. Instead, he’ll be looking into increased use of instant replay.
“And something must be done? Why? Umpires have been ingrained in major-league baseball since the inception of the National League in 1876, somewhere approaching 200,000 games ago, and it’s likely that the umps have botched a call or two in every one of them since then. Somehow this has not eroded the fan base or undermined the integrity of the competition, which is something that the players and the owners have periodically done.
“That reality, in fact, should tell us something about the nature of baseball, which is the least programmatic, the least technological of games. It doesn’t even have a clock. The fields have widely varying shapes and sizes, and the primary battleground between offense and defense – i.e., the strike zone – is a box of air with dimensions that have proven impossible to specify. There is a lot less science in baseball, a lot more art, than in any other sport you can name. (Golf and soccer nuts, just pipe down.) It’s an irony that only in baseball do there exist perfect games.
“This is the main reason that so many baseball fans are so gaga over statistics, because the game’s ambiguities create a hunger for measurement, for exactitude where it doesn’t exist, and it’s the main reason that baseball is the most written about, most discussed, most intellectually parsed game there is.
“It’s also the main reason that instant replay feels more like an intrusion in baseball than it does in tennis or football or basketball or hockey, each of which has adopted some form of video review to re-evaluate some officials’ calls. But the prime responsibilities of officials in those other sports have always been to recognize infractions and assign blame, and umpires don’t do that. And it’s worth noting that those responsibilities – calling penalties, faults and fouls – are largely unaffected by instant-replay rules.
“The role of umpires in baseball is much more integral. They aren’t observers passing judgment on the legality of given actions so much as filters through which the action passes; nothing can happen – a strike, an out, a run scored – without their imprimatur. They have no prime responsibilities, just the responsibility to see and acknowledge everything, which is why the technological usurping of any one of them feels especially sullying….
“I know the argument: The world has evolved, technology has evolved, and baseball has evolved. As long as we can get it right, why not get it right? Well, for one thing, we’d never have had the part shocking, part anguishing, part cosmically comic final moments of the imperfect perfect game last week; nor the very poignant aftermath as the participants confronted the consequences and one another; nor the eruption of passion and debate among millions of baseball fans….
“Insist, if you must, that the umpires are a problem. But the problem is so much more interesting than the solution.”
“In the end, the unlikeliest team of all time covered baseball on one of the worst calls of all time: The pitcher who deserved a perfect game and the umpire who robbed him of it with a call that a Little League umpire wouldn’t have missed, no matter how good a guy the Major League umpire is.
“Armando Galarraga and Jim Joyce covered for everybody by being gentlemen. In their way, they both showed a level of grace that you no longer see in sports, don’t even expect from sports anymore.
“I said this all day Thursday and say it again today: Look at Serena Williams’ reaction with that lineswoman at the U.S. Open last year when Serena thought the woman had robbed her of a chance to make another Open final, win another Open. She walked over to the woman and threatened, in the most profane way, to shove a tennis ball down her throat.
“And then there was this kid, Galarraga, with a kind of grace that you must be born with. He is at first base ahead of the baserunner, he has his perfect game, he sees that Joyce has made this amateur-time call of safe. And what does the kid do? He smiles.
“And then he walks back to the mound and gets the last out all over again.
“Bud Selig…did not believe it was his place to overturn Joyce’s call. He did not want to open that sort of Pandora’s box, and it is absolutely a fair and reasonable position to take. Selig has never used his immense best-interests-of-the-game powers even though he has threatened to do that a few times, and didn’t do it here, even though I believe he should have. We agree to disagree on this one.”
Personally, I do not believe the call should be overturned.
But you know whose story I forgot through all the discussion on perfect games this week? Dave Stieb’s. Stieb, one of the better hurlers in the game in the 1980s and early ‘90s (176-137), threw a no-hitter in 1990. But before then, as recounted by Erik Matuszewski of Bloomberg, Stieb had fallen one out short of no-hitters in consecutive starts during the 1988 season, “one when a ball took a bad hop and the other on a bloop hit. His chance for a perfect game was broken up the next season when Roberto Kelly doubled with two outs in the ninth.”
Imagine, Dave Stieb almost had three no-hitters and a perfect game. Stieb feels Selig should overturn the call.
French Open
Rafael Nadal won his fifth French Open title in six years, 7th Grand Slam title overall, as he whipped Robin Soderling like a rented mule; 6-4, 6-2, 6-4. Earlier in the week I was duly chastised by former frat bro Jim R. for elevating Soderling to the status of Nadal and Federer. Of course Jim is right and I have imposed a penalty on myself…nothing but domestic for a week. I can’t be so careless in the future.
On the women’s side, No. 17-seed Francesca Schiavone became the first Italian woman to win a Grand Slam title when she beat No. 5-seed Samantha Stosur, neither of whom I had ever heard of. Schiavone also became the oldest woman to win her first Grand Slam title since Ann Jones at Wimbledon in 1969 at age 30. Incredibly, she’s also the first Italian Grand Slam champion since Adriano Panatta won the French men’s crown in 1976. I remember Panatta. What the hell have Italians been doing all this time?! Geezuz.
June 6-7, 1944
On June 6, 1944, the Allied powers embarked on what Supreme Commander Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower called ‘the great crusade’ to wrest Europe from the grip of Nazi rule with one of the most ambitious operations in modern history.
The invasion began before dawn with 18,000 paratroopers jumping into Normandy to secure bridges, knock out gun emplacements and wreak havoc behind the German defenses. But while some paratroopers landed at their drop zone, many were scattered around a wide area. By daybreak; the paratroopers had begun to reorganize and take objectives, including the crucial day-one objective of Sainte-Mere-Eglise.
Most of the beach landings went reasonably well. Americans secured Utah Beach in about three hours, and the other beaches were also secured relatively quickly. But the landings at Omaha Beach were horrific.
Most of the pre-landing bombardment and aerial bombing was ineffective. The beach was a tangle of barbed wire and obstacles. Most landing craft were unable to reach the shore and were forced to disembark soldiers 50 to 100 yards from the surf, forcing them to swim ashore, and making them a painfully easy target for the combat-hardened German machine gunners. The initial wave was devastated. The engineers tasked with clearing beach obstacles suffered 40 percent casualties – most of them within an hour. There was hardly a square inch of Omaha not covered by German mortars and small-arms fire.
The first troops advanced no farther than the shingle at the base of Omaha’s massive bluff, but follow-on waves pushed forward and leaders began to take control of the chaos. They moved inexperienced soldiers up the bluff, and by nightfall, soldiers had secured the beach.
Around 1,000 Americans were killed on D-Day, the vast majority of them on Omaha. All told, the Allies suffered 9,000 casualties June 6, including 2,500 paratroopers and 2,500 on Omaha. A third of those were killed.
By sundown, the Allies had full control of the beaches and had put 155,000 troops ashore. The liberation of Europe had begun.
As morning broke over Normandy, France, the Allies were in firm control of the landing beaches and had begun to push inland. But while the invasion had cracked Adolf Hitler’s Atlantic Wall, the Allies faced a tougher fight in the Norman hedgerows and old seaside villages.
Hitler ordered his generals to hold their ground at all costs, though many of the units were still under Allied naval gunfire. The fight would slog on for nearly two months and would claim thousands of American lives.
The Germans used the natural defenses to great effect. The terrain was a ready-made trench system of sunken roads and thick hedgerows that largely neutralized the Allied armor initially. The action resembled the carnage of World War I, with soldiers charging entrenched enemy positions defended by automatic weapons.
Soldiers from the 82nd Airborne Division faced a brutal month of fighting in the once-pristine French countryside. The severe casualties were typical of ground combat troops in northern France; all told, 5,245 of the paratroopers were killed, wounded or went missing. The division’s post-battle report read, “33 days of action without relief, without replacements. Every mission accomplished. No ground gained was ever relinquished.”
Other divisions suffered heavy losses in the hedgerows, none more so than infantry units. The Normandy American Cemetery is the final resting place of 9,387 service members and memorializes 1,557 missing, the vast majority of whom died during the bloody Normandy campaign.
NBA…Ray Allen canned a record eight 3-pointers and Rajon Rondo had a triple-double as Boston evened the series with Los Angeles, 1-1. Jack Nicholson was checking babes out with his binoculars.
NHL…Chicago smoked Philadelphia, 7-4, to take a 3-2 lead in the Stanley Cup Finals.
Ball Bits
–Funny how after a third of the baseball season there just aren’t any interesting stories in the majors on the hitting front, save for a legitimate triple crown candidate in Miguel Cabrera (which would really suck….I have trouble forgiving this guy for his season-ending antics last year).
Normally, a third in you have someone with 30 doubles and the Earl Webb, 67 doubles, record is trotted out once again. Or someone has 9 or 10 triples, and Johnny Mac and I start exchanging notes on how no one has had 25 in a season since like 1925, let alone Chief Wilson’s record 36 set in 1912.
[When it comes to doubles and triples…if you want to take a run at a record, or at least a modern-day one, you better build up a cushion because the dog days of August grab you and triples become doubles and doubles become singles. That’s why baseball aficionados don’t look at a guy with 23 doubles a third of the way through and think, hey, he’s on pace to beat Earl Webb. Nope, doesn’t happen that way.]
Anyway, more broadly speaking, the leading hitter in the N.L. is batting .328. Whoopty-damn-do! [Atlanta’s Martin Prado had to go 5 for 10, Sat. and Sun., to get there.]
The record for lowest ERA over the first 12 starts is Juan Marichal’s 0.80 in 1966*. Following Sunday’s start, Colorado’s Ubaldo Jimenez is at 0.93, having run his scoreless innings streak to 33 before allowing two runs in the seventh. But he won the game and is now 11-1. A host of other pitchers, particularly in the N.L., are on track to win 20.
*There have been all kinds of answers to the first 12 starts question. I’m going with this one.
[Marichal, by the way, finished 1966 with a 25-6 mark, but his ERA did climb to 2.23; yet another reason why I’m waiting another 50 games or so before saying Bob Gibson’s 1.12 record is threatened.]
—Stephen Strasburg takes the mound on Tuesday in his long-anticipated debut in Washington. Monday night, the Nationals will be selecting slugger Bryce Harper with the No. 1 pick in the Major League draft. Not a bad way to build a franchise.
For the record, Strasburg finished his minor league career with a 7-2 record in 11 starts between AA and AAA. His overall ERA was 1.30 and he fanned 65 and walked only 13 in 55 1/3 innings.
—Garrett Wittels extended his hitting streak to 56, two shy of Robin Ventura’s college record, but Wittels’ Florida International team was eliminated in the College World Series so we’ll have to wait until next season for him to extend it, Wittels being a sophomore.
—The Mets finally got what they wanted…an injury to pitcher Oliver Perez so they could put him on the disabled list, seeing as how Ollie refused to go to the minors. But it was funny how the Wall Street Journal’s Tim Marchman had a piece on bad Mets pitching contracts over the years, Perez’ 3-year, $36 million being a prime example.
Contracts like the $51.5 million the Mets handed Pedro Martinez, who from 2006-08 averaged a whopping 90 innings per year. Or the $3.6 million given Kaz Ishii in 2005, upon which he went 3-9 and was out of baseball. Or the $6.2 million handed to Shawn Estes in 2002, after which he went 4-9.
[Incidentally, the 30-27 Mets are now 22-9 at home, 8-18 on the road.]
–Not for nothing, but theYankees’ Mark Teixeira is being paid $20.6 million this season and he’s hitting .211. In Saturday’s 14-inning loss, Tex was 0-for-6 with 5 strikeouts.
–And finally, lost in the shuffle with the Galarraga perfect game that wasn’t was the retirement of Ken Griffey Jr., who leaves the sport fifth on the all-time home run list with 630. Unfortunately, the 40-year-old was a mere shell of his former self the past few years and was hitting only .184 with zero homers this season.
But particularly in Seattle, where he clubbed 417 of the 630, he’ll always be a folk hero, the man who saved the franchise.
One of the most exciting players in the history of the game, in about six years we’ll be admiring his plaque in Cooperstown.
–It’s hard to believe that Justin Rose won his first PGA Tour event on Sunday at the Memorial. Always liked the guy.
–A good friend of mine from Wake Forest, Todd B., has a son, Stephen, who is a very talented junior player. But last weekend at an event in Pinehurst at National Golf Club, Todd thinks Stephen may have made a little history for the wrong reason.
You see, “On the 10th hole one of Stephen’s playing partners holed his second shot on the par-five for a double-eagle. Stephen, though, proceeded to plop 6 consecutive balls in the water on his way to a tidy 17. That is the largest differential I have ever heard of, except for that time Tom Weiskopf made a 21 or something at the 12th at Augusta.”
Actually, Todd, I double-checked. It was 1990 when Weiskopf put five balls into Rae’s Creek on his way to a 13. So, Stephen was involved in the largest shot differential in the history of organized golf!!!
By the way. Incredibly, Stephen bounced back with a birdie his next hole, which was kind of important. As Todd said, “We called off the suicide watch!”
–Congratulations to my high school alma mater, Summit High School here in Summit, N.J. On Saturday, our lacrosse team not only won its second consecutive Tournament of Champions for the overall state crown, but in doing so set a new state mark in winning its 45th straight. It’s been all about defense and in six tournament games, Summit gave up a total of 14 goals.
—Drosselmeyer, a 13-1 shot, won the Belmont Stakes, not that anyone gave a damn. I certainly didn’t. Sarah and Todd Palin’s horse, First Dude, did take third, however.
–We note the passing of actress Rue McClanahan, 76, and star of “The Golden Girls.” The show proved to be a massive hit for CBS during its run, 1985-92. Rue played man-crazy Southern belle Blanche Devereaux. One of her typical lines about her unseen sexual adventures was, “Let’s rent an adult video, drink mimosas and French kiss the pillows.” In real life, McClanahan was married six times.
“A lion has killed a worker at a wildlife orphanage in Zimbabwe. The animal escaped through a cage which had mistakenly been left open and attacked 26-year-old Robyn Lotz.
“A statement by the Chipangali Wildlife Orphanage says the black-maned lion, known as Lobi, pulled her to the ground and held her head in its mouth.”
Lobi was shot to death by the director of the place but it was too late to save Ms. Lotz.
–On the topic of hot dogs (dreadful segue, I admit), Mark R. said I should have included Ted’s Hot Dogs near the Peace Bridge up by Niagara Falls, which was mentioned in the Parade story I referenced last time. Best in the world, says Mark. Cooked over an open charcoal fire….I’m drooling.
–Uh oh…now 17-year-old Miley Cyrus is in trouble for going too far by simulating a lesbian kiss with a female dancer onstage in Britain, according to the New York Post’s Page Six.
“Disney star Cyrus was out to shock on ‘Britain’s Got Talent’ Thursday night, when she strutted in tiny hot pants and fishnet tights ripped near the crotch while performing her new single.
“Mimicking Britney Spears and Madonna’s onstage smooch at the 2003 MTV Video Music Awards, Cyrus stopped just short of actually kissing the scantily clad dancer as she sang her new number ‘Can’t Be Tamed.’”
Of course Cyrus has done lots of raunchy things the past year or so, including performing a lap-dance at a video shoot and a little pole dancing at the 2009 Teen Choice Awards, as well as her provocative Vanity Fair shoot.
Former UsWeekly editor Bonnie Fuller told Page Six: ‘She is going to give ‘Hannah Montana’ fans a heart attack. It’s a mistake to oversex herself and her image, because her fan base is 6- to 11-year-old girls.”
—Rush Limbaugh married for the 4th time and, get this, Elton John, of all people, was the entertainment. Sir Elton was reportedly paid $1 million for the gig at the Breakers Hotel. Rush is 59 and his bride, Kathryn Rogers, is 33. Not a bad deal for Rush, I think you’d agree.
Top 3 songs for the week 6/6/70: #1 “Everything Is Beautiful” (Ray Stevens…did a great version of “Misty” in 1975, which he won a Grammy for) #2 “Which Way You Goin’ Billy?” (The Poppy Family) #3 “Love On A Two-Way Street” (The Moments)…and…#4 “Up Around The Bend” (Creedence Clearwater Revival) #5 “Cecilia” (Simon & Garfunkel) #6 “Get Ready” (Rare Earth) #7 “The Letter” (Joe Cocker) #8 “American Woman” (The Guess Who) #9 “Make Me Smile” (Chicago) #10 “The Long And Winding Road” (The Beatles)
Baseball Quiz Answers: 1965 – Rick Monday. 1969 – Jeff Burroughs. 1970 – Mike Ivie. 1978 – Bob Horner. 1982 – Shawon Dunston. 1996 – Kris Benson.
But here are some No. 1 overall picks that the average fan never heard of…and for good reason. They didn’t pan out.
1966: Mets – Steve Chilcott. 1979: Seattle – Al Chambers (all of 57 games in the big leagues). 1991: Yankees – Brien Taylor (got in a brawl right after signing and severely injured his shoulder).
