[Posted Wednesday…early pm]
San Francisco Giants Quiz: 1) Name the only three to play 2,000 games in a Giants uniform. 2) Between 1928 and 1932, these two Giants carved out the top five single-season hit marks; both Hall of Famers. 3) Name the only three to hit 50 home runs. 4) Name the only three to have 140 RBI in a season. Answers below. [Gotta get ‘em all to be able to treat yourself to a cold frosty.]
Down Goes Serena! Down Goes Serena!
Some of us were heartened by the site of Serena Williams’ stunning loss in the first round of the French Open, thus breaking her unbelievable record of being 46-0 in first-round Grand Slam singles matches.
On Tuesday Williams lost to Virginie Razzano of France, 4-6, 7-6 (5), 6-3. Lindsay Davenport, once a top rival, said, “I’ve never seen her tighter, and I’ve never seen her choke more.”
“It was complete nerves for whatever reason,” Davenport said. “There was no reason to get tight in the tiebreak, and she did, and she was so tight even that last game. She had five break points, and she couldn’t put returns into play. It was like she just completely froze.”
Razzano – who lost her fiancé and coach last May to a brain tumor shortly before she played in the 2011 French Open at his request – played inspired tennis with her back to the wall.
“They don’t have the same game,” Razzano said of the Williams sisters. “But I’d already thought a bit how I wanted to play Serena. It’s been three days that I haven’t slept very well, three days that I haven’t been able to sleep before midnight, 1 in the morning, tossing and turning in my bed. I was already sharpening my teeth to play Serena.”
The incredibly ungracious Williams said of Razzano: “I know of her story and her husband. We all have stories. I mean, I almost died (referring to her health issues, including blood clots), and Venus is struggling herself. So, you know, it’s life. You know, it just depends on how you deal with it. She obviously is dealing with it really well.”
Ball Bits [Thru Tuesday’s play]
A.L. East
Baltimore 29-21
Tampa Bay 29-21
Yankees 26-23
Toronto 26-24
Boston 25-24
N.L. East
Washington 29-20
Mets 28-22
Miami 28-22
Atlanta 27-24
Philadelphia 26-25
–The Phillies suffered another big blow on the injury front as Roy “Doc” Halladay is slated to be on the disabled list for 6-8 weeks with shoulder problems. Just 4-5 on the season, Halladay was 1-5 with a 5.08 ERA his last 8 starts. Meanwhile, slugger Ryan Howard and star second baseman Chase Utley have been out all season and there is no real timetable for either’s return.
–Miami Marlins pitcher Juan Carlos Oviedo was suspended for eight weeks by Major League Baseball for age and identity fraud. Oviedo was caught playing under the fake name of Leo Nunez and spent the offseason in the Dominican Republic clearing up his immigration status. Now 30, he’s a year older than previously listed. He had 36 saves for the Marlins in 2011.
Oviedo can participate in extended spring training and will be eligible to play in the major leagues July 23.
—Manny Ramirez turned 40 on Wednesday, but while he is eligible to return to the major leagues from a 50-game suspension for violating baseball’s drug policy, again, he has not exactly been lighting it up down in AAA for the Oakland Athletics; hitting just .250 in nine games, with all eight hits being singles. Ramirez hasn’t played in a big league contest since April 6, 2011, and hasn’t been effective since the middle of 2000.
–The Rangers signed Roy Oswalt to a minor league contract with the expectation he’ll be called up to the big club by July 1, at which point he’ll make $4 million and can make another $1 million in incentives. The 34-year-old had been a free agent but decided to wait for the right situation. He has a sterling 159-93 career mark with a 3.21 ERA.
–After Tuesday’s win, the Chicago White Sox had won 7 straight and 11 of 12 to move to 28-22 and first place, a ½-game in front of Cleveland. And I have to note the performance of Chicago hurler Chris Sale the other day, who struck out 15, one shy of the club record, in just 7 1/3 in improving his mark to 6-2.
–Drat! Albert Pujols has started to hit and after the Angels’ 5-1 defeat of the Yankees Tuesday, his power numbers are up to 8 homers and 28 RBI in the team’s first 51 games. The Angels are also back over .500 for the first time since Opening Day.
—A-Rod is hitting .287, but has just 19 RBI in the Yankees’ first 49 games. This is good.
–So I’m looking at Tom Seaver’s career stats the other day, as I am wont to do, and you know what is pretty remarkable? In 1975, a year in which he finished 22-9 and won his third, and last, Cy Young Award, Seaver gave up just 11 home runs in 280 innings! As Ronald Reagan probably said at the time…not bad, not bad at all.
–Top seeds for the College World Series, which begins this weekend. Florida (No. 1), UCLA, Florida State, Baylor, Oregon, North Carolina, LSU and two-time defending CWS champion South Carolina. The Gamecocks are attempting to become the first team to three-peat since Southern California won five in a row, 1970-74.
The SEC has eight teams in the field of 64; the ACC seven (but not Wake Forest). Incredibly, the ACC has not produced a CWS winner since Wake in 1955, despite all the outstanding teams they produce.
–Talk about a sports story that at least to me is kind of being taken for granted, until perhaps right now, it’s San Antonio’s 20-game win streak (31 of 33). And while Tony Parker deserves kudos, how about the play of rookie Kawhi Leonard, who is the lowest key player I’ve seen in years…even more so than Tim Duncan (who does his share of bitching on foul calls). God, I wish the Knicks had Leonard. Meanwhile, in Tuesday’s 120-111 victory in Game 2 against Oklahoma City, Duncan was just 2 of 11 from the field but had 12 rebounds, six assists and four blocks. [Leonard had 18 points, 10 rebounds.]
Lord, we know that LeBron James is great and all…and that he is capable of superhuman feats on a basketball court, but many of us just don’t like the man.
Tim Duncan, on the other hand, is a player to root for…always has been. He’s about winning, and team play, and he loves his coach and teammates and loves being in San Antonio (which has a great riverwalk for partying, but I digress).
So help guide the Spurs to victory over the Heat (aka The Devil)…or Boston, should they screw up my best plans.
–Wednesday night is the NBA’s draft lottery and the 7-59 Charlotte Hornets have a 25% chance to win the right to select Kentucky’s Anthony Davis, the consensus top pick.
–I think a lot of people in basketball are surprised the Clippers opted to bring coach Vinny Del Negro back. Sure, he led them to the highest winning percentage in the franchise’s history and a first-round playoff win before San Antonio took them out; it’s just that Del Negro isn’t too highly thought of when it comes to basketball acumen.
–Ten days to go until the Belmont Stakes and I’ll Have Another’s shot at racing immortality. But trainer Doug O’Neill is sending his horse into the race with no official workouts, only gallops. O’Neill said I’ll Have Another gallops like an average horse works.
The New York Post’s Ed Fountaine said compare this lax schedule with that of Secretariat in 1973. Aside from some sizzling workouts before the Kentucky Derby and Preakness:
“Leading up to the Belmont, ‘Big Red’ really got serious. Eight days after the Preakness, he worked six furlongs in 1:12 1/5, galloping out seven in 1:25. Five days after that, Secretariatworked a mile in 1:34 4/5, galloping out 1 1/8 miles in 1:48 4/5. Three days before the Belmont, he blew out a half-mile in :46 2/5.”
In 1977, Seattle Slew had a similar schedule between the Preakness and Belmont.
—Loyola of Maryland defeated the Univ. of Maryland, 9-3, for its first ever men’s Division I lacrosse title.
–Mike Freeman / CBSSports.com…on one of the NFL’s great running backs.
“You are Matt Forte. You are, for the moment, confused. You are also angry. It’s understandable. Your team is selling you out.
“The Bears asked you to touch the ball some 1,200 times because you were versatile and good and didn’t complain about the sometimes crappy offensive line that opened holes as thick as a sliver of cheese.
“No one is going to feel sorry for a football player who makes millions of dollars while the anemic economy destroys lives and careers. But football is different. It’s always been different. The normal rules don’t apply just like they don’t to actors. So in football’s insular world, Forte is getting screwed….
“If you want to understand why NFL players not receiving guaranteed contracts is practically criminal, again, Forte.
“It’s almost comical. The Bears run Forte into the ground and then leak to the media they’re concerned about giving Forte a long-term deal because of concerns over his knee. What the Bears are doing is like a guy running up his credit card bill buying lap dances and Gummi Bears and then blaming Visa.”
–Since 1900, the Civil War’s death toll has long been accepted as 620,000, but now a Binghamton University history demographics professor, J. David Hacker, said the toll is closer to 750,000, as published in Civil War History, a 57-year-old publication considered the pre-eminent journal in its field.
One of the differences is a new look at guerrilla warfare in the border states, which was overlooked in earlier studies. Professor Lesley Gordon of the Univ. of Akron said, “They think about Lincoln, they think about Gettysburg, they think about Robert E. Lee. They don’t think about this often brutal warfare going on in peoples’ backyards.”
The great historian James McPherson, author of the definitive one-volume history of the war, “Battle Cry of Freedom,” has fully embraced the new total.
“It drives home even more forcefully the human cost of the Civil War, which was enormous,” said McPherson, professor emeritus in Princeton’s history department. “And it makes it more understandable why it took the South so long to recover.”
“Hacker, an expert in 19th-century demographics, said he was studying the steady decline in United States birthrates when he kept bumping into the Civil War and its impact on the nation’s population growth in the 1800s. He decided to recalculate the war’s mortality rate for males, using recently digitized Census results from the two national population counts before the war and the two after.”
Hacker’s new estimate “includes men who died of diseases in the years immediately after the war, and men who died of war wounds before the 1870 census. It also includes thousands of civilian men and irregulars who were casualties of widespread guerrilla warfare in Missouri, Kansas and other border states.”
Hacker’s work is being hailed in both the North and South, which is rare for this kind of thing.
John Coski, historian at The Museum of the Confederacy in Richmond, Va., said, “It finally gives substance to what some people have been saying for years, that (620,000) was an undercount.”
—Luke Donald is back at No. 1 in the golfing world, overtaking Rory McIlroy as Donald won the European Tour’s biggest event, the BMW PGA Championship. Donald has six wins around the world in 15 months, but the 34-year-old is still looking for that elusive first major. For his part, McIlroy missed another cut.
—Darren Clarke has withdrawn from the U.S. Open due to a groin injury. He wants to make sure he’s 100 percent for his British Open defense at Royal Lytham, July 19-22.
Clarke hasn’t made a cut all year, but he also got married…groin injury, honeymoon…kind of makes…oh, never mind.
1. Jason Dufner…$3,800,000
2. Bubba Watson…$3,204,000
3. Hunter Mahan…$3,138,000
4. Matt Kuchar…$3,082,000
5. Zach Johnson…$3,033,000
–I forgot to note the triumph on Sunday of 53-year-old Roger Chapman in the Senior PGA Championship. Chapman, a total unknown in the U.S., had one European Tour win way back in 2000. That’s it. He led wire-to-wire in defeating John Cook, with 66-year-old Hale Irwin amazingly finishing solo third.
–I didn’t have a chance last time to note Kasey Kahne’s win at the Coca-Cola 600, his third in the event and 13th career Sprint Cup triumph.
After the first 12 races of the season, Dale Earnhardt Jr. has the most top tens, 9, but still hasn’t won since 2008.
—Alcorn State hired the first “non-black” head football coach in the entire Southwestern Athletic Conference in tabbing former Memphis defensive coordinator Jay Hopson. I know nothing about this guy but find it strange he resigned from Memphis’ staff in September 2011. Weird timing.
–So among my soccer jerseys in the sports drawer is a Juventus one I picked up in Europe years ago, but after my bad luck with my Man U / AIG jersey that is now on the island of Yap, it seems a match-fixing scandal rocking Italian soccer has implicated the coach of Juventus, though the man, Antonio Conte, is under investigation for alleged wrongdoing while in charge of Siena in the 2010-2011 season.
At least seven games are being looked at and a prosecutor said “there have been statements that make us think they were manipulated.” 14 arrests, including five in Hungary, were made on Monday. The ring stretches as far as Singapore and South America and allegedly has been in operation for ten years.
Well I told you of my time in Bulgaria when my driver, Tony, told me all about the match-fixing there, but that’s Bulgaria. [I heard from Tony the other day…the stud is hanging out with drop-dead gorgeous women…but that’s as far as I can go with the story. Ahem…]
Anyway, Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti made no friends on Tuesday at a time, due to the country’s fiscal woes, when he needs as many as he can get, when he suggested that soccer in Italy needed a time out…a suspension of play for two or three years in the wake of the scandal.
–“Man” continues to do all the wrong things when it comes to the All-Species List. From the Anchorage Daily News we have these two stories.
“Alaska Raptor Center officials in Sitka say a bald eagle that had been shot had to be euthanized.
“KCAW says an X-ray revealed a bullet inside the eagle. The bird was a female with a brood patch, an area where feathers have been plucked out to incubate eggs with warm skin.”
Eagles in Alaska were never listed as endangered or threatened species, but they are protected under the federal Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act.
“The two primary breeding females from the best-known wolf pack at Denali National Park – a pack viewed by tens of thousands of visitors each year – are dead, one of them killed by a trapper operating just outside the boundary of Alaska’s premier national park.
“The incident has raised an outcry among Alaska conservationists. They’re demanding an immediate halt to wolf trapping in what was formerly a buffer zone northeast of the park, an area made famous as the site of the abandoned school bus in Jon Krakauer’s ‘Into the Wild.’
“The trapper apparently shot an aging horse and left it as a lure for the wolves, according to residents in the area. Park officials…said two wolves, at least one of them from the well known Grant Creek pack, were fatally snared near the carcass.
“One of the dead wolves was equipped with a radio collar attached by scientists; it was the only female from the pack known to have raised pups last year.”
–Funny story at Taronga Zoo in Sydney, Australia (been there, great spot). The public is being asked to assist in the search for three rare red-tailed black cockatoos after they were spooked by four sea eagles during a bird show.
“The sea eagles are top-order predators and they live on the harbor. The five black cockatoos in the show, seeing them, flew off. It’s a natural reaction. They leave the area where they perceive there to be a risk or threat,” said zoo spokesman Mark Williams.
Two of the five were found nearby and once they can be spotted, they return to their keepers who they recognize and allow themselves to be taken back to the zoo, which they see as home.
–The Wall Street Journal’s Elizabeth Garone interviewed John Brick, author of “The Doctor’s Hangover Handbook: The Intelligent Person’s Guide to Curious and Scientific Facts About Alcohol and Hangovers.”
Q: Is there anything to “hair of the dog” or having another drink?
Brick: “Hair of the dog” works for some people because, for them, a hangover is actually the start of alcohol withdrawal, and the simplest “fix” would be to have a drink. Obviously, this isn’t recommended and may be symptomatic of a more serious problem.
Q: How about a big breakfast – the greasier the better?
Brick: This is a wives’ tale and helpful only if you happen to own a breakfast café.
Anyway, Brick goes on to say that, yes, drinking water during imbibing works, and Alka-Seltzer and aspirin of course work too. Be careful taking acetaminophen if you have a lot of hangovers because the combination can lead to liver damage.
Q: Coconut milk is all the rage right now. Can it cure a hangover?
Brick: Unless it’s fortified with other things, probably not. It is 94.2% water, so drinkers would be better off with Gatorade or a similar sports drink that can replenish electrolytes.
Huh…never thought about Gatorade. I just remember to take aspirin and drink water before going to bed, not that I do this a lot. [Cough cough… cough…]
–And we note the passing of legendary blind folk musician, master flatpicker Doc Watson, who died at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center on Tuesday at the age of 89. Country and bluegrass singer Ricky Skaggs said, “An old ancient warrior has gone home.”
Watson was born March 3, 1923 in Deep Gap, in the Blue Ridge Mountains about 100 miles northwest of Charlotte. He lost his eyesight when he was 1 after developing an eye infection that was worsened by a congenital vascular disorder.
Doc Watson’s father gave him a harmonica as a young child, and by 5 he was playing the banjo. He picked up the nickname when a girl in one of his early audiences couldn’t pronounce his real name, Arthel, and shouted out, call him “Doc.”
Watson changed folk music forever by adopting fiddle tunes to guitar at amazing tempos and is credited with bringing the guitar out front as a melody instrument when heretofore it had been in the background, which is why so many rock and roll guitarists today credit Watson for being such a pioneer.
–Speaking of Blue Ridge Mountains and such…I’ve been watching the “Hatfields & McCoys” on the History Channel. I don’t care what some of the reviews say, I’m finding it highly entertaining. Some great characters.
Top 3 songs for the week 5/31/80: #1 “Funkytown” (Lipps, Inc. some of us actually thought this song was cool…good gawd) #2 “Call Me” (Blondie…anytime I hear her work I break out in hives) #3 “Coming Up” (Paul McCartney & Wings…another poor tune from Sir Paul)… and…#4 “Don’t Fall In Love With A Dreamer” (Kenny Rogers with Kim Carnes…whatever) #5 “Sexy Eyes” (Dr. Hook…OK, considering the competition) #6 “Biggest Part Of Me” (Ambrosia…not bad of this sort…not that I was rushing to buy the album…but it also brings back bad memories…) #7 “Stomp!” (The Brothers Johnson…liked these guys) #8 “Hurt So Bad” (Linda Ronstadt…Little Anthony’s version far better…in fact he is simply one of the more underrated acts in the history of music…right there with my man Sergei Rachmaninoff. Plus, the Imperials were the best back-up act in the business) #9 “Against The Wind” (Bob Seger) #10 “Cars” (Gary Numan…awful…but a few weeks earlier I had graduated from Wake Forest and was now back home, not knowing what the heck I would do with the rest of my life, so I went to the racetrack and played the ponies…)
*I have a ten-minute drive to this park where I do most of my jogging and listen to Beach Boys tunes heading over and “The Little Girl I Once Knew” is threatening to break into my all-time top three of theirs after “All Summer Long,” “When I Grow Up” and “Sail On Sailor.” Just sayin’.
San Francisco Giants Quiz Answers: 1) Games played, career: Willie Mays, 2857; Mel Ott, 2730; Willie McCovey, 2256. [Barry Bonds is at 1976] 2) Single-season hits: Bill Terry, 254 (1930); Freddie Lindstrom, 231 (1928), 231 (1930); Bill Terry, 226 (1929), 225 (1932). *It is a freakin’ joke that Lindstrom is in the Hall of Fame, however. 3) 50 home runs: Barry Bonds, 73 (2001); Willie Mays, 52 (1965), 51 (1955); Johnny Mize, 51 (1947). 4) 140 RBI: Mel Ott, 151 (1929); Orlando Cepeda, 142 (1961); Willie Mays, 141 (1962).
