Baseball Quiz: As of recent play, name the seven active pitchers with 150 or more wins. Answer below.
I’ll Take ‘Nothing But Stuff’ for $400
–Golf’s fifth major, the Players Championship, begins Thursday, and in practice on Tuesday, Tiger Woods looked dreadful, hitting five balls in the water on just the back nine. Jim Furyk said, “What’s strange is he hasn’t shown a side that’s somewhat human for most of his career, and now when all of a sudden he plays bad, shoots 79, it’s a little bit of a shock to the system for everyone.” To say the least, Woods’ life is a mess.
“I’ve been trying to make life adjustments and make life changes,” he said after his ‘practice’ round Tuesday. “A lot of people, when they go through treatment, they’re able to make these adjustments in anonymity. I’m not, and that makes it a lot more difficult.”
Meanwhile, People magazine reporter Steve Helling has written a book, “Tiger,” that is out this week. Helling knew of Tiger’s dalliances way back but failed to expose him, until now.
“Over the years, I had heard rumors of Tiger’s partying – drunken nights at the clubs, dirty dancing with other women, phone numbers slipped to pretty blonds – but I didn’t follow up on the tips,” he notes in his book.
Why? He didn’t want to be cut off from Woods.
“Negative coverage of Tiger – or even positive coverage that wasn’t approved and micromanaged – would often result in swift, permanent excommunication from the Tiger Woods camp. It was in everyone’s best interest to sweep the rumors under the rug….
“Marriage hadn’t changed Tiger’s appetite for sex, and he was always on the prowl for women.”
A television producer source said that when Tiger was shooting commercials at Universal Studios, he asked out some of the girls on the set (this was after he was married). “If they said no, he’d move on.”
Back to the Players, if Phil Mickelson should win, and Tiger finish out of the top five, for the first time ever Mickelson would be ranked No. 1 in the world. Woods has been No. 1 the last five years. Go Lefty!
–USA TODAY’s Bob Nightengale on the worst-kept secret in baseball; that the National League sucks.
“There’s a significant gap,” Oakland A’s GM Billy Beane says, “and probably every GM has had a conversation about it. You’re crazy not to be cognizant of it. There’s just too many examples.”
Like this year the Phillies’ Roy Halladay. True, the guy is one of the best, but following his trade out of the American League, he’s making N.L. hitters look like chumps. Carlos Silva was 5-18 with a 6.81 ERA the last two years for the Seattle Mariners. Traded to the Cubs, he is 2-0 with a 2.90 ERA.
Javier Vazquez, a 15-game winner with a 2.87 ERA for the Braves last year, is 1-3 with a 9.78 ERA for the Yankees.
Joel Pinero, a 15-game winner for the Cardinals, is getting shelled now that he’s on the Angels. Ben Sheets, successful in Milwaukee, has a 7.12 ERA for Oakland. Rich Harden, successful with the Cubs, sucks for Texas.
–I just saw that former Dodgers pitcher John Purdin died a while back. He wasn’t a big figure in the sport, to say the least. Over parts of four seasons, 1964-65 and 1968-69, he had a career record of 6-4 with a 3.90 ERA in 58 games. So unremarkable.
But I note his passing not only because I remember his baseball card, but like so many that make it, at least John Purdin fulfilled his dream. And in a short career like his, 110 innings total, you wonder how many big moments he had? He did strike out 68, after all. How many of those were against the likes of Willie Mays or Willie McCovey, for example? Heck, when he was brought up in 1964, age 22, he threw a shutout that September (his only complete game out of five starts). Not many kids playing sandlot ball, with the same dreams, ever come close to this.
–New Orleans Saints coach Sean Payton denied he “abused” or stole prescription pain medication, as the team’s former director of security, George Santini, alleges in a suit listing two unnamed Saints staff members, “Senior Staff Member A” and “Senior Staff Member B.” They were supposedly involved in the unauthorized use of the prescription painkiller Vicodin from the team’s supply in early 2009. The Saints say it’s an extortion attempt, Santini having been dismissed before the ’09 season began.
“In recent months, there has been no shortage of examples of pro athletes behaving badly.
“Golfer Tiger Woods’ colossal infidelity. The sleazy sexual conduct of Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger in a Georgia nightclub. Washington Wizards star Gilbert Arenas bringing handguns to the basketball team’s locker room – and later making light of it.
“In these and other cases, too many athletes have demonstrated a sense of entitlement or an attitude that the rules don’t apply to them. Or they’ve adopted the ethos, too common in politics and business as well, that anything not illegal is somehow acceptable.
“All of this is why an episode involving Washington Capitals player Brooks Laich comes as such a refreshing change.
“Maybe you’ve heard about it. Last Wednesday night, after his team’s devastating loss in Game 7 of its hockey playoffs against the Montreal Canadiens, Laich (pronounced ‘Like’) was driving home across a Potomac River bridge that links Washington, D.C., and Virginia.
“A woman and her 14-year-old daughter, on their way back from the game, had hit a pothole. Their vehicle was disabled in the treacherous traffic. Laich, whose heavily favored team blew a 3-1 lead in the playoff series, might well have whizzed past.
“Instead, he pulled over and asked the stranded fans whether he could help. Laich spent about 40 minutes changing the tire and apologizing for the Capitals’ loss. He wasn’t looking for any publicity, but word got out when the daughter promptly updated her Facebook page.
“Character, it is said, is how you behave when no one is looking. It’s also how you behave when you’ve got your own problems but have a chance to help someone else. Though Laich’s team lost, his common decency showed why some athletes really do qualify as role models.”
And so we put Brooks Laich in the December file for consideration for the “Bar Chat Good Guy Award.”
–Here’s another good guy…former New York Giants football star Leonard Marshall. I just think it’s really cool that Marshall, who has no coaching experience, was just named head coach at Hudson Catholic High School here in New Jersey. It was two months ago that the athletic director, Terry Matthews, received a voice message from Marshall, inquiring about the vacant coaching position at the school.
“I honestly thought it was one of my friends breaking my chops,” Matthews told the Star-Ledger’s Matthew Stanmyre. “It had to be a joke.”
But the two-time Pro Bowler and Super Bowl champ was serious.
What’s even more cool is that this is a school that almost shut down recently because of debt and dwindling enrollment. The football team finished 2-7 last season.
So how did Marshall come across the place? His first three seasons with the Giants he lived in Jersey City on a street near Hudson Catholic and since then he’s had an affection for it.
So here’s to Leonard Marshall. What a great opportunity these kids have to learn from a class individual who has met the ultimate in team success.
–OK, gotta clear the table on some old articles I wanted to stick into BC and haven’t gotten around to. Regardless of your opinion of George Will, politically, you can’t deny he is an authentic baseball fan. A few weeks ago the Wall Street Journal ran an interview with him on the sport. Among other things:
“Mr. Will…worries that baseball is fast becoming an extinct tradition in this country. The game, he says, is losing talent not because other sports are better but because so few are still teaching the craft to Little Leaguers and high-school stars. With baseball, ‘you don’t just need a hoop and some black top,’ he says. ‘You need a field that takes some grooming. But the teaching and the grooming require fathers, and they’re gone. That’s one of the problems in baseball right now. No one wants to talk about it, and it is related to the problem of the vanishing African-American baseball player.’ Their spots have been filled by top-notch players from countries like the Dominican Republic, Venezuela and Cuba.
“ ‘In baseball, if you’re a terrific young athlete, you’re going to spend some time on a bus, going from Laramie to Carlsbad,’ Mr. Will says. ‘If you go to Ohio State and they make you into a running back, you’re able to go straight into the NFL. Or in college basketball, it’s one and done – you have a great year and then you’re rich, really rich. Baseball remains a humbling game, and partly because of that I think it’s still a pretty admirable slice of young American manhood.’
“Mr. Will believes that baseball is on the verge of a whole new phase. First, he predicts that it’s going to become a younger game. ‘The older players don’t have the amphetamines that once brought them along in August. And the explosion of baseball metrics will help teams begin to figure out how to fortify every run – to see the obvious fact that a run prevented is just as good as a run scored. There will be much more attention to defense. As Billy Beane and others have pointed out, baseball has a clock – 27 outs, 27 ticks. Catching the ball is the best thing a player can do for his pitcher. Defense speeds up that clock.’….
Will would like to see the schedule reduced to 154 games. We all know one day we’ll be playing a World Series in November outdoors in Minnesota. No can do. Anyway, 154 is “a tradition and it gets you back to where most baseball records were generated.”
George Will is a season ticket holder for both the Nationals and the Orioles. His 37-year-old son, who has Down Syndrome, has an administrative position with the Nationals and the two attend most of the games together. “My 17-year-old son, for reasons I can’t explain, is an Arizona Diamondbacks fan. I think it’s the teal they used to have on their uniforms. My other son is an FBI agent, and I briefly made him into a Cubs fan when he was stationed in Chicago, but it didn’t last. Who wants to be a Cubs fan? It’s really not fun.
“Some people think it’s cute – lovable losers, Wrigley Field is the biggest singles bar in Chicago, yada, yada, yada. I think it’s disgusting. I really think protracted mediocrity is not admirable… The Cubs, I think, have something like $111 million tied up in eight players through 2011. That’s not funny, that’s malpractice.”
–And this sad tale is from about two weeks ago. Melanie Reid is a columnist for the London Times. Early in April, she broke her neck. Later, from the hospital bed, she confronted her future. Her story, in part.
“This is me. I’m dictating this because I lie imprisoned on a hospital bed. I’m here because, three weeks ago, I landed on my head and broke my neck. In the space of 15 minutes I have gone from someone whom I considered to be a fairly high-achieving mistress of her universe to what looks like a tetraplegic.
“It happened as I was doing a course of cross-country jumps at the start of the season. I’ve been riding for 30 years and I have always done so on a safe horse. It was the fifth jump, he was jumping a little stickily and with the brilliance of hindsight, the uncatchable brilliance of hindsight, you think, maybe he wasn’t going so well. But experience has taught you to kick on. So we did and we went for this little jump. I had committed, I was riding hard for it – and he stopped sharply. I slid over his head quite slowly, and was face-planted in the Perthshire soil, some of which is still tying up my teeth three weeks later.
“As I landed I felt the impact on my face and thought, OW! And then there was this blinding flash, this red light, and in a perfectly cold, conscious, logical part of my brain I knew my back was broken. When I couldn’t move my legs I wasn’t altogether surprised and I just lay there thinking: shit, why did I let this happen to me? Damn, why did I let this happen to me? Damn, life is going to change forever.
“I lay with my face in the soil. My friend, who is a vet, had jumped the fence first. I told her: ‘I can’t move my legs.’ They phoned for an ambulance.
“The St. John Ambulance team was very good but I think they were horrified to realize the implications of what was going on. I could speak quite normally. I said: ‘Why don’t we phone for a helicopter?’ I could move my shoulders and so I could flip-flop my elbows, but there was no power there and I thought, keep still. Here was me, a middle-aged woman, arrogant enough to think I could compete with riders 20 years younger than I am, telling myself, it’s not going to happen to me. But it has.
“After 15 minutes, the helicopter landed. In fact two helicopters landed. The journalist in me smiled. I think the Sea King got there first and Katie, my friend the vet, said: ‘Ooh, the winchman’s really dishy!’ and he said: ‘Does anyone want to come to Glasgow, with the casualty?’ and she said: ‘Oh yes, I do.’ And I thought, Katie, you should be taking your child and your pony home.
“They put me on the stretcher and already, in a weird way, my life was shutting down. I was strapped on to bodyboards and put on the floor of this helicopter. I love helicopters. I’ve always loved helicopters and I couldn’t enjoy riding in it. I experienced a moment of utter frustration.
“The winchman was indeed very dishy, and he took his helmet off, but I was having trouble breathing, and I think he was worried that, because it was obviously a neck break, I didn’t have the chest power to breathe. I said to him: ‘I can’t breathe,’ and he said: ‘Yes you can, girl. You do this for me. We’re going to be there in six and a half minutes.’ It was one of those hilarious Mills & Boon moments where you think, I’m yours, I’m just completely yours, and at the same time you’re thinking, no one will ever want me again.”
“I have got fairly good use of my right arm and I’m right-handed. I’ve got mobility in my shoulder. My fingers are weak, but hopefully I’ll be able to build on that. If I’m extraordinarily lucky I might get some feeling back in my legs…you hear wonderful stories. I just have to come to terms with the fact that I’m lucky to be here at all. And in my head I am fiercely alive.”
Melanie Reid is a brave woman. We wish her the best. But I can’t help but add this is yet another example of why I’m scared to ride a horse.
–Among the many disturbing aspects of the Virginia lacrosse murder case, where men’s team member George Huguely was charged in the death of women’s player Yeardley Love, is the fact Huguely had been arrested on Nov. 15, 2008, on two misdemeanor charges: resisting arrest and public swearing/intoxication. He was found guilty and received six months probation. This wasn’t a case of having a DUI, this was showing a violent streak. He should have been kicked off the lacrosse team (even if you allow him to stay in school).
–Update: Hofstra basketball coach Tim Welsh was dismissed following his arrest on a DWI charge.
“The bar just got raised in the Northeast. College basketball coaches are going to be held a little more accountable for their actions off the court….
“Despite his sterling reputation, great connections in the metropolitan area with local prep schools, AAU coaches and the media, and no prior arrests, Hofstra took a hard line – demanding Welsh’s resignation before his guilt or innocence was determined in a court of law.
“Some wonder if the same action would have been taken if Welsh was the head of the English Department instead of its hoops coach. Others believe Hofstra president Stuart Rabinowitz took swift and appropriate action….
“Rabinowitz…would not even speak directly with Welsh, a source told the Post. Welsh won’t receive any compensation [forfeiting a five-year, $3 million deal he had signed a month ago.]”
As I noted last time, what got me was how Welsh let the media notify the school of the arrest, rather than calling officials himself. That was the idiot move of the year. Rabinowitz was fuming over this aspect of the whole deal. But, the Post says another angle is that authorities had been asked to contact his office. Did they? Would it have made a difference if Welsh had?
[Meanwhile, Rutgers filled its vacancy by hiring Robert Morris’ Mike Rice, who to say the least is rather excitable. I don’t think this will work out either.]
–The great Tigers broadcaster Ernie Harwell died. He was 92. Incredibly, his wife of 68 years! was by his side. Harwell’s body will lie in repose at Comerica Park on Thursday.
Harwell spent 42 of his 55 years in broadcasting with the Tigers, the play-by-play voice from 1960 to 1991 and 1993 to 2002. Before that he broadcast with the Dodgers, Giants and Baltimore Orioles.
Said fellow broadcaster Vin Scully, “He was such a nice guy, so you can understand why the people of Detroit just loved him.” Ernie himself said, “I just want people to remember me as a guy who showed up for work and tried to do a good job.”
–Shu passed along the important tale of one of the world’s great athletes, Joey Chestnut, once again showing why he is at the top of his sport, competitive eating.
Last Saturday, at Dorney Park in Allentown, Pa., 500 packed the arena to watch 14 men and one woman devour 6-inch rolls piled with 4 ounces of Philly cheesesteak (provided by Subway… Eat Fresh!).
When it was over, Chestnut, 26 and the world’s top-ranked eater, devoured 19 cheesesteaks in ten minutes to take home the top prize of $1,500. Bob “Notorious B.O.B.” Shoudt, currently No. 2 in the world (didn’t know this, Shu), finished second with 16 cheesesteaks.
Personally, I continue to maintain that I could defeat all comers in veal cutlets, sugar cookies, or pulled pork sandwiches (the kind mass-produced at NASCAR races only). I’m looking for an agent to represent me.
–By the way, I was keeping track of the Iowa Beef Industry’s contest to name the best burger in the state and the winner was announced in the past few days…Sac County Cattle Company of Sac City.
So the 2010 Best Burger in Iowa is Sac County Cattle’s Mushroom Swiss Burger… “a 100 percent ground beef patty loaded with sautéed mushrooms and topped with melted Swiss cheese on a toasted bun.”
Goodness gracious…I’m drooling. We’re talking road trip at some point. Maybe 2011, when I’ll combine a return to the Iowa State Fair (and the early presidential candidates’ appearances there).
Sac City, incidentally, just introduced a Monday Night Burger special that features all burgers at half-price, and includes a choice of the Basic Hamburger, Bacon Cheeseburger, Vegetable Burger (which is beef loaded with fresh veggies), the Hwy 57 Burger or the Mushroom Swiss Burger.
But wait…there’s more. Doug Kruchten, owner of Sac City Cattle Company, adds that his place is really known for its popular Ribeye, “which we call ‘The Dude’…a 16-ounce tender and juicy Ribeye lightly seasoned and flame broiled to your taste. We have regular customers that drive more than 60 miles to get here.”
Actually, Doug, how many people have driven over 1,000 miles to see you, like I might one day? Alas, the town of about 2,300 doesn’t have a Four Seasons, yours truly preferring to live in luxury when on the road.
–Golfer Jack Nicklaus, in recalling his first year at Ohio State, which was the first year he didn’t play basketball, said, “I gained 50 pounds. I tried to drink all the beer in Columbus.” [Domestic, no doubt.]
–So guess who I saw in concert on Tuesday? Hall & Oates. And I’m here to tell ya, they were absolutely terrific…far better than I expected. Both are 61, by the way, but look great and Hall’s voice is fine.
It’s also not as if they don’t have a history of super tunes to fall back on. It’s easy to forget, after all, that they had 16 Top Ten hits from 1976 to 1988, and I think they played about 14 of them at the concert.
Also, no B.S. No wasting time introducing musicians and attempting to tell jokes. They just walked on and played 70 straight minutes and then two encore sets of two tunes each.
Hall did casually mention they have a new box set and I’ll get it. Try and catch these guys.
–Attention Bruuuuuuuce fans. Looks like Springsteen and the E Street Band are coming out with a terrific DVD on June 22nd; “London Calling: Live in Hyde Park,” taped last June and featuring 26 songs, including a cover of the Clash’s “London Calling,” which you just know is super.
–Don’t forget Betty White on SNL…this Saturday. Whether it’s good or not, let’s give this legendary 88-year-old an audience.
Top 3 songs for the week 5/5/84: #1 “Against All Odds (Take A Look At Me Now)” (Phil Collins) #2 “Hello” (Lionel Richie) #3 “Hold Me Now” (Thompson Twins…creepy dudes)… and…#4 “Footloose” (Kenny Loggins) #5 “Love Somebody” (Rick Springfield) #6 “To All The Girls I’ve Loved Before” (Julio Iglesias & Willie Nelson) #7 “You Might Think” (The Cars) #8 “They Don’t Know” (Tracey Ullman) #9 “Let’s Hear It For The Boy” (Deniece Williams) #10 “Miss Me Blind” (Culture Club)
–Nooooooooooooo! My man Roy Clark has been reduced to playing the Mt. Airy Lodge and Casino in the Poconos! Roy, come back to us! Johnny Mac…how could you let this happen? I mean this place is awful, though one time I was with some friends at a drunken golf outing there (an overnight) and the heart-shaped tubs were at least appropriately filled with iced down Domestic.
[The great Jay Black is also doing a show at Mt. Airy. I’d make fun of Mr. Black, but he has lots of Mob connections so I’m going to just let this one slide….]
Baseball Quiz Answers: Seven active hurlers with 150 wins.
Jamie Moyer 261
Andy Pettitte 232
Tim Wakefield 189
Livan Hernandez 159
Kevin Millwood 155
Roy Halladay 153
Tim Hudson 150
Derek Lowe 145
Javier Vazquez 143
C.C. Sabathia 140
*Happy 50th Birthday to one of the best people I ever worked with, and a better friend, Jeff B. Have a premium on me, Jeff!
