Baseball Quiz: Rookies of the Year…1) In the decade of the 1960s, three ROY from the N.L. went on to become Hall of Famers. Name ‘em. 2) In the A.L. during the ‘60s, only one ROY from that decade went on to Cooperstown. Name him. Answers below.
**TV Alert…This Saturday on PBS, Aug. 6, “The Ed Sullivan Comedy Special.” According to the Los Angeles Times, this will have some new material from the videos you are used to seeing. It’s amazing to think that some of the following got their starts on Sullivan; Richard Pryor, Flip Wilson, George Carlin, Alan King, Rodney Dangerfield and Joan Rivers. This particular show is also supposed to have clips of Moms Mabley and Totie Fields. I’m curious if some of the acts are even remotely funny these days. Like I was a big Myron Cohen fan back in the day.
Assorted Ball Bits
Baseball…football…golf balls…a veritable potpourri of balls…and in no particular order.
–Cliché alert…cliché alert… “All eyes will be on Tiger Woods starting Thursday at the W.G.C.-Bridgestone Invitational in Akron, Ohio.” Tiger hasn’t played in three months but he says he feels great and there was no sign of a limp on Tuesday. “At a packed news conference, Woods was relaxed and focused, saying he feels as good as he has in years and adding he made a mistake by deciding to play at The Players Championship in May so soon after injuring the knee and tendon in April at the Masters.” [Larry Dorman / New York Times]
We’ll see. I’ve never changed my opinion of Woods. I’m not a fan, but as a fan of the sport itself, golf has always needed him, and needs him playing well. I hope he’s at the top of the leaderboard on Sunday and then either wins or is taken down in dramatic fashion. That would make the following week’s PGA Championship all the better.
As for the caddie situation, boyfriend friend Bryon Bell is not the long-term answer and Woods is looking. Woods said of Steve Williams’ dismissal, “I just thought it was time for a change.”
[The Bridgestone folks, by the way, gave Tiger a big break by pairing him with buddy Darren Clarke the first two rounds. The PGA pairings, not yet announced, will be interesting.]
–The Yankees’ Mark Teixeira became the first to hit home runs from both sides of the plate in a game a 12th time on Tuesday night, thus breaking a tie for the all-time mark with Chili Davis and Eddie Murray.
–You know it’s bad when your historic slump makes the first page of the New York Times, as the White Sox’ Adam Dunn did on Wednesday. After Tuesday’s action, Dunn is hitting .165, which would be the worst season for a regular since Bill Bergen in 1909 hit .139 for the “Brooklyn Superbas.” [And my other favorite player in baseball, Ichioro, is sucking major wind in his own way.]
So while I’ve written enough about Dunn already this year, one stat needs to be updated. He is hitting .039 versus lefties…3 for 77! But the White Sox have to keep playing him, praying he breaks out of it. It has to be there…that 5 home runs in 3 games surge. Or maybe not.
Chicago crowds are booing Dunn unmercifully but at least he was never alleged to have taken steroids. “Thank God I don’t have to worry about that,” he says.
–Oh, to be a Mets fan. On Sunday, the Mets were down one, at Washington, two outs in the top of the ninth, no one on, when Scott Hairston hit a game-tying homer, only to see the Mets lose in the bottom of the ninth. On Monday night, the Mets are back home to host Florida, down two in the bottom of the ninth, two outs, one on, Lucas Duda blasts a game-tying bomb into the center-field seats. Game tied. Mets lose on a Mike Stanton grand slam for the Marlins in the 10th. Tuesday night, Mets up one in the top of the ninth when second baseman Justin Turner threw an easy ball away, two runs scored for the Marlins, Mets lose 4-3. Three of the most brutal losses you’ll see, all in a row, and I’m skipping a bunch of misplays by our incredibly fundamentally challenged first baseman Daniel Murphy. No one…no one in all of baseball…is more suited to be a designated hitter than this guy. We’ve all seen tee-ball players with better baseball instincts than Murphy.
So the Mets sit at 55-55 thru Tuesday. Given their injury picture, it’s been entertaining and better than expected. They play hard, but every time you think they might be getting over the hump, they go right back to being the Mets.
–Then there are the Pirates. Yup, looks like I jinxed them when I suddenly decided to get some tickets for Pittsburgh in mid-September. Forget finishing over .500 for the first time in 19 years, the Pirates were going to be in a pennant race!
Oh well, thru Tuesday they are back to 54-54. At least I’ll be watching the Cardinals, who themselves should be in the thick of it then. And maybe I’ll catch a Pujols home run ball as I sit in the left-field bleachers, drinking domestic.
—Randy Moss said he is retiring, so if you believe that, Moss still being only 34, is he a first-ballot Hall of Famer? Yes. For all his issues, this isn’t a criminal so the talk this week about his character impeding his advancement into Canton is plain stupid. He is tied with Terrell Owens for second on the all-time touchdown list with 153, he’s fifth in yards (14,858) and tied with Hines Ward for eighth in receptions (954…I didn’t realize Ward was that high!).
You know, people talk about Moss taking plays off and such, and it hit me in that regard he’s kind of like Rickey Henderson. But Henderson was still the best leadoff hitter in history, and Moss was perhaps the best deep threat in the NFL.
–Right after I posted last time, the Jets made up for losing Nnamdi Asomugha to the Eagles by re-signing Antonio Cromartie at cornerback to a four-year, $32 million contract (not sure on guaranteed portion). But I just liked some stats I saw from defensive coordinator Mike Pettine, as reported by the Wall Street Journal’s Mike Sielski:
“If Cromartie wants to improve, Pettine appeared to have a suggestion. That Asomugha is a better cornerback than Cromartie seems beyond dispute. Among cornerbacks who were targeted at least 30 times last season, according to Stats LLC, Asomugha had the third-lowest ‘burn rate’ in the league, meaning that opposing quarterbacks completed only 39.4% of the passes they threw at the receivers he covered. (The Jets’ Darrelle Revis had the lowest, 33.9%) Cromartie had the 12th-lowest (43.9%), and QBs targeted him 107 times – more than three times as often as they did Asomugha (33).”
Pettine says Cromartie needs to play more aggressively at the line of scrimmage.
–The Giants signed running back Ahmad Bradshaw to a four-year, $18 million deal and it’s just interesting how a typical contract for a star back works these days.
2011: $1.5 million (guaranteed)
2012: $3 million ($2.5 million guaranteed)
2013: $3.75 million
2014: $4 million
So $9 million guaranteed. [Mike Garafolo / Star-Ledger]
The guaranteed portion of an NFL player’s contract is the key, of course, given the potential for career-ending injuries, so the Jets on Tuesday locked up their star linebacker, David Harris, to a four-year, $36 million deal, but with $29.5 million guaranteed! Wow. All Jets fans like Harris, but that’s a helluva contract. It helps he’s a good guy.
But when it comes to contracts, the Giants have a real jerk on their hands in defensive end Osi Umenyiora, who has two years left on a six-year, $41 million deal that pays him $4 million per these last two. He wants to renegotiate but both the team and fans couldn’t give a rat’s ass about the guy. I was jogging at the track on Tuesday afternoon (sweating out domestic, this time), and I overheard these two guys running together just railing about Umenyiora. “A contract is a contract!!…We don’t need him!!…”
In today’s economy, especially, there isn’t one fan that would support a habitual whiner such as Osi.
–Craig Wolff of the Wall Street Journal had a piece on all the weights and gizmos that baseball players have in the on-deck circle, like the original “doughnut” rings founded by Elston Howard of the Yankees back in the 1960s. The thing is, players use the contraptions, like weighted bats and an old-fashioned sledgehammer, under the principle that if they swing something heavier than their bat, then the bat itself will feel lighter.
But, “Scientific research makes clear that the more weight you swing in the on-deck circle, the slower your swing in the batter’s box.”
Coop DeRenne, a professor at the Univ. of Hawaii, “frames his findings in hard numbers: Increase – or even decrease – the weight of your bat between 10% and 13%, and you decrease bat speed from three to five miles per hour.”
DeRenne says: “As much as possible, the batter should mimic in his warm-up what he will do in the game – the same weight, the same motion.”
—College Football is around the corner and Sept. 3 is a red-letter date. Oregon plays LSU and Boise State goes up against Georgia. If Oregon or Boise is to be in the conversation come year end, they must win these. Any win against the SEC is huge.
Reminder…BCS Champions
2006…Florida
2007…LSU
2008…Florida
2009…Alabama
2010…Auburn
–As noted the other day, Wake Forest was selected last in the ACC in football this season. Rutgers is tabbed last in the Big East. [West Virginia received 21 of 24 first place votes in the preseason poll.]
–I couldn’t agree more than with the New York Post’s Mike Vaccaro, who writes:
“The first part was the easiest part, because it involved (Jets Coach) Rex Ryan’s personality alone. Ryan replaced Eric Mangini, and so that first summer, and that first season, everything Rex said sounded like a greatest-hits compilation of Jon Stewart, George Carlin and Sam Kinison. Taking the stage after Mangini was like Springsteen strumming a guitar after a bad jug band. Easy.
“The second part was harder. That was last year, with the honeymoon over and the expectation elevated. And the results were there. There were some rough patches along the way; Ryan’s defense wasn’t the fun-and-stun crowd-pleaser it had been; his clock management was downright Herm-ian at times; and there were a couple of puzzling no-shows, at New England in the regular season and the first half at Pittsburgh in the AFC title game, that fell directly on the coach’s ample shoulders.
“Now comes the third part, a third season, a third go-round for Ryan and his merry band of chatty misfits. Ryan still finds ways to invent talky talking points, whether it’s the elaborate tattoo that now strangles one of his calves, or his resumption of Super-Bowl-or-bust proclamations, or his daily potshots at the absurdity of ‘walk-throughs’ as substitutes for the two-a-days that were standard operating procedure for 100 years of football.
If he isn’t, this is the season the fan base turns on him. If he is, he’ll have the ‘city’ in the palm of his hands like nothing before.
–A team from Saudi Arabia received a bid to the Little League World Series, replacing the Ugandan squad, the latter having been denied visas. The Saudi team had lost to the Ugandans in the Middle East and African region finals. Not sure how the Saudi boys play in robes, but whatever works.
–Good news out of Duke University Medical Center. Normally, I wouldn’t report the following, such as some “medical breakthrough” that, if it ever comes to fruition, is 20-30 years down the road in actuality.
But I make an exception here because it concerns Hall of Fame catcher Gary Carter, whose family is reporting that his brain tumors are 80% better and doctors at Duke are describing them as “less angry.” Carter’s daughter said the “tumors are starting to GO AWAY!”
We can all only hope so. Keep the faith, Gary. You have a ton of people pulling for you.
–Finally, regarding balls…golf balls…Denise D., who works for a large publishing house, was kind enough to send me Carl Hiaasen’s “The Downhill Lie,” which is the story of his return to golf “after a much needed layoff of thirty-two years.”
The worst part of the monster I created in StocksandNews, in all sincerity, is that I no longer have time to just sit down and read a book. The closest I come to that is on long flights, but even then I save up tons of articles for when I’m traveling.
Anyway, that’s my problem. Hiaasen’s book is more my speed these days…little blurbs…so I’ll share a few of them from time to time.
“Day 30…I play nine holes, and I don’t hit a single drive that flies more than a few feet off the ground. It’s a good thing there are no gophers in Florida because I would’ve killed a bunch. By the end of the afternoon, I’m praying for double-bogeys. And, of course, hating my clubs….
“Day 57…E-mail to Leibo: ‘What is the record for the number of golf balls lost in nine holes? And why doesn’t someone invent a tee that you can slit your wrists with?’
“Day 59… ‘Golf free the rest of your life!’ This is the sales pitch of a mammoth retirement development called The Villages, located south of Ocala in what was once the tranquil horse country of Florida. Commercials for The Villages run frequently during televised PGA event and also on the Golf Channel, which, disturbingly, I’ve begun watching late at night if Letterman is a rerun. The ads show ‘active’ seniors dancing, playing softball and, most festively, marching the links.
“Only briefly do I try to imagine what it would be like to spend my final days on earth among 100,000 aging but feisty golf fanatics. Where in Dante’s elaborate infrastructure of Hell would such a place fit?
“The Villages is so enormous that it sprawls across three counties, and has its own development district. The favorite mode of transportation is the private golf cart, and a special driver-safety course is available for inexperienced newcomers….
“Golf, though, is the foremost attraction; golf, golf and more golf. The development offers a boggling choice of 28 courses, eight of which are full-length championship tracts. The rest are short executive layouts and, not surprisingly, the only ones that residents may play free forever.
“The Villages surely is the place to be if your dream is to drop dead in your FootJoys. The youngest age allowed is fifty-five, so in less than two years I’ll be eligible to move in and tee up with the other grandpas, if my wife dumps me in the interim. Should my relationship with golf turn sour, I could always take up ashtray carving, the long bow or possibly the breaststroke.
“Day 60…Piled up a 103 at Sandridge, just dreadful. I’m breaking down and ordering those Callaways tomorrow. As if it’ll make a difference.”
–Oh, baby. The Wall Street Journal’s Darren Everson reports that there is a solid chance the New York area will get a Formula One race as early as 2013…and on the streets of Weehawken and West New York, N.J., no less! Boy, I could get into that. My brother and I used to love the old races at the Meadowlands, which seems like at least 20 years ago. Heck, I have some great pics somewhere of my sis-in-law and me pounding a few domestics at one. But I digress….
The man behind the race idea is a legit figure, Leo Hindery Jr., former CEO of the YES Network. No tax dollars would be spent…as opposed to a vote earlier this week on Long Island where Nassau County residents turned down a $400 million proposal for a new arena for the New York Islanders, which more likely than not spells the demise of that franchise once the existing lease expires.
–Another fitness article involving 75-year-old golfer Gary Player, this one by Jennifer Murphy of the Wall Street Journal. Back when he started his career, no one had exercise regimens and personal trainers.
“People said weight training was detrimental to golfers,” recalls Player. “I was squatting 325 pounds the night before I won my first U.S. Open in 1965. Today, the players have traveling gyms.”
He still does 1,000 sit-ups and push-ups every morning! He also does a lot of stairs. At his ranch in South Africa, he had 200 built into a hill and he alternates between walking, jogging and taking two steps at a time. This is great:
“I like to mix it up so my body doesn’t know what’s happening, but no matter what I choose, my legs burn at the end.”
For strength, he does three sets of 20 to 25 lunges and squats and then another three sets while holding light weights.
By the way, he does his 1,000 sit-ups with a dumbbell on his chest.
But Player also believes that the future of fitness lies more with nutritionists, what he calls “the new trainers.” “Diet is 70% of the fitness puzzle.”
In all seriousness, these days I feel in as good a shape as I’ve been in quite a while (not quite the shape I was in training for my first marathon in 1996…but not bad for my age) and I think a real key is I eat very little for lunch…just a cup of yogurt of apple slices with peanut butter.
Combined with running and sit-ups, I can drink all the domestic I want and not gain weight, sports fans!!!
–So you know how I wrote the other day that when those three kids went over the falls in Yosemite, that hiked the death toll at the park to 8? “A San Ramon woman who fell to her death Sunday from Half Dome was the 14th person to die this year.” Good lord. As the L.A. Times reports:
“Haley LaFlamme, 26, was descending the dome’s rain-soaked granite face using mounted cables around noon Sunday when she slipped and fell 600 feet.
“Yosemite typically sees five or six deaths by the end of July and 12 to 15 by the year’s end, said Kari Cobb, a spokeswoman for the park.” [Ed. Great name…Kari Cobb…just sayin’.]
Granted, there has been a surge of visitors, but still.
–In the northern Spain town of Navarra, a 74-year-old man was gored to death, in the neck, during the town’s summer festival. The poor guy was killed when the bull left the normal route of the run and escaped into side streets.
So bulls might not be as stupid as you think. Does the editor thus need to reassess their standing on the All-Species List? Bulls haven’t sniffed the top 100 in prior rankings.
–If there was ever any doubt about Dog maintaining his top slot on the All-Species List, this should end the discussion.
“An Army sniffer dog wounded in a firefight with the Taliban just over a week ago will be back out on the front line tomorrow with a lump of shrapnel in its belly.
“Hobo, a black Labrador whose third birthday is tomorrow [Aug. 1…a belated Happy Birthday, Hobo!], has been in Afghanistan for two months, finding Taliban bombs for the royal Gurkha Rifles. The dog’s time almost ended on July 21 when its patrol was attacked by Taliban fighters in the Nahr-e-Saraj district of central Helmand.
“As men from the Royal Gurkha Rifles and 29 Commando Regiment took cover in a compound, the Taliban threw four hand grenades over a wall. Hobo ended up with a bleeding neck wound – the dog had been hit three times, one piece of shrapnel passing through its neck, another lodging in its abdomen.”
Incredibly, Captain George Shipman applied all the standard procedures to stem the bleeding. “I found it harder than treating a human because I couldn’t explain what was going on. Hobo was calm throughout and just stood there while we treated him.”
Hobo was choppered out with the wounded soldiers and a vet was on standby. Despite the huge blood loss, Hobo was stabilized.
So we not only reward Hobo with some premium biscuits, Captain Shipman helps Man regain some standing.
–And something I have long called for is now happening in South Africa. The military, South African soldiers, is being deployed in Kruger National Park to protect the border with Mozambique, “where heavily armed and highly organized poachers have driven the slaughter of rhinos to record levels to feed an Asian black market for traditional medicine.”
The poachers slip in with their night-vision goggles, AK-47s, and even grenades. “Moving in the dark, they scrawl warnings to rangers in the sand.”
So now army patrols are accompanying the rangers. Fifteen poachers have been killed in shoot-outs so far this year in Kruger, nine wounded and 64 arrested…which tells you just how many there are.
But…since the army deployment, the number has steadily dropped. Only two rhinos were taken out in June. Last year, 333 were poached!
–This just in…from the Irish Independent… “A fifth of married couples go a full week without kissing – with older people among the least romantic. Even when couples do kiss it is usually a quick affair lasting no more than five seconds, according to a new survey.
“But younger sweethearts are more romantic with those aged between 18 and 24 saying they lock lips with a partner 11 times a week on average.”
—Eugene (Gene) McDaniels passed away at the age of 76. Talk about time flying, it was 50 years ago that McDaniels rocketed up the pop charts with two tunes, the #3 “A Hundred Pounds of Clay” and #5 “Tower of Strength.” He also had the #10 “Chip Chip” in 1962, which I am not familiar with, but the first two were tremendous and remain staples of oldies stations.
McDaniels also wrote “Feel Like Makin’ Love,” which Roberta Flack took to the top in 1974. I didn’t know that.
Strollin’ in the park, watchin’ winter turn to spring
Walking in the dark, seein’ lovers do their thing
Brilliant stuff. And here’s something I’m embarrassed to admit. Until he died, I thought Gene McDaniels was white! I had obviously never seen his picture in the 47 or so years I was familiar with his two big tunes and, what can I say? I’ve only heard the songs hundreds and hundreds of times, they’d come on the car radio, and I had the image of a white guy doing them.
But I just read this from Dennis McLellan’s Los Angeles Times obit.
“After signing with Liberty Records, McDaniels scored his first major hit with ‘A Hundred Pounds of Clay,’ which reached No. 3.
“Liberty reportedly wasn’t quite prepared for the single’s immediate success and did not release publicity photos of McDaniels for about six months. Many fans initially had no idea he was black until they saw him performing on stage.
“ ‘People were amazed. That really tickled me,’ McDaniels recalled in a 1994 interview. At the time of the record’s release, he said, having throngs of teenage white girls swooning over a black singer would not have been tolerated.
“ ‘If I had been white, I could have been a matinee idol,’ he said. ‘But being black, that was taboo.’”
–The Kings of Leon cancelled their U.S. tour, three days after frontman Caleb Followill left the stage during a show in Dallas. He said he was no longer able to sing because of “heat exhaustion and dehydration.”
But his brother, bassist Jared Followill, said in a tweet that the band has “internal sicknesses & problems” that go beyond dehydration. “I can’t lie,” he wrote. “There are problems in our band bigger than not drinking enough Gatorade.”
Drummer Nathan Followill, their cousin, added his own Tweet: “Not so good morning 4 me today. Ashamed & embarrassed by last night’s fiasco.”
Way back I saw these guys as the warm-up act for U2 in the Meadowlands. Since then it’s been nothing but up for the boys from Nashville, winning Grammy Awards for best song in 2009 and 2010.
Top 3 songs for the week of 8/2/75: #1 “One Of These Nights” (Eagles…my favorite of theirs) #2 “I’m Not In Love” (10cc…I keep your picture…upon the wall…It hides a nasty stain that’s lying there…actually, here in the offices of Bar Chat, your editor has a picture of Shelby Lynne on the wall…ooh baby…) #3 “Jive Talkin’” (Bee Gees…dreadful after the first two)…and…#4 “Please Mr. Please” (Olivia Newton-John…eh) #5 “The Hustle” (Van McCoy…the first big hit of the disco era, and not bad…what followed, though, almost killed us) #6 “Someone Saved My Life Tonight” (Elton John) #7 “Midnight Blue” (Melissa Manchester…big slow dance at Wake Forest when your editor was pretending to be an actual student…ahem ahem…memories …cough cough) #8 “Listen To What The Man Said” (Wings…like it more today than I did back then) #9 “Rockin’ Chair” (Gwen McCrae) #10 “Dynomite-Part I” (Bazuka…YouTube this one only after removing all sharp objects from the house)
Baseball Quiz Answers: 1) Billy Williams, 1961; Tom Seaver, 1967; and Johnny Bench, 1968, went on to the Hall of Fame. Will Pete Rose, ROY in 1963, ever get in? 2) In the A.L., only Rod Carew, ROY 1967, made the Hall out of that decade’s winners.
