[From Charlotte, N.C.]
Baltimore Orioles Quiz: 1) What was the first year in Baltimore? 2) Who are the only four to hit 40 homers in a season for the franchise, all post-1950? 3) Who is the single-season RBI leader with 155. You need help on this one. Set the mark in 1922, and you have to know who the Orioles were back then. Answers below.
–I get a note from Mark R., Phillies fan, on Friday, wondering if I want to place a bet on the Mets-Phillies weekend series. I reluctantly agreed, knowing the Phils have had the Mets’ number for years now. The wager was three premium beers to be consumed at some point this summer in Ocean City, Md., where Mark has a place.
Well whaddya know? By Saturday night, the Mets had taken the first two, 5-2 and 5-0. I’m already tasting the premium. [We lost the third game, 8-2.]
Speaking of premium, one American beer that passes for premium in my book is Shiner Bock and on Saturday in Charlotte, I met long-time buddy Phil W. at Mac’s Speed Shop, a barbecue joint (Shu, you’d love this one). Delicious food, but also a great place to watch games so we sat there eating ‘cue and wings while watching the Mets (Phil being a fellow Metropolitans fan) and then the Rangers-Senators Stanley Cup playoff contest.
Now I had looked at the menu online before arriving and knew they had Shiner. So I arrive before Phil and plopping myself at the bar, immediately start drooling in anticipation of the brew from Shiner, Texas (or maybe it was more the barmaid…now I can’t remember).
So I have my first two Shiners when Phil arrives, I order another and…horrors! They are out of Shiner Bock!!! Drat!!! Well, I lived…but couldn’t even begin to tell you what craft beer I was served instead; a low moment in my life, that’s for sure.
–USA TODAY had their baseball salary review and it’s amazing to think Tampa Bay’s Evan Longoria signed a six-year, $17.5 million contract extension (with three option years totaling $30 million) a week into his rookie season. That year, he batted .272 with 27 homers and 85 RBI in 122 games. Over his four big-league seasons he has averaged 28 homers and 100 RBI.
Does he regret not waiting for a bigger payday? At least outwardly, the classy Longoria says all the right things. “I’ve never regretted it for one day. It would be like somebody putting the winning lottery ticket in your hand, and you say I might have a chance to win it eight years later, so hold off.”
Well at least the guy is getting more and more endorsements. He’s someone to root for. I mean think about it. Jose Reyes, two years older at 28, just signed for six years, $106 million, when looking at impact infielders. Troy Tulowitzki, 27, signed a 10-year, $157.75 million deal in 2011.
–Gee, when I projected that Jacoby Ellsbury would get only five hits this season, I didn’t think he’d suffer a partial dislocation of his shoulder and be out up to 8 weeks, at last report. Sorry, Jacoby. [He’s now stuck on five, incidentally.]
–I’ve been talking a lot about Vin Scully, but the Mets have their own broadcasting legend, Ralph Kiner, who is now 89! Ralph only works a few games a year these days, but imagine how he is an original Met announcer going back to 1962 when he teamed with Bob Murphy and Lindsey Nelson to form the greatest broadcasting trio of all time. Ralph is also just a lovable figure, as described in a recent piece by Ken Belson of the New York Times.
“Kiner is best known for hosting ‘Kiner’s Korner’ after home games. Players loved appearing on the show, and not just because they were paid $50 or $100. In the days before ESPN, it was the first place they could see replays. And Kiner spoke the same language as his guests.
“ ‘The thing about Ralph is he made you feel so comfortable – no pretense, just be yourself,’ said (Tom) Seaver, Kiner’s favorite guest. ‘It wasn’t a high-end show. But the best thing is he understood; he knew just what you meant.’
“Kiner had plenty of opinions, Seaver said, but he shared them only when asked. Mired in a slump during the 1969 pennant race, right fielder Ron Swoboda asked Kiner to watch him take batting practice in St. Louis. Kiner gave him a few tips ‘and all of a sudden, what he said felt good,’ Swoboda said.
“Swoboda then hit two two-run home runs off the Cardinals’ Steve Carlton, who struck out 19 that night but lost, 4-3. [Ed. never knew the Kiner aspect to this game.]….
“Kiner, a Hall of Fame slugger who once dated Elizabeth Taylor, is as human as they come, as his on-air bloopers prove. He once called George Foster, the Mets outfielder, George Strawberry. And Doug Sisk, a Mets reliever, was tied with Darryl Strawberry for the league lead in runs batted in, Kiner said.
“Kiner also confused catcher Gary Carter with the actor Gary Cooper. He referred to his fellow broadcasters Tim McCarver and Gary Cohen as Tim MacArthur and David Cone. On one occasion, he said, ‘It’s Father’s Day today at Shea, so to all you fathers out there, happy birthday.’….
“ ‘He is as comfortable in his skin as anyone I know,’ Cohen said. ‘While he never played for the Mets or another New York team, he embodies the history of the Mets.’”
–The Los Angeles Times’ Bill Dwyre had a piece on Maury Wills and his remarkable season in 1962 for the Dodgers. That was the year he was N.L. MVP for his 104 stolen bases, 130 runs scored and 208 hits, beating out Willie Mays (49 HR 141 RBI 130 runs) and teammate Tommy Davis (230 H 27HR 153 RBI 120 runs). As Dwyre notes, it was just the year before, 1961, that you had the home run exploits of Maris and Mantle, but the 5-10, 160 lb. Wills literally stole the show in ’62.
In the first two games, he had five steals and by September he was at 73, with Ty Cobb’s seemingly untouchable 96 steals from 1915 suddenly in reach.
“Before Wills and the 1962 season came along, the average number of steals in a National League season was 300 – for all the teams combined.”
Wills so revolutionized the game, by 1970 the number of steals in the N.L. passed 1,000.
“Every time he got on base, Dodger Stadium echoed a request: ‘Go, go. Go, Maury, go!’”
Wills stole No. 95 in game No. 154 so a reporter told him he’d have an asterisk when he surpassed Cobb’s mark because Cobb got his 96 in a 154-game schedule. Maury was actually caught just 13 times. Remarkable.
“Next best in stolen bases that season was 99 – by the entire Washington Senators team.”
Of course eventually Lou Brock and Rickey Henderson bested Wills’ 104, but he was first over the century mark.
—Speaking of the Dodgers, how many picked them to win it all like yours truly did this year? And what is their record? 9-1. Cough cough…cough…
And how about Matt Kemp? He said he was going to improve on his near Triple Crown effort of 2011 and after the first ten games, he is hitting .487 with 6 homers and 16 RBI.
–USA TODAY listed the top running backs.
1. Trent Richardson / Alabama
2. Doug Martin / Boise State…I knew he was good; just surprised how highly ranked he has become. Always had a great attitude. Now scouts are drooling over his true athletic ability.
3. David Wilson / Virginia Tech
4. Lamar Miller / Miami
5. Chris Polk / Washington…man, I’m embarrassed. Didn’t know this guy.
6. Isaiah Pead / Cincinnati
7. LaMichael James / Oregon…gonna make some team and its fans very, very happy
8. Bernard Pierce / Temple
*The top fullback in the draft is Evan Rodriguez of Temple.
–So Texas A&M QB Ryan Tannehill has skyrocketed up the draft list since conversation started last fall. He’s now ranked the No. 8 pick overall, according to USA TODAY.
Mike Freeman / CBSSports.com
“If Tannehill moved any faster up the NFL’s draft boards, he’d be Deion Sanders. Starships don’t travel this quickly. Still trying to figure out why. Was it his 1-5 record against ranked teams? Was it his completion percentage that fell last year? Was it his quarterback rating that was lower than Brock Osweiler’s?
“Or the 19 starts? Or that not too long ago he was a wide receiver.
“Maybe it’s the remarkable pedigree of Big 12 quarterbacks in the NFL, like Chris Sims, Brad Smith, Colt McCoy or Vince Young. They’ve been just swell….
“Tannehill has the greatest bust potential of any possible first-round pick. This is nothing personal against Tannehill. He seems like a fine young man and a smart dude. This is about the people doing the evaluating. This is the greatest follywang of the draft, and we see this every year.
“Common sense is replaced by hope. Words like ‘potential’ become fruitful and multiply. It was in this environment players like Blaine Gabbert and JaMarcus Russell floated to places they should have never gone.”
Anyway, it seems that as of today, Miami is looking to take Tannehill with the No. 8 pick.
Meanwhile, Wisconsin QB Russell Wilson is moving up…now the No. 7 rated QB prospect; or a projected 3-4 rounder. But Kellen Moore of Boise State is still No. 12. C’mon, Jets. Take him if he’s available in the sixth or seventh round. [He could back up Tebow in two years…heh heh.]
Elsewhere around the league, Joe Vitt will take over as interim head coach at New Orleans while Sean Payton spends the entire 2012 season serving a suspension for his role in the Saints’ bounty scandal. But Vitt is suspended himself for the first six games of the season so it’s kind of going to be a mess. Quarterback Drew Brees concurs with the team’s decision.
–So I went to the NASCAR Hall of Fame on Sunday here in Charlotte. Phil W., local resident, told me one of the neat things would be the track embankment where they have cars in chronological order on a track that gradually leads up to a 31- degree embankment depicting one of the turns at Daytona. So you can walk on it and it’s just a cool deal.
And if you’re a hands-on type of guy, the HOF is your kind of place. They even have a section where you can perform all the acts of a pit crew, including operating the bolt gun (or whatever they call it). And all kinds of driver simulators.
And a cool 15-minute movie to start things off. Plus lots of different places where the most famous NASCAR incident is retold…that being the 1979 Daytona 500 fight between Cale Yarborough and Donnie Allison as they dueled down the stretch, only to take each other out on the last turn, allowing Richard Petty to win.
The two then got in a fist fight (Donnie’s brother, Bobby, joining in) and what was so significant was that this was the first time Daytona had been televised live. There was also a bad snowstorm in the northeast so the television audience, some say, was double or triple what it would have been if the weather had been normal and people were able to get out.
Thus, NASCAR put on its best show with an incredibly exciting finish to the race and a big fight after. No doubt, that one event hooked more than a few on the sport. What’s even more funny is that before the race, Bill France, Jr., who ran the circuit in those days, reminded his drivers that they were going to be on national television and to mind their ‘Ps’ and ‘Qs’. Ha!
And at the Hall of Fame I got to pay my respects to a man I’ve declared perhaps the Most Underrated Great American Athlete of All Time, David Pearson, the Silver Fox, who is second to Richard Petty with 105 career wins. I didn’t realize Pearson never ran a full schedule in any one year.
Plus there are some great clips of Junior Johnson, who at age 14 began running moonshine for his father and realized he needed to constantly improve his car to outrun the revenuers. Since there were zero outlets for entertainment in the mountains of Carolina back in the Depression Era, the guys running moonshine would hold informal races in fields. The HOF has super footage of some of these early ones. Talk about horrific crashes. It was then in 1947 that Bill France, Sr., founded NASCAR to put some organization into the process.
–How valuable is Minnesota Timberwolves point guard Ricky Rubio? They were 21-20 with him, but are 4-16 since he suffered his season-ending knee injury.
—Carl Pettersson won his fifth PGA Tour title in taking the RBC Heritage Classic, thus tying Jesper Parnevik for most wins by a Swede on U.S. soil.
–Former Arkansas football coach Bobby Petrino’s cellphone text messages were obtained by the AP through a Freedom of Information Act request, though details of the “more than 4,300 texts and nearly 300 calls since September” exchanged between Petrino and Jessica Dorrell, the assistant he had hired that he was having an affair with, have not been revealed.
—Baylor got off easy for its massive rules violations in both the men’s and women’s basketball programs. The NCAA accepted the penalties proposed by the school and put Baylor on three years probation, with men’s coach Scott Drew being suspended for two Big 12 games next season, in addition to recruiting restrictions.
Otherwise, the women’s national championship team program loses two scholarships, and the men, one.
—Nerlens Noel and Shabazz Muhammad, the Nos. 1 and 2 high school basketball prospects in the nation, committed to Kentucky and UCLA, respectively. Noel is a 6-foot-10 center from Tilton, N.H., while Muhammad is a 6-foot-6 forward from Las Vegas. However, Muhammad’s eligibility could be an issue as the NCAA is looking into his family’s dealings with two financial advisers, according to CBSSports.com; as in he may not be an amateur anymore.
–Interesting tidbit in the Wall Street Journal. Don’t place much stock in the winners of the Kentucky Derby prep races then coming through in the big one. As in the last 20 years, only 7% of the winners of one of those races have gone on to Derby glory – and 66% finished off the board completely.
The five major preps being the Florida Derby, Santa Anita Derby, Wood Memorial, Arkansas Derby, and Blue Grass Stakes. Just one example…the last time the winner of the Santa Anita Derby won the Kentucky Derby was Sunday Silence in 1989.
–From the AP’s Wilson Ring:
“A late-night encounter with four bears trying to snack from backyard birdfeeders gave Vermont’s governor a lesson in what not to do in bear country.
“One of the bears chased Peter Shumlin and nearly caught the governor while he was trying to shoo the animals away, he said Friday.
“ ‘I had a close encounter with a bear, four bears to be exact,’ Shumlin said.
“Shumlin said he had just gone to bed…when the bears woke him. He looked out the window and saw the bears in a tree about five feet from the house trying to get food from his four birdfeeders.
“ ‘I open up the window and yell at them to get away from the birdfeeders. They kind of trot off,’ Shumlin said. ‘I go around to the kitchen to turn the lights on and look from the other side, and they’re back in the birdfeeders. So I figure I’ve got to get the birdfeeders out of there or they’re going to make this a habit.’
“He said he then ran out and first grabbed two of the feeders. As he grabbed the other two and made his escape, ‘one of the bigger bears was interested in me.’
“ ‘It was probably six feet from me before I slammed the door, and it ran the other way.’”
–Check this out…From the Charlotte Observer’s Tim Stevens.
“Ramon and Maria Ramirez were on the green at Zebulon Country Club’s par-4 No. 8 hole Tuesday when a golf ball appeared, fell to the green and rolled into the cup.
“ ‘We saw this ball coming toward us,’ Augusto Ramirez said. ‘We couldn’t believe that it went in the hole. We couldn’t see anybody and the ball was rolling on the green.’
“At the tee, 373 yard away, Michael Alvarez had just uncorked a drive. No. 8 has a slight dogleg to the right, goes uphill, then downhill. Golfers can’t see the green from the tee, so Alvarez and his playing partners knew only that the ball was somewhere in the distance.”
–From Men’s Health:
69% of guys say their first crush was on one of their classmates. I would have said 50% classmates, 50% one of their teachers. I had some lookers that were my teachers in elementary school. Mom thought they were lousy, but what did I care?
1 in 2 suffered through their puppy love in silence.
–Also in Men’s Health:
“Don’t burn that burger. A study in PLoS One reports that eating well-done ground beef may raise your risk of developing prostate cancer. The researchers noted a 50% higher risk among consumers of well-done beef than among people who ate rare to medium beef.”
Uh oh…I like my burgers burned to a crisp.
And what is the most fiber-rich of any cooked food? Why it’s boiled Navy Beans, sports fans! One cup of the suckers yields 19 grams of fiber.
Lastly, I told a buddy the other day I was on a horseradish kick (putting it on virtually every food) because I heard a commercial for Gold’s Horseradish Sauce that said it was good at removing toxins from the liver, and, err, I like beer and, err, you know…
So Men’s Health in the May 2012 issue lists “Why it’s healthy”:
“Low-calorie, high-flavor horseradish has glucosinolates, which may help fight cancer cells, according to a review by Indian researchers.”
–I love the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame, flaws and all, but you couldn’t pay me to go to the induction ceremony. The affair on Saturday night evidently lasted 5 ½ hours! And I can think of nothing worse than listening to an All-Star jam session. Just give me the tunes, played straight.
Top 3 songs for the week 4/22/67: #1 “Somethin’ Stupid” (Nancy Sinatra & Frank Sinatra…not bad of this kind) #2 “Happy Together” (The Turtles) #3 “A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You” (The Monkees)…and…#4 “I Think We’re Alone Now” (Tommy James & The Shondells…should be in the Hall!!!) #5 “Western Union” (The Five Americans…as opposed to The Five Peruvians…or Five Guys From Togo…or Five Different Cheeses…The Five Salamis…anyway, the song blows…) #6 “This Is My Song” (Petula Clark…I love you, Pet!!!) #7 “Sweet Soul Music” (Arthur Conley) #8 “Bernadette” (Four Tops) #9 “I Never Loved A Man (The Way I Love You)” (Aretha Franklin…not my type) #10 “Jimmy Mack” (Martha & The Vandellas)
Baltimore Orioles Quiz Answers: 1) The Orioles started in Baltimore in 1954. Prior to that they were the St. Louis Browns. 2) Four to hit 40 or more home runs: Brady Anderson, 50, 1996; Frank Robinson, 49, 1966; Jim Gentile, 46, 1961; Rafael Palmeiro, 43, 1998. 3) Ken Williams of the Brownies led the league in home runs, 39, and RBI, 155, in 1922…his one monster season.
Next Bar Chat, Thursday…from Lexington, Virginia…home of Bobby Lee and Stonewall Jackson. Gonna pay my respects and probably toast the boys a few times.
