Note: Posted early Wednesday morning as I scramble before heading overseas for a little trip. Next BC not until Wed., Aug. 29.
Baseball Quiz: In the history of the Seattle Mariners (1977 being their first season), only six different pitchers have won as many as 18 games. Name them. Answer below.
Ball Bits
–In the Melky Cabrera fiasco, the New York Daily News, which broke the story, reports Major League Baseball went to the Dominican Republic “to procure a jar full of anabolic steroids.”
“Manager Bruce Bochy, third baseman Pablo Sandoval and first baseman Brandon Belt all declined comment on Cabrera’s foray into Web site management, citing a lack of knowledge on the particulars. Belt did say that if the Giants are fortunate enough to advance in October, he would welcome Cabrera back because ‘anybody who can swing it like him getting back into the lineup can help the team win.’
“That assumes that a Cabrera not oozing extra testosterone can still be the hitter he suddenly ‘blossomed’ into during the past two seasons, rather than return to the spare part he often was with the Yankees. Good luck with that.”
Gregg Doyel / CBSSports.com brings up the point that Cabrera, hitting .346 when he was suspended, could “cheat his way to the batting title.”
Now as I write, Pittsburgh’s Andrew McCutchen leads the N.L. at .350, but Cabrera could technically sit and win the title. Here’s how.
“Cabrera is one short of the 502 plate appearances required to qualify for the batting title, but baseball has a rule that adds at-bats to a contending player’s total until he reaches 502 plate appearances.
“The rule is designed to help injured players, not cheaters, but Cabrera could profit handsomely…if his .346 average leads the league when the season ends, baseball would add one at-bat to his total, giving him 460 (at-bats) – and 502 plate appearances….
So as Doyel says, this is the perfect spot for Commissioner Bud Selig to stop it from happening.
“You know by now about all the people who say they don’t care about steroids or human growth hormone or synthetic testosterone, say that if other guys aren’t willing to go to the needle to get bigger numbers and bigger contracts, well, their loss. And by the way? People have a right not to care about what Barry Bonds or Roger Clemens or Lance Armstrong or sprinters or swimmers are using to beat drug testing and the people against whom they’re competing.
“But if the rules about drugs don’t matter in sports, then what rules do matter? If you don’t care about Bonds and the Michelin Man body he had when he was hitting 73 home runs, if you don’t care how Armstrong might have gotten to the Champs-Elysees, then what do you care about when you are watching sports?
“If you don’t care about what you’re watching being on the level, then why watch in the first place?….
“Cabrera thought he could beat the process, and the rap, the way (Ryan) Braun did. Braun with his high-powered agents from CAA behind him, and crisis managers, and fancy lawyers. You ought to know that at one point early in the process Cabrera actually thought about calling Braun’s lawyer.
“He better think about calling one now. As should anybody who helped him. The game just changed, because of another guy who thought the rules of the game applied to everybody except him.”
“Derek Jeter’s (homer) on Friday was his 10th of the year – making him the 10th Yankee this season to reach double digits in the category. Only one team has had more, the 2004 Tigers (11)….
“The Yankees are the 10th team in history with 10 players to reach double digits in homers. That list includes the 1998 Yankees, who won 114 regular season contests on the way to a World Series celebration. But amazingly, that team was the only one among those with the most diversified power portfolios to reach the postseason. And four of the teams – including those 2004 Tigers – actually lost 90 or more games.”
Ichiro has seven, after hitting three in his brief career as a Yankee. So could be No. 11.
But understand that 2004 Tiger team was at the height of the steroids era (which Salfino doesn’t address). Barry Bonds hit .362 that season with 45 HR 101 RBI and an all-time record 232 walks! [An all-time record .609 OBP as you can imagine….and all-time OPS of 1.422, the bastard.] It was his last huge season. And he was a 39-year-old MVP. A freakin’ freakazoid, as we learned later. 10 ½ hat size, or so it seemed.
Anyway, the ’04 Tigers went 72-90 and their starting staff had the following ERAs.
—Roger Clemens is such a jerk. He can’t just disappear…play with his money, much of it ill-gotten as we all know. Nope, Roger, now that he has been cleared of the charge he lied to Congress, which of course he did, is pitching on Saturday night for the Sugar Land Skeeters of the independent Atlantic League.
When I first saw Sugar Land, I thought ‘What the heck is Sugar Land, Texas, doing in the Atlantic League?’ I mean here Roger is scheduled to pitch against Bridgeport, as in Bridgeport, Conn.
But, yes, for some crazy reason the Atlantic League, whose other franchises are all in the northeast (and Maryland) has one in Texas. Am I stupid for thinking this is a killer for everyone on travel expenses, especially Sugar Land?
Anyway…the AP had a piece on other athletes who have played at such an advanced age, aside from Jamie Moyer, and I forgot that when Gordie Howe played his last season in 1980, he was 52 and what is amazing to me, he played all 80 games for the Hartford Whalers of the NHL (their first season) and scored 15 goals. [Check out hockey-reference.com to remind yourself just how great Gordie Howe was.]
Back to Roger, he denies his comeback is an attempt to delay his appearance on the Hall of Fame ballot this winter, which would have to be the case if the Houston Astros decided he was good enough to bring up end of the season.
–The Mets are now 11-26 since the All-Star break (2-12 at home) and on Tuesday’s telecast they pointed out that since 2009, they have the second-worst winning percentage in the second half in all of baseball, .395, with only Pittsburgh worse at .371. The Mets’ starters have a 4.74 ERA during their putrid stretch this season, while the bullpen is at 5.12 over the same period.
–The Nats’ Stephen Strasburg, on his innings limit, nonetheless waited out a 51-minute rain delay on Tuesday and fanned 10 Braves in six innings in Washington’s 4-1 win. Strasburg, 15-5, has now struck out 29 batters in 24 innings in his last four starts, pitching to a 1.50 ERA.
So Strasburg is up to 145 innings, total, meaning he is to be shut down after about another 3, no more than 4, starts.
–Cincinnati Reds minor leaguer Billy Hamilton set the record for steals by minor league teams affiliated with big league organizations when he stole his 146th base on Tuesday, breaking Vince Coleman’s record 145 set back in 1983. Of course Rickey Henderson holds the major league mark at 130 in 1982.
I have to be honest…my first reaction when I saw all the reports that Augusta National was finally admitting women, specifically Condoleezza Rice and financier Darla Moore, was, whatever.
But I’ve selected Sally Jenkins’ of the Washington Post to do a better job than moi in discussing the topic.
“How little those newest members of Augusta National golf club need the clout that joining an all-male stronghold supposedly confers. On the contrary, if anyone gained status from the club’s decision to include women for the first time in its 80-year history, it was the other members. Rice and Moore will class the joint up.
“It never mattered a whit to the fate and future of American women whether a female gained admittance to a small closed society of 300 or so duffers in an old Civil War arsenal town. Anyone who considered Monday’s announcement a powerful symbolic victory was wrong: Rice and Moore have earned plenty of victories, gained entirely on their own and not in the least bit symbolic.
“When Rice and Moore slip on their green members jackets it will be an arresting moment – but not for the reasons posed by those who demanded Augusta accept a woman as a blackmailed concession to social engineering, or some lame gesture of affirmation. It will be arresting for their sheer subversion of that tired old dynamic. What we have here isn’t a case of powerful men granting acceptance to a couple of women and uplifting them to a new level of social stature. What we have here is a couple of powerfully successful women uplifting a bunch of men to new stature – and granting them social amnesty.”
Regarding Moore, she is married to Texas financier Richard Rainwater and Fortune magazine credited her with tripling the wealth of the partnership.
“Her interest in golf, you ask? For one thing, the family firm, Rainwater Inc., bought Pebble Beach. And she is a longtime close friend of Hootie Johnson, the former chairman of Augusta who was so (unfairly) vilified by Martha Burk a decade ago for its all-male policy.”
Meanwhile, I had no idea Rice didn’t take up golf until 2005 but is already a 14 handicap! Good lord. I feel so inadequate.
“A lot of people rushed to take credit-by-association for this ‘joyous occasion,’ as Augusta Chairman Billy Payne put it. Burk hit the radio and suggested it couldn’t have happened without her, even though her protest a decade ago was a comic exercise, as well as an insult to the right of privacy. The commissioner of the PGA Tour and chairman of AT&T both issued applauding statements, even though they were hardly on the front lines when it came to lobbying Augusta to open its doors to female members.
“In fact, only two people are responsible for breaking the gender barrier at Augusta: Rice and Moore. Moore was under consideration for membership years ago during the Burk affair, but declined to lobby publicly because she understood that something more important than symbol was at stake: It has never been the right thing to use political pressure to compromise a club’s privacy. Augusta members are past due in admitting women, but it’s far preferable that they did so voluntarily. It spares them a good deal of ridicule that the women they invited in are no tokens, but the most commanding people in the room.
“The police arrested a professional tennis referee at a Manhattan hotel on Tuesday on a charge of murder in the death of her husband in April. The referee, Lois Ann Goodman, nicknamed Lolo, was in New York to work the United States Open.
“According to the criminal complaint, filed in Superior Court in Los Angeles, Goodman ‘personally used a deadly and dangerous weapon(s), to wit COFFEE CUP.’”
Goodman alleged her husband fell down the stairs but police became suspicious with the amount of blood in the couple’s bedroom. Goodman also allegedly stabbed her husband with the coffee cup. You just can’t make this stuff up.
–In talking about the college football schedule the other day, I should have mentioned No. 8 Michigan at No. 2 Alabama on Sept. 1, but I just don’t think this will be much of a game, frankly.
—Steve Weatherford is the excellent punter for the New York Giants who prides himself on being one of the boys, a workout freak, which isn’t the norm for punters and kickers who are treated more as outsiders in the locker room.
Well, Weatherford’s name is being placed in the December file for consideration for “Idiot of the Year” for posting a hazing incident whereby lineman Jason Pierre-Paul tossed cornerback Prince Amukamara into a cold tub. The players maintained it was innocent, but Prince not only could have been hurt, he certainly didn’t look like he thought it was all in good fun. Plus the language that can be heard is bad.
The thing is, coach Tom Coughlin was not only upset, he singled out Weatherford for his stupidity in posting video of the incident.
“First of all, it was wrong of Steve to do that because there’s trust in the locker room. People have to be able to rely on each other. You don’t think for one minute that would’ve happened if they said this was going to be public.”
Amukamara stated he didn’t have a problem with any of his teammates nor did he feel he was bullied or hazed. Obviously it was the latter.
Weatherford apologized, on Twitter, of course, because he’s a twit.
Every time you begin to like an athlete, you need something like this to remind yourself that for the most part, these guys are truly jerks with a sense of entitlement way beyond proportion compared to their true worth in society.
–What is the over/under on Michael Vick’s season? Two games? I’m thinking Mark Sanchez lasts no more than three. For those of you who don’t follow the Jets, the reason why I’ve been writing this way about Sanchez is because we have this tackle, Wayne Hunter, who is so awful, let’s just say that if there were a few thousand of him at Gettysburg, Gen. Pickett would have won the war for the South. “Gee, that was easy, boys. Move on!”
–ESPN projects the New York Jets to finish 7-8-1, which is more realistic than some of the fans who say we are a playoff team. I’m sticking by my 6-10 mark. [Good lord, ESPN has Buffalo going 11-5.]
–In the rain-delayed, Monday finish of the Wyndham Classic in Greensboro, Sergio Garcia picked up his 8th PGA Tour triumph and first since 2008. He also no doubt secured a Ryder Cup spot, which was his main goal in entering the tourney. Soooo….as Ronald Reagan would have said of Garcia’s effort, “Not bad…not bad at all.”
–More feedback on the logistics at the PGA Championship at Kiawah Island and shuttling 30,000 on a strip of land with one two-lane road. As Golf World pointed out, “the nadir coming late Saturday when severe weather suspended play and thousands departed – or tried to – at the same time.
“That evening it took some spectators more than two hours to get on buses to get to their vehicles and another 90 minutes to make their way out of the on-island lots, where, for the first time at a PGA Championship there was a parking charge ($10 or $20)…
“(During) a period in which the golf industry is trying to attract more people to the game, the logistical snarls at Kiawah are a shadow on that good effort and the good people who run tournaments. Unlike the champion’s talent, the golf fan’s patience isn’t – or shouldn’t have to be – boundless.”
Newly appointed Director of Tennis Operations for Bar Chat, Jeff B., is going to be down on Kiawah for his annual break and I’m having him collect some stories for us; such as how pissed the tennis pros must have been (read lack of business), while I also want Jeff to get the truth on the slaughter of hundreds of spectators by alligators that was covered up by the International Resort Operators Union, with the support of the International Travel Cartel.
–Mark R. reminded me I need to catch the Golf Channel documentary on the “American Triumvirate: Byron Nelson, Ben Hogan and Sam Snead.” One more showing in case you missed it, 8pm, Aug. 28.
–So here last time I told you of the opening for the Premier League season and then Manchester United lost its first match to Everton, 1-0. What kind of makes this funny is that the same column I commented American kids shouldn’t focus so much on soccer because they can’t make any money on it and Everton’s goalie is American Tim Howard.
OK, outside of Howard and literally just a handful of others I couldn’t begin to name….I’d become an engineer.
But congratulations to Howard and Everton! If I recall correctly (and I’m not going back to check my stories), at the site where Buddy Holly died that I wrote of a year ago, I think it was an Everton scarf that was hung on the fence.
–A real trailblazer, comedienne Phyllis Diller died in her sleep on Monday at age 95. Her manager, Milt Suchin, told Reuters that her son who had come to visit found her. “She had a smile on her face, as you’d expect,” Suchin said. You know, I actually believe this in her case.
Let me say up front that I never found Phyllis Diller very funny. A lot of the comedy those of us of a certain generation grew up with, seeing the acts on “Ed Sullivan” for example, would probably say the same thing. I’ve always loved edgier comics. Back then…George Carlin, Richard Pryor. Or Joan Rivers, come to think of it, who said of her friend’s passing, “Phyllis Diller was the last from an era that insisted a woman had to look funny in order to be funny.” But Diller cleared the path for the generations that followed to trade on their jokes alone.
Phyllis Diller was a late-bloomer, getting her start in the male-dominated comedy circuit at age 37. Her first national exposure came as a contestant on Groucho Marx’s TV quiz show “You Bet Your Life.” [I saw a clip of this appearance and what shines through is just how incredibly funny Marx was…and how his comedy was truly timeless.]
Diller had raised five children, was a newspaper columnist and publicist when some of her friends convinced her to give comedy a try. As an obituary in the Irish Independent by Steve Gorman put it:
“She discovered a flair for stand-up jokes at school parent-teacher meetings and similar gatherings…”
Now that must have been pretty funny, I have to admit.
Diller had a great friendship with Bob Hope, which shined through when she toured with him in Vietnam. [I have the full DVD series of Hope’s Christmas shows and for you younger folk, just picture that a lot of us couldn’t wait to see this on television each year….and Raquel Welch and Ann-Margret!! Jill St. John, if I remember right. Ooh baby!!!]
Now where was I? Don Rickles said of Diller’s passing that the teaming with Hope “brought female comics to the forefront.”
Diller, in her 2005 autobiography “Like a Lampshade in a Whorehouse,” counted her ability to laugh at herself as one of her greatest comic assets.
“I let them laugh with me, at me, which makes the audience very comfortable.”
–Once again…my adage “wait 24 hours” proves to be the best. Do you ever wonder why I refuse to Tweet? So you all heard how when director Tony Scott of “Top Gun” fame jumped off the Los Angeles Harbor bridge, ‘friends’ immediately said, ‘well, he had just been informed he had inoperable brain cancer.’ I saw Brian Williams on “NBC Nightly News” relay that information. Wrong, Brian. Seemingly, very wrong.
Because 24 hours later, Tony Scott’s family, through a spokesperson, said “Mr. Scott did not have brain cancer or (an) inoperable tumor,” according to Chief Coroner Investigator Craig Harvey.
Tony Scott directed “Beverly Hills Cop II,” “Days of Thunder,” “The Taking of Pelham 123,” “The Last Boy Scout” and “Crimson Tide.”
“There’s a whole generation with a new explanation,
“People in motion people in motion
“Sometimes a song about a town or city becomes its anthem: New York, New York; or My Kind Of Town about Chicago. Scott McKenzie’s rendition of San Francisco (Be Sure To Wear Flowers In Your Hair), though, became an anthem for a generation. It was the signature song for the counterculture movement that centered on Haight-Ashbury and turned 1967 into the Summer of Love. It remains the musical shorthand for a time when the young plaited freesias in their fringes, urged everyone to make love not war and not to trust anyone over 30, and disdained anything ‘heavy.’
“Hearing the song’s opening refrain – ‘If you’re going to San Francisco / Be sure to wear some flowers in your hair’ – instinctively prompts anyone who was young, idealistic, happened to be hanging around California in 1967, and who had heeded Timothy Leary’s exhortation to ‘turn on, tune in and drop out,’ to grow misty-eyed and ask: ‘Could anyone remind me whether I was there or not?’….
“ ‘When the summer of love had turned into a winter of despair,’ McKenzie recalled recently, ‘our music helped keep us alive and carry us forward into a world we had hoped to change. And so it still does.’ And so it still does. Scott McKenzie may have been a one-hit wonder. But what a hit.”
The perfect summation of McKenzie’s work. Every time I hear it come on I smile. Just a super tune that has aged very well. Written by John Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas, by the way; Phillips being a friend of McKenzie’s since high school.
McKenzie became friends with a lot of Vietnam Vets as time went on and used to tour the Vietnam Memorial with them.
Top 3 songs for the week 8/24/74: #1 “(You’re) Having My Baby” (Paul Anka with Odia Coates…had no clue Paul and Odia were such an item…but wait! I just Wikied Anka’s personal life and during this time, Paul was married to Anne de Zogheb! I mean these two were married 37 years until getting divorced in 2000. So like Anka was having an affair with Odia back in ’74 and I’m thinking Anne didn’t know and he’s having this baby with Odia and getting a No. 1 hit out of it and Anne begins thinking, ‘I wonder whose baby he’s singing about?’….Or maybe I’m reading too much into it….Coates died in 1991 and thus we can’t get her side of the story…) #2 “The Night Chicago Died” (Paper Lace) #3 “Tell Me Something Good” (Rufus…liked this one…fond memories in high school…pre-domestic, you understand)…and…#4 “Feel Like Makin’ Love” (Roberta Flack….super tune…but didn’t have a girl in high school…) #5 “I Shot The Sheriff” (Eric Clapton…simply dreadful tune…talk about mailing it in… “Hey, Eric. People are really stupid and will buy anything you do so we’ve selected this drek.” #6 “Waterloo” (Abba….not Napoleon’s favorite… ‘Geezuz, Josephine, would you turn that off?’) #7 “Wildwood Weed” (Jim Stafford) #8 “I’m Leaving It (All) Up To You” (Donny & Marie Osmond) #9 “Rock Me Gently” (Andy Kim) #10 “Keep On Smilin’” (Wet Willie)
Baseball Quiz Answer: Seattle Mariners….18 wins or more.
Jamie Moyer, 21, 2003
Randy Johnson, 29, 1997
Jamie Moyer, 20, 2001
Felix Hernandez, 19, 2009
Randy Johnson, 19, 1993
Mark Langston, 19, 1987
Freddy Garcia, 18, 2001
Erik Hanson, 18, 1990
Randy Johnson, 18, 1995
Next Bar Chat, Wednesday, Aug. 29….impossible to do one where I’m going in Ireland, given the schedule…cough cough.
