Sports
Detonation by Design
Ian Douglass, writing for The Ringer, has a great profile on Tony Khan and AEW.
I was lucky enough to interview Mr. Khan several years ago, right when AEW was just getting started. He was as enthusiastic and excited then as he is now.
Josh Whitman's Tour of Ubben Basketball Complex
Illinois athletics director Josh Whitman gives the media a tour of the almost-complete renovation of the Ubben Basketball Complex.
1-15
Writing for The Athletic, Katie Woo explains how the Cardinals were eliminated.
Their best two position players and two top National League MVP candidates in Nolan Arenado and Paul Goldschmidt combined to go 1-for-15 with six strikeouts, and the rest of the offense was just as lifeless. Their All-Star closer Ryan Helsley was asked to notch a five-out save in the same week he jammed a finger on his pitching hand and was subsequently tagged for four runs, despite giving up nine total runs all season. Their usually impermeable infield defense crumpled when three separate Gold Glovers, Arenado, Edman and Goldschmidt — were unable to make a play on three consecutive groundballs. Minus a booming two-run, pinch hit home run from Juan Yepez in the seventh inning of Game 1, the Cardinals struggled to string together any kind of offense, even when Marmol opted to sacrifice outfield defense in search of more offense in Game 2, sitting Dylan Carlson and placing Yepez and Dickerson in left and right field.
The Cardinals had their chances — plenty of them — but they rarely cashed in. Now they’ll spend the rest of October as spectators.
When your bats go silent, it isn’t hard to figure out. You simply can’t win when the two top National League MVP candidates, Nolan Arenado and Paul Goldschmidt, combined go 1-for-15 with six strikeouts.
On to the offseason, where the team should look at expanding its payroll, nail down a free agent pitcher, trade some dead weight, and sign Wilson Contreas to be the new catcher.
The Battery and the Bat
— St. Louis Cardinals (@Cardinals) October 2, 2022
We will likely never see something like this again.
The Friendly Confines
To the best fans in baseball,
— Chicago Cubs (@Cubs) September 30, 2022
You make Wrigley Field the Friendly Confines. pic.twitter.com/Gtdr3boTXH
This took a lot of work and some very skilled drone pilots.
Mountaintop
Will Leitch, writing in his newsletter, had a profound paragraph about sports.
One of the best things about sports is that it gives us simplicity and clarity that real life cannot — and should not — provide us with. If we win, I’m happy. If we lose, I’m sad. But that’s not just true in the moment. When you cheer for a sports team, you make a lifelong commitment — you give a little piece of yourself to something outside of yourself that you have no control over, with no assurance whatsoever it will be treated with care, or that your investment will ever pay off. But when it happens, when it does pay off, when you get that thing you wanted so badly, it’s yours — you got it. You’re at the mountaintop. And you get to stay there.
My sports fandom consists of University of Illinois athletics and the St. Louis Cardinals. I do not have an NFL, NBA, NHL, NASCAR, or other leagues or teams that I consistently root for. However, I do enjoy watching sports in general when I don’t have a team to root for. NFL games are more fun for me to watch when I do not have a rooting interest. The same goes for MLB and NBA (although I guess I started being a “fan” of the Chicago Bulls since Ayo Dosunmu started playing for them. I will admit I liked the St. Louis Rams for a couple of years, but that was when they were good, won a Super Bowl, and all that. I was the very model of a modern major fair-weather fan.
I’ve seen the Cardinals win the World Series. I’ve never seen Illinois football or basketball make it to the top of the mountain. Maybe I will. Maybe I won’t.
Still, it would be nice to get to the mountaintop. Just once.
The “Real” Home-Run Record Is 73, Not 61
Will Leitch, writing for New York Magazine Intelligencer, has a strong opinion on performance-enhancing drugs and Major League Baseball. He invokes the unholy trinity of McGwire, Sosa, and Bonds.
If Bonds and company had to face the caliber of pitchers standard in today’s game, would they have broken Maris’s record? I doubt it.
The thing is, though: They did. The record is not 61: It is 73. Unlike in Maris’s case, there is no asterisk. There is no footnote in the record book reading, “Sure, Barry Bonds is technically the man to beat, but a lot of people didn’t like him and he probably took cow tranquilizers and had a huge head, so not really.” If Judge doesn’t get to 73, he doesn’t get the record. It’s pretty cut-and-dried.
Those who want to give Judge the record aren’t particularly interested in honoring him. They’re mostly interested in dishonoring Bonds, McGwire, and Sosa, because they think those guys are irredeemable cheaters. Few baseball narratives have lasted longer than the notion that players who tested positive for using performance-enhancing drugs — or even people who very likely used but never tested positive, like, uh, Bonds and McGwire and Sosa — should go down in history as monsters.
He’s got a real point about McGwire, Sosa, and Bonds. They did not test positive for any substances, and McGwire is the only one who said publicly what he took: androstenedione and HGH, neither of which were banned by baseball when he took them.
The biggest reason this has become a hot-button issue is because San Diego Padre and face of Major League Baseball, Fernando Tatis Jr., has been suspended for 80 games after a drug test found clostebol, a banned substance, in his system. Whatever his reasoning: accidental or intentional, using Clostebol is pretty stupid since it was easily found. Please don’t ask me what Clostebol does… probably very little to make Tatis a better hitter or to help him recover faster. I have no idea.
Personally, when I was younger, I thought it soiled the game to have players caught with PEDs. Today, I could not care less. As Leitch says, the term “PED” is so nebulous it means nothing. Players are definitely getting cortisone shots, and that is definitely steroids, so drawing lines in the sand seems arbitrary.
Overall, he’s absolutely correct in stating the home run record to beat is 73. Anything else is wishful thinking and sits squarely at participation trophy level. Judge hitting more than 61 would be a milestone, but not the record.
Vin Scully, RIP
Richard Goldstein, writing for The New York Times, had this to say about one of the greatest to have ever done it.
Vin Scully, who was celebrated for his mastery of the graceful phrase and his gift for storytelling during the 67 summers he served as the announcer for Dodgers baseball games, first in Brooklyn and then in Los Angeles, died Tuesday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 94. […]
For all the Dodgers’ marquee players since World War II, Mr. Scully was the enduring face of the franchise. He was a national sports treasure as well, broadcasting for CBS and NBC. He called baseball’s Game of the Week, All-Star Games, the playoffs and more than two dozen World Series. In 2009, the American Sportscasters Association voted him No. 1 on its list of the “Top 50 Sportscasters of All Time.” […]
“I regard him, all things considered, as the master of radio and TV,” the sports broadcaster Bob Costas once told The Arizona Republic, recalling listening to Mr. Scully with a transistor radio under his pillow as a youngster in Los Angeles in the early 1960s. “I regard him as the best baseball announcer ever.”
I did not grow up listening to Scully. For me, it was Jack Buck and Mike Shannon. In my opinion, the greatest baseball announcer was Buck. However, I can see a strong argument for Scully.
He was just so good:
Scully called Hank Aaron’s record-breaking 715th home run.
“What a marvelous moment for baseball, what a marvelous moment for Atlanta and the state of Georgia, what a marvelous moment for the country and world. A black man is getting a standing ovation in the deep South, for breaking the record of an all-time baseball idol. And it is a great moment for all of us, and particularly for Henry Aaron.”However, I think his greatest call was Kirk Gibson’s pinch-hit home run in game 1 of the 1988 World Series.
“In a year that has been so improbable, the impossible has happened.”In his time, he called 25 world series, 12 All-star games, 20 no-nos, and 3 perfect games. His final game was on October 2nd, 2016. He was inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 1982 with the Ford C. Frick award for broadcasters' contributions to baseball; and he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2016.
Vin Scully called Dodger games for 67 years, from 1950 through 2016. This is how he said goodbye.
Countdown with Keith Olbermann
Keith Olbermann is back, again, this time with a version of his old MSNBC show “Countdown,” in podcast form. He’s calling it… waitforit… Countdown with Keith Olbermann.
Olbermann was the first talking-head-who-had-a-show that I watched regularly. It might have been because of his ESPN days, or I just liked how he looked at the news and then explained it in a way that made sense to me. I thought he was funny and an excellent interviewer.
This new podcast is the exact same show I remember every weekday morning. It has become the podcast I turn to at 6 am when I walk the dog. During that morning walk, I can almost finish an episode, and I’m fast-forwarding past the commercials and the dogs section.
Olbermann is quite good in this format. I know he has enough money to last a couple of lifetimes, so he has the time, but it seems like a lot of work to do this every week, let alone every weekday.
He’s way more entertaining than some of the other political-type podcasts I listened to in the past, so he has that going for him.
Quadball
Quadball is the new name of the sport formerly known as Quidditch.
If you are a muggle, Quidditch is the magical game played by witches and wizards in the Harry Potter books and movies. The non-magical version of the game is played as a club sport in colleges across the country. Today, Major League Quadball (MLQ) and U.S. Quidditch (USQ) announced a rebranding to Quadball.
Part of the reason is to avoid being associated with JK Rowling’s terrible anti-trans statements and the Warner Bros. legal team. For obvious reasons, MLQ and USQ could not trademark the term “quidditch,” so this is a good move.
“Quadball isn’t just a new name. It’s a symbol for a future for the sport without limitations,” the MLQ founders wrote in a statement. “With it, we hope to turn the sport into exactly what it aspires to be: something for all.”
My daughter played Chaser at Illinois State University, and it was by far the most violent, dangerous club sport I’d ever seen. At least hockey players and football players are wearing pads. Quadball is soccer, lacrosse, and rugby combined with some old-school dodgeball thrown in.
The only thing seriously hokey about the whole thing is the holding of the brooms.
USC and UCLA Join the Big Ten
The Big Ten announced today that the University of Southern California and the University of California, Los Angeles will become conference members effective August 2, 2024, with competition to begin in all sports the 2024-25 academic year.
Kind of a big deal. I expect four more schools to join in the next couple of years.
Robot Umpires
Buried in an ESPN story on Major League Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred is something I’ve been screaming about for years—robot umpires.
Generally, Manfred wants to speed the game up and hears the complaints about three hour games and that game needs fixing.
He tells me, in terms far more certain than he has laid out publicly before, that he fully supports revamping the game with pitch clocks, the elimination of the shift and, in 2024, some form of robo-umpires.
Yes. A million times yes. It will call balls and strikes significantly better than humans AND speed up the game. Robot umpires have been tested minor league baseball games for the last couple of years and, guess what, it works.
John Cena is Amazing
John Cena meets Misha, a teenager with Down syndrome who fled Ukraine after his home was destroyed. To motivate Misha on their journey to safety, his mother told him the fantasy that they were on their way to find Cena. They spent the afternoon building blocks and eating cake.
“How special is today? Pretty darn special.”
This is the content I’m here for.
Illinois is Finally Recruiting like a Power 5 Program
Drew Pastorek, writing for The Champaign Room, noticed something significant.
It’s only been about 18 months since Bret Bielema replaced Lovie Smith as Illinois’ head football coach. I must admit I was initially not a fan of the hire. But I was optimistic after a promising debut season. And after the offseason Illinois has had so far, I have no doubts that Bielema is the right guy to stabilize the program.
…
The Illini have 8 commitments thus far for 2023 (Farrell, Harkless, Jackson, Swanson, Zachary Aamland, Kaden Feagin, Antwon Hayden and TJ McMillen) and the 33rd-ranked class nationally according to 247Sports — ahead of Iowa State, Oklahoma, Wisconsin, Florida, Miami, UCLA, Mississippi State, Ole Miss, Missouri, Indiana & Purdue. In fact, Illinois is currently just behind Michigan (30), Texas A&M (31) and Alabama (32).
Yes…it’s REALLY early. But to even be flirting with a top-30 recruiting ranking was unfathomable at this time two years ago.
The Illini are recruiting like a Power Five football program, not a mid-level MAC school. It may take a little time, but I think Bielema will have Illinois Football rolling sooner rather than later.
Belo
Andre Curbelo has entered the transfer portal. I am not surprised, but I am a little sad. He had one of the best freshman seasons last year and one of the worst sophomore seasons this year. Perhaps, as everyone seems to say, a fresh start would do wonders for him and the Fighting Illini Men’s Basketball program.
Robert Rosenthal, writing at IlliniBoard, has a few thoughts. I’d like to share what I think is the most important part.
…Remember the player he helped up during the first exhibition game when his teammates left him hanging? Remember that one tweet from a TV reporter near the court (can’t remember which game) who reported that an official went to Curbelo (who was in street clothes) and asked him “do you understand your role (on the bench)?” This is all part of the Andre Curbelo experience. He observes a reporter typing without looking and interrupts and NCAA press conference to talk about it. He observes someone reaching out to block a free throw and takes his complaint directly to the officials.
Personally, I love it. He’s so incredibly unique. Put all the basketball aside — I very much enjoy people who see the world through a different lens. The way he sees the court is the way he sees the world.
Unfortunately, I think it was very difficult to see through that lens after everything that happened this season. Last year’s confidence in March became this year’s uneasiness. Whatever the lasting effects were — and remember, he was cleared from the concussion and played three games before it was determined that something wasn’t right and he was shut down for 55 days so it wasn’t “he got a concussion and sat for two months” — he was never really back to Belo. The mental and the physical never got back in sync.
I hope he gets back to being himself. Post-concussion, the only glimmer was the Purdue game, and I think that took a toll on him physically and mentally. I am sorry to see him go. I’m not sure the player we got at the end of his freshman year was ever returning. He was unique, but I’m not sure he has the right mindset to overcome his deficiencies, which was a red flag.
You can be a six-foot point guard in college if you are getting a ton of assists, running the offense, not making turnovers, and going 110% on the defensive end. Curbelo was a smart defensive player and could occasionally make passes others could not, but his numbers were not good this year, and he was obviously hurting all year.
I want Illinois basketball to get taller, more athletic, have a higher basketball IQ, and be less prone to mistakes.
Good luck, Dre. I hope you turn it around.
Cardinals Maybe Interested in Albert Pujols
Do you want to get Cardinals fans excited? Tell them Pujols is returning to St. Louis to join the Wainwright/Molina farewell tour. At the very least, tell them there’s a chance.
Last year, Pujols became a free agent during the regular season. Fans got excited about a potential reunion. President of baseball operations, John Mozeliak, didn’t even consider it and rightfully so. With the universal DH, bringing in a crowd-pleasing player like Pujols could be fun. Nevertheless, it makes little sense for the Cardinals to sign a rapidly declining and limited player in Pujols and take away opportunities for younger players like Nolan Gorman and Lars Nootbaar.
Could Pujols help the Cardinals? Of course. He’d be a veteran on the bench to help the younger players. He’d be a leader in the clubhouse. Reuniting with Yadier Molina and Adam Wainwright would give these three all-time Cardinals one final season together, and it would be a license to print money.
Still, I don’t have my hopes up for a reunion.
Falling Asleep to Fake Baseball
It looks like there isn’t going to be any Major League Baseball in the foreseeable future, but if you are old enough to remember staying up late with a radio tuned to a baseball game and gently falling asleep to the dulcet tones of Jack Buck, Vin Scully, or Curt Gowdy, a Chicago-based media producer who goes by Mr. King has you covered.
The Northwoods Baseball Radio Network is on the air with no yelling and commercials at the same audio level. Mr. King has created a fictional baseball game for those needing something other than white noise to fall asleep.
Kevin Goldstein, writing for Fangraphs, has the story.
The game itself is an unremarkable one, but that’s part of the design for content meant to help you fall asleep. Calling the game on WSLP Radio from Foghorn Field is the fictional Wally McCarthy, voiced by Mr. King, whose energy level, on a scale from one to 10, never exceeds a two. Cadillac scores one in the first, three in the second and two in the third, and coasts to a 6–4 victory over Big Rapids. It features 11 walks and 10 pop-outs. There is never a reason for McCarthy to get excited. There are no errors. The one stolen base attempt ends in a caught stealing. Even the home runs are described by McCarthy as “long and lazy.” Meanwhile, behind his calm-as-can-be delivery is the crowd noise, which is frequently the star of the show thanks to long pauses.
It’s really quite fun and nostalgic.
The Madison Punchslap
Chris Branch, writing The Athletic Pulse newsletter, outlines the mess at the end of the Wisconsin versus Michigan basketball game.
In the final minute of Wisconsin’s 77-63 win over Michigan on Sunday, Badgers coach Greg Gard called two timeouts with less than a minute to go, the last one coming with 15 seconds left. They were functionally unnecessary, though Gard said he wanted to give players more time to advance the ball against Michigan’s press defense.
The timeouts triggered a fracas that could change the makeup of the Michigan coaching staff. A full Pulse breakdown:
First, watch the video. You’ll notice the handshake line is proceeding as usual, until Michigan coach Juwan Howard tries to walk past Gard without shaking hands but tells Gard “I’ll remember this.” Gard becomes angry at this, physically stepping in front of Howard to discuss their issues.
Howard was mad. He puts a finger in Gard’s face, yelling — ostensibly about that unnecessary timeout. A near-melee ensues, including Howard throwing a sort of open-hand punch/slap at Wisconsin assistant Joe Krabbenhoft. Players got involved and a couple of real punches were thrown. No one was injured, but it was an ugly scene.
Michigan and the Big Ten condemned the altercation. Suspensions are possible. Don’t be surprised if Howard faces a lengthy suspension or even termination. That feels harsh, but things aren’t great at Michigan right now. It might be a final-straw situation.
The even-keeled takeaway: Two things can be true here. Gard probably shouldn’t have called that timeout. Take your win, head to the locker room and celebrate properly. No need to filibuster in front of your opponent after you’ve won handily.
Howard probably should’ve given a begrudging handshake and gone home, stewing on the loss in the safe confines of his own locker room with no national TV cameras in sight.
First, he should be fired. If you or I did something similar, we’d be fired immediately.
Second, I would bet the farm he won’t be fired.
Third, my gut says Howard is suspended for the rest of the season and the players are suspended for at least one game.
UPDATE: Exactly what I thought
The New York Times to Buy The Athletic for $550 Million in Cash
Lauren Hirsch, Kevin Draper, and Katherine Rosman, writing for The New York Times, tell the story of their acquisition of The Athletic.
The New York Times Company has reached an agreement to buy The Athletic, the online sports news outlet with 1.2 million subscriptions, in an all-cash deal valued at $550 million, The Times said on Thursday.
The deal brings The Times, which has more than eight million total subscriptions, quickly closer to its goal of having 10 million subscriptions by 2025, while also offering its audience more in-depth coverage of the more than 200 professional teams in North America, Britain and Europe that are closely followed by The Athletic’s journalists.
The Athletic is terrific. Good writers, good design, and a model that supports both national and local coverage. There’s no clickbait shit, no intrusive ads, and basically a clean, simple, and informative site.
They went through a spell where they had to let go of some writers. I hope they rehire them back. For example, Bernie Miklasz was fantastic at writing about the St. Louis Cardinals.