PAL: Kirby Puckett. I mean, we’re just coming off the second world series victory for the Twins in 1992, and Kirby is about to have yet another MVP-caliber season. He was bigger than Prince in Minnesota at that time.
TOB: THE KID. No contest.
Football
PAL: It slips my mind that the Vikings traded what became the foundation of the Cowboys mid-90s dynasty for Herschel Walker…but I never forget his awesome run when his shoe comes off
…in re-watching…not as sweet as I remember it. Maybe Minnesota shouldn’t have given up 4 players and 8 draft picks (3 first round picks, 3 second round picks, a third round, and sixth round)…but Walker sure was big and fast, wasn’t he?
TOB: Uh. Probably Joe Montana. Maybe Bo Jackson.
Basketball
PAL: I mean, there’s only one answer here, right? MJ
TOB: MJ.
Hockey
PAL: I was a big Pavel Bure guy for some reason.
TOB: Hah, wow. I was ALSO a Pavel Bure guy. Somewhere I have a Pavel Bure autographed card. But I don’t think I was really a Bure fan until 1994, when they had a run to the Stanley Cup Finals against the Rangers. They should bring those uniforms back. Fire!
Favorite Players – Age 20 (2002)
Baseball:
PAL: Pudge Rodriguez. I think for favorite players that never play for your team, you have to see them do something incredible live. Watching Pudge throw to second, even in between innings, was unlike any other catcher I’d seen until that point. Why anyone would try to steal third on him…
TOB: Bonds. This was the year he was just a few hits from .400, and had an OBP of .582.
Football:
PAL: Randy Moss, baby! Favorite football player ever.
TOB: No one sticks out. Maybe Vick….
Basketball:
PAL: Pass
TOB: Chris Webber.
Hockey:
PAL: Pass.
TOB: I think by this point I had mostly stopped watching hockey, but Petr Forsberg’s name jumps out at me.
Favorite Players – Age 30 (2012)
Baseball:
PAL: Timmy Lincecum. Must watch for a couple years there. Never rooted for a non-Twin so hard in my life.
TOB:
Big Time Timmy Jim. By 2012 point he had tailed off already, and was in the bullpen during the 2012 playoffs. No matter. My favorite baseball player ever. And that highlight above was my favorite game I ever attended. Incredible.
Football:
PAL: Randy.
TOB: The Goat.
PAL: I thought you said the GOAT.
TOB: That’s right. Highest single season passer rating of all-time? Aaron. Highest career passer rating of all-time? Freakin‘. Lowest career interception rate of all-time? Rodgers.
Basketball:
PAL: Give me a lil Baron Davis.
TOB: The King.
Hockey:
PAL: I mean, Ovechkin highlights are pretty sweet.
TOB: I think by this point I had mostly stopped watching hockey, but Petr Forsberg’s name jumps out at me.
Favorite Players Now – Pushing 40 (2020)
Baseball:
PAL: Can we hold off on this “pushing 40” bullshit? Back to my earlier point, you need to see something special in person for a player not on your team to be your fav. I love watching Nolan Arenado. I love watching him at third, and I love watching him slug. It feels like the Giants are either playing the Padres or the Rockies every time I go to a game, and Arenado always makes a ludicrous play in the field and goes 3-5 with a 3 RBI
TOB: Wow. Hm. I’m not sure I know. But I really like Ozzie Albies. One of those guys who is really good, hustles, and obviously loves the game. Javy Baez is another one like that.
Football:
PAL: JJ Watt. HAHAHA. Just kidding. I mean, who doesn’t love the TE era? George Kittle is a beast. Dude will not go down.
TOB: Mahomes has to be the most fun to watch. Rodgers is still my favorite, though he seems to be declining, finally.
Basketball:
PAL: A hot Curry is still mighty spicy. Must see.
TOB: Probably Curry, but this is a close one with a lot of candidates. The NBA is so deep right now.
Hockey:
PAL: Conor McDavid highlights are a nice wormhole.
TOB: I dunno. Ovechkin? I have no idea.
How about you? Share the favorite athletes of your childhood, young adulthood, and old-as-hell-hood in the comments.
What is the best field/court/whatever on which you’ve competed?
PAL: I’m starting to notice how much these ideas revolve around baseball. Somebody’s missing the start of the season! While, for me, this tends towards baseball fields, I’ll give a rundown of the best fields I played on as a kid. Please share your selections, and send a pic if you can find one.
Baseball
Little League: Brooklyn Center, no contest.
Grass infields, real, sunken dugouts, best concession stand ever. Burgers with grilled onions. Every player in their annual tourney was given a free burger and a pop each day.
High School: Athletic Park – Chaska, MN – a crown jewel of ‘town ball’ in MN. It’s perfection.
While there are many of these types of fields, this one was the best I ever played on.
College: Need help on this one. Chico State was nice, but that is/was a independent league field. We did play on a field in Missouri that Mickey Mantle played minor league ball at apparently – Joe Becker Stadium. Could’ve been a nice field, but I don’t remember it that way. I just recall freezing my balls off behind the plate during an early March game in freezing rain.
All-time: Chaska. Did you look at the picture?
Hockey:
Best ice: Oscar Johnson – St. Paul, MN
Best atmosphere – Aldrich Arena – Maplewood, MN
Oddity: Coliseum at MN State Fair – St. Paul, MN. Pictured above. Fun fact, my grandpa help build this.
Soccer: Whatever rich high school put in a new football/soccer field the previous spring.
What is the minimum age/level of baseball in which it’s okay for a coach to wear a uniform?
PAL: I remember one coach in Little League (ages 10-12) wore the full uni. Dave Fagerlie, Senior. I played several seasons with Fagerlie’s son, Dave “Big Dog”, Jr. (Jr. was a legit 6’ 7” lefty…maybe one of the most brilliant people I’ve ever met, actually – a walking Civil War encyclopedia – but that’s another story).
Back to Senior and the Little League uni. He was the manager of the Yankees. They had a white, v-neck pinstripe top, but every team in the league were given the same, bland grey pants in our league. The whole getup was hilarious on Senior, who is north of 6’ 5” and lanky as a ball of unspooled twine. The pants hardly crossed his knees, and he elected white sanitaries, sans stirrups. Woof. He would sit cross-legged on the end of the bench keeping book while barking out instructions to players mid-pitch. I can still hear him. An oversized man in a kids uniform folded into a little league-sized dugout.
All of this is to say that Little League is much too young for a coach to wear a full uniform.
Honestly, I’m not sure even a regular season college game requires the full uni from a manager. Baseball pants, turf shoes, and a short sleeve warmup gets the job done, but you go full uni for a playoff game.
One thing is for certain, no baseball coach – no matter the level – can really call himself/herself a coach if they don’t rock the Oakley Blades.
TOB: If every coach needs Oakley Blades, then I am a born coach.
(True story: That is a generic lens and piece that holds it, but real Oakley Blades ear pieces that I bought off a friend who broke his pair. I swapped the real ear pieces into my generics, even though the colors didn’t match. So stupid but so hilarious.)
PAL: Are those blades knock-offs, or Bollé knock-offs?
If you want to know why people actually run, then read this article. In a week when gyms and spin classes, and yoga studios are closed, people are going back to the roads. Natalie and I have seen it, and I’m guessing you have, too. Runners. A lot of runners.
While I urge anyone even a little bit interested in running to read the entire story (it’s short), Talya Minsberg calls out running as an odd side effect of the world stopping:
It’s the perfect sport for a pandemic. All you need is a pair of shoes and a six-foot buffer from the next person. (Some New York City paths, however, have gotten crowded with runners and walkers, making social distancing even there a challenge.) [PAL: the same can be said for Lake Merritt here in Oakland]
…The newest runners are easy to spot, falling into one of three camps: overexcited, overstriding or overly dramatic about the hill up ahead. But a transformation comes quickly. A few blocks later and it’s easy to see the release on the faces of runners who have found their new outlet.
Last Saturday, I was a little over halfway through my training for a marathon in Vancouver. Every run had a mileage, a pace, a small part in a plan to run a race in a certain amount of time. This week, the runs have no set distance or pace. I’ve taken different routes. There’s nothing to hurry back for – no meet-up or reservation. Each run is self-contained. The goal is to find that meditative sweet spot when the mind shuts off and the only acknowledgement is the sound of footfalls synced with my breath. Breath in for three steps through the nose, breath out three steps through a loose jaw.
I’d much rather be training for a race and going out to dinner with friends, and going to the office to work, and having dinner with Natalie’s mom and dad, and flying to see my family; but I’m really thankful for the each mile of each day this week. I need the mental break and physical burn.
As a regular runner, you become addicted to the simple act of putting one foot in front of the other because when you’re running hard, that’s all you can think about. The lactic acid building in your legs doesn’t care about your work calendar or your school assignment or etiquette for video conference calls or the state of the pandemic today. Just get comfortable with being uncomfortable. Get to the next mile, to the next repetition, to the next tree, to the next breath.
To all runners out there this week, you’ll be getting the nod from me. Hope to see you out there. – PAL
This is a strange story, and I loved it. Read it twice. In 1971, Alan Shepard hit three golf balls from the lunar surface. While his explanation was that it was “a form of scientific outreach,” the real reason was because Alan Shepard loved to play golf and thought it would be cool to hit a golf ball on the moon.
But Graham MacAree makes a pretty interesting observation in his story. Perhaps no two pursuits better sum up the success and downfall of man better than exploration and domestication. The moon is the high-water mark of human exploration. As for golf…I mean, is there anything more domesticated than a 6-iron? Sheppard was staring at a new frontier* while golfing.
Golf is an expression of mastery, of a hostile world rendered submissive. Those verdant greens and carefully placed trees invoke a nature that’s been twisted into parody for our own amusement. Humans have been fighting against the rest of the world since the dawn of our species (and been rather too successful, might I add), and golf is perhaps the most brutal expression of our need to tame the environment.
Perhaps the idea of domesticating (and destroying) the moon is particularly interesting this week. Brilliant observation on MacAree’s part. – PAL
His most famous quote is simply: “There ain’t much to being a ballplayer if you’re a ballplayer.”
So true.
But the funny part is that while Vaughan undoubtedly learned so much from Wagner by simply being around the great man, Honus was not what you might call a demonstrative or vivid teacher. Yes, Wagner worked with Vaughan for hours on the field, but when someone asked Vaughan how it was progressing, he smiled.
“I’m not sure,” Vaughan said. “When I asked Mr. Wagner what to do, he said, ‘You just run in fast, grab the ball and throw it to first base ahead of the runner.’ But he didn’t tell me how.”
Checking in on the Players from Jackie Robinson West Little League
Way back in 2014, the year we started this blog, Jackie Robinson West Little League from the Southside of Chicago made a run to the Little League World Series championship game. Their run sparked a lot of interest, because they played with a lot of joy, and a lot of flair, and yes because they showed that baseball is not dead with today’s African-American youth.
Well, those kids are all entering adulthood now, and at least a couple of them are prospects. This article checks in on the shortstop on that team, Ed Howard, nicknamed Silk by broadcaster and Hall of Fame shortstop Barry Larkin, is a senior in high school and is expected to be drafted in the first round of the MLB draft…if its held. The article is an interesting look at how much work went into Ed’s game from the time he was a little kid.
But it got me wondering…what about Tre Hondras? Trey is the player featured in our logo at the top of the page. He made it because of his hilarious response to ESPN about what he does to relax before a game:
A distraction – I sure as hell need one. I can’t go down the pandemic wormhole every day. There are no sporting events to argue over or to celebrate. We need to do it ourselves, so TOB and I are sharing a short post daily. Don’t care how goofy the topic (the goofier the better), and we’re asking our readers to join the conversation.
Possible topics to include (readers, please email us at 123sportslist@gmail.com or hit us up on the socials to add your suggestions or request from the current list)
Editor’s Note: A version of this story originally appeared on the author’s personal blog in 2009.
One night, during law school, I went to the gym looking for some pickup with the undergrads. I played about four games, and was ready to head home.
As I was walking off the court I saw a guy from my Law School League basketball team (Yeah, it was a law school-only intramural league. Law school is small, and the basketball talent is slim, but we managed to stockpile all the good players on one team. In three years, we lost zero games). He told me some of the guys from my law school team had an intramural game in an undergrad league starting in a few minutes, and they could use me. I was pretty tired and a bit worried about a knee injury I was just easing back from, but I gave it a shot.
We had a very good team (I was maybe the 8th best of 9 guys), but so were the undergrads. We were down 50-44 with about 45 seconds left and we started fouling. They missed their free throws and we managed to tie it up at 54. We had a decent final shot for the win, but it was no good. In overtime, we were up 3. We got hosed on a horse shit call, and then they hit a 3 to tie.
We went to double overtime, and we were down 1 with 2.8 seconds left. We called timeout, but we still had to inbound the ball full court. And then, essentially, this happened.
I’m not kidding. We (well, I was on the bench) threw it the length of the floor and somehow my teammate Chris caught it on the right wing. He took a couple dribbles toward the baseline, shot it from behind the backboard over 2 guys, and buried it, as the buzzer sounded.
The shot itself was kind of like this.
It was god damn incredible. And don’t think for one second that I didn’t run around like Thomas Hill after that Laettner shot when it happened. Well, less crying and disbelief; more whooping and mobbing. I would pay $100 to see the whole thing on video.
Post Script: Just because these commercials were awesome…
When I first wrote this story, back in 2009, my friend Senthil pointed out that as amazing as this game was it does not surpass the time I tackled a guy and ended the game with a bench clearing brawl. But that is a story for another day… -TOB
PAL: Your memory is bonkers, TOB. Are you the LeBron of your field? Can you recount trials in perfect sequence?
First the defendant told us about his usual morning. Eggs with chorizo and spinach. Cheese: Jack. Coffee – medium roast with half-and-half. Morning news – 4 tabs on the laptop: SF Chronicle, ESPN, 1-2-3 Sports!, CNN. Only after his coffee did he threaten his tenants with eviction via SMS text for the fourth time February, 2018.
A few games stand out, but I don’t remember the exact sequences. Some highlights:
Little League: My brother and brother-in-law coached a rival to my team, and they beat us in a close one. I made the final out as my brother, leaning on years of experience pitching to me in the garage, openly instructed his star pitcher where and where not to pitch me for everyone to hear.
A few years later, same brother and brother-in-law were now coaching my team. Jay, my in-law, kicked off his bachelor party with our game. All of his and my sister’s friends, joined by the team parents – tailgated before and during the game (apparently Roseville had very loose restriction on beer around youth sports). The fans basically partied and this youth game between Roseville and Mahtomedi served the backdrop, like a game on the tube at the bar. Game came down to the last at-bat, and I hit a walk-off single. The 50 fans (a big turnout for a 13 year-old regular season game) went bonkers. I now wonder what the Mahtomedi parents thought. Also, $5 says one of the Mahtomedi dads mosied on over to the tailgate for a cold one.
The ultimate is actually a double-header in college. We needed to sweep University of Omaha in a 4-game weekend series to make the North Central Conference tournament. Can’t remember how, but we won both games on Friday. And then Kevin Wiessner – the tall lefty with the red moon boots mentioned yesterday – hit not one, but two walk-off home runs on Saturday. First game was a walk-off grand slam. The second was a walk-off solo shot in the bottom of the 12th inning. We had an awesome kegger that night at The Moontower. Here’s the writeup about Wiessner’s heroics from UNO.
TOB: I can’t stop laughing about your brother shouting your scouting report for all to hear. But I’ve got bigger questions here. I read the link about Kevin’s two walk off dingers and I have thoughts.
One: THIS is a baseball coach.
Two, from the article:
In the first game, Nebraska-Omaha held a 4-3 lead heading into the bottom of the seventh inning until Augustana loaded the bases with a walk, a hit batsman and a base hit. Wiessner then connected for a grand slam to give the Vikings a 7-4 victory.
Excuse me, the seventh inning? Did you guys play 7 innings? Is this beer league softball? What’s the story here?
PAL: Double-headers were 7-inning affairs in NCC play. Single games were 9 innings. Damn you, TOB.
Lockdown Dailies Overview
A distraction – I sure as hell need one. I can’t go down the pandemic wormhole every day. There are no sporting events to argue over or to celebrate. We need to do it ourselves. We’ll tentatively call in Lockdown Dailies. Don’t care how goofy the topic, and I’m asking our readers to join the conversation. We’re going to do our best to post a fun topic every day or so. We’ll see how all of this goes.
Possible topics to include (readers, please email us at 123sportslist@gmail.com or hit us up on the socials to add your suggestions or request from the current list)
Your process for selecting the perfect baseball glove
What is the earliest level of baseball can coaches wear full uniform w/o ridicule?
Sport you wished you hadn’t quit (or had quit earlier)
Sport you never played but think you could’ve been pretty good at
Greatest game you ever played in
Greatest spectating memories
Ever been ejected? Do tell.
Worst mistake you ever made in competition
Analyzing TOB’s LL stats from Tahoe (altitude)
Best youth field you ever played on
Best youth althlete you ever competed against/with (not how they turned out,but at the time)
Cal – how do we make them not suck?
Why Augustana should not go D1…but if they do can I claim D1 status (asking for a friend)?
Readers – Share your topics…and this story with your friends.
A distraction – I sure as hell need one today. I can’t go down the pandemic wormhole every day. There are no sporting events to argue over or to celebrate. We need to do it ourselves. We’ll tentatively call in Dailies. Don’t care how goofy the topic, and I’m asking our readers to join the conversation. We’re going to do our best to post a fun topic every day or so. We’ll see how all of this goes.
Possible topics to include (readers, please email us at 123sportslist@gmail.com or hit us up on the socials to add your suggestions or request from the current list)
Your process for selecting the perfect baseball glove
Sport you wished you hadn’t quit (or had quit earlier)
Sport you never played but think you could’ve been pretty good at
Greatest game you ever played in
Greatest spectating memories
Ever been ejected? Do tell.
Worst mistake you ever made in competition
Analyzing TOB’s LL stats from Tahoe (altitude)
Best youth field you ever played on
Best youth althlete you ever competed against/with (not how they turned out,but at the time)
Cal – how do we make them not suck?
Why Augustana should not go D1…but if they do can I claim D1 status (asking for a friend)?
Topic 1: Baseball Cleats
It’s spring, and TOB recently took his son, JOB, to get his first pair of real cleats. I loved buying cleats (correction: I loved choosing the cleats my mom and dad would purchase). Each year, I was making a statement of what kind of baseball personality I was projecting. While I’d leave myself open to the possibility of some flourishes, I was an all-black guy. I’d watched by brother, Matt, straight up spray paint his high-top Tanel 360s in the work room. It was all about that shine, baby.
Closest thing I could find to the real ones. Tanel is OOB.
I messed with the high-tops in Little League – sure – but grew out of the fad. And I may have had a puma phase in college (everyone experiments in college). I never grew tired of that shiny black low top cleat, which is funny because, as a catcher, my cleats were dirty by warmups.
My all-time favorites: The Pony Golds
Shit…put a little polish on those and I’d run out there with those right now. So comy. The leather was supple, so much so that these bad boys would’ve torn apart within a month if I hadn’t loaded up the toes with shoe goo and/or a double-helping of pitcher’s toe.
I always thought these classic Nike looked good with most any uni.
What did these tell me about the player? Not as much as they told me that his/her dad just mandated the cleat selection. Conservative, no frills, which – if I’m being honest – is usually the right call on cleats. I’m guessing these were an Al Pflepson staple up at Waite Park.
Also, I’m positive my oldest brother, Tony, rocked off-whitecleats in high school. Not his fault, I guess. Not only was he the oldest, but also he was a private school boy from kindergarten through college.
What did you sport, TOB? Marin Rowe – I know you have some thoughts on this subject. Kevin Wiesnner – damn right I’m calling you out for those disgusting red moon boots you and that Excelsior team wore (let’s leave the jersey shorts for another day, shall we?). You can make a take look pretty, but not in those cleats, my super tall lefty. – PAL
TOB: As I recalI was strictly a Nike guy. Like Phil, I rocked black cleats, but the ones I had in majors had some grey accents, as you can see in this photo of me about to slap the tag on a guy who thought he could take an extra base on the Giants. Psh.
Or this one of me after I hammered a pitch with my little league doubles power.
But I lived in a small town (South Lake Tahoe), and there were not a lot of stores to choose from, so there weren’t a lot of cleat options. By the time I found the Eastbay catalog, I had already (stupidly, idiotically) given up baseball. But whether it was soccer, baseball, or football, I usually got them at the Foot Locker near the casinos, or a local sporting goods store called The Outdoorsman. Maybe we stopped at Champs in Reno or Sacramento.
Phil and San Rafael Forreal Rowe: now that I’m coaching baseball, what’s your stance on cleats for coaches. Never? Only when coaching a certain age?
PAL: Oh wow…and we have tomorrow’s topic tee’d up.
Readers – Share your topics…and this story with your friends.
I listened to two podcasts as I ran around Lake Merritt in the early morning fog on Thursday. The Daily detailed the ways in which the U.S. stumbled out of the gate when it came to testing for Coronavirus (and the impacts those missteps will have). Then Dan Patrick ran down a list of all the sporting events that were cancelled between Wednesday afternoon and Thursday morning. Sports in America disappeared overnight, and I wondered if I was no longer training for the Vancouver Marathon (May 3) and instead just out for a run.
Andrew Keh summed up the incredible toppling with the following:
It was almost unreal to see the sports leagues buckle under the pressure of an unseen, outside force. These institutions are more often seen throwing around their considerable financial might and cultural capital, and are frequently viewed as secure in their near-religious place in American society. And for a time, it even seemed they might resist the coronavirus, too: various half-measures — like locker rooms closed to the news media, arenas closed to fans, games transferred to neutral sites in areas less affected by the virus — were pursued in recent days as solutions to keep athletes safe and sports afloat through the pandemic.
But little by little, over the course of the week, the decision to play on seemed to be clawed from their hands. The pressure came from all over.
Keh detailed various strange scenes taking place around the world – college basketball games canceled at halftime, a bus carrying the Baltimore Orioles to a spring training game turned around (Spring Training was cancelled), and then this downright eerie scene of Olympic athletes leaving in the middle of the night:
In Joensuu, Finland, members of the United States biathlon team preparing for a tournament there this weekend were awakened in their hotel rooms by staff members at 3 a.m. — just after Mr. Trump announced a travel ban from Europe — and told to gather their belongings. Less than three hours later, they were on a series of flights arranged by the team’s leadership — to Helsinki, then Munich, then to the United States — to bring them home.
I feel terrible for what Olympic hopefuls must be wondering right now: are the olympics the next? To train for that long, to be peeking for this specific competition – a lifetime of work brushed aside. I bet those american athletes from the 1980 olympic boycott are sending a little love to today’s athletes.
Bill Simmons has this concept for when an athlete acts erratically – when you could be told that the athlete did anything – fought a bear, ate vaseline, became buddies with a North Korean dictator – and you’d believe it as true (2 of those are real). He calls it the Tyson Zone, named after Mike Tyson.
The world just entered the Tyson Zone. Or maybe we’ve been there for some time and I just realized it. – PAL
TOB: Crazy, man. What a crazy week. On Thursday we were out to dinner with friends, and I commented that for our kids, especially our oldest who is almost 6 years old and just barely aware, this pandemic will be like 9/11 was for kids his age back in 2001. My wife scoffed, but I think it’s true. When we got home, I watched some TV and heard three different commentators make comparisons to 9/11. Both are/were a huge, confusing, unseen force changing how people across the world live. It’s scary and confusing for all of us, but I have to imagine especially so for kids.
As for athletes, I feel most bad for those whose careers will end this way. Vince Carter is likely retiring, and now his career is suddenly over, a month before he expected. Hundreds if not thousands of graduating college athletes were told that the last game they played will be the last they ever play. Every athlete has a last game, of course, but usually you know it’s coming and can emotionally prepare. For the record, those biathlon athletes Phil referenced are likely not in danger of missing their Olympics. The biathlon is a Winter Olympic event, and the next Winter Olympics is not until 2022. Of course, it’s hard to imagine that the Summer Olympics takes place this year.
However:
I really, really want to read a story explaining exactly how the Utah Jazz managed to get their hands on 58 COVID-19 tests in a matter of hours.
“How come Rudy Gobert can get tested on the spot and I can’t?” is a question every last American should be demanding answers to. https://t.co/SkBCM16UcL
My Favorite Anecdotes from Posnanski’s Top 100 This Week
#25 Pop Lloyd:
Lloyd lived long enough to see Robinson break the color line, long enough to see every team in baseball sign at least one black baseball player, and he was asked: Do you ever feel like you were born too soon?
And this is what he said: “I do not consider that I was born at the wrong time. I feel it was the right time. I had a chance to prove the ability of our race in this sport, and because many of us did our best for the game, we’ve given the Negro a greater opportunity now to be accepted into the major leagues with other Americans.”
That’s an incredible amount of humility. Many people in Lloyd’s situation would have been rightfully bitter about the unfair and racist rules that kept him and many others out of major league baseball. It’s nice sometimes to be reminded, though, that while we can’t control everything in our lives, we can control how we choose to deal with the negatives thrown our way.
#17: Rogers Hornsby:
In 1918, Hornsby repeatedly ticked off manager Jack Hendricks with his attitude; he played exactly the way he wanted to play, no more, no less. Once when he was tagged out standing up at home plate, he told his teammates, “I’m too good a ballplayer to be sliding for a tail-end team.” Hendricks fined him $50, which Hornsby paid with a bagful of silver dollars he’d picked up the night before, special for the occasion.
#15: Josh Gibson
We can look at the incomplete box scores and try to piece him together. That year, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette actually ran some of the Homestead Grays box scores. It was sporadic, but from May 29 to June 29, one month, I was able to find partial box scores for 23 games. These games were against all competitors, including local town teams. But Gibson was 19 years old, and he was playing catcher every day, and he was just beginning to make a name for himself.
In one game, he hit three home runs. In another, he hit two. In yet another, he hit a double and two triples (one of the underrated elements of Gibson, as Hubbell referenced above, was his speed). Totaling it up, Gibson hit about .435 and slugged well over 1.000 for that stretch. He hit 13 home runs in the 23 games, so many that the Post-Gazette’s chronicler clearly got bored and just kept re-writing “Josh Gibson hit another home run.”
Earlier this week, we posted a 1-2-3 Sports! original. A few weeks ago, I traveled back to Minnesota to watch my niece become the first person in my family to play in the State High School Hockey Tournament. Read to find out why this high school tournament such a huge deal? Below is an excerpt. Read the full story here
Only in the unexpected moments like this one at the bar do I realize how fast time is moving. Like rolling down the window on the highway. I’m going exactly as fast as I was a moment before, but the wind hits me, snatching the breath from my throat.
We shared the onion rings, and (my sister-in-law) told me how well everything had been going for my niece in her first year at Breck. The juniors and seniors on the team had been nothing short of my niece’s keepers, and the gap between 14 and 18 is so wide that it’s hard to even see across to the other side. She was emphatic in appreciation towards older players on the team. My niece was doing well while being challenged in school. She got into some advanced math program. She was playing a lot, pretty much from the beginning of the year. All indications were that the decision to go to school across town was had paid off in every way.
I had known most of this, but the details weren’t the important element; it was my sister-in-law’s excitement and pride and love for he daughter. It was all mixed up and boiling over. I couldn’t remember the last time just the two of us had thirty minutes to talk. Maybe at the cabin down by the beach when everyone’s either walking down to or up from the lake. We sat at a great bar, eating great onion rings, drinking great beer, waiting to watch her daughter and my niece play in the State Tourney.
I remember this is how life felt growing up. Best-case. I know that’s not true, but that’s how I remember it. Pristine. All of us ‘kids’ were around. All carefree and assured. Hearts unbroken. And then we grew up, and like most, we were humbled over and over with blunt reminders that best-case is the exception. A break that goes your way.
So to sit at that bar with my sister-in-law on a day like that, and to appreciate this moment as a best-case – I savored that conversation.
Turns out, we enjoyed the moment thirty seconds too long. We realized the time, paid the check, and dashed across Rice Park to the back entrance of Xcel, with The Ordway on our right and Herbie’s (named after St. Paul hockey deity Herb Brooks) on our left. – PAL
My wife and I get corona virus. We go to Disneyland and ride California screamin. The park finds out and quarantines us on the coaster and we endlessly ride. We have kids and they grow up on the coaster. It’s all they know. This coaster is our home now. Life is beautiful.
Happy Birthday, Ron Wotus. The Giants coaches did a nice job with this little piece of photoshop.
Larry David’s Fandom Makes Perfect Sense
Talk about a 1-2-3 Sports! sweet-spot story. The Ringer’s Katie Baker breaks down the history of sports fandom in Larry David work, from Seinfield to Curb Your Enthusiasm. It’s an extremely fun read. Here’s the synopsis of David’s sports fandom bio:
Raised in Brooklyn, David is a longtime enthusiast of both sad teams, as well as the Yankees and the Rangers, and he is semiregularly spotted yawning at Knicks games and yawning at Yankees games. But don’t let the sleepiness fool you: David might be one of the most active fans in the celebrity realm. He has low-key dedicated several decades of his life to slipping his sports takes into his work, from voicing the babbling George Steinbrenner on Seinfeld to defending the clutch Derek Jeter on Curb.”
I’m sure you’re reading this and thinking about one of your favorite sports references from David. Of course, there’s the Magic Loogie from Seinfeld. Or David’s golf obsession (which, as Baker points out, is the perfect sport for David’s worldview: he “likes to spend hours laser-focused on a sport that mostly yields frustration and disappointment, again and again.”). There’s the Jeter defense of Jeter’s defense, too. It’s all funny. It remains funny. While I’m not up-to-speed on the latest season of Curb, David’s genius is unassailable. He and Seinfield created a new comedy sitcom that became a huge network success, and then he did it again with Curb. We’re in the 32nd year of David’s brand of comedy, and it’s still funny.
Sports has always had a place in his tv shows, but it’s not just for comic relief. There’s something about fandom that lines up perfectly with David’s brand of comedy: “…David’s love/hate of sports makes perfect sense: Sports provide a socially acceptable forum for his nonstop complaints, regrets, shoulda-woulda-couldas, and laundry lists of enemies and perceived slights.”
The article is littered with clips and links, both from his shows and from radio interviews. My personal favorite is David’s take on Jets coach Adam Gase and his hat-wearing habit: “Either he’s hiding baldness or there’s something about his personality—he’s uncomfortable. You can’t trust a man who wears a hat. He’s got to take the hat off. He’s got to face the public.”
Jeter was, is, and always will be overrated. IN ALL RESPECTS.
Still Today, He is the Greatest of All-Time
Yes, another entry from Joe Posanski’s top 100 baseball players of all-time countdown: the immortal and ageless Rickey Henderson.
Like Johnny Bench last week, I just want to share this fantastic Rickey story, as told by Posnanski:
All right, the rest of this will be a series of Rickey stories. That’s what you want. That’s what I want. We can only assume that’s what Rickey wants. Rickey loves a good Rickey story. We’ll get the most famous one out of the way first because it isn’t even true. The story goes that when Rickey joined the Seattle Mariners in 2000, he saw John Olerud taking some groundballs while wearing his batting helmet.
“Huh,” he said, “I played with a guy in New York who did that.”
“Yeah,” Olerud said. “That was me. Last year.”
As mentioned, the story isn’t true. Olerud and Henderson have debunked it. Apparently, it was a gag the Mariners’ assistant trainer came up with and it soon spread around the clubhouse, as good gags will.
But even an untrue Rickey story leads to a great tale. When Rickey was debunking the story, he made the point that while it was funny, it was also silly because he’d known Olerud years before they played on the same team. Of course he did. Olerud played first.
And, as Rickey said, “I was always on base.”
Ok, one more:
Henderson stepped into the box and then he started talking to himself. Everyone knew about that routine in the American League; Henderson would constantly talk to himself, pump himself up, “Rickey gonna hit this guy! This guy’s got nothing! Rickey’s good, Rickey’s getting a hit, Rickey’s going to steal second and then steal third … ” and so on.
So he was going through that whole routine and behind the plate, Cubs catcher Scott Servais and home plate umpire Jim Quick were trying hard not to laugh. Nobody put on a show quite like Rickey … but with the count 2-2, Henderson swung and missed. And then he turned around toward Servais and Quick and he said this:
“That’s OK. Rickey still the man.”
Sorry, I can’t stop:
So, no, pitchers didn’t often slip that third pitch past him while he watched.
But every now and again they did, and when he would get back to the dugout, [Alex] Rodriguez would ask, “Hey Rickey, was that a strike?”
And Henderson would say: “Maybe. But not to Rickey.”
LOL:
Yes, Rickey negotiated hard. Once, during one of those disputes, he said, “If they want to pay me like (Mike) Gallego, I’ll play like Gallego.”*
Maybe he should have been a stand-up comedian:
Someone asked him what he thought of a Sports Illustrated article in which Ken Caminiti said 50 percent of the players in baseball were using steroids (he actually said “at least half,” but that’s close enough). Rickey’s response? “The article said 50 percent. Well, I’m not one of them. So that’s 49 percent right there.”
This story of Rickey ignoring the “wipe off” sign and stealing second anyways made me cackle:
So, again, La Russa wanted Rickey staying put. He had his third-base coach go through all the signs and then wipe the arms to take off any play. And once again, Henderson stole second on the next pitch.
Now, La Russa was hot. “Hey Rickey,” he said, “all that stuff about being a team player, what gives?”
Henderson looked at La Russa as if he had no idea what he was talking about.
“We gave you a sign,” La Russa continued. “Did you not see it?”
Henderson said, “Yeah, I saw it. You said if you wipe the arm, that means take off. And so Rickey took off.”
PAL: What else is there to say? Sit back and enjoy.
Sports-Adjacent: What It’s Like to Play Hoops With Someone on the Brink of Stardom
Sometimes I think about a very famous person and wonder: What was that person like just before they got famous? Dozens of people in the world can say, “I went to kindergarten with Brad Pitt.” Dozens more can say, “I played Little League with Jeff Bezos.” There are people walkin’ around the planet, knowing they struck Bezos out when they were 12, and they think of that every time they see a new story about him. I’ve got one such story: my best friend in first grade, Hunter Mahan, became a relatively famous golfer. He never won a major, but he was ranked as high as #4 in the world, and made over $30M in his career, good for 31st all time. Still. I moved away after first grade and never saw him again. It’s not that interesting of a story. When you read it you probably thought, “Ok.” Unless you’re a huge golf fan, in which case maybe you thought, “Neat.”
What’s much more interesting to me is when someone knows someone as they become famous. A few people took acting lessons with Brad Pitt the week Thelma & Louis was released. Someone was a barista at the coffee shop Bezos stopped into every morning the week Amazon IPO’d. Those people saw the transition to fame happen, almost in real time, and can speak to how it changed the now-famous person, how it didn’t change them, and how excited they were when it first started to happen. That’s a much more interesting story, and I happen to have one of those, too.
About 7 or 8 years ago, I was a member at the Chinatown YMCA. I’d walk over during lunch to get some shots up, or stop by after work looking for pickup. One day after work, I stopped in and a game was going on. I asked if I could join, and was told it was a private game – that they rent the court. I was pretty annoyed – I was a paying gym member, after all. But then someone got hurt and they needed. I guarded a guy named Dave. He could hoop, so it was a good matchup. I held my own, and they asked me to come back in the future, so I started going every week. As I found out, all of those guys worked together at an ad agency up the street, and their company paid the gym rental fee. I continued to guard Dave on most nights, unless we played together – a pairing I was always hoping for. This went on a couple of years.
Then, in December 2013, I got to the gym and everyone was buzzing. I heard talk about a Kickstarter. I asked what everyone was discussing – it turns out Dave was also a rapper, and after having released some popular self-produced videos, he had started a Kickstarter to raise $70,000.00 to help him record an album and go on tour. In like one day, he had blown past the goal and was approaching $100,000.00. This was wild news! When I got home I googled him. His rapper name was Lil Dicky, and he had a song/video called Ex Boyfriend that was pretty damn good (but NSFW).
I asked my boy Rowe if he had heard of Lil Dicky, and he said yes. That’s when I knew this was kind of a big deal. Over the next few months, Dave/Lil Dicky would come to play basketball and tell us about the crazy things happening in his life. Then, around spring 2014, Dave e-mailed to say that it was his last night at that pickup game. He was moving to L.A. To be a rapper. This seemed crazy to me. Absolutely crazy. But it was also cool to see someone shoot their shot.
More than a year went by. I was no longer going to the pickup game because we had moved across town. Every once in a while Dave would pop into my head. He was not a famous rapper, and I wondered how everything had gone. And then one day in summer 2015, a video on my Twitter headline caught my eye. It was a Lil Dicky video, going viral. And there was Dave, rapping with SNOOP in an animated video. His album was released that day, too.
God damn. The sumbitch did it. He really did it. He’s now superfamous. Last year some kids tagged the walls at the basketball courts in my neighborhood with “Lil Dicky,” and I couldn’t help but laugh. I mentioned to co-worker Kevin that I used to play basketball with him, and Kevin went bananas. Lil Dicky/Dave even has a TV show, co-created by him and starring himself, which premiered on FXX this week (prompting me to tell this story). The show is autobiographical, about the time after his videos went viral but before he made it as a professional rapper.
So, it’s about when I knew him, sorta. It would not be accurate to say we are friends, or even were friends. But, still. Like the people in Brad Pitt’s acting class, I saw a guy go, week by week, go from an advertising professional to a rapper who was about to hit it big, and knowing it. That’s pretty cool.
Anyways, check out this interview with him from this week, where he touches quite a bit on what it’s like to get famous. I especially like the story about playing hoops with Kanye. -TOB
May each and every one of you find your kissing bandit this weekend.
Astros Sorry If Their Cheating Offended Anyone
The Astros had to face the press on Thursday. For the first time, they were to be asked questions about stealing signs (the garbage bin, the Codebreaker app), and man did the players and the owner Jim Crane come off poorly.
Here’s a sampling:
.@MarlyRiveraESPN just nails Crane and this is a complete embarrassment for the Astros. pic.twitter.com/v2bdND3PUp
Bregman and Altuve’s statements were less than 90 seconds, combined. All three of them had a commonality: we’re sorry (for cheating), but it didn’t impact the outcome of the World Series. Oh, and “we’re looking forward to 2020.”
Ah, no.
Aside from the institutional cheating going on for years in the Astros organization, the most incredible takeaway from the team facing the press today is how completely and utterly unprepared they are to answer questions that any PR intern could’ve predicted would be asked today. This news didn’t break yesterday. That’s how in the wrong the Astros were. They knew the questions in advance and this is the best they could muster. They knew what they wanted – to admit wrongdoing, to admit what they were doing created an unfair advantage but to somehow have that admission stop short of impacting the World Series.
Leave it to a 1-2-3 fav Michael Baumann to sum it up just right:
Minutes before Crane went on stage, I joked that it would have been more fun if the Astros refused to apologize, and told the assembled reporters to count the rings and go to hell. Having seen what passes for sincere contrition on Crane’s part, they would’ve been better off taking that approach. At least then I would’ve respected their honesty.
Watching all these video clips of players stuttering through their responses to really simple questions reminded me of cops busting up a college house party and asking the guys who live at the house questions about how they got the beer, why the music was so loud, etc. Everyone’s eager to admit a little bit of wrongdoing, but no one is actually responsible for taking $5 and giving a teenager a Solo cup at door.
At this point, the only detail keeping me from believing the 2017 Astros title should be vacated is that I’m all but certain the Astros and Red Sox weren’t the only teams doing this. No way. – PAL
As for Bregman, Altuve, Correa, Springer: these dudes better have incredible seasons. They need incredible seasons to save their reputations. If they come out this season and hit 30 points below their career averages, then their 2017-2019 seasons will go from suspect to absolute jokes.
Neymar’s Highlights Are Great, But He’s Never Been
I’ve never read Rory Smith’s NY Times soccer column until this week – and even for a guy that follows soccer from the highlights – I enjoyed his musings on Neymar’s squandering of talent as the next generation of players take his place in line in ascension to the throne Messi or Ronaldo at some point will give up. Neymar, playing on the same team as Messi in Barcelona, moved to Paris St.-Germain in an effort to get out of Messi’s shadow (and become the highest paid player on the planet).
The move didn’t work. At 28, Neymar has faded from contention for the Ballon d’Or (the annual award handed out to the best player in the world). In his place are younger stars like P.S.G. teammate Kylian Mbappé.
Talent has never, ever been the issue with Neymar. Smith argues it’s how Neymar values the game, and he uses one small moment in a recent game to serve as Neymar’s signature:
There is something essential about Neymar contained within this vignette: his imagination, his panache, his confidence and his ability, yes, but also his belief that soccer’s highest form is the expression of individual skill. It is that which makes him so in tune with the sport’s modern era, of course — all gifs and memes and six-second snapshots of brilliance going viral — but it is also his flaw.
The thing about those clips, the ones of brilliant goals and outrageous pieces of skill that go viral, accompanied by nothing more than a screed of emojis, is that they are devoid of context, and greatness in soccer, and in all sports, is determined almost exclusively by context.
Neymar’s trickery is an adornment to a game, not a determining factor in it…
Again, I’m not the most ardent soccer fan, but I really enjoyed Smith’s writing. Always great to come across a talented sportswriter. – PAL
I am a LeBron James fan and I always have been. That said, I’m not really sure why The Athletic did an oral history, of sorts, on LeBron this week. Like, I don’t know what the occasion is. But it did provide this incredible tidbit:
Kevin Love, Cleveland Cavaliers, former Cavs teammate: D-Wade has said it before and I hate that I have to quote him. But when we go international, which is obviously always Toronto, he won’t turn on his phone. It’s only WiFi. He’s the cheapest fucking guy. He’s like, “That’s bullshit. I won’t turn on my phone.” He won’t turn on data roaming. He’ll only go when we’re either at the arena or at the Shangri-La, “Hey, what’s the WiFi?” Internationally and in Toronto, he’ll never pay for it.
There’s more good stuff here, including former teammate Tristan Thompson reporting that LeBron “eats like shit.”
The best story, though, is probably this one:
Romeo Travis, professional basketball player overseas, lifelong friend: I was walking through the mall (around the holidays last year). A guy kept calling my name. I’m with my kids, I don’t want to stop. A guy just kept calling my name. I stopped and he’s like, “You’re Romeo, you’re LeBron’s friend?”’ And I was like, “Yeah.” He’s like, “Can you do me a favor?” I’m like, “What’s up, man?” He said, “LeBron put me through rehab. I just want you to tell him thank you. He really saved my life.” Those are the type of the stories that he doesn’t publicize. He don’t even, I didn’t even know. This is something I found out just walking through the mall, that he does things like that. People never find out about it. He does favors and stuff for people that he don’t talk about. They know the big stuff. They know the iPromise school and the philanthropy and things of that nature, but they don’t know the small stuff. Those small things are impactful as well. I was just like, wow. I sent a message to LeBron and was like, “I ran into a guy and he said you put him through rehab.” He said, “Yeah I do that from time to time just to help addicts.”
Women are like wolves. If you want a wolf, you have to trap it. Snare it. Then to keep it happy, you have to tame it. Feed it, care for it. Lovingly. The way an animal deserves to be loved. And my animal deserves a lot of loving.
Much has been written about the sign-stealing scandal in baseball that, so far, has led to year-long suspension for Astros GM and the team’s manager, the “it was mutual” parting of ways between the Red Sox at its manager, Alex Cora, and the Mets asking for a do-over with Carlos Beltran before he ever managed a game with the team. I found Michael Bauman’s article on the subject the most thought-provoking.
By punishing the general managers and managers (but not players, unless you count Carlos Beltran as a player in this instance), MLB and its teams are getting rid of the story, but not the problem.
These investigations, and the punishments they’ve inspired, are attempts to fix a problem. If the problem is “the 2017-18 Astros and 2018 Red Sox were using cameras to steal signs,” then consider that problem all but fixed. The principal offenders in the sign-stealing scandal have now been identified and sanctioned.
But what if the problem is that MLB teams are using technology to gain an unfair advantage during gameplay?
While reading this, I couldn’t help but think of my Twins, owners of the new single-season home run record. Let’s just be very clear: the Twinkies haven’t been mentioned once in any of these stories. The record is legit!…and so is the team’s 16-game playoff losing streak.
Tangent complete. Back to Baumann:
It’s also reasonable to conclude that sign stealing isn’t the problem, but rather merely a symptom of baseball teams’ overreliance on technology. The mere existence of the replay room, which the Red Sox allegedly used to relay signs to hitters, is another example. The manager’s challenge is a pointless complication of replay review anyway, but allowing the manager to wait for a verdict from his own video staff before challenging a call is like giving students the answer to a test beforehand—if a call was so egregiously blown that it needs to be overturned, it should be obvious to the naked eye. But MLB clubs, unwilling to walk the tightrope of replay without a net, have turned around and used those nets to ensnare unwitting opponents.
Amen, man. If we can’t completely remove instant replay from the game, can we at least bypass this completely absurd dance of having teams decide whether or not they want to challenge a call? Get rid of the team challenge, and then we can get rid of these video replay rooms. Clear solution to the immediate problem.
Bigger picture: baseball’s obsession with technology in a stat-obsessed sport makes for a powerful duo, and not always for the better. It removes “human considerations” as Bauman puts it. And while some will roll their eyes at those crusty old dude bemoaning how technology takes out the “human element”, Baumann convinces me there’s something much more important playing out here.
Electronic sign stealing is the cause célèbre of the day, but it’s penny-ante shit compared to other behaviors that stem from the same societal disease that views rules, norms, and human beings as obstacles to be navigated around or run over on the way to the goal.
Again, a thought-provoking, extremely well-written story. – PAL
TOB: As I wrote back in November, I didn’t care too much about this scandal, until I heard the trash can banging videos. It was so blatant, and so disturbing as a competitor. You might as well throw BP up there. But there’s also a side of me that friggin loves the drama. It’s…kinda hilarious. The stupidity of it all is just so funny. On Thursday, as Twitter went wild with accusations of Astos players wearing buzzers during the 2019 playoffs, my co-worker Kevin and I were howling in our offices, sending each other tweets and videos and breaking down video frame by frame. Cheating is bad, yes. But drama is great.
And after such a wild day, I have so many questions and thoughts.
How did the Astros not think they’d get caught?
The proverbial whistle was blown by a former teammate, Mike Fiers; how was Fiers the first to do so?
How did the Astros not consider the fact that a former teammate turned competitor would do so?
How did AJ Hinch have the balls to demand anonymous sources “put their name by” the rumors that his team was using video to steal signs, when he knew full well that they were cheating and there were players no longer on the team who could confirm it?
Exactly how much better did this make the Astros? Is Altuve actually any good?
Watch this video of Bregman, and wonder how big of an idiot he was to be so brazen, and also wonder how everyone missed this:
I still don’t understand how the Astros got away with this for so long. Listen to this one. Alex Bregman is so arrogant he was basically asking for MLB to catch them. pic.twitter.com/ZrLsurrZgo
Or this video, of Alex Cora. Cora was the Astros bench coach in 2017 and the reported mastermind of this all, along with former Astro Carlos Beltran; wonder, again, how we missed this. And also wonder, how players around the league who knew what was going on did not speak out sooner:https://twitter.com/SportzzTweetzz/status/1217479654820413440?s=20
Apex sports radio call just now on @MarksReeseWIP where a guy argued Americans should be pro-Astros cheating because “we would all be speaking Japanese” if America didn’t steal signs during World War II
By now you likely recognize the name Joe Burrow. He was the LSU QB who carved up Clemson to the tune of 463 passing yards, 5 TD passes, and nearly 60 yards rushing. In the process, he capped one of the greatest college football seasons: he lead his team to an undefeated national championship, threw for 60 touchdowns, and had a completion percentage over 76%. LSU smoked Alabama, Georgia, Oklahoma, and Clemson. It should come as no surprise that Burrow was the runaway Heisman winner.
The moment when all of your dreams are realized. 🏆
Perhaps one of the most impressive performances from his year didn’t happen on the field. During his Heisman acceptance speech, Burrow made it a point to use that stage and platform of ESPN broadcast to speak to the kids in Athens, Ohio. Specifically, he spoke to kids in his hometown.
Coming from Southeast Ohio, it’s a very impoverished area, and the poverty rate is almost two times the national average. There are so many people there that don’t have a lot, and I’m up for all those kids in Athens and Athens County that go home to not a lot of food on the table. Hungry after school. You guys can be up here, too.
As Billy Witz of The New York Times details in his story, a lot went into those thirty seconds of Burrow’s speech, and perhaps even more came out of it. While Burrow wasn’t one of the kids living in the trailers (his dad is a recently retired college football coach, and his mom is a principal), he wasn’t oblivious to the socioeconomic makeup of Athens. His mom sees it every day at the elementary school.
Her office is bright and cheery, a welcoming place for “kiddos,” as she calls them, from kindergarten through fourth grade. The office is dotted with photos of her husband, Jimmy, and Joe; there is a bookcase filled with stuffed animal tigers and teddy bears, bracelets and candles; and the accent colors are purple and gold.
Below her desk is a box of macaroni-and-cheese dinners.
How often does she give them out?
“Every day,” she said.
The poverty rate at the school — or those eligible for free or reduced lunch — is 36 percent. Every other Friday, bags of food are sent home with 100 children, about 20 percent of the school’s enrollment. One of Robin Burrow’s biggest concerns is what happens during the two weeks that schools are closed over winter break.
Burrow’s words connected with a lot of people from the area. Will Drabold, who graduated a few years ahead of Burrow, described hearing the speech as “being struck by lightning”.
The next morning, Drabold was determined to do something: He put up a Facebook page asking for donations to the Athens County Food Pantry. The goal was $1,000, which he started with a $50 pledge.
Within 24 hours, the drive had raised $80,000. By Sunday, nearly a month later, it had raised more than $503,000 — more than five times the all-volunteer organization’s annual budget. Similarly, a food pantry in Baton Rouge, La., has raised more than $60,000.
That’s real money leading to real food, feeding really hungry people. Reading Witz story is a great, positive reminder why athletes should not stick to sports. The full story is well worth the read- PAL
TOB: Burrow seems like a good dude, and I’ll say this: I don’t remember the last time I watched a college football game and said, “Oh my god, what a throw,” or some variant thereof, as many times as I did on Monday watching him light up a very good Clemson defense.
1-2-3 SPORTS! 