The Infield Dirt with T.S. O'Connell

   I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s not so much that the modern, neo-narcissist ballplayer is such an abysmal human being but rather that they suffer mightily in comparison to the giants who came before them.

   Thus, when we contemplate the antics of one Manny Ramirez, the shenanigans that appear fairly predictable in our current times ultimately seem like something far less than that when considered in some kind of historical context.

   The playful anarchist in me wants to kind of surreptitiously applaud his whimsical welcoming press conference when he insisted on having an interpreter to translate his Spanish into something suitable for USA Today. But the old-timer in me, who for reasons of good common sense is typically in charge, can’t shake the realization that a Henry Aaron, or an Al Kaline or a Bob Gibson wouldn’t dream of doing something so immature and disrespectful.

   Disrespectful, I concede, is pretty harsh, but it’s that looming, omnipresent respect for the game of Major League Baseball that seems to carry such enormous weight with generations past and yet might be an afterthought to some of the modern guys.

   While money can be blamed for a good deal of this mentality, I don’t think it should be the only culprit listed. Virtually all of the modern stars have been millionaires nearly from the time of voting age, and I think a pervasive sense of entitlement is an inevitable byproduct of that.

   That’s one of the reasons I like to latch onto when rooting for some of the modern guys: finding that 21st-century slugger who brings with him some reverence and acknowledgment of all that came before him.

   I also think that there’s a huge, perhaps difficult to quantify but still significant price to be paid by those who fall victim to the “me first” trappings of the modern game.

   While I suppose they would insist that such things make no difference whatsoever to them as they bank their millions, I believe that their place in the hallowed history of MLB will end up being something far different from what it is for many of those from earlier generations.

   Manny may just be the most visible practitioner of the antics, but I don’t think history will look that fondly at a player of his admittedly staggering talent being shunted from one team to team to another in such ignominious fashion.

   That’s no way for a Hall of Famer to be remembered.

Friday, September 03, 2010 3:19:58 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

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Tuesday, August 31, 2010

The scourge of underage drinking and gambling ...
Posted by T.S.

   I was shocked, I say, shocked to learn the other day that underage teens frequently try to infiltrate the adult playground of Las Vegas for purposes of drinking and gambling.

   This news surfaced by way of tweeting from one Marcus Jordan, 19-year-old son of Michael Jordan, who told the world about spending $35,000 at a single resort and $50,000 for whole day.

   The sophomore guard at the University of Central Florida could hardly be described as your typical college student or even jock. He reportedly had already had a good talking to from both his parents about it; Nevada Gaming Control Board officials are looking into the matter, presumably with the ultimate task of scolding the Las Vegas strip nightclub where this took place.

   But as always, these kinds of scandalous revelations end up making me a bit queasy as they conjure up memories of underage gambling and alcohol consumption from my past, which, admittedly is a lot further in the past than Marcus Jordan’s.

   So before some enterprising journalist digs it up, I’m gonna confess to having booked a few horse racing bets while I was a 16-year-old high school sophomore in Upstate New York, to say nothing of whatever actual bets I may have made in those days.

   The drinking age in New York back then (circa 1966) was 18, so if you’re gonna fudge on that threshold, that means even younger ages like 16 and 17 are going to come into play.

   Thus there was a time when I could get a lunch of chicken and biscuits and a bottle of Genesee Beer at Al’s Dixie Grill and still get back to school in time for sophomore-year trigonometry. Those lunches had absolutely no bearing on my failing trigonometry, which I was perfectly capable of doing even without the application of alcohol.

   At the same time, I worked more than 20 hours per week at a leather factory where you could place a bet on the races at Aqueduct, Belmont or nearby Saratoga without even having to face the inconvenience of going up or down a flight of stairs. Four floors, and a bookie at your disposal on each one.

   I grew up in either a particularly sophisticated era or area, or maybe both. I just wanted to mention this to put Master Jordan’s adolescent playfulness into some kind of context.

   With that kind of jack at his disposal, we’d have made him the secretary/treasurer of our treehouse.

(426)

Tuesday, August 31, 2010 8:15:17 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

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Monday, August 30, 2010

Impossible for Rose to avoid controversy ...
Posted by T.S.

   I saw where a 1974 Topps Pete Rose card in a PSA 10 holder sold for $5,900 in an online auction the other day, and it occurred to me once again that there are people who are de facto Hall of Famers even if they don’t actually have a plaque in Cooperstown.

   It’s a nice bit of symmetry that the two players who most fit that description are Pete Rose and Shoeless Joe Jackson.

   Pete’s back in the news these days as the Reds prepare to honor him at a Sept. 12 ceremony at Great American Ballpark that marks the 25th anniversary of the base hit that moved him past Ty Cobb in the all-time hit rankings.

As is pretty much pro forma anymore for Pete, just about anything he does ends up being tinged in controversy, though it doesn’t seem he bears any culpability in the latest business.

   Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig, on a bit of a hot streak himself with a bronze statue at Miller Park only recently unveiled, took a bit of criticism from his predecessor, Fay Vincent, for having agreed to the Reds’ request that the ban keeping Rose from being involved in official MLB functions be lifted for a day to accommodate the ceremony.

   It sure does seem that the people most intimately involved in Pete’s lifetime ban – 21 years now and counting – seem extraordinarily invested in not budging one teeny weenie bit when it comes to the banned hit king.

   And there’s always irony aplenty in Rose’s case, this time because the date in question, Sept. 11, was actually bumped to Sept. 12 because Rose had a previous commitment for the 11th. At a Kentucky casino, which may sound like fodder for his detractors, but obviously was an obligation made well before the surprise invite from the Reds was offered.

   I always like Fay Vincent – and still do – because of his unabashed reverence for the game, but I can’t shake the idea that he’s simply too close to this one and can’t shake off the long-standing animus to simply allow for a bit of forgiveness to a once-revered baseball icon.

   There ought to be a way for Major League Baseball to show the importance of following the rules along with a similarly vital realization that there almost always ought to be a time for saying, “The individual has been adequately punished for an admittedly significant transgression and perhaps the time has come to allow for a show of compassion.”

   Though that sounds farfetched, MLB is someday going to have to confront the jarring contradiction of allowing a couple of dozen players who used performance-enhancing drugs to be eligible for a Hall of Fame honor that is still denied to the man who bet on baseball.

   For many years when interviewed, Pete would kind of disingenuously say that it wasn’t the Hall of Fame eligibility that he was worried about. He wanted to return to the game as a manager or coach, to resume making his living at the game that he loved. That ship would seem to have sailed.

   I suppose it’s going to be terribly important whatever the charge is given to the next commissioner about Rose’s status. I just can’t see what would be served by continuing to exclude him from a Hall of Fame honor that he earned on the field and apparently forfeited in the dugout.

   Side notes: Another of the ramifications from the lifetime ban has been the absence of any MLB-licensed baseball cards of the hit king for the last 21 years. Obviously, that’s pretty small potatoes in the big picture, but a number of creative hobbyists have addressed it anyway, creating the cool, ersatz Rose cards seen here.

   I would also point out that in researching this piece, I noted where an ESPN columnist said that Rose was “forbidden from showing up at major league ballparks.”

   Unless I misunderstood something, I am pretty sure he’s merely prohibited from taking part in any MLB-sanctioned events and activities; he presumably can buy a ticket to sit in any ballpark he wants.

And a final wee bit of shilling ...

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(425)

Monday, August 30, 2010 4:48:33 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

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Friday, August 27, 2010

Cretin who ratted out Julie Inkster is a schmuck ...
Posted by T.S.

   It may sound hard to believe, but I went to grade school with the guy who ratted out Julie Inkster last weekend at the LPGA Safeway Classic in Oregon.

   Oh, I know that we don’t actually know the name of the knucklehead who did this – or even whether it’s a man or a woman – but either way, I went to grade school with this person. Maybe we all did.

   You know the kid I’m talking about. Maybe even kids plural. So eager for personal advancement that they would rat our their best friend for sticking chewing gum under the seat or smoking in the bathroom (I went to a really tough grade school).

   Coming a week after Dustin Johnson’s heinous rules infraction at the PGA, the spectre of another professional getting hosed by the arcane rules of golf somehow didn’t get quite as much play as you might have thought.

   Leaving aside the question of the rule itself, are we supposed to like the idea of a guy sitting at home munching Cheetos on his couch torpedoing the tourney chances of yet another pro golfer?

   If I may quote Charlie Brown: Arghhh! In the absence of a gender-neutral pronoun, I am stuck with referring to this creature as a “he,” but I suppose in theory it could have been a woman. I just doubt it.

   I cannot for the life of me imagine what must go through this person’s head these days. Does it somehow make him feel important to have shoved a Hall of Fame golfer out of a tournament that might end up being one of her last best shots at yet another win in a sterling career? That's not a prognostication, merely an acknowledgment that every opportunity to contend in golf is precious and elusive.

   It’s one thing to accidentally run over your neighbor’s cat when you’re backing out of the driveway, but quite another if you squish the little dickens with your Buick by intentionally swerving to hit it. Not that I’ve done either one, but it’s merely a parallel that I draw to give a little perspective to what a nasty bit of business this was.

   I really like Julie Inskter, but I’d be hopping mad about crapola like this even if it had been perpetrated on an LPGA player I didn’t care for, like, uh ... OK, I can’t think of one, but that’s not the point.

   I can’t shake the suspicion that a rabid, mindless adherence to rules that seem to defy common sense and any tiny fragment of justice is embraced because it’s so much simpler than having to apply any discretion to the matter.

   We have draconian rules galore in the criminal justice system in this country, but that is mercifully balanced by our allowing judges to use their discretion and – dare I say it – judgment as a means of ensuring that the idea of justice doesn’t get lost in our exuberant caress of rules.

   I don’t know about that anonymous wretch who snitched on Julie, but I for one don’t think that justice was served or even vaguely acknowledged in sacking her from a tournament because she put a donut on her 9-iron.

   And as for the aforementioned tattletale, I hope that the golf gods conspire to throw every bit of nasty karma his way for the rest of his puny life. Plugged in sand traps, under rocks, stuck in trees, inelegantly swallowed up by vast expanses of yawning water hazards. All of it. He should have such foul luck on the golf course from now on that he’d be snapping clubs in half across his thighs and hurling putters into the woods.

   But, I imagine there are rules against that sort of thing, too.

Friday, August 27, 2010 4:54:50 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

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Wednesday, August 25, 2010

Expanding NFL to 18 games no slam dunk ...
Posted by T.S.


   Don’t you just hate it when something seems like a no-brainer but then ends up being a lot more complicated and thus well short of being a slam dunk?

   I am mixing my metaphors, but I refer to the National Football League and its confounding situation of a four-game exhibition season that is about as satisfying as kissing your sister.

   Having largely determined that the current system has long since exhausted its usefulness, NFL moguls are left with the thorny problem of figuring out what to do next.

   I’ve always objected to the four-game dress rehearsal tour on ideological grounds; to wit – professional football is not a game suited to be played in a half-assed manner. It thrives on its brutality and intensity, so asking the players to get through a four-game warm-up where the principal goal may be to avoid getting injured simply does not work.

   Naturally, the NFL made it worse by including these flimsy charades as part of season-ticket packages, meaning that to scratch, for example, two of the games they are then compelled to turn them into regular-season fodder.

   So what seems like a logical solution becomes more than a little troublesome, made worse this year by the impending labor/management tussle as the collective bargaining agreement expires in March of 2011.

   Making two of those faux games the real deal sounds simple, but the players are going to have a thing or two to say about it, and they’ll be doing so at a time when the league and its minions have more pressing concerns to address.

   The NFL played 12 games per season through 1960, then moved to 14 per for the next 17 years, then upped it to 16 in 1978. Adding two more games may not sound to daunting for the guy on the couch munching on Cheetos, but it’s a big deal to the guys in the trenches getting knocked around.

   For the guy pictured here – Buffalo Bills linebacker Harry Jacobs, selected simply because he looks cranky – the 18-game schedule would be a 22 percent increase in workload; for Johnny Unitas in 1960, it would look like a 50 percent jump.

   Even if we are ready for some football, I have my doubts the players are, or at least that much football. My active dislike for preseason games doesn’t really cause me all that much aggravation anyway, since I don’t watch them.

   Around these parts, it just means I have to fend off Packer chat for a few weeks in August while I await the start of the real deal.

Wednesday, August 25, 2010 3:46:19 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

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Tuesday, August 24, 2010

Legendary Charlie Brown comic evokes memories ...
Posted by T.S.

   For me there’s usually a “Sears Catalog” kind of allure to the big auction house catalogs, by which I mean that it’s always fun to look at the stuff even if the vast majority of it is way beyond my means.

   Part of the fun is that you never know which items are going to grab you, again, keeping in mind my premise that we’re talking about fantasy musings and not instances where you see something you actually intend to bid on.

   A couple of Charles Schulz “Peanuts” comic strips did the trick in the current Legendary Auction, which closes on Aug. 25-26. Being a “card guy,” I would typically alight on various singles and sets or – even better – unopened material, but this time it was the famed comic illustrator that caught my attention, along with a neat 1956 Topps Pins complete set.

   In the “Peanuts” strips, published in late December of 1962 and late January 1963, Charlie Brown and Linus are seemingly deep in thought in the first three panels, only to have Charlie screaming to the heavens in the final panel, “Why couldn’t McCovey have hit the ball just three feet higher!” By the second strip, he had adjusted his apparently reasonable plea to only "two feet higher," with Linus initially appearing somewhat startled in the first strip and slightly bewildered in the follow-up.

(www.legendaryauctions.com)

    Schulz, a diehard Giants fan, apparently was still in a good deal of pain about the abrupt ending of the 1962 World Series, or at least aggravated enough by Bobby Richardson’s snatch of Willie McCovey’s blistering line drive that he would put it into his strip a couple of days before Christmas that year and then again more than a month later.

   With a hardly surprising opening bid of $5,000 – and the bidding already at $8,000 with a couple of days left – the auction lot brought back memories for me of one of the first World Series where I vividly remember the ending.

   I was a 12-year-old kid, perched at a bowling alley for some reason or other, watching the game in a bar with all the adults and sucking in second-hand smoke at least a couple of decades before we started calling it that.

   I was also a diehard National League fan, and I remember just being crushed that the similarly crushed line drive couldn’t have been just a couple of feet higher.

   And for the record, the other World Series where I so acutely recall the finish was the 1960 Fall Classic adorned with Bill Mazeroski’s handiwork.

   The other lot I noticed, the 1956 Topps Pins set, is not particularly rare or unusual, but I’ve always liked it despite never having any collecting penchant for pins of any description.

   But my “card guy” roots loves the use on those pins of the exact same images from so many of the 1954-56 Topps portraits from the card sets, along with the brightly colored backgrounds. It’s a testimony to the popular appeal of the issue that it had already ballooned to more than four times its $500 opening by the time I wrote this.

   I also spotted a 1959 Topps Hank Aaron card in a PSA 8 holder at the back of the catalog, which is one of my all-time favorite cards because it makes Henry look younger than even Charlie Brown. I’ll have to steer clear of that one, too, because if I won it I’d have to break it out of the holder, and if you start doing that to PSA 8’s somebody is going to start questioning your fundamentals.

   Mine are just fine, thank you.

(422)

Tuesday, August 24, 2010 3:44:26 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

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Monday, August 23, 2010

Pujols best shot at the Quadruple Crown ...
Posted by T.S.

In a season when you would occasionally hear mumbling about what might be ailing Albert Pujols, you could get a pretty good idea that the St. Louis Cardinals’ amazing first baseman was being held to a standard so high you could get dizzy just thinking about it.

   Lo and behold, as the dog days of August unfold, it turns out that after years of pundits debating Pujols’ chances of being the first National League Triple Crown winner in what would now be 73 years, his 2010 season appears to offer one of the best chances yet to pull off that remarkable feat.

(Bio-illustration by Ronnie Joyner; www.philadelphiaathletics.org)

Actually, in Albert’s case, it could be something more like the Quadruple Crown, since he could easily end up leading the National League in Runs as well as the traditional categories of batting average, home runs and RBIs.

   All this happens in a season when, for a while anyway, Albert seemed a bit off his game, kind of in the same way we used to think about Tiger Woods several years ago when he went more than a handful of tournaments without winning.

   And while we kind of quietly looked the other way, Albert managed to stay close enough to the league leaders in every category except restaurants visited that his apres All-Star hitting spree has now put him in the Redbird, er, catbird seat in vying for that elusive Triple Crown.

   I know we’re going to hear a lot more about it in coming weeks, especially with him a mere 7 points off the batting lead and now sitting atop the league in both home runs and ribbies. Just to make it even more unbelievable, he could also conceivably lead the league in – deep breath needed here – hits, total bases, on-base percentage, slugging percentage, intentional walks, and runs created. If you wanted to mix in a handful of SABR-like exotic formulas, you could add another five or six categories beyond that.

   Not bad for a guy not necessarily having the most prodigious season in an 11-year career that already puts him in Cooperstown even if he decided to call it quits tomorrow afternoon. I just like to say stuff like that to feel that massive, collective shudder throughout the great Midwest and beyond.

   It seems likely that the occasion of his 400th home run, which figures to already be in the books by the time this blog snippet winds up in my column in Sports Collectors Digest, is going to put all the talk about a Triple Crown into high gear.

   Truth is, in Albert’s case, we ought to simply leave that topic on the table just about every year as a matter of course.

   The other reason to like his chances is the realization that the last time the Triple Crown was won in either league, 1966 and 1967 in the American League, was at a time when the offense was taking a pounding in a pitcher-dominated era that ultimately led to the lowering of the pitching mound after 1968 and ultimately to the arrival of the designated hitter five years after that.

   This too, is such a time, in case you haven’t noticed all those no-hitters or perfect or quasi-perfect games being tossed around.

Monday, August 23, 2010 3:22:57 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

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Friday, August 20, 2010

Much not to like about Clemens indictment ...
Posted by T.S.

   Of all the things that I hate about this lamentable Roger Clemens saga – and there are plenty of those – the admittedly long-shot notion that he might, in fact, be innocent is easily atop the list.

   With news of a six-count federal indictment for perjury released yesterday, the peril that the seven-time Cy Young Award winner faces is now front and center once again. The evidence that has already made its way to the mainstream media is daunting indeed, but we’re still left with the realization that he’s got to be presumed innocent.

   If he were to somehow be exonerated – proving a negative is way tougher than the other way around – it’s difficult to even conjure up what the landscape would look like at that point. I guess I’ll have to set that hypothetical aside; suffice it to say, I hope that he’s innocent, despite the fact I’ve never been a Roger Clemens fan. I’ll explain.

   I hope he’s innocent because I don’t like the idea of people being hauled through the legal system and threatened with professional and personal annihilation for doing what most of us would do instinctively if confronted with a similar situation. Similar in terms of being accused of doing something that isn’t even illegal but nonetheless you’d rather not have the whole world know about your having done it. I understand that the same broad swath that I’ve included might have chosen a different strategy when the prospect of lying to Congress can bring legal sanctions.

   I am aware I’ve overreached a bit in lumping in so many millions of my fellow citizens in with The Rocket on this one, but I just don’t like the idea of citizens being forced to incriminate themselves. Make no mistake about it: once he was hauled in front of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform (translated that means the House Committee for Grandstanding and Self-Aggrandizement), his options all looked pretty pukey.

   Taking the Fifth – or even something like Mark McGwire’s wretched hybrid of “I’m not here to talk about the past,” clearly wasn’t much of an option. The presumption of guilt seems nearly as overwhelming there as it would be with an outright admission, though the latter course has its obvious and well-documented attractions.

   Ironically, several of the players who have chosen that path have seemingly done pretty well with it; most prominently, that would include Andy Pettitte. And its Pettitte’s testimony to congressional investigators that Clemens had confided to him that he had used HGH that shakes me up the most, because Pettitte was a friend and teammate of Clemens.

   Back in 2008 when this all began, I did a blog early on that was a parody of the great Jack Nicholson/Tom Cruise scene in the 1992 hit film “A Few Good Men.” At the time I envisioned real parallels between Clemens and the fictional Col. Nathan R. Jessep, and I have seen nothing in the intervening two years-plus to shake that notion.

(I know this is going to sound a little paranoid, but I added the link to that February 2008 blog just below, and the CIA apparently redacted the link so that you can't see it with the naked eye. So if you click with your mouse on the line directly below this odd disclaimer, you should get to that earlier blog. I don't exactly know why the CIA would do this, but I am flattered by the attention.)
http://infielddirt.sportscollectorsdigest.com/default,month,2008-02.aspx

   Of course, that presupposes that Clemens is lying about steroid of HGH use. If it turns out to be otherwise, I’ll be way down the list of a rather staggering array of people who owe him an apology.

   Congress, on the other hand, in their way-less-than-infinite wisdom, would be much closer to the top. As you might have expected, I don’t much care for the idea of citizens who haven’t committed any crime being pummeled by Congress for lying to them about it. And I cringe at tens of millions of tax dollars being casually tossed away as Congress investigates something it has no business being involved in in the first place.

   Still, it’s hard not to take notice of the irony of somebody maybe going to jail for lying to Congress when there doesn’t seem to be any penalty at all when the fibbing goes in the other direction on a much grander scale.

(420)

Friday, August 20, 2010 4:52:36 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

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Wednesday, August 18, 2010

Tales of Tiger and wondering what killed Lou Gehrig ...
Posted by T.S.

   Aside from both being varying degrees of intriguing and involving two monster names from professional sports, these two entries have little in common,
   Still, when the question gets asked if Lou Gehrig actually died from Lou Gehrig’s disease, it would take a better man than me not to read on.

   An Aug. 17 article in the New York Times is a bit more carefully headlined than what its ostensible rivals, The Post or the Daily News might offer, like: “Did Lou Gehrig die from Lou Gehrig’s disease?” Instead, the Times headline notes that brain trauma can mimic A.L.S., and then leaves it to the Times reporter to point out the implication from the study that the Hall of Famer might not have been afflicted with the disease that bears his name.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/18/sports/18gehrig.html?_r=1

   In a paper published in a leading journal of neuropathology – my subscription lapsed; I had to cut back somewhere – the Times says the authors “suggest that the demise of athletes like Gehrig and soldiers given a diagnosis of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, might have been catalyzed by injuries only now becoming understood: concussions and other brain trauma.”

   The Times also points out that although the paper does not discuss Gehrig specifically, its authors in interviews acknowledged the clear implication: Lou Gehrig might not have had Lou Gehrig’s disease.

   Not unlike the many decades of fund raising that have been undertaken to combat the illness, just managing to include Gehrig’s golden name in the story provides a readership vastly greater than would have otherwise been available.

   And for me it provides yet another opportunity to showcase the amazing artwork of Graig Kreindler (www.graigkreindler.com).

   What the paper and the Times story explain is that the vast new information that is being developed about concussive injuries is fueling the speculation that some instance where A.L.S. is diagnosed may really be instances reflecting earlier trauma to the brain, as in getting slammed to the terra firma by a guy weighing 320 lbs., or more precisely in Gehrig’s case, being struck by a pitched baseball traveling in excess of 90 mph. Widespread use of batting helmets was still more than 15 years away from the time of Gehrig’s death in 1941.

* * * * *

The other item, also in the New York Times, mentioned the fall 2009 article in Forbes magazine that remarked about Tiger Woods being the first athlete to earn $1 billion.

   According to the Times, a classical scholar at the University of Pennsylvania pointed out that Tiger isn’t even history’s best-paid professional athlete.

   Instead, that noble distinction belongs to a chariot racer in ancient Rome, one Gaius Appuleius Diocles. The scholar, Peter Struck, cites a monument inscription in the Year 146 that called him “the champion of all charioteers” upon the occasion of his retirement.

   He reportedly earned 36 million sesterces in prize money – enough dough to pay the entire Roman Empire’s ordinary soldiers for 1/5th of a year. Comparing that with the U.S. military today, he says that’s about $15 billion. I'll ignore the obvious shortcomings in the methodology, as I am sure the scholar did as well, all in pursuit of a good story.

   My online research tells me that a sesterce is a silver or, later, bronze coin of ancient Rome worth a quarter of a denarius, or roughly 21/2 asses.

   My question is, where would you keep 90 million asses? And don’t say the Eastern Seaboard.

   I wonder if Gaius ever had second thoughts about retiring in A.D. 146, maybe rolling out the old charriot once again in A.D. 147 for a couple of million more sesterces?

LouG.jpg (94.26 KB)

Wednesday, August 18, 2010 5:02:08 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

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Tuesday, August 17, 2010

Sports personalities say the darndest things ...
Posted by T.S.

Straight talk is a rare commodity these days

   Good grief, it’s something of a wonder that anything worthwhile at all ever gets done in this country in light of the fact that we spend so much time and energy pretending that the difficulties we face are something different than what they really are.

   The examples are boundless, and across every facet of modern life, but sports and politics, two of our favored topics du jour, often seem like the most egregious offenders when it comes its favorite denizens peeing on your leg and telling you it’s raining.

   Thus does Corey Pavin, the captain of the 2010 U.S. Ryder Cup Team, get cornered into making all kinds of absurd parsings when asked about Tiger Woods making the cut for the squad.

   Come on. We’re all more or less grown-ups here. If Tiger Woods wants to be on the Ryder Cup Team and is reasonably healthy, he’s going to be on the team. That’s just the way it is, but of course, Corey Pavin can’t say that, or at least not in that concise fashion.

   Instead we force him to mouth all the obligatory platitudes, or worse yet, get him involved with Jim Gray in an unseemly “He said” vs. “Oh, no I didn’t” wrangle about Tiger’s fate.

   Meanwhile, we all sit around reading this drivel while knowing perfectly well that the No. 1 golfer in the world will be on that team if there’s any way on God’s green Earth to ensure that it comes to pass.

   Elsewhere in the goofy and even more wildly disingenuous world of collegiate sports in general and big-time Division I football in particular, a radio personality in Fayettville, Ark., gets fired for wearing a Florida Gators cap to a Arkansas Hogs news conference. Really?

   Despite all my apparent cynicism, I am still naive enough to hope that by the time this snippet gets into my Sports Collectors Digest column, some teeny weenie sense of perspective will have returned to Fayetteville and this gal will be back on the job.

   The Arkansas coach, Bobby Petrino, had commented on Renee Gork’s headwear after she asked a question at the news conference. “And that will be the last question that I answer with that hat on.”

   The young lady in question (a Florida grad) had, according to the Associated Press, grabbed the Florida cap without thinking “because it was raining outside.” She also reportedly sent a letter of apology to the university and Petrino.

   Yet apparently the wounds from last year's loss to Florida are still too raw and way too deep. And she gets fired from her job. This, presumably, would have been enough to make Danny Thomas spit out his morning coffee. I am not a big fan of too many major college football coaches, in part because I have some understanding of the grotesque ethical compromises they routinely must suffer through at that level, but I have a kind of active contempt for someone who would have a role in getting someone fired from their job for such silliness.

   More than 40 years ago I had a great friend in the Navy who was an Arkansas Razorback fanatic so intense that you would insist on not shortening the word to “fan.”

   And I’m certain that former Radioman Third Class Melvin Burns, USN, wouldn’t approve of this bit of goofy theatre.

   Having a feral pig as a school mascot is no excuse for boorish behavior.

Tuesday, August 17, 2010 3:37:29 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

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