Archive for the ‘Sports’ Category

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Your loser update: week 4, 2023.

Sunday, October 1st, 2023

Lawrence asked me last night which of the remaining teams I favored to go 0-17.

My answer: da Bears and Carolina. I don’t believe the Vikings are that bad, and Denver at least has a coach who’s won a Superbowl.

How did that work out for me? Actually, pretty well.

NFL teams that still have a chance to go 0-17:

da Bears
Carolina

da Bears play Washington on Thursday this week, while Carolina plays Detroit at noon next Sunday. Right now, the Entertainment and Sports Programming Network favors Washington (but not overwhelmingly) and Detroit (overwhelmingly). I’ll be joining FotB pigpen51 in rooting for the Lions, and the entire civilized world in rooting for an asteroid strike on FedEx Field.

Posted in Loser, NFL, Sports | Comments Closed

Firings watch.

Friday, September 29th, 2023

The baseball season’s ending, and we all know what’s coming: the ceremonial throwing out of managers.

The San Francisco Giants started today: Gabe Kapler out. SF Chronicle.

In nearly four seasons with the Giants, Kapler went 295-248, and overall, between the Giants and Phillies, he put up a 456-411 record.

The big problem seems to be that the Giants pretty much fell apart:

The Giants were still in the hunt for a playoff spot entering the month but are 8-17 in September going into their final series and have been outscored by 47 runs. They’ve been horrendous on the road in the second half, losing 28 of their final 34 games away from Oracle Park, and the offense peaked in June and tailed off dramatically — San Francisco is second to last in the league in scoring, with 668 runs, has the third-worst on-base percentage (.314) and the worst OPS (.699).

Sort of on the margin for sports firings (and from ESPN, who I have a high barrier for), but I’ll allow it: an oral history of Lane Kiffin’s legendary “tarmac firing” (which really wasn’t) from USC.

I’m allowing this because there’s a couple of quotes that struck me:

Kiffin
It’s 5 a.m. The sun’s getting ready to come up. I’m sitting in the backyard, and I said to my wife, “When I go to bed, I don’t want to wake up.” She’s got a little more perspective, and she said, “You have three children upstairs. Don’t ever say that again.”

Men: marry that kind of woman.

Kiffin
I saw a podcast the other day on the rapper Macklemore, and he’s talking about, he’s winning the Grammy. He’s on stage. He’s got everything. And he’s not fulfilled. And later, he’s in rehab. He’s making coffee in the morning for people. He’s serving others. And he says, “I felt more fulfilled doing that than when I was on stage.”

Posted in Firings, Sports | 1 Comment »

Loser update update.

Thursday, September 28th, 2023

I should have put this in this week’s update, but I didn’t think to check the schedule until after I posted.

Denver (0-3) plays da Bears (0-3) at noon on Sunday.

Minnesota (0-3) plays Carolina (0-3) at noon on Sunday.

This means a few things:

1. I will probably try to post the loser update on Sunday afternoon after the games end, assuming I’m not napping.

2. We’re going to have two 0-4 teams. Unless there’s a tie, which I would not rule out.

3. It looks like Sunday is the last day of the MLB regular season, so I will probably post a special loser update on Monday for that.

Posted in Loser, NFL, Sports | Comments Closed

Firings watch update.

Wednesday, September 27th, 2023

Mel Tucker officially out at Michigan State University “for cause”. (Previously.)

Posted in Firings, Sports | Comments Closed

Obit watch: September 27, 2023.

Wednesday, September 27th, 2023

Brooks Robinson.

In his 23 seasons with the Orioles, from 1955 to 1977, Robinson became known as the Human Vacuum Cleaner for his ability to snare just about anything hit his way.
Charging topped grounders or bunts, backhanding smashes, ranging to his left or his right, he won 16 consecutive Gold Glove awards as the American League’s leading fielder at third base. Only the pitcher Greg Maddux, with 18 Gold Gloves, has exceeded Robinson’s total.Robinson played on four pennant-winning teams, two of them World Series champions. He was the most valuable player of the 1970 World Series, in which the Orioles beat the Cincinnati Reds in five games, for his spectacular plays and for his hitting: He had a .429 batting average and hit a pair of home runs. (The Orioles also beat the Los Angeles Dodgers in four games in the 1966 Series.)
Robinson had 2,848 hits, 268 home runs and a career batting average of .267. He was the American League’s Most Valuable Player in 1964, when he hit 28 homers, had a league-leading 118 runs batted in and batted .317, all career highs. But he was best known for his fielding.
Robinson was named an All-Star every season from 1960 to 1974. He was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1983, his first year of eligibility, with almost 92 percent of the votes.

Edited to add: Dave Barry on Brooks Robinson.

Phil Sellers. He was a dominant player for Rutgers in the 1970s:

He was called “Phil the Thrill,” and, with Sellers leading a team that also included Eddie Jordan, Mike Dabney and Hollis Copeland, Rutgers kept improving. During Sellers’s junior year, when he averaged 22.7 points and 9.4 rebounds a game, Rutgers had a record of 22-7 and played in the N.C.A.A. men’s basketball tournament, losing in the first round.
Rutgers was undefeated in 26 games during the 1975-76 regular season, Sellers’s senior year. Late in a conference tournament game against St. John’s University that preceded the start of the N.C.A.A. tournament, Sellers clashed with his coach, Tom Young.
“Give me the ball,” Young recalled Sellers saying when he described the incident to The New York Times in 1983. “I said, ‘Phil, we’re going to run our offense.’ He said it three times, ‘Give me the ball.’”
Sellers scored six points in the next 90 seconds, and Rutgers won.
Rutgers then won its first three games in the N.C.A.A. tournament, despite subpar scoring performances from Sellers, to raise its record to 31-0. But the Scarlet Knights lost the semifinal game to Michigan, 86-70, with Sellers scoring only 11 points against the strong defense of Michigan’s Wayman Britt.
Sellers’s college career totals of 2,399 points and 1,115 rebounds are still Rutgers records.

Terry Kirkman, of the Association. This is another one of those groups that was a little before my time – though I have heard of Terry Kirkman – so I’m going to leave comment on this up to my music consultant.

Posted in Music, Obits, Sports | 1 Comment »

Your loser update: week 3, 2023.

Tuesday, September 26th, 2023

NFL teams that still have a chance to go 0-17:

Denver
Minnesota
da Bears
Carolina

70-20? That sounds more like a score from a low-scoring college basketball game, not a NFL one.

In other news, the worthless Chargers won, as did the Texans. But we still have Carolina.

Posted in Loser, NFL, Sports | Comments Closed

Obit watch: September 20, 2023.

Wednesday, September 20th, 2023

I didn’t find out about this until late last night, so I’m a bit behind. Apologies.

Two pilots, Nick Macy and Chris Rushing, were killed in an accident at the Reno Air Races on Sunday.

According to the reports I’ve read, both pilots had been competing in what’s called the “Gold Race” in the T-6 Class. The race had completed, and the pilots were in the post-race recovery period when they collided in mid-air.

Preliminary analysis from the Air Safety Institute. Reno Gazette Journal coverage. As the linked articles note, the remainder of the races was cancelled after the crash: this was the last year for the Reno Air Races in their current form.

Buddy Teevens, football coach at Dartmouth. He was badly injured in a bicycle accident in March, and died of complications from his injuries.

JoAnne Epps, acting president of Temple University. She was attending a memorial service when she collapsed. Ms. Epps was pronounced dead at a local hospital.

James Hoge, noted journalist.

Few editors at major American newspapers have been as young as Mr. Hoge was when he rose to the top at The Chicago Sun-Times, a tabloid aimed at a working-class readership. He became the city editor at age 29, editor in chief at 33 and publisher at 44.
He shook up the staff, strove for sprightlier writing and, like other newspaper editors in the 1970s, introduced new sections on business, food and fashion. “I am always agitating,” he said.
The payoff was six Pulitzer Prizes on his watch: two each for feature photography and criticism and one each for spot news reporting (concerning violence by young radicals in Chicago) and local news reporting (on new evidence in the 1966 murder, still unsolved, of Valerie Percy, a daughter of Charles H. Percy of Illinois, then making his first United States Senate race).

He was also behind the Mirage Tavern investigation, and went on to become publisher of the New York Daily News and the journal Foreign Affairs.

Aware that some council members fretted over his tabloid background, he had some fun with them, offering a mock magazine cover with the model Cindy Crawford and teasers like “sexiest ethnic rivalries.”

Roger Whittaker, British musician.

Burning in Hell watch: Billy Chemirmir. I’d never heard of him, but he was convicted twice of capital murder, and was suspected of 20 more murders. His MO seems to have been smothering old folks.

Most of Chemirmir’s alleged victims lived in apartments at independent living communities for older people. The women he’s accused of killing in private homes include the widow of a man he had cared for while working as an at-home caregiver.

You could also classify this as part of the “fool around and find out” watch:

Dallas County District Attorney John Creuzot told WFAA that Chemirmir was killed after apparently making inappropriate comments sexual in nature towards his cellmate’s children. According to Creuzot, the cellmate allegedly beat Chemirmir, dragged him out of his cell and killed him while other inmates watched. No one intervened and Chemirmir may have been stabbed with a pen, Creuzot said.
“Even though they are on lockdown, apparently [the cellmate] somehow opened the door and dragged [Chemirmir] into the hallway and there were other prisoners who saw it and not one intervened and no one called for help,” Creuzot told WFAA. “He was basically there for 15 to 20 minutes before anybody with authority could figure out what happened. When they got there, they tried to revive him, but he died.”

Posted in Cycling, Law, Media, Obits, Planes, Sports | Comments Closed

Firings watch (sort of).

Tuesday, September 19th, 2023

This is only sort of a firings watch because Mel Tucker isn’t out as head coach of Michigan State yet.

But the school has notified him they intend to fire him “for cause”. Which means no contract payout.

This is a weird story that I’ve been following from a distance, but have had trouble finding a way into that treats everyone involved with respect. Mr. Tucker is accused of sexual harassment. I’m just going to quote from the ESPN story:

Prominent sexual assault awareness speaker Brenda Tracy filed a sexual misconduct complaint against Tucker in December 2022. She claims that Tucker made unwelcome advances after she was hired to speak to the Spartans football team about sexual misconduct and her experience as a rape survivor. She said Tucker also masturbated without her consent during a phone call in April 2022. Tucker admitted to masturbating, but said in a statement last week that it was part of a consensual intimate relationship.
Tracy told USA Today that after she raised concerns about Tucker’s conduct, he postponed and eventually canceled a speaking engagement at the university. Because she had an ongoing professional relationship with the athletic department, she was able to file a claim under the school’s sexual misconduct policy.

Mr. Tucker has seven days from yesterday to respond to the termination letter.

Posted in Firings, Sports | Comments Closed

Your loser update: week 2, 2023.

Tuesday, September 19th, 2023

NFL teams that still have a chance to go 0-17:

New England
Cincinnati
Houston
Denver
Los Angeles Chargers
Minnesota
da Bears
Carolina
Arizona

Still a little early for any predictions on who will win the Owen 17 award this year, but I am kind of wondering if this could be the year for Houston. Or even better, the worthless LA Chargers.

Posted in Loser, NFL, Sports | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: September 15, 2023.

Friday, September 15th, 2023

Éva Fahidi, Holocaust survivor.

Ms. Fahidi, part of a Hungarian Jewish family that had converted to Catholicism, was rounded up in 1944 along with the rest of her family and taken to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration and extermination complex in occupied Poland. She was 18.
She was apparently saved from the gas chamber by being of an age and fitness level to qualify for a forced-labor camp. Her other family members were sent to their deaths. Josef Mengele, the Nazi death camp doctor, presided over the selection process.

…

After the war ended in 1945, Ms. Fahidi (who was also known as Éva Fahidi-Pusztai from an early marriage) kept her experiences largely to herself for more than a half-century. Then, in 2003, on the anniversary of that day on the ramp when she last saw her family members, she visited the Birkenau site and was disappointed to find it more like a tourist attraction than like anything she remembered.
She committed herself to telling her story and to helping younger generations understand what had gone on at the camp and in the Holocaust in general. Over the next 20 years she spoke to countless schoolchildren and worked with young volunteers who collected Holocaust remembrances from survivors. She appeared at anniversary observances marking the liberation of Auschwitz and other occasions and spoke to legislative bodies. And she bore witness, including attending the 2015 war crimes trial in Germany of Oskar Gröning, who at 93 was accused of having been one of the guards working that ramp at Auschwitz and was one of the last complicit Germans to face trial.

Lauch Faircloth, former Senator from North Carolina.

But it was as a member and later as chairman of the appropriations subcommittee on the District of Columbia that Mr. Faircloth made national headlines on a collision course with Mr. Barry, a former leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee who had been a popular elected official in Washington, in various capacities, since the establishment of limited home rule in the capital in 1973.

…

The mayor admitted that the city government was “unworkable” and asked Congress to take over some city functions. Instead, with Mr. Faircloth as point man, a new Republican congressional majority put some city operations into receivership and created a financial control board to take over day-to-day spending and financial planning, with the power to overrule the mayor.
Over the next two years, Mr. Faircloth granted the city some concessions: more money than requested for public schools and repairs to decaying buildings. But Mr. Barry and the control board battled constantly over policy and budgetary issues.
A settlement was reached in 1997, when the Clinton administration and Senator Faircloth agreed to rescue the city but stripped Mr. Barry of power over most city agencies, handing it to the control board. The mayor, who retained authority over parks and recreation, libraries and tourism, called the arrangement “a rape of democracy.”

…

He dismissed Mr. Barry’s criticism. “I’ve heard so many meaningless statements from Marion Barry that one more doesn’t matter,” he said. “It’s airy persiflage.”

Lisa Lyon, bodybuilder and Robert Mapplethorpe photo subject.

Lawrence emailed an obit for Jean Boht, British actress, with the note that he wasn’t aware there was a British remake of “The Golden Girls”. I wasn’t either, but if we can remake British shows in the US, why can’t the Brits remake our stuff?

(I was aware that there was an attempt at a US “Fawlty Towers” remake. I wasn’t aware, until I went to look it up, that there were actually three attempts, including the Harvey Korman/Betty White one, and another with John Larroquette.)

IMDB.

Posted in History, Nazis, Obits, Politics, Sports, TV | 2 Comments »

Firings watch.

Thursday, September 14th, 2023

I guess the baseball season is winding down. I’ll probably do a loser update, either as an individual post or as part of the regular post, when the season ends.

In the meantime: Chaim Bloom out as “chief baseball officer” of the Boston Red Sox.

Bloom was hired in 2019, bringing with him a plan for sustainable success from his time with the Tampa Bay Rays. He instead angered much of the fanbase by methodically stripping the team of its stars and replacing them with an ever-changing cast of veterans on short-term contracts, role players and prospects.
The Sox are 73-72 this season, tied with the Yankees at the bottom of the American League East and 267-262 under Bloom over four seasons. His tenure was marked by the franchise losing its status among Major League Baseball’s powers.

…

Under Bloom, the Sox traded Mookie Betts and David Price to the Dodgers in 2020 in what was essentially a salary dump. The return was Alex Verdugo, Connor Wong, and Jeter Downs.
Verdugo has been a solid player in right field. Wong, 27, has shown promise as a good defensive catcher and Downs was released in 2022.
Betts helped lead the Dodgers to a World Series title in 2020 and remains one of the premier players in the game.

Posted in Firings, Sports | Comments Closed

Obit watch: September 13, 2023.

Wednesday, September 13th, 2023

Howard Safir, former NYPD commissioner and gun grabber.

In the final years of his life, Safir, who founded his own intelligence and security firm, has advocated for stricter policing on guns.
Last year, he floated the idea that those who purchase firearms in the city should be required to conduct yearly safety check-ins so authorities can make sure the weapons aren’t lost or sold off to unknown parties.

Neil Currey, noted bodybuilder. He was 34.

Brandon Hunter, former forward for the Boston Celtics and Orlando Magic. He was 42.

Mike Williams, former NFL wide receiver for Tampa Bay and Buffalo. He was 36, and died as a result of injuries sustained in a construction accident.

Posted in Cops, Law, NFL, NYPD, Obits, Sports | Comments Closed

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